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"Who you know got all they animals out in the open?" Pop says. And Pop is right. Nobody in Bois has their animals out in the open in fields, or in the front of their property.
The goat shakes its head from side to side, pulls back. Tries to shrug the rope. Pop straddles it, puts his arm under the jaw.
"The big Joseph," I say. I want to look out the shed when I say it, over my shoulder at the cold, bright green day, but I make myself stare at Pop, at the goat with its neck being raised to die. Pop snorts. I hadn't wanted to say his name. Big Joseph is my White grandpa, Pop my Black one. I've lived with Pop since I was born; I've seen my White grandpa twice. Big
Joseph is round and tall and looks nothing like Pop. He don't even look like Michael, my father, who is lean and smudged with tattoos. He picked them up like souvenirs from wannabe artists in Bois and out on the water when he worked offshore and in prison.
"Well, there you go," Pop says.
Pop wrestles the goat like it's a man, and the goat's knees buckle. It falls face forward in the dirt, turns its head to the side so it's looking up at me with its cheek rubbing the dusty earth and bloody floor of the shed. It shows me its soft eye, but I don't look away, don't blink. Pop slits. The goat makes a sound of surprise, a bleat swallowed by a gurgle, and then there's blood and mud everywhere. The goat's legs go rubbery and loose, and Pop isn't struggling anymore. All at once, he stands up and ties a rope around the goat's ankles, lifting the body to a hook hanging from the rafters. That eye: still wet. Looking at me like I was the one who cut its neck, like I was the one bleeding it out, turning its whole face red with blood.
"You ready?" Pop asks. He glances at me then, quickly. I nod. I'm frowning, my face drawn tight. I try to relax as Pop cuts the goat along the legs, giving the goat pant seams, shirt seams, lines all over.
"Grab this here," Pop says. He points at a line on the goat's stomach, so I dig my fingers in and grab. It's still warm, and it's wet. Don't slip, I say to myself. Don't slip.
"Pull," Pop says.
I pull. The goat is inside out. Slime and smell everywhere, something musty and sharp, like a man who ain't took a bath in some days. The skin peels off like a banana. It surprises me every time, how easy it comes away once you pull. Pop yanking hard on the other side, and then he's cutting and snapping the hide off at the feet. I pull the skin down the animal's leg to the foot, but I can't get it off like Pop, so he cuts and snaps.
"Other side," Pop says. I grab the seam near the heart. The goat's even warmer here, and I wonder if his panicked heart beat so fast it made his chest hotter, but then I look at Pop, who's already snapping the skin off the end of the goat's foot, and I know my wondering's made me slow. I don't want him to read my slowness as fear, as weakness, as me not being old enough to look at death like a man should, so I grip and yank. Pop snaps the skin off at the animal's foot, and then the animal sways from the ceiling, all pink and muscle, catching what little light there is, glistening in the dark. All that's left of the goat is the hairy face, and somehow this is even worse than the moment before Pop cut its throat.
"Get the bucket," Pop says, so I get the metal tub from one of the shelves at the back of the shed, and I pull it under the animal. I pick up the skin, which is already turning stiff, and I dump it into the tub. Four sheets of it.
Pop slices down the center of the stomach, and the innards slide out and into the tub. He's slicing and the smell overwhelms like a faceful of pig shit. It smells like foragers, dead and rotting out in the thick woods, when the only sign of them is the stink and the buzzards rising and settling and circling. It stinks like possums or armadillos smashed half flat on the road, rotting in asphalt and heat. But worse. This smell is worse; it's the smell of death, the rot coming from something just alive, something hot with blood and life. I grimace, wanting to make Kayla's stink face, the face she makes when she's angry or impatient; to everyone else, it looks like she's smelled something nasty: her green eyes squinting, her nose a mushroom, her twelve tiny toddler teeth showing through her open mouth. I want to make that face because something about scrunching up my nose and squeezing the smell away might lessen it, might cut off that stink of death. I know it's the stomach and intestines, but all I can see is Kayla's stink face and the soft eye of the goat and then I can't hold myself still and watch no more, then I'm out the door of the shed and I'm throwing up in the grass outside. My face is so hot, but my arms are cold.
***
Pop steps out of the shed, and he got a slab of ribs in his fist. I wipe my mouth and look at him, but he's not looking at me, he's looking at the house, nodding toward it.
Excerpted from Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. Copyright © 2017 by Jesmyn Ward. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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