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“Martin,” the young man said.
“Yes. Martin.” Marlowe smiled. “I see great things for your future, Martin.”
The young man smiled in return, happy to be seen, to be thought worthy. It was a start. He, too, wanted more in the land of more.
“Thank you, sir. I won’t disappoint you,” Martin said.
“Swell. Then bring me the next Diviner.”
HEALING
Outside his family’s tent, Nate Timmons was sitting on the ground with his face buried in his hands. Beside him, Moses and Tobias were uncharacteristically quiet. Tobias had started sucking his thumb.
“What’s wrong?” Memphis asked Remy.
“It’s Bessie. She’s got the typhoid, they say. Floyd, she’s bad off.”
“The Red Cross will help.”
“The Red Cross is taking care of the white people, bon ami,” Remy said.
“I lost everythin’ else. Can’t lose my wife to this flood. Please, Lord, please.” Nate broke down and wept quietly, and the other men turned away out of respect. Moses and Tobias started to cry, too.
“I wanna see Mama,” Tobias said.
One of the other women picked Tobias up like he was her own. “Not just yet, baby. Come. Come play with Maxine.”
Memphis remembered his own mother lying on her bed, dying of cancer. He knew what grief was coming for these boys if their mother passed. He started toward the tent. Bill took hold of his arm. “We have to keep low,” he reminded Memphis sadly.
“She’ll die if I don’t,” Memphis said.
“Sometimes it’s hard to understand the way of things,” Bill said.
Memphis had had enough of the way of things. He shook free of Bill’s grasp. He spoke firmly, clearly: “I can do it. I can heal your wife, Mr. Timmons.”
Nate looked up at Memphis, red-eyed and bewildered. “You ain’t no doctor.”
“I’m telling you I can do it. Just take me to her, all right? Take me now.”
The tent where Bessie Timmons lay was rancid with sweat and sick. Thick breath wheezed in and out of her lungs. She had waded through a flood to come live in a dank tent on top of an eight-mile-long levee with thousands of other refugees. Sometimes, sickness came on like the flood itself, with no way to hold it back. But other times, sickness came about because of the carelessness and unfairness of the world.
“Don’t you worry, Mrs. Timmons. I’m gonna do right by you.” Memphis whispered it like a prayer. Memphis had been afraid of being found out as a Diviner with a bounty on his head. Now he had another fear: What if he couldn’t heal this woman after all?
He placed his right palm atop her damp, feverish brow; the other hand he pressed to her rigid belly. The healing power came on so much stronger than before. It reached out and pulled him like a crocodile’s jaws. There was a tight squeezing in his chest, and then the sickness traveled back and forth like a current, from Bessie to Memphis, thinning out each time until it was nothing but a low hum between them. A second jolt shot through Memphis. His whole body felt electric. He was a bird soaring high above the country before it was a country, when it was a quilt of tribes. Down below, majestic buffalo stampeded across the plains, and it was a sight to behold. He felt Bessie’s body healing, growing stronger, could sense that body taking her forward, bearing another child, lifting grandchildren into her arms—even great-grands. Bessie Timmons was going to be all right. More than all right. A third jolt came, and Memphis fell to his knees beside Bessie. His hands shook. The muscles of his arms ached as if he’d been doing push-ups for days.
“Water,” Bessie Timmons said. She sat up. She was drenched in sweat. “Please. Can I have some water?” A bowl of it was fetched and she drank greedily. Outside the tent, families gathered, looking in on the scene: Memphis Campbell, on his knees in the dirt beside the bed of Bessie Timmons, who seemed right as rain. Completely healed.
Moses crept forward. “Mama?”
“That my Moses? Come give your momma a hug now.”
Memphis felt Bessie’s pulse. Where it had been weak it was now steady and strong. She rolled her head toward Memphis. “I… I felt you. Must’ve been a dream. But I could’ve sworn you were with me. But in that place, you had a different name.”
“Fever dreams are funny that way. How you feeling, Mrs. Timmons?” Memphis asked. Lord, but he was tired.
“Fine, thank you. A might bit hungry. But just fine, thank you.”
Bessie smiled at Memphis, and for just a minute he could pretend it was his mother, and that he had healed her and kept her from the clutches of the King of Crows.
