“That’s enough, Libertie.”

She stood up and stood over Mr. Ben. On her face now was a familiar expression, one I had seen often enough in the examination room, and when I accompanied her on her house calls.

When Mama was diagnosing someone, when she was calculating how best to heal them, she got this look. Her eyes emptied out and turned dark, and her brow went completely smooth, and she stared for a good three or four minutes. She did not respond to anything—not a patient’s babbling, not the sound of the wind at the door, not the distraught mother saying, “Please, please, please,” not the cries of the baby who was too young to understand the failings of its own small body. Certainly not to me, the girl at her side holding her bag, watching her disappear from me and go deep into her mind, where the right answer nearly always was. She’d leave me behind, leave us all behind, to commune with the perfection of her intellect. And when she returned, it was with a resolve that was almost frightening to see.

It was sad and cold to be outside her caring. It had scared me as a smaller child, made me cry.

As consolation, Mama had explained that one day I would join her when she left for her mind like that, that one day I would be a doctor, too, standing beside her, both our minds flying free while our bodies did the work. And we’d have a horse and carriage, and a sign with gold letters on it that said dr. sampson and daughter. “Wouldn’t that be nice, Libertie?” she’d said.

And that had been a kind of hollow comfort when she left me behind for her calculations.

Mr. Ben was watching her now. “It feels like I’m dying. Am I gonna die?”

Mama’s eyes filled up again, and she was back. “Not yet,” she said.

He propped himself up on his elbows. “This the worst pain I ever felt. I was whupped till my back was ribbons when I was a younger man, and I thought that was dying, but this is different. It feels like there’s a hole in me, in the very center of me, and the wind’s running through it.”

Mama sat back. “That’s a problem of the spirit.”

“So medicine women are supposed to fix that.”

“I’m a trained doctor,” Mama said, straightening up. “I fix the body. The spirit can tell me what’s wrong with the body sometimes. But what you are describing—you can talk to Reverend Harland at the church about the spirit.”

“Seems you should be able to do it all.”

I did not think, then, that Mama was even listening. If she had heard it, I was sure she had discounted it, because all she said was, “You will stay here to rest.”

The next morning, it took Mama and Madame Elizabeth and Lucien, struggling, to lift the empty coffin back onto the wagon bed it was so unwieldly. Finally, they slid it home.