Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

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.