Calvin wept. “I can’t do nothing!”

“Wake up!” Margaret shouted at him. “I need you to be a man, for once! This isn’t about you, this isn’t about Alvin, it’s about doing the decent thing for people who need you.”

Some of what she was saying finally penetrated Calvin’s hazy mind. “Yes,” he said. “Tell me what to do.”

“Something to take their minds off their anger,” she said. “What we need is a heavy storm. Wind and rain. Lightning!”

“I can’t do lightning.”

“How do you know you can’t?”

“Cause I grew up trying.” He looked down at his hand. The bare bone of one finger was exposed. “Margaret, what’s happening to me!”

“You were too long out of your body,” she said. “Alvin’s hurrying here to save you.”

“He don’t want to help me, he wants me dead!”

“Stop thinking about yourself, Calvin!” she said sternly. “I need something that feels like a force of nature.”

“I can do fires. I can set the city on fire.”

As he spoke, a couple of tiny flames danced around on the floor beside him.

“No!” cried Margaret. “Good heavens, are you insane? The slaves will be blamed for setting the fires, it would make everything even worse! Not fire.”

“I don’t know how anything works,” Calvin said. “Not deep enough to change it. Alvin tried to teach me but all I wanted was the showy stuff.” He wept again. Margaret had to seize his wrists to keep him from rubbing the skin off his face.

“Get control of yourself,” she said. She turned helplessly to Gullah Joe. “Isn’t there something—”

Gullah Joe laughed madly. “I tell you! No good this way! Zombi no good! All he think be, I so dead! He be sad, all sad, him.”

“What about the water?” she asked Calvin. “I know you and Alvin played with water, he told me. Making it splash without throwing in a stone—that’s a game you played. Remember?”

“Big splash,” he said.

“Yes, that’s right. Make it splash out there. In the river, really big splashes. Slosh the water up on the shore. Make it flood.”

“All we did was little splashes,” said Calvin.

“Well this time do a big one!” Margaret shouted, her patience wearing thin. If, in fact, she had any patience left at all.

“I’ll try, I’ll try, I’ll try.” He cried again.

“Stop that! Just do it!”

She felt someone kneel down beside her. Fishy? No, Denmark’s wife. She had a damp cloth. Gently she pressed it against Calvin’s forehead. Then his cheek. She mumbled something unintelligible, but the music of it was calm and comforting. Calvin closed his eyes and began trying to make the water in the river splash.

Margaret also closed her eyes and cast about for heartfires near the river. She skipped from one to another, up and down the shore, on the north side of the peninsula and the south. No one was looking toward the water. They were all watching inland, fearful of the howling from the slaves.