Pop doesn’t look up.
“Warden and sergeants was in cars on the road, following the dogs. Their baying. All them men roaming, had they dogs out, too, and it was a boy who stumble across Blue. He was up a tree in one of them stands to the west. I had to squint at the shouts that came up when they found him. They started firing off they rifles, and the warden and sergeants and trusty shooters rode that way. I heeled my dogs. Waited. Because they wasn’t pointed west. They was pointed north, and I knew it was Richie they followed. Wasn’t five minutes passed before I saw the bonfire they lit, and I knew what was happening. I knew before I even heard Blue start screaming.”
Richie blinks. His fingers splayed like a bird’s wings. His blinks start slow, but as Pop talks, they get faster until they’re blurred like a hummingbird, and all I see are his eyes, his black eyes, with a thin scrim over them.
“One of the trusties told me later they was cutting pieces of him off. Fingers. Toes. Ears. Nose. And then they started skinning him. That’s when I followed the dogs, making them quiet, across that sky turning from blue to black, across them fields, to another stand of trees. And Richie hunched down at the base of one, cupping his black eye. Crying. Nose up, listening to Blue and the crowd.”
Richie makes fists, lets them go. Makes fists. Spreads his fingers to wings.
“They was going to do the same to him. Once they got done with Blue. They was going to come for that boy and cut him piece from piece till he was just some bloody, soft, screaming thing, and then they was going to string him up from a tree.”
Pop looks at me. Every piece of him aquiver.
“He wasn’t nothing but a boy, Jojo. They kill animals better than that.”
I nodded again. Richie is winding his arms around himself, hugging tighter and tighter, his arms and fingers growing incredibly long.
“I said: It’s going to be all right, Richie. He said: You going to help me? Riv, which way should I go? I heeled the dogs. Held out my hands to him, light side out. Moved slow. Soothed him. Said: We gone get you out of this. We gone get you away from here. Touched his arm: he was burning up. I’m going home, Riv? he asked. I squatted down next to him, the dogs steady yipping, and I looked at him. He had baby hair on the edge of his scalp, Jojo. Little fine hair he’d had since he sucked at his mama’s tit. Yes, Richie. I’m a take you home, I said. And then I took the shank I kept in my boot and I punched it one time into his neck. In the big vein on his right side. Held him till the blood stopped spurting. Him looking at me, mouth open. A child. Tears and snot all over his face. Shocked and scared, until he was still.”
Pop speaks into his knees. Richie’s head has tilted back until he is looking at the sky, at the great blue wash of it beyond the embrace of the trees. His eyes widen more, and his arms snap out and his legs spread and he doesn’t even see me and Pop, but he is looking at everything beyond us, past the miles we drove in that car, past the point where the pine trees turn to field and cotton and just-budding spring trees, past the highways and towns back to the swamps and stands of trees hundreds of years old. At first I think he is singing again, but then I realize it is a whine that rises to a yell that rises to a scream, and the look on his face is horror at what he sees. I squint and barely hear Pop through Richie’s keening.
“I laid him down on the ground. Told the dogs to get. They smelled the blood. Tore into him.”
Richie roars. Casper is somewhere out on the road, furious, barking. The pigs are squealing. The horse is stamping its pen. Pop is working his hands like he doesn’t know how to use them. Like he’s not sure what they can do.
“I washed my hands every day, Jojo. But that damn blood ain’t never come out. Hold my hands up to my face, I can smell it under my skin. Smelled it when the warden and sergeant came up on us, the dogs yipping and licking blood from they muzzles. They’d torn his throat out, hamstringed him. Smelled it when the warden told me I’d done good. Smelled it the day they let me out on account I’d led the dogs that caught and killed Richie. Smelled it when I finally found his mama after weeks of searching, just so I could tell her Richie was dead and she could look at me with a stone face and shut the door on me. Smelled it when I made it home in the middle of the night, smelled it over the sour smell of the bayou and the salt smell of the sea, smelled it years later when I climbed into bed with Philomène, put my nose in your grandmother’s neck, and breathed her in like the scent of her could wash the other away. But it didn’t. When Given died, I thought I’d drown in it. Drove me blind, made me so crazy I couldn’t speak. Didn’t nothing come close to easing it until you came along.”
I hold Pop like I hold Kayla. He puts his face in his knees and his back shakes. Both of us bow together as Richie goes darker and darker, until he’s a black hole in the middle of the yard, like he done sucked all the light and darkness over them miles, over them years, into him, until he’s burning black, and then he isn’t. There is soft air and yellow sunlight and drifting pollen where he was, and me and Pop embracing in the grass. The animals are quieting in grunts and snorts and yips. Thank you, they say. Thank you thank you thank you, they sing.
Chapter 14
Leonie
When I got home with my load of cemetery rocks, Michael left in my car. The weight of the stones in my shirt was heavy, remind me of what it felt like to carry Jojo and Michaela, to bear another human being in my stomach. After I picked up the stones I’d dropped in Mam’s room, I bang out the door to find Phantom Given. His head is cocked to the side, and he’s looking down the shotgun line of the house, through the living room, through the kitchen, out the back door. He’s listening. I stop where I am.