Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

George stayed with the cousin’s family that weekend. The young men had planned to catch the train to Jackson on Tuesday morning to get their new assignments. On Sunday morning George went to church with the family and saw Anne again. She waved at him after the service, a dark spirit in a long blue dress, and then disappeared on a road with some friends, with Lucas a few steps ahead of them. “I was afraid,” George would tell his grandson and the recording machine, “afraid that God was tellin me somethin and I might not be smart anough to read the signs right.” He had on the same wool suit and the weather punished him even more than it had the day before and he was still somewhat hobbled by what he had first seen in Anne’s eyes. “I got separated from her cousin, my buddy, and just followed her and that crowd on up the road, hopin I wouldn’t get lost.”

When she happened to turn and see him walking alone, she came back and let him know he was going the long way to her cousin’s place. He told her he figured that sooner or later the road would double back, and he’d be where he needed to be. The roads may work that way in Washington, D.C., she said, but by the time the roads in Mississippi double back, you could be in another state or in the river.

“Can I walk a ways with you?” he asked nearly half a mile from the church, wringing out his handkerchief again.

She shrugged. “Ain’t that what you doin now?” He wasn’t Neddy- or Lucas-handsome either. Too light as well. Dark had a way of touching the heart. Light, she had decided at seventeen and a half, only shook hands.

“Yes,” he said, “but I’m doin it without none a your permission.”

The rains came early that afternoon and he stayed at her place. Unlike other women up and down his railroad lines, she had surprisingly little interest in Washington, and he kept digging deep, trying to come up with some detail he felt would make him seem a man of the world. Women liked men of the world. They talked on the porch sitting on cane-bottom chairs, her mother sewing at one end of the porch, three of her brothers sitting on the floor in the middle, playing Old Maid with cards their father had bought in Jackson. The rain never letting up. At one point she turned her face and managed to cover her yawn with four fingers before asking where his people came from. She had not learned that colored people could actually be born in Washington. And when he could say no more than that his parents came from some forgotten place in North Carolina, her face saddened as if, in the end, she was talking to an orphan. He saw that look, because, unlike the one with the yawn, she failed to hide her face in time. Orphans are to be helped and not so much pitied, her father had taught her, but most of all try to make them feel like human beings. Remember, you your own self got a mother and father.

It might be that her father knew that his second daughter was destined for some place else, beyond where he could walk in a day or two to see her if all other transportation failed. He stayed away until George had left early that evening, did not even make it to supper, something that had not happened within the children’s memory. Everyone else in Anne’s household was fascinated by the fact that George lived in Washington, especially her mother, who wanted to know if he had ever met the president, whether colored people did not have to step into the gutter when a white person approached.

Anne was quiet most of the meal, and George figured correctly that she was bored with him. She was quite aware that he was trying too hard. She liked confidence to just roll off a man. Maybe, he thought just before the peach cobbler, it would have been different if he had been from Chicago or New York. Then he could have had something to poem about to her. But after the cobbler and before the coffee, he let it all pass, stopped trying to say something to impress her. Anne’s mother placed a cup of coffee before him, and he thanked her. He turned to Anne while his coffee cooled and asked why she chose to work on something like a tapestry that took so many months, even years, when she could do a crochet and be done in a few days or weeks. On the way to the kitchen table he had seen the tapestry she was working on folded up in a corner of the parlor and had asked what it was. She had started it three weeks before. A winter scene that came almost entirely from her imagination, because snow had been rare in her life. It would be nine years before the work was completed. “I seen women turn out them crochets left and right in lil no time,” he said. “My tapestry ain’t a race, Mr. Carter.” She had completed only three other tapestries in her lifetime, and the first of those had been with her grandmother’s help. “I hope thas always the case,” George said. “Them other women, they was mostly doin it to make a livin.” “Well,” Anne said, looking from her mother to her brother named after their father, “I do it cause I can’t help myself.” Her cousin came for George before sunset, having been told by someone who had heard it from someone else where he could be found. It was still raining, but the cousin had brought some clothes that George could wear to save his wool suit. Go-to-work-in-the-field clothes. On the porch, preparing to leave, he surprised himself and everyone else and asked Anne if he might see her tomorrow. She turned to look momentarily at her mother, who nodded, and then Anne shrugged for the fifth time that day and said to him, “Why not?” He was twenty-two, and she was a few months from being eighteen. The year was 1932.

Her father returned about seven and found her at the kitchen table with the new tapestry. She was inspecting a trail in the snow that a brown bunny had made on its way back home. Only one detail among dozens. So much white thread, so little gray. Because she had known next to no snow, she was working only from half-remembered pictures in books and from what her mind told her a snow world looked like. Her father stood in the doorway and said nothing, leaning against the doorjamb, his arms folded. When he spoke, she was startled and said, “Oh, I didn’t see you standin there, Daddy,” and he said, “No, I don’t spose you did.”

He came to her and sat at his place at the head of the table. He had even avoided George all the day of the homecoming. “Whas this one gonna be?” he said, picking up one edge of the cloth with one hand. She had made a few light pencil markings on it, but aside from the bunny heading home, it was a large and empty thing. The new calluses on her father’s hand snagged on the material. He dropped the edge and watched it swing just a bit, then come to rest.

“I’m gonna try makin this snow scene work,” she said. They could hear her mother and her five younger brothers in the parlor, laughing, talking about every little piddling thing, for they did not yet know that the world had changed just that quickly. His oldest daughter, the one who crocheted, had married a man from the Chatsworth family and settled with him within a short wagon’s ride of where he now sat. Fifteen minutes if he could get ahold of someone’s Ford and the roads weren’t flooded. Not more than four hours if he had to walk. More than a day if he had to crawl.

He rose to leave. “You might have a time of it since you ain’t seen much snow.” He thought she had seen a snowstorm once when she was seven, but the snow he was thinking of had been in his mother’s childhood, not Anne’s.

“I’ll just imagine it.”

“You have a good evenin,” her father said and stepped toward the door.

“You, too.” Anne used her left forefinger to trace the pale gray trail the bunny had made. She came to the bunny and her finger hopped over him. Two inches from him she decided that that was where his home should be. The line he had made behind him was seven inches. Her eyes went back to the beginning of the trail and she realized for the first time that the work would not be complete without a diving hawk, a bird of prey more dominant than anything else in the sunless sky. A hawk with its talons exposed, glinting so that the killer might be portrayed in all its murderous and beautiful glory. Her right forefinger went up near the top of the tapestry, and when she knew where the hawk would be, she looked momentarily out the window into the yard, toward the east and beyond, and then she called out, “Daddy?”