Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

The visit was quite brief, with most of it taken up with Bethany standing between her father’s legs as he sat in a chair two feet from his bed. Anita stood at the window. She could see how the sergeant had withered, could see what was missing. While the room was bright, it faced nothing more than the roof of the second floor. He was in the brown pajamas and bathrobe and slippers his father had brought him. At the last minute, Anita had thought to bring him the same things, only in blue, but she was too late with hers, and he was never to wear them. She had forgotten that blue was a color he did not like.

The mother and her child both kissed his cheek and left him in the chair as he admired the book of poems Bethany had brought. As the two neared the elevator, Anita turned and found him following them. He said he might walk out with them because he hadn’t seen the sun in a while. His daughter held his hand all the way.

Out in the sun, Percival slowed and went to the nearest bench. The woman and the child stood for a bit until Anita thought they had waited long enough. They kissed his cheek again.

Once in her car, she considered going around the parking lot and passing the sergeant on the bench so that he might get one more look at their daughter. There seemed an extremely long line of cars passing behind her, and she waited in the parking space.

“Mama, Mr. Methuselah wants us to do a project by the end of next week,” Bethany said.

“Oh?” Anita said. “What is it this time? More grandparent stuff?” After the tenth car passed behind her, she wondered why everyone had decided to leave at once.

“No, we’re done with that.” Anita stopped watching the passing cars and looked at her daughter’s face in the rearview mirror. There was a public school near her parents, a good school she had heard about from her sister-in-law. “He wants us to write a paragraph about what we would say to people who might not know Jesus and don’t even know they could live till five thousand years.” On some days, she could see Percival’s mother’s face in her child; on other days, she could see her own father. He, too, was dying, just as Percival might be. “What would we say to the poor Lapland people, you know? What would you say to em, Mama? Gimme a hint.” She had seen Methuselah several times, and each time he seemed only steps from his own grave.

Anita began inching out of the space. Through trial and error, she had learned many things about the world, about her husband, and one of them was that he would be waiting, for such was the way of many men whose lives had taken a cut to the bone. As she came out of her parking space, she again saw her daughter’s face in the rearview mirror, bright and hopeful with all the life any parent could ever hope for, and she began looking for an exit that would not take her back that way to the sergeant and his bench. Waiting to go on to 16th Street, she did not know whether she wanted left or right. Perhaps it might be good to go left, into Maryland. There was a street, a curious side street in Bethesda, that she had seen one busy, crowded day as she took Wisconsin Avenue into Maryland, and she had told herself that one day she and Bethany would explore that most inviting street and not even care that much if they got lost. What time could be better than today? What time could be better than what might be the last day of five thousand years?

They caught him after he had killed the second man. The law would never connect him to the first murder. So the victim—a stocky fellow Caesar Matthews shot in a Northeast alley only two blocks from the home of the guy’s parents, a man who died over a woman who was actually in love with a third man—was destined to lie in his grave without anyone officially paying for what had happened to him. It was almost as if, at least on the books the law kept, Caesar had got away with a free killing.

Seven months after he stabbed the second man—a twenty-two-year-old with prematurely gray hair who had ventured out of Southeast for only the sixth time in his life—Caesar was tried for murder in the second degree. During much of the trial, he remembered the name only of the first dead man—Percy, or “Golden Boy,” Weymouth—and not the second, Antwoine Stoddard, to whom everyone kept referring during the proceedings. The world had done things to Caesar since he’d left his father’s house for good at sixteen, nearly fourteen years ago, but he had done far more to himself.

So at trial, with the weight of all the harm done to him and because he had hidden for months in one shit hole after another, he was not always himself and thought many times that he was actually there for killing Golden Boy, the first dead man. He was not insane, but he was three doors from it, which was how an old girlfriend, Yvonne Miller, would now and again playfully refer to his behavior. Who the fuck is this Antwoine bitch? Caesar sometimes thought during the trial. And where is Percy? It was only when the judge sentenced him to seven years in Lorton, D.C.’s prison in Virginia, that matters became somewhat clear again, and in those last moments before they took him away, he saw Antwoine spread out on the ground outside the Prime Property nightclub, blood spurting out of his chest like oil from a bountiful well. Caesar remembered it all: sitting on the sidewalk, the liquor spinning his brain, his friends begging him to run, the club’s music flooding out of the open door and going thumpety-thump-thump against his head. He sat a few feet from Antwoine, and would have killed again for a cigarette. “That’s you, baby, so very near insanity it can touch you,” said Yvonne, who believed in unhappiness and who thought happiness was the greatest trick God had invented. Yvonne Miller would be waiting for Caesar at the end of the line.

He came to Lorton with a ready-made reputation, since Multrey Wilson and Tony Cathedral—first-degree murderers both, and destined to die there—knew him from his Northwest and Northeast days. They were about as big as you could get in Lorton at that time (the guards called Lorton the House of Multrey and Cathedral), and they let everyone know that Caesar was good people, “a protected body,” with no danger of having his biscuits or his butt taken.

A little less than a week after Caesar arrived, Cathedral asked him how he liked his cellmate. Caesar had never been to prison but had spent five days in the D.C. jail, not counting the time there before and during the trial. They were side by side at dinner, and neither man looked at the other. Multrey sat across from them. Cathedral was done eating in three minutes, but Caesar always took a long time to eat. His mother had raised him to chew his food thoroughly. “You wanna be a old man livin on oatmeal?” “I love oatmeal, Mama.” “Tell me that when you have to eat it every day till you die.”

“He all right, I guess,” Caesar said of his cellmate, with whom he had shared fewer than a thousand words. Caesar’s mother had died before she saw what her son became.

“You got the bunk you want, the right bed?” Multrey said. He was sitting beside one of his two “women,” the one he had turned out most recently. “She” was picking at her food, something Multrey had already warned her about. The woman had a family—a wife and three children—but they would not visit. Caesar would never have visitors, either.

“It’s all right.” Caesar had taken the top bunk, as the cellmate had already made the bottom his home. A miniature plastic panda from his youngest child dangled on a string hung from one of the metal bedposts. “Bottom, top, it’s all the same ship.”

Cathedral leaned into him, picking chicken out of his teeth with an inch-long fingernail sharpened to a point. “Listen, man, even if you like the top bunk, you fuck him up for the bottom just cause you gotta let him know who rules. You let him know that you will stab him through his motherfuckin heart and then turn around and eat your supper, cludin the dessert.” Cathedral straightened up. “Caes, you gon be here a few days, so you can’t let nobody fuck with your humanity.”