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about a slave graveyard. I’d kind of like to see one. I’d kind of like to know. She said that a bunch of her relatives are buried there, and that they don’t have tombstones or anything.”
    Dad resumed his reckless driving, dodging potholes like a professional slalom skier. “I don’t have much to do with graveyards. I don’t think there’s enough money in them, really. It’s a dead business, ha ha.” He pulled down his visor, then stuck it back up. “I tell you one thing, though. When the graveyards get all filled up up north, it might be a good thing to start a cemetery and charge a couple thousand bucks a plot. Now you’re thinking, son.”
    I didn’t say how I hadn’t thought it up whatsoever. I said,“Okay. Forget it.”
    â€œThere’s enough to learn from the living, Mendal. Don’t go get all obsessed with graveyards and tombstones. The only thing you can learn in an old graveyard, if you ask me, is how hard the granite carver had to work.” My father pulled over into some weeds and checked a piece of paper he’d written directions on. In the field to our right, a field-stone chimney leaned alone, surrounded by honeysuckle. Three others stood off in the distance. “You want to know about graveyards—word is an entire family lived here back around 1870. They all got killed by a tornado that skipped from one house to the next. Land’s been passed down from family member to family member until now, and they’re ready to sell it for a hundred dollars an acre.”
    I said, “Maybe it’s cursed,” because—although my father’s odd business acumen hadn’t failed to my knowledge—I never saw how any scrubland could end up a golf course, subdivision, or recreational development.
    My father walked through beggar-lice fifty yards into the parcel, then took out his compass. He slashed at sweet grass with his cane. I followed him, wary of copperheads. The sun beat down on this parched, cracked red land. We might as well have been tredding across Mars. “Sooner or later Duke Power will want to dam up the Saluda River,” he pointed northwest, “or the Reedy.” He pointed west. “And if this doesn’t become lakefront property, it’ll be close enough forpeople to want to build bait shacks and boat dealerships. Hell, boy, you might even want to build your first house down here one day, just to get away from the rat race. It would make a nice place for a nursery. This land’s got to be arable by now, doomed and cursed or not.”
    I didn’t say, “What rat race?” or “Oh, maybe I forgot to tell you that I won’t be returning to South Carolina anytime soon.” I said, “It would make a nice spot for a brick factory. You wouldn’t even need a kiln.”
    My father raised his cane. He turned to me and said, “If I ever catch wind that you and Shirley Ebo go off to that slave graveyard, believe me when I say that I’ll disinherit you faster than a bitch dog its runt of the litter.” He had a look in his eye that I’d not seen in real life before, though I’d once found a book in the public library on abnormal psychology that had a series of pictures of a full-fledged schizophrenic who, according to a panel of experts, could change from Betty Boop to Hitler’s unknown mean brother in a matter of seconds.
    â€œOkay. Okay. I was only asking. Sometimes Shirley Ebo tells me things that she made up in the first place.”
    â€œLike what?” my father asked. He brushed past me on his way back to the car.
    I didn’t say, “That you were brought up by wolves in the tree farm across the street from our house.”
    On the way back home I kind of wished that I still sat in Senora Schulze’s class. She liked to start off each day tellingus about the importance of siestas. Senora Schulze said that if we’d had