The Truth of the Matter by Robb Forman Dew Page B

furtiveness—left Agnes and the Butlers and Uncle George Scofield unsettled, even when they factored in the difficulties of transportation and the uncertainties of wartime life. None of them spoke of their misgivings, however, because it would have been traitorous in some way they couldn’t quite pin down. Claytor and Trudy wouldn’t ever have married each other in any case, since they were related. But none of the family knew if Claytor had transformed his infatuation with Trudy into no more than a cousinly affection.
    A month or so after the news of the marriage, Uncle George approached Agnes where she sat alone on the small side porch, doing nothing at all other than trying to stay cool one hot afternoon. George was the last of his generation of Scofields still living, and he was the only Scofield of his generation with whom Agnes had ever been comfortable.
    She had admired Warren’s uncle Leo but had always felt shy in his company, and she had done her best to stay out of the way of Warren’s father, John Scofield, whose attentions toward her had been secretively sly and lecherous, disguised by a pretense of affectionate teasing. But George Scofield, the youngest of those three brothers, with his eccentricities, his gentle curiosity, his elegance—Agnes had always liked him. When she saw him crossing the wide yard in her direction, carrying with him some object or other, her spirits lifted. She looked forward to being distracted from the heat by one of Uncle George’s reimaginings of a Civil War battle or some new intrigue he had inferred. He often brought along items from his collection of memorabilia to illustrate one or another of the incidents he described. This afternoon he carried an old jar of some viscous, murky brown substance.
    “It’s just a jar of peaches,” he said when he was about ten feet away and saw her look with apparent apprehension at what he was carrying. “Can I join you here for a little while?” he asked, just as Agnes had gotten up to dust off and reposition an old wooden rocker that had been abandoned to the elements.
    “Would you like some lemonade, Uncle George?” But he was declining even as she asked.
    “No, no. Just some shade. I don’t require another thing. Don’t trouble yourself.” He put the jar on the table between them. “A jar of peaches put up by Adelaide Murry in June of eighteen sixty-one,” he said. “They were in the basement of a farmhouse that was right in the middle of the battle of Gettysburg. Now that’s a fantastic thing, isn’t it? Her husband was a captain in the Union Army. But he was with Grant’s men, fighting in Mississippi. Out in Tennessee, as well.”
    “You’d think it would have been broken somewhere along the way,” Agnes said. “That is amazing.” She gazed at the peaches that had turned to a muddy sludge over their eighty-odd years, and she reminded herself that she and Lily needed to rotate the fruit and tomatoes they put up every year so they would use up the older ones first.
    “When I used to be able to travel more easily . . . while Leo and John stayed home making my fortune . . . Well, Leo did, anyway, though John was the best salesman I ever knew in my life. Because he liked to listen to people. Liked to hear all the stories they wanted to tell about themselves. At least for a while. . . . Well.
I
spent all my time searching those battlefields. . . . But, in any case, on one of my last forays I came upon these peaches. And I found out the story of Adelaide and Edward Murry. It’s always interested me. I haven’t ever been able to decide in the end if it’s a happy or a sad story.”
    He leaned back in the rocker, stretching his long legs out almost to the edge of the porch, crossing his arms comfortably over his chest. Even now George Scofield was the handsomest man Agnes had ever seen. Tall and lean and patrician to such a degree that his good looks had never had any emotional or visceral effect. It was as though he