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life of summer dresses and tea cakes was never for me. I’ve cast all that off. I need nothing from the outside world now.”
    Carrie had not said so much to Mariah, and certainly nothing so personal, in years. This was an invitation offered to a greater intimacy by a lonely woman, Mariah knew. She knew Carrie that well, at least.
    “Except,” Carrie said, “you are the only person who has ever run this household, and I wonder if it can possibly go on without you.”
    Mariah understood this was Carrie’s way of trying to take care of things. The lady of Carnton could not, for instance, go calling on the old Negress in her tiny house in Franklin. They could not meet for tea, could not sit beside each other in church. A woman such as Mariah Reddick, free she may be, was to be seen and not heard unless spoken to, like a child. She was not to assume she had a part in the rituals of civil society, which were open to her by invitation only. This was the truth of the world after the war, and Mariah knew all about it. But Carrie persisted in thinking that they were friends even so, and that left only employment as the means for acting out the gestures of friendship. In Carrie’s world, they could have tea together so long as it was Mariah serving it. Had she herself, Mariah Reddick, ever been given the choice of rejecting Carrie McGavock’s friendship? For almost forty years that had not been an option. Whether or not to serve Carrie McGavock had not been a question either.
    Mariah leaned against the oak tree, a couple dozen feet from Carrie. She felt tiny slivers of bark fall down the neck of her dress.
    “You come back, and we start again,” Carrie said. “No contracts either, not like John has with the tenants, just your own will to stay. I have work here for you, but perhaps it won’t seem so much like work. The work of helping me with this cemetery is special, spiritual work. You know there is more to this life and the spirit. Your mother knew, certainly.”
    Carrie had never spoken of Mariah’s mother. Mariah wondered if she even knew the woman’s name.
    “Not sure what Mama knew.”
    “Oh, that isn’t true! She had the sight. She could talk to the dead! You know that. We all knew that.”
    It was news to Mariah that this was something Carrie McGavock had known. “What you mean by that?”
    “The dead! She had the power of the dead. She saw the dead, she communicated.”
    Carrie stood closer, so close Mariah could feel her breath on her cheeks. Her eyes were wet, crinkled half-shut by one of Carrie’s sweet, world-forgiving smiles. Mariah knew that her mama’s use of the arts had been nothing so exciting as Carrie imagined it now.
    Carrie put her hand on Mariah’s shoulder as if to steer her toward the house. There were no sounds of birds. Mariah strained to hear them, but nothing. Then, in the distance, she heard the sound of a mockingbird, very faint, and she was glad. The world had not stopped. She felt the light tap of a fly at the top of her head.
    She had once ruled this place. The kitchen ran according to her direction, as did the cleaning of the house and the maintenance of the yard and grounds. A dozen others curried her favor, hoping to someday be appointed out of the field and into the house. Others feared being sent out into those same fields, and when she passed them by in the parlor she noticed how hard they seemed to polish the silver tea set, or how persnickety they became about dust among the rows of Sir Walter Scott’s volumes on Colonel McGavock’s shelves.
    She had once had power, yes, but it had been borrowed power, the power of a slave for the moment raised up among other slaves. She could feel the essential falsity, which was like playacting, but nonetheless it had been appealing. Her memories held lots of people in them, and not just any people but people who thought of Mariah and wanted her time and her attention. Most of these had fled Franklin at the first chance. There were not