But he’d known something, felt something still, like a shiver just under the skin. As he drove away, his gaze shifted to the rearview mirror. He took another long look at the stone wall, the markers and the madly thriving honeysuckle.

Then he turned his eyes to the road ahead.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

HE KNEW THIS LAND, THE RISE AND FALL OF IT, THE spread of the fields, the rough shoulders of rock that jutted out. He knew the stone walls that kept the fat cows grazing on the green. His hands had helped build some of them, with his uncle’s patient tutelage to guide him.

Though he’d traveled some distance from this land, its rise and fall, he’d always planned to come back to it. To make his home near some bend in the creek that ran over rocks and cooled its water under the shade of the woods.

He loved this land as he’d loved no other his feet had trod upon.

But today on this September morning, it was a landscape of hell. Today, his sweat soiled his uniform and the ground beneath him. His sweat, but not his blood. Not yet.

Today he fought, and lived as he had on other days since some deep-seated need drove him to enlist. And today, he wished with all of his heart, all of his soul, that he had carved out that need and crushed it under his boot.

He’d thought he’d find honor, excitement, even adventure. Instead he’d found despair, terror, misery, and questions he couldn’t begin to answer.

The sky that had dawned beautiful and blue turned to a dirty haze under the sooty smoke of cannon fire. Mini-balls sang on their vicious journey, ending in a crescendo of flying earth, destroyed flesh.

Oh, what an insult to the body and soul was war.

The sound of men’s screams assaulted his ears, his guts, until he heard little else, deaf even to the blast of cannon, the endless screech of shell, the hail-on-tin-roof patter of bullets.

He lay a moment, fighting to chase his breath that seemed just out of his reach. The blood on his uniform had been inside the friend he’d made on the march—George, a blacksmith’s apprentice, a jokester with hair the color of cornsilk and eyes as blue and happy as summer.

Now the cornsilk ran red, and those eyes stared out of his ruined face.

He knew this land, Billy thought again as his ears rang and his heart beat like the battle drums. The quiet road that wound through it divided the Piper and Roulette farms. His parents were friendly with the Pipers.

He wondered where they were now, now that this meandering border sunken into that rolling land served as a line of blood and death.