The Diviners Read Online Free PDF Page A

That’s part of what made the game so exciting—all those possibilities.
    “What about an eye with a lightning bolt underneath?” Memphis asked.
    Mrs. Jordan paused, the hot comb still in her customer’s hair. “I don’t rightly know. But somebody else might could tell you. Why you ask, honey?”
    Memphis realized he was frowning. He relaxed again into that charming smile people had come to expect from him. “Oh, just something I saw in a dream is all.”
    The customer in the chair bristled. “Ow! Fifi, you about to burn my scalp off with that hot comb!”
    “I am not! You’re just too tender-headed is your trouble.”
    “Good day to you, ladies. I hope your number comes in,” Memphis said and beat a hasty retreat.
    Above Harlem, the morning’s gray clouds frayed into thin wisps, revealing a perfect blue sky as Memphis passed the Lenox Drugstore, where he and his little brother, Isaiah, liked to stop in for hamburgers and talk with the owner, Mr. Reggie. He crossed the street to avoid the Merrick Funeral Home, but he could not sweep away the memory. It crept up from deep inside, still with the power to squeeze the breath out of him:
    His mother lying up front in the open casket covered with lily of the valley, her hands crossed over her chest. Isaiah asking, “When Mama’s gonna wake up, Memphis? She’s missing the party, and all these people here to see her, too.” His father sitting on the cane-back chair, staring down into his big, trumpet-playing hands while mourners cried and hollered and somebody sang, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The feel of the dirt in Memphis’s fingers as he dropped clods of it onto the grave. The soft
thud
as it hit the top of the coffin, the finality of the sound. He remembered his father packing up their apartment off 145th Street and sending Memphis and Isaiah to share the cramped back room of Aunt Octavia’s place a few blocks farther uptown while he went off to Chicago to look for work. He’d promised to send for them when he was settled. That had been two years, ten months, and fifteen days ago, and they were still sharing the back room at Octavia’s.
    Memphis swiped a milk bottle from a stoop and took a big swig, as if he could chase away the past. His skin itched with restlessness, a feeling that the world was about to be ripped wide open. And he was sure it had to do with the dream.
    For two weeks running, it had been the same: The crossroads. The crow flying to him from the field. The darkening sky, and the dust clouds rising on the road just ahead of whatever was coming.And the symbol—always the symbol. It was getting to where he was afraid to sleep.
    A phrase came to him quickly. Memphis knew that if he didn’t write it down, it would be gone later, when he was ready to write. So he stopped and jotted this new bit of poetry in his head onto two blank numbers slips, then shoved them into a different pocket. Later, when he could head up to the graveyard, where he liked to write, he’d copy them into the brown leather notebook that held his poems and stories.
    Memphis turned the corner. Blind Bill Johnson sat on a stoop with his guitar. His upturned hat lay at his feet, a collection of small change scattered across the hat’s worn lining. “
Met a man on a dark road, he had a mark upon his hand
,” the bluesman sang in his gravelly whisper of a voice.
“Met a man on a dark road, he had a mark upon his hand. Said the storm’s a-comin’, rain down hard upon the land.”
As Memphis passed, Blind Bill called, “Mr. Campbell! Mr. Campbell! ’Zat you?”
    “Yes, sir. How’d you know?”
    The old man wrinkled up his nose. “Floyd’s good with the scissors, but that oil he use could wake a dead man.” He broke into a hard, raspy laugh. His fingers sought the collection of change in the hat, touching each coin until he had two dimes. “Put twenty cents on my number, Mr. Campbell. One, seven, nine. Go on now, and put that in. Put it in for old Blind Bill,”