Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

That Sunday the preacher gave his first sermon since returning from South Carolina from burying his mother, who died two days short of her seventy-ninth birthday. He had buried his father three years before, he reminded his congregation, and now “the whole fortress” between him and death was gone because he was their oldest child.

“On that long train ride back here, back to what’s gotta be called home now cause Mama and Papa made my home down there and that home ain’t really home no more, all the way back up here I kept thinkin how afraid I shoulda been. But I wasn’t. I didn’t have a crumb’s bit of fear,” he said, and his people said, “Amen.”

“I’m next in that long death line that started with our Daddy Adam. And with Mama Eve. O Mama Eve, we forgive you for pickin that fruit and bitin into it with not a care for all of us what was to come after you and face death. Yes, we forgive you. We forgive, Mama Eve.” And his people said, “Yes, we forgive.” In that church row Ruth sat at one end with Miles on her lap, and Joan was at the other end. Aubrey sat next to Ruth and Earl sat next to him. Between Earl and Joan there were two guests from 1011, a medical doctor and his wife up from North Carolina. The wife had not even finished the North Carolina Normal School for Colored Girls, but her husband insisted on calling her “Doctor,” at times in a very endearing way, punctuated with a touch of his fingers on her wrist. Before their visit to Washington had ended, everyone else was addressing her as “Doctor” as well.

“I tell ya,” the preacher said. “I wanna tell yall that the wind was blowin the day we buried my mother down in South Carolina and I looked over at all the empty spaces that was to the right of where they laid her, all the empty spaces all the way to that little baby iron fence, and I said to myself, ‘What’s the use of goin back to Washington? What’s the use? Why not go back to that little house you was raised in and sit on the porch and wait on Papa Death?’”

“Oh, Jesus,” the people said. “Oh, my Jesus.”

“I tell ya I just stood there watchin the wind rock that baby iron fence of that cemetery and I musta stood there too long, cause my own baby girl pulled on my arm and said, ‘Daddy? Daddy?’ Her little boy had hold of her frock and the wind stopped and they was fillin in the place where they put my mama. I blinked right then and there. I just blinked and I could see that day I first held her little baby boy and the way he squirmed like I wasn’t holdin him right and all that hair on his head like he was a full-grown boy and I could see me again blowin on all that hair till he stopped squirmin and got to knowin I didn’t mean him a pip’s worth of injury. I tell ya I just blinked and God asked me what was I afraid of.” The people said, “I know He did.” “And the wind started back and God asked me the same question and I didn’t have an answer. Cause there ain’t no answer when you get down to the marrow of the marrow, and He knowed that when He asked me. God does that to us, you know?” “He does that,” the people said. “I blinked again and I could see myself goin home on that train, goin home to Washington and havin yall tell me I was home. And I wasn’t afraid comin out that churchyard where every tombstone had a name I could tell you a hundred stories about and I wasn’t afraid goin back to that little baby house and hearin people say what a good and steady woman my mama was, through rain and sunshine and any bad weather she was a good human bein my mama was, and how heaven was lucky to have her and I wasn’t afraid comin back home, comin back to yall in Washington. I tell ya I just blinked and it was all laid out to me.”

Miles had fallen asleep in Ruth’s lap. She was crying as she listened to the preacher. Aubrey had placed a hand on the baby’s leg. Ruth picked up Miles and rested his head on her shoulder and Ruth’s husband’s hand fell away. It was far less cruel to do it that way than remove Aubrey’s hand.

“So we forgive you, Mama Eve. God did that for you, so how can we do less? I stand next in the long death line under that eternal gaze of a just and fair God who just blinked, just blinked a few times, I tell ya, and in that little bit of blinkin my mama had lived her seventy-nine good years. Just a blink in God’s eye. But O what a wondrous blink!”

Ruth thought to tell her husband that her mother was ill once more, but she was old enough now to know that God would not be pleased with such a lie and might well punish her by hurting her mother and others she loved. So she told her husband simply that she was going home. Aubrey himself took it to mean sickness in the family and said nothing to her.

Earl took her back to Virginia. The weather was cold, the baby wrapped in three blankets. The week before, Earl had seen the man he had beaten in Georgia walking without a care in the world up New Jersey Avenue toward New York Avenue. He lost sight of the man and figured he had been a ghost. He and Ruth and Miles reached Georgetown about noon. Just before they touched the Aqueduct Bridge to Arlington, Earl asked Ruth, “You think if a man does a great sin, he has a right to any happiness after that?”

She had been home a week when Aubrey decided to go out to Virginia, having awakened one morning and heard only the sound of a solitary heartbeat in their bedroom. He borrowed a sorrel mare from a friend with a large stable on I Street. He left two hours after breakfast and about eleven was a little more than a mile from the place where he and Ruth had spent their first married days. A light snow began, and he apologized to the horse. He did not know why, but he got off the horse less than half a mile before his father’s house, where he had been told two days before she was living. He tied the horse to a magnolia tree and walked the rest of the way. There was a handful of trees just before the path that led down to his father’s place, and he stopped at the edge of those trees and looked down at Ruth. She could have seen him if she had looked up, but something told Aubrey that she would not. Farther down the road, where his mother’s lover had lived, all the land now belonged to Ruth’s brothers.

Miles was strapped to her back, his arms flailing as he played with cherubs only he could see. Aubrey looked down at his boots, at the way the wind dusted the snowflakes over them. He did not remember what snow there had been last winter, so this could well be the baby’s first snow. He recalled the dimples on the back of the baby’s hand when it was outstretched over the green blanket. The dimples Ruth loved to kiss.

Ruth was chopping wood. She cut pieces and threw them around to a pile just behind her. She was accompanied by two massive dogs, as large as wolves, descendants of the brown dog that had fallen from the sky into the August corn. She had taught one of the dogs to take wood up to the porch, where it dropped it in an untidy pile and returned for more. The other dog took pieces from the porch pile into the house. After some minutes, the first dog stopped and looked up at Aubrey. It waited for Aubrey to make some gesture to signal his intent. It turned once or twice as if to make certain that the other dog saw Ruth’s husband as well. Finally, the first dog went back to work. The day Earl took Ruth to this place, she had answered his question, “Every last one of us is a sinner, Earl, but we all got some right to peace and happiness till the day we die.”

The snow stopped. Aubrey saw the gray smoke rising from the chimney with great energy, and it was, at last, the smoke, the fury and promise of it, the hope and exuberance of it, that took him back down to the horse.

In his mind, Ruth’s husband shrugged. He was learning to put the events of his young life on a list according to where they stood with his father’s death, which was at the top. He had at first put his mother’s death at number ten, even though numbers five to nine were blank. But over the months, as he had remembered her touch, her mama words, he put her dying at number two. He did not know where to put the end with his wife.