Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Noah ate little chunks of chicken. “Why’d you get that?” Maggie said. “The fish would have been better for you.”

“I read in the paper where the fish was worse. Somethin bout how they make it up, what they put in it. And all that sauce. With chicken I kinda know what I’m gettin. You have to do a lot to a chicken after you wring his neck before you turn it into a mystery meat.” He looked at Adam. “Right?”

“Yes.”

“He’s rich,” Maggie said. “He’s got five whole dollars. His mother gave it to him.” She looked hard at Noah to make certain he got what she meant. “Not Tamara. Miss Joyce.”

“I got it in my shoe.”

“Don’t tell people where you got your valuables, baby,” Noah said. “It’s okay with us. But don’t tell other people, baby.”

Maggie put down her hamburger. “You do know,” she said to Adam, “that you are coming home with us?”

“Home to Mama Wilson?” He stopped eating. “Goin home?”

“No, to our place,” Noah said. “You live with us now. We’re your people, we’re your family.” Noah pointed at Maggie and then at his own chest. Just a week before, a retired friend of Noah’s had got on his boat and sailed off with his fourth wife around the world. A black man and woman on the wide blue sea.

Adam resumed eating, but they could tell that whatever joy he had found in the food was now gone. “Yes,” he said after a bit. “Yes, ma’am” or “Yes, sir” was disallowed more times than allowed. People sometimes thought a “ma’am” or a “sir” made them seem old. “Dontcha put me in my grave before I’m ready,” one city government man had warned him. “I just won’t have livin in my grave before the good Lord calls me.”

Their granddaughter, Elsa, stood tiny and eager when Maggie opened the door. She ran and grabbed Maggie’s leg, then she put her arms around Adam and reached up and kissed his cheek, though she had never laid eyes on him a day in her life. Adam, having known some good children in his life, giggled. Finally, Elsa went to Noah and he picked her up with an arm that could do seventy-five push-ups, dropping Adam’s shopping bag just inside the door. Elsa kissed his mouth.

“I thought she’d have a conniption fit waitin for yall,” said Mrs. Battle, a neighbor from downstairs. “It was ‘Grandma’ this and ‘Grandma’ that. She kept pointin at that picture of yall on the side table. But she settled down after a while. If you start tellin a child how to pick cotton, they go quiet. How you go up this row and down that row, pickin them little bugs outa your cup of water. Talkin bout pickin cotton is like a mother’s lullaby. A child will calm down and drift along.”

Noah said nothing. Maggie introduced her to Adam. “A full house now, huh?” Mrs. Battle said. “My, my.” She had nine grandchildren and three great-grands, but they all went home in the evening after visiting. And if she allowed one to stay the night—for she loved all of them more than she let on—the child’s parents had to come get him or her before noon or she would put the child in a cab bound for home. Before the taxi arrived for the pickup, she would pin an enveloped note to the child’s blouse or shirt: “I raised one set and I don’t plan on raising another.”

Adam watched Mrs. Battle leave and then stood beside his shopping bag. It was all wrong because it was all so perfect. The way the carpet soothed his feet even with his tennis shoes on. The table of many flowers in front of the window, a clean window with the ever so blue curtains fluttering in the wind from the machine that cooled everything. The thousand photographs of grown-ups and children who had more right to stand where he was standing, because they were family. The girl’s doll sleeping on the floor against the couch, waiting for another go-round. He had known perfect before, but there had always been a tilt, and that tilt told him that this was home, however temporary: Music all the time, even in the middle of the night. A big dog gnawing at a chair leg and turning its head to eye him. Whatcha lookin at, boy? A finger in his face to emphasize a thousand rules. Mustard-and-ketchup sandwiches. Cigarette smoke curling around his nose before it dashed in. Even in Miss Joyce’s big house there had been unlit corners that whispered, Stay away. The basement.

Whatever this was, it was not home in the way he had been taught. He put his fingers around the shopping bag’s handles. “When I’m goin home?” he said at last in as submissive a tone as he could muster.

“What?” Noah said. He put Elsa down. Maggie was adjusting the thermostat. “You are home,” Noah said. Adam blinked but didn’t release the handles. Noah reached out his hand to the boy and Adam took it, dragging the bag along. Noah led him into the first bedroom of the apartment. “That’s gonna be your bed.” The man pointed to one of the twin beds on either side of a window adorned with a green curtain. The bedspread was beige and covered with cartoon people Adam remembered from a television in a city government home in Northeast. “And that’s your teddy bear there, waitin for you to give him a name.” Adam had once seen a dog named Cecil tear open the stomach of a teddy bear. The brown bear on this bed sat propped against two pillows, one on top of the other, and the bear’s arms were wide open.

Elsa was now standing in the doorway.

“And here,” Noah said, leading him across the room to a chest of drawers. “These two drawers up here belong to you.” He pulled out the drawers and picked Adam up to show him the shirts and pajamas and underwear in both drawers, the result of Maggie’s quick trip downtown the day before. “And this here middle one you can share with Elsa for socks and whatnot. Okay?” He pulled the drawer out and pointed to the boy’s socks on the left side. “See?”

Adam said, “Yes.”

“You do know that Elsa is your sister, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

Noah noticed that the yeses were piling up and weren’t amounting to even a speck of caring or understanding. He put the bag on the floor beside the bed and sat on the bed, taking Adam between his legs. “I know how bad this might be right now, but you’ll see. It’ll work out.” Noah did not believe that. The second bank had yet to call back about cashing in one of his retirement funds, money that would have paid for a trip to China when they were seventy. “Can you trust me? Can you trust your grandma and me to do the right thing by you?” Noah opened his hands, made a bowl of them, and offered it to the boy. Adam put one of his hands into the bowl. Elsa came up to them, standing very close to Adam. She said nothing, but watched the man and the boy. Adam looked at her and she put her face hard against his arm. He remembered her from somewhere, and as he kept his hand in his grandfather’s, he thought that if he could remember her he would be home again, at Mama Wilson’s, and everything would be jim-dandy.

Thursday

For five weeks, Noah had been tending a new, frail tree in front of their two-story apartment building. He took the children out that evening with his can of water. The tree box was now eight straight days without debris, a record. There was an oak about midway down the street, the 1500 block of Independence Avenue in Southeast. It was sturdy, maybe owing to the prayers of the three older women who lived in the house facing it. Across the street, down near 16th, were the remnants of a catalpa that refused to die.

Noah handed the can to Adam. “Give it some,” he told the boy, and Adam watered the tree. “Now let her.” Adam gave the can to Elsa, who had trouble with it and got most of the water on the sidewalk and in the gutter. Adam looked at Noah and Noah winked knowingly at him. Girls, Noah mouthed, and rolled his eyes.