All Aunt Hagar's Children Read online




  ALL AUNT HAGAR’S CHILDREN

  Edward P. Jones

  To my sister

  Eunice Ann Mary Jones-Washington

  and

  to the multitudes who came up out of the South

  for something better, something different, and, again,

  to the memory of my mother,

  Jeanette S. M. Jones,

  who came as well and found far less

  than even the little she dared hope for

  CONTENTS

  In the Blink of God’s Eye

  Spanish in the Morning

  Resurrecting Methuselah

  Old Boys, Old Girls

  All Aunt Hagar’s Children

  A Poor Guatemalan Dreams of a Downtown in Peru

  Root Worker

  Common Law

  Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister

  The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River

  Blindsided

  A Rich Man

  Bad Neighbors

  Tapestry

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Edward P. Jones

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  IN THE BLINK OF GOD’S EYE

  That 1901 winter when the wife and her husband were still new to Washington, there came to the wife like a scent carried on the wind some word that wolves roamed the streets and roads of the city after sundown. The wife, Ruth Patterson, knew what wolves could do: she had an uncle who went to Alaska in 1895 to hunt for gold, an uncle who was devoured by wolves not long after he slept under his first Alaskan moon. Still, the night, even in godforsaken Washington, sometimes had that old song that could pull Ruth up and out of her bed, the way it did when she was a girl across the Potomac River in Virginia where all was safe and all was family. Her husband, Aubrey, always slept the sleep of a man not long out of boyhood and never woke. Hearing the song call her from her new bed in Washington, Ruth, ever mindful of the wolves, would take up their knife and pistol and kiss Aubrey’s still-hairless face and descend to the porch. She was well past seventeen, and he was edging toward eighteen, a couple not even seven whole months married. The house—and its twin next door—was always quiet, for those city houses were populated mostly by country people used to going to bed with the chickens. On the porch, only a few paces from the corner of 3rd and L Streets, N.W., she would stare at the gaslight on the corner and smell the smoke from the hearth of someone’s dying fire, listening to the song and remembering the world around Arlington, Virginia.

  That night in late January she watched a drunken woman across 3rd Street make her way down 3rd to K Street, where she fell, silently, her dress settling down about her once her body had come to rest. The drunken woman was one more thing to hold against Washington. The woman might have been the same one from two weeks ago, the same one from five weeks ago. The woman lay there for a long time, and Ruth pulled her coat tight around her neck, wondering if she should venture out into the cold of no-man’s-land to help her. Then the woman pulled herself up slowly on all four limbs and at last made her stumbling way down K toward 4th Street. She must know, Ruth thought, surely she must know about the wolves. Ruth pulled her eyes back to the gaslight, and as she did, she noticed for the first time the bundle suspended from the tree in the yard, hanging from the apple tree that hadn’t borne fruit in more than ten years.

  Ruth fell back a step, as if she had been struck. She raised the pistol in her right hand, but the hand refused to steady itself, and so she dropped the knife and held the pistol with both hands, waiting for something terrible and canine to burst from the bundle. An invisible hand locked about her mouth and halted the cry she wanted to give the world. A wind came up and played with her coat, her nightgown, tapped her ankles and hands, then went over and nudged the bundle so that it moved an inch or so to the left, an inch or so to the right. The rope creaked with the brittleness of age. And then the wind came back and gave her breath again.

  A kitten’s whine rose feebly from the bundle, a cry of innocence she at first refused to believe. Blinking the tears from her eyes, she reached down and took up the knife with her left hand, holding both weapons out in front of her. She waited. What a friend that drunken woman could be now. She looked at the gaslight, and the dancing yellow spirit in the dirty glass box took her down the two steps and walked her out into the yard until she was two feet from the bundle. She poked it twice with the knife, and in response, like some reward, the bundle offered a short whine, a whine it took her a moment or two to recognize.

  So this was Washington, she thought as she reached up on her tiptoes and cut the two pieces of rope that held the bundle to the tree’s branch and unwrapped first one blanket and then another. So this was the Washington her Aubrey had brought her across the Potomac River to—a city where they hung babies in night trees.

  When Aubrey Patterson was three years old, his father took the family to Kansas where some of the father’s people were prospering. The sky goes all the way up to God napping on his throne, the father’s brother had written from Kansas, and you can get much before he wakes up. The father borrowed money from family and friends for train tickets and a few new clothes, thinking, knowing, he would be able to pay them back with Kansas money before a year or so had gone by. Pay them all back, son, Aubrey’s father said moments before he died, some twelve years after the family had boarded the train from Kansas and returned to Virginia with not much more to their names than bile. And with the clarity of a mind seeing death, his father, Miles, reeled off the names of all those he owed money to, commencing with the man to whom he owed the most.

  Aubrey’s two older sisters married not long after the family returned to Virginia and moved with their husbands to other farms in Arlington County. They—Miles, the mother, Essie, and Aubrey—lived mostly from hand to mouth, but they did not go without. Aubrey’s sisters and their husbands were generous, and the three of them, in their little house on their little piece of land with a garden and chickens and two cows, were surrounded by country people just as generous who had known the family when they had had a brighter sun.

  A little bit before Aubrey turned thirteen, it came to be that his mother took to going off down the road most evenings. “Goin to set with Miss Sally a piece,” she would say of the old woman a half mile or so away. But her son learned that way before Miss Sally’s cabin there lived a man in a shack with a busted door, and that was often where she stopped. If his father, a consumptive, knew, he never said. At first, before he closed his heart to her, Aubrey would stand on the porch and watch her go off, one of the yellow dogs following her until she turned and threw a stone at her. The other dog rarely moved from under the house. Aubrey would watch the road even after she had disappeared. “Whatcha you doin, son?” his father would ask from inside. “Come read me a few verses, maybe some chapters.” His mother had taught him to read in Kansas when he was four. Her people were all book people.

  They grew closer, the father and the son, in a way that had not been possible in Kansas, where each day’s new catastrophe had a claim on their hearts. His father encouraged him to attend church. “It’s but a little bit outa your whole life, son,” Miles said, remembering how angry God must have been after he had awakened from his nap when the family was in Kansas. “And God has a long memory.” His son was nearing fourteen then. So each Sunday morning, the boy, alone, would set off down the road, opposite the way to Miss Sally’s, carrying the Bible inherited from his maternal grandfather, the same book he read from to his father about the trials and tribulations of the Jews thousands of years before the first black slave set foot in America.

  Now Ruth Hawkins, whom Aubr
ey would one day marry, had four brothers born on one side of her and four brothers born on the other side, so men were no mystery to her, and they were not gods. She and Aubrey had played together as little bitty babies, though they had not remembered. But the old women all around Arlington remembered, and they liked to recite the short history of the two after Aubrey returned from Kansas. The old women would mingle after church, only steps away from the Praying Rock Baptist Church graveyard, leaning on walking sticks and on grandchildren anxious as colts to be out and away. “Come here, little bit,” they would say to Ruth and Aubrey, seeing down the line that the two had a future together. “You member that time…,” and they would go on with a story about two playing infants that seemed to have no end.

  At first, Ruth and Aubrey had nothing to say to each other after church, after the old women’s talk had turned to something else and the two were free to go. He was always desperate to get back to his father, and she had a whole world of people and things to occupy all the moments of her days. Even her dreams were crowded, she told a friend. Then, in late August of 1899, Mrs. Halley Stafford, who, people said, had given her name to the comet, decided she had had enough and died in the bed she was conceived and born in. Representing her own family at the funeral, Ruth stepped up to the open grave with a handful of dirt and dust and let it sprinkle on Mrs. Stafford’s coffin as it was lowered down into its resting place. The new preacher, with less than a hundred shaves to his name, kept repeating, “Dust to dust…Ashes to ashes…” The dirt flowed ever so slowly out of Ruth’s hand, and in the slowness of the moments she began to feel as though she could count each grain as it all fell from her. She turned from the grave and looked at her mother, at her father, at her brothers, at everyone assembled about her, and all the while the dirt and dust kept flowing. After the funeral, she came up to Aubrey along the path that led to the road that would take him home. He stopped, and she walked a half circle or so around him, and he took off his hat and held it midway up his chest, hoping it would not be long off his head. Over her shoulders he could see departing people and buggies and wagons and horses and mules, stirring up heaps of dust. The sun behind her flowed soft yellow through the threads of her summer bonnet. “When you gonna ask my daddy when you and your daddy can take supper with us?” she said. He blinked. “I reckon…I reckon next week,” he said, flinging out any words he thought would satisfy her. This was their longest conversation up to that moment. “Could be the fire next time, come next week,” Ruth said. He thought of his father carrying him at four years old on his shoulders along the flat roads of Kansas. In his bed that night, he realized that she had made that half circle so the sun would be out of her face and full on his.

  Whenever they were together after that, her youngest brother, Harold, eight years old, accompanied them. More and more of the toys that had once belonged to his brothers were coming his way, so he was mostly a happy boy. Armies of wooden men, still vital after all those years of playing hands, were now his to command as he had always dreamed. In October and early November, before the cold came upon them, he would carry a platoon of soldiers in a small burlap sack as he walked several steps behind Ruth and Aubrey when they strolled a foot apart, hands to themselves, down to the creek. Harold would stamp down the grass and position the soldiers about the ground as the couple, giggling, skipped stones into the quiet water, or sat on what passed for a bank and saw who could kick up the biggest splash with their bare feet. The boy would lie back and tap the soldiers’ heads against the face of the sun, putting fighting words in their mouths. In late February, after the cold took an early parting, his father told Harold it would be fine if the couple walked hand in hand, and the boy, on his own, increased the distance between himself and them by three paces and stopped singing the song he sang when he thought they were too close. Into March, into April, well beyond the planting season, he rested a squad of men in his lap while he played checkers with Aubrey’s father in the front room that now doubled as the man’s bedroom. And when he could not hear the mumble of the couple’s conversation from the porch, the boy would excuse himself to Miles and go to the door, soldiers in both his hands. When he was satisfied that all was proper, he would go back to the game. He had already given names to all his men in the first days of his sister’s courting, but in the time it took Ruth and Aubrey to grow comfortable with each other and then to move into love, Harold had more than enough time to rename them, enough time to promote a sergeant to colonel for saving a motherless kitten about to drown, to send a one-arm captain home to his family for sassing him.

  Aubrey Patterson would go only twice down to the shack his mother shared with the man she had taken up with. She was an outcast to all the world, even more so than the man. Not even the postman went there.

  The dawn he found his father dead, Aubrey first called him and waited. When he knew at last, he kissed his father’s lips and his hands. Then, as he had done most mornings, he washed his father’s face, combed his hair, and shaved him with the pearl-handled razor Miles’s grandfather had purchased from a whore in Annapolis. He took off his father’s nightclothes and put on the best clothes the man had owned, just as he would have if they were expecting company. Finally, he sat in a chair beside the man’s bed and read a chapter of Genesis and two chapters of Psalms. Then he went down the road to the shack. “Case you wanna know, case you care…,” he began after he had shouted for his mother from the yard. All the way down there, he thought of his father, and all the way back, he thought of Ruth.

  The second time he went to the shack, it was to tell his mother he was getting married. He and Ruth were in the wagon his father had left him. Ruth stayed in her seat as Aubrey got out and shouted for his mother as he had done the day his father died. In a few minutes they were gone, his mother this time not coming to the door. Essie Patterson, living in sin, disappeared out of his life. His oldest sister sent word to him when she died. “We gotta go to her,” Ruth told him, two weeks after they started life in Washington. “We gotta go to her. She the only mother you ever had,” which was something she would not be able to say about the baby in the night tree.

  They spent the first weeks of their marriage in his house. In between the lovemaking, they told each other things they had not been able, for any manner of reason, to say when they were courting. That third night ended with his confessing that he had once stolen a chicken. He had not started out to do it, he told her, but he was walking by Mr. Johnson’s place and the chicken followed him down the road, and no matter what he did, the chicken would not go back home. Then God began to whisper to him, and those whisperings, along with his failing father at home, convinced him that Mr. Johnson could stand the loss of one chicken, a tough thing to eat as it turned out. She found it endearing that he could not tell the difference between God’s counsel and the why-the-heck-not advice of the Devil.

  About two in the morning that eighth night, Ruth, hearing that old night song, sat on the side of the bed and reached down in the dark for the slippers he had presented her. They were not where she thought she had put them and she settled for his boots. Outside in the warm, she let the flow of the song lead her about the place, lit by a moon that commanded a sky with not even one cloud. She walked all about, even near the dark of the night woods, for there was no cautionary story about wolves roaming in Virginia. An owl hooted and flew up, wings as wide as the arms of a scarecrow. It disappeared in the woods and Ruth turned back to the house. She would miss this little piece of a farm, but Aubrey’s aunt, Joan Hardesty, had assured her that Washington was a good place to be. Joan had taken him aside in the moments after his father’s funeral and told him there was always a place for him with her if he didn’t think Virginia was good enough to give him a future. He had grown up knowing her as a dainty thing, famous for separating the different foods on her plate with toothpicks. Ruth, nearing the house, paused to admire the moon that had started out dusty orange at the horizon and had gotten whiter and whiter the more it rose. Paul Hardesty
had married Joan not two months after first meeting her, and they had gone across the Potomac River to Washington, and the city had put some muscle on her. On the day of Aubrey’s father’s funeral, Joan had been a widow for more than a year, Paul having been killed by one of the first automobiles ever to go down the streets of Washington. The story of death by an automobile was such a novel one that white men told it in their newspapers. The white newspapers never mentioned that Paul was unable to run from the automobile because one of his legs was near useless, having been twisted and turned as the midwife pulled him from the womb.

  “It grows on you,” Ruth, at the funeral, remembered Joan saying of Washington, like a woman talking about a lover whose shortcomings she would just have to live with. “You just let it grow on you.” In Washington Joan had found a special plate with compartments, and so never had to use toothpicks again to separate her food.

  Ruth now came around the side of the house, stopped at the well, and pulled up the bucket and drank deeply. A married woman could dispense with the drinking cup. Aubrey’s father was dead, and his mother less than a whore, so there was nothing much for him in Virginia anymore. He smiled when he said Ruth’s name, and he smiled when he told people he was going to live in Washington, D.C. Ruth had no feeling for Washington. She had generations of family in Virginia, but she was a married woman and had pledged to cling to her husband. And God had the baby in the tree and the story of the wolves in the roads waiting for her.

  “Ruth, honey?” Aubrey stood in the doorway. “Sweetheart, you hurtin or somethin?” The bucket had been returned and she had been watching the moon. “You all right, honey?” After your parents, Miles had advised Aubrey, nothing stands between you and unhappiness and death but your own true wife.