I sat on a stool in the corner. Mama had told me beforehand to only begin when she gave me the signal. At last, Mama lifted one finger, and I picked up my pen.

“I wish to talk to you a bit about Daisy.”

I watched his shoulders slump forward, ever so slightly, and then back upright, as if he had remembered something. “So that’s what you want,” he said.

“You miss her,” Mama said.

It was quiet for a bit. But then Ben Daisy trusted himself enough to say “She was a fine gal. I miss her something terrible.”

“What if I could give you something,” Mama said. “Something to help with the pain.”

“I’ve already got that down at Culver’s.” Ben Daisy laughed sadly.

“But Culver’s whiskey doesn’t help you,” Mama said.

“It’ll do what it’ll do.”

“But it makes you listless and miss your work. It makes you quarrel with your sister.”

Ben Daisy was quiet. Then he said, “What does Hannah want from me?”

“Nothing,” Mama said.

“That’s right. It’s all nothing.” Ben Daisy lifted his head off the back of the chair and put his hands on the arms, ready to push himself off the big leather seat and out our door.

That’s when Mama said, “You wouldn’t want Daisy, if she were here, to know you like this, though, would you? If she were able to see you. Are you the man she’d wish you to be in freedom?”

Ben Daisy lowered himself back into the chair. “So, what are you proposing?”

Mama stood up and told me to fetch the solution. She measured some out, very carefully, into a smaller vial and handed it to him.

“You take this,” she said. “One swallow, and one swallow only each night. It’s night, isn’t it, that the pain’s the worst?”

Ben Daisy sighed. “Night is when it all catches up with me,” he said.

Mama instructed him to return the following afternoon, and for every afternoon after that for five days. “You see how you feel,” she told him. “And if it seems to help, tell your friends down at Culver’s. It may help them, too.”

When he’d left, she sat and began to dictate to me again.

“We have in our midst,” she said, “a group of men, and a few women, who, upon discovering our community and life here in freedom, find their souls still oppressed. Their bodies are here with us in emancipation, but their minds are not free. Their spirits have not recovered from the degradation of enslavement, despite the many hardships and privations they have suffered to come here.

“Indeed, I argue that it is precisely because of these hardships and privations that when they arrive here, with us, some part of them does not return. When they arrive, I can treat the physical effects of their enslavement—the yaws in their limbs, and the scars on their backs and heads, and the bones that broke and were never set. But I have, up until now, not been able to treat what would be called the mental effects, the spiritual effects, which do not respond to prayer or clean living or even the embrace of friends.

“I believe the root cause for this is an intense solitude and loneliness, even in their freedom. At least, that is how some of them have described it to me. We have seen this illness before,” she said. “In the cases of those we love, like Mr. Ruggles and Miss Sojourner Truth. They were afflicted by this deep and abiding loneliness even in freedom and took to drink, and then the water cure, lying in bathtubs and wrapped in cold, wet sheets to try and soak it out. And it has not done much for them. If all these good and kind warriors are felled by this disease of feeling, what hope is there for any of us?

“And what is at the root cause of loneliness? It is a lack of love. I believe if we can treat this deficit of affection, we can begin to see an improvement in those new to freedom. We can make them whole in both body and in spirit and see a real change in their condition. They will ingest this substance, which is made of the solitude and longing for love of the ocean, and it will rebalance what has been made unsteady inside them. Take Mr. Ben, who is lost in amorousness, who is able to do nothing but pine. We will realign his affections, so that he no longer loves what is dead but loves us here, the living. He will be filled with agape. He will love his fellow man. It is what I attempt to test, in my proving. He will be my first patient.”

Then she raised her hand again, her sign that we were done for the day. She gathered the pages I had written, so that she could read what I’d taken from her own voice and correct it.

Ben Daisy took the solution faithfully. During that time, he did not appear any different—he still walked with one shoulder up high, and the other men still walked a little bit ahead so that they did not have to be in conversation with him. No one else from Culver’s came to Mama’s door. Either Ben Daisy didn’t tell them to come or they were unimpressed with his progress.

The only time we saw his sister was at church on Sundays. Miss Hannah sat in the back pews, near the door, and her brother never came with her. We sat in the pews in the front, because Mama’s father had been one of the men to build that church. When Mama was a girl, she and her brothers and sisters took up two whole pews. But now, of the old family, it was just me and her left sitting up front—the rest of the seats given away to friends. When we passed Miss Hannah on the way to our pew every Sunday, she would stiffly nod in Mama’s direction, but she didn’t smile. If Culver had read the apology aloud to her, it had not impressed her at all.

When Ben Daisy came back to our house two weeks later, it was in the last bit of light. His shirt was wet from work, and when we let him in, he sat sideways in his chair and we could smell the drink on him.

“I can’t give it to you if you’ve been to Culver’s already,” Mama said. “Tell me the truth.”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “This is from one of the other men. They knocked a ladleful of cider on me, and that’s why I smell like this. I’m as sober as a judge.” Ben Daisy gave her a glassy smile.

Mama looked at him, and she came to some sort of decision.

“Libertie, my record book,” she said, and I went and fetched it for her.

She took the book and looked at the columns of numbers. Then she licked her thumb, very carefully, and smudged out one. She dipped her pen in ink and wrote something else over it. Then she sprinkled some sand to let the ink dry.

As she rubbed the grains from her fingers, she said, very steadily, “A dose and a half today for Ben Daisy, I think.”

Lenore sucked her teeth.

“Yes,” Mama said.

Lenore took the little steel file she used, and measured a few more grains onto the slip of paper she’d set on the scale.

By the time the dose was prepared, Ben Daisy’s head had begun to loll, and Mama had to hold his chin steady as she placed it in his mouth.

The other times he’d taken it, Ben Daisy had only grimaced at the taste—“Golly, Doctor, you can’t cut this with nothing?” This time, he truly gagged. His knees rose up to his chest and he coughed, and Mama stepped back, surprised, then called for water.

She poured it in a slow trickle in his mouth until he was swallowing good and steady, and then she let him go. He slumped back in the chair, breathing heavily. Another cough. A third. He swallowed. And then he vomited something green and awful-smelling, all down the front of his shirt.

I jumped forward, Lenore cursed—“Oh damn”—and Mama stepped back again.

“Get it off,” she said to Lenore. She grabbed one sleeve. “We’ve got to get it off.”

Between the two of them, they managed to get the shirt over his head.

Ben Daisy lay in the chair bare-chested, his belly soft in his breeches, his eyes still closed, his breath in shuffles. Then his eyes flickered open, and he slowly sat up straight.

“You all right?” Lenore asked.

He put his hands on his knees, shook his head gently.

“Sit still, sit still,” Lenore insisted. But Ben Daisy stood up, creaking, and made his way toward the door. By now it was dark; the sun was gone, and the fireflies of Kings County were out.

At the door, he looked out over the fields and watched the lights scatter across the long grass, as if everything was new to him. Then he gave a deep sigh, like the sound the water makes when the ocean turns over. And he lurched out into the night, still bare-chested.

“Well,” Mama said. “Well,” she half laughed. She was nervous.

“Should I run after him?” Lenore asked.

“No,” Mama said. “I am sure he will be fine.” But she did not look certain.

The next evening, just as Lenore was to leave for the day, the office door swung open and Ben Daisy stood in the frame.

“What did you give me?” he said.

“Why?” Mama asked. She snapped her fingers for my attention, and then pointed to the ledger book. I reached for a pen to transcribe their conversation.

“All day long,” he said. “All day long, it’s felt like this.”

“Like what?”

“I hear it lapping at my ear, you know. I hear it crashing.”

“Sit down,” Mama said, guiding him to the leather chair. “Tell me what you mean.”

“I hear it, in my ear. Lapping, lapping. It’s been lapping all damn day, Doctor.”