Free Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

nice,” he said. “I’m going to brush my teeth now. Why don’t you get into bed?”
    There was a brief pause, then the door opened and shut. As his footsteps receded down the hall, I looked at the fig tree and thought of the fruit that would begin ripening there come summer. I wondered if Alice Stokes liked figs; if she would gather up the fruit eagerly or let it fall to the ground and rot.
    I N THE MORNING we said goodbye to the Stokeses and headed to the general store to buy food, kerosene, buckets, candles and the other provisions we would need on the farm. That’s when I learned there was no electricity or running water in the house.
    “There’s a pump in the front yard,” Henry said, “and some kind of stove in the kitchen.”
    “A pump? There’s no indoor plumbing?”
    “No.”
    “What about the bathroom?” I said.
    “There is no bathroom,” he said, with a hint of impatience. “Just an outhouse.”
    Honey, by the way.
    A stout-bodied woman in a man’s checked shirt and overalls spoke from behind the counter. “You the new owners of the Conley place?”
    “That’s right,” said Henry.
    “You’ll be wanting wood for that stove. I’m Rose Trickle-bank, and this is my store, mine and my husband Bill’s.”
    She stuck her hand out, and we all shook it in turn. Shehad a strong, callused grip; I saw Henry’s eyes widen when her hand grasped his. Yet for all her mannish ways, from the neck up Rose Tricklebank resembled nothing so much as the flower whose name she bore. She had a Cupid’s-bow mouth and a round face surrounded by a mop of curly auburn hair. A cigarette tucked behind one ear spoiled the picture, but only a little.
    “You’ll want to stock up good on supplies today,” she said. “Big storm’s coming in tonight, could rain all week.”
    “Why should that matter?” Pappy asked.
    “When it rains and that river rises, the Conley place can be cut off for days.”
    “It’s the McAllan place now,” Henry said.
    After we paid, Rose hefted one of our boxes herself and carried it out to the car, over Henry’s protests. She pulled two licorice ropes out of her pocket and handed them to Amanda Leigh and Isabelle. “I’ve got two girls of my own, and my Ruth Ann is about your age,” she said to Amanda, tousling her hair. “She and Caroline are in school right now, but I hope you’ll come back and visit us soon.”
    I promised we would, thinking it would be nice to have a friend in town, and some playmates for the girls. As soon as she was out of earshot, Henry muttered, “That woman acts like she thinks she’s a man.”
    “Maybe she is a man, and her husband hasn’t cottoned to it yet,” Pappy said.
    The two of them laughed. It irritated me. “Well, I like her,” I said, “and I plan on visiting her once we get settled in.”
    Henry’s brows went up. I wondered if he would forbid meto see her, and what I would say if he did. But all he said was, “You’ll have a whole lot to do on the farm.”
    T HE FARM WAS about a twenty-minute drive from town, but it seemed longer because the road was so rutted and the view so monotonous. The land was flat and mostly featureless, as farmers will inevitably make it. Negroes dotted the fields, tilling the earth with mule-drawn plows. Without the green of crops to bring it alive, the land looked bleak, an ocean of unrelieved brown in which we’d been set adrift.
    We crossed over a creaky bridge spanning a small river lined with cypresses and willows. Henry stuck his head out the window of the truck and shouted back at me, “This is it, honey! We’re on our land now!”
    I mustered a smile and a wave. To me, it looked no different from the other land we’d passed. There were brown fields and unpainted sharecroppers’ shacks with dirt yards. Women who might have been any age from thirty to sixty hung laundry from sagging clotheslines while gaggles of dirty barefoot children watched listlessly from the porch. After a time we came to a