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Church. And I did not believe anymore that the two held hands more tightly than a vise.
    “There is truth here,” I said to the priest at my last confession. “But this is not all the truth there is to be found.”
    I told him I meant to leave, and he did not stop me.
    I had half a mind to follow the crumbs of truth wherever they went. I opened my eyes, opened my ears, and opened my Bible. Piece by piece the trail became clear. A light beckoned across the ocean—it lured me onto a boat, and over the water. I followed it as best I could. I watched it flicker and dim, then flare and sizzle.
    I went to America.
    Didn’t everyone, who needed a new start?

V.
    I will tell you how it happened.
    It fell apart.
    ***
    She was my boat, and she was always meant to be my last. After our last run, down that little leg from Knoxville to Chattanooga—hardly a hundred miles—I was going home. My wife was waiting for me there, at her sister’s place on Lookout Mountain. I was to lean hard on the whistle treadle three times when I passed between the hills. She would know to look outside and see me coming. The smoke from the big black stacks would show my progress even at a very great distance.
    Her sister would bring her down to the landing.
    We might stay in the valley for a while; the weather was good and there was no rush to head back home.
    But we hadn’t talked about that, yet—whether or not we’d really go home. We weren’t certain anything was left of it. Last we heard, the Yankees hadn’t burned it; but however Bellehurst was standing, word had it, the place wasn’t doing so well.
    Maybe we’d heard wrong. The news coming up was spotty and unreliable, or that’s how we liked to think.
    In Chattanooga, the war hadn’t treated the city too bad. It was too important, with the river and the rails. Everyone needed to use it. It took some beating, sure—but nothing like what they got down in Georgia. Nothing like Chickamauga, maybe ten or twelve miles south.
    I hear the mountains took the worst of it, but I don’t know if it’s true. I know soldiers and generals always try to take the highest ground, and there’s nothing higher around there than Lookout and Signal.
    But after it was over…after Appomattox, there was no going back to the way things were. Not in Tennessee, not in Georgia, and not anywhere else.
    I did say they left the house standing, though, didn’t I? Sherman went another way, and burned another stretched-out scar on someone else’s land. But they didn’t take our place—even though we left it for them.
    I went into the service. They made me a major, because they couldn’t expect a man with stature to enlist in the infantry. I pray I did them proud.
    Nancy went to go stay with family. I’d say that between us, she sure got the better part of the deal. My wife had cousins down in Florida—on an indigo plantation, if I remember right. When the war came, these cousins of hers didn’t just leave the state or the Confederacy, they left the continent altogether. They went to the Caribbean and waited out the conflict there on the sandy islands to the south and east.
    In my private thoughts, I felt they were being disloyal. They should have stayed and fought with the rest of us. But if they were determined to leave, then it was just as well they took Nancy with them. I don’t know how well she would have handled it, staying there. She could’ve been killed, or worse.
    But when the war ended and the homestead was gone—or out of commission, anyway, since everyone who worked it was scattered or free, I didn’t know what to do. Fortune hadn’t favored us, to say the least. I was out of money, though Nancy was spared that trouble, being in the islands like she was. I am glad for that. I should speak better of her cousins. I don’t know what would have happened if they hadn’t taken her with them.
    After my discharge, I sat down and wrote a very painful letter to my wife. I didn’t go into any more