“Can’t say I knowed him, him bein’ a cap’n, me a private, and us in different companies. But I knowed him to see him. Only time I talked to him, except to salute and say good mornin’, was the time my cap’n sent me to him with a message. Recollect that real clear, it was before Longstreet’s corps—our regiment was part of it—deployed to go up against Burnside at Seven Pines. Cap’n Lightbourne was settin’ at the fire with his company sergeant and a lieutenant and they was jawin’ about their families. The cap’n said he got a letter from his wife and that his son—reckon that would be your uncle—had spoke his first words, and that if he lived through the thing tomorrow, first thing he would do is ask for leave so he could get on home and hear his boy call him daddy. Yep, recollect that because them words, ‘If I live through this thing,’ was on everybody’s mind, but nobody dared to speak ’em except the cap’n. Said it real calm and matter-of-fact-like. He was a brave man. And here’s his grandsons, right here in Snead’s Landing, all the way from Maine. How is it y’all got to be Yankees?”

Succinctly as he could, Nathaniel related that story, carefully editing out any reference to his father’s service in the Union navy. He had been thrilled by Kincaid’s brief reanimation of their grandfather, a man who had been little more than a name to him and his brothers, a figure in a cracked photograph without voice or personality. How wonderful to meet someone who had laid eyes upon the living man, had spoken to him and had heard him speak. The scene, suffused with the romance of the long ago, with the glamour of war, had composed itself in Nathaniel’s mind: the fair-haired officer in rebel gray, seated at the watchfire with his officers on the night before battle. Only part of this captivating picture troubled him.

“Are you sure our grandfather was talking about a son?” he asked Kincaid. “That it was a son who’d spoken his first words?”

“Sure am. There’s things I remember from the war like they was last week, some of ’em things I’d as soon not remember. That’s a peculiar question. How come you asked it?”

An instinct told Nathaniel to keep the real reason to himself, but before he could formulate a plausible alternative, Drew blurted out:

“Our mother never told us she had a brother.”

“That a fact?” Kincaid said, laying a finger against the wart on his nose. “Well, that’s peculiar, too.”

“Oh, Dad’s side is the same way,” Eliot tossed off lightheartedly. “We’re a peculiar family all around.”