Strange, that helped. She heard and knew and sensed the difference, and uneasily accepted. It kept Angie, my old love, back safe, and for myself. It saved that time when we both sat groaning, joking, wondering about him. But Alabama would never again get to be, for me, plain Angelina Renata Byrnes, co-hick, another troublemaking player, my fellow beginner.

And at the same second I vowed this, I learned something. I learned that, all along, my real passion had not been Robert. (That’d all been cupid arrow ricochet.) It had not ever been Miss Alabama Famous. No, I most yearned for that freckled missing person.

It was li’l Angie that I’d really loved.

But we stayed together; we had too many years on record not to. I had never before understood my parents’ marriage, how—having got this far in—they could neither of them just admit a mistake and bail the hell out. Happiness might demand it, but Mythology—the myth of their being a handsome couple made-for-each-other—would simply not permit that. Myth outranks any single person’s little Joy. We’re all continually upstaged by the scale of our own times and tragedies. In the end, the name of the ship that took you down is better known than your name ever will be.

Mother had sent me photostats of two letters Colonel Hartley wrote his wife after the Battle of Shiloh. (My aunt, recently remodeling the family farmhouse, found them tucked under dining room wainscotting.) I read the things hoping to understand my great-grandad’s character. But all he really ever mentioned were the awful conditions, his boys losing their teeth from simple malnutrition, his outrage over all of this, his feeble attempts to make things locally easier. That seemed the single thing he thought about. Rare mention of a Yankee. Only the salutation and endings of his bulletins threw her scraps, a sentence or two of something a little personal, stray emotions for his worried hungry wife left home, fending with six kids. It was always only The Front, only Care and The Cause.

“They cannot do this to us, Julia. This loss of life shall not be permitted to continue. What must our boy recruits think of such a God? He is surely setting, Julia, such a poor example for our young. Pray without ceasing for my charges and your too obdnt. husband, … Increase.”

Results

told Robert he would have to go and have The Test, and when he asked me why, I gently turned over his wrist and pointed to spot. It had now become two. They were black.

The look that then passed between us, the questions filed like knives in it, would take the rest of this lights-out fairy-tale story to unpack and catalogue, longer. “Who knew what when?” The Watergate hearings tried to answer. An impeachment followed. But the rushing questions still abound.