Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

At the lovely creek that day, they met her father’s brother and his pregnant wife. The wife had a baby finger with a long nail, and she had been wondering if she should cut the nail before her baby arrived, lest she accidentally mar the child with scratches or poke its eye out. It was Sunday morning, and what family deserved a day of rest more than theirs? Arlene’s uncle had brought half a pig for barbecuing and they all paused but a moment or so in their joking and joy before going down to the bank to cross to where the best picnicking spots were. There was sun everywhere—a little wink-wink from God. With one hand holding the smaller picnic basket, her mother took hold of Arlene’s hand and swung it back and forth as if her child were an old, old girlfriend. The two set off first. It had rained the night before, but it had rained a million nights leading up to that day and no harm had ever come to a single crossing soul. The wooden bridge to the other side was very new, and if a body interested in the chemistry and biology of life had bent down close to any part of it, she could have smelled what the woodsman smelled that moment after he made the first wounds into the trees that would create the bridge.

When they were all still on the bridge and many feet from the other shore, the creek water seemed to rise up and grow violent, with no reason at all except that it wanted to. The water chewed the bridge to splinters and razored the thick rope holding the wood together, and all the people tumbled into the creek, now nearly three times as high as it had been five minutes before. Her aunt went floating away first, the baby inside her only one and a third months old, the two pulled from the group with the ease of a twig and dispatched swiftly down the creek, which wasn’t anyone’s lovely sight anymore. Her father and uncle went next, partly in an effort to retrieve her aunt. They were all silent, amazed, and overwhelmed. The pig carcass slowly sank to the bottom of the creek, as if to hide from it all, while the other picnic fixings—the homemade barbecue sauce, the sodas, the two cakes, the potato salad, the pepper shaker on its side and the top of its head nudging the upright salt shaker—drifted away nonchalantly. Her brother followed her father and uncle, knocked down until he was flat on his back, kicking all the while, trying to swim or to right himself, his hair even now still as perfect as the jar of My Knight pomade had promised on the label, hair still looking like all of the forty-five youthful minutes he had spent on it that morning. Her mother was next, and maybe she knew that she was about to be parted from her child until that day somewhere in eternity when God decided otherwise, for she tried pushing Arlene away, toward the shore. Then she too was forced down and away, still silent, still moving her arms to try to give her child one more push into life.

The Israelites who found safe passage through the parted Red Sea could testify as to what it was like next. A shallow path of easy water presented itself and Arlene was pushed quite peacefully to the other side, her stomach heavy with a quart or more of creek water. She was exhausted once she hit the shore and did not move once there, her body expelling the water a spoonful at a time. She was eight years and two weeks, and this was the first miracle.

Even silent death can have a loudness that calls out for witnesses, and so a white man, arm in arm with his sweetheart, a short, plump Cherokee woman, happened upon them. He pulled Arlene completely out of the water in time to see everyone but her mother disappear around the bend folks called No Name Preacher. The white man, seeing Arlene’s mother reach out and grab a hickory branch standing straight up like a flagpole in the rushing water, began to jump up and down, as if to cheer her on. Arlene’s mother held on to the branch with both hands, and such a hopeful sight compelled the man, bony with almost transparent skin, to take off the new shoes his sweetheart had bought him.

He jumped in. He was only a few feet from the mother when the branch wobbled, uprooted itself and pulled her away. The water took the man as well, like some kind of punishment for interfering. His sweetheart, bending down over Arlene, now stood and called out to him. “Mitchell…Mitchell.” It was at first a soft call, as if she wanted her lover merely to come away from doing some boyish mischief. “I say, Mitchell…” Arlene stood as well and began calling out to her mother. She and the woman were holding hands. “Mama!” Arlene was shivering with the emotion of it all. The woman was now screaming the man’s name, even as the water began to calm and went back to what it had been all the days before that one. The Indian woman felt the shaking of the child and knelt down and pulled Arlene to her and began calling for her own mother, who had not been alive for thirty-five years, since before the Indian woman had turned three years old. She did not call the dead woman “Mother,” but shouted to the water using her first and middle names, the ones her mother had been christened with.

Arlene Baxter went to live with her paternal grandparents.

Her grandfather had lost his only children in the creek, along with a grandson named for him, two daughters-in-law he cherished, and an unborn grandchild whose future in his pained imagination became limitlessly bright, if only because now there was no future. The loss became his life, and no matter what grand things he might manage to think God still had in store for him, what small pleasures he had once enjoyed and might again savor—combing the rain from his wife’s hair, the taste of the first peach of the season—he could, in one horribly short moment, be back at the first crushing second he had learned of the loss. He had been a man of few words, and now there were fewer still. Arlene suffered the same feelings, compounded by the fact that she had been a witness. She was too young to feel the guilt of a survivor, but not too young to see that the wondrous and bountiful forest that had been her good life had, in less than ten minutes, been cleared down to nearly nothing.

Her grandmother had endured the same loss, but she had God and He told her He had a plan. God held her hand every step of the way.

Then her grandmother died, a woman who had tried to keep everything going for the three of them, the curtains cleaned and ironed, the cow milked and happily sassy, the neighbors over for supper at least once a week to let Arlene and her grandfather know that they were still in life and life was still in them. With her death, that all went away. The cow mooed all day waiting to be milked and would sashay on up to the house in the early evening and poke her head in the side window; and when neighbors, country people all, came to offer a hand to do anything, the grandfather said they needed nothing and asked that they go away. He woke early one morning before dawn, three months after his wife’s death, his beard filthy and stiffly matted and falling almost a foot down his chin until it turned and formed an “L” with the base pointing to his heart. He found Arlene at the kitchen table in half-darkness eating a breakfast of food burned black. With a doting mother and grandmother who nevertheless should have known better, a spoiled farm girl can be left to concentrate on things other than how long to fry an egg. The child was close to nine years old. “That food ain’t good for you, sweetie,” her grandfather managed to say. “I’s so hungry, Paw Paw,” Arlene said.

He understood enough about himself and the wreckage that was his life to know that wherever he was headed, this one innocent thing he was charged with caring for should not have to suffer the same road. He did a rough shave late that morning, got the beard down to a short “I,” and became enough of himself to telegraph a distant cousin of Arlene’s mother who ran a preparatory school for well-off Negro girls some forty-nine miles away in Nashville. The headmistress did not remember Arlene’s mother, but she did remember quite well the mother’s aunt, and that was sufficient for her to connect a line from her blood to Arlene’s blood. “Will be there with next train,” the headmistress, an economist and mathematician, telegraphed back.