Clayton was a senior at Prairie View A&M when he’d first seen Naomi, a freshman in pedal pushers and a sweater set, her hair freshly pressed and curled. She was so pretty, dark brown hair and smoky, almond-shaped eyes, he would have tripped on his loose shoelace if she hadn’t slowed on the quad to point it out to him. Their eyes met, and Clayton was done for. Prairie View was the premier college for colored folks in Texas, but he almost hadn’t gone there, had almost broken Mathews tradition and enrolled in Wiley College in Marshall for the chance not to be known as William Mathews’s twin brother—for a few years, at least. But the moment he laid eyes on Naomi Cortland, he knew he would be grateful for the rest of his life that he’d chosen to be a PV man. William was an ROTC student at the same school, majoring in math and history, and seemed wholly indifferent to Naomi when he first met her, even calling her “scrawny” in private. He was caught up at the time with an education major from Lufkin. A few months into his courtship of Naomi, Clayton was already thinking marriage, but he didn’t want to buy a ring until he’d paid for law school. During Clayton’s third year at Texas Southern’s law school in Houston, William completed his first voluntary tour in Vietnam and returned to PV to finish his degree. William and Naomi got to talking, more than just a few passing words in the hallway of Clayton’s dormitory. There were long conversations about the war and why William had gone. He suffered from a patriotism that pulled him along by the navel, he said; it was a feeling he was always trying to catch up to, was always scratching at the heels of a love for the country he wanted America to be. He was willing to fight for the ideal, believed that duty and service could get him there. At the time, Naomi wanted to be a nurse and she understood a life of service, understood wading through blood and shit on the hope that you could fix what was broken. It’s the fight, William often said. The nobility is in the fight. Clayton, head in a law book somewhere all the way down to Houston, seemed distant to both of them, and at the dinner following Clayton’s graduation ceremony, William and Naomi sat him down in a quiet corner to tell him they were engaged. Clayton called William a cheat and Naomi a fool; she’d be a war widow by Christmas, he said, William taking a bullet for a country that would never love him back. They were words he never did take back, not even as he stood at his twin brother’s graveside after William was killed in the line of duty as a Texas Ranger.