hands in both explanation and invitation. “I’ve hired Mose and your brother to help with the work of the crusade, at least until we get you to Saint Louis. I’ll put them up with the others who do that for me. You and Emmy will stay with me at the Morrow House. We’ll tell everyone that you’re my nephew and Emmy is my niece. I’ve got a couple straw hats with big, wide brims I’ll give her. Much nicer than the seed cap, but they’ll still do a good job of hiding her face.”
“You know who she is? How?”
“Not important. What’s important is that we keep you safe and get you where you want to go. I can do that.”
“Like the trumpet player said, it could get you into trouble.”
“Sid’s a worrier. I’ve danced around trouble all my life.”
I glanced at Albert. “It’s really okay with you?”
Albert shrugged. “She convinced me.”
I looked at Mose, who grinned and signed, Donuts every day.
“What do you say, Odie?” Her face was serious, her voice deeply inviting. “Are you on board?”
I’d gobbled the last of my donut and was ready to swallow anything Sister Eve told me. “Heck, yes.”
“Do you want to wake up Emmy and ask her?”
Emmy lay curled on a blanket, still sound asleep. I shook her gently. She rolled onto her back and opened her eyes, just a whisper.
“You awake, Emmy?”
She made a sound, not much, but enough that I knew she could understand.
“It looks like we’re going to stay with Sister Eve for a while.”
She blinked up at me sleepily.
“I knew that,” she said, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I HADN’T TAKEN a shower since the day we left Lincoln School. Standing under a steady stream of clean hot water was like heaven. Sister Eve bought us new clothing and had our old things washed, and we settled into the life of a traveling Christian healing show.
Emmy and I were given a bedroom in the suite of rooms Sister Eve rented at the Morrow House. To keep folks from suspecting a connection with us, Albert and Mose waited another day at our camp on the river. When they joined the troupe, they were given cots in the tent the men shared. The women of the crusade occupied another tent. Everyone had at least one work assignment, but most juggled several jobs.
Mose was put in the kitchen tent, helping prepare the meals that followed each crusade service and also the meals that fed everyone who traveled with Sister Eve—there were nearly a dozen of them. The cook was a big man, bald as an ice cube, with a tattoo of a bare-breasted mermaid on his right forearm. He called himself Dimitri, although like everyone else who traveled with Sister Eve, that probably wasn’t his real name. He spoke with a thick Greek accent, and Mose loved him. Dimitri, who seemed to have no trouble interpreting the simple signs Mose used to communicate, swore he was the best laborer he’d ever seen.
Albert worked with the roustabouts, most of whom were also crusade musicians. In no time at all, his mechanical knack and ability to jerry-rig a solution to any problem won their admiration. They took to calling him Professor because he had a general knowledge of just about everything.
Whisker, the piano player, took me under his wing. He was thin, his arms and legs like soda straws, his skin the color of molasses. He was old, or what seemed old to me then, maybe fifty, and his eyes looked tired. He taught me about music in a way that Miss Stratton never had time for. I knew how to read sheet music, but I’d never been a part of a larger body of musicians. Whisker worked with me on timing and listening to the other instruments and feeling what he called the “noble bubble,” by which he meant that moment when all the notes of each musician slid effortlessly around and among one another so that a piece of music became such a beautiful sound that it captured the spirits of both player and listener and carried them effortlessly upward.
“Like in a bubble,” I said.
“Zactly,” he said and grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. He sipped from the glass that always sat atop his piano, filled with two fingers of bootlegged whiskey that never seemed to diminish in volume no matter how long he nursed it. “Doesn’t always happen, Buck, but when it does, feels like God’s lifting you up in the