“It’s all those ideas they talk,” Edna said. “I can’t argue worth a shoot; I just get mad. Anybody can make me look a fool talking ideas. Still, I know right and wrong. They use words that don’t have anything to do with the actual way we live and do things. Don’t you go listening to them and getting mixed up with their ideas. Rooster says that’s what they want, to turn us against each other. Doreen! Rachel!”

The two younger women had finished their work and stood pensively side by side, their arms resting lightly about each other’s waist as they stared at Benjamin’s headstone, now dark with time, and thought of the dead around them, those they had known and those they had only been told about. Hearing Edna, they turned their heads.

“I’m tired, and it’s going to rain,” Edna said. “Gather our things and let’s go home.”

2

The rain came and continued to fall off and on for a week, but it did not keep the two families from going into Highboro for church services on Sunday. The uncertainties of that time and of future time made them want to gather with other county families to exchange news and rumors, to reassure one another that whatever happened they would stand together.

At the end of his sermon the Reverend Stewart Throckmorton asked the congregation to pray with him “That our Overruling and Heavenly Father may still avert this unjust and unholy war the North is determined to thrust upon us.”

Afterwards, as Annabel and Blair Saxon talked on the church porch with the adult Kendricks and Davises, Blair Junior and his brother Bonard chased B.B. and Jane around the graveyard, aiming index fingers at them and calling out, “You’re the Yankees, and we aim to kill you! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!”

Annabel stopped the conversation to say how cute the boys were and how staunchly patriotic to the South, until the game was broken up by Jane’s climbing a memorial stone and whacking her Bible as hard as she could on their heads, which sent them both squalling to their mother, who slapped them and told Rachel that her children were savages.

Penelope had news to offer from friends in Savannah. “Rosalie Pernell wrote me there was prayer meeting every day. But she says after Georgia seceded there was less of a demonstration than the great torchlight parade when South Carolina bravely set the example.”

“Surely there was an illumination?” Annabel queried.

“Oh, yes, I believe so.” Penelope agreed vaguely.