Read Online Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez - Free Book Online

woman. Her husband died in the war, I believe. If your wife is dead, least you’ll know.”
    Hemp was just as troubled by the reverend’s suggestion they convene with spirits as he was that it involved a white woman.
    â€œA time before, she sat right there in that back room and talked to us. Five colored folks paid good money to hear about their dead family.”
    â€œYou think my Annie dead?”
    â€œI ain’t got the faintest idea, son. I wish I could tell you.”
    â€œWhat if she ain’t. You reckon that widow can tell me where to find her?”
    â€œAin’t you tried everything else? She might be your best chance.”
    Every day Hemp thought about the reverend’s proposition, and when he returned to the row of tenements in the evening, he thought even more about it. He had not met many possibilities in his lifetime and knew well enough that hope was a slippery fish. If Annie did contact him, she might not reveal much. The reverend said a spirit spoke through the widow. Annie had always been a woman with little to say, and Hemp did not know if she would trust a white woman medium. Surely Annie was the same dead as she had been alive.
    He saved his money and finally gave the reverend his consent. On the night of the sitting, Hemp combed his hair. He wanted to look presentable for his wife. The preacher had grouped the chairs into three lines of four with a single chair facing the others, but the room overflowed. They sat. They stood. They crouched and leaned, fretting, a keening in their backs. The faint stink of unwashed bodies hung over them, the men still in work clothes. Hemp’s palms were so moist, they left damp spots on the fronts of his trousers. More people packed into the room. They ranged in age, but their cumulative years added up to more than a sum. He sensed a weariness among them. It was a room of believers and disbelievers. Yet they were all part of the same small flock. Their emotions had been hutted inside of them for too long. A deacon lit four candles and set them on a table. Someone accidentally knocked the cross off the wall. They shifted, fanning themselves, and their lace-ups, high buttons, russet-colored brogans, still covered in the dirt of the roads they had walked that day, scratched the floor as they prepared to harvest their memories and lay them out in untidy rows before the widow.
    They all had names on their lips. Fanny. Jessie. Lydia. Herbert. Even the preacher claimed somebody on the other side. Behind Hemp, the grapevine worked:
    Rhoda in Mississippi?
    Naw. Harry on the Parker place down in Missouri?
    Naw. Eleanora in Tennessee?
    Eleanor or Eleanora, you say?
    The room quieted and they turned. The widow’s blue eyes did not appear to blink as she walked to the front. She looked much younger than Hemp had expected. A colored woman stood in the shadows against the wall, holding the widow’s shawl. Hemp thought she might be a ghost.
    The reverend moved her chair forward. “I appreciate you coming, Mrs. Walker.”
    The widow did not look at the people in the room. “The spirit comes and goes as it pleases,” she murmured. She had barely seated herself before she closed her eyes.
    Allow me to introduce myself. My name is James Heil and I was a soldier in the Fourth Illinois Cavalry of the United States Army. I died during a victorious battle at Shiloh led by General Grant, leaving behind all the sweet memories of my young life.
    There is a girl. I am not sure who she belongs to. She says her sister is here.
    A woman behind Hemp uttered, “Sweetness.”
    She says she hovers over you. She wants you to know she’s peaceful over there. There’s no pain or hunger. She’s happy.
    â€œThank you, oh thank you, Jesus.”
    There is a man.
    The room fell silent.
    He says to tell his brother he sits with the angels.
    Someone rocked in a chair. Its feet clicked on the wooden floor. The woman next to Hemp who had