“Were you able to work?”

“I had to stop a turn and box my own ears, I did. Nothing came out.”

“Lie back,” Mama said. “Let me see.”

She snapped her fingers again, and I put down the record book, took one of the slim white candles she used for close examination, and lit its wick in the fire. I placed it in the small glass lantern and came and stood at Mama’s side.

“Steady, there, Libertie,” she said as she lifted my arm herself, so I could get the angle of the light right.

She settled down into the little chair and leaned forward. She took his ear in her hand, as gently as a lover, and stretched the lobe very carefully, so that she could see inside.

“And it’s so damn cold!” Ben Daisy said suddenly, rising up.

Mama sat back.

“So cold all the time. And my mouth, I tell you, it tastes like salt. Ever since yesterday. It just tastes like salt in my mouth. And Hannah, she says my breath stinks like the wharves. What do I care,” he said. “That sister of mine finds every way to tell me I’m wrong. But the foreman said it, too, this morning.”

He sat back down. As he spoke, indeed, a deeply salty smell filled the room. It was not necessarily unpleasant. Just very strong.

“I feel,” he said. “I feel …” He slumped back down. “I feel like I’m falling underwater.”

Mama lifted her chin. “Note that down, Libertie.” She was trying, very hard, to conceal her excitement.

“Well,” she said after a moment, “there is not much I can do for the smell of the breath. But chew these, twice a day.” She handed him a bundle of mint leaves. “And come back again next week—”

“Like hell I will,” Ben Daisy said.

“Just to talk,” Mama said quickly, and Ben Daisy grumbled and then moved toward the door.

Mama watched him go and then turned to me.

“Is he cured?” I asked. I was excited.

“We shall see,” she said. She was not going to play her hand.

All week long, I asked Mama if she thought Ben Daisy would come back to us, and she said, “It’s not for me to decide, Libertie. It’s up to him.” But I could see by Saturday she was as nervous as I was, even though she would not say it.

Sunday morning, we headed to church and walked past the stony-faced Miss Hannah to our pew, as always.

Reverend Harland began the sermon—about Belshazzar’s feast and the disembodied hand that had appeared to him and had begun to write on the wall the thoughts of God. Reverend Harland was talking about rulers dishonoring God and the calamity that would follow, but while he talked, I tried to think of that hand, floating in the air. Were its fingers long or stubby? Its palms jaundiced? What color was its skin—deep black or warm brown or the same pink as Mama’s cheeks? Did that hand also float above a pyramid, or in a distant desert, shimmering in the heat? And did Belshazzar, who saw the wonder, ever think in the moment of astonishment to keep the marvel to himself, to keep a secret, to not reveal it, to revel in the mystery of words untranslatable?

The sermon ended, and so did my speculations. The singing was about to begin. The choir assembled, and then, as they were about to start, we heard a loud, off-tune voice, too straw-like to be called a tenor, rise from the back of the church.

Oh Lord,

Oh Lord,

Oh Lord,

I’m saved again.

We all turned to see who it could be, and it was Ben Daisy, his shirt now cleaned and pressed, his hat back on his head, singing as loud as he could while his sister stood beside him, crying tears of joy and sharp embarrassment.

After that, Mama was revered. Everyone could see Ben Daisy was cured. He was the first man down the road at dawn, heading to the fields. He helped out the reverend at church. He stopped drinking altogether. He only went to Culver’s to pay the few cents he could, to settle his debt for all the corn whiskey he’d drunk in the past.

The others came out of Culver’s back room and began to take the cure with Mama, too—Otto Green Leaf and Birdie Delilah, and even Pete Back Back, whose shirt was still wet from his never-closing wounds.

Ben Daisy was truly a new man, anyone could see, and Reverend Harland dedicated a special sermon to it that next week.

“The psalms tell us that the Lord heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds,” Reverend Harland said. “He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit. The psalms tell us to sing to the Lord, as Ben Daisy has done, with grateful praise and make music to our God. For the Lord delights in those who fear him and who put their hope in his unfailing love. And he sends his word to melt the snow; he stirs up the breezes, and the waters flow.”

Afterward, when everyone had surrounded Mama to congratulate her, Ben Daisy pushed through the scrum of people, and hooked his little finger into Mama’s and shook it—a queer offer of thanks, I remember thinking.

“You done it,” he said with a wink. And then he sighed, “I can’t wait to tell Daisy all about this.”

Mama looked taken aback, but then she smiled and said, “I’m happy for you.” She did not ask me to note that exchange in her little book, not yet.

Ben Daisy was cured right before Pinkster. Pinkster was what the old ones celebrated, the ones who had been alive for slave days here in Kings County—so ancient they seemed to me then, as old as the hills all around us. They all spoke in that strange singsong accent of old New York. They had celebrated Pinkster when they were young, and their hips still moved, and it was a queer kind of pleasure we all took, to make sure they could still celebrate it in their old age.

Every Pentecost, we young ones were instructed to make the old ones gingerbread and gather bunches of azaleas. In Sunday school, we worked to make the paper crowns that would sit on top of their graying heads. A few men Mama’s age practiced the old songs on the drums, but they did not teach them to us children. They were the rhythms of the past, and only the old ones remembered them for sure, lifting their walking sticks to pound in time, sucking their teeth in disapproval when the beat was off.

At Pinkster, we crowned a King Charles, who was in charge of the festivities. We built him a grass hut, and he teased the children and paraded for the old. Usually, it was one of the church ushers, who would dance and twirl around town. But that year, because of his miraculous recovery, it was unanimously decided that Ben Daisy should lead the celebrations.

On Pinkster morning, I and the other girls in Sunday school woke up early, when the day was still cold. All week, we had been gathering rushes from the fields, setting them out to dry, and pounding them flat. We had been weaving the strands into thick walls, the green of the grass fading to a fragile brown. And now, we pieced them together, finishing the huts we were to celebrate in.

When we were done with the largest hut, the girls sent me to find Ben Daisy and lead him to it. He was standing in the crowd with the others, our neighbors and friends, waiting for the celebration to begin. I took his warm hand in mine and brought him into the enclosure.

The day was one of those sharply cold sunny ones, where you panted in the light but any bit of shade chilled you. It was even cooler in the largest hut, under all the grass. Ben Daisy stood peering out onto the churchyard. The old ones, already gathered in the hut, sat in a corner, skeptical of a newcomer having the place of honor.

The drums pounded, and everyone started dancing. I ran out of the hut as soon as I could, to spin in a circle with the other girls, their hands soft and slipping through mine as we tried to hold close, and to run up and down the yard. Pinkster was the only holiday when everyone tried a little cider—every other celebration we kept temperate. But on Pinkster, because the old ones celebrated it, a beer or two was allowed. Which is to say that someone may or may not have slipped Ben Daisy a sip of something that afternoon.

At the height of the day, when all our bodies were still humming from the dance, Ben Daisy stood in the doorway of the hut, paper crown pushed back on his head.

“A yup, a yup!” he called. He was getting into the spirit of it. Some others began to clap, a syncopated rhythm, to his name.

Ben

Day

Zee

Ben

Day

Zee

“That’s me,” he called over the din. “That there’s my name. And soon you will meet my Daisy, too.”

One of the children laughed. “Truly?” the child said.

“Truly,” he said. “Daisy came to me just the other day. I wish y’all could have seen her. She’s here right now, in fact. But she’s shy.”

Some people laughed louder, thinking he was playing.

“I tell you, she looks marvelous now. She’s got long curly hair all the way down her back, and she’s got a pink silk gown.”

“Oh really? Where’d she get that from?”