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Memphis stole a glance at Theta. “Can’t a man be alone with his thoughts?”
“Sure. Except you’re not alone,” Sam said.
Don’t lie to yourselves: We’re all alone, Memphis wanted to shout back.
“I just want to get this done,” he said.
HARVEST SONG
He should’ve known it was doomed from the start, but Memphis had wanted to believe in miracles again, so he’d let himself fall straight toward the fist coming at his heart. A mangled mess lay behind his ribs now. He could scarcely breathe for the pain. Like he’d been torn from happiness in a trail of blood. The only emotion more powerful than the pain was his rage. His anger was a bullet shot indiscriminately, flying through space, in search of a target.
“Memphis, did you send in your application yet?” Mrs. Andrews had asked him the day before as he tried sneaking out of the library after dropping off his cache of books.
“No, ma’am. I forgot.”
“Again? Memphis!” she chided, shaking her head. “You’ll miss the deadline.”
“I suppose I will.” He hadn’t meant for it to come out the way it did. Mrs. Andrews raised an eyebrow at him.
“Sorry, Mrs. Andrews,” he said, ashamed.
“No harm, Memphis,” she said a little crisply but not unkindly. Then she placed a hand on his shoulder, looking up at him with clear eyes. “I don’t know what it is, but don’t forget to come back to yourself when it’s finished. Too much good to go throwing it away.”
She stamped a book and handed it to him. Cane by Jean Toomer. “I saved it for you,” she said.
He tried to give it back with a lackluster “’Fraid I don’t have time to read much these days.”
Mrs. Andrews pushed it right back at him. “Make time,” she commanded.
He thanked her. Downstairs, he watched the Krigwa Players blocking out a scene from a new play. Behind them, Mr. Douglas’s powerful scenery soared above the little stage, a story in color and shape. Stories. He cared about those once.
The days numbed him. Around him, Harlem swirled with life: The men laughing on the other side of the Floyd’s Barbershop glass. The trolley rattling down 125th Street. The little girl eyeing the sweets while her mother examined a bin of yams for the best ones. A pretty girl waiting for the bus, singing a song Florence Mills made famous. The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks parading past in their ceremonial aprons. The world felt like a windup toy he wished he could pinch between his fingers and still.
Memphis opened the book Mrs. Andrews had given him. Inside was a poem, “Harvest Song”: “I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown. All my oats are cradled. But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger.”
Memphis shut his eyes. Early that morning, the Diviners had answered a call from the caretaker at Green-Wood Cemetery out in Brooklyn who’d seen “a pack of bright, skulking terrors.” Terrors did skulk in the dark, and the caretaker was right to be afraid. They’d set off with their flashlights, jumping at every marble angel, every shadow that fell across a headstone. Berenice flitted above Memphis, hopping from tombstone to tombstone, squawking. “Shush, now, Berenice,” he’d tutted. But the bird wouldn’t be calmed. At one point, the crow tugged at his sleeve, as if urging him back. Memphis heard a sound and followed it to a crypt. There he’d come face-to-face with a wraith in tattered bedclothes hunched over the carcass of a mutilated, half-dead squirrel. The wraith’s mouth and jaw were smeared with the twitching animal’s blood. Those razor-sharp teeth gnawed at the poor squirrel’s tendons and bit through bone with a sickening crunch. The butchered bodies of two birds and a rat lay nearby, as if the thing ate blindly, never getting its fill. It was alone, though, separated from its hunting pack. So was Memphis. This one was beyond questioning and useless to them. Heart beating fast, Memphis backed away, cracking a twig underfoot. The creature’s head snapped up. Those white-marble eyes locked on Memphis’s and he froze. Nearby, the crow spread its wings as if it could shield Memphis from danger. The wraith let out a pitiful cry. It sounded confused, lost, perhaps lonely for its brethren, if one could call what it ran with any kind of brotherhood.
“Here, now. It’s all right,” Memphis said. He didn’t know why he’d said it. For those few seconds, Memphis had felt a strange connection to that lost, wretched creature trying to sate its longing. Pain did not end at the grave. Had this unfortunate thing once carried a beating heart inside? Had it walked the same streets as Memphis, shared the same dreams? Did it have a story?
The wraith had cocked its head as if trying to understand. Memphis could hear his friends calling his name as they came running. The thing in front of him growled and dropped into a defensive stance. It unhinged its jaw and hissed, showing its pointed, bloodied teeth matted with animal fur and muscle. Memphis had been trying to reason with it. But there was no reasoning with these filthy things. He needed to remember that. Ghosts had been people, Will had once told them. And people showed themselves for what they were eventually. Even people who said they loved you. Memphis understood that now.
“Now!” Sam called. The Diviners stood together, concentrating until their power multiplied. Memphis felt nothing but hatred as the ghost looked up for just a moment, a silent howl of betrayal on its pallid face just before they created the energy field and sent it into oblivion.
Afterward, once the fierce glow of ghost-banishing had faded—“I fear knowledge of my hunger”—Theta had put her hand on his arm. “That thing was so close! You copacetic?”
“Fine. I got to get Isaiah home before Octavia wakes up and finds us gone,” he said, and left her standing there in the cold of the graveyard.
“Why you mad at Theta?” Isaiah asked as Memphis tucked him in.
“Mind your own business,” Memphis said, and Isaiah had rolled over without a word. That was two people he’d hurt in one night. And he called himself a healer. He wasn’t anything. He was just existing. Memphis took off his shoes and socks. There were new sores on his ankles. He tried to ignore them and go to sleep.
The next night, in a corner of the Hotsy Totsy, Memphis opened his book and read: “I am a deaf man who strains to hear the calls of other harvesters whose throats are also dry.”
He watched the band going to town and the chorines cutting loose. On the dance floor, it was glorious, stomping mayhem. Memphis felt none of it. The music was hollow. The dancing was hollow. The smiles were hollow. He was hollow. A ghost among the living but no one noticed.
He thought again of the thing in the graveyard showing its teeth. And now he wondered—had it been promising to hurt him? Or had it been afraid of him? He didn’t know. He didn’t know if what they were doing to the ghosts was the right thing. And the doubt was beginning to eat away at him.
He woke in the night, thinking of Theta, remembering every good night they’d ever had. The way the brightness strafed the Palisades as the two of them sat with their arms wrapped around each other, watching the river from the lighthouse. The softness of her lips. The husky cackle of her laugh. The quiet huff of her breath against his neck when she fell asleep with her head on his shoulder. Gone. All gone. He tried to funnel the howl inside him into words. But there were limits to language. Sometimes, he stood among the tall stacks at the 135th Street library staring at the spines of all those books, all those people hungry to tell what they saw, what they felt, what they hoped other people also saw and felt. They wrote it all down so they wouldn’t disappear. So they wouldn’t disappear. A testimony: I was here. So many stories. Why did he think his would even matter?
