Speaking in Tongues

Again, the uneasy twist of his stomach at the thought.
    He glanced once more over his shoulder—toward where he’d seen the wisp of the ghostly soldier gazing at him from the cluster of vines and kudzu and loblolly pine. Tate returned to the damaged pipe, recalling what his grandfather—born Charles William Collier but known throughout northern Virginia as “the Judge”—had told him about the Dead Reb.
    A young private in the bold experiment of the Confederacy took a musket ball between the eyes at the first battle of Bull Run. By all laws of mercy and physiology he should have fallen dead at the picket line. But he’d simply dropped his musket, stood up and wandered southeast until he came to the huge woods that bordered the dusty town of Manassas. There he lived for six months, growing dark as a slave, sucking eggs and robbing cradles (the human victuals were legend only, the Judge appended in a verbal footnote). The Dead Reb was personally responsible for the cessation of all foot traffic after dusk through the Centreville woods that fall—until he was found, stark naked and dead indeed, sitting upright in what was the middle of Jackson’s Corner, now a prime part of Tate Collier’s farm.
    Well, no ghosts here now, Tate reflected, only a hundred feet of pipe to be replaced . . .
    Straightening up now, he wiped his watch crystal.
    Twenty minutes till they were due.
    Look, he told himself, relax.
    Through the misty rain Tate could see, a mile away, the house he’d built eighteen years ago. It was a miniature Tara, complete with Doric columns, and was white as a cloud. This was Tate’s only real indulgence in life, paid for with some inheritance and the hope of money that a young prosecutor knows will be showered upon him for his brilliance and flair, despite the fact that a commonwealth’s attorney’s meager salary is a matter of public record. The six-bedroom house still groaned beneath a hearty mortgage.
    When the Judge deeded over the fertile Piedmont land to Tate twenty years ago—skipping Tate’s father for reasons never articulated though known to one and all of the Collier clan—the young man decided impulsively he wanted a family home (the Judge’s residence wasn’t on the farmland itself but was eight miles away in Fairfax). Tate kept a two-acre parcel fallow for one season and built on it the next. The house sat between the two barns—one new, one the original—in the middle of a rough, grassy field punctuated with patches of black-eyed Susans, hop clover and bluestem, a stand of bitternut hickory trees, a beautiful American beech and eastern white pines.
    The eerily balmy wind grabbed his rain slicker and shook hard. He closed two buckles of the coat and happened to be gazing toward the house when he saw a downstairs light go out.
    So Megan had arrived. It had to be the girl; Bett didn’t have keys to the house. No hope of cancellation now. Well, if you live three miles from a Civil War battlefield,you have to appreciate the persistence of the past.
    He glanced once more at the fractured pipe and started toward the house, heavy boots slogging through the untilled fields.
    Like the Dead Reb. No, he reflected, nothing so dramatic. More like the introspective man of forty-four years that he’d become.
    •   •   •
    An enthymeme is an important rhetorical device used in formal debate.
    It’s a type of syllogism (“All cats see in the dark. Midnight is a cat. Therefore Midnight sees in the dark.”), though the enthymeme is abbreviated. It leaves out one line of logic (“All cats see in the dark. Therefore Midnight sees in the dark.”). Experienced debaters and trial lawyers like Tate Collier rely on this device frequently in their debates and courtroom arguments but it works only when there’s a common understanding between the advocate and his audience. Everybody’s got to understand that the animal in question is a cat; they have to supply the missing information in order for the logic to hold up.
    Tate reflected now that he, his ex-wife and Megan had virtually none of this common understanding. The mind of Betty Susan McCall would be as alien to him as his was to her. Except for his ex-wife’s startling reappearance seven weeks ago—with the news about Megan’s drunken climb up the water tower—he hadn’t seen her for nearly two years and their phone conversations were limited to practical issues about the girl and the few residual financial threads between