Mudbound (4 page)

“Good for her!” Jamie said. “Now why don’t you two show me this fine city of yours?”

We took him to the Peabody Hotel, which had the best restaurant in Memphis and a swing band on weekends. At Jamie’s insistence we ordered a bottle of champagne. I’d had it only once before, at my brother Pearce’s wedding, and I was light-headed after one glass. When the band started up, Jamie asked Henry if he could have a dance with me (Henry didn’t dance, that night or any other, because of his limp). We whirled round and round to Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, music I’d heard on the radio and danced to in the parlor with my brothers and young nephews. How different this was, and how exhilarating! I was aware of Henry’s eyes following us, and others’ too—women’s eyes, watching me enviously. It was a novel sensation for me, and I couldn’t help but revel in it. After several numbers, Jamie escorted me back to our table and excused himself. I sat down, flushed and out of breath.

“You look especially pretty tonight,” Henry said.

“Thank you.”

“Jamie has that effect on girls. They sparkle for him.” His expression was bland, his tone matter-of-fact. If he was jealous of his brother, I couldn’t detect it. “He likes you, I can tell,” he added.

“I’m sure he doesn’t dislike anyone.”

“Well, at least not anyone in a skirt,” Henry said, with a wry smile. “Look.” He gestured toward the dance floor, and I saw Jamie with a willowy brunette in his arms. She was wearing a satin dress with a low-cut back, and Jamie’s hand rested on her
bare skin. As she followed him effortlessly through a series of complicated turns and dips, I realized what a clumsy partner I must have been. I wanted to cover my face with my hands; I knew everything I felt was there for Henry to see. My envy and embarrassment. My foolish yearning.

I stood up. I don’t know what I would have said to him, because at that moment he rose and took my hand. “It’s late,” he said, “and I know you have church in the morning. Come on, I’ll take you home.”

He was so gentle, so kind. I felt a rush of shame. But later, as I lay sleepless in my bed, it occurred to me that what I’d shown Henry so nakedly wasn’t new to him. He must have seen it before, must have felt it himself a hundred times in Jamie’s presence: a longing for a brightness that would never be his.

J
AMIE RETURNED TO
Oxford, and I put him out of my thoughts. I was no fool; I knew a man like him could never desire a woman like me. It was marvel enough that Henry desired me. I can’t say whether I was truly in love with him then; I was so grateful to him that it dwarfed everything else. He was my rescuer from life in the margins, from the pity, scorn and crabbed kindness that are the portion of old maids. I should say, he was my potential rescuer. I was by no means sure of him, and for good reason.

One night at choir practice, I looked up from my hymnal and saw him watching me from one of the rear pews, his face solemn with intent.
This is it
, I thought.
He’s going to propose.
Somehow I got through the rest of the practice, though the director had to chide me twice for missing my entrance. In the choir room afterward, as I unbuttoned my robe with clumsy fingers, I had a sudden vision of Henry’s hands undoing the buttons of my nightgown on our wedding night. I wondered what it would be like to lie with him, to have him touch my body as intimately as though it were his own flesh. My sister Etta, who was a registered nurse, had told me about the sexual act when I turned twenty-one. Her explanation was strictly factual; she never once referred to her own relations with her husband, Jack, but I gathered from her private smile that the marriage bed was not an altogether unpleasant place.

Henry was waiting for me outside the church, leaning against his car in his familiar white shirt, gray pants and gray fedora. That was all he ever wore. Clothes didn’t matter to him, and his were often ill-fitting—pants drooping at the waist, hems dragging in the dirt, sleeves too long or too short. I laugh now when I think of the feelings his wardrobe aroused in me. I practically throbbed with the desire to sew for him.

“Hello, my dear,” he said. And then, “I’ve come to say goodbye.”

Goodbye.
The word billowed in the space between us before settling around me in soft black folds.

“They’re building a new airfield in Alabama, and they want me to oversee the project. I’ll be gone for several months, possibly longer.”

“I see,” I said.

I waited for him to say something more: How he would miss me. How he would write to me. How he hoped I’d be
here when he returned. But he said nothing, and as the silence stretched on I felt myself fill with self-loathing. I was not meant for marriage and children and the rest of it. These things were not for me, had never been for me. I’d been a fool to think otherwise.

I felt myself receding from him, and from myself too, our images shrinking in my mind’s eye. I heard him offer to give me a lift home. Heard myself decline politely, telling him I needed the fresh air, then wish him the best of luck in Alabama. Saw him lean toward me. Saw myself turn my head so his kiss found my cheek instead of my lips. Watched as I walked away from him, my back as straight as pride could make it.

Mother pounced on me as soon as I came in the door. “Henry stopped by earlier,” she said. “Did he find you at church?”

I nodded.

“He seemed eager to speak with you.”

It was hard to look at her face, to see the hope trembling just beneath the surface of her bright smile. “Henry’s going away,” I said. “He doesn’t know for how long.”

“Is that . . . all he said?”

“Yes, that’s all.” I started up the stairs to my room.

“He’ll be back,” she called out after me. “I know he will.”

I turned and looked down at her, so lovely in her distress. One pale, slender hand lay on the banister. The other clenched the fabric of her skirt, crumpling it.

“Oh, Laura,” she said, with a telltale quaver.

“Don’t you dare cry, Mother.”

She didn’t. It must have been a Herculean effort. My mother
weeps over anything at all: dead butterflies, curdled sauce. “I’m so sorry, darling,” she said.

My legs went suddenly boneless. I sank down onto the top step and put my head on my knees. I heard the creak of her footsteps and felt her sit beside me. Her arm went around me, and her lips touched my hair. “We won’t speak of him,” she said. “We won’t mention his name ever again.”

She kept her promise, and she must have passed the word to the rest of the family, because no one said a thing about Henry, not even my sisters. They were just overly kind, all of them, complimenting me more often than I deserved and concocting ways to keep me busy. I was in great demand as a dinner guest, bridge partner and shopping companion. Outwardly I was cheerful, and after a time they began to treat me normally again, believing I was over it. I wasn’t. I was furious—with myself, with Henry. With the cruel natural order that had made me simultaneously undesirable to men and unable to feel complete without one. I saw that my former contentment had been a lie. This was the truth at the core of my existence: this yawning emptiness, scantily clad in rage. It had been there all along. Henry had merely been the one who’d shown it to me.

I didn’t hear from him for nearly two months. And then one day, I came home to find my mother waiting anxiously in the foyer. “Henry McAllan’s come back,” she said. “He’s in the parlor. Here, your hair’s mussed, let me fix it for you.”

“I’ll see him as I am,” I said, lifting my chin.

I regretted that little bit of defiance as soon as I laid eyes on him. Henry looked tan and fit, more handsome than he ever had. Why hadn’t I at least put on some lipstick? No—that was
foolishness. This man had led me on, then abandoned me. I hadn’t gotten so much as a postcard from him in all these weeks. What did I care whether I looked pretty for him?

“Laura, it’s good to see you,” he said. “How have you been?”

“Just fine. And you?”

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

I was silent. Henry came and took my hands in his. My palms were damp, but his were cool and dry.

“I had to be sure of my feelings,” he said. “But now I am. I love you, and I want you to be my wife. Will you marry me.”

And there it was, just like that: the question I’d thought I would never hear. Granted, the scene didn’t play out quite like I’d pictured it. Henry wasn’t kneeling, and the question had actually come out as more of a statement. If he felt any worry over my answer, he hid it well. That stung a little. How dared he be so sure of himself, after such a long absence? Did he think he could simply walk back into my house and claim me like a forgotten coat? And yet, beside the enormity of his wanting me, my anger seemed a paltry thing. If Henry was certain of me, I told myself, it was because that was his way.
Meat should not be eaten rare. Blue is your color. Will you marry me.

As I looked into his frank gray eyes, I had a sudden, unbidden image of Jamie grinning down at me as he’d spun me around the ballroom of the Peabody. Henry was neither dashing nor romantic; like me, he was made of sturdier, plainer stuff. But he loved me, and I knew that he would provide for me and be true to me and give me children who were strong and bright. And for all of that, I could certainly love him in return.

“Yes, Henry,” I said. “I will marry you.”

He nodded his head once, then he kissed me, opening my mouth with his thumb and putting his tongue inside. I clamped my mouth shut, more out of surprise than anything; it had been years since I’d been French-kissed, and his tongue felt foreign, thick and strange. Henry let out a little grunt, and I realized I’d bitten him.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t know you were going to do that.”

He didn’t speak. He merely reopened my mouth and kissed me again exactly the same as before. This time I accepted his invasion without protest, and that seemed to satisfy him, because after a few minutes he left me to go and speak to Daddy.

W
E WERE MARRIED
six weeks later in a simple Episcopal ceremony. Jamie was the best man. When Henry brought him to the house he greeted me with a bear hug and a dozen pink roses.

“Sweet Laura,” he said. “I’m so glad Henry finally came to his senses. I told him he was an idiot if he didn’t marry you.”

Jamie had spoiled me for the rest of the McAllans, whom I met for the first time two days before the wedding. From the moment they arrived it was clear they felt superior to us Chappells, who (it must be said) had French blood on my father’s side and a Union general on my mother’s. I didn’t see much of Henry’s father that weekend—Pappy and the other men were off doing whatever men do when there’s a wedding on—but I spent enough time with the McAllan women to know we’d never be close, as I’d naïvely hoped. Henry’s mother was cold, haughty
and full of opinions, most of them negative, about everyone and everything. His two sisters, Eboline and Thalia, were former Cotton Queens of Greenville who’d married into money and made sure everybody knew it. The day before the wedding my mother gave a luncheon for the ladies of both families, and Fanny asked them whether they’d gone to college.

Thalia arched her perfectly plucked brows and said, “What good is college to a woman? I confess I can’t see the need for it.”

“Unless of course you’re poor, or plain,” said Eboline.

She gave a little laugh, and Thalia giggled with her. My sisters and I looked at each other uncertainly. Had Henry not told them we were all college girls? Surely they didn’t know, Fanny said to me later; surely the slight had been unintentional. But I knew better.

Still, not even Henry’s disagreeable relations could dampen the happiness I felt on my wedding day. We honeymooned in Charleston, then returned to a little house Henry had rented for us on Evergreen Street, not far from where my parents lived. And so my time of cleaving began. I loved the smallness of domestic life, the sense of belonging it gave me. I was Henry’s now. Yielding to him—cooking the foods he liked, washing and ironing his shirts, waiting for him to come home to me each day—was what I’d been put on the earth to do. And then Amanda Leigh was born in November of 1940, followed two years later by Isabelle, and I became theirs more utterly even than I was their father’s.

It would be six years into my marriage before I remembered that cleave has a second meaning, which is “to divide with a blow, as with an axe.”

JAMIE

I
N THE DREAM
I’m alone on the roof of Eboline’s old house in Greenville, watching the water rise. Usually I’m ten, but sometimes I’m grown and once I was an old man. I straddle the peak of the roof, my legs hanging down on either side. Snatched objects race toward and then around me, churning in the current. A chinaberry tree. A crystal chandelier. A dead cow. I try to guess which side of the house each item will be steered to by the water. The four-poster bed with its tail of mosquito netting will go to the left. The outhouse will go to the right, along with Mr. Wilhoit’s Stutz Bearcat. The stakes of the game are high: every time I guess wrong the water rises another foot. When it reaches my ankles I draw my knees up as much as I can without losing my balance. I jockey the house, riding it north into the oncoming flood while the water urges me on in its terrible voice. I don’t speak its language but I know what it’s saying: It wants me. Not because I have any significance, but because it wants everything. Who am I, a skinny kid in torn britches, to deny it?

When the river takes me I don’t try to swim or stay afloat. I
open my eyes and my mouth and let the water fill me up. I feel my lungs spasm but there’s no pain, and I stop being afraid. The current carries me along. I’m flotsam, and I understand that flotsam is all I’ve ever been.

Something glows in the murk ahead of me, getting brighter as I get closer to it. The light hurts my eyes.
Has a star fallen in the river?
I wonder.
Has the river swallowed everything, even the sky?
Five rays emanate from the star’s center. They’re moving back and forth, like they’re seeking something. As I pass by them I see that they’re fingers, and that what I thought was a star is a big white hand. I don’t want it to find me. I’m part of the river now.