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“You got kids?” Tobias asked, bringing Memphis back to the moment.
Memphis laughed. “How old do you think I am, Shrimpy?”
Moses and Tobias burst into giggles, and Memphis thought about Isaiah’s laugh, which was just about the best sound in the world.
“We gotta get off this levee and on to Bountiful,” he said to Bill and Henry on the way back from dinner.
When they reached their tent, Nate Timmons was sitting in front of it, whittling a stick. He looked very serious.
“How’s your wife feeling?” Memphis asked.
“Better.” Nate kept whittling. He dropped a curl of wood onto the ground. “You’re the one they looking for. Memphis Campbell. The Harlem Healer. The Diviner.”
Memphis’s stomach went cold. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money. Enough to get a sharecropper and his family off this levee and headed up north.
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell.” Nate looked up at Memphis not with suspicion or greed, but with a soft pleading. “But you got to be careful, you hear? Word gets back to these white planters like Mr. LeRoy or those National Guard boys, they’ll turn you in quick as a snakebite turns bad.”
That night, as Memphis lay on his blanket on the ground inside the tent he shared with Bill and Henry, he could tell Bill was mad about something. He could hear Henry outside the tent playing that piano and singing, keeping everybody entertained. It was just Memphis and Bill.
Memphis propped himself up on his elbows. “What is it?” he asked at last.
“You don’t
know nothing ’bout your powers, really. None of y’all do.”
“So?”
“So you don’t know if what you got… how long it lasts.”
“I’m fine,” Memphis growled.
“Yeah, you fine, now. Enjoying being the big man on the levee. Memphis, if you use it all up here, what you gonna do when it counts—when you got to heal the breach?”
Memphis had worried before that his power might be finite. He did feel awfully tired after a healing, and that worried him a bit. During the initial phase of a healing, the sickness in the person transferred to Memphis. He could feel it invading his body, and that was often the moment that scared him most: What if he got stuck with that sickness? When Papa Charles had made him heal Dutch Schultz’s boys, Memphis had even gotten rashes and sores.
Back when he was the Harlem Healer, his mother used to say there was no sense hiding your light under a bushel: Whatever gifts you’ve been blessed with, you must share them. There will always be enough. Think of Jesus and the fishes and the loaves. But now Memphis was concerned. What if he needed the healing at some point and it wouldn’t come? Maybe he should hoard the power and use it only for the people closest to him.
So the next day, when word came that the Robinson family would sure appreciate a healing, Memphis said he wasn’t able. It was only a cough; a cough was nothing. No reason to think it wouldn’t get better on its own. He felt lousy about it, though. Because the thought had also occurred to him: What if the secret to his power was in using it? What if, rather than a battery being drained, it was like a muscle being trained, and the more he used it, the better he’d get?
“Henry,” Memphis whispered into the dark of the tent later that night. “Henry.”
“I’m awake.” Henry rolled over to face Memphis. “Can’t sleep, either?”
“No,” Memphis whispered. “I wanted to ask you something.”
“Sure. Just don’t ask me state capitals.”
“You think, maybe, we could look for Theta in dreams? What I mean is, is there a way I could be awake with you in that world? I promise to heal you up afterward, take the edge off of what it does to you.”
“It’s Ling who usually has luck finding people. But we could try. If we’re together, we might boost each other’s powers.”
“All right, then. What do I need to do?”
“Well, Ling always says that we need something that belongs to the person. A ring, a comb, anything, really.”
Memphis’s heart sank. Then he remembered: “Wait! I got this book of poems she gave me. Does that count?”
“Don’t see why not.”
