Mudbound

by Hillary Jordan

  “What’d you do?” asked Daddy.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just tried to walk out the door is all.”

  “The front door,” McAllan said, “and when my father and some other men objected to it he made a fine speech. Put us all in our place, didn’t you?”

  “Is that true?” said Daddy.

  I nodded.

  “Then I reckon you better apologize.”

  McAllan waited, his pale eyes fixed on me. I didn’t have a choice and he knew it. He might as well to been God Almighty as far as we were concerned. I made myself say the words. “I’m sorry, Mr. McAllan.”

  “My father will want to hear it too.”

  “Ronsel will pay him a visit after church tomorrow,” said Daddy. “Won’t you, son?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “That’s fine then,” said McAllan. “Let me tell you something else, Ronsel. I don’t hold with everything my father says, but he’s right about one thing. You’re back in Mississippi now, and you better start remembering it. I’m sure Hap would like to have you around here for a good long while.”

  “Yessuh, I would,” said Daddy.

  “Well then. Y’all enjoy your Saturday.”

  As he turned to leave, I said, “One more thing, sir.”

  “What?”

  “We won’t be needing that mule of yours much longer.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I aim to buy us one of our own just as soon as I can find a good one.”

  Daddy’s jaw dropped. I heard a little gasp from inside the house and knew Mama was listening too. I’d wanted to buy it first and surprise them with it, but I wanted to knock Henry McAllan down a peg even more.

  “Mules cost a lot of money,” he said.

  “I know what they cost.”

  McAllan looked at my father. “All right, Hap, you let me know when he finds one. In the meantime I’ll rent you mine on a day-to-day basis. I’ll just put it on your account and we can settle after the harvest.”

  “I’ll settle with you in cash soon as I get that mule,” I told him.

  I could tell Henry McAllan didn’t like that, not one bit. His voice had a sharp edge to it when he answered. “Like I said, Hap, I’ll just put it on your account.”

  Daddy laid a hand on my arm. “Yessuh, that’ll be fine,” he said.

  McAllan got in his truck and started up the engine. As he was about to pull away, he called out, “Don’t forget to stop by the house tomorrow, boy.”

  I watched the truck disappear into the falling dusk. The whippoorwills had started their pleading and the lightning bugs were winking in and out over the purpling fields. The land looked soft and welcoming, but I knew what a lie that was.

  “No point in fighting em,” said Daddy. “They just gone win every time.”

  “I ain’t used to walking away from a fight. Not anymore.”

  “You better get used to it, son. For all our sakes.”

  WE FOUGHT FOR six months straight across France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Germany and Austria. With the different infantry battalions we were attached to, we killed thousands of German soldiers. It wasn’t personal. The Jerries were the enemy, and while I tried to account for as many as I could, I didn’t hate them. Not till the twenty-ninth of April 1945. That was the day we got to Dachau.

  We didn’t know what it was even, just that it was in our way. Nary one of us had ever heard of a concentration camp before. There’d been rumors floating around about Germans mistreating POWs, but we thought they were just tall tales meant to scare us into fighting harder.

  By then I’d gotten my own tank command. Sam was my bow gunner. We were driving toward Munich a few miles ahead of the infantry when we caught the smell, a stink worse than anything I’d ever smelled in my life, and by that time I’d smelled plenty of corpses. About a mile later we came to a compound fenced all around by a concrete wall, looked like a regular military post from the outside. There was a big iron gate set in the wall with German writing on the top. Then we seen the people lined up in front of the gate, naked people with sticks for arms and legs. SS soldiers were walking up and down the lines, shooting them with machine guns. They were falling in waves, falling down dead right in front of us. Sam took out the soldiers while Captain Scott’s tank busted down the gate.

  Hundreds of people—if you can call skin scraped over a pile of bones a person—came staggering out of there. Their heads were shaved and they were filthy and covered with sores. Some of them ran off down the road but most of them were just walking around in a daze. Then they caught sight of this dead horse that’d been hit by a shell. It was like watching ants on a watermelon rind. They swarmed the carcass, ripping off pieces of it and eating them. It was horrible to see, horrible. I heard one of the guys retching behind me.

  We followed the sound of gunshots to this big barnlike building. It was on fire and I could smell roasting flesh. We came around the corner and seen more SS soldiers shooting at people inside. The building was full of bodies stacked six foot high on top of one another, smoking and burning. Some of them were still alive and they were crawling over the dead ones, trying to get out. The SS soldiers were standing there just as calm as they could be, shooting anybody that moved. We opened fire on those motherfuckers. Some of them ran and we got out of the tank and chased them down and shot them. I took out two myself, shooting them in the back as they were running away from me, and I felt nothing but glad.

  I was walking back to my tank when a woman tottered over to me with her hands stretched out toward me. She had on a ragged striped shirt but she was naked from the waist down—that’s the only way I could tell she was a woman. Her eyes were sunk way back in the sockets and she had sores all over her legs. She looked like a walking corpse. I started backing away from her but I stepped in a hole and fell and then she was on me, clutching me, jabbering nonstop in whatever language she spoke. I was pushing her away, yelling at her to get the fuck off me, when all the strength seemed to go out of her and she went limp. I laid there underneath her and stared up at the sky—such a pale pretty blue, like nothing bad had ever happened under it or ever could happen. Her weight on me was light as a blanket, so light she was hardly there at all. But then I felt the warmth of her body through my uniform. I ain’t never been so ashamed of myself. It wasn’t her fault if she seemed less than human, it was the fault of them that did this to her, and them that didn’t raise a voice against it.

  I sat up, trying to be careful. Her head was laying in my lap and she was looking up at me like I was her sweetheart, like the sight of me was everything she ever hoped for in this world. I rooted around in my pockets and found a chocolate bar. I unwrapped it and gave it to her. She sat up and crammed the whole thing in her mouth, like she was afraid I was going to change my mind and take it away from her. I felt a shadow on me and looked up and seen other prisoners surrounding us, dozens of them, ragged and stinking and pitiful. Some were talking and making eating motions with their hands and mouths, and some were just standing there quiet as ghosts. I was feeling around in my pockets to see what other food I had when the woman in my lap curled up into a ball, moaning and grabbing her stomach.

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “What’s the matter with you?” But she just laid there jerking and moaning like she was gut-shot. It went on a long while and there wasn’t nothing I could do. Finally she went still. I put my head on her chest and listened but I couldn’t hear a heartbeat. Her eyes were wide and staring. They were blue, the same pale blue as the sky.

  “Ronsel!”

  I looked through the stick-thin legs of the prisoners and seen Sam walking toward me. Tears were running down his face. “Medic says not to feed em,” he said. “Says it can kill em since they ain’t eaten in so long.”

  I looked back down at her, the woman I’d just killed with a chocolate bar. I wondered what her name was and who her people were. I wondered whether anybody ever held her like I was doing, whether anybody ever stroked her hair. I hop
ed somebody did, before she came to this place.

  I NEVER THOUGHT I’d miss it so much. I don’t mean Nazi Germany, you’d have to be crazy to miss a place like that. I mean who I was when I was over there. There I was a liberator, a hero. In Mississippi I was just another nigger pushing a plow. And the longer I stayed, the more that’s all I was.

  I was in town picking up some feed for the new mule when I ran into Josie Hayes. Well, she was Josie Dupock now—she’d gone and married Lem Dupock last September. Josie and me used to walk out together before the war. I was real sweet on her, even thought about marrying her. But when I joined up she was so vexed with me she wouldn’t see me or speak to me, and I ended up leaving Marietta without saying goodbye to her. I sent her a few letters but she never wrote back, and after awhile I just let it go. So when I seen her there on Main Street, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

  “Heard you was back,” she said.

  “Yeah. Got home about two months ago. How you been?”

  “Been fine. I’m married now.”

  “Yeah, Daddy wrote and told me.”

  A silence came down between us. Time I knew Josie we were always laughing and jollying. I used to tickle her till she squealed but she never tried to get away, just wriggled and giggled and if I stopped she’d tease me till I started up again. She didn’t look like she did much laughing now. She was still a fine-looking gal but her eyes had hardened up, and I had a good idea of why. Lem and me went to school together. He was the kind always starting trouble and never ending up with the blame, just setting off to the side smiling while the rest of us were getting our butts switched. When we got older he was always slipping around at the gals, had him two or three at a time. Lem Dupock wouldn’t never give a woman nothing but tears, I could’ve told Josie that a long time ago.

  “Ain’t seen you in church,” I said.

  “Ain’t been there. Lem ain’t the church-going kind.”

  I hesitated, then asked, “He treating you all right?”

  “What’s it to you, how he’s treating me?”

  Not a damn thing I could say to that. “Well,” I said, “I’d best be getting on home, Josie. You take care of yourself.”

  I started to head back to the wagon but she grabbed ahold of my arm. “Don’t go, Ronsel. I need to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Bout us.”

  “Ain’t no us, Josie. You seen to that five years ago.”

  “Please. There’s some things I want to say to you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Not here. Meet me tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “My house. Lem’s gone, he went down to Jackson. I ain’t expecting him back till next week.”

  “I don’t know, Josie,” I said.

  “Please.”

  I knew I shouldn’t have gone over there but I went anyway. Ate the supper she fixed me and talked about old times. Let her tell me how sorry she was. Let her show me. Josie and me used to fool around some but we never laid down together. I’d imagined it plenty of times though, how it would feel to have her and to let her have me. Afterward we’d snuggle up and talk and laugh together, that was how I always pictured it.

  It wasn’t nothing like that. It was sad and lonesome during and stone quiet after. I thought Josie was asleep but then in a husky voice she said, “Where you gone to, Ronsel? Who you thinking bout?”

  I didn’t tell her the truth: that I was all the way to Germany, thinking about a white woman named Resl, and the man I was when I was with her.

  HER FULL NAME was Theresia Huber, Resl was just a nickname. That surprised me at first, that the Germans would have nicknames like we did. Shows you how well the Army trained us not to think of them as human.

  Resl’s husband was a tanker too, he got killed at Strasbourg. That was one of the first things she asked me: “Vas you at Strasbourg?” I was glad I could tell her no. She had a six-year-old daughter, name of Maria, a shy little thing with dark blue eyes and hair white as cotton. That was how I met Resl in the first place, was through Maria. When we rolled into a town the women would send their children out to beg us for food. German or not, it was a hard thing watching hungry kids rooting around in garbage cans, so we always kept some extra rations in our mess kits. The day we got to Teisendorf there were more kids than usual swarming around our tanks. Maria was hanging back a little like she was afraid. I went over to her and asked her name. She didn’t answer, I reckoned she didn’t understand me, so I pointed at my chest and said “Ronsel” then pointed at hers. But she just stood there looking up at me with eyes too big for her face. Child that age should’ve still had baby fat in her cheeks but hers were hollowed out. I gave her all my extra rations that day and the next. The third day she took me by the hand and led me back to her house. Sam went with me. We always went in pairs, just in case. Even though the Jerries had surrendered, you could still run into trouble in some of them little Bavarian towns—SS soldiers hiding out in somebody’s cellar, that kind of thing. But when we got to the house all we found was Resl, waiting for us with hot soup and a little old loaf of brown bread about the size of my hand. We gave her our rations and told her we weren’t hungry but she kept on pushing the food at us. We could tell it was hurting her feelings that we wouldn’t eat so finally we had some. The soup was mostly water with a few potatoes and onions floating in it and the bread like to broke our teeth, but we made “mmm” sounds and told her it was good.

  “Goot!” she said. Then she smiled for the first time and my breath caught. Resl was that sorrowful kind of pretty that’s even prettier than the happy kind. Some women get like that, hard times just pares them down till all that’s left is their beauty. I’d seen it at home amongst my own people too but somehow it was different over there, and not just because the faces were white. Here was a woman who’d never wanted for a thing in her life and now all of a sudden she had nothing—no husband, no food, no hope. Well, not nothing, she had her daughter and her pride, and those were the two things she lived for.

  Resl’s English wasn’t too good and I hardly spoke ten words of German, but that don’t matter between a man and a woman who understand each other. Up to that point I’d stayed away from the fräuleins—after whatall I seen at Dachau I just didn’t want to mess with them—but plenty of the other guys had German sweethearts. Jimmy taken up with this gal, she wasn’t even a fräulein, she was a frau, meaning a missus with a live husband. Jimmy met her up in Bissingen, the first town we occupied after the cease-fire, and when we left there to go to Teisendorf she followed after him. There were plenty of others like her too. I used to wonder what would make a woman want to transact herself that way, want to leave her husband and take up with a colored man who’d laid waste to her country and killed her people. But after knowing Resl awhile I started to understand it better. It wasn’t just that she’d been without a man for two years and here I was giving her food and whatever else she wanted from me. That was part of it, sure, but there was more to it than that. The two of us had something in common. Her people were conquered and despised, just like mine were. And just like me, Resl was hungry to be treated like a human being.

  I spent every spare minute I had at her house. With the money and provisions I gave her, she made dumplings and sauerkraut and rye bread, and sausage when we could get it. Every night after she put Maria to bed, Resl and me would set on the couch for a spell. Sometimes she’d talk in German in a low sad voice—remembering how things used to be, I guessed. Sometimes I’d tell her about the Delta: how the sky was so big it shrank you to nothing, and how in the summertime the lint from the cotton laid a fuzzy coat of white over everything in the house. Then after awhile I’d feel her tug at my hand and we’d go upstairs. I’d been with a fair number of women by that time, I never made a dog of myself like some of the guys but I’d had my share of romances. But I never felt nothing like I felt with Resl in the nights. She gave her whole self to me, didn’t hold back, and before too long I didn�
�t either. When I was on duty I’d be thinking about her the whole time, got to where I could smell her scent even when I wasn’t with her. One time in the quiet after, she put her hand on my chest and whispered, “Mein Mann.” I was happy to be her man and I told her so, but later I found out from Jimmy it also meant “my husband.” That fretted me for a few days, till I made myself see the truth. The way we were together, we might as well to been man and wife.

  So in September when most of the other guys took their discharges and headed home, I volunteered to stay in Teisendorf. Lot of greenhorns were coming over from the States to replace the guys who’d shipped out, and the Army needed seasoned men to show them the ropes. Jimmy and Sam told me I was crazy for staying, but I couldn’t stand to leave Resl. First time I ever lied to my mama and daddy was when I wrote and told them the Army wasn’t ready to let me go yet. I didn’t like to do it but Daddy wouldn’t have understood the truth. Me loving a white woman, he might’ve come around to that, though he would’ve told me I was a damn fool. But me not jumping at the first chance to come home—that, he never would’ve understood, not if he had a hundred years to think about it.

  But then in March the Army gave me a choice: either re-enlist or ship out for the States. I wasn’t about to sign up for four more years of soldiering so I took my discharge. Lot of tears over it but there wasn’t nothing else I could do. I couldn’t stay in Germany, and I damn sure couldn’t bring Resl and Maria home with me. On the boat to New York I told myself it was just one of them things, just a wartime romance that was never meant to last, between two people who didn’t have nobody else.

  Till that night with Josie I even believed it.

  FLORENCE

  EVERY DAY I asked God, Please send him home to us. Send him home whole and right in his mind. And if that’s too much to ask of You just let him be right in his mind and not like my uncle Zeb, who come back from the Great War with all his parts but touched in the head. One morning my mama and I went out to the yard and found all six of our hens laid out in a neat row with their necks wrung and Uncle Zeb laying sound asleep at the end of the row like he was number seven. Few weeks later he wandered off and we never laid eyes on him again.