Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Just before two Glynnis suggested that she fix lunch, and Dr. Imogene said that was the best idea of the day. As Glynnis stood at the kitchen counter, preparing the sandwiches, the root worker came up beside her and touched the young woman’s shoulder and Glynnis decided right then to cut the sandwiches into fours rather than halves. “You know, Dr. Holloway, I must say the truth of it, but you would make somebody a good mama.” Glynnis was both puzzled and moved by the statement. It was as if someone, seeing her step deftly over a small puddle, had told her she would make a good trapeze artist. “I’m not sure that’s on the horizon for me.” “It all be on the horizon, Doctor, until the horizon goes away and never comes back.”

With each bite, the root worker returned to her old self, and before she had eaten half of her sandwich, she said out of the blue, “You know, I knew bout a root worker not far from here when I was just a little old girl who took to sittin under people’s windows at night. I woke up with her on my mind this mornin for some reason.”

“A Peepin Tom, huh?”

“Oh, no, Dr. Holloway, I don’t think she was impish bad that way.” The old woman leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “She just listened to what folks was sayin inside. She thought it was a way of gettin the rest of the story when folks came for help. A body comes to you for help, say like the witches with our Alberta. Maybe she thought it helped to know that her neighbor wanted her outa the way for somethin. Had it in bad for her.”

Glynnis said, “There was no one like that around us.”

“No, no, Doctor, I’m usin that as a xample of what that long-gone root worker was up to.” She sensed that Glynnis had misunderstood and she endeavored to choose the right words. “She figured if she could know what folks did when the day was bein put to bed, then she could know more about treatin em. Or say you got a woman heartsick ova some no-good man and wants to keep him close. Maybe that worker thought it good to know what went on at night, and for every bad thing a woman would say about that, there’d be five good ones, and not very good ones. ‘But he bathes every day…But he always says he sorry…’ Why help a woman keep that kinda man? When a man’s heart is rotten, no amount of bathin gonna help.”

Glynnis nodded. “I can’t see you listening outside someone’s window.”

“Oh, I neva thought of goin that route, Dr. Holloway. One little ‘Boo’ and I’m outa my skin.” She smiled. “And cause I knew I ain’t nobody’s nightwalker, I knew I had to try to read folks as best I could, and thas somethin I ain’t neva done well. Maybe it was better if I was one for the night. Woulda made things easier. You try not to do the wrong thing, but sometimes, many’s the time, you fall down short.” She drank from the coffee cup and set the empty cup in the middle of the plate. “I wish I could know what it was that happened to our sweet Alberta…. I knew of a situation where this woman carried this hatred for her friend—her best friend, mind you, Dr. Holloway—for years, clean outa the time they was chirren and into them bein grown women. Grown and owin to not one soul, but that hatred wouldn’t ever go away. She carried it like we carry babies, only this neva got old anough to come out. So we gets round to one evenin. Maybe they was drinkin. Celebratin, maybe. And this pain, it just took a hold on the hurtin woman and she stole somethin from the friend’s place. Only she took a thing that belonged to the woman the friend was stayin with. A handkerchief, a brush fulla hair. And the hurtin woman couldn’t see cause the hurtin wouldn’t let her. She just took it to a root worker, and that friend’s friend neva walked again.”

A few ticks beyond four o’clock, Jesse came. Glynnis and Dr. Imogene, who was holding the walking stick with the snakes, were standing on the porch. “I have a body comin,” the root worker had said before rising from the lunch table. “We can talk some more later.” Jesse parked in the church lot, got out, opened the door for a woman who was almost as old as Dr. Imogene, and helped her out, aided by someone Dr. Imogene said was her daughter. That woman was about Glynnis’s age. The root worker went down the steps to the path leading to the gate, and Glynnis thought that that was how she was the day they all arrived from Washington, a long, long time ago. She watched the group cross the road, and before they had reached the gate, Dr. Imogene raised the empty hand Hello and the old woman coming her way raised her hand as well. Once they were inside the gate, the old women kissed, lips to lips, and the younger woman kissed the root worker on the cheek. And after the mother and daughter and the root worker went inside, Jesse asked Glynnis how the vacation was going.

“It’s getting to be more and more like a busman’s holiday,” she said. Then she nodded toward the house and asked, “What’s wrong with her, if I can ask?”

“Who?”

“The mother.”

“It isn’t the mother, Dr. Holloway. It’s the daughter.” The week before, Jesse had told her about not calling his grandmother “Miss Imogene.” He was nearest the gate, and now he went past Glynnis toward the house, and as he went along the path, he seemed to scrutinize the plants on either side, as a gardener might look over the work to be done. He walked to the side of the house and down along the narrow passage that led to the back. “They’re the richest people about,” he said quietly, and she followed. In the back, he knelt and leaned forward and smelled several of the plants on either side. “Black or white. They are undertakers, but she and my grandmother grew up like sisters, with practically nothing.” He stood up and went to the gate, and she continued to follow.

“She looks so healthy, the daughter. Extraordinarily beautiful and healthy.”

“You should know better, Dr. Holloway. You of all people.” He opened the gate. “Why don’t we walk along. I have to return in a bit and take them back. I’ve become a jack-of-all-trades for my grandmother.” He closed the gate after her, and they crossed to the field. “My grandmother has a saying—‘The wellest day you ever had, you sick anough to die.’ That means a pack of stampeding elephants could come down this way and run over you, Dr. Holloway, and no matter how perfect and beautiful you are, that would be it. Or a plane could drop from the sky onto your pretty head. What could your healthy body do against that? Healthiness certainly didn’t help my parents in that collision with that fuck of a drunken driver. Going to church, no less.” She would remind him of his words four years later, some weeks after the funeral, where the two, in utter mourning and despair, sat side by side as the crowd flowed down and about and then out the cemetery, beyond the road and all over the land of the old white farmer and his wife, who had not suffered headaches many a day and who themselves were standing but three feet from the preacher as the man of God spoke about her, failing even with his hour of talking to do her justice.

The field ended and they stepped into the forest. “I got to know this place quite well as a boy, after I became an orphan.” There was a band holding his dreadlocks together and he took it off and shook the locks and put the band around his wrist. “I got a sense that you want to learn what she has. You should tell her. You should tell her you wouldn’t mind being her student. After my mother died, I think she felt no one would ever come along. Then you show up, a little uppity, but still teachable. God knows I could never do it. Men don’t make the best conjurers.”

“Why?”

“I suppose we can be slow learners, Dr. Holloway. And by the time we get it, it’s time to die.” He laughed. The forest smelled as it might after a heavy rain, though it had not rained in several days. “I read this article once about the discovery of aspirin. Maybe the writer made the whole thing up. The aspirin plant, the guy said, was found near some riverbank. A woman with a bad headache wandered in pain and just started eating the plant, that’s how crazy the headache had made her. She didn’t know it would do anything. She was just crazy with pain. But it did the trick. Only steps from her front door. I told that to my grandmother and she said maybe that was a lesson for all those people who go around the world to India and Tibet and places, trying to find a cure for what ails them. They come back chanting and all, but that cure never lasts.” They went deeper into the forest, and soon Glynnis heard the creek several yards ahead, a soothing sound that she thought must have been the same decades before when he was a boy. “The undertaker family has traveled everywhere trying to help the daughter, and now they are with my grandmother just up the road from that mansion.” She asked if the undertaker’s daughter was among the children on Dr. Imogene’s wall. “No,” he said, “but that would not have saved her. My father is on that wall. That did not save him….” He came to a tree and touched the trunk. “I could have sworn I put initials here.” He walked around the tree. “They aren’t here now…. God how I loved that girl when we were young.” Glynnis looked at him and he looked away from her because that was not a thought he had ever put into words. “We best be getting back, Dr. Holloway.”