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of 1865, he could play the entire concerto without pause, executing the tense flying arpeggios with accuracy and authority, making low chords thunder and high chords chime like silver bells. Alice herself gave less and less instruction as the months passed but never tired of listening to him play, even as her own fate, and the Confederacy’s, came closer.
    The war that was to have finished by Christmas of ’61 lasted four catastrophic years. More than 625,000 combatants were dead of wounds, starvation, or disease, with a million more bodies and spirits damaged beyond fixing. Nearly everyone in the South was bankrupted by the collapse of the Confederate currency and the postwar inflation. In this, the Hollidays were no exception, though the clan was more fortunate than most. Its menfolk bore their share of danger and hardship, but they all came back alive and relatively whole.
    In the end, it was not Confederate veterans but his mother who taught John Henry Holliday that there are wars that cannot be won, no matter how valiantly they are fought. Consumed by fever, weakened by privation and by the terrible hunger that followed Sherman’s march to the sea, exhausted by the violent cough that all but shook her to pieces, Alice McKey Holliday died, day by day, before her child’s eyes.
    He was barely fifteen when the great blow fell. Until her coffin closed, they had never been separated longer than a school day.
    More mature members of the family were not surprised when John Henry’s father remarried a scant three months after his first wife was laid in her grave. In the view of Henry Holliday’s many brothers, he had shown admirable restraint during the long years when Alice was no true wife to him, for it was not only the war and her illness that had come between them. No one would have said as much, but everybody knew. On the day his little boy was born, Henry Holliday became superfluous in his own household—displaced as decisively as King Laius by the returning Oedipus, who made Queen Jocasta his own.
    Equally unsurprising: Henry’s son did not see matters that way. Like the defeated, devastated South, in deep mourning and groaning under Yankee occupation, the grieving boy was outraged by the sudden appearance in his home of a young and pretty pretender to his mother’s throne. Relations between father and son quickly went from indifferent to cold to worse.
    There are a thousand ways for a boy of fifteen to go wrong. The most gently reared will lash out, battered by gusts of mindless fury. The brightest can be swamped by black despair. The sweetest may turn sullen and withdrawn. The most rational are quick to anger. Add the antagonism of a stepmother hardly older than the boy himself, and not one whit wiser. Pile on daily humiliations in an occupied country where the only things available in abundance are guns, hard liquor, and provocation …
    Well, something had to be done.
    Nearly two dozen aunts and uncles came together to discuss John Henry’s future. The consensus was to put a little distance between disconsolate son and newlywed father. That might be enough to mitigate the current discord and keep the breach from widening.
    John Stiles Holliday, who’d attended John Henry’s birth and repaired his cleft, had always taken a special interest in his namesake nephew. During the occupation, Dr. Holliday had quietly accepted a few Yankee patients who could pay in greenbacks; this was an economic extremity he concealed as effectively as he could, but he soothed his conscience by looking for discreet ways to share the income with destitute relatives and friends. He and his wife, Permelia, had already fostered the young mulatto daughter of a Charleston friend, and if little Sophie Walton could become part of the doctor’s family, why not take John Henry in as well? The more the merrier, and the good Lord knew that poor boy could use some cheering up! He could continue his studies at the Fayetteville boys’