Mudbound (19 page)

“Why didn’t Eboline drive you?”

“One of the girls wasn’t feeling well. Sick headache or some such thing. Eboline said they’d be down this weekend.”

“I’m glad you didn’t wait,” Henry said.

Jamie turned to me then, looking at me in that way he had—as if he were really seeing me and taking me in whole. He held his hands out. “Laura,” he said.

I went to him and gave him a hug. He felt light against me, insubstantial. His ribs protruded like the black keys of a piano.
I could pick him up
, I thought, and had a sudden irrational urge to do so. I stepped back hastily, flustered. Aware of his eyes on me.

“Welcome home, Jamie,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”

“You too, sweet sister-in-law. How are you liking it here in Henry’s version of paradise?”

I was spared from lying by the old man. “You’d think a son would see fit to greet his father,” he bellowed from the porch.

“Ah, the dear, sweet voice of our pappy,” said Jamie. “I’d forgotten how much I missed hearing it.”

Henry picked up one of Jamie’s suitcases and we headed
toward the house. “I think he’s lonely here,” Henry said. “He misses Mama, and Greenville.”

“Oh, is that the excuse he’s using these days?”

“No. He doesn’t make excuses, you know that,” Henry said. “He’s missed you too, Jamie.”

“I just bet he has. I bet he’s quit smoking and joined the NAACP, too.”

I laughed at that, but Henry’s reply was serious. “I’m telling you, he’s missed you. He’d never admit it, but it’s true.”

“If you say so, brother,” Jamie said, throwing an arm around Henry’s shoulder. “I’m not gonna argue with you today. But I have to say, it’s mighty good of you to have taken him in and put up with him all these months.”

Henry shrugged. “He’s our father,” he said.

I felt a ripple of envy, which I saw echoed on Jamie’s face. How simple things were for Henry! How I wished sometimes that I could join him in his stark, right-angled world, where everything was either right or wrong and there was no doubt which was which. What unimaginable luxury, never to wrestle with whether or why, never to lie awake nights wondering what if.

A
T SUPPER THAT NIGHT
, Jamie regaled us with stories about his travels overseas. He’d been as far north as Norway and as far south as Portugal, mostly by train but sometimes by bicycle or on foot. He told us about snow-skiing in the Swiss Alps: how the mountains were so tall the tops of them pierced
the clouds, and the snow so thick and soft that when you fell it was like sinking into a feather bed. He took us to the sidewalk cafés of Paris, where waiters in crisp white shirts and black aprons served pastries made of a hundred layers, each thinner than a fingernail; to the bullfights in Barcelona, where the matadors were hailed as gods by roaring crowds of thousands; to the casino in Monaco, where he’d won a hundred dollars on a single hand of baccarat and sent Rita Hayworth a bottle of champagne with the winnings. He made it all sound grand and marvelous, but I couldn’t help noticing how drawn he looked, and how his hands shook each time he lit one of his Lucky Strikes. He ate little, preferring to smoke one cigarette after another until the room was so hazy the children’s eyes were red and watery. They didn’t complain, though. They were completely under their uncle’s spell, especially Isabelle, who made eyes at him all through dinner and demanded to sit in his lap afterward. I’d never seen her so smitten with anyone.

Henry was the only one of us who seemed impatient with Jamie’s stories. I could tell by the crease between his eyebrows, which got deeper and deeper as the evening wore on. Finally he blurted out, “And that’s what you’ve been doing all these months, instead of coming home?”

“I needed some time,” said Jamie.

“To play in the snow and eat fancy foreign bread.”

“We all heal in our own ways, brother.”

Henry made a gesture that took in Jamie’s appearance. “Well, if this is what you call healing, I’d hate to see what hurting is.”

Jamie sighed and passed a hand across his face. The veins on the back of his hand stood out like blue cords.

“Are you hurt, Uncle Jamie?” asked Isabelle worriedly.

“Everybody was hurt some in the war, little Bella. But I’ll be all right. Do you know what
bella
means?” She shook her head. “It’s Italian for ‘beautiful one.’ I think that’s what I’ll call you from now on. Would you like that, Bella?”

“Yes, Uncle Jamie!”

I would heal him, I thought. I would cook food to strengthen him, play music to soothe him, tell stories to make him smile. Not the weary smile he wore tonight, but the radiant, reckless grin he’d given me on the dance floor of the Peabody Hotel so many years before.

The war had dimmed him, but I would bring him back to himself.

HENRY

T
HE WAR BROKE
my brother—in his head, where no one could see it. Never mind all his clever banter, his flirting with Laura and the girls. I could tell he wasn’t right the second I saw him. He was thin and jittery, and his eyes had a haunted look I recognized from my own time in the Army. I knew too well what kind of sights they were seeing when he shut them at night.

Jamie was thin-skinned to begin with, had been all his life. He was always looking for praise, then getting his feelings hurt when he didn’t get it, or enough of it. And he never knew his own worth, not in his guts where a man needs to know it. Our father was to blame for that. He was always whittling away at Jamie, trying to make him smaller. Pappy thought he had everybody fooled, but I knew why he did it. He did it because he loved my brother like he never loved anybody else in his whole life, not even Mama, and he wanted Jamie to be just like him. And when Jamie couldn’t be or wouldn’t be, which was most of the time, Pappy punished him. It was a hard thing to watch, but I learned not to get in the middle of it. We all did, even Mama. Defending Jamie just made Pappy whittle harder.

Once when I was home for Christmas, Jamie must have been six or seven, we were hauling wood and we flushed a copperhead out from under the woodpile. I grabbed the axe and chopped its head off, and Jamie screamed.

“Stop acting like a goddamn sissy,” Pappy said, cuffing him on the head. “You’d think I had three daughters instead of two.”

Jamie squared his shoulders and pretended he didn’t care—even that young, he was good at acting—but I could tell how hurt he was.

“Why do you do that?” I asked Pappy when we were alone.

“Do what?”

“Cut him down like that.”

“It’s for his own good,” Pappy said. “You and your mother and sisters have near to ruined him with your mollycoddling. Somebody needs to toughen him up.”

“He’s going to hate you if you’re not careful,” I said.

Pappy gave me a scornful look. “When he’s a man, he’ll understand. And he’ll thank me, you wait and see.”

My father died waiting for that thanks. It gives me no satisfaction to say so.

J
AMIE DIDN
’
T TALK
to me about the war. Most men don’t, who’ve seen real combat. It’s the ones who spent their tours well behind the lines who want to tell you all about it, and the ones who never served who want to know. Our father didn’t waste any time before he started in with the questions. Jamie’s first night home, as soon as Laura and the girls had gone to bed, Pappy said, “So what’s it like, being a big hero?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Jamie said.

Pappy snorted. “Don’t give me that. They wrote me about your fancy medals.”

Jamie’s “fancy medals” included the Silver Star and the Distinguished Flying Cross, two of the highest honors an airman can receive. He never mentioned them in his letters. If the Army hadn’t notified Pappy, we wouldn’t have known about them.

“I was lucky,” Jamie said. “A lot of guys weren’t.”

“Bet you got plenty of tail out of it too.”

My brother just shrugged.

“Jamie never needed medals to get girls,” I said.

“Damn right, he don’t,” Pappy said. “Takes after me that way. I didn’t have two cents to rub together when your mama married me. Prettiest girl in Greenville, could’ve had any fellow in town, but it was me she wanted.”

That was true, as far as I knew. At least, Mama had never contradicted his version of their courtship. I believe they married each other almost entirely for their looks.

“She wasn’t the only one either,” Pappy went on. “I had em all sniffing after me, just like you do, son.”

Jamie shifted in his chair. He hated being compared to our father.

“Well one thing’s for sure,” Pappy said. “You must’ve killed a whole lot of Krauts to get all them medals.”

Jamie ignored him and looked at me. “You got anything to drink around here?”

“I think I’ve got some whiskey somewhere.”

“That’ll do just fine.”

I found the bottle and poured two fingers all around. Jamie downed his and refilled his glass again, twice as full as before. That surprised me. I’d never known my brother to be a drinker.

“Well?” Pappy asked. “How many’d you take out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take a guess.”

“I don’t know,” Jamie repeated. “What does it matter?”

“A man ought to know how many men he’s killed.”

Jamie took a hefty swig of his whiskey, then smiled unpleasantly. “I can tell you this,” he said. “It was more than one.”

Pappy’s eyes narrowed, and I swore under my breath. Back in ’34, when he was still working for the railroad, Pappy had killed a man, an escaped convict from Parchman who’d tried to rob some passengers at gunpoint. Pappy pulled his own pistol and shot him right in the eyeball. A single shot, delivered with deadeye accuracy—at least, that was how he always told it. Over the years the elements of the story had hardened into myth. The terrified women and children, and the cool-headed conductor who never felt a moment’s fear. The onlookers who cheered as he carried the body off the train and dumped it at the feet of the grateful sheriff. Killing that convict was the proudest moment of our father’s life. Jamie knew better than to belittle it.

“Well,” Pappy said with a smirk, “at least I looked my
one
in the eye before I shot him. Not like dropping bombs from a mile up in the air.”

Jamie stared tight-jawed into his glass.

“Well,” I said, “time to hit the hay. We’ve got an early day tomorrow.”

“I’ll just finish my drink,” Jamie said.

Pappy got up with a grunt and took one of the lanterns. “Don’t wake me up when you come in,” he said to Jamie.

I sat with my brother while he finished his whiskey. It didn’t take him long, and when he was done his eyes flickered to the bottle like he wanted more. I took it and put it back in the cupboard. “What you need is a good night’s sleep,” I said. “Come on, Laura made up your bed for you.”

I took the other lantern and walked him out to the lean-to. At the door I gave him a quick hug. “Welcome home, little brother.”

“Thanks, Henry. I’m grateful to you and Laura for having me.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. We’re your family, and this is your home for as long as you want, hear?”

“I can’t stay long,” he said.

“Why not? Where else have you got to go?”

He shook his head again and looked up at the sky. It was a cloudless night, which I was glad to see. I wanted the cotton to stay nice and dry till after the harvest. Then it could rain all it wanted to.

“Actually,” Jamie said, “it was more like four miles up in the air.”

“What was?”

“The altitude we dropped the bombs from.”

“How can you even see anything from that high up?”

“You can see more than you’d think,” he said. “Roads, cities, factories. Just not the people. From twenty thousand feet, they’re not even ants.” He let out a harsh laugh. It sounded exactly like our father. “How many did you kill, Henry? In the Great War?”

“I don’t know exactly. Fifty, maybe sixty men.”

“That’s all?”

“I was only in France for six weeks before I got wounded. I was lucky, I guess.”

For a long time Jamie was silent. “Pappy’s right,” he said finally. “A man ought to know.”

After he’d gone in I shuttered the lantern and sat on the porch awhile, listening to the cotton plants rustle in the night wind. Jamie needed more than a good night’s sleep, I thought. He needed a home of his own, and a sweet Southern gal to give him children and coax his roots back down into his native soil. All of that would come in good time, I had no doubt of it. But right now he needed hard work to draw the poison from his wounds. Hard work and quiet nights at home with a loving family. Laura and the girls and I would give him that. We’d help him get better.

When I went in to bed I thought she was asleep, but as soon as I was settled under the covers, her voice came soft in the dark. “How long is he planning to stay?” she asked.

“Not for long, is what he says. But I aim to change his mind.”

Laura sighed, a warm gust on the back of my neck.

•  •  •

T
HE HARVEST STARTED
two weeks later. The cotton plants were so heavy with bolls they could barely stand up. There must have been a hundred bolls per plant, fat and bursting with lint. The air prickled with the smell of it. Looking out over the fields, breathing that dusty cotton smell, I felt a sense of rightness I hadn’t known in years, and maybe not ever. This was my land, my crop, that I’d drawn forth from the earth with my wits and labor. There’s no knowledge in the world as satisfying to a man as that.

I hired eight colored families to pick for me, which was as many as I could find. Orris Stokes had been right—field labor was hard to come by, though why anybody, colored or white, would prefer the infernal stink of a factory and the squalor of a city slum to a life lived under the sun, I will never understand. The talk at Tricklebank’s was all about these new picking machines they were using on some of the big plantations, but even if I could have afforded one I wouldn’t have wanted it. Give me a colored picker every time. There’s nothing and no one can harvest a cotton crop better. Cotton picking’s been bred into the Southern Negro, bred right into his bones. You just have to watch the colored children in the fields to see that. Before they’re even knee-high their fingers know what to do. Of course, picking’s like any other task you give one of them, you’ve got to keep a close eye on them, make sure they’re not snapping on you, taking the boll along with the lint to increase the weight of their haul. You take that trash to the gin, you’ll get your crop downgraded right quick. Any picker we caught snapping got his pay docked by half. You better believe we had them all picking clean cotton before long.