Mudbound (10 page)

“Who’s this, Henry? Where’s the doctor?”

“The bridge is washed out,” he said. “I couldn’t get to town. This is Florence Jackson, she’s a midwife. I thought she might be able to help.”

“Do you see anybody giving birth here?” she said. “These children need a medical doctor, not some granny with a bag full of potions.”

Just then the little one started gagging like they do when the whooping takes em real bad. I went right over to her. I turned that child onto her side and held her head over the bowl, but all that come out was some yellow bile. “I seen this with my own children,” I told her. “We need to get some liquid down em. But first we got to clear some of that phlegm out.”

She glared at me a minute, then said, “How?”

“We’ll make em up some horehound tea, and we’ll keep after em with the steam like you been doing. That was real good, making that steam for em.”

Mist McAllan was just standing there dripping water all over the floor, looking like somebody stabbed him whenever one of them little girls coughed. Times like that, you got to give the men something to do. I asked him to go boil some more water.

“That tea’ll draw the phlegm right on out of there,” I told Miz McAllan. “Then once they get to breathing better we’ll make em some chicken broth and put a little ground-up willow bark in it for the fever.”

“I’ve got aspirin somewhere, if I can find it in all this mess.”

“Don’t fret yourself over it. Aspirin’s made out of willow bark, they do the same work.”

“I should have taken them to the doctor yesterday, as soon as they started coughing. If anything happens to them . . .”

“Listen to me,” I said, “your girls gone be just fine. Jesus is watching over em and I’m here too, and ain’t neither one of us going nowhere till they feeling better. Give em a week or so, they’ll be right as rain, you’ll see.” I talked to her just like I talk to a laboring woman. Mothers need to hear them soothing words. They just as important as the medicines, sometimes even more.

“Thank you for coming,” she said after awhile.

“You welcome.”

After they had some tea and was quieted down some I went and started plucking the chicken I’d brought. I hadn’t been in the house since the Conleys left and it was filthy from standing empty. Well, not altogether empty—plenty of creatures had been in and out of there. There was mouse droppings and snail tracks on the floor, cicada husks stuck to the walls and dirt all over everything. When Miz McAllan come in and seen me looking, I could tell she was ashamed.

“I haven’t had time to clean,” she said. “The children took sick as soon as we got here.”

“We’ll set it to rights, don’t you worry.”

Whole time I was plucking that chicken and cutting up the onions and carrots for the broth, that ole man was setting at the table watching me. Mist McAllan’s father, that they called Pappy. He was a bald-headed fellow with hardly any meat on him, but he still had all his teeth—a whole mouthful of em, long and yellow as corn. His eyes was so pale they was hardly any color at all. There was something bout them eyes of his, gave me the willies whenever they was on me.

Mist McAllan had gone outside and Miz McAllan was back in the bedroom with the children, so it was just me and Pappy for a spell.

“Say, gal, I’m thirsty,” he said. “Why don’t you run on out to the pump and fetch me some water?”

“I got to finish this broth for the children,” I said.

“That broth can do without you for a few minutes.”

I had my back to him, didn’t say nothing. Just lingered along, stirring that pot.

“Did you hear me, gal?” he said.

Now, my mama and daddy raised me up to be respectful to elderly folks and help em along, but I sure didn’t want to fetch that water for that ole man. It was like my body got real heavy all of a sudden and didn’t want to budge. Probably I would a made myself do it but then Miz McAllan come in and said, “Pappy, there’s drinking water right there, in the pail by the sink. You ought to know, you pumped it yourself this morning.”

He held his cup out to me without a word. Without a word
I took it and filled it from the pail. But before I turned around and gave it back to him I stuck my finger in it.

For supper I fried up some ham and taters they had and made biscuits and milk gravy. After I served em I started to make up a plate for myself to take out to the porch.

“Florence, you can go on home now,” Miz McAllan said. “I’m sure you’ve got your own family to see to.”

“Yes’m, I do,” I said, “but I can’t go home to em. It’s like I told your husband when he come to fetch me. That whooping cough is catching, specially at the start like your girls is. They gone be contagious till the end of the week at least. If I went home now I could pass it to my own children, or to one of my mothers’ babies.”

“I ain’t sleeping under the same roof as a nigger,” Pappy said.

“Florence, why don’t you go check on the girls?” Miz McAllan said.

I left the room but it was a small house and there wasn’t nothing wrong with my ears.

“She ain’t sleeping here,” Pappy said.

“Well, we can’t send her home to infect her own family,” Miz McAllan said. “It wouldn’t be right.”

There was a good long pause, then Mist McAllan said, “No, it wouldn’t be.”

“Well then,” Pappy said, “she can damn well sleep out in the barn with the rest of the animals.”

“How could you suggest such a thing, in this cold?” Miz McAllan said.

“Niggers need to know their place,” Pappy said.

“For the last few hours,” she said, “her
place
has been by your granddaughters’ bedside, doing everything she could to help them get better. Which is more than I can say for you.”

“Now Laura,” Mist McAllan said.

“We’ll make up a pallet for her here, in the main room,” Miz McAllan said. “Or you can sleep in here and we can put Florence out in the lean-to.”

“And have her stinking up my room?”

“Fine then. We’ll put her in here.”

I heard a chair scrape.

“Where are you going?” Mist McAllan asked.

“To the privy,” she said. “If that’s all right with you.”

The front door opened and then banged shut.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into your wife,” Pappy said, “but you better get a handle on her right quick.”

I listened hard, but if Mist McAllan said anything back I didn’t hear it.

S
LEPT FOUR NIGHTS
in that house and by the end of em I’d a bet money there was gone be trouble in it. Soft citybred woman like Laura McAllan weren’t meant for living in the Delta. Delta’ll take a woman like that and suck all the sap out of her till there ain’t nothing left but bone and grudge, against him that brung her here and the land that holds him and her with him. Henry McAllan was as landsick as any man I ever seen and I seen plenty of em, white and colored both. It’s in their eyes, the way they look at the land like a woman
they’s itching for. White men already got her, they thinking,
You mine now, just you wait and see what I’m gone do to you.
Colored men ain’t got her and ain’t never gone get her but they dreaming bout her just the same, with every push of that plow and every chop of that hoe. White or colored, none of em got sense enough to see that she the one owns them. She takes their sweat and blood and the sweat and blood of their women and children and when she done took it all she takes their bodies too, churning and churning em up till they one and the same, them and her.

I knew she’d take me and Hap someday, and Ruel and Marlon and Lilly May. Only one she wasn’t gone get was my eldest boy, Ronsel. He wasn’t like his daddy and his brothers, he knowed farming was no way to raise hisself up in the world. Just had to look at me and Hap to see that. Spent our lives moving from farm to farm, hoping to find a better situation and a boss that wouldn’t cheat us. Longest we ever stayed anywhere was the Conley place, we’d been there going on seven years. Mist Conley cheated us some too but he was better than most of em. He let us put in a little vegetable patch of our own, and from time to time his wife gave us some of their old clothes and shoes. So when Miz Conley told us she’d up and sold the farm we was real anxious. You never know what you getting into with a new landlord.

“I wonder if this McAllan fellow ever farmed before,” Hap fretted. “He’s from up to Memphis. Bet he don’t know the eating end of a mule from the crapping end.”

“It don’t matter,” I told him. “We’ll get by like we always do.”

“He could put us off.”

“He won’t, not this close to planting time.”

But he could a done it if he’d had a mind to, that was the plain truth. Landlords can do just about anything they want. I seen em put families off after the cotton was laid by and that family worked all spring and summer to make that crop for em. And if they say you owe em for furnishings you don’t get nothing for your labor. Ain’t nobody to make em do right by you. You might as well not even go to the sheriff, he gone take the boss man’s side every time.

“Even if he wants us to stay,” Hap said, “we still might have to move on, depending on what type a man he is.”

“I don’t care if he’s the Dark Man hisself, I ain’t moving if we don’t have to. Took me this long to get the house fit to live in and the garden putting out decent tomatoes and greens. Besides, I can’t just go off and leave my mothers.” I had four mothers due in the next two months and one of em, little Renie Atwood, was just a baby herself. Couldn’t nary one of em afford a doctor and I was the only granny midwife for miles around.

“You’ll move if I say so,” Hap said. “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.”

“Only so long as he alive,” I said. “For if the husband be dead the wife is loosed from his law. Says so in Romans.”

Hap gave me a sharp look and I gave him one right back. He’s never once laid a hand to me and I always speak my mind to him. Some men need to beat a woman to get her to do what they want, but not Hap. All he has to do is talk at you. You can start off clear on the other side of something, and then he’ll get to talking, and talking some more, and before long
you’ll find yourself nodding and agreeing with him. That was how I started loving him, was through his words. Before I ever knowed the feel of his hands on me or the smell of him in the dark, I used to lay my head on his shoulder and close my eyes and let his words lift me up like water.

Henry McAllan turned out not to be the Dark Man after all, but wasn’t no use telling that to my husband. “Do you know what that man is doing?” Hap said. “He’s bringing in one of them infernal tractors! Using a machine to work his land instead of the hands God gave him, and putting three families off on account of it too.”

“Who?”

“The Fikeses, the Byrds and the Stinnets.”

That surprised me about the Fikeses and the Stinnets, on account of them being white. Lot of times a landlord’ll put the colored families off first.

“But he’s keeping us on,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Well, we can thank the Almighty for that.”

Hap just shook his head. “It’s devilry, plain and simple.”

That night after supper he read to us from the Revelations. When he got to the part about the beast with seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns and upon his heads the name of blasphemy, I knowed he was talking bout that tractor.

T
HE REAL DEVIL
was that ole man. When Miz McAllan asked me to keep house for her like I done for Miz Conley,
I almost said no on account of Pappy. But Lilly May needed a special kind of boot for her clubfoot and Ruel and Marlon needed new clothes, they was growing so fast they was about to split the seams of their old ones, and Hap was wanting a second mule so he could work more acres so he could save enough to buy his own land, so I said I’d do it. I worked for Laura McAllan Monday to Friday unless I had a birthing or a mother who needed looking in on. My midwifing came first, I told her that when I took the job. She didn’t like it much but she said all right.

That ole man never gave her a minute’s peace, or me neither. Just set there all day long finding fault with everything and everybody. When he was in the house I thought up chores to do outside and when he was out on the porch I worked in the house. Still, sometimes I had to be in the same room with him and no help for it. Like one time I had ironing to do, mostly his ironing, he wore Sunday clothes every day of the week. He was setting at the kitchen table like always, smoking and cleaning the dirt from under his fingernails with a buck knife. Cept he couldn’t a been getting em too clean cause he was too busy eyeballing me.

“You better be careful, gal, or you’re gonna burn them sheets,” he said.

“Ain’t never burnt nothing yet, Mist McAllan.”

“See that you don’t.”

“Yessuh.”

He admired the dirt on the tip of the knife awhile, then he said, “How come that son of yours ain’t home from the war yet?”

“He ain’t been discharged yet,” I said.

“Guess they still need some more ditches dug over there, huh?”

“Ronsel ain’t digging ditches,” I said. “He’s a tank commander. He fought in a whole lot of battles.”

“That what he told you?”

“That what he done.”

The ole man laughed. “That boy’s pulling your leg, gal. Ain’t no way the Army would turn a tank worth thousands of dollars over to a nigger. No, ditch digger’s more like it. Course that don’t sound as good as ‘tank commander’ when you’re writing the folks back home.”

“My son’s a sergeant in the 761st Tank Battalion,” I said. “That’s the truth, whether you want to believe it or not.”

He gave a loud snort. I answered the only way I could, by starching his sheets till they was as stiff and scratchy as raw planks.

LAURA

F
AIR
F
IELDS
. That’s what Henry wanted to call the farm. He announced this to me and the children one day after church, clearing his throat first with the self-consciousness of a small-town politician about to unveil a new statue for the town square.

“I think it has a nice ring to it, without being too fancy,” he said. “What do you girls think?”