Gladys blushed and smiled at me. Annadel spooned more soup into my bowl.

“Speaking of that,” she said to me, “aint you freezing to death in that tent by yourself?”

“Hit gits right cold,” I admitted.

“Why dont you move in with us?”

“No, with me!” Gladys cried. “I git so lonesome in that big house. We can talk about our men.”

“Albion dont want me to put myself above the others,” I said.

“Now aint that silly?” Annadel said. “And you a-sitting up all hours nursing the sick. You’ll do poorly yourself and then you wont be worth nary a thing to nobody. You look right peaked as it is.”

I wasn’t hard to convince. The first night at Gladys’s house, I took a hot bath. The enormous tub rested on four porcelain lions’ paws. I stretched out full length in the hot water, pretended I was an Egyptian princess borne upon a chaise, and fell asleep.

Ermel Justice traveled to the county seat each day to check on Isom and Albion. Albion’s face was bruised, he said, but they were fine otherwise. They would be out any day.

I was reassured but I couldn’t rest easy until Albion was back. I feared that his very gentleness would be an affront to the guards, that they would take pleasure in abusing him. He was content to let God protect him. But sometimes I thought it was a point of honor with God to abandon the faithful ones.

Dr. Booker came home first, but only briefly. He was not a miner and, in the eyes of the state police, only a Negro who took up space in the jail. They ordered him to pack and leave Justice County or he would be sent to the penitentiary. I found him in his office, packing his medical books in a green suitcase.

“Child, I hate to leave you with all this,” he said.

“I’ll manage. I learnt a lot from you.”

“You put these medicines in boxes and git somebody to help carry them down to the camp.” He lifted his framed diploma off its hook, studied it with his forehead furrowed. “Howard University. I went to Howard all the way from Greenwood, Mississippi, where the delta start. I ever tell you about that?”

“No,” I said.

“Had a uncle lynch in Leflore County. After that, I couldnt git away fast enough. Couldnt git far enough away from that place so I went all the way to Washington, D.C., and worked my way through Howard. That’s where I heard about West Virginia. You know how this here state was started? It seceded from Virginia when Virginia joined the Confederacy. West Virginia didnt want to be no slave state. I heard that and I liked it. And I heard tell a Negro could vote in West Virginia, and they was lots of Negroes needed a doctor around these mines. So I come.”

He sat on a white chair beside the examining table.