Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

When Noah woke again, it was nearly three o’clock and Adam was still talking. The boy in the story was driving up a mountain. “Don’t go too fast,” the girl told the boy. “We gotta save on the gas. Gas expensive. Five dollars.” Noah turned on his side, and in no time at all he was asleep again. He was never to know when Adam went back to bed. In the dream, Noah began begging for a ride as the car came to a stop. The girl was a lost cause, he could tell that just by the confident way she had gripped the ice-cream wheel, but Noah, turning his pockets inside out to show how empty they were, began to plead his case before the boy. “Just a short ride on up the road,” Noah told the boy. “We’ll come back for you,” the boy said, starting up the motor, “and when we do you must be ready.”

Sunday

That last Sunday in August was grandparents’ day at church and Noah, at the final moment, decided to go with them. “You sure you know the way?” Maggie said before they set off. Something compelled Colbert Prentiss to depart from his text near the end of his sermon that morning. It might have been all the grandparents he saw before him, all the people who had struggled into old age only to find themselves parents once again. Clement Carson. Mr. and Mrs. Harrelson. The widow Anderson. Colbert’s own sister and brother-in-law. Mr. and Mrs. Apacka. Maggie and Noah Robinson. All of them the kind of people the preacher had built his rock on. The world was turned upside down when the mature ones were forced to do what the younger ones should be doing. Indeed, it was August, so why not have it snow outside, Colbert said to the hundreds. Why not lift our eyes to the sky and see all the pigs flying with their cherub wings?

He had the grandparents and their grandchildren stand and apologized to any who might have a touch of the shyness fever. He told his congregation that the people standing would lead them all out into a better day. The people sitting applauded.

Maggie helped Elsa stand up on the seat. Noah looked at those standing. Clement’s three grandsons were not wearing suits, just white shirts and ties and dark pants. They were all taller than their grandfather. He found Mrs. Anderson’s granddaughter across the aisle looking at him and he smiled at her, but she did not smile back. She blinked once and looked ahead. Noah’s son Caleb had had a hard time sitting still in church, was forever turning and staring at what was about him. Noah looked down at the top of Adam’s head. The crown had the same tuft of hair his son’s had had. The barber always had a tough time mowing it down. “Should charge you extra for that bit a hair, Noah, but maybe I’ll let it slide,” the barber always said. And Noah would say, “You charge me the regular for the regular hair. Any damage after that and Caleb gonna pay.”

The congregation began singing “The Blind Man Stood in the Road and Cried.” The spiritual ended and everyone sat down and Adam looked up at Noah, sensing his grandfather’s eyes on him. Elsa curled up in Maggie’s lap and soon went to sleep, one arm stretched out to the wooden pocket on the back of the pew in front of them. The congregation sang “I Done Done What Ya Told Me to Do.” Without even thinking about it, Noah pulled Adam close to him and they looked at the words in the book and Adam began to cry. The boy put one hand behind his grandfather’s back and grabbed hold of his suit coat as best he could. Still crying, he went over the words in the book with his finger. It was an old trick of an old boy: if you pretended to read, maybe they wouldn’t notice that you really couldn’t. Adam held on to Noah’s coat, for he knew it was possible for people to rise up and disappear out of his life. He could not then know that Noah had already told God that he planned to live forever. Why should eternal life be only for bonsai trees? Why should men, the greatest glory of God, come second to trees? Noah placed his hand over Adam’s as it went over the words in the book. Adam grabbed more of the coat and it was then that Noah, feeling himself go light as a blossom in the wind, leaned down and anchored his lips to that difficult tuft of the boy’s hair.

Some fourteen years after her grandmother walked out into the Atlantic Ocean on her way to heaven, Laverne Shepherd went into the Safeway on Good Hope Road, S.E., and for the first time came face-to-face with the Devil. That morning in the store, she had, like so many times before, taken a shopping cart from just inside the door and maneuvered it to the aisle farthest to the left. She neared a face-high display of canned pinto beans and glanced at a short shopping list after she took it from her sweater pocket, and when she looked up from the list of four or so items, the Devil was before her. She stopped, not out of fear, but because to go any farther would have meant running into him with the cart. “Himself been studyin you,” the Devil said. Laverne looked down at her wedding ring on the hand resting on the cart’s handle, and when she raised her eyes, the Devil was taking off his hat, in that dramatic way men did in old movies to impress women who needed very little impressing.

The Devil was dressed in a splendid gray gabardine suit, and down through the metal rods of the empty cart Laverne could see that on feet small enough to belong to a little girl, he wore two-tone, black-and-white shoes. The knot of his purple tie was situated just so to the left of his Adam’s apple, as if he had dressed himself without the benefit of a mirror. There was an almost boyish quality to the off-center knot, and for a moment Laverne thought it would have been the most natural thing in the world for a woman, any woman, to reach over and center the knot and end the whole gesture with a final tap of the finger on the knot. There…That’ll do you for a while… The tie was held in place against his white shirt with a ruby tie clip, about the size of a candy fireball.

Himself been studyin you,” the Devil said again, now smiling. All the teeth in his head were perfect, exquisite white marvels that were an artwork all their own. A woman could spend all day and part of the next just laying about looking at them. Turn a little bit and lemme see how the light shine on em that way… Both her grandmothers had come to know the Devil so well that he, in all his guises, called them always by their childhood nicknames. At various times in her life, Laverne’s grandmothers had tried to tell her how she would know the Devil that first time. It will be, they had explained as best they could, the way you know that you are hungry or that you are thirsty: the body will say it and you will take it as gospel. But they had not told her what to say, what to do, whether to run or go forward and attack him with the fury of an angel doing God’s work.

Once more the Devil said, “Himself been studyin you.” He came toward her and as he did he lowered the arm with the hat down to his side. The fedora was the same pleasing gray as his gabardine suit. The Devil himself was the color of an everyday brown paper bag. He rested a hand on the side of the cart, less than a foot from where her wedding ring hand was resting, and turned down his smile a few degrees, turned it down in disappointment, as if he had come upon a long-lost friend and the friend had denied knowing him.

“What?” Laverne said. “What?” She was nine weeks pregnant with her second child, happy in all things, happy in her twenty-fifth year of life.

The Devil said, “Himself come all this way, come all the way cross the river, swim all the way cross that Anacostia. Himself swim all that way to say ‘Good mornin’ and say ‘Hi you do?’”