Taft by Ann Patchett Page A

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