“What,” Foster asked, still looking at the portrait, “are their names?”

“Norman and Leah Pelham. Your grandparents.”

“Mother,” Abigail said, “was a Mebane from Carolina. Her maiden name before she met your grandfather.”

“That name don’t mean a thing,” Prudence said. “It was just the name of the man she ran off from.”

“He was more than that.”

“Hush that,” Prudence said.

Foster lifted both hands and rested the tips of his fingers on the mantelpiece. Not ready yet to look away from the couple on the wall. Feeling sweat running down his sides with his upraised arms.

Behind him Prudence said, “He’s the spit of Father.”

He took his eyes from the Negro woman and looked at the man. He could not see himself.

Abigail said, “Father went off to the war in eighteen and sixty-two. He went, scared and frightened, swept along by what was going on around him until that became what was happening to him. He went because it was where he had to go. He was just a year older than you are when he set off. All he’d ever tell me, when I’d ask him about it, was that he felt he didn’t have a choice.”

Foster turned then and looked at her. Abigail standing back in the center of the room, watching him. He said, “I can understand that.”

She smiled at him. “Oh yes,” she said. “I imagine you can.”

Prudence said, “He served right on from ‘sixty-two until the end. Was wounded two times, the first at Gettysburg. They don’t brag about it because they wasn’t that kind of men but it was the boys of the Second Vermont that broke the back of that battle, the way I heard it. It was them tore into Pickett’s flank when he made his famous charge and made a hole there and that was when the whole thing turned. He took a sabre wound to his right arm high up. It cut through the muscle right to the bone. He was in hospital with that but went right back after he got out. He could’ve come home. But he didn’t. Second time was right there at the very end, the spring of ‘sixty-five. They were down in southern Virginia chasing after the ragtag ends of Lee’s army and some of them rebel boys threw some shots back at them, a couple rounds from some little artillery gun. Tore up a tree beside where Father was crouched and a piece of the tree struck right into his head. I don’t know what happened then, he was never sure whether he wandered off and got separated or maybe was left behind. But he got lost. He didn’t recall any of it. When he woke up there was a runaway slave girl taking care of him in the woods. That was Mother.”

“So she nursed him,” Foster said, “and he brought her back here.”