Mudbound Read online

  “Hello, my dear,” he said. And then, “I’ve come to say goodbye.”

  Goodbye. The word billowed in the space between us before settling around me in soft black folds.

  “They’re building a new airfield in Alabama, and they want me to oversee the project. I’ll be gone for several months, possibly longer.”

  “I see,” I said.

  I waited for him to say something more: How he would miss me. How he would write to me. How he hoped I’d be here when he returned. But he said nothing, and as the silence stretched on I felt myself fill with self-loathing. I was not meant for marriage and children and the rest of it. These things were not for me, had never been for me. I’d been a fool to think otherwise.

  I felt myself receding from him, and from myself too, our images shrinking in my mind’s eye. I heard him offer to give me a lift home. Heard myself decline politely, telling him I needed the fresh air, then wish him the best of luck in Alabama. Saw him lean toward me. Saw myself turn my head so his kiss found my cheek instead of my lips. Watched as I walked away from him, my back as straight as pride could make it.

  Mother pounced on me as soon as I came in the door. “Henry stopped by earlier,” she said. “Did he find you at church?”

  I nodded.

  “He seemed eager to speak with you.”

  It was hard to look at her face, to see the hope trembling just beneath the surface of her bright smile. “Henry’s going away,” I said. “He doesn’t know for how long.”

  “Is that . . . all he said?”

  “Yes, that’s all.” I started up the stairs to my room.

  “He’ll be back,” she called out after me. “I know he will.”

  I turned and looked down at her, so lovely in her distress. One pale, slender hand lay on the banister. The other clenched the fabric of her skirt, crumpling it.

  “Oh, Laura,” she said, with a telltale quaver.

  “Don’t you dare cry, Mother.”

  She didn’t. It must have been a Herculean effort. My mother weeps over anything at all: dead butterflies, curdled sauce. “I’m so sorry, darling,” she said.

  My legs went suddenly boneless. I sank down onto the top step and put my head on my knees. I heard the creak of her footsteps and felt her sit beside me. Her arm went around me, and her lips touched my hair. “We won’t speak of him,” she said. “We won’t mention his name ever again.”

  She kept her promise, and she must have passed the word to the rest of the family, because no one said a thing about Henry, not even my sisters. They were just overly kind, all of them, complimenting me more often than I deserved and concocting ways to keep me busy. I was in great demand as a dinner guest, bridge partner and shopping companion. Outwardly I was cheerful, and after a time they began to treat me normally again, believing I was over it. I wasn’t. I was furious—with myself, with Henry. With the cruel natural order that had made me simultaneously undesirable to men and unable to feel complete without one. I saw that my former contentment had been a lie. This was the truth at the core of my existence: this yawning emptiness, scantily clad in rage. It had been there all along. Henry had merely been the one who’d shown it to me.

  I didn’t hear from him for nearly two months. And then one day, I came home to find my mother waiting anxiously in the foyer. “Henry McAllan’s come back,” she said. “He’s in the parlor. Here, your hair’s mussed, let me fix it for you.”

  “I’ll see him as I am,” I said, lifting my chin.

  I regretted that little bit of defiance as soon as I laid eyes on him. Henry looked tan and fit, more handsome than he ever had. Why hadn’t I at least put on some lipstick? No—that was foolishness. This man had led me on, then abandoned me. I hadn’t gotten so much as a postcard from him in all these weeks. What did I care whether I looked pretty for him?

  “Laura, it’s good to see you,” he said. “How have you been?”

  “Just fine. And you?”

  “I’ve missed you,” he said.

  I was silent. Henry came and took my hands in his. My palms were damp, but his were cool and dry.

  “I had to be sure of my feelings,” he said. “But now I am. I love you, and I want you to be my wife. Will you marry me.”

  And there it was, just like that: the question I’d thought I would never hear. Granted, the scene didn’t play out quite like I’d pictured it. Henry wasn’t kneeling, and the question had actually come out as more of a statement. If he felt any worry over my answer, he hid it well. That stung a little. How dared he be so sure of himself, after such a long absence? Did he think he could simply walk back into my house and claim me like a forgotten coat? And yet, beside the enormity of his wanting me, my anger seemed a paltry thing. If Henry was certain of me, I told myself, it was because that was his way. Meat should not be eaten rare. Blue is your color. Will you marry me.

  As I looked into his frank gray eyes, I had a sudden, unbidden image of Jamie grinning down at me as he’d spun me around the ballroom of the Peabody. Henry was neither dashing nor romantic; like me, he was made of sturdier, plainer stuff. But he loved me, and I knew that he would provide for me and be true to me and give me children who were strong and bright. And for all of that, I could certainly love him in return.

  “Yes, Henry,” I said. “I will marry you.”

  He nodded his head once, then he kissed me, opening my mouth with his thumb and putting his tongue inside. I clamped my mouth shut, more out of surprise than anything; it had been years since I’d been French-kissed, and his tongue felt foreign, thick and strange. Henry let out a little grunt, and I realized I’d bitten him.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t know you were going to do that.”

  He didn’t speak. He merely reopened my mouth and kissed me again exactly the same as before. This time I accepted his invasion without protest, and that seemed to satisfy him, because after a few minutes he left me to go and speak to Daddy.

  WE WERE MARRIED six weeks later in a simple Episcopal ceremony. Jamie was the best man. When Henry brought him to the house he greeted me with a bear hug and a dozen pink roses.

  “Sweet Laura,” he said. “I’m so glad Henry finally came to his senses. I told him he was an idiot if he didn’t marry you.”

  Jamie had spoiled me for the rest of the McAllans, whom I met for the first time two days before the wedding. From the moment they arrived it was clear they felt superior to us Chappells, who (it must be said) had French blood on my father’s side and a Union general on my mother’s. I didn’t see much of Henry’s father that weekend—Pappy and the other men were off doing whatever men do when there’s a wedding on—but I spent enough time with the McAllan women to know we’d never be close, as I’d naïvely hoped. Henry’s mother was cold, haughty and full of opinions, most of them negative, about everyone and everything. His two sisters, Eboline and Thalia, were former Cotton Queens of Greenville who’d married into money and made sure everybody knew it. The day before the wedding my mother gave a luncheon for the ladies of both families, and Fanny asked them whether they’d gone to college.

  Thalia arched her perfectly plucked brows and said, “What good is college to a woman? I confess I can’t see the need for it.”

  “Unless of course you’re poor, or plain,” said Eboline.

  She gave a little laugh, and Thalia giggled with her. My sisters and I looked at each other uncertainly. Had Henry not told them we were all college girls? Surely they didn’t know, Fanny said to me later; surely the slight had been unintentional. But I knew better.

  Still, not even Henry’s disagreeable relations could dampen the happiness I felt on my wedding day. We honeymooned in Charleston, then returned to a little house Henry had rented for us on Evergreen Street, not far from where my parents lived. And so my time of cleaving began. I loved the smallness of domestic life, the sense of belonging it gave me. I was Henry’s now. Yielding to him—cooking the foods he liked, washing and ironing his shirts, waiting for him to come ho
me to me each day—was what I’d been put on the earth to do. And then Amanda Leigh was born in November of 1940, followed two years later by Isabelle, and I became theirs more utterly even than I was their father’s.

  It would be six years into my marriage before I remembered that cleave has a second meaning, which is “to divide with a blow, as with an axe.”

  JAMIE

  IN THE DREAM I’m alone on the roof of Eboline’s old house in Greenville, watching the water rise. Usually I’m ten, but sometimes I’m grown and once I was an old man. I straddle the peak of the roof, my legs hanging down on either side. Snatched objects race toward and then around me, churning in the current. A chinaberry tree. A crystal chandelier. A dead cow. I try to guess which side of the house each item will be steered to by the water. The four-poster bed with its tail of mosquito netting will go to the left. The outhouse will go to the right, along with Mr. Wilhoit’s Stutz Bearcat. The stakes of the game are high: every time I guess wrong the water rises another foot. When it reaches my ankles I draw my knees up as much as I can without losing my balance. I jockey the house, riding it north into the oncoming flood while the water urges me on in its terrible voice. I don’t speak its language but I know what it’s saying: It wants me. Not because I have any significance, but because it wants everything. Who am I, a skinny kid in torn britches, to deny it?

  When the river takes me I don’t try to swim or stay afloat. I open my eyes and my mouth and let the water fill me up. I feel my lungs spasm but there’s no pain, and I stop being afraid. The current carries me along. I’m flotsam, and I understand that flotsam is all I’ve ever been.

  Something glows in the murk ahead of me, getting brighter as I get closer to it. The light hurts my eyes. Has a star fallen in the river? I wonder. Has the river swallowed everything, even the sky? Five rays emanate from the star’s center. They’re moving back and forth, like they’re seeking something. As I pass by them I see that they’re fingers, and that what I thought was a star is a big white hand. I don’t want it to find me. I’m part of the river now.

  And then I’m not. I feel a sharp pain in my head and am yanked up, back onto the roof, or into a boat—the dream varies. But the hand is always Henry’s, and it’s always holding a bloody hank of my hair.

  More than a thousand people died in that flood. I survived it, because of Henry. I wasn’t alone on Eboline’s roof, she and my parents were there with me, along with her husband, Virgil, and their maid, Dessie. The water didn’t come and take me, I fell into it. I fell into it because I stood up. I stood up because I saw Henry approaching in the boat, coming to rescue us.

  Because of Henry. So much of who I am and what I’ve done is because of Henry. My earliest memory is of meeting him for the first time. My mother was holding me, rocking me, and then she handed me to a large, white-haired stranger. I was afraid, and then I wasn’t—that’s all I remember. The way Mama always told it, I started to pitch a fit, but when Henry held me up in front of him and said, “Hello, little brother,” I stopped crying at once and stuck my fingers in his mouth. I, who howled like a red Indian whenever my father or any other male tried to pick me up, went meekly into my brother’s hands. I was one and a half. He was twenty-one and just returned from the Great War.

  Because of Henry, I grew up hating Huns. Huns had tried to kill him in a forest somewhere in France. They’d given him his limp and his white hair. They’d taken things from him too—I didn’t know what exactly but I could sense his lack of them. He never talked about the war. Pappy was always prodding him about it, wanting to know how many men Henry had killed and how he’d killed them. “Was it more than ten? More than fifty?” Pappy would ask. “Did you get any with your bayonet, or did you shoot em all from a distance?”

  But Henry would never say. The only time I ever heard him refer to the war was on my eighth birthday. He came home for the weekend and took me deer hunting. It was my first time getting to carry an actual weapon (if you can call a Daisy Model 25 BB gun an actual weapon) and I was bursting with manly pride. I didn’t manage to hit anything besides a few trees, but Henry brought down an eight-point buck. It wasn’t a clean kill. When we got to where the buck had fallen we found it still alive, struggling futilely to get up. Splintered bone poked out of a wound in its thigh. Its eyes were wild and uncomprehending.

  Henry passed a hand over his face, then gripped my shoulder hard. “If you ever have to be a soldier,” he said, “promise me you’ll try and get up to the sky. They say battle is a lot cleaner up there.”

  I promised. Then he knelt and cut its throat.

  From that day on, whenever the crop dusters flew over our farm, I pretended I was the pilot. Only it wasn’t boll weevils I was killing, it was Huns. I must have shot down hundreds of German aces in my imagination, sitting in the topmost branches of the sweet gum tree behind our house.

  But if Henry sparked my desire to fly, Lindbergh ignited it with his solo flight across the Atlantic. It was less than a month after the flood. Greenville and our farm were still under ten feet of water, so we were staying with my aunt and uncle in Carthage. The house was full, and I was stuck sleeping in a three-quarter bed in the attic with my cousins Albin and Avery, strapping bullies with pimply faces and buckteeth. Crammed between the two of them, I dreamed of the flood: the guessing game, the voice of the water, the big white hand. My moaning woke them, and they punched and kicked me awake, calling me a pansy and a titty baby. But not even their threats—to smother me, to throw me out the window, to stake me out over an anthill and pour molasses in my eyes—could stop the flood from coming to get me in my sleep. It came almost every night, and I always gave in to it. That was the part I dreaded: the part where I just let the water have me. It seemed a shameful weakness, the kind my brother would never give in to, even in a dream. Henry would fight with everything he had, and when his last bit of strength was gone he’d fight some more—like I hadn’t done. At least, I was pretty sure I hadn’t. That was the hell of it, I had no memory of what had happened between the time I fell in the water and when Henry pulled me out. All I had was the dream, which seemed to confirm my worst fears about myself. As the days passed and it kept recurring, I became more and more convinced it was true. I’d given myself willingly to the water, and would do it again if I had the chance.

  I started refusing to take baths. Albin and Avery added “pig boy” to the list of endearments they had for me, and Pappy whipped my butt bloody with a switch, yelling that he wouldn’t have a son who went around stinking like a nigger. Finally my mother threatened to bathe me herself if I wouldn’t. The thought of Mama seeing me naked was enough to send me straightaway into the tub, though I never filled it more than a few inches.

  It was during this time that stories about Lindbergh started to crop up in the papers and on the radio. He was going after the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Orteig Prize, offered by a Frenchman named Raymond Orteig to the first aviator to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, or vice versa. The purse had been up for grabs since 1919. A bunch of pilots had tried to win it. All of them had failed, and six had died trying.

  Lindbergh would be the one to make it, I was positive. So what if he was younger and greener than the other pilots who’d tried? He was a god—fearless, immortal. There was no way he would fail. My confidence wasn’t shared by the local papers, which dubbed him “the Flying Fool” for attempting it without a copilot. I told myself they were the fools.

  The day of the flight, our entire family gathered around the radio and listened to the reports of Lindbergh’s progress. His plane was sighted over New England, then Newfoundland. Then he vanished, for sixteen of the longest hours of my life.

  “He’s dead,” Albin taunted. “He fell asleep, and his plane crashed into the ocean.”

  “He did not!” I said. “Lindy would never fall asleep while he was flying.”

  “Maybe he got lost,” said Avery.

  “Yeah,” said Albin, “maybe he was just too stupid to find his way.”


  This was a reference to the fact that I’d gotten lost a few days before. The two of them were supposed to take me fishing, but they’d led me in circles and then disappeared snickering into the woods. I was unfamiliar with the country around Carthage and it took me three hours to find my way back to the house, by which time my mother was out of her mind with worry. Albin and Avery had gotten a whipping, but that didn’t make me feel any better. They’d bested me again.

  They wouldn’t this time. Lindbergh would show them. He would win for both of us.

  And of course, he did. “The Flying Fool” became “the Lone Eagle,” and Lindy’s triumph became mine. Even my cousins cheered when he landed safely at Le Bourget Field. It was impossible not to feel proud of what he’d done. Impossible not to want to be like him.

  That night after supper, I went outside and lay on the wet grass and stared up at the sky. It was twilight—that impossible shade of purple-blue that only lasts a few minutes before dulling into ordinary dark. I wanted to dive up into that blue and lose myself in it. I remember thinking there was nothing bad up there. No muck or stink or killing brown water. No ugliness or hate. Just blue and gray and ten thousand shades in between, all of them beautiful.

  I would be a pilot like Lindbergh. I would have great adventures and perform acts of daring and defend my country, and it would be glorious. And I would be a god.

  Fifteen years later the Army granted my wish. And it was not. And I was not.

  RONSEL

  THEY CALLED US “Eleanor Roosevelt’s niggers.” They said we wouldn’t fight, that we’d turn tail and run the minute we got into real combat. They said we didn’t have the discipline to make good soldiers. That we didn’t have brains enough to man tanks. That we were inclined by nature to all kind of wickedness—lying, stealing, raping white women. They said we could see better than white GIs in the dark because we were closer to the beasts. When we were in Wim-bourne an English gal I never laid eyes on before came up and patted me right on the butt. I asked her what she was doing and she said, “Checking to see if you’ve got a tail.”