Mudbound

by Hillary Jordan

  “In the attic. He hanged himself,” Pappy said. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Did he leave a note saying why?” I asked.

  Pappy pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. The ink had run where someone’s tears had fallen on it. It was addressed to “My darling wife.” In a quavering hand, Virgil confessed to Eboline that he’d lost the bulk of their money in a confidence scheme involving a Bolivian silver mine and the rest on a horse named Barclay’s Bravado. He said he was ending his life because he couldn’t bear the thought of telling her. (Later, when I was better acquainted with my father-in-law, I would wonder if what Virgil really couldn’t bear was the thought of spending one more night under the same roof as Pappy.)

  Eboline wouldn’t leave her bed, even to soothe her children. That job fell to me, along with most of the cooking for a house full of people; Henry had kept the maid on for the time being, but he’d had to let the gardener and cook go. I did what I could. As much as I disliked Eboline, I couldn’t help feeling terribly sorry for her.

  After the funeral, the girls and I drove home to Memphis while Henry stayed on to help his sister sort out her affairs. He would just be a few days, he said. But a few days turned into a week, then two. The situation was complicated, he told me on the phone. He needed more time to settle things.

  He took the train home in mid-January. He was cheerful, almost ebullient, and unusually passionate that night in our bed. Afterward he threaded his fingers through mine and cleared his throat.

  “Honey, by the way,” he said.

  I braced myself. That particular phrase, coming out of Henry’s mouth, could lead to anything at all, I never knew what: Honey, by the way, we’re out of mustard, could you pick some up at the store? Honey, by the way, I had a car accident this morning.

  Or in this case, “Honey, by the way, I bought a farm in Mississippi. We’ll be moving there in two weeks.”

  The farm, he went on to tell me, was located forty miles from Greenville, near a little town I’d never heard of called Marietta. We’d live in town, in a house he’d rented for us there, and he’d drive to the farm every day to work.

  “Is this because of Eboline?” I asked, when I could speak calmly.

  “Partly,” he said, giving my hand a squeeze. “Virgil’s estate is a mess. It’ll take months to untangle, and I need to be close by.” I must have given him a dubious look. “Eboline and the children are all alone now,” he said, his voice rising a little. “It’s my duty to help them.”

  “What about your father?” I asked. Meaning, can’t he help them?

  “Eboline can’t be expected to look after him now. Pappy will have to come and live with us.” Henry paused, then added, “He’ll be driving the truck up next week.”

  “What truck?”

  “The pickup truck I bought to use on the farm. We’ll need it to move the furniture. We won’t be able to take everything at once, but I can make a second trip when we’re settled.”

  Settled. In rural Mississippi. In two weeks’ time.

  “I bought a tractor too,” he said. “A John Deere Model B. It’s one hell of a machine—you won’t believe how fast it can get a field plowed. I’ll be able to farm a hundred and twenty acres by myself. Imagine that!”

  When I said nothing, Henry propped himself up on one elbow and peered down at my face. “You’re mighty quiet,” he said.

  “I’m mighty surprised.”

  He gave me a puzzled frown. “But you knew I always intended to have my own farm someday.”

  “No, Henry. I had no idea.”

  “I’m sure I must have mentioned it.”

  “No, you never did.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m telling you now.”

  Just like that, my life was overturned. Henry didn’t ask me how I felt about leaving my home of thirty-seven years and moving with his cantankerous father in tow to a hick town in the middle of Mississippi, and I didn’t tell him. This was his territory, as the children and the kitchen and the church were mine, and we were careful not to trespass in each other’s territories. When it was absolutely necessary we did it discreetly, on the furthermost borders.

  MOTHER CRIED WHEN I told her we were leaving, but it was hardly the squall I’d expected. It was more of a light summer shower, quickly over, followed by admonitions to buck up and make the best of it. Daddy merely sighed. “Well,” he said, “I guess we’ve had you with us longer than we had any right to expect.” This was what happened to daughters, their expressions seemed to say. You raised them, and if you were lucky they found husbands who might then take them off anywhere at all, and it was not only to be expected, but borne cheerfully.

  I tried to be cheerful, but it was hard. Every day I said goodbye to some beloved person or thing. The porch swing of my parents’ house, where Billy Escue had given me my first real kiss the night of my seventeenth birthday. My own little house on Evergreen Street, with its lace curtains and flowered wallpaper. The roaring of the lions at the nearby zoo, which had made me uneasy when we first moved in but now provided a familiar punctuation to my days. The light at my church, which fell in shafts of brilliant color upon the upturned faces of the congregation.

  My own family’s faces I could hardly bear to look at. My mother and sisters, with their high Fairbairn foreheads and surprised blue eyes. My father, with his wide, kind smile and sloping nose that never could hold up his spectacles properly.

  “It’ll be an adventure,” said Daddy.

  “It’s not that far away,” said Etta.

  “There are bound to be nice people there,” said Mother.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I told them.

  But I didn’t believe a word of it. Marietta was a Delta town; its population—a grand total of four hundred and twelve souls, as I later learned—would consist mostly of farmers, wives of farmers and children of farmers, half of whom were probably Negroes and all of whom were undoubtedly Baptists. We would be miles from civilization among bumpkins who drank grape juice at church every Sunday and talked of nothing but the weather and the crops.

  And as if that weren’t bad enough, Pappy would be there with us. I’d never spent much time around my father-in-law, a blessing I didn’t fully appreciate until that last week in Memphis, when I was forced to spend all day every day alone with him while Henry was at work. Pappy was sour, bossy and vain. His pants had to be creased, his handkerchiefs folded a certain way, his shirts starched. He changed them twice a day, not that they were ever soiled by anything but spilled food; he exerted himself only to roll cigarettes and instruct me on how to pack. I dug up some books I thought he’d like, hoping to distract him, but he waved them away contemptuously. Reading was a waste of time, he said, and education was for prigs and sissies. I wondered how he’d ever managed to produce two sons like Henry and Jamie. I hoped that once we got to Marietta, he’d be spending his days with Henry at the farm, leaving the house to me and the girls.

  The house was the only bright spot in this otherwise bleak picture. Henry had rented it from a couple who’d lost their son in the war and were moving out west. He described it as a two-story antebellum with four bedrooms, a wraparound porch and, most enticing to me, a fig tree. I’ve always been crazy for figs. As I wrapped dishes in newspaper and boxed up lamps and books and linens, I spent many not entirely unpleasant moments picturing myself walking out my back door, plucking the ripe fruit from the branches and eating it unrinsed, like a greedy child. I imagined the pies and minces I would make, the preserves I would lay in for the winter. I said nothing of this to Henry; I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction. But every night at supper, he’d bring up some pleasing detail about the house that he’d neglected to mention before. Had he told me it had a modern electric stove? Did I know it was just three blocks from the elementary school where Amanda Leigh would start first grade the following year?

  “That’s nice, Henry,” I would reply noncommittally.

  The day of our departur
e, we rose before dawn. Teddy and Pearce came and helped Henry load the truck with our furniture, including my most prized possession—an 1859 Steiff upright piano with a rosewood case carved in the Eastlake style. It had belonged to my grandmother, who’d taught me to play. I’d just started giving lessons to Amanda Leigh.

  Daddy arrived as I was making my last check of the house. I was surprised to see him; we’d said our goodbyes the night before. He brought biscuits from Mother and a crock of her apple butter. The eight of us ate the hot biscuits standing in the mostly empty living room, shivering in the chill, licking our sticky fingers between bites. When we were done my father and brothers walked us out to the car. Daddy shook Pappy’s hand, then Henry’s, then hugged the children. At last he turned to me.

  Softly, in a voice meant for my ears alone, he said, “When you were a year old and you came down with rubella, the doctor told us you were likely to die of it. Said he didn’t expect you’d live another forty-eight hours. Your mother was frantic, but I told her that doctor didn’t know what he was talking about. Our Laura’s a fighter, I said, and she’s going to be just fine. I never doubted it, not for one minute, then or since. You keep that in your pocket and take it out when you need it, hear?”

  Swallowing the lump in my throat, I nodded and embraced him. Then I hugged my brothers one last time.

  “Well,” Henry said, “the day’s getting on.”

  “You take good care of my three girls,” Daddy said.

  “I will. They’re my three girls too.”

  The children and I sang as we left Memphis. They sat beside me in the front seat of the DeSoto. Henry, Pappy, and all our belongings were in the truck in front of us. The Mississippi River was a vast, indifferent presence on our right.

  “You’ve got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive,” we sang, but the words felt as foolish and empty as I did.

  IT WAS NEARING dusk when we turned onto Tupelo Lane. This, I knew, was the name of our street, and I felt a little ripple of excitement each time Henry slowed down. Finally he pulled the truck over and stopped, and I saw the house: a charming old place much as he’d described, but with many agreeable particulars he’d neglected to mention—probably because, being Henry, he hadn’t noticed them in the first place. There was a large pecan tree in the front yard, and one side of the house was entirely covered in wisteria, like a nubby green cloak. In the spring, when it bloomed, its perfume would carry us down into sleep every night, and in the summer the lawn would be dotted with fallen purple blossoms. There were two bay windows on either side of the front door, and under them, clumps of mature azalea bushes.

  “You didn’t tell me we had azaleas, Henry,” I chided him when I’d gotten the girls bundled up and out of the car.

  “So we do,” he said with a smile. I could tell he was feeling pleased with himself. I didn’t begrudge him that. The house was truly lovely.

  Amanda Leigh sneezed. She was leaning heavily against my leg, and her sister was half-asleep in my arms. Both of them had head colds. “The children are done in,” I said. “Let’s get them in the house.”

  “The key should be under the mat,” he said.

  As we started up the walk, the porch light went on and the front door opened. A man stepped out onto the porch. He was huge, with hunched shoulders like a bear’s. A small woman came up behind him, peering from around his shoulder.

  “Who are you?” he said. His tone wasn’t friendly.

  “We’re the McAllans,” Henry replied. “The new tenants of this house. Who are you?”

  The man widened his stance, crossing his arms over his chest. “Orris Stokes. The new owner of this house.”

  “New owner? I rented this place from George Suddeth just three weeks ago.”

  “Well, Suddeth sold me the house last week, and he didn’t say nothing to me about any renters.”

  “Is that a fact,” Henry said. “Looks like I need to refresh his memory.”

  “You won’t find him. He left town three days ago.”

  “I gave him a hundred-dollar deposit!”

  “I don’t know nothing about that,” Orris Stokes said.

  “You get anything in writing?” Pappy asked Henry.

  “No. We shook on the deal.”

  The old man spat into the street. “How a son of mine could be such a fool, I’ll never know.”

  I watched my husband’s face fill with the knowledge that he’d been cheated, and worse, that he was powerless to make it right. He turned to me. “I paid him a hundred dollars cash,” he said, “right there in the living room of that house. Afterward I sat down to dinner with him and his wife. I showed her pictures of you and the girls.”

  “You’d best be getting on,” said Orris Stokes. “Ain’t nothing for you here.”

  “Mama, I have to tinkle,” Amanda Leigh said in a child’s loud whisper.

  “Hush now,” I said.

  The woman moved then, coming out from behind her husband. She was a tiny bird-boned thing with freckled skin and small, fluttering hands. No steel in her, I thought, until I saw her chin. That chin—sharply pointed and jutting forward like a trowel—told a different story. I imagined Orris had felt the sting of her defiance on more than one occasion.

  “I’m Alice Stokes,” she said. “Why don’t y’all come in and have a little supper before you go?”

  “Now, Alice,” said her husband.

  She ignored him, addressing herself to me as if the three men weren’t there. “We’ve got stew and cornbread. It ain’t fancy but we’d be pleased to share it with you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, before Henry could refuse. “We’d be most grateful.”

  The house was cheaply furnished and deserved better. The ceilings were high and the rooms spacious, with lovely period details. I couldn’t help but imagine my own things in place of the Stokeses’: my piano beside the bay window in the living room, my Victorian love seat in front of the hand-carved mantel in the parlor. As I sat down to supper at Alice’s crude pine table, I thought how much better my own dining set would have looked beneath the ornate ceiling medallion.

  Over supper we learned that Orris owned the local feed store. That perked Henry up a bit. The two of them talked livestock for a while, discussing the merits of various breeds of pigs—a subject on which Henry was astonishingly well versed. Then the talk turned to farm labor.

  “Damn niggers,” Orris said. “Moving up north, leaving folks with no way to make a crop. Ought to be a law against it.”

  “In my day we didn’t let em leave,” Pappy said. “And the ones that tried sneaking off in the middle of the night ended up sorry they had.”

  Orris nodded approvingly. “My brother has a farm down to Yazoo City. Do you know, last October he had cotton rotting in the fields because he couldn’t find enough niggers to pick it? And the ones he did find were wanting two dollars and fifty cents per hundred pounds.”

  “Two-fifty per hundred!” Henry exclaimed. “At that rate they’ll put every planter in the Delta out of business. And then what’ll they do, when there’s nobody to hire them and give them a roof over their heads?”

  “If you’re expecting sense from a nigger, you’re gonna be waiting a good long while,” said Pappy.

  “You mark my words,” said Orris, “they’re gonna be asking for even more this year, now the government’s done away with the price controls.”

  “Damn niggers,” said Pappy.

  It was eight o’clock by the time we finished supper, and the children were nodding into their bowls. When Alice offered to let us stay the night, I accepted quickly; it was a two-hour drive to Eboline’s in Greenville, and I wasn’t about to chance our flimsy wartime tires on those pothole-filled roads in the dark. Henry and Orris both looked like they wanted to object, but neither of them did. The three men went outside to cover the furniture in the truck against the dew, while Alice cleaned up and I put the girls to bed. After I got them tucked in, I helped her make up the bed Henry and I would share.
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br />   “This is a big house,” I said. “Is it just you and Mr. Stokes?”

  “Yes,” she said in a low, sad voice. “Diphtheria took Orris Jr. in the fall of ’42, and our daughter Mary died of pneumonia last year. Your girls are sleeping in their beds.”

  “I’m sorry.” I busied myself with the pillowcases, not knowing what else to say.

  “I’m expecting,” she confided shyly after a moment. “I haven’t told Orris yet. I wanted to be sure it took.”

  “I hope you have a fine strong baby, Alice.”

  “So do I. I pray for it every night.”

  She left me then, wishing me a good sleep. I went to the window, which looked out over the backyard. I could see the promised fig tree, its branches naked of leaves but still graceful in the moonlight. If he had just signed a lease, I thought. If he were just a different sort of man. Henry was never good at reading people. He always assumed everybody was just like him: that they said what they meant and would do what they said.

  When the door opened I didn’t turn around. He walked up behind me and laid his hand on my shoulder. I hesitated, then reached up and touched it with my own. The skin on top was soft and papery. I felt a rush of tenderness for him, for his aging hands and his wounded pride. He kissed the top of my head, and I sighed and leaned into him. How could I wish him to be other than he was? To be hard and suspicious, like his father? I couldn’t, and I felt ashamed of myself for having had such thoughts.

  “We’ll find another house,” I said.

  I felt him shake his head. “This was the only place for rent in town. It’s all the returning soldiers, they’ve taken all the housing. We’ll have to live out on the farm.”

  “What about one of the other towns nearby?” I asked.

  “I’ve got no time to look elsewhere,” he said. “I have to get the fields broken. I’m already starting a month late.”

  He stepped away from me. I heard the snap of the suitcase opening. “The farmhouse isn’t much, but I know you’ll make it nice,” he said. “I’m going to brush my teeth now. Why don’t you get into bed?”

  There was a brief pause, then the door opened and shut. As his footsteps receded down the hall, I looked at the fig tree and thought of the fruit that would begin ripening there come summer. I wondered if Alice Stokes liked figs; if she would gather up the fruit eagerly or let it fall to the ground and rot.