All Aunt Hagar's Children

IN THE BLINK OF GOD’S EYE

That 1901 winter when the wife and her husband were still new to Washington, there came to the wife like a scent carried on the wind some word that wolves roamed the streets and roads of the city after sundown. The wife, Ruth Patterson, knew what wolves could do: she had an uncle who went to Alaska in 1895 to hunt for gold, an uncle who was devoured by wolves not long after he slept under his first Alaskan moon. Still, the night, even in godforsaken Washington, sometimes had that old song that could pull Ruth up and out of her bed, the way it did when she was a girl across the Potomac River in Virginia where all was safe and all was family. Her husband, Aubrey, always slept the sleep of a man not long out of boyhood and never woke. Hearing the song call her from her new bed in Washington, Ruth, ever mindful of the wolves, would take up their knife and pistol and kiss Aubrey’s still-hairless face and descend to the porch. She was well past seventeen, and he was edging toward eighteen, a couple not even seven whole months married. The house—and its twin next door—was always quiet, for those city houses were populated mostly by country people used to going to bed with the chickens. On the porch, only a few paces from the corner of 3rd and L Streets, N.W., she would stare at the gaslight on the corner and smell the smoke from the hearth of someone’s dying fire, listening to the song and remembering the world around Arlington, Virginia.

That night in late January she watched a drunken woman across 3rd Street make her way down 3rd to K Street, where she fell, silently, her dress settling down about her once her body had come to rest. The drunken woman was one more thing to hold against Washington. The woman might have been the same one from two weeks ago, the same one from five weeks ago. The woman lay there for a long time, and Ruth pulled her coat tight around her neck, wondering if she should venture out into the cold of no-man’s-land to help her. Then the woman pulled herself up slowly on all four limbs and at last made her stumbling way down K toward 4th Street. She must know, Ruth thought, surely she must know about the wolves. Ruth pulled her eyes back to the gaslight, and as she did, she noticed for the first time the bundle suspended from the tree in the yard, hanging from the apple tree that hadn’t borne fruit in more than ten years.

Ruth fell back a step, as if she had been struck. She raised the pistol in her right hand, but the hand refused to steady itself, and so she dropped the knife and held the pistol with both hands, waiting for something terrible and canine to burst from the bundle. An invisible hand locked about her mouth and halted the cry she wanted to give the world. A wind came up and played with her coat, her nightgown, tapped her ankles and hands, then went over and nudged the bundle so that it moved an inch or so to the left, an inch or so to the right. The rope creaked with the brittleness of age. And then the wind came back and gave her breath again.

A kitten’s whine rose feebly from the bundle, a cry of innocence she at first refused to believe. Blinking the tears from her eyes, she reached down and took up the knife with her left hand, holding both weapons out in front of her. She waited. What a friend that drunken woman could be now. She looked at the gaslight, and the dancing yellow spirit in the dirty glass box took her down the two steps and walked her out into the yard until she was two feet from the bundle. She poked it twice with the knife, and in response, like some reward, the bundle offered a short whine, a whine it took her a moment or two to recognize.

So this was Washington, she thought as she reached up on her tiptoes and cut the two pieces of rope that held the bundle to the tree’s branch and unwrapped first one blanket and then another. So this was the Washington her Aubrey had brought her across the Potomac River to—a city where they hung babies in night trees.

When Aubrey Patterson was three years old, his father took the family to Kansas where some of the father’s people were prospering. The sky goes all the way up to God napping on his throne, the father’s brother had written from Kansas, and you can get much before he wakes up. The father borrowed money from family and friends for train tickets and a few new clothes, thinking, knowing, he would be able to pay them back with Kansas money before a year or so had gone by. Pay them all back, son, Aubrey’s father said moments before he died, some twelve years after the family had boarded the train from Kansas and returned to Virginia with not much more to their names than bile. And with the clarity of a mind seeing death, his father, Miles, reeled off the names of all those he owed money to, commencing with the man to whom he owed the most.

Aubrey’s two older sisters married not long after the family returned to Virginia and moved with their husbands to other farms in Arlington County. They—Miles, the mother, Essie, and Aubrey—lived mostly from hand to mouth, but they did not go without. Aubrey’s sisters and their husbands were generous, and the three of them, in their little house on their little piece of land with a garden and chickens and two cows, were surrounded by country people just as generous who had known the family when they had had a brighter sun.

A little bit before Aubrey turned thirteen, it came to be that his mother took to going off down the road most evenings. “Goin to set with Miss Sally a piece,” she would say of the old woman a half mile or so away. But her son learned that way before Miss Sally’s cabin there lived a man in a shack with a busted door, and that was often where she stopped. If his father, a consumptive, knew, he never said. At first, before he closed his heart to her, Aubrey would stand on the porch and watch her go off, one of the yellow dogs following her until she turned and threw a stone at her. The other dog rarely moved from under the house. Aubrey would watch the road even after she had disappeared. “Whatcha you doin, son?” his father would ask from inside. “Come read me a few verses, maybe some chapters.” His mother had taught him to read in Kansas when he was four. Her people were all book people.

They grew closer, the father and the son, in a way that had not been possible in Kansas, where each day’s new catastrophe had a claim on their hearts. His father encouraged him to attend church. “It’s but a little bit outa your whole life, son,” Miles said, remembering how angry God must have been after he had awakened from his nap when the family was in Kansas. “And God has a long memory.” His son was nearing fourteen then. So each Sunday morning, the boy, alone, would set off down the road, opposite the way to Miss Sally’s, carrying the Bible inherited from his maternal grandfather, the same book he read from to his father about the trials and tribulations of the Jews thousands of years before the first black slave set foot in America.

Now Ruth Hawkins, whom Aubrey would one day marry, had four brothers born on one side of her and four brothers born on the other side, so men were no mystery to her, and they were not gods. She and Aubrey had played together as little bitty babies, though they had not remembered. But the old women all around Arlington remembered, and they liked to recite the short history of the two after Aubrey returned from Kansas. The old women would mingle after church, only steps away from the Praying Rock Baptist Church graveyard, leaning on walking sticks and on grandchildren anxious as colts to be out and away. “Come here, little bit,” they would say to Ruth and Aubrey, seeing down the line that the two had a future together. “You member that time…,” and they would go on with a story about two playing infants that seemed to have no end.

At first, Ruth and Aubrey had nothing to say to each other after church, after the old women’s talk had turned to something else and the two were free to go. He was always desperate to get back to his father, and she had a whole world of people and things to occupy all the moments of her days. Even her dreams were crowded, she told a friend. Then, in late August of 1899, Mrs. Halley Stafford, who, people said, had given her name to the comet, decided she had had enough and died in the bed she was conceived and born in. Representing her own family at the funeral, Ruth stepped up to the open grave with a handful of dirt and dust and let it sprinkle on Mrs. Stafford’s coffin as it was lowered down into its resting place. The new preacher, with less than a hundred shaves to his name, kept repeating, “Dust to dust…Ashes to ashes…” The dirt flowed ever so slowly out of Ruth’s hand, and in the slowness of the moments she began to feel as though she could count each grain as it all fell from her. She turned from the grave and looked at her mother, at her father, at her brothers, at everyone assembled about her, and all the while the dirt and dust kept flowing. After the funeral, she came up to Aubrey along the path that led to the road that would take him home. He stopped, and she walked a half circle or so around him, and he took off his hat and held it midway up his chest, hoping it would not be long off his head. Over her shoulders he could see departing people and buggies and wagons and horses and mules, stirring up heaps of dust. The sun behind her flowed soft yellow through the threads of her summer bonnet. “When you gonna ask my daddy when you and your daddy can take supper with us?” she said. He blinked. “I reckon…I reckon next week,” he said, flinging out any words he thought would satisfy her. This was their longest conversation up to that moment. “Could be the fire next time, come next week,” Ruth said. He thought of his father carrying him at four years old on his shoulders along the flat roads of Kansas. In his bed that night, he realized that she had made that half circle so the sun would be out of her face and full on his.

Whenever they were together after that, her youngest brother, Harold, eight years old, accompanied them. More and more of the toys that had once belonged to his brothers were coming his way, so he was mostly a happy boy. Armies of wooden men, still vital after all those years of playing hands, were now his to command as he had always dreamed. In October and early November, before the cold came upon them, he would carry a platoon of soldiers in a small burlap sack as he walked several steps behind Ruth and Aubrey when they strolled a foot apart, hands to themselves, down to the creek. Harold would stamp down the grass and position the soldiers about the ground as the couple, giggling, skipped stones into the quiet water, or sat on what passed for a bank and saw who could kick up the biggest splash with their bare feet. The boy would lie back and tap the soldiers’ heads against the face of the sun, putting fighting words in their mouths. In late February, after the cold took an early parting, his father told Harold it would be fine if the couple walked hand in hand, and the boy, on his own, increased the distance between himself and them by three paces and stopped singing the song he sang when he thought they were too close. Into March, into April, well beyond the planting season, he rested a squad of men in his lap while he played checkers with Aubrey’s father in the front room that now doubled as the man’s bedroom. And when he could not hear the mumble of the couple’s conversation from the porch, the boy would excuse himself to Miles and go to the door, soldiers in both his hands. When he was satisfied that all was proper, he would go back to the game. He had already given names to all his men in the first days of his sister’s courting, but in the time it took Ruth and Aubrey to grow comfortable with each other and then to move into love, Harold had more than enough time to rename them, enough time to promote a sergeant to colonel for saving a motherless kitten about to drown, to send a one-arm captain home to his family for sassing him.

Aubrey Patterson would go only twice down to the shack his mother shared with the man she had taken up with. She was an outcast to all the world, even more so than the man. Not even the postman went there.

The dawn he found his father dead, Aubrey first called him and waited. When he knew at last, he kissed his father’s lips and his hands. Then, as he had done most mornings, he washed his father’s face, combed his hair, and shaved him with the pearl-handled razor Miles’s grandfather had purchased from a whore in Annapolis. He took off his father’s nightclothes and put on the best clothes the man had owned, just as he would have if they were expecting company. Finally, he sat in a chair beside the man’s bed and read a chapter of Genesis and two chapters of Psalms. Then he went down the road to the shack. “Case you wanna know, case you care…,” he began after he had shouted for his mother from the yard. All the way down there, he thought of his father, and all the way back, he thought of Ruth.

The second time he went to the shack, it was to tell his mother he was getting married. He and Ruth were in the wagon his father had left him. Ruth stayed in her seat as Aubrey got out and shouted for his mother as he had done the day his father died. In a few minutes they were gone, his mother this time not coming to the door. Essie Patterson, living in sin, disappeared out of his life. His oldest sister sent word to him when she died. “We gotta go to her,” Ruth told him, two weeks after they started life in Washington. “We gotta go to her. She the only mother you ever had,” which was something she would not be able to say about the baby in the night tree.

They spent the first weeks of their marriage in his house. In between the lovemaking, they told each other things they had not been able, for any manner of reason, to say when they were courting. That third night ended with his confessing that he had once stolen a chicken. He had not started out to do it, he told her, but he was walking by Mr. Johnson’s place and the chicken followed him down the road, and no matter what he did, the chicken would not go back home. Then God began to whisper to him, and those whisperings, along with his failing father at home, convinced him that Mr. Johnson could stand the loss of one chicken, a tough thing to eat as it turned out. She found it endearing that he could not tell the difference between God’s counsel and the why-the-heck-not advice of the Devil.

About two in the morning that eighth night, Ruth, hearing that old night song, sat on the side of the bed and reached down in the dark for the slippers he had presented her. They were not where she thought she had put them and she settled for his boots. Outside in the warm, she let the flow of the song lead her about the place, lit by a moon that commanded a sky with not even one cloud. She walked all about, even near the dark of the night woods, for there was no cautionary story about wolves roaming in Virginia. An owl hooted and flew up, wings as wide as the arms of a scarecrow. It disappeared in the woods and Ruth turned back to the house. She would miss this little piece of a farm, but Aubrey’s aunt, Joan Hardesty, had assured her that Washington was a good place to be. Joan had taken him aside in the moments after his father’s funeral and told him there was always a place for him with her if he didn’t think Virginia was good enough to give him a future. He had grown up knowing her as a dainty thing, famous for separating the different foods on her plate with toothpicks. Ruth, nearing the house, paused to admire the moon that had started out dusty orange at the horizon and had gotten whiter and whiter the more it rose. Paul Hardesty had married Joan not two months after first meeting her, and they had gone across the Potomac River to Washington, and the city had put some muscle on her. On the day of Aubrey’s father’s funeral, Joan had been a widow for more than a year, Paul having been killed by one of the first automobiles ever to go down the streets of Washington. The story of death by an automobile was such a novel one that white men told it in their newspapers. The white newspapers never mentioned that Paul was unable to run from the automobile because one of his legs was near useless, having been twisted and turned as the midwife pulled him from the womb.

“It grows on you,” Ruth, at the funeral, remembered Joan saying of Washington, like a woman talking about a lover whose shortcomings she would just have to live with. “You just let it grow on you.” In Washington Joan had found a special plate with compartments, and so never had to use toothpicks again to separate her food.

Ruth now came around the side of the house, stopped at the well, and pulled up the bucket and drank deeply. A married woman could dispense with the drinking cup. Aubrey’s father was dead, and his mother less than a whore, so there was nothing much for him in Virginia anymore. He smiled when he said Ruth’s name, and he smiled when he told people he was going to live in Washington, D.C. Ruth had no feeling for Washington. She had generations of family in Virginia, but she was a married woman and had pledged to cling to her husband. And God had the baby in the tree and the story of the wolves in the roads waiting for her.

“Ruth, honey?” Aubrey stood in the doorway. “Sweetheart, you hurtin or somethin?” The bucket had been returned and she had been watching the moon. “You all right, honey?” After your parents, Miles had advised Aubrey, nothing stands between you and unhappiness and death but your own true wife.

She turned from the path that led out to the road. “I’m fine as Sunday,” she said. “I get this way sometimes. Specially when I’m happy.” He came to her and she came to him.

“Thought maybe you was sleepwalkin. Knew a nice woman in Kansas who did that, useta go out and try to milk her cows till one of em kicked her one night.”

“Not me. I’m wide awake. See my eyes.” He laughed and put his arms around her. His arms were not trembling the way they had been the very first times. They stood there for a long time, time enough for the moon to hop from one tree across the road to another. The moon shone silver through all the trees, which the wife first noted to herself, then pointed to places on the ground for her husband to see—a shimmering silver all the more precious because it could be enjoyed but not contained. The moon was most generous with the silver where it fell, and even the places where it had not shone had a grayness pleasant and almost anticipatory, as if the moon were saying, I’ll be over to you as soon as I can. “I’m gonna miss Virginia,” Ruth said and yawned. Aubrey said, “I’ll make it up to you. Sides, we be just cross the river. In a lotta places we can stand on the river and see Virginia.” Sleep had escaped him now, but it was gaining on her, and at last he had to pick her up and carry her to bed. They were the children of once-upon-a-time slaves, born into a kind of freedom, but they had traveled down through the wombs with what all their kind had been born with—the knowledge that God had promised next week to everyone but themselves.

The feeling that the baby’s mother might never come back started coming to Ruth three mornings after she had cut him down from the tree when she alone witnessed his umbilical cord dropping off. She held the blackened thing in the palm of her hand, a thing that was already turning to dust, and she realized her own mother must have done the same thing over and over again, with the children who would live and the ones who died before their first year. Fourteen days after she cut the infant down, she named him Miles, after Aubrey’s father, who had treated her like a grown-up who always knew right from wrong. She did not consult Aubrey about calling the baby by his father’s name—she just woke up that morning thinking it was a bit of bad luck for a child to be in the world and not be known by anything but “him” on a good day and “it” on a bad day. Aubrey said not a word when he heard her calling the baby Miles; they both had always known that was what they were to call their first son. It would not be untrue to say that it was a very long time before Aubrey stopped thinking that the baby’s mother was returning, and for months and months he went all about Washington, even into Virginia, asking who might have lost a baby boy. He came from a land where human beings had a past as tangible as dirt, where even children with no parents or grandparents had laps they could cry into. But while his wife knew this, she also knew a body’s world was held up only by a dime-store thread: Playing with three of her youngest brothers one day, she saw a brown bundle fall from the sky and hit the August corn with a crack! The children waited in the awful quiet after the fall, and after many seconds, a brown puppy poked most of its trembling body out of the cornfield, looked left, then right, like a well-taught child about to cross a road of danger. The puppy was clearly teetering between alive and dead, tattooed with the bloody marks of a hawk’s talons on both haunches. Finally, satisfied it might now be safe, it wobbled its way in the direction of Harold.

Ruth and Aubrey had been two and a half months in Washington when the baby appeared, paid helpers in the various businesses Joan Hardesty ran out of the two-story houses at 1011 and 1013 3rd Street, N.W. She ran a little hotel at the 1011 address for colored people who were forbidden in the city’s white hotels. She did laundry out back, and at the 1013 house people could buy supper five days a week and sit at the big table and enjoy their meal. The chickens in the back provided her with eggs, which had just gone up to three cents a dozen when the newlyweds arrived. People could also buy freshly killed chickens, though most of her customers preferred to take them home and wring the birds’ necks themselves. There was a little blacksmith business, also in the back, but it had been failing since her husband was killed.

Ruth Patterson’s first friend in Washington was forty-seven-year-old Sailor Willie, who rented a room from Joan at the 1013 address, where she herself lived, the place where she gave the big upstairs front room to Ruth and Aubrey. Joan had moved from that big room, where she had spent most of her married life, to the smaller upstairs one in the back after Paul was killed. Sailor Willie, Paul’s second cousin, lived in the middle room, which was not big and not small and which looked out at the 1011 house. The view had never mattered to a man who had been all over the world, and it was mattering even less by the time Ruth and Aubrey arrived because his eyes were failing him. He was slowly becoming known as Blind Willie. He had made his living first as a merchant seaman and then as a whaler, and having spent so many years among men who smelled of the rotting flesh of whales, he loved to smell sweet all the day long. Before he came home from the sea for the last time, he had bought many bottles of a man’s “evening water” in London, and he patted that on his face almost as soon as he was out of bed in the morning. He had had women all over Washington, before and after he retired from the sea, but as his light failed, these women began to see a chance to twist the heart of a man who had often twisted theirs, and they turned their backs on him. “Sailor Willie,” they mocked, “want a nurse now that he turnin into Blind Willie. He sweet as sugar now, but I don’t want none of that in my coffee.” In the days before Ruth arrived, he had been going about the city to see some of the women, telling those who would open the door that he just wanted “to pay my respects.” He actually wanted to say he was sorry, but the sea had not given him words for that, and what few meetings there were turned out badly. Two women he especially wanted to see had been avoiding him. One of them, Vi Sanchez, was dead, but he didn’t know that, and the other, Melinda Barclay, had just been trying to hold on to what life she had left after Sailor Willie went away the second and last time.

In the days before she cut the baby from the tree, Ruth and Aubrey’s time on 3rd Street was pleasantly exhausting. Joan was not a slave driver, but she wanted her money’s worth from any who worked for her. Whenever the couple happened to meet up in some quiet corner in one of the houses, or in the barn out back, they clung to each other, kissing until they heard a noise. At night in their big front room, they would giggle and tickle each other, waiting until they heard the roar of Willie’s snoring in the middle room. Then they made love, and when they were done, he would lick the sweat from her face, her chest. He was desperate to have a child, a son he could name for his father, who was with him always.

No one ever came to claim the baby, and before long Aubrey, no longer blessed with guiltless sleep because of the baby crying in the night, went the other way when he heard Ruth approaching those quiet corners. He began to devote even more time to trying to find who might have “lost” a baby boy. By February he was even knocking on the back doors of white people to find out, as he put it, if they had heard tell of someone who was in the family way and now was not but had no baby to show for it. By February, too, he was resenting Ruth for having so easily made a home for the baby with them in that big front room. From that first night she had put the baby in the wooden crib one of her older brothers had created, a small thing of absolute beauty with cherubs carved on the sides, cherubs doing everything from throwing balls to jumping rope to sitting on tree limbs. A cherub with closed eyes and upraised arms and wings unfurled sat with his fat crossed ankles on the crib’s headboard. The crib had always been intended for their own first child, but now day after day Aubrey could see the orphan sleeping in it, his arms spread without a care in the world, his belly fat with milk Aubrey himself had taken from the humpbacked cow Joan rented to make the butter she sold.

It was in late April that he began to think that Ruth was not getting pregnant because her heart was too much with the orphan. (“Don’t call him Miles,” he had finally told her in March. “Don’t call him nothin. Whoever come to get him will wanna give him back his real name, and the boy’ll just haveta get used to bein called somethin else.” Ruth had sighed, the same way she did in the old days when she was about to fall asleep.) And it was in April that he began to seek her out during the workday to take her wherever he found her alone. The force and frequency of his seed would overpower her heart’s fondness for the tree baby. A guest came upon them in one of the upstairs rooms in the 1011 house and complained to Joan. “What kinda damn place yall think I’m runnin here?” she demanded of Ruth and Aubrey. “You can take that mess back to Virginia.” All the while she spoke, she seemed about to cry, as if their doing it in broad open daylight like that was only a small part of what was troubling her.

When Aubrey took Ruth at night in their bed, he no longer waited to hear Blind Willie start to snore. In early May she screamed for the first time with the brutality of it. “I won’t let you touch me no more if you keep hurtin me,” she said one morning as she fed the orphan, the baby’s eyes blinking sleepily, one hand raised to touch her mouth. “I’ll do it right from now on,” Aubrey said quietly, but his word lasted only three days. By the time Ruth got word in late May that her mother was ailing, she had not let him touch her in more than a week. They had quarreled all that week, mostly at night, and though Aubrey tried to contain his shouting, Blind Willie could hear them. He would knock on the wall. “Yall be good to one nother in there, you hear? Ain’t no call for yall not bein good to one nother.”

She took the orphan when she went to see about her mother, ignoring Aubrey when he asked what he should do when the baby’s mother came back to get the child. In Virginia she found peace again, found she could shake off the unsettling way Washington had insinuated itself in her nerves, something that had happened long before she cut the baby down. She helped her father and brothers with the crops. Once her mother improved, the two took the orphan in the buggy and went all about Arlington, visiting people Ruth had not seen in many months. The world in Virginia kept telling her that marriage and Washington had been good for her. Ruth said yes, yes they had. She learned to tell people right away that Miles was not hers, that she had found him in a tree. Then people, the same people who said Washington had been good to her, would tsk-tsk and say what could anyone expect of a city with a president who was so mean to colored people. She slept with the orphan in the bed she had slept in before her marriage. The baby slept holding tightly to her nightgown. May became June, and then before she could turn around, it was July.

Aubrey sent her a letter:

My dear Wife,

I write with all hope that your dear Mother is taking well once again. I have prayed for Her. I have prayed for You and I have prayed for the Life We have tried to make for ourselves here in the City.

I do not sleep because You are not beside me. I work but I am not happy because I know that I cannot find You quick as I could before You left for your sick Mother and Virginia. I want more than living tomorrow to come to get You before the second day of August, 1902. Please know that I write these words with my Heart true in every word. I will come out to get You.

To my loving Wife Mrs. Ruth Patterson

From Your true and one Husband

Mr. Aubrey Patterson

She read the letter a dozen times the day she received it. That night, after the house was quiet and the baby fast asleep, she went outside, not so much because of the song—though it played on still—but because standing in the yard might bring Aubrey quicker than the second of August.

He came and stayed with her and her family for three days. For some reason he seemed surprised to see the baby, as if he had expected it to have simply disappeared over time. He thought the baby twice as large as he had been before leaving Washington. The same size might have been the most he could ever hope for, but to have blossomed, to appear twice its size, was a blow to the heart. But he said nothing.

While Ruth was away, Joan had increased Aubrey’s pay to $2.50 a week. Had he been asked the day he held the new pay in his hand, he would have said that he was now a Washingtonian. Virginia was way over there somewhere in the past. He would not have returned to Virginia to be a man for anything in the world except the resurrection of his father. The only thing that could make his living perfect was Ruth’s return. There was a terrible part of him that resented her for being absent for so long, though he could understand about her mother. A woman on I Street owed Joan some money, and she sent Aubrey to collect it. The woman opened her door to invite him in, and he sensed that she wanted to give more than the money. He hesitated, looked all the way up and down I Street, where no one knew him or his business. His father had said once that even if he were ten thousand miles from any human being, he must still sit and eat at his table with a knife and fork and use his eating manners the way he had been taught. So he told the woman that if she didn’t have the money that day, he would just tell his aunt. And he banked his pay, every penny except that used to buy sweets, which he could not live without.

Also while Ruth was away, Joan hired Earl Austin, a man only four months up from Georgia. Suffering headaches in Georgia, Earl had gone to a root doctor, and the woman, after having Earl spit on a plate painted black, had diagnosed, “Your wife ain’t your wife no more.” Free of headaches but with a heart sliced up, he fled the state after catching his wife in their marriage bed with a man still in his hat and socks and then beating the man for nearly an hour and leaving him for dead in his wife’s spring garden. He knew how to blacksmith, he had told Joan when seeking a job, and he could even sew and crochet if that would put food in his belly. He did not say that he had seen her one day walking down K Street and had followed her all the way back to 3rd Street. He did not say that he was quitting a good porter job at the Ebbitt House just to be near her, that he had been seized that day on K Street by an emotion that overwhelmed and confused him. He did not say that he would have worked for free or that he knew that even in a thousand years he had no hope of reaching the heart of a woman like her, one with money and property.

Ruth and Miles came back.

Aubrey thought that if he made his wife’s life as easy as possible in Washington, her body would consent, and she would at last become pregnant. With Earl around and the baby needing to be watched as he began to explore more and more of his world, Ruth had about a third less work than before she went home to Virginia. And so she took Aubrey to her at night, eager, happy to be back, and he returned to her body, a man in love, in awe, in fear. Washington survived the blazes of August. September was warm, quite acceptable to Joan’s guests not from the South. Much of October was fiercely cold, but November was like September all over again.

Like a thick window shade being pulled down in the brightness of day, the world was darkening for Blind Willie. By Ruth’s return, he was accepting his new nickname, but he joked it was unfair to be called blind even before he was fully so. “I think I should be just Half-Blind Willie. Next thing you know,” he said to Ruth one evening as everyone lingered after a pork chop supper, “they’ll wanna put me in the ground when I’m only half dead.”

He and Ruth, with Miles, went about the city in the afternoons of November in a wagon pulled by a mule that was good for short trips about the city but would have died, or simply refused, if forced to try anything longer. Born and raised in Washington, Willie told Ruth he wanted to show her the places of his childhood before his eyes took the places away. The truth is that he needed a companion as he went about trying “to pay his respects” to the women he had known. He saw his blindness as a kind of death. By November he had learned that Vi Sanchez was dead, but Melinda Barclay was still managing to avoid him. Her neighbors kept telling him she was off on a trip around the world. Ruth enjoyed being with him. She believed that Miles was going to grow up in Washington, so he may as well learn about it early. And Willie had an endless amount of stories, about the sea, about whales, about foreign countries, about love in Africa and Brazil. That all of Washington seemed to know him reminded her of how well known she was in Virginia. The old people in Washington called him William, for that, they would say, was the name his mother gave him, and it should be good enough for everybody else. With plenty of rest for the mule along the way, he and Ruth would go as far as Georgetown some days, picnicking and fishing at the river’s edge.

At last, after months and months, two days before the end of November, Melinda opened the door to her home at 8 Pierce Street, N.W. Her face said nothing when she saw Willie. Indeed, she looked over his shoulders and around him, as if she had been expecting someone who had never caused her pain. She sighed with disappointment. Willie was surprised at how happy he was to find her, and he thought right away of the letter—only the third one of his life—he had written her that last time two years before, a letter labored over only days before he decided to retire from the sea. He wrote in the letter that he would miss her cooking, that it was the hardest thing in the world to go back to the ship’s food. He had started the letter in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and finished it before the ship saw England, but he had not mailed it. He wrote in the letter that he knew a dressmaker in Paris and he would have her make Melinda something out of this world.

“Oh, Melinda,” Willie said now in the doorway, “you don’t know how happy I am to find you at home.”

“Willie.”

“I been lookin for you, Melinda.”

“I been away, Willie. Way away. Didn’t folks tell you?” She had now stepped back. Her hair was made up quite prettily, as if for some party. “I heard bout whas happenin to you and it’s a shame. To be blind.”

Willie looked around at Ruth and Miles in the wagon.

“You should get back to em,” Melinda said and made to close the door. He saw the darkening figure of the door and raised his hand to stop it from closing. “Please, Melinda. Please, darlin.” She stopped the closing and sighed once more. “Thas Ruth and little Miles. She my landlady’s niece. Her…her niece-in-law.” He turned around to look at Ruth as if to make certain he had gotten right her relationship to Joan. There had been a woman in Brazil who had understood very little English and who just nodded at everything he said, even when he told her he was coming back with a ring that would weigh her hand down.

“I have somewhere to go, Willie,” Melinda said. “You might have to come back some other time.”

Ruth could not hear their words from the wagon, but she sensed the distress in Willie, in the way his head hung a little bit. Miles was in her lap, playing with the reins.

“Now, Melinda, please wait a little bit,” Willie said. His head was turned slightly to the side, for there out of the corners of his eyes was where most of the last of his sight resided. A stranger walking by would have seen him talking to the side of Melinda’s house.

She did a dismissal with her teeth. “You promised me a letter, Willie. Just some plain letter that a child could manage. Just a plain old letter.”

“I know I did, Melinda.”

“And you know what else,” she said, opening the door just an inch or so more. “That damn necklace fell apart on me, do you know that? But I can understand fallin apart. Everything does that. It woulda been nice to know it was gonna happen. It woulda been nice to know that it never come from the king of Haiti. I didn’t mind the fallin apart. Just the lyin.”

“I know,” Willie said, not even remembering the necklace. “I shouldna said that. There ain’t been no king in Haiti for a lotta years.”

“It ain’t the necklace. I got all the necklaces I could ever need.”

“I’ll get you something else, and I mean that,” Willie said.

They did not speak for a time, until Miles squealed when he dropped one of the reins.

“Yall may as well come in,” Melinda said. “Yall may as well do that. You make my house look poor standin out there like that.”

On the morning of the third night Willie was with Melinda, he felt someone tap him lightly on the left side of his head. He woke and found it curious because Melinda was sleeping on his right side. In the half-darkened room he sat on the side of the bed and waited for his eyes to adjust. Finally, he held his hand before his face, moved it back and forth. Melinda was sleeping quietly, like a little girl, the way she had always done. He put his hand in his lap. “Oh, shoot,” he said at last. “I’m all the way blind.” He said it with no more emotion than a man might say he was late for something of little consequence after seeing his clock had stopped. He had hoped for a few months more.

He dressed with as little noise as possible and went down and out her door. He closed the door behind him and stood in his first morning hearing the sound of the closing door echo in his head. He went out the gate, making sure to shut it tight behind him. A neighbor’s smelly dog liked to come in her yard and sleep under the porch. Willie took three tentative steps away from Melinda’s house. A rooster crowed and Willie was emboldened. He put his right hand out in front of him, and the left hand he held out to the side where the homes were. He remembered that once he had come out of a woman’s house in Northeast on just such a crisp morning and had gone three blocks in the wrong direction before he realized just what woman he had been with. He reached the end of Pierce Street and went down 1st. The slight dip was a surprise, something that had certainly not been there in all the years he had had eyes. He made his way home, to 3rd Street, and with all his steps he spelled out her name. William had never been a good speller in school, and Sailor Willie had been even worse, so Blind Willie made his way to Joan’s repeating M-I-L-I-N-D-A.

Late the next day Ruth got word that her mother was again ill. Aubrey sulked all the rest of the day, slept on the edge of their bed that night, and twisted and turned as loudly as he could. He sulked most of the next day as well, until Ruth left with Miles. She was gone nearly two weeks, until days before Christmas. He did not touch her again until well after Christmas. He stopped while inside her, dropped all his weight on her, and then, after she began complaining, rolled away.

One day in early January, he saw her talking to Earl in the kitchen of the 1013 house and suspected something. How, he wondered, as he stepped between them to get to the coffeepot, could he trust any child out of her to be his? He poured his coffee and before taking the first sip told Earl to go tidy up the chicken coop.

“You didn’t have to say that to him like that,” Ruth said to her husband after Earl left.

“Say it what way?” her husband said, holding his cup in both hands.

“Mean like that. He a good man. Earl don’t trouble nobody less they trouble him.” With winter, there were fewer guests in the 1011 house and Joan had allowed Earl to stay in the back room upstairs. “Ain’t no call for bein mean like that, Aubrey.” One morning Earl had raised his shade and saw Joan across the way in 1013, her back to him, looking in her mirror as she fixed her hair. He thought his heart would run away from him.

“Why you takin up for somebody against your own legal husband?” Aubrey knew as soon as he had said them that the words made no sense, but once they were out there in the kitchen where two pots were cooking supper, he could do no more than support them. “Ain’t no call for you to do that, thas what I say.” Joan had turned from the mirror and saw Earl watching her that morning.

“You could be nicer to everybody, Aubrey, thas all I’m sayin. Earl, Willie, you could be nicer.” As Earl watched Joan, he saw himself exiled back to Georgia, but rather than turning away, Joan had stepped to the window and stuck the second hatpin down through her hat and into her hair and never took her eyes from him. Earl lowered his head until his eyes fell on his shoes. He raised his hand Good Morning and left the window.

“I’m as nice as I need be,” Aubrey said, wanting no more of the coffee. “Seem to me that the crime round here is you bein too nice. If I ain’t bein nice, you sure makin it all up for me.”

What he was saying finally came to her, and it pounded into her heart. “It don’t cost one penny to be nice to people, Aubrey. It don’t hurt a soul one bit.” She wanted to cry, but the baby was asleep upstairs, and it would not have done for him to awaken and find her in distress. The orphan cried at the least little thing. Ruth stepped away to go upstairs.

There came to be nothing to talk about between them. He often pointed to something when he wanted her to do anything. At the dining table, with Joan and Willie and Earl and any guests, they sat as far from each other as they could. Willie was usually the life of the table, with a story about any subject someone could name. Say “speck of sand,” for example, and he would regale with a story about an Abyssinian pirate who was caught at his lair near the sea and died wiggling with the hangman’s rope around his neck, wiggling with the pain of the rope and the discomfort of the sand that had blown into his eyes. The pirate had lived most of his time on the sea, but he had detested sand all his days. Ruth liked everything Willie said, but her pleasure would dissolve when she would look across the table and find an unsmiling Aubrey staring hard at her, his arms folded.

One day she came into the room after hearing the baby whimpering on the pallet she had made for him. He was now too big for the crib and she had put it out in the barn. Aubrey was kneeling down, holding one of the baby’s legs. “What he want?” she said. “I don’t know,” Aubrey said. “I didn’t ask him and he didn’t tell me.”

He released the leg after she knelt down to the baby. He stood up and left. The child was wet, as it turned out. He was smiling. As she changed him, she kept hearing the sound of his whimpering before she had entered the room. Had the child been quiet or asleep when she found Aubrey over him, it would not have mattered. But the whimpering said so much to her, becoming as she stood up with him in her arms not even whimpering anymore but a long and painful cry.

She did not let Miles out of her sight after that. She carried him about in her arms. Or, when there were jobs that required both hands, she toted him on her back, having fashioned a pouch out of a blanket that he could lie in comfortably. She made the pallet beside the bed bigger and slept there with Miles. That was mid-January.

Willie woke in the night toward the end of January and remembered once again that he had promised Melinda to make up for the necklace from the king of Haiti. There had been nothing between them since the morning he went blind and left her asleep in bed. He felt he had enough money saved up from the sea to provide for his room and board at Joan’s for the rest of his days. He would not trouble anyone else. He had at first thought that he and Ruth would pick out something for Melinda in some Washington store that would treat colored customers with respect. He would have Ruth or someone else take the jewelry to Melinda, for he would not want her to think he wanted something by taking it himself.

He got up that January night and opened the trunk that had been all around the world with him, a trunk big enough to be a man’s coffin. In one corner there was a brooch, wrapped in two handkerchiefs, a brooch that he had not thought about for a long time. It was a cameo of a longnecked woman looking to the left. He had bought it in Marseilles, from a man with only nubs for hands. Intending it as a present for his mother. Twelve American silver dollars. But when he returned home he found that his mother had been dead a little more than two weeks, and he had put the brooch away, vowing not to think about it again. But he owed Melinda something wonderful.

Melinda said nothing when Ruth took the brooch to her. She invited her in. The baby, in a wooden carriage Earl had found in an alley and made over, had fallen asleep. It was early afternoon, a Saturday. Ruth declined to go in, saying she best get back, and Melinda walked her to the corner, to 1st Street. Ruth said, “He told me to tell you to enjoy every time you wear it. He wants you to be happy with it.” The next morning Melinda was standing outside their home as the group at 1011 and 1013 prepared to go off to church. They came through the gates of the houses and Melinda touched Blind Willie’s shoulder. He could tell it was not one of the people he had come out of the house with.

“Who?” he asked.

“Me,” she said. She unwrapped the fingers of one of his hands and placed the brooch, now in one of her own handkerchiefs, in the center of the hand. He knew right off what it was.

“I want you to have it,” he said. “I honestly did.” Everyone else walked away a piece, up toward L Street.

“Why you treat me like this? What bad thing did I do you, William?”

“Nothin, you know that.”

“If I done nothin, then good. Then your and my books been set straight if I never done nothin bad to you. I never want your things. Not a one.” He heard her walk away.

“Melinda, please…” He took a step, fearful now of falling, holding the fence as best he could with the hand she had put the brooch in. “Melinda, please please, darlin. Please, darlin.” He held his hand out to her, but he began to cry and so had to take that hand and cover his eyes. Ruth, with Miles in his carriage, considered going to him. Willie said, “I meant you no bad thing. Only my kind of love, such as it is.” Melinda looked at Ruth, at Miles’s hands and feet rising and falling in the carriage, and then she slowly turned around. Everyone in the group going to church started to walk away and they did not stop. It was not very cold considering it was January, but for days there had been talk of snow.

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.

The snow came up again and he turned onto the main road that would lead all the way down through Arlington to the bridge. Ruth’s husband patted the horse’s neck to reassure her that she was capable of the snow journey, that the snow would not amount to much. The horse’s mane was in a tangle, and as he made his way through the new snow, he busied himself with trying to untangle it. But it was a hopeless task, and he patted the neck again, told the horse he would do a proper job with a soft brush before he returned her to her owner. The dank smell of the horse rose up and held fast like a stalled cloud before his face. Ruth’s husband smiled and told the horse he forgave her.

In less than a mile, the snow came up fierce and he considered stopping for the night at the Landrys. But within sight of their place, the snow returned to a gentle falling, and he passed the Landrys and their hearth and its promise and continued on. He and the horse were alone on the road, and it occurred to him that all the world might know something about the weather to come that he should know, something that maybe he, no more a country boy, had learned and forgotten. In another mile, the snow took a turn toward bad again. Ruth’s husband stopped and tied his scarf around his head and pulled the hat tight on top of that. They went on. They came through a small forest virtually empty of snow and he pulled the coat tighter, and as they emerged from the forest, Washington appeared before him, a long grayness shimmering between the snowflakes across the Aqueduct Bridge, across the quiet Potomac.

He halted at the mouth of the bridge, the land of Washington, D.C., spread out forever and ever before him. He ran his hand over his meager mustache and the beginnings of a beard. He wiped the snow from them and thought what a wasted effort it was since there was more snow to come. The horse raised her head high, then a bit higher, perhaps knowing something the man did not. Ruth’s husband could hear voices now, and he shuddered. He turned in the saddle to see the southern road so many would travel on to reach that land just across the river. He saw nothing but the horse tracks in the snow, growing fainter with each second as more and more snow covered them. The voices hushed. His boots touched the horse’s sides ever so gently. The horse stepped onto the bridge to Washington, her white breath shooting forward to become one with the white of the snow. Ruth’s husband patted her neck. The top button on his coat came loose again and he rebuttoned it, thankful that his hand had not yet stiffened up. His heart was pained, and it was pain enough to overwhelm a city of men.