Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

His car, a year-old Toyota, was parked a few yards beyond the building. Noah opened the front passenger door and let Adam crawl into the driver’s seat. He sat in the passenger seat with Elsa on his lap. He waited for the boy to pretend to drive, the way all boys did, the way Caleb did, but Adam just looked out the window. “Go on, take us somewhere,” Noah said. Adam said, “Where?” “Anywhere you want,” his grandfather said and took Adam’s hands and placed them on the steering wheel. “Why don’t you take us home?” “Home,” Elsa said. Without a word, Adam moved his hands slowly about the wheel. Noah said, “That’s what I’m talkin about.” “Talkin bout,” Elsa said.

“You been in a airplane?” Adam said, not looking at his grandfather and still moving his hands on the wheel.

“Yeah,” Noah said. “A whole lotta times. You been in one?”

Adam did not answer.

“We’ll take you up in one. We’ll go see your aunt Charlene, in Chicago. Surprise her before she comes to see us. We’ll drive to Baltimore to see your aunt Laverne and your uncle and your cousins. And we’ll go across the river to see your aunt Imogene.”

The boy put his hands in his lap and looked out the window. Jesus Christ, Noah thought. Now what did I say? What had done it, he wondered, talking about the airplane, Aunt Charlene, Chicago? “You ain’t thinkin bout goin home again, are you?” Adam said nothing. Noah took one of the boy’s hands and placed it back on the wheel. “Drive us some more, Adam,” he said. “Take us somewhere.”

Saturday

While Noah did the dinner dishes, Maggie bathed the children. There were two quite noticeable scars on the boy’s back, a superficial one of some two inches at his left shoulder and a more profound one of less than an inch down near the base of his spine. She did not yet have the courage to ask about them. “We have to fatten you up,” she said, squeezing warm water from the washcloth over his back. “Make you as fat as a little piggy.” He told her he knew a bath song, and he started singing a bunch of nonsense words. Elsa, her back to the spigot, joined in. Her back was unblemished.

Later, after the children had watched one of two dozen videos their youngest daughter, in Virginia, had sent, Noah sat between them on the couch and read from a fairy-tale book. He had not been a good reader until he met Maggie. After Mrs. Waters, he and school had not got along, he once told her. Not three weeks after Elsa came to them, he had sat her on his lap for a simple bedtime story. She pointed to magazines on the coffee table, and he had to suffer through three copies of Ebony as she asked about every picture in them. Hundreds of pages and thousands of pictures. “What this?” she asked as she pointed to each picture. “Thas a doggy.” She certainly knew a man and a dog and a woman when she saw them in her everyday life, but for some reason she needed him to make the connection between what was in her mind and the colorful pictures in the magazines. “What this?” “A truck.” And she needed him to connect them over and over. He started cheating with the third magazine, turning five and ten pages at a time. “What this? What this?”

Adam fell asleep before the fairy tale had ended, leaned over against Noah’s arm, his open mouth forming a very small O. His grandfather carried him to the bed where the teddy bear was waiting. “He sleepin,” Elsa said as Noah went out of the room. “Now you,” Maggie said, picking the girl up.

On the couch, Noah put his arm around Maggie. “I don’t want no more hanky-panky with my daughter,” her father had said to Noah after he had been exiled because of the Atlas Theater kiss. Her father had guided fifteen-year-old Noah by the neck around to the side of the house. An ancient elm straddled the properties of Maggie’s family and the people next door. “I can’t help that Maggie wants to see you, boy, but I can help how many of your teeth I knock outa your head.” The elms had not fared well in other cities, Noah had heard, but all the ones he had seen in Washington had been thriving. “Open your mouth, boy. Open it wide. Thas one I’ll get. And them two teeth over there, I’ll knock them out, too.” He had eulogized his father-in-law, named his son after him. “This is the saddest day of my life, cause I come here to bury one a my fathers,” Noah had said in that church, with a thousand people looking on.

“You want some more cake?” Maggie said.

“Naw, I’m done for the night.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Want some TV?” He had struggled on through his last year of high school, hoping that that would impress her father.

“What’s on?” Maggie asked. She had a Ph.D. His three daughters had four Ph.D.s and an M.D. among them. He and Caleb had only high-school diplomas. “What am I gonna do with you, Noah?” her father had said the day Noah asked to marry Maggie. Falling acorns had a way of sounding to an adulterer like the footsteps of a father-in-law.

“Let me turn it back on and see.” He reached for the remote control, but she pulled his arm back.

“Let it come on by magic,” she said. “Let’s see it come on by magic.” In Rome they had turned on the television, but none of it made sense because they did not know the language. It rained a lot in Paris their first days there, and they would sleep until eleven or so in the morning. “I will see you again, Kenya,” he had said, buckling his airplane seat belt. “I’ll see you before the by-and-by.”

Monday

In the newspaper’s obituaries, he saw, for the hundredth time, a name that he thought could be that of the woman, but he could not be certain, because he had long ago forgotten her name. They, he and the woman, had started what they had nearly a year before Maggie became pregnant with Caleb. “What’s the use a eatin your lunch in this dirty old garage?” the woman said to him the day she brought her broken-down Chevy in and saw him sitting on a stool eating a tuna-salad sandwich that Maggie had made. Maggie’s coffee still hot in the thermos. “I got a nice table and chair just waitin to be used.” Maggie had asked him once what he thought of having just one woman for the rest of his life, and he had innocently thrown it back at her and asked what she thought of having but one man for the rest of hers. She said she was fine with that. Just fine, thank you very much. That was when they had had only one child, and it was nighttime when she asked and right then that one baby girl started crying for more of everything and he never got to answer her and she never asked the question again. One baby, two babies, three babies…He waited two days after the woman’s offer of the chair and table and got her address from the work order, told his fellow workers, Big Tiny and the rest, he was taking lunch in the park. Big Tiny said, “Dontcha get into any fights with them sassy trees in that park, y’hear?” “I knowed it was you even before I opened the door,” the woman said after his two knocks—knocks so soft they wouldn’t have awoken a sleeping baby. It was a few days after Palm Sunday and she had palms sticking out between her bedroom mirror and the wall. The wind came through the window and disturbed the palms, and when the wind stopped, the palms on the bottom were the first to come to rest. The top ones took a while, as they held on to the memory of wind for a longer time. “I’m Catholic,” the woman said when Maggie was five months pregnant with Caleb. “Catholic on my mother’s side. Pure dee Catholic. On my father’s, I’m straight up and down Baptist.”

At home, his daughters continued to worship him, and his wife grew big with Caleb. When Caleb was two weeks old, Noah told the woman he would not ever come back. The woman shrugged. “Easy come, easy go. A tree has more leaves than I can count. Why cry bout just one leaf fallin away?” He came back before Caleb was two years old and would always believe that it was the return that had doomed him and his boy. God told the Israelites that he would punish men who stole grapes by setting their children’s teeth on edge. Oh, that God. God and his long, punishing fingernails…Before Caleb was two and a half, Noah said good-bye to the woman again. Caleb took sick the night of that good-bye. In the ambulance, he held Caleb as the boy shivered and shook, and all the way to the hospital Noah thought his boy would be fine if only the siren would hush and give them some peace. “Can’t you stop that noise?” he said to the driver. “That noise tells folks your son is somebody important, mister,” the woman said.