The oldest was Lavada Waller, a girl who, in Lucinda’s estimation, was almost stunningly thickheaded; the youngest, a sweet, placid boy named Pete who stuttered badly. On Lucinda’s first day, Euphrastus presented her to the community with an introduction so lengthy that half the students, along with a good number of the parents crowded into the overheated schoolroom, nodded off. He intoned a speech on the virtues of Southern education, which had been cut short during the “War of Northern Aggression,” and revisited in agonizing detail the resultant evils of Federalism, reinforced by Reconstruction. Lucinda looked over the sad, wilted gathering of settlers, the women in faded dresses, the men in their work denim, and recognized in all of their faces the tenuous look of hope, pale and limpid, painful in its degree of uncertainty, inadequate as a counterweight to the years of starvation, of violence, of sudden death. During the war, she had worked for a short time nursing the amputees who filled Confederate hospitals.
