Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Ruth and Miles came back.

Aubrey thought that if he made his wife’s life as easy as possible in Washington, her body would consent, and she would at last become pregnant. With Earl around and the baby needing to be watched as he began to explore more and more of his world, Ruth had about a third less work than before she went home to Virginia. And so she took Aubrey to her at night, eager, happy to be back, and he returned to her body, a man in love, in awe, in fear. Washington survived the blazes of August. September was warm, quite acceptable to Joan’s guests not from the South. Much of October was fiercely cold, but November was like September all over again.

Like a thick window shade being pulled down in the brightness of day, the world was darkening for Blind Willie. By Ruth’s return, he was accepting his new nickname, but he joked it was unfair to be called blind even before he was fully so. “I think I should be just Half-Blind Willie. Next thing you know,” he said to Ruth one evening as everyone lingered after a pork chop supper, “they’ll wanna put me in the ground when I’m only half dead.”

He and Ruth, with Miles, went about the city in the afternoons of November in a wagon pulled by a mule that was good for short trips about the city but would have died, or simply refused, if forced to try anything longer. Born and raised in Washington, Willie told Ruth he wanted to show her the places of his childhood before his eyes took the places away. The truth is that he needed a companion as he went about trying “to pay his respects” to the women he had known. He saw his blindness as a kind of death. By November he had learned that Vi Sanchez was dead, but Melinda Barclay was still managing to avoid him. Her neighbors kept telling him she was off on a trip around the world. Ruth enjoyed being with him. She believed that Miles was going to grow up in Washington, so he may as well learn about it early. And Willie had an endless amount of stories, about the sea, about whales, about foreign countries, about love in Africa and Brazil. That all of Washington seemed to know him reminded her of how well known she was in Virginia. The old people in Washington called him William, for that, they would say, was the name his mother gave him, and it should be good enough for everybody else. With plenty of rest for the mule along the way, he and Ruth would go as far as Georgetown some days, picnicking and fishing at the river’s edge.

At last, after months and months, two days before the end of November, Melinda opened the door to her home at 8 Pierce Street, N.W. Her face said nothing when she saw Willie. Indeed, she looked over his shoulders and around him, as if she had been expecting someone who had never caused her pain. She sighed with disappointment. Willie was surprised at how happy he was to find her, and he thought right away of the letter—only the third one of his life—he had written her that last time two years before, a letter labored over only days before he decided to retire from the sea. He wrote in the letter that he would miss her cooking, that it was the hardest thing in the world to go back to the ship’s food. He had started the letter in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and finished it before the ship saw England, but he had not mailed it. He wrote in the letter that he knew a dressmaker in Paris and he would have her make Melinda something out of this world.

“Oh, Melinda,” Willie said now in the doorway, “you don’t know how happy I am to find you at home.”

“Willie.”

“I been lookin for you, Melinda.”

“I been away, Willie. Way away. Didn’t folks tell you?” She had now stepped back. Her hair was made up quite prettily, as if for some party. “I heard bout whas happenin to you and it’s a shame. To be blind.”

Willie looked around at Ruth and Miles in the wagon.

“You should get back to em,” Melinda said and made to close the door. He saw the darkening figure of the door and raised his hand to stop it from closing. “Please, Melinda. Please, darlin.” She stopped the closing and sighed once more. “Thas Ruth and little Miles. She my landlady’s niece. Her…her niece-in-law.” He turned around to look at Ruth as if to make certain he had gotten right her relationship to Joan. There had been a woman in Brazil who had understood very little English and who just nodded at everything he said, even when he told her he was coming back with a ring that would weigh her hand down.

“I have somewhere to go, Willie,” Melinda said. “You might have to come back some other time.”

Ruth could not hear their words from the wagon, but she sensed the distress in Willie, in the way his head hung a little bit. Miles was in her lap, playing with the reins.

“Now, Melinda, please wait a little bit,” Willie said. His head was turned slightly to the side, for there out of the corners of his eyes was where most of the last of his sight resided. A stranger walking by would have seen him talking to the side of Melinda’s house.

She did a dismissal with her teeth. “You promised me a letter, Willie. Just some plain letter that a child could manage. Just a plain old letter.”

“I know I did, Melinda.”

“And you know what else,” she said, opening the door just an inch or so more. “That damn necklace fell apart on me, do you know that? But I can understand fallin apart. Everything does that. It woulda been nice to know it was gonna happen. It woulda been nice to know that it never come from the king of Haiti. I didn’t mind the fallin apart. Just the lyin.”

“I know,” Willie said, not even remembering the necklace. “I shouldna said that. There ain’t been no king in Haiti for a lotta years.”

“It ain’t the necklace. I got all the necklaces I could ever need.”

“I’ll get you something else, and I mean that,” Willie said.

They did not speak for a time, until Miles squealed when he dropped one of the reins.

“Yall may as well come in,” Melinda said. “Yall may as well do that. You make my house look poor standin out there like that.”

On the morning of the third night Willie was with Melinda, he felt someone tap him lightly on the left side of his head. He woke and found it curious because Melinda was sleeping on his right side. In the half-darkened room he sat on the side of the bed and waited for his eyes to adjust. Finally, he held his hand before his face, moved it back and forth. Melinda was sleeping quietly, like a little girl, the way she had always done. He put his hand in his lap. “Oh, shoot,” he said at last. “I’m all the way blind.” He said it with no more emotion than a man might say he was late for something of little consequence after seeing his clock had stopped. He had hoped for a few months more.

He dressed with as little noise as possible and went down and out her door. He closed the door behind him and stood in his first morning hearing the sound of the closing door echo in his head. He went out the gate, making sure to shut it tight behind him. A neighbor’s smelly dog liked to come in her yard and sleep under the porch. Willie took three tentative steps away from Melinda’s house. A rooster crowed and Willie was emboldened. He put his right hand out in front of him, and the left hand he held out to the side where the homes were. He remembered that once he had come out of a woman’s house in Northeast on just such a crisp morning and had gone three blocks in the wrong direction before he realized just what woman he had been with. He reached the end of Pierce Street and went down 1st. The slight dip was a surprise, something that had certainly not been there in all the years he had had eyes. He made his way home, to 3rd Street, and with all his steps he spelled out her name. William had never been a good speller in school, and Sailor Willie had been even worse, so Blind Willie made his way to Joan’s repeating M-I-L-I-N-D-A.