“They’s not any Mebanes left to speak of,” the old man went on as if answering a question. “Now you get down around Wilmington, below on the Cape Fear, there’s plenty of second and third cousins three and four times removed that have the name but they’re nothing to me. They’d be as much a stranger if one walked in the door as you are. I haven’t been down there since I was a boy, since before the war, and don’t expect or want to go back there, not in this lifetime. My one brother was killed at Petersburg and both my sisters are dead too; one went to Raleigh and married there and raised up a boy and three girls but not one of them’s a Mebane by name or nature and the other sister stayed right here and married a farmer called Pettigrew and there’s children from that and children of those children but except for the one crazy one I don’t see much of them either. It’s a drifting falling-apart end of the line is what it is, here. My daddy somehow picked this little plot of nowhere to hang his shingle and drag along my mother who was from Raleigh and thought she was getting better than what she got. He snuggled in tight with the government during the war and was doing fine for himself but he was a man couldn’t see around a corner that wasn’t even there. When Lee quit and then Johnston my daddy had near ever cent of his money tied up in Jeff Davis bonds that went from being a wild hope to something you could light a cigar with if you was fortunate enough to afford a cigar which he was less and less able to do. After the war, men—and men with less connections and ability than my daddy—they had to make themselves all over again. When the Yankees and coloreds was running things just after the war he threw his luck in with what was left of the old ways and it went against him and then when the Yankees pulled out and left us to sort things out ourselves he made a stab at sidling up to the Negroes but by then it had all shifted around and his old cronies were on the rise again, except they’d watched him spin and they left him right out there. Dangling. Where he’d got himself. It wasn’t anything he didn’t deserve but it was hard on my mother. There was her house in Raleigh and this place here and that was pretty much it. After she died it took everything I could do to hold on to this place, settling old debts and such. There was more than one banker who looked the other way on her account. Out of pity for her, out of contempt for my daddy. Who of course in his sensible selfish way managed to die a good ten years before her. There was still a cigarbox of those old useless bonds in his desk we found after the funeral. But that was about it.