“Not that I’ve done much better. I read a little law too and did my best, as a young man. But my heart was never in it. The law is an ideal superseded by a structure. I just have never been much of one for finding my way around a structure. No sir, I was not much of a hand at being a lawyer. I was the one always taking on the cases without a prayer or a dime, those I couldn’t win. Especially of course those are the ones can’t be won. It doesn’t matter if they should be or not. The law is not about should-be’s. I counted up my pennies and spent two years writing letters pursuing a war pension. I had the luck to have an arm gone and even more luck that there was a hospital record someone finally found in Virginia and so after those two years I got that pension. Which I can’t tell you in all honesty arm or no arm that I deserve. But money comes each month out of Washington D.C. and I take a small pleasure in that. As if it’s some balance against my dead brother. Or it could even be nothing more than plain old everyday greed. Getting what I can get. I truly don’t care, either way. But there. Just so you know. In case you were sitting up there in New Hampshire with dreams of some fine plantation, some life waiting for you. All it is, is a old bitter man in a falling-down house.”

“I told you. All I want’s to find out what happened here.”

Alexander Mebane leaned forward, the mechanism of the captain’s chair crying for oil. “What’s the matter with you,” he asked. “Don’t you have any imagination?”

“No sir. Not the way you’re thinking. All I know is, back behind my own father, and his two sisters, what happened in their lives all comes someway out of what happened to their mother. And nobody knows what that was. At least not much about it. Because it happened here. Not there.”

“What kind of man was your grandfather?”

“I did not know him. My father left there young and never went back. I don’t know if there was a problem with him and his father; I don’t think so. I think his problem was his mother hanging herself. He was just a little boy. His sisters, my aunts, they admired their father. What I can tell, he was a good man. I know he loved my grandmother something fierce.”

“Did he?”

“Yes sir, he did.”

“There you go.” Alexander Mebane paused and looked away from Foster. After a time looked back. “I remember your grandmother.”

“Yes sir.”

“Both from when she went away the first time and the time you mentioned. When she came back but did not stay.”