Tom stuffed a pillow between his arthritic knees, then turned on his side and listened to Peggy snore. Her regular breathing comforted him. Viola’s death had shaken him so profoundly that he felt detached from the material world, like an astronaut drifting away from his mother ship. This sense of dislocation reminded him of those sleepless weeks forty years ago, when he and Viola had stolen every private moment they could. But he was no longer the man he’d been then. A quarter century ago, surgeons had cut vessels from his legs and grafted them into his coronary arteries, allowing him to survive into his late fifties. Since then, various stents had been inserted to keep him alive, and they’d held up pretty well. But now his heart itself was failing. He sometimes had to take seven or eight nitroglycerine tablets simply to get through the day. If tomorrow morning brought the sheriff to his door … what then?

He’d always known it would come to this. As Penn had said, the past was fighting its way to the surface, like a sunken corpse filling with the gases of decay. Knowing what tomorrow might bring, Tom had allowed himself two shots of bourbon along with his evening cigar, then sat up reading The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. Tonight he had reread the order, given at Gettysburg, that had placed the “University Greys” of Ole Miss—Penn’s alma mater—in the first wave of Pickett’s Charge. Lee’s fatal mistake had doomed every last boy in that unit, and the Confederacy with them. To Lee’s everlasting credit, after he was beaten, he had forbidden any guerrilla activity that would extend the conflict, and had supported Reconstruction.

Tom thought about the Lost Cause myth, and how Jim Crow had grown out of Reconstruction as surely as World War II had grown out of Versailles. In so many ways, the primary issue of the Civil War had never truly been settled, and both North and South were complicit in this tragedy. A hundred years after the dreadful sacrifice at Antietam, President Kennedy had been forced to call out the National Guard to get a single black man admitted to Ole Miss. Kennedy’s assassination a year later had set LBJ on the road to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which opened the way for black leaders to carry their struggle onto Main Street, USA. And God, how white America had fought back—both North and South.