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messages to the contrary. Prayer is mysterious, and God is even worse. I don’t completely understand it yet.
    L ater—when I got frightened in bed and I guess cried a little because Papa’s eyes were like mustard and ketchup and his teeth were all rotten and screwed up and then I woke up and Irwin’s bed was empty and I could hear the darkness breathing so I called and called and for the longest time nobody answered—Papa finally came plodding up the stairs three-fourths asleep, and laid down beside me, which he hadn’t done in so long I could barely remember. He didn’t get in my bed. Mumbling something about wiggleworms, he pushed Irwin’s bed against mine, flopped down on top of it, folded his arms behind his head, shut his eyes, and said, “Don’t you worry, Kade. I called Uncle Marv and Aunt Mary Jane’s. And Mama’s fine. She’s just gonna spend a little time up there.”
    I nodded, but felt confused. I hadn’t been worried about Mama. I’d forgotten all about her. So was
he
worried? “What you and I need,” he said, “is a song.”
    Before I could even agree he started singing a cowboy tune called Cool Clear Water in a voice so low and soothing that before it ended I was digging my thumbnail into my forehead—which is a trick Peter taught me to keep from falling asleep in church—because I was afraid if I dozed off, Papa would stop singing and leave. But Papa’s is a voice, once it’s warmed up, that carries you with it whether you want to go or not, and by the time Cool Water ended and The Old Man Is A-Waitin’ For to Carry You to Freedom began, my forehead, thumbnail, brain and thoughts were all smooshed together down into the pillow.
    Follow! Follow, follow
, he sang,
Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd …
    It was a song the slaves had sung to the Big Dipper, Papa once told me, back when they were lost in the woods trying to run away North. They called it the Drinkin’ Gourd, he said, because they used gourds for dippers, because the poor don’t buy what they can grow. But the mystery of the song to me was who this “Old Man” was who was waiting for to carry them to freedom. When I’d asked around, Irwin thought it was Abe Lincoln, Peter guessed it might be Jesus, and Everett and Mama figured it was God since they called him “Old Man.” But Papa told me that really no Old Man carried the slaves to freedom. He said they’d walked the whole way themselves, and carried each other, and that most of their offspring were having to walk and carry each other still. I’m not sure what he meant by all that. But I do know that once, just last winter, after a strike shut down the mill and Papa got into serious trouble with his union for not picketing, because he was out moonlighting for a carpenter, because we were out of money and almost out of food, a guy named Theodore Bikel came on the car radio and sang this very song, and Papa got serious and sad as I’ve ever seen him, and said the song was about us now too. A
white mill nigger
, he called himself, and Mama didn’t even shush him. “Except,” he said, “there’s no North for us to run to.”
    But now he sang it like last winter never happened, and as his voice dipped low for another
Follow, follow
the people in the song appeared to me—a whole band of them, dressed all ragtag, carrying babies and bundles, hunched low in the starlight as they moved across a field of corn stubble toward a black wall of trees. Knowing they were dream-people and that I’d fall asleep if I kept watching, I tried to make them enter the trees and disappear. But they were still in the open when I heard Papa singing
How can there be a cherry that has no stone?
, which was a whole ’nother song. And even in the wrong song the ragtag people kept moving north through the corn stubble, and when they did reach the wall of trees, instead of vanishing they signaled me to come on in with them. SoI did. I stepped right into the trees. And even in the dark we saw that