A few days later, he saw me again on the road to Culver’s.
“Hey there, Black Gal.”
“Hey, yourself,” I said, wary. I could smell on him that he was unwell.
“I’ve heard,” he said, “you grow pansies nice.”
I paused. “I do.”
“I’ll give you a penny for five of them, for my Daisy.”
I knew I should not agree to give him anything for her. “But how are they going to stay fresh?” I asked.
“Won’t need to stay fresh long, because she’s here,” he said. But his voice was uncertain.
I felt a spasm of conscience. “I could,” I said carefully, “press them for you. If you’d like.”
“All right. But don’t cheat me, girl,” he said, smiling again.
“I can give them to you,” I said finally. “Find me after church.”
I did not tell my mother. By then, Miss Hannah had enlisted the reverend, and the three of them spent evenings talking about how best to fix his strange behavior. “Give it time,” Mama kept assuring. “It takes a while for the dose to even out.” She seemed to believe it, even though the reverend and Miss Hannah perhaps did not.
I do not know what I believed at that point. I thought my mother infallible. But I had also been up close to Ben Daisy, smelled the salt water of his breath and seen the dullness of his eyes. I trusted my mother, but I knew that Ben Daisy had no hope of becoming a steady man.
Still, I was a craven little thing. I wanted the penny he promised for myself. While I was tending the garden, I snipped off the heads of five pansies, big and wide. That was the least I could do for him—give him the hardiest ones. I dropped them into the pocket of my apron, and then, at night, when Mama was bent over her books, I bent over my own and placed each flower’s head between the pages of my ledger, right in the corner, up close to the spine. Then I shut the book and did not open it again until later that week, when they had dried and turned crisp and thin, their color only dimming slightly.
The Sunday morning I was to give them over to Mr. Ben, I wrapped them up in a piece of fine paper pinched from Mama’s writing desk.
Ben Daisy and I were to meet in the little copse by the graveyard. When I saw Mama and Lenore were caught up in the talk of the other women in the churchyard, I went closer to the trees, calling for him underneath my breath.
“Ben Daisy,” I hissed. I stepped past the stones of my father and Mama’s sister with no name, past where the land dipped and sank over their final resting place, into the cold shadow of the fir trees. “I have your pansies for you.”
There he was. I could see his back was straight. He was the sweetest I had ever smelled him. But when he turned to me, his face was broken. “Forget them.”
“But why?”
“She’s already here. Saw her last night. On her finger was three wedding bands—one, two, three—all real gold, too. I said, ‘What’s the meaning of this Daisy?’ And she only laughed.”
He began to cry, great shaking sobs, while I stood beside him with the dried flowers on their sheet of paper, wishing he would stop.
“She betrayed me,” he said. “She betrayed me all over again.”
“At least take your flowers, Mr. Ben,” I said. But he was sobbing so hard, his hands shaking, that he couldn’t hold them.
“Here.” I looked over at the crowd of parishioners. My mother stood in the middle, searching for me, I knew. “Kneel down.”
He sat at my feet while I peeled each papery flower off the page and stuck them, carefully, into the band of his hat.
The church bell rang. The crowd began to move into the chapel. I had to take my place at my mother’s side.
“Black Gal, your penny,” he called.
“You can keep it,” I said, and hurried toward the church.
I had expected him to follow me and join his sister in service, but he didn’t. As I rushed to the doors, I looked back to the graveyard. Ben sat on the ground in the green and brown, his head still low. As the door swung shut, I swore I saw, through a flash in the trees, the figure of a woman rushing toward him, the long trail of her pink silk skirt fluttering in her haste. The church door closed, I walked to my pew, and when I craned my head to try and see him out the window, no one was there. I thought it must have been a shadow, that my pity for Ben Daisy had led me to yearn to see what he did, to bring the dead woman back for him and me—as if that would have healed anything at all.
During the service, I kept seeing that penny in Ben Daisy’s hand, and I thought about the woman who he’d claimed had come to him at night, who wore the rings of other lovers on her fingers, who could not even manage to be faithful as a spirit. Was this what caring for another did? Resurrect them, even in death, to only become your worst fears? Did Ben Daisy suffer from too much care? Mama thought he did not have enough of it. But it seemed to me as though Ben Daisy had too much.
In the following weeks, he did not go to work with the other men anymore. He did not leave his bed in the room he shared with Miss Hannah. He even stopped saying that name. He became a ghost. When Mama tried to talk to Miss Hannah about it, she would only shake her head and say, “I don’t know, Miss Doctor,” before walking away.
One Saturday night, Pete Back Back came to Mama’s door. He would not sit in her big leather
