Free Mudbound by Hillary Jordan Page B

and so could Pappy.
    “I need to speak to you in private,” I said, looking at Henry. I went out onto the front porch. Henry followed, shutting the door behind him.
    In a low voice, I said, “When you told me you were bringing me here, away from my people and everything I’ve ever known, I didn’t say a word. When you informed me your father was coming to live with us, I went along. When Orris Stokes stood there and told you you’d been fleeced by that man you rented the house from, I kept my mouth shut. But I’m telling you now, Henry, we’re not getting rid of that piano. It’s the one civilized thing in this place, and I want it for the girls and myself, and we’re keeping it. So you can just go back in there and tell your father he can sleep in the lean-to. Either that or he can sleep in the bed with you, because I am not staying here without my piano.”
    Henry was looking at me like I’d just sprouted antlers. I stared back, resisting the urge to drop my gaze.
    “You’re overtired,” he said.
    “No. I’m fine.”
    How my heart thumped as I waited him out! I’d never defied my husband so openly, or anyone else for that matter. It felt dangerous, heady. Inside the house I could hear the girls squabbling over something. Isabelle started crying, but I didn’t take my eyes off Henry’s.
    “You’d better go to them,” he said finally.
    “And the piano?”
    “I’ll put a floor in the lean-to. Fix it up for him.”
    “Thank you, honey.”
    That night in our bed he took me hard, from behind, without any of the usual preliminaries. It hurt, but I didn’t make a sound.

HENRY
    W HEN I was six years old, my grandfather called me into the bedroom where he was dying. I didn’t like to go in there—the room stank of sickness and old man, and the skeleton look of him scared me—but I was reared to be obedient so I went.
    “Run outside and get a handful of dirt, then bring it back here,” he said.
    “What for?”
    “Just do it.” He waved one gnarled hand. “Go on now.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    I went and got the dirt. When I returned with it, he asked me what I was holding.
    “Dirt,” I said.
    “That’s right. Now give it to me.”
    He cupped his hands. They shook with palsy. I poured the dirt into them, trying not to spill any on the sheets.
    “What am I holding?” he asked.
    “Dirt.”
    “No.”
    “Earth?”
    “No, boy. This is land I’ve got. Do you know why?” His eyebrows shot up. They were gray and bushy, tangled like wire.
    I shook my head, not understanding.
    “Because it’s mine ,” he said. “One day this’ll be your land, your farm. But in the meantime, to you and every other person who don’t own it, it’s just dirt. Here, take it on back outside before your mama catches you with it.”
    He poured it back into my hands. As I turned to leave, he grabbed ahold of my sleeve and fixed me with his rheumy eyes. “Remember this, boy. You can put your faith in a whole lot of things—in God, in money, in other people—but land’s the only thing you can count on to be there tomorrow. It’s the only thing that’s really yours.”
    A week later he was dead, and his land passed to my mother. That land was where I grew to manhood, and though I left it at nineteen to see what lay outside its borders, I always knew I’d return to it someday. I knew it during the weeks I spent overseas with my face pressed in alien mud soaked in the blood of people not my own, and during the long months after, lying on my back in Army hospitals while my leg stank and throbbed and itched and finally healed. I knew it while I was a student up in Oxford, where the land doesn’t lie flat, but heaves itself up and down like seawater. I knew it when I went to work for the Corps of Engineers, a job that took me many places that were strange to me, and some others that looked like home but weren’t. Even when the flood came in ’27, overrunning Greenville and destroying our house and that year’s