by Ann Patchett
Maybe Cyndi wasn't crazy, maybe she just liked to drink. Everybody in Muddy's liked to drink. "Look," I said, leaning over the bar. "If I was to be gone for a while, you could take care of things, couldn't you? If I was to start getting away some more?"
"More money?" Cyndi said.
I thought about it, no one around here ever kept a job long enough to ask for a raise except for Rose, and she never asked. "Sure," I said. "I'll look at the books and come up with something."
"Okay," she said, looking pretty pleased about the whole thing. "I came in today thinking you were probably going to fire me."
"Yeah, well, you never know."
Before we had a chance to work out any of the details, a tour group came through saying they wanted a drink in a real Memphis bar. Usually whatever groups you got were on Friday nights when things were packed anyway. I couldn't tell where these people were from or why they were together, but they all seemed sick of one another. The women rifled through their purses, pretending to be looking for something, while the men picked the cashews out of the bowls of nut mix. They weren't a talking group, just drinkers. Cyndi left off her polishing and washed up. The bar rail stayed like that, half tarnished and half bright. I figured over time enough people would hold onto it that things would even out again.
I remembered how to get to Fay's, but it was different going there in the daylight. The houses were bigger and whiter now. There were a few warm days last week and it had been enough to bring the forsythia to bud. I kept catching little bits of yellow out of the corner of my eye. Every now and then I passed a maid standing out on the street. They were waiting on the one city bus that went through this neighborhood at three o'clock for the sole purpose of collecting maids. In their white uniforms they made me think of Marion. One of them waved to me, and I waved back.
From all the way at the end of the street I could see her standing there. She had been watching, but as soon as she saw me she stared at the ground. She looked small. It was more than the way everybody looks small from a distance. I pulled up alongside of her and leaned over to open the door. "Lost your brother again?" I said.
She got in quick. "You mind driving around?"
"That's what I do."
We just rode for a while, longer than I thought we would without saying anything. The way I saw it, she had called me. I could keep quiet all day. I was just making random turns again, going nowhere. It was fine, really, having her in the car. Simple. I thought there was a chance that this could amount to nothing. "How's Carl feeling?"
"Lousy, I guess. I don't think there's anything wrong with him. He's pretty much been asleep all day. He said to thank you though, for driving him home and everything."
I nodded, thinking it was funny how in memory it would be a ride home.
"I was wondering if maybe we could go somewhere." Her voice was hesitant, like she wasn't so sure she wanted to ask me. "I don't know how you're set for time or anything."
Something in me wanted to be sharp with her: Listen up, my days aren't for driving you around. But then there was the smell of her in my car, the way she sat with one foot up on the seat. The hand that had touched my neck was flat out beside me on the green vinyl. It shook the words up in my head. "Where do you want to go?"
She looked out the window. "That's the question," she said. "Where do people go? I mean, when they really want to be someplace else." She turned around and faced me. "What I'd like is to get out of Memphis. You ever feel like getting out of town?"
"Sure," I said. I knew all about that. The city seemed to boil down to two marks on the map, where I worked and where I slept. A hundred times I had thought there had to be someplace else, a third place it would make sense to go to. There were other places, back before Franklin and Marion left, but once they were gone everything tightened up.
"We could go to Shiloh," Fay said. "It's a ways, but I always wanted to go there. My dad went once. His dad took him. He was a big Civil War buff, my grandfather."
"Shiloh? Do you know where that is?" That was craziness. That was leaving, people looking for you, or at least people looking for her.
She glanced around, like maybe she could spot it from the car. "It's south and east," she said. She kneeled on the seat and pointed towards my left shoulder. "Is that east?"
I told her it was.
She readjusted her pointing a little. "Then it's that way."
"I've got a job, you know. That bar doesn't run itself."
"The bar does fine."
"I'm going to take you home," I said. "We're just out here wasting gas."
"I'm serious," she said, sitting back down again. "Why can't we go? What in the world difference would it make if we just went for a drive?" She was quiet for a while, but she could see which way I was heading. The streets ticked by. Every one was the name of an Indian tribe, Sioux, Tisho-mingo, Iroquois, Cherokee, Catawba, Arawata. Home in no time. "Last night when we were looking for Carl I was thinking, wouldn't it be nice if we were just in the car, just like we are now except we were there because we felt like it." She kept her voice down. Had we been farther away, had I driven like she wanted me to, she never would have said it. "I wondered if you would have gone anyplace with me if there wasn't a reason to go, if there wasn't someone to look for. Part of the time last night I wasn't even thinking about Carl."
I could feel it rising up in me again, something like a thrill. I was wondering what it was in her that could make me feel like I did. I was wondering if I stayed with her for the afternoon if I could figure it out. "You've got too much on your mind," I said. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"Come on and go to Shiloh with me."
"You interested in the Civil War?" I said.
"I'm interested in driving there," she said. "The rest of it we'll just have to see about."
I hadn't been there myself, but I knew where it was. When I was a kid in school my class had gone but something happened, I'd been sick or something, I don't remember. That was a long time ago. "We won't have a long time." All I had to say was that and it was over. The second I started entertaining the idea I was as good as lost. "By the time we get there it's almost going to be dark."
"But we'll be able to say we've been." You could hear it in her voice. She'd latched onto the little opening I'd given her. It was done, sunk, over.
"Sure," I said. "Why not. I don't see where going to Shiloh's going to hurt anything."
"Really?" she said, so pleased. "That would be great. Just going. Bang. Nobody knows where you are. That would be heaven."
I turned the car around and headed out to 40 East.
I don't know that Tennessee is prettier than other places. Sometimes I think that the pretty you like is just the pretty you know. There are a lot of places I hear are beautiful, out in the west where there are nothing but open spaces, and I think I'd like to go there to see. All the traveling in my life has been to play or to see somebody play. I've gone as far north as Chicago and south to New Orleans, but I never seem to make it more than a few hours away from the Mississippi on either side. Driving through west Tennessee to Shiloh, I thought I hadn't missed so much. Even in the late winter, which isn't our best time, the hills and trees and flat fields of broken corn stalks look fine, in as much as they look like home. The quickest way there is a two-lane blacktop with no shoulders that snakes its way through nowhere. It is such an empty road that Fay said the only reason it was built was to take us to Shiloh. In an hour we only passed three cars. She counted them.
"Four," she said when a blue Ford pickup went by.
She made comments on every animal we passed, too. Sometimes it was nothing more than her looking out the window and saying "Cows" when we were passing cows. She liked the horses best. I slowed down to give her a better look.
"I used to go riding some when I was a kid," she said. "For a while my parents talked about getting me a horse, but they couldn't do something like that. It's expensive, you know, once you board them and all."
Neither one of us said anything about what we were doing, probably because we didn't know. It was better that way. While we were driving we were having a good time, not saying much. When we got to Shiloh it was nearly dark and the big sign at the front of the park said it all closed down at nightfall, but we'd come too far to just turn around. Right away I thought about Franklin, how I'd bring him here as soon as he came back. He'd like the cannonballs that were stacked into pyramids all over the fields. It's easy to see how pretty it would be once it was really spring. Just being a little farther south the trees had budded out already. There was a ranger locking up the tourist center when we pulled in and he went back inside to get us a couple of brochures.
"Just don't stay too long," he said. "It gets hard to find your way out of here after dark."
"Late start," I said.
I saw him looking at Fay, trying to catch her eye, maybe to see if she was going to signal him that she had been kidnapped or something, but she was already wandering off towards the first marker. He gave me a wave as he got in his truck and I figured his mind was at ease about the whole thing.
"You coming?" she called from across the parking lot. "There isn't a lot of time."
The air was cool and it smelled sweet, or maybe it just didn't smell like Memphis anymore. I zipped up my jacket as I walked towards the path where Fay had gone.
It was a sight, her standing there with her back to me and on either side of her as far as you could see were tombstones, white stones not much bigger than school books sticking up. It looked like they grew there rather than were put there. So many of them that it was hard to think that each one meant a person. Fay crouched down to get a closer look at one. She ran her hand over the top where there were numbers chiseled in. Every stone had a number and some had names and dates besides. It was the ones that just had numbers that you felt for. Nobody even able to figure out who you were before they buried you. Fay was moving on to the next one and then the next in the row.
"We should have come sooner," she said. The way she said it, she made it sound like maybe we could have done something to prevent all this. "I didn't know there was going to be a cemetery. This would take all day by itself."
"What would?"
"Reading the tombstones." All the time she was talking she was moving from one to the other. "You've got to read as many of them as you can. My grandmother used to tell me that. That's what makes the dead feel better, having their tombstones read."
"That's crazy."
"You shouldn't just visit with the dead people you know," she said, like she was telling me some fact of science. "You've got to pay attention to all of them. It helps them rest. Living people remembering them is what they like."
"There are more than ten thousand dead people in this park," I said, and I took her arm to help her up off the grass. "Dead people from all over. There's no way you're going to be visiting with all of them."
Fay brushed off the knees of her pants and then shaded her eyes against the late, slanting sun so she could get a good look at all the graves. "I don't expect that any of their families come."
"No," I said. "I wouldn't think so."
We walked up the hill a little way until it crested and we could see the Tennessee River winding past the bottom of the red cliffs. Spending your whole life on the Mississippi can make a person think of other rivers as incidental. But the Tennessee from such a height at that particular time of day looked fine.
"I don't think there's a thing in the world worth dying over," Fay said, looking down at the water.
I didn't tell her different, but I could think of half a dozen things without even trying.
We drove the car from one battlefield to the next, getting out and reading the markers until it was so dark we could barely see the words. You could imagine what it must have been like for them in the dark, stopping the fighting long enough to get a little rest. All those boys, holding on to the trees beside them, wanting to sleep and being too afraid.
"Stop here," Fay said.
I pulled the car over to the side of the road and tried to make out what she was seeing. It was a statue of some kind out in the middle of the field. It was tall as a two-story house.
"I want to go see that," she said.
I started to tell her no, that it was too late, and then I thought that one more statue wouldn't make any difference. We'd done something senseless in going there. When we got home was just splitting hairs. She got out and I pulled the car halfway into the field so that the headlights spread over the grass and gave everything the overbright quality of a nighttime baseball game. Then Fay stepped in front of me and lit up like a Christmas tree. I could see everything, every part of her was bright, the blue cloth of her shirt that showed at the neck where her jacket was open, her hands, her mouth, her bright eyes. The light made her beautiful in a way that she wasn't really. She smiled at me and waved.
I followed her out into the field, half dizzy from the sight of her. We crossed the dried out grass to the tall piece of marble where a woman made out of bronze was laying a wreath.
"It's from Iowa," Fay said. "They put this here for all the boys from Iowa who died. Way out here in the middle of nowhere." She climbed up the base of the thing to spread her hands out on the marble. "It's beautiful," she said. "It's so cold. Come feel how cold it is."
But when I went to touch the statue it was Fay I touched, her hair. I put my hands on either side of her head and felt its small shape. I could almost get my hands completely around her head. My thumbs were resting on her eyebrows and I brought her head to my chest and I held her there against me. Her hair was fine and soft and I put my hand against her neck and wrapped my other arm across her back and she held me, like I was the tree and she was the soldier asleep. The headlights weren't so bright because we were far away from them, but they showed us to anyone who could have been passing by. When we walked back to the car she held onto my arm like it was all she wanted. Like this was the most natural thing in the world.
"We moved out here after my father died. Not right after. We stayed home for almost three months before it was just sort of clear that we couldn't do it. It wasn't like he'd been sick or anything. It was his heart. There hadn't been any time to think about what we might do later. My mother worked in my high school. She was the secretary, but that was only part-time and after my father died she didn't go back to work anymore. They kept her job open for her but she just couldn't go back. She wanted a big funeral. She said they didn't have any sort of a wedding because there hadn't been any money so at least she was going to have a good funeral. It was, I guess. I mean, who can tell the difference? After that there was nothing left. No insurance. Nothing. People were real nice and everything, everybody was willing to float us along, but you know that's got to come to an end sooner or later. We were just kind of hanging out, eating what people came by with and what the grocery sent over. I think sometimes if we'd been living in a city like Memphis there wouldn't even have been that. I didn't think about the money right at first. You don't think about it when you're at home and your parents have always taken care of things. I figured my mother was handling it. But she just sort of melted. She spent all her time outside. Even when it got cold she'd get all bundled up and sit out back in a folding chair. My father had been building a deck on the back of the house right before he died. It wasn't quite finished. It was like she felt closer to him, sitting out on that deck."
"You said he was building a deck?"
She nodded. "It was nice. Even unfinished it was nice. My mother sat out there all the time. She didn't like to be in the house any more than she had to be."
"What about Carl?"
"Carl got a job at the lumberyard after school. My dad had friends down there who were looking out for us. I already had a job at the Dairy Queen and they gave me more hours. Carl and I got so worried about money that we didn't even feel as bad as we should have. I mean, w
e felt horrible, but it was almost like there wasn't time. My mother was sitting outside all day. I'd always have to go tell her it was time to come in, time to have something to eat. She was always stalling, a few more minutes, another half hour. I think she would have slept out there if I'd let her. She didn't even know the power had been cut off until Carl got home from work. She'd been putting all the mail in a paper sack underneath the sink. We owed money to everybody in the world, people I'd never heard of. Even after I found all those bills, I still thought I was going to be able to pull it out of the fire. I didn't think there was any other choice, we'd just figure it out somehow, make it work. I never even thought about moving to Memphis until Carl started to slip. Maybe I should have done it right away. It was clear enough my mother was having problems. But it wasn't until Carl that I figured there wasn't any chance of working it out in Coalfield. It was too much for him, trying to keep up in school and working all the time. He stopped going to school and then he stopped going to work. They even paid him for a few weeks when he wasn't showing up. Those people at the lumberyard were good to us." Fay was quiet for a little while, rolling a piece of hair between her fingers. "I should have looked after him more, thought about his feelings. I thought we would all pull through because there wasn't any choice but to pull through. But there is a choice, there're lots of them. You can choose to just lay down. That's what my mother did."
"And that's what Carl did?"
"No," she said. "Carl didn't lay down exactly. Carl just started looking for things to make himself feel better. I don't figure that's such a crime."
I told her it probably wasn't.
"Well, that's when I called my aunt and uncle and told them we'd move to Memphis. They'd offered a couple of times. There wasn't any other way. We were backed up at the bank like crazy, not paying the mortgage, credit cards. I'm hoping when they settle it all out there'll be something left, but I'm not holding my breath."