“Oh,” he said, “thank you.” He took the huge, white pitcher and set it upon the wash-stand. She offered him a linen towel with a pink border. Then she said good night and went away.

He hunted through the crammed, haunted drawers of his desk until he found a pair of scissors. His razors and whetstone and shaving mug were in the wash-stand drawer. In forty minutes he had sponged himself, and removed his beard. The dark, bony face which glared out of the lamp-lit mirror was no face which he had ever known. He didn’t even keep a mustache. Cut it all off. It seemed the thing to do.

The sheets on the bed hadn’t been changed for a very long time. They felt damp and unearthly until the warmth of his body dried them out. He lay there in darkness, listening to the treetoads, and a dog which bawled somewhere west along the Pike. Later came a momentary patter of rain, and a wind to bang the loose shutters. Pentland Bale and all his ancestors came up to sit around the bed, but Dan didn’t mind them. He kept rubbing his sore, smooth face and wondering nervously, “Why did I do it? Why did I cut it off?” And God, he thought, during the eternity before he slept, I hope Grandfather didn’t suffer too much. Not too much. I hope Doc never tells me if he did.

And Tyler Fanning was struck by a piece of shell at Antietam. Somewhere there is a vast, mistaken displacement called a war.

He slept, and though he didn’t know it, there were still lights burning over at the Fanning place. Ty was vomiting.

Chapter 3

3.

This Doctor Adam Duffey, who came in and sat down at the foot of Dan’s bed before he was actually awake, in the morning, was a surviving genius of his childhood. Nearly twenty-six years before, he had driven up to that pink brick house on the Chambersburg Pike, and come inside to wash his hands, speak bitterly to a cringing midwife, and snip the wet cord which bound Daniel Bale to his mother’s body … One of the boy’s earliest memories was of Adam Duffey, shirt-sleeved, a wad of tobacco deforming his spongy cheek, pounding up drugs in a mortar.

Now he slid in, cat-footed, his battered silk hat clasped between two red thumbs which protruded from the gray, sausage-shaped bandages that were his hands.

Dan lifted himself on his elbows, and blinked.

“Praise Peter,” exclaimed the doctor. “And you’ve cut off your saintliness.”

“What?”

“The handsome beard, and it’s gone.” Duffey cocked his oversized, silver head on one side and pressed his mossy brows together. “You want to be a young man of fashion, once you’re back among white folks again.”

Dan said, “I’m just waking up. I didn’t know where I was, or who you were. Close the door.”