Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

suspected many of those men who’d died on the battlefields had not left the earth singing hymns.
    â€œI don’t know why you came to Chicago, but I suspect you ran away from something. I know you were free down there, but something happened, didn’t it?”
    Free freedom , Madge wanted to say.
    â€œYou and I have something in common.”
    The woman was crazy. They had nothing in common. Madge placed her beliefs beside the widow’s. To Madge, the spirits were in the flick of a flame. The ancestors inhabited whatever space they chose. The wrinkled bark of a tree. The bright anther of a flower. Core of a cabbage head. A baby’s wormy tongue. When a pig was slaughtered, every part from tail to snout was filled with spirit. The Lord King was inseparable from the spirit world. Why, the widow did not even pray! How could this woman talk to spirits without recognizing the holiness of everything, the carefully and ingeniously drawn earth? If the two were not one, then where did bowels-of-Christ leaves and Adam-and-Everoot come from? It was true that Madge believed in the widow’s abilities, fully believed, as only a fellow person who respected life’s mysteries could. What Madge did not agree with was the woman’s understanding of it.
    Madge wanted to turn and leave without answering. She didn’t trust Sadie with her hurt. That’s what the sisters had taught her, but alone in this new city, she did not know how she would keep it all bottled inside. She tried to think of what she could say that would make the widow understand.
    â€œYou ever wonder what heaven look like? You ever think it might be just ’round that corner only you can’t see it none ’cause your steps too short to make it that far?”
    â€œI’m afraid I’m not very religious,” answered Sadie. “I think heaven is right here in this room.”
    â€œIt ain’t what I was running from. It’s what I was running to. We all trying to get to the same place, Mrs. Walker.”
    â€œWhere’s that?”
    â€œBlessed deliverance.”
    Sadie thought of her mother. Perhaps that was what she had been looking for in that hospital.
    Madge paused. “Truth was, I didn’t have no freedom with them women.”
    â€œWhat women?”
    Madge rubbed her nose with her forearm, gesturing toward Sadie’s shoulder with the bowl as she turned to leave the room. “You best stay out tight dresses till that thang heal.”
    â€œY OU ’ VE GONE AND GOTTEN RICH , have you? Funny thing. I thought you worked here same as me.” Olga poked her head out of the back door, breathless. “She’s calling for you again.”
    Madge did not hurry as she rose from her sitting position on the back step and made her way up the stairs to the widow’s room. The boil had dried to a blemish, but the woman still insisted on a fresh poultice every other day.
    â€œWe can’t be long because I have people coming this afternoon.”
    Madge slid the dress down. The good news was that when there weren’t customers visiting the parlor, the widow let Madge be, preferring books over walking, talking company. On the second floor of the house a room was filled with them, the shelves packed with only the occasional slit of space like a missing tooth. Because she could not read, the room frightened Madge more than the darkened parlor ever had, and she imagined they contained a knowledge far more harmful than recipes for tonics and teas passed down through three reclusive sisters.
    But she had done as she was told, because although she had never worked in someone’s house, she found the work tolerable, relished the freedom allowed by the widow’s distraction, and on those evenings when there were no visitors scheduled, Madge ceased her chores, sat on the back step, and chewed tobacco, streaming brown juice into the grass.
    Every now and again, when the widow spoke at