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.

He grinned after the exertion—a prosperous man grown thick about the middle. But his middle was still hard. At fifty-four, he could still lift a grown man over his head, split half a cord of blackjack before breakfast, outshoot any man half his age.

He was alone today. His wife, Mary, was at Blowing Rock, in the mountains, with his three grown daughters. Usually, she went there only in summer, but this season, the heat had lasted so long. She’d be back within the week.

His boy, Bill Junior, was building a hydroelectric dam in Mexico. He’d passed through in June, back from a stint in Sault Sainte Marie. He was an alert boy, sharp as flint, good head for numbers. Engineer. Going to make his mark in this world. Hell, only twenty-six, and the boy had already been around the world—built a plant for Carbide Manufacturing in Sydney, Australia, then traveled home via Borneo, Sumatra, China, Japan, Ceylon, London, Berlin, Rome, Paris, and Niagara Falls.