She closed her eyes and concentrated. She had brought forth her mother without him. Surely she could do it with the other spirits. How did she do it without him interfering? She thought she might have heard directly from the spirits while dozing in the hospital, but she was unsure how to call them on her own. She heard James’s voice and quickly opened her eyes. No, she would not allow it this time. She stood and walked around the room, then sat again. This time, a cacophony of voices rose, his among them. She willed herself to stay awake, to not lose consciousness as she often did.
She sat down again. The table began to shake. Her skin cooled. She felt she might be sick. She tasted the remains of the stew at the back of her throat. She placed a hand on each side of her face. I will not allow him to own me. I will not allow any man to own me. She pushed him away. He pushed back.
I’m sorry, he said. I shouldn’t have come back. You don’t deserve to carry me around like a piece of luggage. I just needed to feel that we died for something.
Later, Olga found Sadie sprawled across the floor, vomit on her dress. She gently picked her up and carried her upstairs to her bedroom.
A FEW DAYS LATER, Sadie’s father came home. Richard helped him into the drawing room. Since he could not navigate the stairs yet, they set up a bed downstairs. Richard propped up the injured foot. Sadie put an extra pillow behind his back.
“Are you comfortable?” she asked.
“I am. Thank you.”
“It appears they have taken good care of you.”
“I’ve managed to avoid losing a foot. That’s always a good thing.”
He tapped his leg, as if to wake it up. The foot was tightly bandaged. Through Michael’s heroic efforts, the old man had somehow avoided infection. She had spoken with Michael just the day before. He had told her he no longer needed to speak with his brother. That was good news since James had already released her.
“Yes, the doctor tells me there is no infection.”
“That Heil turned out to be a very good doctor, though I will admit I do not like that he encourages your proclivities.”
“I brought you some more books,” she said, pointing to the stack on the table next to the bed.
“Sadie, I must tell you something. After I heal, I will return to York.”
“Yes.”
“This city is no place for an old man like me. I miss my garden.”
“But what will you do there? Who will look after you?”
“I will look after myself. And there are the neighbors.”
“Neighbors?” Sadie thought of the widow who lived across the street from him. The woman would gladly usurp her mother’s place. Perhaps she had already been eyeing the neat little house. Sadie did not like the thought of another woman in her mother’s bed. But she also knew this was the way things were now. Families shifting. Upheaval. Reconstruction.
“Will you write?” she asked in a pleading tone that almost sounded like Will you still love me?
“Of course I will,” he answered, then added, “As necessary.” He drank from a cup of water beside his stack of books.
He will not change, she thought. Still, she could not shake her need for his approval. This was, she thought, the curse of the dutiful child. “The spirits,” she began, “I can speak to them without James Heil now.”
“Sadie . . .”
“They need my help. So many people have questions. I can help them.”
“I have thought about your viewpoint on this.”
“You have?”
“Yes. And I have tried to understand it.” He took another sip of water.
“And?”
“You are my child, my family, but we are different. Our truths differ. There is no harm in that, I suppose. It is just . . . what it is.”
“This isn’t so great a difference as to . . .”
“I’m afraid it’s fundamental, Sadie. There are certain irreparable rifts. That is a fact.”
“I don’t agree.”
“It is true,” he said, his voice soft.
“In your way of thinking,” she said, “there is only death, not life.”
“Don’t be so dark, Sadie.”
“I’m not the one who is dark.”
The wife dead. The daughter depraved. The son-in-law killed. In his mind, the war had all but destroyed his family. Yet there was always a space for love to reappear between the cracks, wasn’t there? His view lacked faith. Hers kept it. Sadie had hated the war. What sense did it make to place lofty ideals in the hands of men with guns? Yet here was the real hurt—the rupture of father and daughter, a rupture he’d called irreparable. There was no reason to get up in the morning if what he said were true.
The light fell. She pulled the curtains in the parlor and turned up the lamp. She did not look over at him, but she heard him pick up a book. She sat at her desk, cornered a set of calling cards in her fingers. She considered her mediumship over the past year, straining to remember the details of her lectures. There was still so much to learn. How could she speak to married women if she barely knew life as one? How could she speak to unmarried women if she had been widowed so quickly? She had never given birth to a child, never even spent much time with children. It would be difficult to speak to women about the choices ahead of them. Still, she felt she must. Perhaps she was a woman preacher, after all. She glanced over at her father. How peaceful he looked sitting up in the narrow bed, his eyes trained on the page. How easy it must have been for him to live in an empty house, take up with another wife only if he chose. Such independent moves were nothing less than acts of rebellion for her. Each step a leap. Each turn a renunciation of another direction.
She felt the sharp pain of a child realizing the imperfection of a parent. Her father was wrong. She placed the cards back in the drawer. She slid the drawer closed, exhaling in one long breath. On the other side of the room, he quietly turned a page.
She reached for a map on the corner of her desk, unfolded it. She traced a finger from south to north, Tennessee to Illinois, Illinois to Indiana, through Ohio, until it rested on Manhattan City. She had never been there and longed to see the infamous city. She wondered what the crowds would be like, if they would sound a bell of doubt or quietly listen with belief as she stood before them, spreading whatever news passed through her lips.
29
MADGE WORE THE SAME TRAVELING dress she’d worn going home. When it grew too hot, she pulled the veil back, but as soon as the car cooled, she pulled it forward again. The widow had been right. The costume granted her privacy, but any perception of respectability for a colored woman was still tenuous. Each time the railway worker walked through the car, she clutched her travel satchel, her nerves frayed. This constant vigilance during the trip exhausted her.
She napped for a short time, but soon she gave up trying to rest. The wind rattled the train car. She remembered the long walk up from Tennessee, the first time she’d laid eyes on this vast grassland, the mystifying sight of it. She’d listened to the brush, thinking: how knowledgeable the sisters were among the Tennessee hardwoods, how there wasn’t a plant or a tree or a bush or a fruit they could not put to work, how their pickaxes probed like Moses’s magical rod and fished plants into coarse bags tied to their waists. This prairie, with its lack of trees and waves of willowy flowers, spoke of something beyond Tennessee, beyond her life, perhaps even beyond God. She had never even heard the word prairie before coming here. Even the word sounded like the name of a flower. She had a hard time pronouncing it. Pair-ree, she said. The Pair-ree State.
She touched her fingers to the window. She tried to recall her first enchantment with the North. Although she had never set foot in such a place, she’d known from the very beginning that she would, at least, try to rise and meet it. Everything was so much faster—the people talked and walked and drove their carriages more quickly than any she’d ever seen. Each day she bore witness to something new. The range of her choices was not as boundless as this land, but surely there was
room to hope.
First, she had to find a place to brew and store. She could not continue to work out of the widow’s kitchen. This healing balm was already working on her ambitions, propelling her to think of the future. I can do it, she told herself, rallying her courage. She caught a piece of scrambling paper beneath her foot, picked it up, peering at its indecipherable markings. The edge was ragged, torn from a booklet of some kind. In order to cross this valley, she would have to cross this barrier of deciphering letters, too. She let the paper go, watching as it flew through the car.
She wiped the window with the sleeve of her dress. The prairie glowed with the subtler hues of late summer. She was grateful for the empty car and tried to relax. The conductor walked through and announced the last stop before Chicago. She gathered her things. The train slowed, and she looked longingly at the ugly city, thought of her drafty little room in the widow’s house. She could taste the first nip of fall. She had lived in the city long enough to guess how many more days she could go without a shawl. She waited until the platform cleared.
There was no one there to meet her. She had asked a literate woman to write the note, copy the widow’s address down. But she did not trust the postal system, and she did not believe they had ever gotten it. If Richard had known, he would have been there to meet her. A kindly man.
A hack driver slowed. She asked for Ontario Street as he loaded her trunk. She settled into the ride, looking onto the city. Hemp. Now he was a man. Not some transient stopping through town long enough to flirt with an innocent healing girl. Madge had not known such pain until she’d left him behind, ostensibly for good. She had not been able to bring herself to tell her mother about him, though she’d wanted to. There was no future, no chance for anything serious. She’d always wondered about the stories she’d heard about love, the way it shook the sense out of a woman. Perhaps this new freedom had something to do with abandon, a reckless notion to follow a scent in the wind. Back home in Tennessee, such feelings were dangerous. When each step spelled potential peril, there was no place for such nonsense. A woman’s passion had to be measured by the teaspoon.
What on earth could she do with this tender tree of a man anyway? She wished her hands were larger, wished she could wrap her palms and fingers around his entire body, feel out all his insides. This love needed room to grow and roam, but with that other woman’s ghost haunting him, there was little space left.
Madge did not know what she would say when she saw him. All she knew was that she could not leave things as they’d been.
When she opened her eyes, they were crossing the bridge into the northern district of the city.
SHE ENTERED THE HOUSE through the kitchen. Olga was sitting at the table peeling potatoes. She barely looked up.
“Thought you were gone for good.”
“Thought I was, too.”
“She expecting you?”
“Don’t know.”
“Well, she hasn’t hired anyone else, so I suppose you better get out of those traveling clothes and get back to work.”
Madge picked up the trunk and carried it to the bottom of the back stairwell. She stopped. She could not help herself. She peeked into her herb cupboard. The cook had been filling it with jars and foodstuffs. It did not smell the same.
Upstairs, she scooted the trunk into a corner and began to undress. When she had changed into a suitable dress, she went looking for the widow. She heard a man’s cough coming from the drawing room. The widow’s father must have arrived while she was gone.
She climbed the stairs, knocked softly on the widow’s bedroom. No answer. She found the widow napping in the library.
“Mrs. Walker, you need anything?”
Sadie’s eyes flew open and she sat up. “Madge. You’re back.”
“That old dream about the house in Tennessee wasn’t much of nothing.”
“When I saw you standing there, I thought I was dreaming.”
“I brought you some tea back.”
“My father had a fall. He can’t make it up the stairs, so he’s sleeping in the drawing room for now.”
“Want me to bring it up?”
“You said the dream didn’t mean anything. How was your mother?”
Madge took a breath, then allowed the flap inside her to open. “My mother lost her eyes, but she’s making it.”
“The war left its mark on everyone.”
“Yes, ma’am. But if it wasn’t for the war, I wouldn’t be standing here.”
“Please sit, Madge.”
“What for?”
“My father says he is returning to York. He doesn’t approve of my speaking with spirits.”
“I don’t blame him,” Madge said, then softened her tone. “But that decision is yours. Long as you feel you helping people.”
“I can talk to the dead without him, you know.”
“Without who?”
“James.”
“Ain’t that something. Never knew your own strength.”
“And what about your strength? What will you do with those hands? Surely you can do more than mix up plants in my kitchen.”
“I can make that tea for you and your daddy if you like.”
“Thank you, Madge. That would be nice.”
Madge turned to leave.
“And Madge? I’m sorry for what I said about Hemp.”
“We all got our regrets, Mrs. Walker.”
WHEN MADGE RETURNED TO THE KITCHEN, Richard was sitting at the table drinking a bowl of soup.
“What’s new, old man?” She smiled at him.
“Didn’t know you were getting back today. I would have met you at the station.”
“No need.”
“Hemp been around here looking for you.”
She froze. “Where is he?”
“Don’t know. You could try the church.”
She could not help herself. “Did the doctor find Annie?”
“I reckon that’s a conversation you need to have with him.”
She didn’t dare hope. “I got to work right now. Can you take me over there in a little while?”
“I can walk you.”
“That’ll do. I’ll holler when I’m ready.”
A couple of hours later, the two of them stopped in front of the church.
“Is he all right?”
“He fine, he fine. But I think the two of you got business to settle,” said Richard, opening the door for her. “I see you back at the house.”
Inside, Madge saw a man she assumed was the reverend sitting in the front pew staring up at the ceiling. She looked up. She could see the outline of where a large hole had been patched. He spoke without turning around.
“It took us quite a while to patch up that hole. Seem like every time we patched it up, the snow and ice made it fall in again. Finally, we got it good and fixed and not a single ray of sun has peeped through.”
“Mighty fine work, Reverend.”
He turned. “Forgive my manners. I didn’t know I was in the presence of a lady. Come on in. What can I do for you today?”
“I’m looking for Deacon Hemp. Any chance he around here?”
“Haven’t seen him today. If it’s important, I can—”
“Yes, I need to see him.”
“All right then, take a seat and I’ll send a boy to fetch him. I believe he driving for a doctor man on the west side. The stable ain’t too far from here.”
“I really appreciate it. I hate to trouble you.”
“No trouble at all.”
She sat in a front pew, and the reverend disappeared through a door in the back of the church. She remembered the last time she had come inside this church. She had been with the widow, and they had gone into that back room where a small group of anxious people awaited them. But she could not remember the last time she’d gone into a church to worship. She looked at the small seating area for the choir, the minister’s lectern. There was a beautifully embroidered cloth draped across it, the most colorful
thing in the room. Her brand of religion didn’t include the kinds of things that went on inside churches, but it did not mean she didn’t respect the healing that went on here. She recognized healing in all its forms, and when people jumped and danced as they sang and prayed, she could almost see the mending stitches run up their bodies. She ran her hand back and forth over the back of the pew in front of her. It was smoothly planed, and she thought of all the care men like the deacons must have put into maintaining the modest little building. She knew Hemp was one of those men.
The reverend came back a few minutes later. He sat a few feet over from her on the same pew. He returned to staring up at the ceiling. His breathing was labored.
“You know Deacon Hemp from Kentucky?”
She winced, wondering if the man thought she was Annie. The woman’s shadow would haunt her forever. She wished she could contact the spirit world like Sadie could, talk to the woman herself. Let go of him, she would say. Let the man move on in peace. A ghost love ain’t real as mines.
“No, I met him here. I’m from Tennessee.”
“Oh, is that right?”
She wondered how much Hemp had told his reverend of her, if anything at all. She wanted to feel as if she were important enough to make him confide in this elder. But when she looked at the reverend’s face, he did not reveal any knowledge of her. The man’s face was unreadable.
But she could read something other than his face. The shallow breath. The tightened chest.
“Reverend?” She scooted closer. “Forgive my asking, but you been feeling all right?”
He looked over at her, and she could see that he would not give her a straight answer. He said exactly what she thought he would: “The Lord is good. I can’t complain.”
She tried to figure out how she would touch him. If he let her put her hands on him, she would be able to see what was going on. She guessed there was something in his chest; something needing to be cleared. The eyes also appeared a bit yellow, and she knew a good tea for that as well.
“Give me your hands, Reverend.”
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