Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Glynnis went out to the porch. She wanted to take a walk, she wanted lots of greasy food, she wanted a man to pull her close and put his hands over her behind and talk nasty to her, she wanted to get loud after two and a half beers in a bar surrounded by her girlfriends, she wanted to raise her eyes from a book and look briefly at the sea and think Lord what a dirty read. She went down the steps and stopped at the edge of one part of the garden. She knelt and took first one plant and then another in her fingers. There, close to them, she could see how different in color and texture was each section of plants on that side. But that was all she could see, and she sighed. “Is it magic what a little mint do to stinky breath? Is it magic that water be wet?”

Back in the house she found Dr. Imogene in her armchair holding the television remote control and pointing it at the television with channel after channel going by. Until the evening before, the machine had been in the box, and then, after Glynnis had gone to bed, Dr. Imogene’s grandson, the dreadlock man, had taken it out and set it up. The old woman now punched button after button, trying to lower the volume. “May I?” Glynnis said and took the remote control, looked at it and cut the sound in half.

“Oh, dear,” Dr. Imogene said. “Oh, dear dear dear. I never once wanted somebody’s television box. I done had radios all my life and they done right by me, so what good would a TV do me? Till this one, I don’t think I ever been in the same room with one for more than a hour or so.”

“Then why one now, Dr. Imogene?” Glynnis asked. After five days of it, she had gotten used to calling her “doctor.” She handed the control back to the old woman. On the television, a white man, his face red and very mean, was shouting at a woman, who was doing nothing in response but looking down at her feet.

“Jesse got it for me for my birthday. But I told him to keep it in the box till I got used to havin it. Last night he said it was time.” She leaned her head to the side and looked puzzled. “Hmm…What done happened to those ladies talkin bout that princess lady? Where they done got to? Hmm…” Glynnis sat on the couch, her eyes fully on Dr. Imogene, who touched a button and watched as the channels sailed by again, her face growing ever puzzled. “Oh, dear. Where could they be?”

“Who?”

“The ladies on the TV talkin bout that po princess. I got sleepy last night and turned it off just when it was gettin interestin. I figured I’d get back to them ladies this mornin, but they gone. Where they could be?”

Glynnis began to realize what the root worker was thinking. “Doctor?” The old woman looked at her. “It does not stop, the things on the television. It all goes on, just as if you were still watching it. It isn’t like a film you can stop.” Dr. Imogene, reluctant to accept what she was hearing, pressed the button again, and the channels went on by. At last the old woman’s shoulders drooped and she let out a breath. She gave the control to Glynnis as if to apologize for not believing at first. “I’ll find out what happened to the princess and let you know. Every detail. I promise.”

Glynnis would note the beginning of everlasting affection for the old woman from that moment. She had seen her do something extraordinary for Alberta, and the small jars and the pictures of the children on the tiny room’s wall hinted at what she had done for others, but she did not know what a simple television could and could not do.

“Maybe we should turn it off for now,” Dr. Imogene said and Glynnis did so. “We might as well go get some breakfast.”

Physician-to-be, when it is all said and done, and the patient has recovered or is well on the way to recovery, you must not hesitate to say good-bye. By this point, you should have given only the prescribed amount of comfort and understanding. There should have been no love, because love, especially in its rawest form, risks wrecking the machine again and doing more harm to the mechanisms than what brought the machine to you in the first place.

As for the absence of recovery, as for death, there are machines that were not meant for the road.

They sat for a long time at the breakfast table, and somewhere toward the end of the meal of toast and one shared egg, Glynnis felt comfortable enough to ask about what had helped her mother, about the jars and the plants. The old woman pushed her glasses back on her nose and hunched her shoulders, as if all of it was no big deal, a mere stroll out to the end of the garden and back again.

She led Glynnis into the small room next to the kitchen and said, “Jesse once tried to put labels on them with some cellophane tape, but I always knew what I put in em, so them labels never done me no good. They got to fallin off them jars after a time, I guess cause they knew I didn’t no more care bout em than the man in the moon.”

“Which one sent the witches away from my mother? Which one gave her peace?”

Dr. Imogene reached up to the second shelf and took down a jar third from the end of the row. She handed it to Glynnis, who saw that while the dominant color was a muddy green, there were purple flecks along the edges of the leaves. “I was taught the names for all them things,” Dr. Imogene said, “but then the root worker—bless her heart—who taught me died when I was young. I still didn’t have a fixed mind, and it whatn’t long fore I forgot the names of most things. My mind ain’t never worked that way, even when sweet Evelyn was alive. This one”—she tapped the top of the jar in Glynnis’s hand—“I just call Purple Mess. A body gets tired of callin em green this and green that. When Jesse was still in college, he brought by this book and showed me Purple Mess and a lotta other ones that was in it. Pictures pretty anough to frame, but none of that helped me member what the book was callin em.”

“A rose by any—” Glynnis stopped as the old woman turned and considered the photographs of the children on the other wall.

“These many of the chirren I help bring into the world,” Dr. Imogene said. “These was all trouble births. A root worker gotta know to fix them hands on a woman’s stomach somewhere after the fourth month and know if the baby wants to come out easy anough or take the road harder than ordinary. Then you gotta know what to do to help em both.” She turned back to the jars and the first fullness of the sun came through the window, hit the photographs and rested upon the women’s backs. What was left of the sun went around them and over them and between them to hit the jars. “I failed many a one, but what root worker puts that up on the wall. You can see that clearer than a picture every minute of God’s day you look inside.”

Glynnis returned Purple Mess to the shelf, and it was then that the old woman told her there was no magic in any of it, for she had begun to feel that the younger woman was headed that way. She led Glynnis out to the garden in the back. She pointed to a patch of less than one square foot and told Glynnis that was Purple Mess. “It grows wild down at the creek. It’s a nice spot and a body can sit there all day on it and watch the water flow on by.” In the garden, Purple Mess was the smallest patch of all. “Not many people suffer with witches ridin em, but you can’t stop growin it cause who knows what God’ll put in front a you.” Glynnis stood at the edge of the garden. “Go over to it, Dr. Holloway. Go on in there and see that Purple Mess ain’t nothin special.”

Talk of the jars and the photographs and the garden seemed to have opened a sad room in Dr. Imogene’s heart, and she was mostly quiet throughout the last of the morning and into the first touches of the afternoon. She busied herself with minor chores—from washing the breakfast dishes to fluffing the couch pillows—and Glynnis followed her about, helping where she could, waiting in case the root worker needed to share something. Now and again Dr. Imogene would stop in the midst of some job and stare into the eyes of the younger woman, as if the latter could read her mind and aid by putting into words what the root worker could not say. In her beginning days as a doctor, Glynnis had had a patient who, a month or so into her treatment for hyperthyroidism, would stand silent for several minutes after her session. Glynnis, uncomfortable, new to it all, used the time at first to make notes as the patient stood with her back to the door, her eyes to the floor. Then, toward the end of a year of treating her, Glynnis learned to rid herself of the woman by asking before even a minute of silence had gone by, before she had started to wash her hands, “Will that be all, Mrs. Evans?” Hyperthyroidism became hypothyroidism, and the treatment and the seconds of silence at the door went on, until one day in their third year together Mrs. Evans failed to show up for an appointment, and her file was returned that very morning to the cabinet where it was even now.