Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward Read Free Book Online Page B

Maybe her milk’s bad for him or something.”
    â€œI think he got parvo. I think he picked it up out the dirt.”
    My morning nap on the tile comes back strong.
    â€œMaybe he just sick, Skeet.”
    â€œWhat if it’s in the dirt? What if the rest of them get infected?”
    The puppy taps the floor with one paw.
    â€œMaybe if you just get him to eat. Maybe he ain’t been able to get enough milk.”
    Skeet scoops up the puppy, puts him in the dirt inches away from China. She lowers her head, pointed like a snake. When the puppy jerks his neck again, she growls. It is the rumbling of rocks across packed earth. The puppy lays still. His eyes aren’t even open yet. She growls again, and he slides to one side.
    â€œStop it, China.” Skeet breathes. “Feed him.” He pushes the puppy forward inches. The puppy’s face plows into the sand.
    China’s neck snaps out and she barks. She lashes. Her teeth graze the puppy, whose legs twitch outward and draw in tight.
    â€œSkeet!” I yell.
    â€œYou bitch!” he hisses, cutting his eyes at her, wounded. He grabs the puppy, wraps it in his shirt, sits back on his folded feet. China ignores him and lays her head along her white, gleaming arms that look like herons’ necks. Her eyelids droop, and suddenly she looks tired. Her breasts are all swollen, and the puppies pull at them. She is a weary goddess.
    She is a mother so many times over.
    â€œMaybe she just trying to protect the rest of them. You know, if it’s serious, she know.”
    Skeetah folds the puppy in his hand like a baseball. He nods.
    â€œFine.” The bugs outside sing because the day is so bright, it is gold. Daddy guns the tractor; he is pulling plywood in stacks across the clearing, gathering wood from all the corners of the Pit for the storm. Big Henry had told us one of his cousins from Germaine had a whole litter die of parvo; the puppies had just opened their eyes, and then the first one died, and then each day after that, every time his cousin walked out back to his doghouse, he would find another puppy dead, so small and hard that it was difficult for him to imagine that they might have once lived. “You going to come out with me and camp tonight?” The puppy is a black ball in Skeetah’s black tee: still, round. Skeetah is not looking at his hands, but he is watching China with something like respect and love in his face. “I need to separate him. Make it easy for him til he dies.”
    â€œYeah.” I breathe. My stomach flutters. I will watch Skeet kill his own. “You know I’m here.”
    Eating is different now. I hunch over a bowl of eggs and rice in the kitchen and I eat but feel like I am lying to myself and Skeetah, who is stealing food for our night in the woods. Every bite is another lie. Food is the last thing I want. Skeetah pulls more plastic bags from under the sink and wraps them around the one holding the food so that the bundle is opaque as a spider’s egg sac, and I can’t see the mix of things that would be our hurricane supplies that Skeetah is filching.
    â€œLook good?” he asks.
    I swallow. I nod.
    â€œWe should take a jug of that water.”
    â€œYou know Daddy done probably counted them.”
    â€œWe’ll tell Randall to tell him that it was them beers he was drinking yesterday. Made him miscount.”
    â€œRandall ain’t coming?”
    â€œDon’t know. But you know Randall tell Daddy whatever.”
    Skeetah puts the bundle of bags under his shirt. He looks pregnant now.
    I skim the belly of my bowl with my spoon, slide the steel along all the curved places. The rice clumps; the eggs are bundled. It all disappears, and I wonder what I am feeding. I imagine the food turning to mush, sliding down my throat, through my body like water through a storm drain to pool in my stomach. To make what is inside me grow to be a baby in the winter. And Skeet