Mudbound by Hillary Jordan Page B

said, his voice rising a little. “It’s my duty to help them.”
    “What about your father?” I asked. Meaning, can’t he help them?
    “Eboline can’t be expected to look after him now. Pappy will have to come and live with us.” Henry paused, then added, “He’ll be driving the truck up next week.”
    “What truck?”
    “The pickup truck I bought to use on the farm. We’ll need it to move the furniture. We won’t be able to take everything at once, but I can make a second trip when we’re settled.”
    Settled. In rural Mississippi. In two weeks’ time.
    “I bought a tractor too,” he said. “A John Deere Model B. It’s one hell of a machine—you won’t believe how fast it can get a field plowed. I’ll be able to farm a hundred and twenty acres by myself. Imagine that!”
    When I said nothing, Henry propped himself up on one elbow and peered down at my face. “You’re mighty quiet,” he said.
    “I’m mighty surprised.”
    He gave me a puzzled frown. “But you knew I always intended to have my own farm someday.”
    “No, Henry. I had no idea.”
    “I’m sure I must have mentioned it.”
    “No, you never did.”
    “Well,” he said, “I’m telling you now.”
    Just like that, my life was overturned. Henry didn’t ask me how I felt about leaving my home of thirty-seven years and moving with his cantankerous father in tow to a hick town in the middle of Mississippi, and I didn’t tell him. This was his territory, as the children and the kitchen and the church were mine, and we were careful not to trespass in each other’s territories. When it was absolutely necessary we did it discreetly, on the furthermost borders.
    M OTHER CRIED WHEN I told her we were leaving, but it was hardly the squall I’d expected. It was more of a light summer shower, quickly over, followed by admonitions to buck up and make the best of it. Daddy merely sighed. “Well,” he said,“I guess we’ve had you with us longer than we had any right to expect.” This was what happened to daughters, their expressions seemed to say. You raised them, and if you were lucky they found husbands who might then take them off anywhere at all, and it was not only to be expected, but borne cheerfully.
    I tried to be cheerful, but it was hard. Every day I said goodbye to some beloved person or thing. The porch swing of my parents’ house, where Billy Escue had given me my first real kiss the night of my seventeenth birthday. My own little house on Evergreen Street, with its lace curtains and flowered wallpaper. The roaring of the lions at the nearby zoo, which had made me uneasy when we first moved in but now provided a familiar punctuation to my days. The light at my church, which fell in shafts of brilliant color upon the upturned faces of the congregation.
    My own family’s faces I could hardly bear to look at. My mother and sisters, with their high Fairbairn foreheads and surprised blue eyes. My father, with his wide, kind smile and sloping nose that never could hold up his spectacles properly.
    “It’ll be an adventure,” said Daddy.
    “It’s not that far away,” said Etta.
    “There are bound to be nice people there,” said Mother.
    “I’m sure you’re right,” I told them.
    But I didn’t believe a word of it. Marietta was a Delta town; its population—a grand total of four hundred and twelve souls, as I later learned—would consist mostly of farmers, wives of farmers and children of farmers, half of whom wereprobably Negroes and all of whom were undoubtedly Baptists. We would be miles from civilization among bumpkins who drank grape juice at church every Sunday and talked of nothing but the weather and the crops.
    And as if that weren’t bad enough, Pappy would be there with us. I’d never spent much time around my father-in-law, a blessing I didn’t fully appreciate until that last week in Memphis, when I was forced to spend all day every day alone with him while Henry was at work. Pappy was sour, bossy