Mudbound

by Hillary Jordan

By the same logic, my father-in-law was murdered because I was born plain rather than pretty. That’s one possible beginning. There are others: Because Henry saved Jamie from drowning in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Because Pappy sold the land that should have been Henry’s. Because Jamie flew too many bombing missions in the war. Because a Negro named Ronsel Jackson shone too brightly. Because a man neglected his wife, and a father betrayed his son, and a mother exacted vengeance.

I suppose the beginning depends on who’s telling the story.

I was a thirty-one-year-old virgin when I met Henry McAllan in the spring of 1939, a spinster well on my way to petrifaction.

Henry had all the self-confidence that I lacked. He was certain of an astonishing number of things: Packards are the best-made American cars. Meat ought not to be eaten rare. Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” should be the national anthem instead of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which is too difficult to sing. The Yankees will win the World Series. There will be another Great War in Europe, and the United States would do well to stay out of it. Blue is your color, Laura.

I unspooled my life for him.

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.

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.”

The two sisters together were Regan and Goneril to my hapless Cordelia.

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.

I tried to shape my happiness out of the fabric of his, like a good wife ought to, but his contentment tore at me.

The battles he’d fought were the kind nobody cheers you for winning, against sore feet and aching bones, too little rain or too much, heat and cotton worms and buried rocks that could break the blade of a plow.

Ain’t never a lull or a cease-fire.

What we can’t speak, we say in silence.

That’s what it is to love someone: to give whatever you can while taking what you must.

Silenced,