Mudbound (21 page)

JAMIE

B
ECAUSE OF
H
ENRY
. Somehow it always comes back to that.

There I was again, indebted to him for pulling my ass out of the sling I’d custom-made to hold it. He wouldn’t tell me how much he was out on my account, but I figured it was close to a thousand bucks.

Henry wasn’t the only one I owed. Thanks to me, Laura didn’t get her house in town, her indoor toilet and grass lawn. Instead she got another year of stink and muck. She never reproached me for it, though, never even raised an eyebrow at me. She welcomed me home as sweetly as if I were returning from church and not the county jail. A lot of women act sweet, but with most of them that’s all it is, an act they learn young and hone to perfection by the time they’re twenty-one. My sisters were both masters of the craft, but Laura was something else altogether. She was sweet to the core.

Then there was Dottie Tipton. I snuck into Greenville to see her a week after the accident. (That’s how everybody except my father referred to it—“the accident.” Pappy referred to it
as “your drunken rampage” and took to calling me “the cow-slayer.”) Dottie was tickled pink to see me. Nothing was too good for the man who’d given her a concussion and put her arm in a cast. She changed her dress and put on lipstick, one-handedly fixed me a drink in a crystal highball, fussed over my bruises. Was I sure I wasn’t hungry? She’d be happy to whip up a little something, it would be no trouble at all. I pictured us sitting at her dining room table eating supper off her wedding china, no doubt with dessert afterward in her bedroom. The urge to leap up and run out the door was as powerful as anything I’d ever felt before battle. It was Dottie’s dead husband who stopped me. Joe Tipton stared out at me from his silver frame on the mantel, his expression stern under the cap of his uniform.
Don’t you do it, you craven son of a bitch
, that expression said. So I stayed awhile and had a few drinks and laughs with her. The drinks made the laughs come easier, and the lies too. When it was time to say goodbye, I was tender and rueful—Antony to her Cleopatra.
Bravo
, said Joe.
Now get the fuck out.
Dottie clung to me a little when I told her I could never see her again, but she didn’t cry. Another thing I owed her for.

All those people whose lives I’d careened into—just like that, they let me off the hook. All that was left was for me to do the same, and that wasn’t hard. Booze helped, and remembering: Flaming planes trailing black smoke, falling from the sky. Men falling from the planes, falling with their chutes on fire, falling with no chutes at all, throwing themselves out of the planes rather than be burned alive. The
wuff wuff wuff of enemy
of
flak, ripping them all to pieces, the falling planes and falling men and pieces of men.

They say you have to hate to be in the infantry, but that wasn’t true in the Air Corps. We never saw the faces of our enemies. When I thought of them at all, I pictured blank white ovals framed by blond crew cuts—never bangs or curls or pigtails, though I knew our bombs fell on plenty of women and kids too. Sometimes we just picked a big city and blasted the hell out of it. Other times, if we couldn’t get to our primary target, usually a military installation or factory, we went after a “target of opportunity” instead. We called them AWMs, short for “Auf Wiedersehen, Motherfuckers.” There was an unspoken rule never to bring the bombs back home. My last run, thunderstorms kept us from reaching the munitions depot we were supposed to hit, so we ended up dumping our full load on a big park full of refugees. We knew from our intelligence briefing that there were SS soldiers there, seeking cover among the civilians. Still, we killed thousands of innocent people along with them. When we got back to base and made our strike report to the CO, he congratulated us on a job well done.

A few seconds before I hit that cow it turned its head and looked straight at me. It could have moved, but it didn’t. It just stood there watching me as I bore down on it.

I
GUESS
I
COULD
have talked to Henry about the war, but whenever I started to bring it up I found myself cracking a joke or making up a story instead. He wouldn’t have understood
what I felt. The horror, yes, but not the guilt, and certainly not the urge I’d sometimes had to drive my plane into an enemy fighter and turn us both into a small sun. Henry, longing for oblivion—the very idea of it was laughable. What my brother longed for was right under his feet. He scraped it from his boots every night with tender care. The farm was his element, just as the sky had once been mine. That was the other reason I didn’t confide in him: I didn’t want to muddy his happiness.

Whiskey was the only thing that kept the nightmares at bay. After the accident I knew Henry, Laura and Pappy were all keeping a close eye on me, so I was careful never to have more than a couple of beers in front of them. I did my real drinking in secret. I had bottles stashed everywhere—on top of the outhouse, out in the barn, under a floorboard on the front porch—and I always carried a tin of lemon drops to hide the smell on my breath. I never got falling-down drunk, just maintained a nice steady infusion throughout the day. A lot of it I sweated out. The rest I put to use. I was the designated charmer of the household, the one responsible for keeping everybody else’s spirits up. To play my part I needed booze.

I played it brilliantly, if I do say so myself. None of them guessed my secret, except for Florence Jackson. Her sharp eyes didn’t miss much. One time I discovered a half-full bottle of Jack Daniel’s tucked underneath my pillow, like a gift from the Bourbon Fairy. I knew it was Florence who’d put it there because it was washing day and the sheets had been changed. I must have left it somewhere, and she’d found it and returned it to me. This one act of kindness aside, she didn’t much like me.
I tried to win her over, but she was immune to my charm—one of the only women I’d ever met who was. I think she must have sensed the part I would play in the events to come. Henry would scoff at me for saying so, but I believe Negroes have an innate ability that us white people lack to sense things, a kind of bone-sense. It’s different from head-sense, which we have more of than they do, and it comes from an older, darker place.

Florence may have sensed something, but I had no idea of what I was setting in motion the day I gave Ronsel Jackson a lift from town. It was just after the new year. I’d been back in Mississippi for four months, but it felt more like four years. I drove into Marietta to get my hair cut and pick up some groceries for Laura, and some bourbon for me. Usually I bought my liquor in Tchula or Belzoni, but that day I didn’t have time. I was coming out of Tricklebank’s with my purchases when I heard a loud explosion off to my left. I hit the ground, covering my head with my hands and dropping the box of groceries, which spilled out into the street.

“It’s all right,” said a deep voice behind me. “It was just a car.” A tall Negro in overalls stepped out from behind a parked truck. He pointed at an old Ford Model A moving away from us down the street. “It backfired, is all,” he said. “Must’ve had a stuck intake valve.” Belatedly I recognized Ronsel Jackson. I’d only spoken to him a couple of times and only about farm business, but I knew from Henry that he’d fought in one of the colored battalions.

Somebody chuckled, and I looked up to see a dozen pairs of
eyes staring at us from under hat brims. All the Saturday afternoon regulars were on the porch at Tricklebank’s, exchanging opinions on whatever passed for news in Marietta—at the moment, no doubt, that crazy brother of Henry McAllan’s, the one who killed that cow over to Greenville. Hot-faced, I bent down and started putting the groceries back in the box. Ronsel helped me, handing me some oranges that had rolled his way. The flour sack had come untied, spilling half its contents onto the dirt, but the whiskey was mercifully intact. When I picked it up, my hands were shaking so hard I dropped it again.

If Ronsel had said anything, if he’d even made a sound that was meant to be sympathetic or soothing, I might have hauled off and hit him—God knows I wanted to hit somebody. He didn’t give me the excuse, though. He just held his own hand out, palm down, so I could see it was shaking every bit as bad as mine. I saw the same frustration in his face that I was feeling, and the same rage, maybe more.

“Reckon it’ll ever stop?” he asked, looking down at his hand.

“They say it does eventually,” I said.

“Did you walk here?”

“Yessuh. Daddy’s using the mule to break the fields.”

“Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”

He headed for the bed of the truck. I was about to tell him he could ride up front with me—it was cold out and starting to drizzle—but then I saw the men on the porch watching us, and I remembered Henry mentioning that Ronsel had gotten into some trouble here awhile back. I waited till we were out of town, then I pulled over, stuck my head out the window and called out, “Why don’t you come on up front?”

“I’m doing just fine back here,” he called back.

The drizzle had turned into a steady rain. I couldn’t see him, but he had to be cold and wet, and getting more so by the minute. “Get in, soldier!” I yelled. “That’s an order!”

I felt the truck rock as he jumped off, then the passenger door opened and he got in, smelling of wet wool and sweat. I expected him to thank me. What he said was, “How do you know you outranked me?”

I laughed. “You obeyed my order, didn’t you? Besides, I was a captain.”

His chin came up. “There were Negro captains,” he said. “I served under plenty of em.”

“Let me guess. You were a sergeant.”

“That’s right,” he said.

I reached into the box sitting between us, uncorked the whiskey and took a good long swallow. “Well, sergeant, how do you like being back here in the Delta?”

He didn’t answer, just turned his head and stared out the side window. At first I thought I’d ruffled his feathers, but then I realized he was giving me privacy in which to drink.
A fine fellow, this Ronsel Jackson
, I thought, taking another swig. Then I had a second, more accurate realization: He wasn’t looking at me because he figured I wasn’t going to offer him any. He was protecting his dignity and giving me the leeway to be a son of a bitch at the same time. Annoyed, I thrust the bottle at him. “Here, have a snort.”

“No thanks,” he said.

“Are you always this stubborn, or is it just around white people who are trying to be nice to you?”

He accepted the bottle and took a quick sip, his eyes never leaving my face. The truth was, not that long ago I wouldn’t have offered him any, not unless it was the last swig in the bottle. I wasn’t sure whether it was a good or a bad thing that I didn’t care anymore.

“What kind of an NCO are you?” I said, when he tried to hand the bottle back to me after that one little sip. This time he took a big snort, so big he choked and spilled some on his overalls. “Don’t waste it, now,” I said. “That’s my medicine, I need every drop.”

When I took the bottle back from him, I saw him notice my missing finger. “You get that in the war?” he asked.

“Yeah. Frostbite.”

“How does a pilot manage to get frostbite?”

“You got any idea how cold it is at twenty thousand feet, with the wind blowing through like fury? I’m talking fifty, sixty below zero.”

“Why’d you leave the window open?”

“Had to. There were no wipers. When it rained, you had to stick your head out the window to see.”

He shook his head. “And I thought I had it bad, being stuck inside a rolling tin can.”

“You were a tanker?”

“Sure was. Spearheaded for Patton.”

“You ever piss in your helmet?”

“Yeah, plenty of times.”

“We had relief tubes in the cockpit but sometimes it was easier just to use our flak helmets. And at twenty thousand
feet that piss freezes solid in less than a minute. One time I went in my helmet and forgot all about it. It was a long haul. When we got close to the target I put the helmet back on. We did the bombing run and were dodging enemy flak when I felt something wet running down my face. And then I smelled it and realized what it was.”

Ronsel gave a big booming laugh. “You must a caught hell back at the Officers’ Club.”

“My buddies never let me hear the end of it. The ones who survived, that is.”

“Yeah. I hear you.”

It was nearing dark and cold enough that I could see his breath and mine, mingling in the air. I put the truck in gear and we drove the rest of the way to the farm in silence, letting the bourbon be our conversation, back and forth. When we pulled up to the Jackson place, Hap was outside filling a bucket at the pump. The look of alarm on his face when he saw his son in the cab of the truck was so exaggerated it was comical.

I rolled down my window. “Evening, Hap.”

“Everything all right, Mist Jamie?”

“Everything’s fine. I just gave Ronsel here a lift from town.”

Ronsel opened the door and got out, a bit unsteadily. “Thanks for the ride,” he said.

“You’re welcome.” As he was about to shut the door, I said, “I expect I’ll be heading into town again next Saturday afternoon. If you like I’ll stop by here, see if you want a ride.”

Ronsel glanced at his father, then back at me. He nodded
his head once, as solemnly as a judge. And in that moment, sealed his fate.

Maybe that’s cowardly of me, making Ronsel’s the trigger finger. There are other ways to look at it, other turning points I could pick, eeny, meeny, miny, moe: When that car backfired. When he got in the cab of the truck. When I handed him the whiskey. But I think it was right then, when he stood half-drunk in the rain and nodded his head. And I believe Ronsel would tell you the same thing, if you could ask him, and he could answer.

III.

LAURA

I
FELL IN LOVE
with my brother-in-law the way you fall asleep in the car when someone you trust is driving—gradually, by imperceptible degrees, letting the motion lull your eyes closed.
Letting
, that’s the key word. I could have stopped myself. I could have shoved those feelings into some dark corner of my mind and locked them away, as I’d done with so many other feelings I’d found troubling. I tried to, for a time, but it was a halfhearted effort at best, doomed to failure.