“Steady, there, Libertie,” she said as she lifted my arm herself, so I could get the angle of the light right.

She settled down into the little chair and leaned forward. She took his ear in her hand, as gently as a lover, and stretched the lobe very carefully, so that she could see inside.

“And it’s so damn cold!” Ben Daisy said suddenly, rising up.

Mama sat back.

“So cold all the time. And my mouth, I tell you, it tastes like salt. Ever since yesterday. It just tastes like salt in my mouth. And Hannah, she says my breath stinks like the wharves. What do I care,” he said. “That sister of mine finds every way to tell me I’m wrong. But the foreman said it, too, this morning.”

He sat back down. As he spoke, indeed, a deeply salty smell filled the room. It was not necessarily unpleasant. Just very strong.

“I feel,” he said. “I feel …” He slumped back down. “I feel like I’m falling underwater.”

Mama lifted her chin. “Note that down, Libertie.” She was trying, very hard, to conceal her excitement.

“Well,” she said after a moment, “there is not much I can do for the smell of the breath. But chew these, twice a day.” She handed him a bundle of mint leaves. “And come back again next week—”

“Like hell I will,” Ben Daisy said.

“Just to talk,” Mama said quickly, and Ben Daisy grumbled and then moved toward the door.

Mama watched him go and then turned to me.

“Is he cured?” I asked. I was excited.

“We shall see,” she said. She was not going to play her hand.

All week long, I asked Mama if she thought Ben Daisy would come back to us, and she said, “It’s not for me to decide, Libertie. It’s up to him.” But I could see by Saturday she was as nervous as I was, even though she would not say it.

Sunday morning, we headed to church and walked past the stony-faced Miss Hannah to our pew, as always.

Reverend Harland began the sermon—about Belshazzar’s feast and the disembodied hand that had appeared to him and had begun to write on the wall the thoughts of God. Reverend Harland was talking about rulers dishonoring God and the calamity that would follow, but while he talked, I tried to think of that hand, floating in the air. Were its fingers long or stubby? Its palms jaundiced? What color was its skin—deep black or warm brown or the same pink as Mama’s cheeks? Did that hand also float above a pyramid, or in a distant desert, shimmering in the heat? And did Belshazzar, who saw the wonder, ever think in the moment of astonishment to keep the marvel to himself, to keep a secret, to not reveal it, to revel in the mystery of words untranslatable?