Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Late the next day Ruth got word that her mother was again ill. Aubrey sulked all the rest of the day, slept on the edge of their bed that night, and twisted and turned as loudly as he could. He sulked most of the next day as well, until Ruth left with Miles. She was gone nearly two weeks, until days before Christmas. He did not touch her again until well after Christmas. He stopped while inside her, dropped all his weight on her, and then, after she began complaining, rolled away.

One day in early January, he saw her talking to Earl in the kitchen of the 1013 house and suspected something. How, he wondered, as he stepped between them to get to the coffeepot, could he trust any child out of her to be his? He poured his coffee and before taking the first sip told Earl to go tidy up the chicken coop.

“You didn’t have to say that to him like that,” Ruth said to her husband after Earl left.

“Say it what way?” her husband said, holding his cup in both hands.

“Mean like that. He a good man. Earl don’t trouble nobody less they trouble him.” With winter, there were fewer guests in the 1011 house and Joan had allowed Earl to stay in the back room upstairs. “Ain’t no call for bein mean like that, Aubrey.” One morning Earl had raised his shade and saw Joan across the way in 1013, her back to him, looking in her mirror as she fixed her hair. He thought his heart would run away from him.

“Why you takin up for somebody against your own legal husband?” Aubrey knew as soon as he had said them that the words made no sense, but once they were out there in the kitchen where two pots were cooking supper, he could do no more than support them. “Ain’t no call for you to do that, thas what I say.” Joan had turned from the mirror and saw Earl watching her that morning.

“You could be nicer to everybody, Aubrey, thas all I’m sayin. Earl, Willie, you could be nicer.” As Earl watched Joan, he saw himself exiled back to Georgia, but rather than turning away, Joan had stepped to the window and stuck the second hatpin down through her hat and into her hair and never took her eyes from him. Earl lowered his head until his eyes fell on his shoes. He raised his hand Good Morning and left the window.

“I’m as nice as I need be,” Aubrey said, wanting no more of the coffee. “Seem to me that the crime round here is you bein too nice. If I ain’t bein nice, you sure makin it all up for me.”

What he was saying finally came to her, and it pounded into her heart. “It don’t cost one penny to be nice to people, Aubrey. It don’t hurt a soul one bit.” She wanted to cry, but the baby was asleep upstairs, and it would not have done for him to awaken and find her in distress. The orphan cried at the least little thing. Ruth stepped away to go upstairs.

There came to be nothing to talk about between them. He often pointed to something when he wanted her to do anything. At the dining table, with Joan and Willie and Earl and any guests, they sat as far from each other as they could. Willie was usually the life of the table, with a story about any subject someone could name. Say “speck of sand,” for example, and he would regale with a story about an Abyssinian pirate who was caught at his lair near the sea and died wiggling with the hangman’s rope around his neck, wiggling with the pain of the rope and the discomfort of the sand that had blown into his eyes. The pirate had lived most of his time on the sea, but he had detested sand all his days. Ruth liked everything Willie said, but her pleasure would dissolve when she would look across the table and find an unsmiling Aubrey staring hard at her, his arms folded.

One day she came into the room after hearing the baby whimpering on the pallet she had made for him. He was now too big for the crib and she had put it out in the barn. Aubrey was kneeling down, holding one of the baby’s legs. “What he want?” she said. “I don’t know,” Aubrey said. “I didn’t ask him and he didn’t tell me.”

He released the leg after she knelt down to the baby. He stood up and left. The child was wet, as it turned out. He was smiling. As she changed him, she kept hearing the sound of his whimpering before she had entered the room. Had the child been quiet or asleep when she found Aubrey over him, it would not have mattered. But the whimpering said so much to her, becoming as she stood up with him in her arms not even whimpering anymore but a long and painful cry.

She did not let Miles out of her sight after that. She carried him about in her arms. Or, when there were jobs that required both hands, she toted him on her back, having fashioned a pouch out of a blanket that he could lie in comfortably. She made the pallet beside the bed bigger and slept there with Miles. That was mid-January.

Willie woke in the night toward the end of January and remembered once again that he had promised Melinda to make up for the necklace from the king of Haiti. There had been nothing between them since the morning he went blind and left her asleep in bed. He felt he had enough money saved up from the sea to provide for his room and board at Joan’s for the rest of his days. He would not trouble anyone else. He had at first thought that he and Ruth would pick out something for Melinda in some Washington store that would treat colored customers with respect. He would have Ruth or someone else take the jewelry to Melinda, for he would not want her to think he wanted something by taking it himself.

He got up that January night and opened the trunk that had been all around the world with him, a trunk big enough to be a man’s coffin. In one corner there was a brooch, wrapped in two handkerchiefs, a brooch that he had not thought about for a long time. It was a cameo of a longnecked woman looking to the left. He had bought it in Marseilles, from a man with only nubs for hands. Intending it as a present for his mother. Twelve American silver dollars. But when he returned home he found that his mother had been dead a little more than two weeks, and he had put the brooch away, vowing not to think about it again. But he owed Melinda something wonderful.

Melinda said nothing when Ruth took the brooch to her. She invited her in. The baby, in a wooden carriage Earl had found in an alley and made over, had fallen asleep. It was early afternoon, a Saturday. Ruth declined to go in, saying she best get back, and Melinda walked her to the corner, to 1st Street. Ruth said, “He told me to tell you to enjoy every time you wear it. He wants you to be happy with it.” The next morning Melinda was standing outside their home as the group at 1011 and 1013 prepared to go off to church. They came through the gates of the houses and Melinda touched Blind Willie’s shoulder. He could tell it was not one of the people he had come out of the house with.

“Who?” he asked.

“Me,” she said. She unwrapped the fingers of one of his hands and placed the brooch, now in one of her own handkerchiefs, in the center of the hand. He knew right off what it was.

“I want you to have it,” he said. “I honestly did.” Everyone else walked away a piece, up toward L Street.

“Why you treat me like this? What bad thing did I do you, William?”

“Nothin, you know that.”

“If I done nothin, then good. Then your and my books been set straight if I never done nothin bad to you. I never want your things. Not a one.” He heard her walk away.

“Melinda, please…” He took a step, fearful now of falling, holding the fence as best he could with the hand she had put the brooch in. “Melinda, please please, darlin. Please, darlin.” He held his hand out to her, but he began to cry and so had to take that hand and cover his eyes. Ruth, with Miles in his carriage, considered going to him. Willie said, “I meant you no bad thing. Only my kind of love, such as it is.” Melinda looked at Ruth, at Miles’s hands and feet rising and falling in the carriage, and then she slowly turned around. Everyone in the group going to church started to walk away and they did not stop. It was not very cold considering it was January, but for days there had been talk of snow.