Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Terence was sleeping peacefully, one foot sticking out of the covers, the exquisite German clock’s dull red numbers shining down on him from the bedside table with the reassurance of a child’s night-light. Her father hated such clocks, the digital ones that told the time right out; he believed, as he had tried to teach Sharon and her brother, that children should learn to tell time the way he had learned, with the big hand and the little hand moving around a circle of numbers. Possibly a second hand, but that was not needed to know what time of day it was. She stood in the doorway and watched Terence and the clock, and for all the time she was there he did not stir. A burglar could come in, she thought, and he would never know it. She could stab him to death and end his world and he would never know it. She could smother him. The whole world could end and he would not know that either. The insurance they paid on all that they owned—not including the cars and their own lives, which had separate policies—came to $273.57 a month. It is worth it, the white insurance man had said as he dotted the final i, “because you will sleep better at night knowing you are protected.” Knowing. Knowin.

She got out of her clothes in the bathroom, took off everything she had on, even her underwear, and found that the blood had seeped through all the way to her skin. She held her uniform up before her. She stared at her name tag and found it hard to connect herself with the name and the uniform and the naked person they belonged to. Am I really who they say I am? The blood reminded her of someone that had a name but the name escaped her. Bleeding. Bleedin. None of Derek’s people had ever used the g on their ing words; one of the first things she herself had been taught early in life was never to lose the g . The g is there for a reason, they had told her. It separates you from all the rest of them, those who do not know any better. Sharon did not shower. Another Sharon in another time might have been unsettled by him appearing from nowhere, by the thought that he had been following her. But the idea that he had been there, out there in weather of whatever sort, out there in the dark offering no sign and no sound, out there for months and perhaps years of her life, seemed to give her something to measure her life by. But she did not know how to do that. After she turned out the bathroom light, she stood in the dark for a long time. In their bedroom she decided against putting on underwear and so got into bed the way she came into the world. Terence stirred, pulled his foot back under the covers, but beyond that, he did nothing. Almost imperceptibly, the rightmost red number on the fine German clock went from two to three.

Were it not for the sleeping car porter, she might well have grown old there. And then—for her people were people of long lives—she would have grown older still. The case could be made that Anne Perry would have married Lucas Turner, for though she had gone off him after Lucas told her she was not as beautiful as she made herself out to be, she was fast maturing and was coming, day by day, to sour on Ned Murray, who told her endlessly how pretty she was. Ned promised that he would marry her and hang the moon and the planets and star-jewels around her pretty neck. (“I’ll wring your damn neck!” Ned was to say to the woman he would marry within two years. “I’ll wring it all to hell and back again.”) “Oh, Ned,” Anne’s mother found her saying late one Saturday morning, smiling into the mirror at her face. A face with a past of few tears that mattered. The same mirror her father used to shave. “Oh, my sweet Ned.” “Anne, honey, I needs to confess to you that many’s the woman in the world done been bamboozled by nothin,” her mother said, straightening her bonnet without once looking into the mirror. Anne’s mother opened the back door, took the one step down into the yard, turned and then stood, one foot still in the doorway and one foot in the yard. She held out her open hand, palm up, and slowly raised it until the hand seemed to be floating. “I needs to confess to you, honey, thas the weight of pretty.”

So, yes, were it not for the sleeping car porter, Lucas Turner, the second son of Maize and Ozell, would have become Anne’s husband. Lucas would have come back and said to her words that would have been as close to an apology as a young man like him could manage. “You is beautiful, and I shouldna said you whatn’t. But sometimes you make it hard….” Lucas’s father, Ozell, had been a deaf-mute all his days, so many people just naturally thought his nine children would not be able to manage so much as a “hey” or a “linger here.” Lucas would have made Anne Perry a good husband. He wouldn’t have told her every day how much he loved her or how beautiful she was, but on those rare days when he could force himself to get that out, she would know he meant it with his whole heart, and just maybe his saying it would have carried her up the mountain until the next time he said it. And Lucas would never have hurt her, was not raised that way. The world could not say that about Ned. And if Lucas had, in some insane moment, deviated from a sound upbringing, his father would have thrashed him to know he could bring something like that into the world. Then Anne’s father would have torn him asunder and cast his parts to the winds.

Yes, were it not for the sleeping car porter, Lucas Turner it would have been. He had large hands, strong hands to work the acres his father would have passed on to him, wordless. Her own practical father would have perhaps bought them many more acres, maybe even a piece of that haunted but fertile section of land owned by the white man Hooper Andrews, a generous soul who woke up one cold morning and found that during a night of sound sleep all his perfect teeth had fallen out and were lying in a special, bloodless pile on his pillow. God, people said, did more mysterious things in Mississippi than he did anywhere else on Earth. The land from Lucas’s father and the land bought from Andrews might have been enough for Anne and Lucas Turner to make a good life—some little of this, a whole lot of that, enough of a living raising crops so that they could put more and more distance between themselves and the legacy of slavery. The children would have helped to do that, too. They would not have had less than five children, given the kind of people they came from. The first boy would have been called Roger, named for Lucas’s grandfather, who had been lynched, just the opening act of the entertainment for an Independence Day celebration. Just before the white people’s picnic and five hours before the fireworks, which had been imported cheap that year from New Orleans.

The first girl might have been named Maize, after Lucas’s mama, but Anne would have wanted to honor her father’s mother, Clemie, the one who taught her how to make tapestries, that long and arduous process of creating something giant and wonderful enough to put up in a church or a palace, or even on a family’s wall to replace the wallpaper of magazine and newspaper covers. “Anybody can crochet,” Clemie said to the ten-year-old Anne and her older sister on the day of the first lesson, spreading out on the kitchen table a large thick cloth and spools of yarn. The blue river of one spool especially caught and held Anne’s eye. That blue and the other colors would ultimately not be enough to hold her sister, who would eventually lose herself to crocheting. “Well,” Clemie sighed to Anne the day the sister wandered over into crocheting, “a body can be happy there. I been there. It ain’t so bad. But me and you will have to settle for somethin that will stay round for a hundred years. Maybe even a thousand. You think you gon like that? You think you gon like that many years?” Anne nodded sure, her hands resting on the table’s edge—one hundred, two hundred, three hundred. It didn’t matter, as long as she could keep touching that blue. And the green, the green was nice, too, lush and warm as a thick blanket of grass after a hard day’s work. And the yellow so hypnotically bright, as if John Henry had taken the sun and whipped it up in a cake-making bowl and laid it out in streams of gold across the table end to end.