His name was Nick Overby, and, like most of the boys at the Babylon tonight, he was in town on a weekend pass from Camp McCoy. A mere four months earlier, he told her, all the boys of the 2nd Division had been home at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, where the October wind blew a balmy 75 degrees and, even at midnight, walking home from the canteen, they’d been able to wear shirtsleeves. But then they’d been assigned to winter training at Camp McCoy, and when they’d arrived there at the end of that month, it was 25 below zero, and the supply people were scurrying to find enough parkas for all the men. Then they really loaded on the junk: mountain boots, mukluks, snowshoes, skis, ski boots, ski pants, ski poles, three pairs of extra socks. Not that he wasn’t glad for it, in the cold. “What I can’t get used to,” he said, “is the idea that to sleep warm when you’re sleeping out, you’ve got to take all your clothes off.”

She blushed at this, but he just smiled.

He told her he was from a little town in Tennessee that she never would have heard of, Dover. She surprised him by knowing about the Civil War battle that had taken place there at Fort Donelson, and had to explain that she’d read Gone with the Wind three times (and seen the movie twice). “So you’ve got a skewed notion of the South, haven’t you?” he said.

“Why? What is it really like?”

“You ought to come visit sometime, and find out for yourself.”

He said that in the spring months of March and April—which Elissa quickly informed him were winter months, but never mind—when the redbud and dogwood trees were in blossom, walking under one was like walking into heaven itself. There was a redbud tree that stretched to just below his attic bedroom window, and in the spring, he told her, he would pile the quilts and feather ticks on his bed so he could leave the window open all night and let the scent of the redbud air drift in. He was an only child; his father had died before he was born, and his mother, who had never remarried, had kept boarders for as long as he could remember, filling the four bedrooms in the big old house his grandfather had built right in town on a bluff high above the Cumberland River.

“My house is on a little bluff above the Bear Trap River,” she told him. “And my grandparents still live in their house above the river, on the other side of town.”

“Then I reckon we got a lot in common,” he said. “What’s it like in your town?”

“In Pine Rapids? Oh, it’s—it’s home!”

“Tell me about it.”