“How soon will she die?” Papa asked. “By morning?”

  “She’ll be dead before sunrise, Papa.”

  Papa nodded. “Then I better get busy. The girl I can take care of. You women can think of something to do with that pickaninny, I hope.”

  “Oh, we can, can we?” said Mama.

  “Well I know I can’t, so you’d better.”

  “Well then maybe I’ll just tell folks it’s my own babe.”

  Papa didn’t get mad. Just grinned, he did, and said, “Folks ain’t going to believe that even if you dip that boy in cream three times a day.”

  He went outside and got Po Doggly to help him dig a grave.

  “Passing this baby off as born around here ain’t such a bad idea,” said Mama. “That Black family that lives down in that boggy land—you remember two years back when some slaveowner tried to prove he used to own them? What’s their name, Peggy?”

  Peggy knew them far better than any other White folks in Hatrack River did; she watched over them the same as everyone else, knew all their children, knew all their names. “They call their name Berry,” she said. “Like a noble house, they just keep that family name no matter what job each one of them does.”

  “Why couldn’t we pass this baby off as theirs?”

  “They’re poor, Mama,” said Peggy. “They can’t feed another mouth.”

  “We could help with that,” said Mama. “We have extra.”

  “Just think a minute, Mama, how that’d look. Suddenly the Berrys get them a light-colored baby like this, you know he’s half-white just to look at him. And then Horace Guester starts bringing gifts down to the Berry house.”

  Mama’s face went red. “What do you know about such things?” she demanded.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mama, I’m a torch. And you know people would start to talk, you know they would.”

  Mama looked at the Black girl lying there. “You got us into a whole lot of trouble, little girl.”

  The baby started fussing.

  Mama stood up and walked to the window, as if she could see out into the night and find some answer writ on the sky. Then, abruptly, she headed for the door, opened it.

  “Mama,” said Peggy.

  “There’s more than one way to pluck a goose,” said Mama.

  Peggy saw what Mama had thought of. If they couldn’t take the baby down to the Berry place, they could maybe keep the baby here at the roadhouse and say they were taking care of it for the Berrys cause they were so poor. As long as the Berry family went along with the tale, it would account for a half-Black baby showing up one day. And nobody’d think the baby was Horace’s bastard—not if his wife brought it right into the house.

  “You realize what you’re asking them, don’t you?” said Peggy. “Everybody’s going to think somebody else has been plowing with Mr. Berry’s heifer.”

  Mama looked so surprised Peggy almost laughed out loud. “I didn’t think Blacks cared about such things,” she said.

  Peggy shook her head. “Mama, the Berrys are just about the best Christians in Hatrack River. They have to be, to keep forgiving the way White folks treat them and their children.”

  Mama closed the door again and stood inside, leaning on it. “How do folks treat their children?”

  It was a pertinent question, Peggy knew, and Mama had thought of it only just in time. It was one thing to look at that scrawny fussing little Black baby and say, I’m going to take care of this child and save his life. It was something else again to think of him being five and seven and ten and seventeen years old, a young buck living right there in the house.

  “I don’t think you have to fret about that,” said Little Peggy, “not half so much as how you plan to treat this boy. Do you plan to raise him up to be your servant, a lowborn child in your big fine house? If that’s so, then this girl died for nothing, she might as well have let them sell him south.”

  “I never hankered for no slave,” said Mama. “Don’t you go saying that I did.”

  “Well, what then? Are you going to treat him as your own son, and stand with him against all comers, the way you would if you’d ever borne a son of your own?”

  Peggy watched as Mama thought of that, and suddenly she saw all kinds of new paths open up in Mama’s heartfire. A son—that’s what this half-White boy could be. And if folks around here looked cross-eyed at him on account of him not being all White, they’d have to reckon with Margaret Guester, they would, and it’d be a fearsome day for them, they’d have no terror at the thought of hell, not after what she’d put them through.

  Mama hadn’t felt such a powerful grim determination in all the years Peggy’d been looking into her heart. It was one of those times when somebody’s whole future changed right before her eyes. All the old paths had been pretty much the same; Mama had no choices that would change her life. But now, this dying girl had brought a transformation. Now there were hundreds of new paths open, and all of them had a little boy-child in them, needing her the way her daughter’d never needed her. Set upon by strangers, cruelly treated by the boys of the town, he’d come to her again and again for protection, for teaching, for toughening, the kind of thing that Peggy’d never done.

  That’s why I disappointed you, wasn’t it, Mama? Cause I knew too much, too young. You wanted me to come to you in my confusion, with my questions. But I never had no questions, Mama, cause I knew from childhood up. I knew what it meant to be a woman from the memories in your own head. I knew about married love without you telling me. I never had a tearful night pressed up against your shoulder, crying cause some boy I longed for wouldn’t look at me; I never longed for any boy around here. I never did a thing you dreamed your little girl would do, cause I had a torch’s knack, and I knew everything and needed nothing that you wanted to give me.

  But this half-Black boy, he’ll need you no matter what his knack might be. I see down all those paths, that if you take him in, if you raise him up, he’ll be more son to you than I ever was your daughter, though your blood is half of mine.

  “Daughter,” said Mama, “if I go through this door, will it turn out well for the boy? And for us, too?”

  “Are you asking me to See for you, Mama?”

  “I am, Little Peggy, and I never asked for that before, never on my own behalf.”

  “Then I’ll tell you. If you take him in, and treat him like your own son, you’ll never regret doing it.”

  “What about your papa? Will he treat him right?”

  “Don’t you know your own husband?” asked Peggy.

  Mama walked a step toward her, her hand all clenched up even though she never laid a hand on Peggy. “Don’t get fresh with me,” she said.

  “I’m talking the way I talk when I See,” said Peggy. “You come to me as a torch, I talk as a torch to you.”

  “Then say what you have to say.”

  “It’s easy enough. If you don’t know how your husband will treat this boy, you don’t know that man at all.”

  “So maybe I don’t,” said Mama. “Maybe I don’t know him at all. Or maybe I do, and I want you to tell me if I’m right.”

  “You’re right,” said Peggy. “He’ll treat him fair, and make him feel loved all the days of his life.”

  “But will he really love him?”

  There wasn’t no chance that Peggy’d answer that question. Love wasn’t even in the picture for Papa. He’d take care of the boy because he ought to, because he felt a bounden duty, but the boy’d never know the difference, it’d feel like love to him, and it’d be a lot more dependable than love ever was. But to explain that to Mama would mean telling her how Papa did so many things because he felt so bad about his ancient sins, and there’d never be a time in Mama’s life when she was ready to hear that tale.

  So Peggy just looked at Mama and answered her the way she answered other folks who pried too deep into things they didn’t really want to know. “That’s for him to answer,” Peggy said. “All you need to know is that the choice you already made in your heart is a good one. Already just deciding that has changed your life.”

  “But I haven’t even decided yet,” said Mama.

  In Mama’s heart there wasn’t a single path left, not a single one, in which she didn’t get the Berrys to say it was their boy, and leave him with her to raise.

  “Yes you have,” said Peggy. “And you’re glad of it.”

  Mama turned and left, closing the door gentle behind her, so as not to wake the traveling preacher who was sleeping in the room upstairs of the door.

  The Black girl was awake, her eyes open. The baby was still mewling. Without the girl saying a thing, Peggy knew she was willing for the babe to suckle, if she had anything in her breasts to suck on out. The girl hadn’t even strength to open up her faded cotton shirt. Peggy had to sit beside her cradling the child against her own thighs while she fumbled the girl’s buttons open with her free hand. The girl’s chest was so skinny, her ribs so stark and bare, that her breasts looked to be saddlebags tossed onto a rail fence. But the nipple still stood up for the baby to suck, and a white froth soon appeared around the baby’s lips, so there was something there, even now, even at the very end of his mama’s life.

  The girl was far too weak to talk, but she didn’t need to; Peggy heard what she wanted to say, and answered her. “My own mama’s going to keep your boy,” said Peggy. “And no wise is she going to let any man make a slave of him.”

  That was what the girl wanted most to hear—that and the sound of her greedy boy-baby slurping and humming and squealing at her breast.

  But Peggy wanted her to know more than that before she died. “Your boy-baby’s going to know about you,” she told the girl. “He’s going to hear how you gave your life so you could fly away and take him here to freedom. Don’t you think he’ll ever forget you, cause he won’t.”

  Then Peggy looked into the child’s heartfire, searched there for what he’d be. Oh, that was a painful thing, because the life of a half-White boy in a White town was hard no matter which of the paths of his life he chose. Still, she saw enough to know the nature of the babe whose fingers scratched and clutched at his mama’s naked chest. “And he’ll be a man worth dying for, too, I promise you that.”

  The girl was glad to hear it. It brought her peace enough that she could sleep again. After a time the babe, satisfied, also fell asleep. Peggy picked him up, wrapped him in a blanket, and laid him in the crook of his mama’s arm. Every last moment of your mama’s life you’ll be with her, she told the boychild silently. We’ll tell you that, too, that she held you in her arms when she died.

  When she died, Papa was out with Po Doggly, digging her grave; Mama was off at the Berrys, to persuade them to help her save the baby’s life and freedom; and here was Peggy, thinking as if the girl was already dead.

  But she wasn’t dead, not yet. And all of a sudden it came to Peggy, with a flash of anger that she was too stupid to think of it before, that there was one soul she knew of who had the knack in him to heal the sick. Hadn’t he knelt by Ta-Kumsaw at the battle of Detroit, that great Red man’s body riddled with bullet holes, hadn’t Alvin knelt there and healed him up? Alvin could save this girl, if he was here.

  She cast off in the darkness, searching for the heartfire that burned so bright, the heartfire she knew better than any in the world, better even than her own. And there he was, running in the darkness, traveling the way Red men did, like he was asleep, and the land around him was his soul. He was coming faster than any White could ever come, even with the fastest horse on the best road between the Wobbish and the Hatrack, but he wouldn’t be here till noon tomorrow, and by then this runaway slavegirl would be dead and in the ground up in the family graveyard. By twelve hours at most she’d miss the one man in this country who could have saved her life.

  Wasn’t that the way of it? Alvin could save her, but he’d never know she needed saving. While Peggy, who couldn’t do a thing, she knew all that was happening, knew all the things that might happen, knew the one thing that should happen if the world was good. It wasn’t good. It wouldn’t happen.

  What a terrible gift it was, to be a torch, to know all these things a-coming, and have so little power to change them. The only power she’d ever had was just the words of her mouth, telling folks, and even then she couldn’t be sure what they’d choose to do. Always there’d be some choice they could make that would set them down a path even worse than the one she wanted to save them from—and so many times in their wickedness or cantankerousness or just plain bad luck, they’d make that terrible choice and then things’d be worse for them than if Peggy’d just kept still and never said a thing. I wish I didn’t know. I wish I had some hope that Alvin would come in time. I wish I had some hope this girl would live. I wish that I could save her life myself.

  And then she thought of the many times she had saved a life. Alvin’s life, using Alvin’s caul. At that moment hope did spark up in her heart, for surely, just this once, she could use a bit of the last scrap of Alvin’s caul to save this girl, to restore her.

  Peggy leapt up and ran clumsily to the stairs, her legs so numb from sitting on the floor that she couldn’t hardly feel her own footsteps on the bare wood. She tripped on the stairs and made some noise, but none of the guests woke up as far as she noticed right off like that. Up the stairs, then up the attic ladderway that Oldpappy made into a proper stairway not three months afore he died. She threaded her way among the trunks and old furniture until she reached her room up against the west end of the house. Moonlight came in through her south-facing window, making a squared-off pattern on the floor. She pried up the floorboard and took the box from the place where she hid it whenever she left the room.

  She walked too heavy or this one guest slept too light, but as she came down the ladderway, there he stood, skinny white legs sticking out from under his longshirt, a-gazing down the stairs, then back toward his room, like as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to go in or out, up or down. Peggy looked into his heartfire, just to find out whether he’d been downstairs and seen the girl and her baby—if he had, then all their thought and caution had been in vain.

  But he hadn’t—it was still possible.

  “Why are you still dressed for going out?” he asked. “At this time of the morning, too?”

  She gently laid her finger against his lips. To silence him, or at least that’s how the gesture began. But she knew right away that she was the first woman ever to touch this man upon the face since his mama all those many years ago. She saw that in that moment his heart filled, not with lust, but with the vague longings of a lonely man. He was the minister who’d come day before yesterday morning, a traveling preacher—from Scotland, he said. She’d hardly paid him no mind, her being so preoccupied with knowing Alvin was on his way back. But now all that mattered was to send him back into his room, quick as could be, and she knew one sure way to do it. She put her hands on his shoulders, getting a strong grip behind his neck, and pulled him down to where she could kiss him fair on the lips. A good long buss, like he never had from a woman in all his days.

  Just like she expected, he was back into his room almost before she let go of him. She was halfway down the stairs when she heard the bar fall into place across the door. Peggy didn’t even have time to care whether she caused him undue misery. All she cared for now was to get the caul down to where she could use it to help the runaway, if by any chance Alvin’s power was really hers to use. So much time that minister had cost her. So many of the slavegirl’s precious breaths.

  She was still breathing, wasn’t she? Yes. No. The babe lay sleeping beside her, but her chest didn’t move even as much as him, her lips didn’t make even so much as a baby’s breath on Peggy’s hand. But her heartfire still burned! Peggy could see that plain enough, still burned bright because she was so strong-hearted, that slavegirl was. So Peggy opened up the box, took out the scrap of caul, and rubbed a dry corner of it to dust between her fingers, whispering to her, “Live, get strong.” She tried to do what Alvin did when he healed, the way he could feel the broken places in a person’s body, set them right. Hadn’t she watched him as he did it so many times before? But it was different, doing it herself. It was strange to her, she didn’t have the vision for it, and she could feel the life ebbing away from the girl’s body, the heart stilled, the lungs slack, the eyes open but unlighted, and at last the heartfire flashed like a shooting star, all sudden and bright, and it was gone.

  Too late. If I hadn’t stopped in the hall upstairs, hadn’t had to deal with the minister—

  But no, no, she couldn’t blame herself, it wasn’t her power anyway, it was too late before she began. The girl had been dying all through her body. Even Alvin himself, if he were here, even he couldn’t have done it. It was never more than a slim hope. Never even hope enough that she could see a single pathway where it worked. So she wouldn’t do like so many did, she wouldn’t endlessly blame herself when after all she’d done her best at a task that had little hope in it from the start.

  Now that the girl was dead, she couldn’t leave the baby there to feel his mama’s arm grow cold. She picked him up. He stirred, but slept on in the way that babies do. Your mama’s dead, little half-White boy, but you’ll have my mama, and my papa too. They got love enough for a little one; you won’t starve for it like some children I seen. So you make the best of it, boy-baby. Your mama died to bring you here—you make the best of it, and you’ll be something, right enough.

  You’ll be something, she heard herself whispering. You’ll be something, and so will I.

  She made her decision even before she realized there was even a decision to be made. She could feel her own future changing even though she couldn’t see rightly what it was going to be.

  That slavegirl had guessed at the likeliest future—you don’t have to be a torch to see some things plain. It was an ugly life ahead, losing her baby, living as a slave till the day she dropped. Yet she saw just the faintest glimmer of hope for her baby, and once she saw it, she didn’t hold back, no sir, that glimmer was worth paying her life for.