Mudbound Read online

  “He went to town to get some shotgun shells. Said he’s taking her hunting this afternoon.”

  Just keep her talking, I thought. Henry and Pappy were due back any time now. “Hunting?” I said.

  “That’s how he started with Renie, taking her out to the woods with him.”

  “How can you be sure? That he . . .?”

  “Renie wouldn’t eat nothing they brought back. Deer, rabbit, squirrel—didn’t matter what it was, she wouldn’t touch it. Said she wasn’t hungry. But Carl sure was. Set there gobbling that food like he hadn’t et in a week, gnawing on the bones and talking about how nothing tastes better than meat you hunted and brought down yourself. ‘Ain’t that right, Renie,’ he says to her. And her setting there skinny as a rail, staring at that food like it was full of maggots.”

  Vera was rocking back and forth on the balls of her bare feet, the knife swinging at her side. Her head was tilted, and her eyes were wide and unfocused. She looked like a woman I’d seen once at a hypnotist’s show at the state fair.

  Just keep her talking. “Did you say anything to him about it?” I asked.

  “No. He would have just denied it. When Renie started to show I asked her who done it but she wouldn’t say, not even when I got after her with the switch. Just stood there real quiet and took it like she deserved a whupping. I knew right then but I didn’t want to know. I told myself if it was a boy then it wasn’t but if it was a girl then it was, that would be the proof cause Carl ain’t got nothing in him but girls. And when that baby came out and I seen its parts, I knew it for his seed.”

  I stole a glance at Amanda Leigh and Isabelle. Their gingham dresses were spattered with mud. A streak of it ran across Isabelle’s forehead where she’d brushed her bangs out of her eyes, and she was sucking on her thumb, watching us.

  “Look at me,” Vera demanded.

  I obeyed instantly.

  “You look at me,” she said.

  “I’m looking, Vera. I see you.”

  “A few days after it was born I came in the bedroom and found Carl holding it. He had his finger in its mouth and the baby was sucking on it, and Renie was laying there watching em. Right then I decided to do it.”

  “What?” I asked. But I knew.

  “I waited till they was all asleep that night. And then I took a pillow and I sent that baby out of his reach, like I hadn’t done for Renie.”

  “And your own baby?”

  Her face contorted, and then she was standing right beside me and the knife was touching the side of my neck. I could hear my heart thundering in my ears. “You got to drive me to town now,” she said.

  Her breath smelled of rotting teeth. Fighting back nausea, I said, “Vera, listen to me. My husband will be back soon. When he gets here, we’ll talk to him. Henry will know what to do.”

  “No,” said Vera, “I can’t wait. We got to go now. Come on.”

  She jerked me by the arm, pulling me toward the truck, but the key wasn’t in it; it was hanging on a nail by the front door. Amanda Leigh and Isabelle were watching us with big frightened eyes. What would I do with them? I couldn’t leave them alone on the farm—they were too little, anything might happen to them. But how could I take them with us? I didn’t think Vera would harm them, but in the wild state she was in I couldn’t be sure. I pictured Carl’s red lips pressed to Alma’s. Pictured Vera sitting next to my children in the truck with the butcher knife in her hand.

  “I can’t, Vera,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Henry doesn’t let me drive the truck. I’m not even sure where he keeps the key.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I swear it’s true. The one time I tried to drive it I almost wrecked it. See that big dent there, on the front fender? I did that. Henry was so mad he took the key away.”

  Vera grabbed my shoulder hard. Her eyes bulged, the pupils dilated despite the brightness of the day. “I got to stop him!” she said, giving me a shake. “You got to help me stop him!”

  I felt another swell of nausea. I sagged in her grip. “Vera, I can’t. I don’t have the key. For all I know Henry took it with him.”

  She let go of me, and I sank to the ground. She threw her head back and gave a keening cry. It was a sound of such desolation that I had to stop myself from running into the house and getting the key.

  “Mama?” Amanda Leigh’s voice, thin with fear. I glanced over at them, then back at Vera. I saw the madness drain from her face.

  “Don’t be scared,” she said to the girls. “I ain’t gonna hurt you or your mama.” She turned to me. Her eyes were serene and terrible. “I’m going now,” she said.

  “I’ll speak to Henry as soon as he gets home. He’ll help you, I promise.”

  “It’ll be too late then.”

  “Vera—”

  “You look after them girls of yourn,” she said.

  She set off down the road toward town, moving at a steady lope, the knife glinting in the sun. As the girls ran over to me, I felt the first cramp hit—a mocking imitation of labor pains. I sank to my knees and pressed my hands to my stomach.

  “What’s the matter, Mama?” asked Amanda Leigh.

  “I need you to be a big girl, and go and fetch Florence from her house. Do you know how to get there?”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “Hurry now,” I said. “Run as fast as you can.”

  She went. I felt another cramp, like a fist grabbing my insides and squeezing hard, then wetness between my legs. Isabelle clung to me, sobbing. I lay in the dirt and curled my body around hers, letting her cry for both of us, and for the child who would never be her brother.

  THEY FOUND CARL’S body lying in the road halfway between the farm and town. Vera had stabbed him seventeen times, then gone on to Marietta and turned herself in to Sheriff Tacker. Rose and Bill saw her walking down Main Street. They said she was covered in blood, like she’d bathed in it.

  I learned these details later. At the time, I was too lost in my own agony to care about anyone else’s. I lay in the bed, sleeping as many hours a day as my body would permit, waking reluctantly to lie with my face turned to the wall. I got up only to use the outhouse. Florence nursed me, cajoling me to eat and pushing clean nightgowns over my head. The children brought me gifts: wildflowers, drawings they’d made, a molted rattlesnake skin that I feigned delight with, though it repelled me. Rose paid me a couple of visits, offering news from town between awkward throat-clearings. Henry tried to comfort me when he came to bed at night, but I lay stiff against him, and after a few days he kept to his side.

  A week passed in this way, then two. The children grew fretful, and Henry’s compassion turned to impatience. “What’s the matter with her?” I overheard him say to Florence. “Why doesn’t she get up?”

  “You got to give her time, Mist McAllan. That baby left a hollow place that ain’t been filled back up yet.”

  But Florence was wrong about that. It had been filled up, and to the bursting, with rage—toward Vera and Carl, toward Henry and God, and most of all, myself. It blazed inside of me, and I fed it just like I’d fed the baby, keeping it alive with what-ifs and recriminations. If it hadn’t been Florence’s day off. If Henry hadn’t left me alone with the girls. If he hadn’t brought me to this brutal place to begin with. If I’d just listened to him when he told me there was no room for pity on a farm. I played that phrase over and over in my head like a fugue, cudgeling myself with it. Thinking of Henry’s face when he walked in and found me lying in the bed, empty of our child; of the way he’d schooled his features, packing away his sorrow so I wouldn’t see it and be hurt by it, letting only his tenderness show. Tenderness for me, the woman who had just lost his baby through her own stubborn foolishness. Yes, I knew miscarriages were common, especially in women my age, but I still couldn’t shake the idea that the stress of Vera’s assault had caused mine; that if I’d let Henry put the Atwoods off like he’d wanted to, I wouldn’t have lost the baby. It had been
a boy, just as we’d hoped. Florence didn’t tell me and she wouldn’t let me look at it, but I saw it in her face, and in Henry’s.

  I resumed my life some three weeks after the miscarriage, on a Monday. There was no fanfare, no scene between me Henry, or me and Florence, in which I was lectured on my responsibilities and dragged, flailing and cursing, from my sickbed. I simply got up and went on. I bathed my sour body, combed my hair, put on a clean dress and took up my roles of wife and mother again, though without really inhabiting them. After a time I realized that inhabiting them wasn’t required. As long as I did what was expected of me—cooked the meals, kissed the cuts and scrapes and made them better, accepted Henry’s renewed nocturnal attentions—my family was content. I hated them for that, a little. Sometimes, in the small hours of the night, I would wake in the stifling airless heat with Henry’s skin hot as a brand against mine and imagine myself getting up, dressing swiftly, going into the girls’ room and brushing my lips softly against their foreheads, then taking the car key from the nail by the door, walking across the muddy yard, getting in the DeSoto and driving off—down the dirt road, across the bridge, to the gravel road, to the highway, and then straight east until the road ran into the sand. It had been so long since I’d smelled the ocean and immersed myself in that cool bluegreen.

  I didn’t act on this impulse, of course. But I sometimes wonder if I might have, in another week or another month, if Jamie hadn’t come to live with us.

  WE WEREN’T EXPECTING him; the last we’d heard he was in Rome. We’d gotten a postcard back in May with a picture of the Colosseum on the front and a hastily scrawled message on the back about how the Italian girls were almost as beautiful as Southern girls. It had made me smile, but not Henry.

  “It’s not right,” he said, “Jamie wandering all over and not coming home.”

  “I know you find this hard to believe, but not everybody longs to be in rural Mississippi,” I said. “Besides, he’s a young man, with no responsibilities. Why shouldn’t he travel if he wants to?”

  “I’m telling you, it’s not right,” Henry repeated. “I know my brother. Something’s the matter with him.”

  I didn’t want to believe it, and so I didn’t. Nothing could ever be the matter with Jamie.

  He came to us in late August, in the hot, slow days before the harvest. I was the first to see him: an indistinct form, shimmering slightly in the heat, striding up the dusty road with a suitcase in each hand. He wore a hat, so I couldn’t see his red hair, but I knew it was Jamie by the way he walked—back straight, shoulders steady, hips absorbing all the motion. A movie star’s walk.

  “Who’s that?” asked Pappy, squinting through the haze of smoke that surrounded him. The two of us were sitting on the porch, me churning butter and the old man back to doing his usual nothing. The girls were playing in the yard. Henry was out in the barn, feeding the livestock.

  I shook my head in answer to Pappy’s question, pretending ignorance for reasons I couldn’t have explained, even to myself. As Jamie got closer I began to make out details: aviator sunglasses, oval patches darkening the armpits of his white shirt, baggy trousers sagging around his narrow hips. He spotted us and lifted one suitcase in greeting.

  “It’s Jamie!” said Pappy, waving his cane at his son. There was nothing wrong with the old man’s legs; he was spry as a fox. The cane was purely for effect, a prop he used whenever he wanted to appear patriarchal or get out of working.

  “Yes, I think you’re right.”

  “Well don’t just sit there, gal! Go and greet him!”

  I stood, swallowing a tart response—for once, I wanted to obey him—and walked down the steps and across the yard. I was painfully conscious of the sweat staining my own dress, of my sun-browned skin and unwashed hair. I ran my hands through it, feeling it catch on the calluses on my palms. Farm-wife’s hands, that’s what I had now.

  I was about a hundred feet away from him when Pappy hollered, “Henry! Your brother’s home! Henry!”

  Henry emerged from the barn holding a feed bucket. “What?” he yelled. Then he saw Jamie. He whooped, dropped the bucket and broke into a run, and so did Jamie. Henry’s bad leg made him awkward, but he seemed not to notice it. He pelted forward with the joyous abandon of a schoolboy. I realized I’d never seen my husband run before. It was like glimpsing another side of him, secret and unsuspected.

  They came together ten feet in front of me. Clapped each other on the back, pulled apart, searched each other’s faces: ritual. I stood outside of it and waited.

  “You look good, brother,” Jamie said. “You always did love farming.”

  “You look like hell,” Henry replied.

  “Don’t sugarcoat it, now.”

  “You need to put some meat on those bones of yours, get some good Mississippi sun on your face.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “How’d you get out here?”

  “I hitched my way from Greenville. I met one of your neighbors at the general store in town. He dropped me off at the bridge.”

  “Why didn’t Eboline drive you?”

  “One of the girls wasn’t feeling well. Sick headache or some such thing. Eboline said they’d be down this weekend.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t wait,” Henry said.

  Jamie turned to me then, looking at me in that way he had—as if he were really seeing me and taking me in whole. He held his hands out. “Laura,” he said.

  I went to him and gave him a hug. He felt light against me, insubstantial. His ribs protruded like the black keys of a piano. I could pick him up, I thought, and had a sudden irrational urge to do so. I stepped back hastily, flustered. Aware of his eyes on me.

  “Welcome home, Jamie,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”

  “You too, sweet sister-in-law. How are you liking it here in Henry’s version of paradise?”

  I was spared from lying by the old man. “You’d think a son would see fit to greet his father,” he bellowed from the porch.

  “Ah, the dear, sweet voice of our pappy,” said Jamie. “I’d forgotten how much I missed hearing it.”

  Henry picked up one of Jamie’s suitcases and we headed toward the house. “I think he’s lonely here,” Henry said. “He misses Mama, and Greenville.”

  “Oh, is that the excuse he’s using these days?”

  “No. He doesn’t make excuses, you know that,” Henry said. “He’s missed you too, Jamie.”

  “I just bet he has. I bet he’s quit smoking and joined the NAACP, too.”

  I laughed at that, but Henry’s reply was serious. “I’m telling you, he’s missed you. He’d never admit it, but it’s true.”

  “If you say so, brother,” Jamie said, throwing an arm around Henry’s shoulder. “I’m not gonna argue with you today. But I have to say, it’s mighty good of you to have taken him in and put up with him all these months.”

  Henry shrugged. “He’s our father,” he said.

  I felt a ripple of envy, which I saw echoed on Jamie’s face. How simple things were for Henry! How I wished sometimes that I could join him in his stark, right-angled world, where everything was either right or wrong and there was no doubt which was which. What unimaginable luxury, never to wrestle with whether or why, never to lie awake nights wondering what if.

  AT SUPPER THAT NIGHT, Jamie regaled us with stories about his travels overseas. He’d been as far north as Norway and as far south as Portugal, mostly by train but sometimes by bicycle or on foot. He told us about snow-skiing in the Swiss Alps: how the mountains were so tall the tops of them pierced the clouds, and the snow so thick and soft that when you fell it was like sinking into a feather bed. He took us to the sidewalk cafés of Paris, where waiters in crisp white shirts and black aprons served pastries made of a hundred layers, each thinner than a fingernail; to the bullfights in Barcelona, where the matadors were hailed as gods by roaring crowds of thousands; to the casino in Monaco, where he’d won a hundred dollars on a single hand of
baccarat and sent Rita Hayworth a bottle of champagne with the winnings. He made it all sound grand and marvelous, but I couldn’t help noticing how drawn he looked, and how his hands shook each time he lit one of his Lucky Strikes. He ate little, preferring to smoke one cigarette after another until the room was so hazy the children’s eyes were red and watery. They didn’t complain, though. They were completely under their uncle’s spell, especially Isabelle, who made eyes at him all through dinner and demanded to sit in his lap afterward. I’d never seen her so smitten with anyone.

  Henry was the only one of us who seemed impatient with Jamie’s stories. I could tell by the crease between his eyebrows, which got deeper and deeper as the evening wore on. Finally he blurted out, “And that’s what you’ve been doing all these months, instead of coming home?”

  “I needed some time,” said Jamie.

  “To play in the snow and eat fancy foreign bread.”

  “We all heal in our own ways, brother.”

  Henry made a gesture that took in Jamie’s appearance. “Well, if this is what you call healing, I’d hate to see what hurting is.”

  Jamie sighed and passed a hand across his face. The veins on the back of his hand stood out like blue cords.

  “Are you hurt, Uncle Jamie?” asked Isabelle worriedly.

  “Everybody was hurt some in the war, little Bella. But I’ll be all right. Do you know what bella means?” She shook her head. “It’s Italian for ‘beautiful one.’ I think that’s what I’ll call you from now on. Would you like that, Bella?”

  “Yes, Uncle Jamie!”

  I would heal him, I thought. I would cook food to strengthen him, play music to soothe him, tell stories to make him smile. Not the weary smile he wore tonight, but the radiant, reckless grin he’d given me on the dance floor of the Peabody Hotel so many years before.

  The war had dimmed him, but I would bring him back to himself.

  HENRY

  THE WAR BROKE my brother—in his head, where no one could see it. Never mind all his clever banter, his flirting with Laura and the girls. I could tell he wasn’t right the second I saw him. He was thin and jittery, and his eyes had a haunted look I recognized from my own time in the Army. I knew too well what kind of sights they were seeing when he shut them at night.