Mudbound (29 page)

A shadow fell across us, and I turned and saw Jamie in the doorway. The light was behind him so I couldn’t see his expression. Bella got up and ran to him, hugging him around the knees. “Pappy’s dead, Uncle Jamie!” she cried.

“It’s true,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He picked Bella up and moved to stand at the foot of the bed. He was still in his dirty clothes from the night before, but he’d combed his hair and washed his battered face. There was bitterness in his eyes as he gazed down at his father’s body, and sorrow. I’d expected the one but not the other. It tore at my heart.

“It looks like he went peacefully, in his sleep,” I lied.

“That’s how I’d like to go,” Jamie said in a small voice. “In my sleep.”

He looked down at me then, a look of such tender desolation that I could hardly bear to meet it. I saw a brother’s guilt in that look, but none of the shame or contempt I’d feared to find. Just love and pain and something else I recognized finally as gratitude, for what I’d given him. Gone was the gallant and
fearless aviator, the laughing cocksure hero of my imaginings. But even as I mourned his loss, I knew that that Jamie wouldn’t have needed my comfort, or lain with me.

That Jamie had never really existed.

The realization stunned me, though it shouldn’t have. He’d given me all the clues I needed to see the weakness at the core of him, and the darkness. I’d ignored them, preferring to believe the fiction. Jamie had created that fiction, acting the part almost to perfection, but I’d been the one who swallowed it whole. I was to blame, for having fallen in love with a figment.

I loved him still, but there was no longing to it, no heat. Already the memory of our lovemaking was beginning to seem distant, as though it had happened to someone else. I felt strangely empty, without all that carnal furor.

I think he saw it in my eyes. His own dropped to the floor. He set Bella down and knelt beside me, bending his head. Waiting for me to begin. For the second time, I was at a loss. What honest prayer could I, an adulteress kneeling with my lover beside the body of my hated, murdered father-in-law, possibly offer Him? And then I knew, and I clasped Jamie’s hand in mine and started to sing:

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;

Praise Him, all creatures here below;

Praise Him above, ye heavenly host:

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

My voice was strong and clear as I sang the familiar words of thanksgiving. The girls joined in at once—the Doxology was the first hymn I’d ever taught them—and then Jamie did as well. His voice was raw, and it splintered on the
amen
. I found myself thinking that Henry wouldn’t have waited for me to begin. He would have led us in prayer unhesitatingly, and his voice wouldn’t have cracked.

JAMIE

T
HE
B
IBLE IS FULL
of thou-shalt-nots. Thou shalt not kill, that’s one. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, that’s two. Thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife—three and four. Notice how none of them have any loopholes. There are no dependent clauses you can hang your sins on, like: Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife,
unless
thou art wandering in the blackest hell, lost to yourself and to every memory of light and goodness, and uncovering her nakedness is the only way back to yourself. No, the Bible’s absolute when it comes to most things. It’s why I don’t believe in God.

Sometimes it’s necessary to do wrong. Sometimes it’s the only way to make things right. Any God who doesn’t understand that can go fuck Himself.

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain—that’s five.

T
HE DAY AFTER
the lynching passed with the slow heaviness of a dream. I hurt everywhere, and I had the mother of all
hangovers. I couldn’t stop thinking of Ronsel, of the knife flashing, the blood spurting, the clotted howling that went on and on.

I took refuge in work. There was plenty of it: the storm had wrecked the chicken coop, peeled half the roof off the cotton house and sent the pigs into a murderous frenzy. Henry hadn’t returned from Greenville yet, but we expected him back any time. I’d gone earlier to check the bridge and found it just barely passable. From the ominous look of the clouds, it wouldn’t stay that way for long. In weather like this Henry would know to hurry home.

I was in the barn milking when Laura came and found me. Venus hadn’t been milked since the previous morning, and her udders were full to bursting. She’d already punished me for it twice by swatting me in the face with her cocklebur-infested tail. Still, it was good to sit with my cheek against her warm hide, listening to the snare-drum sound of milk hitting the pail, letting the rhythm empty my head.

“Jamie,” Laura said. I looked up and saw her standing just outside the stall. “Henry will be back soon. We need to talk before he gets here.”

With some reluctance I left the shelter of the stall and went to her. She had on lipstick, I noticed, but apart from that she was totally without artifice, probably the only woman I’d ever known who was. That would change now, because of me. I had turned her into a liar.

“How are the girls?” I asked her.

“Fine. They’re both asleep. All this has worn them out.”

“I expect it has. Death is unsettling. Especially the first time you see it.”

“They wanted to know if you and Henry and I would die someday, and I said we would, a long time from now. Then they asked if they would die. I think it was the first time it ever occurred to them.”

“What did you tell them?”

“The truth. I don’t think Bella believed me, though.”

“Good,” I said. “Let her have her immortality while she can.”

Laura hesitated, then said, “I need to ask you about something.” She pulled a crumpled piece of white cloth from her pocket. Even before I saw the eyeholes I knew what it was. “I found this on the floor of the lean-to. I imagine it belonged to Pappy.” When I didn’t answer, she said, “You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?”

I nodded, the memories exploding like grenades in my head.

“Tell me what happened, Jamie.”

I told her. How I’d seen the light near the sawmill and gone over there. How I’d discovered Ronsel with a rope around his neck in a room full of hooded men, my father among them. How I’d broken in on them and tried to get Ronsel out of there. How I’d failed. “I didn’t even fire my gun,” I said.

“Listen to me,” Laura said. “What happened to that boy isn’t your fault. You tried to save him, which is more than most people would have done. I’m sure Ronsel knew that. I’m sure he appreciated it.”

“Yeah, I bet he’s just overflowing with gratitude towards me. He probably can’t wait to thank me.”

“He’s alive?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God,” she said, her eyes closing in relief.

“At least, he was when I left,” I said. And then I told her the first lie: how I’d come to with Sheriff Tacker bending over me, and the others gone, and learned they’d cut out Ronsel’s tongue. Laura’s hand flew to her own mouth. Mine, I remembered, had done the same.

“Tom Rossi drove him to the doctor,” I said. “He’d lost a lot of blood.” It had been everywhere: drenching his shirt, pooling on the floor, spattering Turpin’s white robes.

“Why?” she asked. “Why did they do it?

I reached in my pocket and pulled out the photo and handed it to her. She looked at it, then back at me. “Who are they?”

“That’s Ronsel’s German lover, and the child she had by him. There was a letter with it, I don’t know what happened to it.”

“How did they get hold of this?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Lie number two. “I guess Ronsel must have dropped it somewhere.”

“And one of them found it.”

“Yes.”

“Who else was there, besides Pappy?”

“I didn’t recognize any of the others,” I said.

Lie number three, this one for her own safety. I’m sure she saw through it, but she didn’t call me on it. She just gazed at me thoughtfully. I had the feeling I was being weighed, and found wanting. It gave me an unfamiliar pang. I’d cheerfully disappointed dozens of women. Why, with Laura, did it feel so bad?

“What will you tell Henry?” she asked.

“I don’t know. He’s going to be upset enough as it is, without having to know that our father was part of a lynch mob.”

“Did Tom or Sheriff Tacker actually see Pappy at the sawmill?”

“I don’t think so. But even if they did, this is the Delta. The last thing the sheriff wants to do is identify any of them.”

“What about Ronsel?”

“He won’t talk. They made sure of that.”

“He could write it down.”

I shook my head. “What do you suppose would happen to him if he did? What would happen to his family?”

Laura’s eyes widened. “Are we in danger?”

“No,” I said. “Not as long as I leave here.”

She walked to the barn door and looked out at the brown fields and the bleak crouching sky, hugging herself with her arms. “How I hate this place,” she said softly.

I remembered the strength of those arms around me, and the surprising sureness with which her hand had gripped me and guided me into her. I wondered if she was that fierce and sure with my brother. If she cried out his name like she’d cried out mine.

“I can’t see any reason to tell Henry your father was involved,” she said finally. “It would only hurt him needlessly, to know the truth.”

“All right. If you think so.”

She turned and looked at me, holding my gaze for long seconds. “We won’t ever speak of it,” she said.

W
HEN
H
ENRY GOT
home he was already in a welter because of the storm. Laura and I met him at the car, but he barely gave us a glance as he brushed by us to kneel in the fields and examine one of the flattened rows of newly planted cotton. It had started to rain again, and we were all getting soaked.

“If this keeps up all the seed will be washed away, and we’ll have to replant,” he said. “The almanac predicted light rain in April, damnit. What time did it start here?”

“Around five o’clock yesterday,” said Laura. “It poured all night long.”

Her voice sounded strained. Henry looked from her to me and frowned. “What happened to your face?”

I’d forgotten all about my face. I tried to think up a story to explain it, but my mind was blank.

“Venus kicked him,” Laura blurted out. “Last night, when he was milking. The storm agitated her. All the animals. One of the pigs is dead. The others trampled it.”

Henry looked from her back to me. “What in the hell’s the matter with the two of you?”

She waited for me to tell him, but I shook my head. I couldn’t speak. “Honey,” she said, “your father is gone. He died last night in his sleep.”

She went and stood next to him but didn’t touch him. He wasn’t ready to be touched yet.
How well she knows him
, I thought.
How well they suit each other.
He bent his head and stared at his muddy boots. Eldest child, now the head of our family. I saw the weight of that settle on him.

“Is he . . . still in his bed?” Henry was asking me. I nodded. “I guess I’d better go and see him,” he said.

Together the three of us walked to the lean-to. Henry went in first. Laura and I followed, coming to stand on either side of him. He pulled the sheet down. Pappy’s eyes, vacant and bulging, stared up at us. Henry reached out to close them, but Laura took his hand and gently pulled it back.

“No, honey,” she said. “We already tried. He’s still too stiff.”

Henry let out a long breath. I put an arm around him and so did Laura. When our hands accidentally touched behind his back, she shifted hers away.

I hadn’t expected Henry to cry, and he didn’t. His face was impassive as he looked down at our father’s dead body. He turned to me. “Are you all right?” he asked.

I felt a flare of resentment. Did he never get tired of being the strong one, of being stoic and honorable and dependable? I saw in that moment that I’d always resented him, even as I’d looked up to him, and that I’d bedded his wife in part to punish him for being all the things I wasn’t.

“I’m fine,” I said.

Henry nodded and squeezed my shoulder, then looked back down at Pappy. “I wonder what he saw, at the end.”

“It was a dark night,” I told him. “No moon or stars. I doubt he saw much of anything.”

Lie number four.

“N
IGGER LOVER
!” Turpin shouted. “Judas!”

Finally a boot connected with the back of my head, and that
was all—for five minutes or so. When I came to, somebody was none too gently slapping my cheek. I was lying on my side with the other cheek against the dirt. The room was a blur of legs and white robes.

“Wake up,” said my father, giving me a hard shake. A half dozen overlapping hooded heads swam over me. I tried to push him away from me. That’s when I realized my hands were tied behind my back. He pulled me to a sitting position and propped me against the wall. The sudden motion made the room spin, and I felt myself starting to topple over. Pappy yanked me back up again by my jacket collar. “Sit up and act like a man,” he hissed in my ear. “You make one more wrong move, and these boys are liable to kill you.”

When the room resettled itself I saw Ronsel, still alive, his head straining upward in an effort to keep the noose from choking him.

“What are we gonna do with him?” said Deweese, waving in my direction.

“No need to do anything,” said Pappy. “He won’t talk, he told you so already. Ain’t that right, son?”

My father was scared, I realized. He was scared as hell, and he was trying to protect me. I think it was right then that I really began to feel afraid myself. My heart started to pound and I felt sweat breaking out all over me, but I made my voice stay calm and confident. For me and Ronsel to walk out of here alive, I would need to give the performance of my life.

“That’s right,” I said. “Just let him go, and as far as I’m concerned this never happened.”