“Oh, for heaven’s sake—sit down and finish your tea.” It had been a clean, fine morning. Now, it was ruined. The beautiful light was wasted. She passed Callie a handkerchief. “Here, now, wipe your face.”

“Thank you, dear. I don’t mean to carry on like this.” She mopped her face till the handkerchief was limp and filthy. She sipped from her cup and smacked her lips. “Nothing like a nice cup of tea when you’re feeling low.”

Across the fence, her two boys were yelping like wild dogs. “Come see the parade!” they shouted. “Come see the parade!”

The Red Shirts, Mike Dowling at their head, rode down Castle Street in a column of four, twenty deep. In the November light, their shirts looked crisp and military. The stocks of their Winchesters gleamed with linseed oil—Dowling had ordered them to spruce up their rigs for today’s gala. Most of them wore jaunty slouch hats, like Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

Dowling had borrowed a cavalry saber for the occasion, but he was unused to it, and it clanked against his boot as he rode, bruising his ankle.

As they passed knots of staring Negroes, they drew pistols and Winchesters and fired them into the air. The Negroes disappeared in a hurry. The mood in the ranks was jovial, lots of laughter. Men joshing, smelling the gun smoke in the autumn air.

They turned onto Third Street. “Coming into the finer neighborhoods,” Dowling warned over his shoulder. “Holster them guns.”

The two women seated on the porch at Third and Ann streets didn’t wave. Dowling didn’t care. Today, everybody would see who really ran this city. From a tall horse, a man could see a long way. He could listen to the good creak of leather, feel the muscled rhythm of the horse that carried him above the shit of the street, feel the power of mounted men eager to be commanded into action. He could see his own future as a golden glow at the end of a hard, fast ride.

Well behind the Red Shirts marched Colonel Walker Taylor and his Boys Brigade, uniformed in khaki, white wooden drill rifles on their shoulders. Taylor deliberately put as much distance as he could between his boys and Dowling’s riders.

As the Red Shirts and the Boys Brigade proceeded through town, the crowd lining the streets fell in behind them and followed. At Chestnut Street, in back of the post office, the Red Shirts reined up in a park where tents had once been erected to house returning Confederate veterans. Today, those same old tents, flaps tied up, housed trestle tables and a brass band. At a brick barbecue pit, half a dozen men turned beef ribs and stirred pork barbecue in iron pots. Under the white canvas tents, ladies dished out coleslaw, cornbread, potatoes, okra, greens, and pecan pie.

From a solid silver tureen, two Daughters of the Confederacy ladled lemon punch.