“You didn’t look as pitiful,” Carter countered. “Anyway, it was good. I had the feeling that old cockroach was sitting in there, listening to you.”

“Maybe he was,” I said. “Maybe he was.”

After I changed clothes—from the suit I had worn for Avrum’s memorial service to the ancient, out-of-style casual wear that I like, but Carolyn despises—I slipped out of the Inn without Lila seeing me, and I walked north to the cemetery. I could hear a dull hammering from Arch’s and I knew that Sammy was at work, knocking away pieces of marble or granite in search of Amy’s face, like some crazed surgeon trying to make life out of spare parts. Sammy would not stop to think the face from the stone. He would pound it out. I saw the young girl standing in front of the window, wearing the woman’s dress hat, staring inside at Sammy. She seemed intrigued, or amused. She turned, as though she could sense my presence, and looked at me, then she turned back to the window.

My walks through the cemetery began the year that Nora Dowling died. While visiting her grave, I realized there were many names that I recognized, people who had been patient and caring. Each time that I returned, there were new names, new headstones with brief, coded stories of a life chiseled into the facing, like headlines from newspapers. Arch Ellis was the newest story, the latest headline. Amy said she had been to Arch’s grave. When she said his name, it was with sadness and joy, and I knew that I would also feel that bewildering contradiction.

One year, Carter went with me into the cemetery and complained irritably about my solemn pauses at the gravesites. “They’re dead, boy,” he grumbled. “You’re not going to talk them out of that ground and we both know it. But if you do, I’ve got a deal for you that you won’t believe.”

Carter did not understand why the cemetery visits were important to me. “Must be a Southern thing,” he groused. “Some kind of redneck religion. Is that what they mean by ‘The South’s gonna rise again,’ Bobo? Is that what your people do? Stand around the tombstones, hoping General Lee will come charging down off one of those monuments with Jesus on his right hand and Stonewall Jackson on his left? Is that how you Rebs are finally going to whip our ass, Bobo?”

I tried to tell Carter that being in the cemetery was a simple thing, that it effected memories of good people from one of the good experiences of my life. He denounced my argument as poetic bullshit. As always, he evoked the name of Amy Lourie.