Edward P. Jones

 

The moment she got word that they had gone, that it was safe to go up to the place and be with him, she set out. Mosell Cummings, who had lived near the place all his days and who had watched as they sauntered home, murmuring, had brought word to her in his wagon, speeding through dust and the cloud-dark day because he knew she would be waiting, that each second would be unbearable for her. When he reached her front yard, he stopped the horse and climbed down, rushing through the crowd of people waiting with bowed heads and whispers. He called her name: “Amelia! Amelia!”, and she appeared out of the house, her hair uncombed and her eyes red and fearful. The old women on the steps stood up quietly and made way for her. “Amelia, they leavin’! They leavin’…” The tears flowed down his face, and when she was but two feet from him, he fell to his knees. “Amelia, I’m so sorry. God knows I am. Oh, Amelia…” She reached down and touched his cheek, sweat and tears, a small stump of an old man smelling of chewing tobacco. “I’m just so sorry.” She touched his sparse gray hair and moved past him without a word, eyes cast to the ground. The people in the yard parted to make a clear path for her to the road. “Amelia,” a woman said behind her, “some a us’ll go up with you. Don’t go alone, child.” “No,” her mother said from the porch. “No, Anna, leave her be. Leave her be.” And so she set out for the place, her long dress saying swish-swish over the ground and her bare feet saying nothing at all.

It was not far, this place she had set out for, and yet it was in another world. She walked opposite the fields her husband had worked all his life, the same fields his father had worked until the day they found him sprawled dead across his plow, the buzzards circling patiently overhead, the same fields her son, still a boy, would not ever labor in again. After three-quarters of a mile or so, she turned from the road and stepped down into the now dry Pittman Gully where, within one day, the rain water would be two feet, and within two days, four feet. But now the disturbed dust swirled up at her passing, and rather than falling back to the ground, it took to the air where it would stay forever. The beetles and ants and grasshoppers crawled and jumped to see and hear her coming, scurrying not in fear, but as if they simply wanted her walk to the place to be as unobstructed as possible. Then, after she had passed, they were silent and still.

There in the gully the air was cool and sweet, and the huckleberries grew lushly on bushes twice as tall as she was, and on another day in her life, it would have been a pleasant place to stop and linger and forget time, duties, and the place. But she walked up out of the ravine to the woods, where the grass was high enough to kiss the lowest leaves on the trees. With each step she parted the grass almost methodically, like a swimmer parts the water. At first, birds chirped and whispered among themselves, and then suddenly they, too, grew quiet, huddling together and closing their eyes as in night. Long ago in that place a wildflower had come up and supplanted the several blades of grass it had found around it. And over the years that wildflower was joined by others until there was now a whole blue and yellow colony in that place in the woods both the dark and the white people called The Hole. Here, too, on another day in her life, it would have been nice to stop and linger and remember or forget, or do both.

When she cleared the woods, the hill, the place she had set out for, stood sullenly, boldly, before her. She could not see him, knew she would not be able to until she reached the summit. She shivered now, not from any cold, because the weather was warm and would remain so until the rains stopped: but she shivered from that mysterious thing in a body that anticipates all too well. With both hands she lifted her dress up and trudged up the hill. As a girl she had played on it, and as a girl becoming a woman, she had first known that she and Ramsey could make a life together. But that was a different life ago, and now the dark children shunned the hill even as they shunned the cemetery, not from superstitious fear as with the cemetery, but from some unspoken knowledge that it was no longer a place for children, for playful abandon.

Though the climb was steep, she did not allow herself to become tired as she made her way, knowing all her strength would be needed at the top. There was the feeling inside her that she was being watched, but she did not have to turn to see, because she knew no human eyes were about. When she reached the top she saw him hanging thin as a browned corn stalk from the middle tree, his bare feet a little ways from the ground. She stopped and closed her eyes tightly, letting her dress go without a thought. After a while she opened them and bit deeply into her lower lip, drawing blood. “Ramsey?…Ramsey?…” There was a wind, but on the hill it seemed to move nothing, not even her dress or a wisp of her hair. And on another day here, if the moment and circumstances had been right, she could have looked seven or eight miles into the distance where the earth fell away, dropped, as if it were the end of the world.

The rope made a dry, creaking sound as it swung him slowly in small arcs. There passed quickly through her mind the image of him pushing their daughter on the swing in the backyard. That rope made the same sound. She walked to him and touched with agonizingly trembling hands his arms and back, looking from limb to rope to neck. All three seemed somehow to form one continuous part of the same thing. “Ramsey, I say….” She whispered and waited as if there might possibly be some answer. Then she stood on tiptoes and worked breathlessly to loosen the rope. She hugged his waist with one arm and with the other worked until she could pull the rope over his head. Finally she lowered him to the ground. Death had taken the soul that weighed but an infant’s breath and so though he weighed more with the burden of death, for all the slowness of care with which she handled him, he could have weighed nothing at all.

She settled herself beside him on the trampled ground, trying to keep her eyes from falling on the neck the rope had burned dark purple. After she had rested his head in her lap, she sighed and began to rock. “Ramsey.” She closed his eyes. He had decided only three days ago to grow a beard and moustache, and on his face now was the growing hair, stubble, the beginnings. But it’ll grow, she thought, still rocking. It’ll grow, you’ll see. “It fills the grave,” her father had said when she was a girl and feared death.

About her she saw cigarette butts and gum wrappers and a baby’s shoe. She could smell human sweat. Seven days ago they had brought Jenny Cutler’s husband here. And not long before that, Ada Taylor’s oldest boy. And in each of these women’s yards she had stood waiting with Ramsey, her heart so full and heavy it could have burst. They had taken them from their farms and their lives with no more thought than they would pick out goods from the shelves of Crawford’s General Store. Now she thought strangely of Job, and for the first time in her pious life she ventured to think he had been foolish to have kept faith for so long. Nothing fit; it was all asunder; and no God should ask that you stay sane in the midst of madness. No, that was too godlike, and if you could manage to be that, then… “Poor Job,” she said to the world about her. She felt her words bouncing and coming back to her as if the place were enclosed with invisible walls. “My poor Job.”

The grass on and around the hill now trembled with the wind. She felt light-headed, giddy. She closed her eyes and when she opened them, the grass seemed alive with faces. Each blade of grass had a face that looked like Ramsey or herself or one of their children. She turned her head to see the rest of the hill and the thousands and thousands of eyes looked at her, into her. She studied the faces that looked like her in the same way her daughter looked like her, and suddenly she shivered again and felt the same sense of knowing she had the night she saw the ghost of Ada Taylor’s older boy walking out of Ramsey’s fields down to his parents’ house, the same route he always took when he wanted a shortcut home, his head bent down as he had kept it all his life. (Seeing him, she had felt so close to him, so much caring, that she wanted to call his name, but when a man is about his business, you never call him from it.) All the faces stretched down over the hill, down to the woods, through the years, through her children’s years, through their children’s years, to infinity. She touched his shirt and rubbed his face, cradling his head as carefully as possible because she felt at any moment it might separate from the body.

She looked to the East from where the sun had always come, but had not in six mornings. What was there——as it had been morning after morning——was a swirling world of clouds. From the West more clouds now came, darker and fiercer and thicker than she had ever known them. She closed her eyes and stopped rocking and the faces were gone, disappearing into time, to be seen and remembered and touched on another day in her life. The earth was absolutely quiet and she bent forward and kissed his mouth the hardest and longest ever. And then she said in a whisper, “Goodbye.”

Down below she could hear people coming and she knew they were the same people who had stood waiting in her yard, as she herself had stood in other yards before coming. She heard the familiar rumble of a wagon. The winds swirled up about her, taking more dust to the air, dust that would not ever fall back to the ground. The sky and the earth turned dark and darker still, and the darkness enveloped her. The trees swayed and the wind beat their leaves. “I won’t cry here,” she said to him. Then the rains began, inconsolable, demanding. It was late April, and it would be late May before they stopped.

Edward P. Jones’ The Known World (2003) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award. In 2004 he was granted a MacArthur Fellowship. With his first collection of short stories, Lost in the City (1992), he won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short listed for the National Book Award. All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), his second story collection, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 he was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story. Jones lives in Washington, D.C. where he teaches English at George Washington University.