Four years I prayed for my son to come home. The first two years we only seen him twice, that was when he was still in training in Louisiana and Texas. We was hoping he’d miss out on all the fighting but then in the summer of ’44 they sent him over there, smack dab in the middle of it. Every now and then there’d be an article about his battalion in the AFRO American and Hap would read it out loud to me. Course by the time we got ahold of the paper it was usually a month old or more and Ronsel was long gone from wherever they was writing about. Same with his letters, it took em forever to reach us. Whenever we got one I’d hold it in my hand and wonder if he was being shot at or lying somewhere bleeding or dead right at that moment, but the marks on the paper didn’t tell me. And when the war was over and he didn’t come home, them marks didn’t tell me why. Ronsel was always after me to learn how to read but I don’t see the point of it myself. Writing on a paper ain’t flesh and blood under your roof.
But there’s a old word that goes, “Be careful what you wish for or you might just get it.” God answered all my prayers. He sent my son home safe and with enough money for a new mule too. We was back to working on a quarter share and I was keeping house again for Miz McAllan while Lilly May stayed home and looked after her father. (Well, I didn’t exactly pray to keep Laura McAllan’s house but I sure did like the extra money.) Hap was getting around good on his crutches, preaching again on Sundays and spinning his old dreams, talking bout getting a second mule and taking on more acres and saving up to buy his own land. Marlon and Ruel loved having their big brother back. They followed him around like puppies, pestering him for stories about the places he seen and the battles he was in. Oh yes, we all got our wishes, all on account of Ronsel, and all except for him.
What he wanted was to leave. He never said so—I didn’t raise my children to be complainers—but I could tell he wasn’t happy from the day he got home. At first I thought he was just vexed on account of that ugly business at Tricklebank’s with ole Mist McAllan and them other no-count white men. Told myself he’d been away a long while and just needed to get hisself settled back in, but that didn’t happen. He was jumpy and broody, and he twitched and moaned in his sleep. When he wasn’t working in the fields he was writing letters to his Army friends or setting on the porch steps staring off at nothing. Didn’t talk at mealtimes, wasn’t chatting up the gals at church. That fretted me more than anything. What man don’t want a woman’s arms around him after he’s just got done fighting a war?
Part of him was still fighting it, I knowed that from his sleep talk. I reckoned he seen some pretty terrible things over there and maybe done some too, things that wasn’t setting easy with him. But I also knowed it wasn’t just the war troubling him. It was the Delta, pressing in on him and squeezing the life right out of him. And we was too, by wanting him to stay.
Hap said that was hooey. Said I worried too much about Ronsel and always had. Maybe that was true and maybe not but I knowed my son and it wasn’t like him to be so quiet. Four of my five children come peaceful into the world, but not Ronsel. When I was carrying him he squirmed all day and kicked all night. My aunt Sarah, she taught me midwifing, she said all that ruckus was a good sign, it meant the baby was healthy. “Well,” I told her, “I sure am glad somebody’s feeling good cause I’m plumb wore out.” Then when I went into labor, Ronsel decided he was just gone stay put. I labored thirty-two hours with him. He like to tore me in two coming out and when he finally did he bout busted our ears with his squalling. Aunt Sarah didn’t even have to turn him upside down and swat him, his lungs already knowed what to do.
After all that I thought I was gone have a devil baby on my hands but Ronsel was just as sweet as he could be. Strong too. Before he was even a year old he was walking. I’d set him on a pallet at the end of the row I was picking and here he’d come, toddling down that row, wanting my breast. He was always babbling and singing to hisself. His first word was Ha! and he said it fifty times a day, pointing at his foot or a cloud or a cotton worm, any little thing that caught his eye. By the time he was three he was talking up a storm, wanting to know everything bout everything. Come time to go to school he was always itching to go, and always hangdogging around during planting and picking time when school was closed. When he finished eighth grade his teacher come to see me, said Ronsel had a gift. Well, she wasn’t telling me nothing I didn’t already know. She said if we’d let him come in the afternoons she’d keep on teaching him. I had a wrangle with Hap over that, he wanted Ronsel helping him full-time in the fields. But I stood my ground, told Hap we had to let our son use whatall the Lord seen fit to give him, not just his strong back and his strong arms.
“You sure this is what you want?” Hap asked him.
“Yes, Daddy.”
“You’ll still have to help me till two o’clock every day and get all your chores done besides. Won’t leave you no time for fishing or having fun.”
“I don’t mind,” Ronsel said.
Hap just shook his head and let him go. And when the war come and Ronsel was hell-bent on joining the white man’s army, Hap didn’t understand that either but he let him.
When I looked at my children I could see me and Hap in all of em. And I loved my husband and myself too, and so I loved our children. But when I looked at Ronsel I seen something more, something me and Hap couldn’t a gave him cause we ain’t got it. A shine so bright it hurt your eyes sometimes but you still had to look at it.
I loved all my children, but I loved Ronsel the most. If that was a sin I reckoned God would forgive me for it, seeing as how He the one stacked the cards in the first place.
LAURA
THE COTTON BLOOMED at the end of May. It was magical, like being surrounded by thousands of little white fairies, shimmering in the sunlight. The blooms turned pink after a few days and fell off, revealing green bolls no bigger than my fingertip. They would ripen over the summer and burst open in August. My own time would come right around the new year. My morning sickness had started in early May, so I reckoned I was about two months pregnant.
I wanted to be certain before I told Henry. There was no obstetrician in Marietta, much less a hospital; most women had their babies at home with Doc Turpin. I had no intention of going that route if I could help it. I was about to ask Eboline for the name of her doctor in Greenville when I received a timely invitation from Pearce to attend Lucy’s confirmation at Calvary at the end of June. Lucy was my goddaughter as well as my niece; of course I had to go. And while I was in Memphis, I would pay a visit to my old obstetrician, Dr. Brownlee.
Henry couldn’t spare the time to accompany me, but he agreed to let me and the girls go for a week. Seven days in civilization! Seven days with no mud, no outhouse and no Pappy. It was a heady prospect. I would have a hot bath every day, twice a day if I wanted to. I would call people on the telephone and have afternoon tea at the Peabody and visit the Renoirs at the museum. I might even lie awake in bed at night and read a book by lamplight that didn’t flicker.
Henry drove us to the train station. He went at his usual leisurely pace, slowing often to look at the farms we passed and compare the growth of their cotton, soybeans, and corn to ours. I wanted to tell him to hurry up or we’d miss the train, but I knew he couldn’t help himself. Henry never had much use for nature in its untouched state. Forests didn’t move him, nor mountains, nor even the sea, but show him a well-tended farm and he was breathless with excitement.
We arrived at the station with ten whole minutes to spare. Henry kissed the girls and exacted solemn promises from them to be good and mind me. Then he turned to me. “I’ll miss you,” he said. Time and the daily sight of his cotton thriving had thawed him considerably, though he was still touchy about his authority and had only just resumed our intimate relations in the last week.
“I wish you could come with us,” I said.
As soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized they weren’t true. I wanted some time away from him, not just from Pappy and the f
arm. I wondered if Henry suspected how I felt.
“You know I can’t be away for that long, not this time of year,” he said. “Besides, you girls will have more fun without me along.”
“I’ll write to you every day.”
He bent and kissed me. “You just make sure and come back, hear? I couldn’t do without you.”
He said it lightly, with a smile, but I thought I detected a faint undercurrent of worry in his voice. I felt a twinge of guilt at that, but not nearly enough to make myself say, I’m not going after all, not without you.
The train ride seemed interminable to me. It was stiflingly hot, and the sooty air that blew through the open windows made me queasy. But to the children, who had never been on a train before, it was a grand adventure. My parents met us at the station, Daddy with a big hug and Mother with the expected flood of tears.
It was wonderful, after five months of exile, to be among my own people again. To stand in church and hear the voices of my family, young and old and in-between, ringing out on every side of me. To sit between my sisters on Etta’s wicker glider and sip sweet tea while our children chased lightning bugs together in the slowgathering dusk. And best of all, to share my joyful news, once Dr. Brownlee had confirmed it, with all of them, and be the object of their tender fussing. At any other time, I might have padlocked myself to my old bed in my parents’ house and thrown away the key rather than return to Mudbound. But within a few days, I began to want Henry: the groan of his weight settling onto the mattress beside me at night; the damp, heavy press of his arm across my waist; the rasp of his breathing as I fell asleep. I never felt more in love with my husband than when I was carrying his children. I reckon that’s the Lawd’s doing—that’s what Florence would have said.
The night before we were to return, just as I was about to turn off the bedside lamp, I heard a soft drumming of fingernails on my door. My mother came in and sat on the edge of the bed, bringing the familiar smell of Shalimar with her. It was Daddy’s favorite scent and she never wore any other, just like she never cut her hair because he liked it long. During the day she wore it pinned up, but now it hung like a girl’s in a long silver plait down her back. She was seventy-one years old, and to me, as lovely as ever. And as maddeningly indirect.
“I’ve been thinking about your brother,” she said.
“Pearce?” Pearce was the one of us she worried the most about, because he was entirely too serious and had married into money.
“No, Teddy,” she said. Teddy was her favorite, though she’d always tried valiantly to hide the fact. Teddy was everybody’s favorite. He was a natural clown; he didn’t hesitate to spend his dignity, and we all loved him for it, even Pearce.
“What about him?”
“I was just about your age when I was carrying him, you know.”
I’d heard the story many times: How she’d conceived at thirty-eight, after the doctor had told her she’d never have another child. How it had been the most trouble-free pregnancy and shortest labor of them all.
“The last baby came the easiest,” I said, quoting the familiar ending to the story. “I hope it’ll be the same for me.”
“Except Teddy wasn’t the last baby,” my mother said in a low voice.
“What do you mean?”
“He was a twin. His little sister was stillborn ten minutes after him. She barely weighed four pounds.”
“Oh, Mother. Does Teddy know?”
“No, and don’t you ever tell him,” she said. “I don’t want it haunting him like it has me. I should have listened to the doctor, he warned me not to get pregnant again. He said I was too old, that my body couldn’t take the strain, but I thought I knew better. And so that poor little child, your sister—” She broke off and looked down at her hands.
“Is that why you’re telling me this?” I asked. “Because you’re afraid for me?” She nodded. “But Mother, if you hadn’t gotten pregnant again, you wouldn’t have had Teddy. And how could any of us bear it without him? We couldn’t.”
She gave my hand a hard squeeze. “You just be extra careful not to strain yourself,” she said. “Let Henry and your colored girl do for you, and if you feel tired, rest. You rest even if you aren’t tired, for a couple of hours every afternoon. Promise me.”
“I will, Mother, I promise. But you’re worrying for nothing. I feel fine.”
She reached out and stroked my hair just as she had when I was a child. I closed my eyes and let sleep take me, feeling utterly safe.
• • •
THE NEXT DAY, I returned to the farm, if not quite eagerly, then at least willingly. Henry was thrilled by my news. “This one will be a boy,” he said. “I feel it in my bones.”
I hoped his bones were right. Not that I didn’t adore my girls, but I wanted the fiercer, less complicated love, unsullied by judgment and comparisons to one’s own self, that my sisters had for their sons, and my brothers for their daughters.
“Well, one thing’s for sure,” said Florence, the day I told her I was pregnant. “You definitely carrying a male child.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I’ve knowed for almost two months now. The signs are all there, plain as the nose on your face.”
I ignored the implication that she’d known I was pregnant before I had. “What signs?” I asked.
“Well, you ain’t had much morning sickness, that’s one way you can tell it’s a boy. And you craving meat and cheese more than sweets.”
“I always do.”
“Besides,” she said, with a decisive wave of her hand, “the pillows on your bed are to the north.”
“What difference does that make?”
The lift of her eyebrows sent a clear message: How could I possibly be so ignorant of such a universally known fact? “You’ll see, six months from now,” she said.
Things between the two of us were much the same as they had been, but she was noticeably stiffer around Pappy and, to a lesser extent, Henry. That was because of the trouble with Ronsel, I knew. We hadn’t seen much of him since the day he’d come to apologize to the old man, and for Ronsel’s sake I was glad. He and Pappy weren’t oil and water, they were oil and flame. Best for all concerned if they stayed far apart.
Unfortunately I had no such option with respect to my father-in-law. He was constantly underfoot and more cantankerous than ever once Henry put him to work helping me and Florence around the house. Henry was always protective of me when I was pregnant, but this time he was positively Draconian: under no circumstances was I to risk any sort of exertion. Florence could do only so much in a day, so it fell to Pappy to help with the hauling, milking, churning and so on.
“You’d think a man would be allowed to enjoy the fruits of his labor in his old age,” he said. “You’d think his family wouldn’t put him to work like a nigger.”
“It’s only for a little while, Pappy,” I said. “Just to make sure you have a healthy grandchild.”
He snorted. “Just what I need. Another granddaughter.”
JULY SPED BY. The weather got hotter and the cotton grew. I wasn’t showing much yet, but I could feel the baby’s presence inside of me, a tiny spark I fed with prayers and whispered exhortations to grow and be well. My pregnancy had completely healed the breach between Henry and me, unraveling our anger and knitting us back together again. We began to talk about what we would do when the baby was born. There was no question of our staying on the farm with an infant. Henry promised we’d look for a house to rent right after the harvest. If necessary, he said, we’d live in one of the neighboring towns, Tchula or Belzoni, even though it would mean a longer drive for him. The thought of being in a real house again was exhilarating. I began to feel a certain wistful nostalgia for Mudbound—now that I knew I was leaving it—and even occasionally to enjoy its rustic charms.
It was on such a day, an unusually balmy Saturday toward the end of July, that disaster struck. As usual when anything bad happened, Henry was away. He and Pappy
had gone to Lake Village to see about some hogs, so I was alone with the girls. They were making mud pies by the pump and I was sitting under the oak mending one of Henry’s shirts. There was a nice breeze and a sweet smell of poison in the air; the crop dusters had flown over that morning. I must have nodded off, because I didn’t see Vera Atwood come into the yard. I woke to the sound of her girlish voice, loud and shrill. “Where’s your mama at?” she was saying. “Where is she?”
“I’m right here, Vera,” I said.
She whirled and looked at me. Her breath was coming in whistling gasps, and her dress was drenched with sweat. She must have run all the way to our house.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“You got to take me to town,” she said. “I’m gonna kill Carl.”
It was then that I saw the butcher knife in her hand. I felt a surge of raw fear. The girls were standing just a few feet away from her. I stood and said, “Come here, Vera. Come and tell me what’s happened.”
She came, staggering a little. The girls started to follow, but I made a shooing motion with my fingers. Amanda Leigh took her sister’s hand and held her back.
“He’s started in on Alma,” said Vera.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s started in on her just like he done with Renie. I got to stop him. You got to take me.”
“He beat her?”
“No.”
When I took her meaning my body went cold despite the heat. Renie was the eldest Atwood girl, the one whose baby Florence had delivered in February, just two months before Vera’s own. Both children had died within a few days of being born—crib death, Florence had told me.
“He ain’t gonna have Alma too, not if I can help it,” Vera said.
“Where is he now?”
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