![]() ![]() Then one windy morning, Caleb returns home bearing an ugly facial scar and stories of his incarceration in a Union prison camp. Warily, the brothers agree to George’s request, and eventually the three of them succeed in coaxing plants from the reluctant ground. In return, he offers to pay them whatever he can to help subsidize their journey. George reaches out to the two Black men for help in restoring his farmland with a peanut crop. At this low point in the Walkers’ lives, Prentiss and Landry, Black brothers freed from slavery, wander onto the couple’s barren land seeking little more than temporary shelter on their northbound trek in search of their mother, who was sold away from them in childhood. They are mired in grief over the presumed death of their only son, Caleb, a missing Confederate soldier. Somewhere between the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox and the beginning of Reconstruction, George Walker and his wife, Isabelle, live alone and emotionally estranged from each other on their family homestead just outside the village of Old Ox. ![]() Though the Civil War is over when this novel opens, the threat of violence and the persistence of bigotry still loom over a Georgia town. ![]()
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