Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Adam went on and on, and in the end his grandfather said he would build him a shelf for all he had acquired.

“You got a picture of your mama and daddy?”

“I think I did,” Adam said, and he looked out the window, trying to remember a woman he had last seen walking away from him. He had no memory of Caleb, but in the boy’s mind his father was always smiling, because that was what fathers did. “But I think somebody took it. Maybe Oscar Tremont. He already had a mama and a daddy picture, but he wanted another one.” Noah came to him and put the boy in his lap and they looked out the window together. Adam said, “I ain’t never goin home, huh?” Noah was silent.

Friday

Noah did eighty-four sit-ups and a hundred and five push-ups, then lay down where he was beside the bed, his arms folded under his head. Maggie came into the room and saw him, waited a long time for him to move. He was still. The life insurance was paid up, but she could not remember if the policies were in the apartment or if they had returned them to the bank’s safe-deposit box. She began to count the seconds, and still he did not move. If she could survive picking out his casket, then maybe she could make it until after the funeral. There would be no end to the men who would be proud to be his pallbearers, to carry him home. He had been that kind of man. A good father, a good husband, a good grandfather, a good friend. Rest in peace, my love.

She went closer, and Noah stirred. She had trouble catching her breath. He turned and saw something on her face. He asked, “What’s the matter, honey?”

“Nothing.” She herself had been looking forward to seeing India. She knew widowed grandmothers who had been forced to raise grandchildren alone, but she had never thought she could.

Noah sat up. “Well, somethin is the matter, cause I can see it on your face.”

“Stop doing all those damn exercises, Noah.” She sat at the foot of the bed.

“I’m addicted, honey.” He leaned back on his elbows.

“Addicted, schmaddicted. Why don’t you stop?”

“Look.” He rolled up his pajama sleeve and flexed the muscle. “If I stopped, who would save you from the bad guys? Answer me that. Who would save you?” He scooted closer and offered the muscle to her and she felt it, tried unsuccessfully to press down on it. Noah looked at his arm, at the scars up and down it, and he looked up to see her watching him and rolled his sleeve down. He knew how each scar came to be, could describe the day it all happened and how long the pain had been with him. She got down from the bed onto her knees and he pulled her to him and sat her sideways in the valley that his thighs made with his chest. He kissed her hard, and when they opened their eyes and looked around, Elsa was staring at them, one of her dolls in her hand. The child was blinking but was not impressed one way or the other with what she was seeing.

Monday

At dawn he rose after only fifteen minutes of sleep, with the conversation he had had the evening before with Colbert Prentiss, the preacher, playing over and over in his head. “You ain’t gonna give up on me, are you?” Noah joked. “It ain’t in my nature to give up,” Colbert said. “Give some thought to coming for next Sunday’s grandparents’ day.” Noah did not have it in him to tell his friend that he did not think he would ever return to church. Noah asked before they hung up, “Didn’t God have some responsibility to make nice so people would want to go on worshipping Him? Why should it be so one-sided just because He happened to be God?”

He left Maggie still asleep and went to the children’s room. Adam was standing in the middle of the floor, waiting, his tennis shoes on but still in his pajamas. Noah dreaded the question, so he jumped in: “Tell me about this home you so anxious to get back to.” Elsa had just awoken and lay in bed with her eyes half open. Noah stood in front of Adam. “Tell me about it. I might wanna go live there myself.”

Adam began describing the front yard, a grassless place, as it turned out, “except way over there in the corner.” Elsa got out of bed and began singing and running around her grandfather and her brother. Adam then began talking about Mama Wilson’s downstairs, but as he went on he had to correct himself many times, because he was confusing that woman’s place with many others. “No,” he said, “that big TV wasn’t at Mama Wilson. She had a tiny one. No flowers, neither.” He looked up at Noah, as if hoping the corrections hadn’t done damage to the overall truth of what he was saying. Noah sat on the floor, and Elsa immediately began climbing about him. Adam sat. In his last weeks at Mama Wilson’s, he managed to say, he had had to share that bed with a boy who screamed in his sleep. Adam waited for his grandfather to say he had never mentioned having to share the bed. Elsa left off her grandfather and began climbing about Adam. “He wasn’t such a bad little boy,” Adam said, “once he stopped all that screamin.” He hesitated, avoided his grandfather’s eyes. “Really. He wasn’t a bad little boy. Really and true.” Noah did not speak. “Honest. He wasn’t a bad boy after the screamin.”

Thursday

A little before two that night Noah awoke after a few minutes of sleep and heard tiny voices.

At the children’s bedroom door he saw Adam standing at Elsa’s bed, telling her to go back to sleep, that he would keep her safe. “I tell you a story if you go back to sleep,” Adam said. “All little chirren gotta be asleep.” And Elsa said Yes, yes, she would sleep for a story, but not no scary story. She lay down and Adam stayed at the side of the bed, pulling the covers up to her shoulders and placing a doll on either side of her. He began telling her about a little girl and a little boy who were driving alone to the beach in a car with bird wings. Noah went into the living room, the boy’s voice still all around him. He did not know which way to turn, but after a long while the voice of Adam led him to the couch. The voice bade him to lie down. Noah covered himself with the throws and listened to the story of the little boy and the little girl going to the beach. It seemed to be a trip that had no end, and Noah kept waiting for them to arrive at the beach. The boy and the girl shared the driving. Sometimes they lost their way and squirrels with cowboy hats and boots had to drop from trees onto the hood of the car and tell them which way to go. There were mothers and fathers standing in Easter baskets along the road to the beach, and other children who were going places in their own cars—to the circus, to the movies. But no one except the boy and the girl were going to the beach. “Can they come, too?” Elsa asked. “Tomorrow,” Adam said, “but not right now.”

Noah began to fall asleep at the point where the girl was behind the ice-cream steering wheel and it began dripping on her new tennis shoes. “I can’t drive with them dirty tennis shoes,” the girl told the boy. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” In a dream Noah applied cold hands to the ice-cream wheel and it froze over again. The boy thanked him and the girl thanked him, but when Noah asked about a short ride on up the road, the little girl said no. “First you,” the girl said, biting into the chocolate wheel, “then all them other people will wanna ride, too. We gotta put a stop to this thing right here and now.” As they drove off, the boy stuck his head out the window and said to Noah, “I come back for you way before the by-and-by. Okay?”

Noah had watched his father putting on his tie not two days after they had arrived in Washington. His father’s first job was as a dishwasher at the Willard Hotel. His mother had straightened his father’s tie seconds before he walked out the door. “A man,” his father said as he sat his new hat atop his head, “must do what a man must do.”