Given to a certain melancholy all his life. Leon had over the last years become oddly isolated as well. He made his usual rounds of the plantation, knowing it was unnecessary, for Floyd as Overseer was as firm and knowledgeable as he was just. At the sawmill Leon spoke to the men as he went about observing them at work, but the mill was run by a foreman who knew the work and the men better now than Leon did.

At Beulah Land, Sarah paid attention to the running of the house, but Lovey and Clarice were formidable collaborators, and required no supervision. Old as she was, Lovey commanded respect amounting to terror from all the house workers, more because of her legend than any severity she exerted. It had always under Sarah been a steady sort of household; there were few quarrels among the servants, and none between them and those who superintended them. Easily bored with her female relatives, Sarah spent much of her time in the office attending to records and accounts, work that she had learned thoroughly during the lean years that had followed the big fire.

And so Leon, not lazy but not one to make work either, was often idle; and there were no companions left to share his idleness. Floyd was busy. Even their fishing and hunting together became special experiences because they were not common any more. Leon’s former companions in idleness, Bonard and Felix—and finally, Clovis—were dead and gone. Leon was too young to accept the idea of growing old, and he was too old to hope that life held anything new and wonderful for him in the future.

Then, there was the eager talk of coming war, a war Leon did not understand the reasons for. But he did understand enough to know that if it came, the way he lived was doomed and done, whatever the outcome. The convention that met at Montgomery on February 4 had created the Confederate States of America with Jefferson Davis as its President. White-haired old Buchanan fumbled through his last weeks as President of the United States, and Lincoln traveled about making speeches before his Inaugural on March 4. One of the jokes Leon overheard at the depot was: “If the USA is called Uncle Sam, will the CSA be called Uncle Sambo?”

Leon had never leaned to politics. If he was largely ignorant of government affairs, it was because he was not interested. His concerns had always been personal. No more than Edna could he argue and care about “ideas.” He cared about his family and Beulah Land. He had lost Rachel when she married James. He had long ago accepted as fact the notion that Sarah had married not him but Beulah Land. Had he been different, she might have married both, but he was Leon.