The Diviners

He was startled from his concentration by the cawing of a crow perched on a headstone nearby. Memphis’s mother had told him that birds were heralds. Warnings. It was silly, of course—nothing more than some leftover African superstition. Birds were just birds. He was reminded for just a moment of the crows in his dream, but the thought was fleeting. The hour was late and Memphis’s eyes burned with exhaustion. There would be no more words tonight. He blew out the lantern, bundled everything into his knapsack, and headed down the empty street with its lonely gas lamp. The moon sat full and gold above the ruin of the old house on the hill, the former Knowles mansion, now dwarfed by the rows of apartment buildings in the distance. No one had lived there in all the time Memphis had been going to the graveyard. The house gave Memphis the creeps, and he usually walked down the center of the street, far from it.

Cold light washed over the boarded-up windows and refuse-strewn lawn. It pooled on the marble limbs of a broken angel statue and made the dead trees seem alive. Memphis glanced quickly at the house and stopped. From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw movement. Something about the house was different, though he couldn’t say what.

The bothersome crow flitted past, making Memphis jump, and he hurried on his way. Once back on the crowded streets of Harlem, Memphis shook his head and laughed softly at his skittishness. He took comfort in the neon signs, the wild strands of jazz creeping out of clubs whenever happy swells of people pushed through the doors in their finery. Blind Bill Johnson shuffled up the street, his cane testing the path ahead of him. Memphis didn’t feel like talking to the old man, so he dodged down a side street and raced on. It felt good to run in the warm September night. He had his notebook of poems, his books, and a pocket full of money. What was there to be worried about? It was time to stop worrying and get on with living. With his world slung on his back, Memphis walked the rest of the way back to Harlem. He passed the brownstones of Sugar Hill, peering from afar into the warm amber light of windows and lives he hoped would someday be his, and headed for home.

His brother, Isaiah, was asleep in the narrow bed by the window in the back room. Memphis took off his shoes, undressed, and slipped into his own bed as quietly as possible. Isaiah sat up and Memphis held his breath, hoping his brother would roll over and fall back to sleep. He hoped he hadn’t woken him.

Isaiah sat very still, staring into the dark. “I am the dragon. The beast of old,” he said.

Memphis raised himself onto his elbows. “Ice Man? You all right?”

Isaiah didn’t move. “I stand at the door and knock.”

A few seconds later, he fell back on the pillow, fast asleep. Memphis felt his brother’s forehead, but it was cool. Nightmare, he guessed. Memphis sure knew about those. He rolled onto his side and let his body go limp. His eyelids grew heavy and sleep overtook him.

In the dream, Memphis stood on a dusty road bordered by cornfields. Overhead, the clouds tangled into dark, angry clumps. In the distance sat a farmhouse, a red barn, and a gnarled tree stripped of leaves. A crow cawed from a mailbox on a wooden post. The crow flew to the fields and perched on the shoulder of a tall man in a funny hat. His skin was as gray as the sky, his eyes black and shining. The half moons of his nails were caked with dirt, and every finger wore a ring. “The time is now,” the man said, though Memphis did not see his lips move.

The dream shifted. Memphis stood in a long corridor. At the end was a metal door, and on the door was the symbol: the eye surrounded by the sun’s rays, a lightning bolt directly beneath it like a long zigzag of a tear. He heard the soft flutter of wings, and then he was lost in heavy fog, and his mother’s voice called to him: “Oh, my son, my son…”

Memphis was not aware of the tears damp on his own cheeks. He moaned softly in his sleep, rolled over, and was lost to a different dream, of pretty chorus girls waving fans of feathers who blew sweet kisses and promised him the world.

EVIE’S DREAM

Evie’s dream began as it often did, with fog and the snow and the forest. James stood on the edge of the wood in his crisp khaki uniform, pale and grim. Evie’s lips formed his name in her sleep, but inside the dream, there was no sound. With one arm, James motioned to her to follow.

The trees grew sparser as they came to a small clearing filled with soldiers. A boy in sergeant’s stripes began shouting orders, and the camp blurred with sudden movement—cigarettes tamped under boots, tin coffee mugs abandoned, gas masks donned, positions taken, every man alert and waiting. Dark clouds swirled overhead. Flashes of lightning broke the gloom like a charge—one, two, three! Someone was pulling her down into a deep trench, and Evie slid along the earthen, tomblike walls, hiding from an enemy she could not see. There was a haunting silence, like the world holding its breath, and then Evie watched in awe as a fierce wave of bruising light spread across the sky, followed seconds later by a violent force that knocked her to the ground like the punch of an invisible giant.