The entire walk home, Isaiah had talked a mile a minute. “So I get to use my powers again, Memphis? Do I? And I can make ’em as strong as I want? Memphis, hey, Memphis!”
“Yes, yes, Isaiah!” Memphis laughed. “But remember: You can’t say nothing to Octavia about it.”
Isaiah grinned. “You mean I can’t say anything to Octavia.”
“Oh, yeah? Put ’em up.” Memphis dropped into a crouch, dukes up, and he and Isaiah pretend-boxed their way down the sidewalk past folks hurrying home to their suppers. Isaiah stopped suddenly. They were in front of Madame Seraphina’s brownstone. A sign hung from a hook: MADAME SERAPHINA, PRIESTESS. A crow flitted above Memphis’s head and came to rest on the hand railing.
“There’s that bird again,” Isaiah said.
“Why, hello, Berenice,” Memphis said, greeting the bird with a grand flourish of a bow that made Isaiah laugh, which was Memphis’s second—favorite sound. The first was Theta whispering his name followed by I love you.
“How come that bird’s always chasing after you?”
“All the ladies chase after me!” Memphis said with mock-umbrage. “Even the birds!”
The crow squawked three times and cocked its small, shiny head toward the partially closed drapes of the basement. Through them, Memphis could see Seraphina’s altar with its offerings to the spirits and ancestors. Seraphina’s face appeared at the window.
“Bet I can beat you home,” Memphis said, and took off running, slowing down at the end to let Isaiah beat him into their aunt Octavia’s apartment. It wasn’t Octavia, but her boarder, Blind Bill Johnson, who greeted them. He sat on Octavia’s prized settee with his guitar on his lap and his cane at his side.
“Well, well, well. Is that the Campbell brothers I hear?” Bill called in his raspy voice.
“Evenin’, Uncle Bill,” Isaiah said. “Where’s Auntie?”
“At church. She left you some pork and plantains in the icebox, though. What you boys get up to this evenin’ that kept you out past suppertime?”
Isaiah looked to Memphis, who shook his head. “Just went to play ball with Shrimpy here,” Memphis said.
“That so? How’d you do, little man?”
Isaiah was uncharacteristically quiet. “I, uh, I threw real good,” he said after a moment’s pause.
The pause told the old man all he needed to know: The Campbell boys had a secret. Bill could just make out the dim shapes of them moving through the endless gray cloud of his vision. But even that tiny slice of sight would fade soon unless he did something about it.
“Well,” Bill said at last. “Good. Good.”
Later, after the boys had eaten their fill of Octavia’s spicy pork scooped up with buttery corn bread, Memphis left for the Hotsy Totsy, to work for Papa Charles and meet up with that girl he was seeing, the girl he didn’t bring ’round to the house. “Don’t you worry. I’ll look after little man,” Bill assured Memphis on his way out. “I got the spoon handy in case he has one of his fits.”
“That happens, you send Brother Julius upstairs over to the club for me.”
“Of course,” Bill said, smiling.
Now Blind Bill sat on the settee with Isaiah listening to a radio show. The show was funny. Two bumbling men chasing after a goat they couldn’t seem to tie up. Isaiah laughed and laughed.
“Say, little man, you really go play ball this afternoon?” Bill asked when the announcer came on to praise the sponsor, the Parker Dental System—Don’t your teeth deserve the very best?
“Mm-hmm,” Isaiah said, but he sounded nervous. Memphis had surely warned his little brother not to say anything about where they’d been.
“I know you’re lying, Isaiah.”
Isaiah’s voice was small. “Memphis told me not to tell.”
“That so? Well, that ain’t fair he done that to you. Run off and made you be the liar to your old pal Bill. Ain’t right.”
“I’m not a liar,” Isaiah grumbled. There was guilt in it, though.
“Sure do hope Memphis ain’t gettin’ you mixed up in something bad.” Bill let that land. Then he shook his head slowly, like a disappointed father. “And here I thought we was friends. Good friends, too. But I guess if you don’t trust your uncle Bill, well…” Bill took his arm away. There was no greater bartering tool with a child than love or the threat of its absence.
“We saw Sister Walker!” Isaiah blurted.
There it was. The Walker woman. And if she was involved, it meant one thing: Diviners. Powers. She was working with them again.
“Don’t tell Auntie. Please.”
“No. I won’t. ’Course I won’t! Who’s your best friend in this world?”
“Memphis. And you.”
“Mm-hmm. It’s just… What that woman want with you?”
Another pause. Being blind had taught Bill to read silences. This one was big.
“Gonna work on my powers.”
Confirmation.
“Didn’t old Bill tell you the same thing? Wasn’t I working with you good?”
“Yes, sir. But…”
“But what?”
“She says it’s not just about me. We gotta keep the country safe.”
“Safe from what?”
“A big storm that’s coming.”
“Hmph. That what she said?”
“Uncle Bill, how come you don’t like Sister Walker?”
“I got my reasons,” Bill said. “Listen, don’t you worry none. You keep telling old Bill everything that happens with Sister Walker, and I promise I won’t let nothing bad happen to you. We got us a deal?”
“Deal.”
“And you don’t hafta tell Memphis one word ’bout our deal, neither. He don’t need to know.”
The boy leaned into Bill as if he were his father. Bill wrapped his long arm around the boy and held him tight like the son he might’ve had, the son he never would have thanks to people like Margaret Andrews Walker. This time he’d beat her at whatever game she was playing.
Bill let the power trickle down from his shoulder to his fingers and into Isaiah, connecting them. The warm coin taste was strong on the back of Bill’s tongue as he sucked energy from the boy. Just enough to bring on one of the boy’s fits. Already, he could feel the faint traces of Memphis’s week-old healing power flowing into him and thinning the gray cloud of his vision as Isaiah convulsed on the family sofa. To see a little better for a day or three was worth it. Wasn’t it? And anyway, it wasn’t Bill’s fault. This was Memphis’s doing. The boy had lied to him all this time, said he still couldn’t heal when Bill knew for a fact he’d gone and healed that old, no-good drunk. And if he could do that, there was no reason he couldn’t heal Bill’s blindness.
What a man couldn’t get through asking, he would take in whatever fashion he needed.
“There, there,” Bill said, turning Isaiah on his side as the boy’s fit subsided. “It’s all gonna be all right.”
Bill shuffled to the door, which he could see as a faint outline now that the fumes of Memphis’s healing flowed through him. He stuck his head out and shouted up the stairs, “Brother Julius! Brother Julius! Come quick! The boy had another one a’ his fits! You better run for Memphis now. Hurry!”
Then Bill sat on the couch, the fallen Isaiah in his arms, and waited.