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himself to the ground and squirm into a little indentation in the dirt. But Eli raised himself to one knee to look around, curious to the end. The sharp-nosed shell buried itself in the dirt of the hill behind the Confederate line and forty yards in front of the boys’ position. The shell was a few inches in the dirt before it exploded, a malfunction of the fuse that saved the boys from the ripping and buzzing shrapnel. But the
sound
. The percussion of the explosion shattered one of Eli’s eardrums. The compressed air, fanning out in waves from the impact, lifted the boy up off his feet and threw him back ten yards. The last thing he noticed was how deep the sky appeared, endless and calm, before his head met the sharp edge of a limestone shelf barely peeking out of the soil.

8
    C ARNTON
    A tall young black man on a mule picked his way among the old cobs and broken stalks of a hilly cornfield that lay a couple miles away from the McGavock house. He had spent the better part of the morning casting around the property, spurring Zack the mule to stumble along a little faster, and cursing when the beast looked back and bared his teeth. This was Theopolis, Mariah’s nineteen-year-old son. When he finally spotted Colonel McGavock across the large cornfield winding wire around a fence post, he reined in old Zack and approached with some semblance of dignity and grace. For he was a young man who greatly prized dignity and grace, and it was for this reason that the Colonel liked him better than any slave he had ever owned.
    Colonel John McGavock could barely see for all the sweat in his eyes, and so he didn’t notice Theopolis until he and the mule were almost upon him. He noticed how Theopolis struggled to keep his face still, but the corners of the young man’s mouth turned up slightly. The Colonel knew it amused Theopolis to see a white man laboring away in a suit.
    “What are you laughing at, boy?”
    “Ain’t laughing at nothing, sir. That’s a fine fence right there, sir.”
    John looked back at his work. The snake fence had begun to rot down there in the corner of the field where it got wet and muddy near the creek, and so he had cut down some young trees, stripped them of their bark, and lashed them together. The new pieces stuck out like parts of a giant jigsaw puzzle, glaring and white against the muted silver of the old fence pieces. Not bad.
    “It’s better than I would have thought. Now, why are you interrupting me?”
    “I come to tell you they’s men come to the house, men on horses and in uniforms.”
    “What kind of uniforms?”
    This news worried John very much. He started to whistle for his horse, who was eating old corn shucks off in the distance.
    “They gray uniforms. Secesh, I reckon.”
    “Confederate.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    John bit his lip and crossed his arms. “We’re going to ride back and see what’s going on. I’ll lead.”
    John swung up onto his horse and took up the reins. McGavock looked much younger than his forty-odd years. His full beard was unsullied by even the smallest gray hair, and in the saddle he rode with his back unwaveringly straight. His eyes were a deep evening black, shot through with flecks of lighter brown. His three dead children had had the same eyes, but his two living ones did not. He was a sensitive enough man, and he had noticed and filed away that coincidence.
    Since he’d sent most of his slaves south to escape capture, loaning them out to friends in Montgomery who were out of the way of the fighting, he himself had done most of the work required to keep the plantation running, and it had kept him fit. He liked to think he was running the plantation. But in his more thoughtful moments he admitted to himself that he was really just able to raise enough food to feed his household and keep a little money coming in. He hadn’t even bothered to make a payment on the debt he owed on his land, and if not for the chaos of wartime, he surely would have already