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of the season, Nature poured out a stream of sunny, smiling days so still, so deep, so perfectly poised on the sweet edge of sadness, that it seemed as though somewhere, wherever it is that beauty is minted and happiness struck, the workers had discovered an endless supply of gold and, throwing out the baser, cloudier metals, had dedicated themselves to stamping out one shining day after another.
    In the mornings the mist stayed on in the bottomlands till late, covering the ponds and the low-lying fields in thick billowy pillows of cloudfrom which a bull might emerge like Zeus come to earth to seduce some wide-hipped servant girl, or a flock of geese stream as though pulled along on a string. There were no middle hours; we’d look up from our work and the day would already be leaving. And yet there was no feeling of loss, of things having passed too quickly. To the contrary, the hours felt full and appropriate. There was a silence to those days—the bark of a dog or the lowing of a cow made small by something other than distance—as though the world were waiting, listening for an old lover sure to come.
    The harvest, such as it was that Year of Our Temperamental Lord, 1856, was largely in by then. Our fifty acres of corn had brought in hardly a hundred bushels. The Irish and sweet potatoes, cowpeas, and beans had all done poorly, as had the cotton: hardly fourteen bales for the eighty acres we had planted. And yet what ought to have been a ruinous year was hardly that. The bright leaf tobacco saved us. In the Richmond papers that fall, demand and prices were high, as few farmers had had the nerve to try it. Between the tobacco and the livestock, we knew we’d do fine, and maybe considerably better than that.
    But it wasn’t just the harvest. Quarrels with neighbors died before the seed could set. Stoneman, his four sons behind him, appeared on our porch for the first time in nine years to ask about the bright leaf we’d planted, listened politely, then cleared his throat and offered us the use of his reaper—the only one to be had in those parts—then nodded once, as though agreeing with himself, again to the four hulking boys waiting hat-to-stomach by the door, and left.
    And so it went. Though my brother had returned to his devotions, I hardly minded. Aunt Grace had made her plum cake, whose recipe called for a glass of brandy. Compensation enough. And so, while Eng struggled on toward the land of milk and honey, the bodies piling in the margins, I dwelt contentedly in a Canaan worth struggling for, a Canaan in which plum cakes so light they fluttered the hearts of the heavenly seraphim had long ago been voted in, under threat of secession, as the only proper food for the soul.
    Nor was it just the soul that received its due that season. Now that theair lifting the curtains made the blanket welcome once more, Addy and Sallie had begun spending the nights with us again; Addy in particular, whose interest in sharing our bed had declined in recent years almost as fast as her sister’s, seemed to have recently stumbled across some minor springlet of Ponce de León’s fountain of youth behind the garden.
    We had never been particularly conversant in matters of love. Though she had adjusted easily enough to our situation at first, our desire for each other had begun to gutter and fade almost as soon as it was lit. I was made to understand, by slow degrees—a general lack of interest, a hand gently moved—that any attempt on my part to bring some variety into our lives would not be welcome. Recognizing her many virtues, I did my best to uphold the vows I had taken on the day we were married, though here again, if truth be told, my best grew better as the years came on, and my memory of the love I had once known and lost gradually came to matter less.
    And now, suddenly, a whisper after dinner, a smile over cards. A willingness, if not to be pleased, then at least to humor my desires. I was relieved to learn that,