Mudbound (13 page)

When Florence brung him in to me he told her to go wait in the other room. “Is there any way I can help you, doctor?” she asked.

“If I want something I’ll tell you,” he said.

I would a liked her to stay and I knew she wanted to but she
went on and left. Doc Turpin shut the door behind her and came over to the bed. He was a fat fellow with yellow-brown eyes and a funny little tilted-up nose, looked like it belonged on a lady’s face. “Well, boy,” he said, “I heard you went and broke your leg.”

“Yessuh, I did.”

“Henry McAllan sure does want to see you get well, so I spose I’d better fix you up. You know how lucky you are to have a landlord like Mr. McAllan?”

Seemed like every time I seen that man he was telling me how lucky I was. I didn’t feel too lucky right at that moment but I nodded my head. He pulled the cover off a my leg and whistled. “You sure did bust yourself up good. You been taking that pain medicine I sent you?”

“Yessuh.”

He poked my leg and I jumped. “When was the last time you had some of it?” he said.

“Right after dinner, bout four five hours ago.”

“Well, in that case, this is gonna hurt some.” He reached down into his bag and pulled out some pieces of wood and some strips of cloth.

“Can’t you give me some more medicine?” I said.

“Sure I can,” he said, “but it won’t take effect for another fifteen or twenty minutes. And I don’t have time to sit here and wait on it. Mrs. Turpin’s expecting me home for supper.” He handed me one of the pieces of wood, smaller than the others. There were marks all over it in curved rows. “Put that between your teeth,” he said.

I put it in my mouth and clamped down on it. Sweat broke out all over me and I could smell my own fear, and if I could smell it I knew Doc Turpin could too. Couldn’t do nothing bout that but I told myself I wasn’t gone cry out, no matter what. God would see me through this like He seen me through so much else, if I just had faith in Him.

What time I am afraid, I will trust in Thee.

“Now, boy,” he said, “I’d shut my eyes if I was you. And don’t you move. Not if you want to keep that leg a yours.” He winked at me and grabbed my leg by the knee and the ankle.

In God I will praise His word, in God I have put my trust. I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.

He pulled up sharp on my ankle and the pain come, pain so bad it made whatall I had before seem like stubbing a toe. I screamed into the stick.

Then nothing.

LAURA

W
HEN
H
ENRY TOLD ME
Florence wouldn’t be coming back, I felt something close to panic. It wasn’t just her help around the house I’d miss, it was her company, her calm, womanly presence in my house. Yes, I had the children, and Henry in the evenings, but all three of them were unspeakably happy on the farm. Without Florence, I would be all alone with my anger, doubt and fear.

“It’s only till July,” Henry said. “Once the cotton’s laid by, she should be able to come back.”

July was three months away—an eternity. I spoke without thinking. “Can’t we lend them one of our mules?”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them. “Lend” is a dirty word for Henry, akin to the foulest profanity. He distrusts banks and pays cash for absolutely everything. At Mudbound he kept our money in a strongbox under the floorboards of our bedroom. I had no idea how much was in there, but he’d shown me where it was and told me the combination of the lock: 8-30-62, the date Confederate forces under the command of Robert E. Lee crushed the Union Army in the Battle of Richmond.

“No, we can’t ‘lend’ them a mule,” he snapped. “You don’t just ‘lend’ somebody a mule. And I’ll tell you something else, if Florence and those boys don’t get that seed in real quick, they’ll be using our mule all right, and paying us for the privilege.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s just like with the Atwoods. If they don’t have a mule and they can’t get the work done on time, they’ll have to use one of ours. Which means they’ll have to pay us a half share in cotton. It’s hard luck for them, but good for us.”

“We can’t take advantage of them like that, Henry!”

His face reddened with outrage. “Take advantage? I’m about to let Hap Jackson use my stock to make his crop. A mule I paid good money for, that I’m still paying to keep fed. And you think I ought to let him use it for free? Maybe you think I should just give him that mule outright, on account of Hap being sick and all. Why don’t we give him our car while we’re at it? Hell, why don’t we just give him this whole place?”

Sounded like a fine plan to me.

“I just think we owe it to them to help them, honey,” I said. “After all, Hap hurt himself working for us, trying to repair our property.”

“No. Hap hurt himself working for Hap. If he didn’t repair that shed,
his
tools would rust, and
his
income would suffer for it. Farming’s a business, Laura. And like any business, it carries risks. Hap understands that, and you need to understand it too.”

“I do, but—”

“Let me put it another way,” he said. “I sank everything we had into this place. Everything. We need to make some money this year. If we don’t,
our
family’s in trouble. Do you understand that?”

Like the Union Army at Richmond, I was utterly defeated. “Yes, Henry,” I said.

He softened a little, gracious in victory. “Honey, I know this has been hard on you. We’ll see about finding you a new maid just as soon as the planting’s done. In the meantime, why don’t you go to Greenville tomorrow and do a little shopping. Buy yourself a new hat and some Easter dresses for the girls. Take Eboline to lunch. Pappy and I can fend for ourselves for a day.”

I didn’t want a new hat, I didn’t want to see Eboline and I especially didn’t want a new maid. “All right, Henry,” I said. “That sounds nice.”

T
HE GIRLS AND
I set out early the next morning. On the way I stopped at the Jacksons’ to check on Hap and drop off some more food for them. I hadn’t seen Florence since the day of the accident, and her haggard, unkempt appearance alarmed me.

“Hap’s terrible sickly,” she said. “His leg ain’t healing straight and he been running a fever for three days now. I’ve tried everything but I can’t get it to come down.”

“Do you want us to get Doc Turpin back?”

“That devil! Never should a let him lay a hand on Hap in the
first place. Half the colored folks who go to him end up sicker than they was before. If Hap loses his leg on account of that man . . .” She trailed off, no doubt contemplating various gruesome ends for Doc Turpin. My mind was racing in a different direction: If Hap lost his leg, I’d never get Florence back.

And so I went shopping in Greenville—not for hats and Easter dresses, but for a doctor willing to drive two hours each way to treat a colored tenant. It would have been easier to find an elephant with wings. The first two doctors I saw acted like I’d asked them to do my laundry. The third, an old man in his seventies, told me he didn’t drive anymore. But as I turned to leave, he said, “There’s Dr. Pearlman over on Clay Street. He might do it, he’s a foreigner and a Jew. Or you could go to niggertown, they’ve got a doctor there.”

I decided to take my chances with the Jewish foreigner, though I was unsure what to expect. Would he be competent? Would he try to cheat me? Would he even agree to treat a Negro? But my fears proved foolish. Dr. Pearlman seemed kindly and learned, and his office, though empty of patients, was well-kept. I’d barely finished explaining the situation to him before he was getting his bag and hurrying out the door. He followed me and the girls to Hap and Florence’s house, where I paid him the very reasonable fee he asked and left him.

By the time we got home it was almost dark. Henry was waiting on the porch. “You girls must have bought out half of Greenville,” he called out.

“Oh, we didn’t find much,” I said.

He walked over to the car. When he saw there were no packages, his eyebrows went up. “Didn’t you get anything?”

“We got a doctor,” said Amanda Leigh. “He talked funny.”

“A doctor? Is somebody sick?”

I felt a flutter of nervousness. “Yes, Henry, it’s Hap. His leg’s not healing. The doctor was for him.”

“That’s what you spent your whole day doing?” he said. “Looking for a doctor for Hap Jackson?”

“I didn’t set out to look for one. But there was a doctor’s office right next to the dress shop, and I thought—”

“Amanda Leigh, take your sister in the house,” said Henry.

They knew that tone and obeyed with alacrity, leaving me alone with him. Well, not quite alone; I saw the old man at the window, lapping up every word.

“Why didn’t you come to me?” Henry asked. “Hap is my tenant, my responsibility. If he’s sick, I need to know about it.”

“I just happened to stop by their place on my way to town. And Florence said he’d gotten much worse, so I—”

“Did you think I wouldn’t have taken care of it? That I wouldn’t have gone and fetched Doc Turpin?”

He wasn’t so much angry as hurt; I saw that suddenly. “No, honey, of course not,” I said. “But Florence doesn’t trust Doc Turpin, and since I was already in Greenville . . .”

“What do you mean, she doesn’t trust him?”

“She said he didn’t set Hap’s leg properly.”

“And you just took her word for that. The word of a colored midwife with a fifth-grade education over a medical doctor’s.”

Put like that, it sounded ridiculous. I had taken her word, unquestioningly. And yet, as I stood withering under the heat of my husband’s gaze, I knew I’d do it again.

“Yes, Henry. I did.”

“Well, I need you to do the same thing for me, your husband. To take my word for it that I’m going to do what’s best for the tenants, and for you and the children. I need you to trust me, Laura.” In a thick voice he added, “I never thought I’d have to ask you that.”

He left me standing by the car. The sun had slipped below the horizon, and the temperature had dropped. I shivered and leaned against the hood of the DeSoto, grateful for its warmth.

HAP

W
HEN
I
COME TO
, Doc Turpin was gone and I was still alive, that was the good news. The bad news was my leg hurt like the dickens. It was all bandaged up so I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it all right. Heat was coming off it and the skin felt dry and tight. That was a bad sign, I knew that from tending to mules.

“Doctor said you should get to feeling better in a day or two,” Florence said.

But I didn’t feel better, I felt worse and worse. The throbbing got real bad and I was in and out of sense. I remember faces floating over me, Florence’s, the children’s. My mama’s, and she’d been laying in the clay going on twenty years. Then come a strange white man bending over me, a settle-aged man with a gray beard and one long eyebrow thick as a mustache.

“This is Doc Pearlman,” Florence said. “He gone fix your leg.”

He picked up my wrist and held it while he looked at his pocket watch. Then he shined a light in my eyes and put his eyeball right up next to mine and looked in there. “Your
husband is in shock,” he said, in a funny accent. He started shaking his head like he seen something that disgusted him, I reckoned he was mad on account of having to doctor a nigger. I didn’t want no angry white man doctoring me and I told him so but he went ahead anyway and started taking the bandages off a my leg. I let into thrashing.

“Hold him still,” he said to Florence.

She came and held my shoulders down. I tried to push her off me but I was too weak. I couldn’t see what the doctor was doing and I had a bad feeling.

“Has he got a saw?” I asked her.

“No, Hap.”

“Don’t you let him cut my leg off. I know he’s mad but don’t you let him.”

“You got to lay still now,” Florence said.

The doctor bent down to me again, so close I could smell the pipeweed on his breath. “Your leg wasn’t set properly, and it’s in flames,” he said.

“What?” I started fighting Florence again, trying to get up, but I might as well to been wrestling Goliath.

“Shh,” she said. “It’s just swole up is all. That’s what’s causing your fever.”

“I’m going to make you sleep now,” said the doctor. He put a little basket over my nose and mouth and dribbled some liquid on there. It had a sickly sweet smell.

“Please, Doc, I need my leg.”

“Rest now, Mr. Jackson. And don’t worry.”

I tried to stay awake, but sleep was tugging, tugging. The
last thing I remember is him bending down to get something out of his bag. There was a little knitted cap on the back of his bald head, looked like a doily, and I wondered how he got it to stay on there. Then sleep took ahold of me and swallowed me up.

W
HEN
I
WOKE UP
it was morning and my leg still hurt, but less than before. This time I was glad of the pain till I remembered ole Waldo Murch and his arm that had to be took off back in ’29. Waldo swore that arm still ached even though it wasn’t there no more. I’d seen him myself plenty of times, rubbing at the air, and I wondered if it was that kind of imagine pain I was feeling. But I guess God must a decided He’d humbled me enough cause when I pulled the blanket off there was my leg, all bandaged and splinted up. I’m here to tell you, seeing you got two legs when you thought you was down to just one is a mighty glad feeling.

I could hear Florence moving around in the other room and I called out to her.

“I’m fixing your breakfast,” she said. “Be right there.”

She brung me a plate of brains and eggs. Soon as I smelled it my stomach let into growling, felt like I hadn’t et in a week. “Take this first,” she said, handing me a pill.

“What is it?”

“Pencil pills. They to keep away the infection. You got to take em twice a day till they all gone.”

I swallowed the pill and tucked into the food. Florence put
her hand on my forehead. “Fever’s down,” she said. “You was plumb out of your head yesterday. Sure is a good thing that doctor showed up. Miz McAllan brung him all the way from Greenville.”