She told me to run to the houses of as many women as I could think of. To find as many of them as I could. I did. I ran down our dirt road and to the main drag, past the church. To Miss Annie, the schoolteacher, and to the choir director and her sister, Miss Nora and Miss Greene, and to Reverend Harland’s daughter, Miss Dinah, to the women who lived on the other side of the churchyard, and even to Miss Hannah. To her door I ran, and said, “Come with me, sister, if you can.”

I brought them all to the crossroads, where Mama and Lenore were waiting with the cart. Mama had her doctor’s bag, and Lenore had lined the cart bed with blankets. Together, we made the long trip to the waterfront. Mama had Miss Hannah sit with her on the driver’s bench. I walked steadily beside them, and I saw Mama, every so often, lean over and whisper in Miss Hannah’s ear that it would be all right. We all knew Miss Hannah hadn’t been downtown since Ben was lost, but she was determined now. Miss Hannah gripped Mama’s arm, and Mama said, “There will be so many of them. You’ll only have their want to think about.” Mama had Miss Hannah hold a blanket over her other arm, to keep her hands from shaking.

But when we got to the waterfront, the whole stretch was empty. There were no boats. “Where are they all?” Miss Dinah said, and only the waves slapping the bottom of the wharf answered her. By then, it was just after dawn. The water before us was first a long line of silver and then a sudden wall of cloud and fog. The smoke from all the fires the whites had set was rolling over to us, across that wide expanse of river, and it mixed with the muggy July dawn until one swirling mass of white and gray sat on top of the water.

I had never seen smoke mix with fog like that before, how it hovered like a curtain between this world and maybe the next, from light to dark, from heaven to hell, from sleep to consciousness. That was where the woman in the water lived even now—I knew it. I knew it in my bones. And I felt how foolishly I had spent the last year, looking for her in common well water, when she was here all along. While I stood with the women on the dock as they tried to see what was coming to them through the veil, I prayed to her, that woman,

Let ’em through, let ’em through, LET ’EM THROUGH.