Memphis opened the book Mrs. Andrews had given him. Inside was a poem, “Harvest Song”: “I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown. All my oats are cradled. But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger.”
Memphis shut his eyes. Early that morning, the Diviners had answered a call from the caretaker at Green-Wood Cemetery out in Brooklyn who’d seen “a pack of bright, skulking terrors.” Terrors did skulk in the dark, and the caretaker was right to be afraid. They’d set off with their flashlights, jumping at every marble angel, every shadow that fell across a headstone. Berenice flitted above Memphis, hopping from tombstone to tombstone, squawking. “Shush, now, Berenice,” he’d tutted. But the bird wouldn’t be calmed. At one point, the crow tugged at his sleeve, as if urging him back. Memphis heard a sound and followed it to a crypt. There he’d come face-to-face with a wraith in tattered bedclothes hunched over the carcass of a mutilated, half-dead squirrel. The wraith’s mouth and jaw were smeared with the twitching animal’s blood. Those razor-sharp teeth gnawed at the poor squirrel’s tendons and bit through bone with a sickening crunch. The butchered bodies of two birds and a rat lay nearby, as if the thing ate blindly, never getting its fill. It was alone, though, separated from its hunting pack. So was Memphis. This one was beyond questioning and useless to them. Heart beating fast, Memphis backed away, cracking a twig underfoot. The creature’s head snapped up. Those white-marble eyes locked on Memphis’s and he froze. Nearby, the crow spread its wings as if it could shield Memphis from danger. The wraith let out a pitiful cry. It sounded confused, lost, perhaps lonely for its brethren, if one could call what it ran with any kind of brotherhood.
“Here, now. It’s all right,” Memphis said. He didn’t know why he’d said it. For those few seconds, Memphis had felt a strange connection to that lost, wretched creature trying to sate its longing. Pain did not end at the grave. Had this unfortunate thing once carried a beating heart inside? Had it walked the same streets as Memphis, shared the same dreams? Did it have a story?
The wraith had cocked its head as if trying to understand. Memphis could hear his friends calling his name as they came running. The thing in front of him growled and dropped into a defensive stance. It unhinged its jaw and hissed, showing its pointed, bloodied teeth matted with animal fur and muscle. Memphis had been trying to reason with it. But there was no reasoning with these filthy things. He needed to remember that. Ghosts had been people, Will had once told them. And people showed themselves for what they were eventually. Even people who said they loved you. Memphis understood that now.
“Now!” Sam called. The Diviners stood together, concentrating until their power multiplied. Memphis felt nothing but hatred as the ghost looked up for just a moment, a silent howl of betrayal on its pallid face just before they created the energy field and sent it into oblivion.
Afterward, once the fierce glow of ghost-banishing had faded—“I fear knowledge of my hunger”—Theta had put her hand on his arm. “That thing was so close! You copacetic?”
“Fine. I got to get Isaiah home before Octavia wakes up and finds us gone,” he said, and left her standing there in the cold of the graveyard.
“Why you mad at Theta?” Isaiah asked as Memphis tucked him in.
“Mind your own business,” Memphis said, and Isaiah had rolled over without a word. That was two people he’d hurt in one night. And he called himself a healer. He wasn’t anything. He was just existing. Memphis took off his shoes and socks. There were new sores on his ankles. He tried to ignore them and go to sleep.
The next night, in a corner of the Hotsy Totsy, Memphis opened his book and read: “I am a deaf man who strains to hear the calls of other harvesters whose throats are also dry.”
He watched the band going to town and the chorines cutting loose. On the dance floor, it was glorious, stomping mayhem. Memphis felt none of it. The music was hollow. The dancing was hollow. The smiles were hollow. He was hollow. A ghost among the living but no one noticed.
He thought again of the thing in the graveyard showing its teeth. And now he wondered—had it been promising to hurt him? Or had it been afraid of him? He didn’t know. He didn’t know if what they were doing to the ghosts was the right thing. And the doubt was beginning to eat away at him.
He woke in the night, thinking of Theta, remembering every good night they’d ever had. The way the brightness strafed the Palisades as the two of them sat with their arms wrapped around each other, watching the river from the lighthouse. The softness of her lips. The husky cackle of her laugh. The quiet huff of her breath against his neck when she fell asleep with her head on his shoulder. Gone. All gone. He tried to funnel the howl inside him into words. But there were limits to language. Sometimes, he stood among the tall stacks at the 135th Street library staring at the spines of all those books, all those people hungry to tell what they saw, what they felt, what they hoped other people also saw and felt. They wrote it all down so they wouldn’t disappear. So they wouldn’t disappear. A testimony: I was here. So many stories. Why did he think his would even matter?
He tucked away his notebook and didn’t look at it once.
Papa Charles came for him. Without a word, Memphis followed his boss to the back rooms of the Cotton Club, where Memphis healed up a couple of Owney’s thugs. And then he pocketed the money, though he’d long since forgotten what he was saving for. He spent too much money on a fine suit he didn’t wear but once. He bought a new leather glove for Isaiah. He stuffed rent money in Octavia’s fake sugar jar in the kitchen. At the club, there were drinks for the chorus girls who hugged his neck and told him he was “an angel.” When a dancer named Pauline kissed him and placed his hands on her hips, Memphis felt nothing. Hollow. Hollow. “My throat is dry. I hunger.”
“Sorry,” he told Pauline, and she cursed his name on the way out.
At the lighthouse, Memphis stood outside and tossed rocks into the Hudson, watching them sink. He’d known their love was bad odds. But wasn’t all love betting against the odds? He was the damned fool who’d gone and believed.
“I fear knowledge of my hunger.”
All of these thoughts weighed on Memphis as he walked up and down Madame Seraphina’s block, trying to work up the courage to ring her bell. When at last he did, she opened the basement door and smiled at him. The white turban she wore exposed the round, high-cheeked beauty of her face. The porch light made the apples of her cheeks shine as if polished.
“Come,” she said, and went inside.
Seraphina showed Memphis to her formal parlor, which had been painted a deep royal blue that made Memphis think of a sky just past sunset. She settled into the chair opposite his and crossed her long legs. “So. Here we are, you and I.”
“I’ve come about my mother. You said she came to see you before she passed. I want to know why,” Memphis explained.