Was freedom worth it if you still ached like that? If you were still bound on this Earth by desire?

It was a blasphemous thing to think, and I could not speak it to anyone, except to the plants in Mama’s garden. I whispered it into the open blossoms’ faces in the mornings, and then I carefully ran my thumb over each velvety petal. I knew my words were poison, and I was certain they could kill whatever good lived there.

Who was the woman Ben Daisy loved enough to die for? I looked for her where we’d all last seen her—in the water. I looked at the bottom of our well, in the muddy pools that collected in the ditches by the path to downtown. I looked for her in the pond, just past our settlement, where we took our laundry to wash. I looked for her in the wetlands, where the turtles and frogs and dragonflies swept through, where the men sometimes fished on Saturday afternoons. I stood, the tongues of my leather boots stiffening with mud, my feet sinking into the ground, and breathed in that murky smell of lake beds, and knew, in an instant, she wasn’t there. Despite what Ben Daisy had said about her love of cakes and sugar, I did not think a woman who could drown a man in her arms lived in anything as sweet as fresh water. Her domain was brackish. She would live in salt.

The few times we went close to the waterfront, when Mama had to travel downtown and take the cart, I would lift my head to try and catch the smell of it over all the other scents—the rotted fruit in the gutters, the sweet blossoms of the trees planted in front of the nicer houses, the warm breath of horse manure, the sweat of all the bodies teeming around us. At the very top, maybe, when the wind was right, I could smell that other woman’s home. Mostly, though, I listened.

If you listen closely, water, when it laps against the sides of a bucket, when it mouths a riverbed, sounds like hands clapping. It sounds like a congregation when prayers are done. But what is its message? It is not deliverance, I don’t think. It is not salvation. It is something just underneath that, something that even Mama couldn’t reach with her mind. So what hope was there for me of finding it?

A few times, riding beside her in our cart or walking beside her through our town, the rhymes I’d started myself about women and water ringing in our ears, I asked Mama, “Is the woman in the water real?” but she would only say, “I’ve taught you too well to fall for nonsense.” It was a flash of her old assurance, which had gone somewhere underground, inside her, after Ben Daisy was gone.