Mudbound Read online

  Jamie was thin-skinned to begin with, had been all his life. He was always looking for praise, then getting his feelings hurt when he didn’t get it, or enough of it. And he never knew his own worth, not in his guts where a man needs to know it. Our father was to blame for that. He was always whittling away at Jamie, trying to make him smaller. Pappy thought he had everybody fooled, but I knew why he did it. He did it because he loved my brother like he never loved anybody else in his whole life, not even Mama, and he wanted Jamie to be just like him. And when Jamie couldn’t be or wouldn’t be, which was most of the time, Pappy punished him. It was a hard thing to watch, but I learned not to get in the middle of it. We all did, even Mama. Defending Jamie just made Pappy whittle harder.

  Once when I was home for Christmas, Jamie must have been six or seven, we were hauling wood and we flushed a copperhead out from under the woodpile. I grabbed the axe and chopped its head off, and Jamie screamed.

  “Stop acting like a goddamn sissy,” Pappy said, cuffing him on the head. “You’d think I had three daughters instead of two.”

  Jamie squared his shoulders and pretended he didn’t care—even that young, he was good at acting—but I could tell how hurt he was.

  “Why do you do that?” I asked Pappy when we were alone.

  “Do what?”

  “Cut him down like that.”

  “It’s for his own good,” Pappy said. “You and your mother and sisters have near to ruined him with your mollycoddling. Somebody needs to toughen him up.”

  “He’s going to hate you if you’re not careful,” I said.

  Pappy gave me a scornful look. “When he’s a man, he’ll understand. And he’ll thank me, you wait and see.”

  My father died waiting for that thanks. It gives me no satisfaction to say so.

  JAMIE DIDN’T TALK to me about the war. Most men don’t, who’ve seen real combat. It’s the ones who spent their tours well behind the lines who want to tell you all about it, and the ones who never served who want to know. Our father didn’t waste any time before he started in with the questions. Jamie’s first night home, as soon as Laura and the girls had gone to bed, Pappy said, “So what’s it like, being a big hero?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Jamie said.

  Pappy snorted. “Don’t give me that. They wrote me about your fancy medals.”

  Jamie’s “fancy medals” included the Silver Star and the Distinguished Flying Cross, two of the highest honors an airman can receive. He never mentioned them in his letters. If the Army hadn’t notified Pappy, we wouldn’t have known about them.

  “I was lucky,” Jamie said. “A lot of guys weren’t.”

  “Bet you got plenty of tail out of it too.”

  My brother just shrugged.

  “Jamie never needed medals to get girls,” I said.

  “Damn right, he don’t,” Pappy said. “Takes after me that way. I didn’t have two cents to rub together when your mama married me. Prettiest girl in Greenville, could’ve had any fellow in town, but it was me she wanted.”

  That was true, as far as I knew. At least, Mama had never contradicted his version of their courtship. I believe they married each other almost entirely for their looks.

  “She wasn’t the only one either,” Pappy went on. “I had em all sniffing after me, just like you do, son.”

  Jamie shifted in his chair. He hated being compared to our father.

  “Well one thing’s for sure,” Pappy said. “You must’ve killed a whole lot of Krauts to get all them medals.”

  Jamie ignored him and looked at me. “You got anything to drink around here?”

  “I think I’ve got some whiskey somewhere.”

  “That’ll do just fine.”

  I found the bottle and poured two fingers all around. Jamie downed his and refilled his glass again, twice as full as before. That surprised me. I’d never known my brother to be a drinker.

  “Well?” Pappy asked. “How many’d you take out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Take a guess.”

  “I don’t know,” Jamie repeated. “What does it matter?”

  “A man ought to know how many men he’s killed.”

  Jamie took a hefty swig of his whiskey, then smiled unpleasantly. “I can tell you this,” he said. “It was more than one.”

  Pappy’s eyes narrowed, and I swore under my breath. Back in ’34, when he was still working for the railroad, Pappy had killed a man, an escaped convict from Parchman who’d tried to rob some passengers at gunpoint. Pappy pulled his own pistol and shot him right in the eyeball. A single shot, delivered with deadeye accuracy—at least, that was how he always told it. Over the years the elements of the story had hardened into myth. The terrified women and children, and the cool-headed conductor who never felt a moment’s fear. The onlookers who cheered as he carried the body off the train and dumped it at the feet of the grateful sheriff. Killing that convict was the proudest moment of our father’s life. Jamie knew better than to belittle it.

  “Well,” Pappy said with a smirk, “at least I looked my one in the eye before I shot him. Not like dropping bombs from a mile up in the air.”

  Jamie stared tight-jawed into his glass.

  “Well,” I said, “time to hit the hay. We’ve got an early day tomorrow.”

  “I’ll just finish my drink,” Jamie said.

  Pappy got up with a grunt and took one of the lanterns. “Don’t wake me up when you come in,” he said to Jamie.

  I sat with my brother while he finished his whiskey. It didn’t take him long, and when he was done his eyes flickered to the bottle like he wanted more. I took it and put it back in the cupboard. “What you need is a good night’s sleep,” I said. “Come on, Laura made up your bed for you.”

  I took the other lantern and walked him out to the lean-to. At the door I gave him a quick hug. “Welcome home, little brother.”

  “Thanks, Henry. I’m grateful to you and Laura for having me.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense. We’re your family, and this is your home for as long as you want, hear?”

  “I can’t stay long,” he said.

  “Why not? Where else have you got to go?”

  He shook his head again and looked up at the sky. It was a cloudless night, which I was glad to see. I wanted the cotton to stay nice and dry till after the harvest. Then it could rain all it wanted to.

  “Actually,” Jamie said, “it was more like four miles up in the air.”

  “What was?”

  “The altitude we dropped the bombs from.”

  “How can you even see anything from that high up?”

  “You can see more than you’d think,” he said. “Roads, cities, factories. Just not the people. From twenty thousand feet, they’re not even ants.” He let out a harsh laugh. It sounded exactly like our father. “How many did you kill, Henry? In the Great War?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Fifty, maybe sixty men.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I was only in France for six weeks before I got wounded. I was lucky, I guess.”

  For a long time Jamie was silent. “Pappy’s right,” he said finally. “A man ought to know.”

  After he’d gone in I shuttered the lantern and sat on the porch awhile, listening to the cotton plants rustle in the night wind. Jamie needed more than a good night’s sleep, I thought. He needed a home of his own, and a sweet Southern gal to give him children and coax his roots back down into his native soil. All of that would come in good time, I had no doubt of it. But right now he needed hard work to draw the poison from his wounds. Hard work and quiet nights at home with a loving family. Laura and the girls and I would give him that. We’d help him get better.

  When I went in to bed I thought she was asleep, but as soon as I was settled under the covers, her voice came soft in the dark. “How long is he planning to stay?” she asked.

  “Not for long, is what he says. But I aim to change his mind.”

  Laura sig
hed, a warm gust on the back of my neck.

  • • •

  THE HARVEST STARTED two weeks later. The cotton plants were so heavy with bolls they could barely stand up. There must have been a hundred bolls per plant, fat and bursting with lint. The air prickled with the smell of it. Looking out over the fields, breathing that dusty cotton smell, I felt a sense of rightness I hadn’t known in years, and maybe not ever. This was my land, my crop, that I’d drawn forth from the earth with my wits and labor. There’s no knowledge in the world as satisfying to a man as that.

  I hired eight colored families to pick for me, which was as many as I could find. Orris Stokes had been right—field labor was hard to come by, though why anybody, colored or white, would prefer the infernal stink of a factory and the squalor of a city slum to a life lived under the sun, I will never understand. The talk at Tricklebank’s was all about these new picking machines they were using on some of the big plantations, but even if I could have afforded one I wouldn’t have wanted it. Give me a colored picker every time. There’s nothing and no one can harvest a cotton crop better. Cotton picking’s been bred into the Southern Negro, bred right into his bones. You just have to watch the colored children in the fields to see that. Before they’re even knee-high their fingers know what to do. Of course, picking’s like any other task you give one of them, you’ve got to keep a close eye on them, make sure they’re not snapping on you, taking the boll along with the lint to increase the weight of their haul. You take that trash to the gin, you’ll get your crop downgraded right quick. Any picker we caught snapping got his pay docked by half. You better believe we had them all picking clean cotton before long.

  Jamie was a big help to me. He threw himself into every task I gave him, never once complaining about the work or the heat. He pushed himself hard, too hard sometimes, but I didn’t try to stop him. Moodwise, he was up and down. He’d go along fine for three or four days, then he’d have one of his nightmares and wake us all with his shouting. I’d go out there and calm him down while our father grumbled about being kept awake. Pappy thought it was a weakness of character, something Jamie could fix if he just put his mind to it. I tried to explain to Pappy what it was like, reminding him how I’d once had those same kind of nightmares myself, and I was in combat for a lot less time than Jamie.

  “Your brother needs to toughen up,” Pappy said. “You wouldn’t see me quaking and screaming like a girl.”

  On the weekends Jamie would take the car and disappear for a night, sometimes two. I was pretty sure he was going to Greenville to drink and mess around with cheap women. I didn’t try to stop that either. I figured he was old enough to make his own decisions. He didn’t need his big brother telling him what to do anymore.

  But I figured wrong. One Monday in October I was on the tractor in the south field harvesting the last of the soybeans when I saw Bill Tricklebank’s truck coming up the road in a hurry. Jamie had been gone since Saturday, and I was starting to worry. When I saw Bill’s truck I knew something must have happened. We didn’t have a phone, so when somebody needed to reach us they called Tricklebank’s.

  I got down off the tractor and ran across the field to the road. I was out of breath by the time I reached Bill. “What is it?” I said. “What’s the matter?”

  “The Greenville sheriff’s office called,” Bill said. “Your brother’s been arrested. They got him in the county jail.”

  “What for?”

  He looked away from me and mumbled something.

  “Speak up, Bill!”

  “Driving drunk. He hit a cow.”

  “A cow?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “Is he hurt?”

  “Just a bump on the head and some bruises, is what the deputy told me.”

  Relief flooded me. I gripped Bill by the shoulder and saw him wince a little. The man was thin as a dandelion stalk and about as sturdy. “Thank you, Bill. Thank you for coming out and telling me.”

  “That ain’t all,” he said. “There was a . . . young lady in the car with him.”

  “Was she hurt?”

  “Concussion and a broke arm. Deputy said she’d be all right though.”

  “I’d be obliged if you and Rose would keep this to yourselves,” I said.

  “Sure thing, Henry. But you ought to know, Mercy’s the one who placed the call.”

  “Damn.” Mercy Ivers was the nosiest of the town’s operators, with the biggest mouth. If everybody in Marietta didn’t already know Jamie was in jail, I had no doubt they would by nightfall.

  Bill dropped me at the house and went on his way. Laura and Pappy were waiting on the porch. I filled them in, leaving out the part about the young lady. I was sorry my wife had to know about any of it, but with the Tricklebanks and Mercy Ivers involved there was no help for it. I figured Laura would be angry, and she was—just not in the way I expected.

  “After all he’s done for his country,” she said, “to throw him in jail like a common criminal! They ought to be ashamed.”

  “Well, honey, he was blind drunk.”

  “We don’t know that,” she said. “And even if he was, I’m sure he had reason to be, after all he’s been through.”

  “What if he’d hit another car instead of a cow? Somebody could have been badly hurt.”

  “But nobody was,” she said.

  Her defending him like that nettled me. My wife was a sensible woman, but where Jamie was concerned she was as blind as every other female who ever breathed. If it had been me out driving drunk and killing livestock, you can bet she wouldn’t have been nearly so forgiving.

  “Henry? Was someone else hurt?”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her and knock him off the pedestal she’d built for him—I was that mad at both of them. Lucky for Jamie I’m no rat. “No, just him,” I said.

  “Well then,” Laura said, “let me get some supper for you to take to him. I’m sure they haven’t fed him properly.” She went inside.

  “You want me to come with you?” Pappy asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “You’ll need money for bail.”

  “I’ve got enough in the strongbox.”

  Pappy pulled his wallet out of his pants pocket, took out a worn hundred-dollar bill and held it out to me. I gaped at it, then at him. My father was a Scot to the marrow. Parting him from money was like trying to get milk out of a mule.

  “Go on, take it,” he said gruffly. “But don’t you tell him I gave it to you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want him expecting more.”

  “Whatever you say, Pappy.”

  AT THE GREENVILLE jail I asked to see Sheriff Partain. I knew him slightly. He and my sister Thalia had been high school sweethearts. He’d wanted to marry her, but she had her sights set higher. Caught herself a rich tobacco planter from Virginia and moved up north with him. Told everybody she’d broken Charlie Partain’s heart beyond repair. For Jamie’s sake, I hoped she’d been wrong. Thalia always did have an exaggerated idea of her own importance.

  When the deputy led me into Charlie’s office he came out from behind his desk and shook my hand, a little too hard. “Henry McAllan. How long’s it been?”

  “About fifteen years, give or take.”

  Charlie hadn’t changed much in that time. He had a little belly on him, but he was still a good-looking fellow, big and affable, with an aw-shucks smile that couldn’t quite hide the ambition underneath it. A born politician.

  “How you been?” he asked.

  “Just fine. I’m living over to Marietta now. Got me a cotton farm there.”

  “So I heard.”

  “You’ve done well for yourself,” I said, gesturing at the badge on his shirt. “Congratulations on winning sheriff.”

  “Thanks. I was an MP in the war, guess I just got a taste for the law.”

  “About my brother,” I said.

  He shook his head gravely. “Yeah, i
t’s a bad business.”

  “How is he?”

  “He’s all right, but he’s got one helluva headache. Course, drinking a whole fifth of bourbon’ll do that to you.”

  “Can you tell me what happened, Charlie? I got the story secondhand.”

  He walked back behind his desk, taking his time about it, and sat down. “You know,” he said, “I like to be called sheriff when I’m working. Helps me keep the job separate. You understand.” His face stayed friendly, but I didn’t miss the sharp glint in his eye.

  “Of course. Sheriff.”

  “Have a seat.”

  I sat in the chair he gestured to, facing the desk.

  “Seems your brother and a female companion were parked out east of town on Saturday night. Watching the moon is what she said.” Charlie’s tone indicated how much he believed that.

  “Who is this gal?”

  “Her name’s Dottie Tipton. She’s a waitress over at the Levee Hotel. Her husband Joe was a friend of mine. He died at Bastogne.”

  “Sorry to hear it. Jamie fought in the Battle of the Bulge too. It’s where he won his Silver Star. He was a bomber pilot, you know.”

  “You don’t say,” Charlie said, crossing his arms over his chest.

  So much for my efforts to impress him. I decided I’d better stick to the business at hand. “So the two of them were parked, and then what happened?”

  “Well, that’s where it gets kinda fuzzy. Your brother don’t remember a thing, or so he claims.”

  “And the woman?”

  “Dottie says he ran into that cow by accident when they were driving back to town. Which I might believe if we’d found it laying in the road instead of smack-dab in the middle of Tom Easterly’s pasture.”

  “You said yourself Jamie was drunk. He probably just lost track of the road.”

  Charlie leaned back in his chair, putting his feet up on the desk. Enjoying himself. “Uh-huh. There’s just two problems with that.”

  “What?”