Mudbound (23 page)

Henry’s expression was incredulous. “You let him sit inside the truck all the way from town?”

“What if I did?” Jamie said. “What does it matter?”

“Did anybody see you?”

“No, but I wouldn’t care if they had.”

They glared at each other, Jamie defiantly, Henry with a familiar mixture of anger, hurt and bewilderment that I’d last seen directed at me. Henry shook his head. “I don’t know who you are anymore,” he said. “I wonder if you do.” He turned and walked toward the house. Jamie looked after him like he wanted to stop him, but he didn’t move.

“Don’t ever let me catch you giving that jigaboo a ride again,” Pappy said.

“Or what?” Jamie said. “You gonna come after me with your cane?”

The old man grinned, revealing his long yellow teeth. He rarely smiled; when he did, the effect was both bizarre and repellent. “Oh, it ain’t what I’ll do to
you.
”

Pappy followed Henry inside, leaving me alone with Jamie. His body looked tensed, poised for violence or flight. I was torn between wanting to soothe and chide him.

“I can’t stay here,” he said. “I’m going to town.”

To his woman
, I thought. “I wish you’d change your mind,” I said. “I’m making rabbit stew for supper.”

He reached out and lightly brushed my cheek with one finger. I swear I felt that touch in every nerve of my body. “Sweet Laura,” he said.

I watched him go. As the truck and its wake of dust got smaller and smaller and finally disappeared, I thought,
Rabbit stew. That’s what I’d been able to offer him.
It was all I would ever be able to offer him. The knowledge was as bitter as bile.

FLORENCE

I
RAN THE BROOM
over his foot three times. Said, “Sorry, Mist Jamie, ain’t I clumsy today.” The third time Miz McAllan gave me a scolding and sent me out of the house, finished the sweeping her own self. I didn’t care what she thought, or him either. I just wanted him gone. But he didn’t go, not even after I threw salt in his tracks and put a mojo of jimsonweed and gumelastin under his bed. He kept right on coming back, turning up like the bad penny he was.

He was a shiny penny though, with his handsome face and his littleboy smile. Folks just took to him natural, they couldn’t help themselves, like the way a child hankers for a holly berry. He don’t know it’s poison, he just sees something pretty and red and he wants it in his mouth. And when you take it away from him he cries like you taking away his own heart. There’s a whole lot of evil in the world looks pretty on the outside.

Jamie McAllan wasn’t evil, not like his pappy was, but he did the Dark Man’s business just the same. He was a weak vessel. Whiskey on his breath at noon and womansmell all over his clothes every Monday. Now a man can like his nature
activity and even his drink and still be the Lord’s, but Jamie McAllan had a hole in his soul, the kind the devil loves to find. It’s like a open doorway for him, lets him enter in and do his wicked work. I thought maybe he got it in the war and it would close on up in time but it just kept on getting bigger and bigger. None of em seen it but me. Jamie McAllan geehawsed em all, specially Miz McAllan. The way she looked at him you would a thought he was her husband and not his brother. But Henry McAllan didn’t seem to mind, that’s if he even noticed. Tell you one thing, if my sister ever stretched her eyes at Hap like that, I’d claw em right out.

Even my son was took in by him. I knowed about their Saturday afternoon drives and them other times too when Ronsel went out walking after dark. Only place colored folks round here go walking after dark is to and from the outhouse, if they know what’s good for em anyway. No, I knowed exactly where he was. He was out in that ole falling-down sawmill by the river, getting drunk with Jamie McAllan. I seen Ronsel heading off that way plenty of times and heard him stumbling in late at night. I tried to tell him to keep away from that man but he wouldn’t listen.

“What you doing, hanging around with that white man?” I asked him.

“Nothing. Just talking.”

“You asking for trouble is what you doing.”

Ronsel shook his head. “He ain’t like the rest of em.”

“You right about that,” I said. “Jamie McAllan’s got a snake in his pocket and he carries it along with him wherever he
goes. But when that snake gets ready to bite, it ain’t gone bite him, oh no. It’s gone sink them fangs into whoever else is with him. You just better make sure it ain’t you.”

“You don’t know him,” Ronsel said.

“I know he’s drinking whiskey every day and hiding it from his family.”

Ronsel looked away. “He’s just chasing off his ghosts,” he said.

My son had plenty of em too, I knowed that, but he wouldn’t talk to me bout em. He was like a boarded-up house since he come back from that war, nothing going into him or coming out of him—at least, nothing from or to us. Jamie McAllan had more of Ronsel than we did.

I didn’t tell Hap about the two of em drinking together. I don’t like to keep things from my husband but him and Ronsel was already butting heads all the time. That was Hap’s doing, he was pushing Ronsel to talk to Henry McAllan bout taking over the Atwoods’ old acres. There was a new cropper family in there but Mist McAllan wasn’t happy with em, he’d said so to Hap. Ronsel told his daddy he’d think it over, but he wanted them acres like a cat wants a pond to swim in. And Hap just kept on pushing him and pushing him, that was the landsickness talking is what that was.

“You don’t stop, you gone push him right out the door,” I told him.

“He’s a man grown,” Hap said. “He needs to get his own place, start his own family. Might as well be here. One of the twins can help him. With the four of us working fifty acres,
and if cotton prices stay above thirty cents a pound, in three four years we’ll have enough to buy our own land.”

Ronsel couldn’t a cared less about having his own land, but there wasn’t no point in telling that to my husband. Might as well to been singing songs to a dead hog. Once Hap gets a notion a something, he’s deaf and blind to everything that don’t mesh with it. It’s what makes him a good preacher, his faith never wobbles. Folks see that in him and it bucks em up. But what works in the pulpit ain’t always good at your own kitchen table. All Ronsel seen was his daddy not caring bout what he wanted. And what he wanted was to leave. I hated the thought of him going but I knowed he had to do it soon, just like I had to set back and let him.

B
Y SPRINGTIME HE
was getting drunk with Jamie McAllan every couple days. So when ole Mist McAllan seen the two of em together in the truck, I was glad. I thought it would put a stop to the whole business.

Ronsel didn’t mention it to us. Just like the last time, we had to find out what happened from Henry McAllan. He come by one afternoon, all het up, wanting a word with Hap and Ronsel. And just like the last time, I listened in. Reckoned I had a right to know what was being said on my own front porch, whether the men thought so or not.

“I expect you know why I’m here, Ronsel,” Mist McAllan said.

“No suh, I don’t.”

“My brother tells me he gave you a lift from town today.”

“Yessuh.”

“I reckon it wasn’t the first time.”

“No, not the first.”

“Exactly how long has this been going on?”

“I can’t rightly say.”

“Hap, do you know what I’m talking about?”

“No, Mist McAllan.”

“Well, let me tell you then,” Henry McAllan said. “Apparently your son here and my brother have been riding around the countryside in my truck for God knows how long, sitting in the cab together like two peas in a pod. My father saw them today, coming back from town. You telling me you knew nothing about this?”

“No suh,” Hap said. “Well, I knew Mist Jamie given Ronsel a ride every once in awhile, but I didn’t know he was setting up in front with him.”

But Hap did know, cause he’d seen em together that first time. You better believe he gave Ronsel a talking-to that day, told him never to sit in the front seat of a white man’s car again unless he was the driver and wearing a black cap to prove it.

“And now that you do know,” Mist McAllan said, “what have you got to say about it?”

A silence come down amongst em. I could feel Hap struggling, trying to decide how to answer. It wasn’t right, Henry McAllan asking him to take sides against his own son like that. If Mist McAllan wanted Ronsel humbled down he should
a done it his own self, instead of expecting Hap to do it for him.
Don’t you do it, Hap
, I thought.

But before he could answer, Ronsel spoke up. “I don’t reckon my father’s got anything to say about it, seeing as how he didn’t know nothing about it. It’s me you should be asking.”

“Well then?” Henry McAllan said. “What in the world were you thinking?”

“White man tells me to get in his truck, I get in.” Ronsel’s voice was pretend-humble though, even I could hear it.

“You mocking me, boy?” Henry McAllan said.

“No suh, course not,” Hap said. “He just trying to explicate hisself.”

“Well let me explicate something to you, Ronsel. If I catch you riding in the car with my brother again, you’re going to be in a heap of trouble, and I don’t mean a nice little talk like we’re having right now. My pappy isn’t much of a talker when he gets riled up, if you take my meaning. So the next time Jamie offers you a ride, you tell him you need the exercise, hear?”

“Yessuh,” Ronsel said.

“You know, Hap,” Henry McAllan said, “I expected better sense from a son of yours.” In a louder voice he said, “And that goes for you too, Florence.”

After he was gone I went to the front door and looked out. Ronsel was standing on the edge of the porch staring after Henry McAllan’s truck, and Hap was setting in his rocking chair staring at Ronsel’s back.

“Well, Daddy,” Ronsel said, “ain’t you gone say I told you so?”

“Got no need to say it.”

“Come on, I know you’re itching to. So say it.”

“Got no need.”

For a long while the only sound was the crickets and the tree frogs and the squeak of Hap’s rocker. Then Ronsel cleared his throat.
Here it comes
, I thought.

“I’ll stay till the cotton’s laid by,” he said. “Then I’m leaving.”

“Where you gone go, son?” Hap said. “Some big city up north, where you got no home and no people? That ain’t no way to live.”

“Wherever I go and however I live,” Ronsel said, “I reckon it’ll be better than here.”

HENRY

B
Y PLANTING TIME
I was about ready to kill my brother, messed up in the head or not. It wasn’t just that he was drinking again and lying about it after he swore to me he’d stop. It was his selfishness that really got my goat. Jamie did whatever he damn well pleased without a thought for how it might affect anybody else. There I was, working hard to make a place for myself and my family in Marietta, and having a drunk brother who consorted with whores and niggers sure wasn’t helping me. And on top of everything I had to listen to Laura make excuses for him while my father sat there smirking. Pappy thought I was blind to it but he was wrong. Even if I hadn’t had two perfectly good eyes in my head, my ears would have told me.

Whenever Jamie was around she sang. And when it was just me, she hummed.

S
TILL
, I
DIDN
’
T
MEAN
to say what I said, not like that. But Jamie pushed me too far and the words just spilled out, and once they were out I couldn’t take them back.

The two of us were in the barn. Jamie had just milked the cow and was taking the pail to the house when he tripped and fell, spilling the milk all over the floor and himself. He started laughing, acted like it was nothing. And I guess in the scheme of things it wasn’t but right at that moment it rankled me.

“You think it’s funny, spilling good milk,” I said.

“Well, you know what they say, no use crying over it.”

By the way he ran the words together and lurched to his feet I could tell he’d been drinking. That rankled me even more. I said, “No, especially when it’s somebody else’s.”

That wiped the grin off his face. “I see,” he said, in a sarcastic tone. “What do I owe you, Henry?” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a handful of change. “Let’s see, there must have been three gallons there, that’d run what, about two dollars? Let’s say two and a quarter to be on the safe side. I wouldn’t want to gyp you.” He started to count out the money.

“Don’t be an ass,” I said.

“Oh no, brother, I insist.” He held out the money. When I wouldn’t take it, he reached over and tried to shove it in my shirt pocket. I batted his hand away, and the coins fell to the floor.

“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “This isn’t about money and you know it.”

“What’s it about then? What would you have me do, Henry?”

“Sober up, for one thing,” I said. “Take some responsibility for yourself and start acting like a grown man.”

“One pail of spilled milk and I’m not a man?” he said.

“You’re sure not acting like one lately.”

His eyes got small and mean, just like our father’s did when anybody crossed him. “And how should I act, brother—like you?” Jamie said. “Walking around here like God Almighty in his creation, laying down the law, so wrapped up in myself I can’t see my wife is miserable? Is that the kind of man I should be? Huh?”

I’d never hit my brother before but right then I was mighty close to it. “Be whatever kind of man you want,” I said. “Just do it someplace else.”

“Fine. I’ll go to town.” He started to walk out.

“I don’t mean for the night,” I said.

I saw it in his face then, that look like he used to get as a boy when one of Pappy’s gibes cut deep. Then it was gone, pasted over with indifference. He shrugged. “Yeah, well,” he said. “I was getting tired of this place anyway.”

He’s got nothing
, I thought.
No wife or kids, no home to call his own. No idea of himself he can shape his life around.
“Look,” I said, “that didn’t come out like I meant it to.”