“But you talked to them, Papa Grey. You talked good too.”
“But I could feel it, honey. It’s like black curtains comin’ down on me. Like a shroud.”
They reached across the table at the same time, entwining their fingers. Ptolemy smiled and Robyn understood him.
“Come on ovah to the closet, baby,” he said. “It’s time I gave you my treasure.”
In the night Coy came to him.
“You finally done did sumpin’, huh, boy? What took you so long?”
“I was scared,” a full-grown Ptolemy Grey said to the man Coy McCann.
“Scared? What you got to be scared about? Here you got a nice apartment, wit’ two girlfriends, money comin’ in every week, an’ a treasure too.”
“There’s blood on that gold, Coydog.”
“My blood. You know, for every grain of gold dust that make up that treasure a black mother have cried and a black son done shed sweat or blood, maybe even life itself. That man was a slave master, only he didn’t have to feed his slaves.”
“You stole,” Ptolemy said.
“An’ they stoled an’ they murdered. So who gonna be in front’a who on the line?”
Ptolemy smiled then. His fever was raging but he didn’t know it. He was with Coydog again, having a brand- new conversation like they did in the old days before fire and blood flooded the chambers of the child’s mind.
“You right, Coy,” he said in his delirium. “You sure is. I showed Robyn the treasure an’ told her what to do an’ how to do it. She gonna be your heir. She gonna take that gold an’ see my blood outta down here. They all gonna go to college or rest easy in they final days.”
Coy stood there for a long time at the foot of the bed. The sun was rising behind him, and Africa, from two thousand years before, loomed in those first rays of light.
Ptolemy remembered the stories Coy told him about Africa; about a land before the gods of the North descended; about kings and crazy men; about wars waged and done with and not a drop of blood drawn or even a bruise suffered by a single warrior.
How you know all that, Coy?” the boy, Li’l Pea, had asked. “You said that the white man’s history books lie about us all the time.”
“They do.”
“Then how you know about how it was before the white man? No niggah know all that.”
“Oh yeah, boy,” Coy McCann said. “We from there. Some of us remembah with our minds. But even more got them stories jammed up in they hearts an’ spirits. They tell white men’s stories but changes ’em. They talkin’ about things they know an’ don’t remembah. I listens an’ tease out the truth that lay underneath.”
Coy stood at the foot of the bed with the sun rising and the secret memory of Africa emerging out of memories that were forgotten but not lost.
Ptolemy began to fret that maybe he’d done something wrong. Maybe Coy didn’t want a woman to lay hold to his treasure. Maybe he had waited too long to take action. But after a long time, at least two days by Ptolemy’s reckoning, Coydog smiled, and then, a few hours later, he nodded . . .
A pain lanced through Ptolemy’s rib cage. It was like a spear that had entered by his left side and went out through the right. He sat up straight in his bed and yelled.
Robyn was sitting there, and next to her was a man who was holding a syringe, leaning over and frowning.
“Hello, Satan.”
“Good to see you, Mr. Grey,” Dr. Ruben said.
“Am I dead yet?”
“If it wasn’t for your niece you would have been. I’m surprised you’ve made it so long. I’m glad too.”
“You ain’t taken no money or nuthin’ from him, have you, girl?” Ptolemy asked.
“No, sir. Nuthin’.”
Ptolemy thought he could make out things crawling and bristling in the doctor’s great mustaches. Ruben’s eyes seemed to be blazing: yellowy-green flames on a brown sea.
“Lemme talk to this man alone a minute, will you, Robyn?”
“Yes, sir,” she said again, relief at his revival in her tone and her shoulders, and even in the way she stood.
She closed the door and the doctor pressed a thumb against Ptolemy’s wrist.
“You have the constitution of a man half your age,” he said.
“How long have I been in this bed?”
“Three days.” Ruben took out a little notebook and started writing. While he did this he continued to talk. “That niece of yours is something else. She went to Antoine Church with two men and they threatened him until he found a way to get in touch with me. I came as soon as she called. I thought you would die, I told her so. But I gave you this concentrated injection and you came to immediately. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“How long?”
“If you were anybody else I’d say two days. But at the outside it’s two weeks.”
