The dusk came toward the window, dry water, growing thicker and more heated with every slow moment. A thunderstorm twitched in the hills beyond Greenwood; vapid lightning shocked with a formless quiver. It would rain in Gettysburg before the night was done. Tyler was far down in Maryland; Irene had counted him out of her life, inch by inch, hour by hour, car-length by car-length … She wondered what the Potomac looked like. Like the Delaware or Schuylkill, no doubt, but somehow sleepier and more southern. There would be many negroes, and pontoon bridges, and cavalrymen who rode along rocky trails beside the water, silent hulks against the sky. Washington threw a silver dollar across the Potomac, she had read. And maybe President Lincoln would go to walk on the banks, a cadaverous lawyer from Illinois with the weight of the whole war bending across his back. Banjos playing in night winds across the dark blue mountains, up from the south …

She shuddered. Tyler had told her about the south. In a nagging, profane whine he had said the necessary words about Antietam Creek: It was a town called Sharpsburg, and they had to attack across open ground. He said he was coming from Second Brigade headquarters on horseback, when he got hit. He thought the horse had run into an iron pipe stretched across the road—that was the way it felt—an iron pipe striking him heavily in the middle. Then he didn’t know anything until he was lying flat on the ground, clutching a bunch of sharp weeds in his hand. The horse was dead, a few feet away. He could feel something immense and wet inside him, as if he had swallowed a hot, steaming sponge. A big corporal named Hatchworth picked him up over his shoulder and carried him back to a hospital; on the way, he could hear the rebels coming. The rebels went back, still yelling, after the artillery opened on them. It was cannister at point-blank range, Ty said. Whatever that was. It sounded ugly … And while he was in the hospital, somebody stole his watch. He lost twenty-seven pounds in something like three weeks.

That was Maryland, that was far over the line, that was as far as the south had come. Now he had gone back to it all, and his wife knew that he would be killed, and she hated her soul and body because of the nausea which she did not feel. Killed. He’ll be dead and buried. You’ll be a widow, widow, widow.

Lying there on the bed in the density of summer dusk, she pressed her hands over her eyes. The green saturation of wistaria lay across her life—there was no calm darkness behind her closed eyelids but only tropical vines, crawling and climbing, and they were coming slowly alive, and they had snakes for the vine part of them.