There was a blinding rainstorm, with vivid lightning, the day Tolbert finally made it home. It was early May, a time when the fields of Saluda were rank with yellow wildflowers, awaiting the plow, and ferns and may apples were pushing through the mulch of the wooded ravines. The familiar landmarks of his former life were still there: the stone bridge spanning a rushing freshet along the pike between Madison and Saluda; his family’s red-brick farmhouse, with its wooden gingerbread framing the front porch, midway between the Tryus Church and the cemetery where his father lay; the little hamlet of Paynesville, where Maddox’s family farmed.
 
But otherwise the world had changed in profound ways, and it must have felt strange to finally be home. His brother Tyrus was dead. His younger brother Sammie was basically a broken old man at fifteen. Daniel had lost three fingers and the use of his left hand and would never work again. Mathew, who had endured scurvy and pneumonia as a prisoner of war, would soon marry and move away. Only Silas had come through four years of war largely unscathed. Romulus himself had passed through his own nine circles of hell and was now back where he started from.