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rain.
    “Miss Carrie, I got your note and I just want to say—”
    Carrie would not let Mariah finish her sentence. She held her hands awkwardly out from her sides just a few inches, as if she had not yet decided whether an embrace would be in order. Finally she smiled very sweetly and placed a hand on Mariah’s right arm in an approximation of an embrace.
    “Thank you for coming, Mariah, and since you are in your work clothes, perhaps you would accompany me to the cemetery? So much more pleasant to converse there, don’t you think?”
    Mariah had not worn her work clothes ; what she had on was her finest, though covered in the dust that had been kicked up off the road. Carrie didn’t leave room for an answer and was already out the door before Mariah could reply. With resignation and familiarity, Mariah turned and followed. How easy that was. She hardly had to think in order to tread behind her former mistress, out and across the gallery, down the steps, and down paths that led to a cemetery that stretched far into the distance.
    I ain’t staying, I am decided.
    Carrie marched down the path with the Book of the Dead under her arm, arms swinging and chin up.
    Here, in this cemetery of Carrie’s, a stone’s throw from her house, the Book of the Dead recorded the final resting places of hundreds of Confederate dead, marked by even rows and columns of whitewashed cedar boards, arranged according to state, each board identified only by a number and initials, no names, no ranks. Every dead man and boy rested in equal relation to the other, laid out just so and blanketed by a thick, fine-leaved grass.
    “I have your letter here, Miss Carrie.”
    “Let us not talk about that yet, shall we? So much work to do.”
    “It’s why I come.”
    “You need not have a reason to come see me, Mariah Reddick, not ever, and you needn’t blame that little piece of paper. Now, I count forty-three rows from South Texas to the row missing its monument…”
    Because of her constant patrolling of the cemetery, the hem of Carrie’s dress was often faded with a light layer of cemetery dirt. Mariah’s mother would have called this goofer dust . Goofer might be used in some bad work against enemies if they were known, but enemies were sneaky and often they weren’t known.
    “Texas forty-three!” Carrie called. “Who is that?”
    Mariah ran her finger down the columns drawn in Carrie’s crabbed blue script. “Jeremiah Carter.”
    “Poor Jeremiah!”
    *  *  *
    As children they had explored the old place in Terrebonne Parish in Louisiana, owned and mastered by Carrie’s father. Back then Mariah could think that the general principles of a slave’s life did not apply to her, since she was companion of the master’s daughter . She and Carrie braided hair and wrestled and climbed stunted oaks together, and Maude the cook would hand them both pieces of sugarcane, each piece no bigger than the other.
    When Mariah went off with Carrie after her wedding, Mariah sat high up on the dowry cart, face forward, following the closed carriage that contained the newlyweds, and she had never been happier. It didn’t occur to her until later that she was in the dowry cart because she was herself one of the gifts.
    They had continued for almost twenty years, mistress and slave, companions who knew each other best in the world. And then came a disruption greater than the war: Mariah became a freewoman, and they had found no words to talk about that.
    “You have a bed in town, in a house. Do you feel at home there?”
    “Yes ma’am.”
    The oaks here cast cool shadows, and the leaves rustled overhead. Sunlight dappled Carrie’s black dress. “But you return here when I ask you.”
    Because , thought Mariah, you are incapable of taking care of yourself, Widow of the South. “Yes.”
    “Does it feel like home here? I think it’s starting to feel like home to me, after all these years. And do you know why?”
    Mariah shook her head.
    “The