“I asked you, in the what?”

“The Civil War,” he repeated, very puzzled. Not a minute ago, the old man had mentioned the war and now acted as if he’d never heard of it.

Bristling, the way Trajan bristled when a dog or strange cat came near, Kincaid laid hands on Drew’s shoulders and breathed into his face (he wasn’t more than three inches taller) the smells of bad teeth and stale tobacco.

“If you really had a granddaddy who fought for the South, you’d know that down here we call it the War Between the States, because that’s what it was. Wasn’t a damned thing civil about it. I’m bein’ real civil right now, and the war wasn’t that, son.” The hands dropped, and Kincaid unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a scar that twisted from his sternum to his navel, like a long, pink worm. “Nothin’ civil about this, is there? Seven Pines, May 28, 1862. I was with Longstreet, finest man ever to come outta South Carolina. The War Between the States, remember that. Y’all can go back to callin’ it the Civil War when you’re back in Maine, or wherever the hell it is y’all come from.”

Drew gulped and said, “Yes, sir.”

“So now that we’re talkin’ the same language, let’s hear about this granddaddy.”

His voice and body had relaxed, yet the man was so touchy they were afraid that anything they said would give offense.

“I sure hope you wasn’t fibbin’ to me about that. I truly do.”

“He was killed at the Battle of Antietam Creek,” Drew said.

“Sharpsburg. Down here, we prefer to call it Sharpsburg.”

“Yes, sir. Sharpsburg. Fall of 1862.”

“That’s when it was. This granddaddy of yours have a name, or don’t you know that, neither?”

“It was Lightbourne. Pardon Lightbourne.”

Kincaid’s head snapped back, but he recovered instantly and assumed again a look of flinty skepticism.

“Let’s hear a little more.”

“Our mother said he was a captain. That’s what her aunt told her, our great-aunt Judith. She raised our mother after our grandmother died.”

“Your maw got a picture of her daddy?”

Nathaniel answered that she had only one, a photograph showing a tall officer with very light hair and a mustache.

Murmuring, “Ain’t this somethin’?” Kincaid removed his hat, uncovering a bald head ribboned in gray, and wiped the sweatband with a finger. “Boys, there was a Captain Pardon Lightbourne in the regiment of volunteers raised up in Beaufort County. Troopers called him ‘Swede’ because he was a tall man, hair like cornsilk and the mustache to match. I was in that regiment, a private when I got shot at Seven Pines.”

“You knew our grandfather?” asked Nathaniel, feeling something move through him, a pleasurable chill.