Mudbound (14 page)

“She went and fetched him by herself?”

“Yeah. Drove up in the car with him following her.”

“When you see her, tell her we’re much obliged.”

She snorted. “You lucky you still got your leg after the job that butcher done on it. Doc Pearlman was considerable mad about it, I mean to tell you. Said Doc Turpin didn’t deserve to be called a doctor.”

“Reckon Doc Pearlman ain’t from around here,” I said.

“No, he’s from somewhere over to Europe. Australia, I think he said.”

“You mean Austria. That’s the place Ronsel was where it snowed all the time.”

Florence shrugged. “Whatever it’s called, I’m mighty glad he ended up here instead of there.”

“How long am I gone be laid up?”

“Eight to ten weeks, if there’s no infection.”

“Eight weeks! I can’t lay here till June!”

She went on like I hadn’t said a word. “Doc said we got to keep a sharp eye out for it. And you got to keep that leg real still. He’s coming back on Monday to check on you, said if the swelling was down he’d make you a cast.”

“How am I gone chop cotton in a cast? How am I gone preach on Sundays?”

“You ain’t,” Florence said. “The children and me gone do the
chopping, and Junius Lee gone drive over from Tchula and do the preaching, and you gone keep your weight off a that leg like the doctor told you to. If you don’t, you could wind up a cripple, or worse.”

“And if I do and we have to go back to sharecropping, we’ll never get out from under Henry McAllan.”

“Can’t worry bout that now,” Florence said. “God’ll see to that, one way or another. Meantime you gone do what the doctor told you.”

“The contentions of a wife are a continual dropping,” I said. “Proverbs 19:13.”

“And a prudent wife is straight from the Lord,” she shot back. “Proverbs 19:14.”

Woman knows her Scripture, I’ll give her that. Got no book-learning but there ain’t nothing wrong with her memory.

“I better get out to the fields,” she said. “Lilly May will be here if you need anything. You rest now.”

Lingered along, lingered along. Laid in that bed knowing my wife was out doing my work for me. Couldn’t even do my business without one of em helping me. I tried to put it off till Florence and the boys got home but one day I couldn’t wait and I had to ask Lilly May to come help me with the pan. There’s some things a daughter should never have to do for her daddy. Made me wish I’d a just crapped myself and set in it till Florence got home.

Meantime she and the twins was just about done in from working in the fields. Florence’s hands was all blistered up and I seen her rubbing her back when she thought I wasn’t looking.
She didn’t complain though, nary a word, just went on and did what had to be done. They worked straight through, even on Sunday, and Florence don’t hold with working on the Sabbath. They had to do it though. Had to get them fields planted before Henry McAllan decided to bring in his mule.

Monday rolled around and Doc Pearlman come back just like he said he would. He took the bandages off a my leg and looked at it. “Goot,” he said, which I took to mean good. “The swelling is gone. We must make the cast now. For that I will need boiled water.”

Florence sent Lilly May to do it. Meantime, Doc Pearlman was checking me all over, looking in my eyes and listening to my heart and wiggling my toes. He didn’t seem to mind touching me. I wondered if all the white people in his country were like him.

“Florence says you from over to Austria,” I said.

“Ya,” he said. “My wife and I came here eight years ago.”

Fore I could think what I was saying I said, “Our son Ronsel was there. He’s a tanker, fought under General Patton.”

“Then I’m grateful to him.”

I shot a glance at Florence. She looked as fuddled as I was. Speaking real slow to be sure he understood me, I said, “Ronsel fought against Austrian folks.”

He got a kindling look in his eye, made all the hairs on my arms stand straight up. “I hope he killed a great many of them,” he said. Then he left the room to go wash his hands.

“Well, what do you make of that?” I said to Florence.

She shook her head. “All kind a crazy white people in the world.”

T
HE RAIN CAME
the next day, a big hard rain that packed the fields down tight as wax. Nothing we could do but set there and watch it and fret for two days till it finally cleared up. Florence and the children went back out to the fields, even Lilly May. Field work was hard for her with her bad foot and all but there wasn’t no help for it.

I laid in the bed with my leg propped up, itching and cussing. Felt like I had a bunch of ants crawling around under my cast, looking for their next meal. There was no way to scratch either, the cast went all the way from my ankle to the top of my thigh.

I was weaving a basket out of a river birch trunk, trying to take my mind off the itching, when I heard a infernal noise and I looked out the window and seen Henry McAllan driving up on that tractor. He turned it off and got down.

“Hap?” he called out.

“Over here,” I called back.

He come to the bedroom window and looked in. We how-dyed and he asked how I was feeling.

“Whole lot better, thanks to that doctor Miz McAllan brung me,” I said. “Sure am grateful to her for fetching him.”

“I expect you are,” he said. He lit a cigarette. “How much longer you gonna be in that cast?”

Behind him off in the distance I could see Florence and the children out plowing. I mean to tell you, setting there jawing with Henry McAllan while my family was toiling in the hot sun hurt me a lot worse than my leg. “Another month or so is all,” I said.

“Is that a fact.”

“Yessuh.”

“You know, I broke my leg in the Great War. As I recollect, it was a couple of months before the cast came off, and longer than that before I could do any real work.”

“I’m a fast healer, always have been,” I said.

He took a drag off his cigarette. I waited, knowing what was coming. “The thing is, Hap, it’s the second week of April,” he said. “Y’all ought to be well into planting by now but you haven’t even gotten your fields laid off.”

“Soil has to be rebroke first on account of the rain.”

“I’m aware of that. But if they were using a mule they’d be done in no time. As it is it’ll be the end of the week before they even start fertilizing, much less getting that seed in the ground. There’s just the three of them, Hap. I can’t afford to wait any longer. You’re a farmer, you understand that.”

“It won’t take that long. We got Lilly May helping too.”

“A crippled little girl’s not going to make the difference and you know it.” He flicked his cigarette into the dirt. “You tell one of your boys to come fetch that mule after dinner today.”

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do: and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

“Yessuh,” I said. The word stuck in my throat, but wasn’t nothing else I could say.
That’s it, Hap
, I told myself,
you a sharecropper again now, might as well get used to it.

When Florence come in for dinner with the children I didn’t even have to tell her, she took one look at my face and said, “He sending that mule, ain’t he.”

“Yeah. Starting this afternoon.”

“Well,” she said, “it’ll make the plowing go faster anyway.”

We set down to eat. It wasn’t much of a meal, just fatback and grits one of the sisters from church had brung by earlier, but I said the blessing like always. When I was through Florence kept her head bent for a good long while. I knew what she was praying for. It was the same thing I’d been asking Him for every day since I fell off a that ladder: for Ronsel to come home and deliver us.

II.

LAURA

H
ENRY STAYED MAD
at me, and he showed it by ignoring me in our bed. My husband was never an especially passionate man, but he’d always made love to me at least twice a week. In the first months of our marriage I’d felt awkward and reluctant (though I never refused him—I wouldn’t have dreamed of it). But eventually we settled into an intimacy that was sweet and familiar, if not entirely fulfilling. He liked to do it at night, with one lamp on. At Mudbound it was one candle. That was his signal: the sound of the match head rasping against the striker. Joined with Henry, his body shuddering against mine, I felt very close to him and miles distant from him at the same time. He was experiencing sensations I wasn’t, that much was plain to me, but I didn’t expect ecstasy. I had no idea it was even possible for a woman. I hadn’t always enjoyed Henry’s lovemaking, but it made me feel like a true wife. I never realized how much I needed that until he turned away from me.

If my bed that April was cold, my days were hot, sweaty and grueling without Florence to help me. Henry hired Kester Cottrill’s daughter Mattie Jane to come and clean for me, but
she was slovenly and a chatterbox to boot, so after the first day I restricted her to laundry and other outdoor tasks. I saw Florence mostly from a distance, bent over a hoe, chopping out the weeds that threatened the tender cotton plants. Once I ran into her in town and started to complain about Mattie Jane. Florence gave me a look of incredulous scorn —
This is your idea of a problem?
—that shamed me into silence. I knew I should be grateful I wasn’t spending twelve or more hours a day in the cotton fields, but it was poor consolation.

One Saturday at the end of April, the five of us went into town to do errands and have dinner at Dex’s Diner, famed for its fried catfish and the sign outside that read:

JESUS LOVES YOU
MONDAY - FRIDAY
6:00-2:00
SATURDAYS
6:00-8:00

After we ate we stopped at Tricklebank’s to get the week’s provisions. Henry and Pappy lingered on the front porch with Orris Stokes and some other men, and the girls and I went inside to visit with the ladies. While I chatted with Rose, Amanda Leigh and Isabelle ran off to play with her two girls. Alice Stokes was there, radiantly pregnant, buying a length of poplin for a maternity dress. Wretched as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to begrudge her happiness. We’d been chatting for a few minutes when a Negro soldier came in the back door. He was a tall young man with skin the color of strong tea. There were sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves and a great many
medals on his chest. He had a duffel bag slung over one broad shoulder.

“Howdy, Miz Tricklebank,” he said. “Been a long time.” His voice was sonorous and full of music. It rang out loudly in the confines of the store, startling the ladies.

“Is that you, Ronsel?” Rose said wonderingly.

He grinned. “Yes, ma’am, last time I looked.”

So this was Florence’s son. She’d told me all about him, of course. How smart he was, how handsome and brave. How he’d taken to book-learning like a fish to water. How he drew people to him like bees to honey, and so on. “Ain’t just me talking mama nonsense,” she’d declared. “Ronsel’s got a shine to him, you’ll see it the minute you lay eyes on him. The gals all want to be with him, and the men all want to be like him. They can’t help it, they drawn to that shine.”

I had thought it was mama nonsense, though I hadn’t said so. What mother doesn’t believe her firstborn son has more than his fair share of God’s gifts? But when I saw Ronsel standing there in Tricklebank’s, I understood exactly what she meant.

He dipped his head politely to me and the other ladies. “Afternoon,” he said.

“Well, I declare,” said Rose. “Aren’t you grown up.”

“How you been doing, Miz Tricklebank?”

“Getting along fine. You seen your folks yet?”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “Bus just got in. I stopped to buy a few things for em.”

I studied him as Rose helped him with his purchases. He
looked more like Hap, but he had Florence’s way of filling up a room, and then some. You couldn’t help but watch him; he had that kind of force. He glanced over at me curiously, and I realized he’d caught me staring. “I’m Mrs. McAllan,” I said, a little embarrassed. “Your parents work on our farm.”

“How do,” he said. His eyes only met mine briefly, but in those few seconds I had the feeling I’d been thoroughly assessed.

“Do Hap and Florence know you’re coming home?” I said.

“No, ma’am. I wanted to surprise em.”

“Well, I know they’ll be mighty glad to see you.”

His forehead wrinkled in concern. “Are they all right?”

He didn’t miss much, this son of Florence’s. I hesitated, then told him about Hap’s accident, emphasizing the positive. “He’s using crutches now, and the doctor said he should be walking again by June.”

“Thank God for that. He can’t stand to be idle. He’s probably driving Mama crazy, being underfoot all day.”

Uneasily, I looked away from him. “What is it?” he asked.

I realized suddenly that the other women had gone dead silent and were watching us, making no effort at discretion. Some looked shocked, others hostile. Rose looked concerned, and her eyes held a warning.

I turned back to Ronsel. “Your parents lost their mule,” I said, “and then we had a spell of bad weather. They’re using our stock now. And your mother’s working in the fields with your brothers.”

His jaw tightened and his eyes turned cold. “Thank you for
telling me,” he said. The ironic emphasis on the first two words was impossible to miss. I heard a sharp intake of breath from Alice Stokes.

“Excuse me,” I said to Ronsel. “I have shopping to do.”

As I walked away from him, I heard him say, “I’ll come back for that cloth later, Miz Tricklebank. I better get on home now.”

He paid Rose hurriedly and headed for the front door with his purchases and his duffel bag. Just before he reached the door, it opened and Pappy came in, followed by Orris Stokes and Doc Turpin. Ronsel stopped just short of running into them.

“Beg pardon,” he said.

He tried to step around them, but Orris moved to stand in his way. “Well, looky here. A jig in uniform.”