Another week passed. It was a too-warm spring that year. So hot we wished for the cold and gray of March. Our settlement was in a valley, not the fine, cooler tracts of land that the white people had reserved for themselves, and so it was always warmer in our town, we imagined, than elsewhere. Culver’s shop was even busier, with its pump out back, where we children liked to play at catching the final dribbles of cool, rusty water to rub on our tongues and splash behind our necks.

Mr. Ben liked the pump, too. He liked to sit out there, as the sun went down, before heading into Culver’s back room. By the pump, he was always mumbling that name, Daisy, turning it over and over in his mouth, a kind of lullaby he said to soothe himself, to encourage him to keep lifting one foot in front of another, without his woman by his side.

The boldest children used her name to rechristen him. I took this as a sign of hope—you knew a newcomer belonged to the town when they got a nickname. The children called the new name after him at dawn, as he made his way to the wharves downtown, as he left all of us at Culver’s. They called it to him as he stood on Front Street, palming a penny before passing it to the woman with a rush basket full of eels and taking the slinking black coil down beneath the wharves, to cook over an open fire, because, as he loudly cried to anyone who would listen, he had no Daisy to cook it for him. They called it to him as he emerged from under the docks in the dusk, to venture out along the board, and look out across the angry gray river to Manhattan and softly whisper to his love across the stinking, cold, and unforgiving waves.

So by the time his sister Hannah came at the end of May, no one bothered to call him Mr. Ben anymore. Everyone called him Ben Daisy.

Miss Hannah came to us in the same coffin Ben Daisy did. The first time I saw her was when Lucien and Madame Elizabeth performed the same sleight of hand they had with him—set down the coffin, pried off the lid. But instead of a lifeless body, there was Miss Hannah, eyes shining bright, looking avidly up at us, her hands clutching a small, irregular yarn handkerchief to her chest. She sat up in the light immediately, put her free hand to her back and winced, and stretched out her other hand to Madame Elizabeth, handing her the piece of cloth.

“How I passed the time on the journey,” she said. “Took a line of yarn with me and weaved it the whole way.”

Mama looked very pleased at that, and Madame Elizabeth beamed. Miss Hannah was a steadier hand than Ben Daisy could ever hope to be.