Salvage the Bones
To be sure, a plot summary sounds very melodramatic. The narrator is Esch, a teenager girl. She has three brothers and a single father (her mother died in childbirth). They are African Americans living in a small town in Mississippi, in a neighborhood indecorously known as the Pit. Not only is the hurricane on its way, but Esch discovers she is pregnant. One of her brothers, Skeetah, has a beloved pit bull named China who has just had puppies. He hopes to sell the puppies so another brother, Randall, can go to basketball camp and maybe get a scholarship.
Though this may sound like a soap opera, and often it plays like one, the writing is so good that one forgives the intersection of plot points (another is her father losing some fingers in a tractor accident--how much more can happen to this family? There's also a somewhat pained comparison of Esch to Medea, whom she is studying in school: "I will go to Skeetah like Medea went to her brother when they fled on their great adventure with the Argonauts. I will offer my help."
But make no mistake, this is a brilliantly written book. There are several sections that were real page turners. One is when Skeetah steals some worm medicine for his dog from a nearby white people's house (the white people in this book are like somewhat legendary figures). Another is when Skeetah has China fight the sire of her pups in a winner-take-all match--though dog fighting is certainly reprehensible, there's something about it in this book that makes it noble, perhaps because so much is riding on the family's livelihood. And, of course, the third is the arrival and aftermath of the hurricane.
Ward, who is from the area, and had her own harrowing adventure during Katrina, knows how to create atmosphere: "There is a sound above the water; someone is shouting. When I surface and breathe, my lungs pulling for air, Skeetah is the only one left, and he is silent. Bats whirl through the air above us, plucking insects from the sky while they endlessly flutter like black fall leaves."
She also has some fantastic similes, such as describing the attention Skeetah plays to China: "he...wipes at her cuts with a towel he's washed, bleached, and dipped in hydrogen peroxide. She smiles lazily like a woman in a new Fourth of July outfit being complimented." Or, Ward can quickly summarize a moment: "The waiting room was scrubbed clean and pale; it smelled of Pine-Sol, coffee, and weariness."
But the storm is the big climax of the book. It's difficult to comprehend for us who didn't go through it what it was like, such as when they realize water is coming into the house and before they know it they are in the attic and water is starting to come in there, too. The family breaks through the roof: "It is terrible. It is the flailing wind that lashes like an extension cord used as a beating belt. Is the the rain, which stings like stones, which drives into our eyes and bids them shut. It is the water, swirling and gathering and spreading on all sides, brown with an undercurrent of red to it, the clay of the Pit like a cut that won't stop leaking. It is the remains of the yard, the refrigerators and lawn mowers and the RV and mattresses, floating like a fleet. It is trees and branches breaking, popping like Black Cat firecrackers in an endless crackle of explosions, over and over and over again. It is us huddling together on the roof, me with the wire of the bucket handle looped over by shoulder, shaking against the plastic. It is everywhere. Daddy kneels behind us, tries to gather all of us to him. Skeetah hugs China, and she howls. Daddy's truck careens slowly in the yard."
Salvage the Bones is a book that I won't forget easily.
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