She smiled, but she was near tears. On the porch, he embraced her. He wanted her. He’d been waiting for her. She was his wife. He wanted to strip off her dress and kiss her shining black hair, her breasts, the insides of her thighs, feel her heat. He would do it gently. He would take hours.

She pulled away. “No,” she said. “I’m not—I’m not ready.”

Sam felt scolded. He stood on the porch as she went inside, expecting her to find the blue chrysanthemums he had brought her and rush back to him, linger in his arms, feel his love.

But instead, he heard her footsteps on the stairs, heavy and measured. Sweet Jesus, he wanted a drink. He went into the kitchen and ran a glass of water from the pump. The water was lukewarm and tasted of rust. He thought, the only place in town that doesn’t have cold water.

Chapter Eight

The Old North State, the Home of Beauty, Courage, Honor, Industry, Virtue, and Independence.

C H A P T E R   E I G H T

Saturday, October 8

WILLIAM RAND KENAN stood in his shaded backyard on Nun Street a block and a half from the river and exercised with dumbbells. Arms straight down by the sides, lift slowly till the arms are perpendicular to the trunk, hold them there, feel the muscles burn, expel the breath, and down. Twenty repetitions, a thick towel scrubbed over the neck and face, then twenty overhead lifts. Next, Indian clubs. Swing in a gentle arc, loose as swatting a baseball—down, over, around. Again. Coordination. Grace. Control.

Then a quart of cold well water tasting of stone and iron.

The heat had broken at last. A cool breeze off the river rattled the high branches of the elms. The air smelled sweet, like the mountains. It carried the scent of storm and the first hint of burning leaves.

Kenan toweled off and threaded his thick arms through a white sweater. He patted his stomach—he hadn’t carried that belly in the War, retreating to the Petersburg trenches with Ewell’s tattered corps. He was a rail then, an eighteen-year-old recruit who’d left the University of North Carolina without a degree to follow his brothers, Thomas and James—colonel and captain—both wounded and captured at Gettysburg.

By nineteen, he had been promoted in the field to sergeant major. He wasn’t shot until the summer of ‘64 at the Battle of Charleston. Then he made adjutant, and finished out the war an officer.

He’d survived. Couldn’t even feel the wound anymore. He would sit in the big copper bathtub and try to find the scar where the minie ball had clipped off a chunk of flesh from his thigh, but it was gone. Like the War. A memory, a receding dream of blood, passion, and fear.