First Impressions

remarked.
    Shane laughed, taking a bend in the road competently. “My ancestors fought here. Gran didn’t let me forget it.”
    “For which side?”
    “Both.” She gave a small shrug. “Wasn’t that the worst of it really? The choosing sides, the disintegration of families. This is a border state. Though it went for the North, sympathies this far south leaned heavily toward the Confederacy as well. It isn’t difficult to imagine a number of people from this area cheering secretly or openly for the Stars and Bars.”
    “And with this section being caught between Virginia and West Virginia—”
    “Exactly,” she said, very much like a teacher approving of a bright student. Vance chuckled but she didn’t seem to notice. Shane pulled off the side of the road into a small parking area. “Come on, let’s walk. It’s beautiful here.”
    Around them mountains circled in the full glory of fall. A few leaves whipped by—orange, scarlet, amber—to be caught by the wind and carried off. There were rolling hills, gold in the slanting sunlight, and fields with dried, withering stalks of corn. The air was cooler now as the sun dropped toward the peaks of the western mountains. Without thinking, Vance linked his hand with hers.
    “Bloody Lane,” Shane said, bringing his attention to a long, narrow trench. “Gruesome name, but apt. They came at each other from across the fields. Rebs from the north. Yanks from the south. Artillery set up there”—she pointed—“and there. This trench is where most of them lay after it was over. Of course, there were engagements all around—at the Burnside Bridge, the Dunker Church—but this . . .”
    Vance shot her a curious look. “War really fascinates you, doesn’t it?”
    Shane looked out over the field. “It’s the only true obscenity. The only time killing’s glorified rather than condemned. Men become statistics. I wonder if there’s anything more dehumanizing.” Her voice became more thoughtful. “Haven’t you ever found it odd that to kill one to one is considered man’s ultimate crime, but the more a man kills during war, the more he’s honored? So many of these were farm boys,” she continued before Vance could form an answer. “Children who’d never shot at anything more than a weasel in the henhouse. They put on a uniform, blue or gray, and marched into battle. I doubt if a fraction of them had any idea what it was really going to be like. I’ll tell you what fascinates me.” Shane looked back at Vance, too wrapped up in her own thoughts to note how intensely he watched her. “Who were they really? The sixteen-year-old Pennsylvania farm boy who rushed across this field to kill a sixteen-year-old boy from a Georgia plantation—did they start out looking for adventure? Were they on a quest? How many pictured themselves sitting around a campfire like men and raising some hell away from their mothers?”
    “A great many, I imagine,” Vance murmured. Affected by the image she projected, he slipped an arm around her shoulders as he looked out over the field. “Too many.”
    “Even the ones who got back whole would never be boys again.”
    “Then why history, Shane, when it’s riddled with wars?”
    “For the people.” She tossed back her head to look at him. The lowering sun shining on her eyes seemed to accentuate the tiny gold flecks that he sometimes couldn’t see at all. “For the boy I can imagine who came across that field in September more than a hundred and twenty years ago. He was seventeen.” She turned back to the field as if she could indeed see him. “He’d had his first whiskey, but not his first woman. He came running across that field full of terror and glory. The bugles were blaring, the shells exploding, so that the noise was so huge, he never heard his own fear. He killed an enemy that was so obscure to him it had no face. And when the battle was over, when the war was over, he went home a man, tired and aching for his own land.”
    “What happened to him?” Vance murmured.
    “He married his childhood sweetheart, raised ten kids and told his grandchildren about his charge to Bloody Lane in 1862.”
    Vance drew her closer, not in passion, but in camaraderie. “You must have been a hell of a teacher,” he said quietly.
    That made Shane laugh. “I was a hell of a storyteller,” she corrected.
    “Why do you do that?” he demanded. “Why do you underrate yourself?”
    She shook her head. “No, I know my