Enoch sat in the chair Jennie brought to the back yard, and watched her pick vegetables: two squash, then three cucumbers, and finally, some ripe tomatoes went into the woven basket. She passed him and carried these items onto the enclosed back porch. He knew her habits. She would lay them on the counter by the porch hand pump and return to the yard to pick some fresh flowers.

A train whistle interrupted his reverie. He stopped to listen as it grew near and then rushed through town two blocks from where he sat. Enoch leaned back, as he recalled his long, slow train ride many years ago. He hardly slept during that tedious trip in 1865, as he seemed to hear the forlorn whistle at every cattle crossing and every lonesome hamlet. Those steel tracks brought his wounded body back to Illinois to recuperate. Enoch recalled how his spirits rose as the train began to leave the devastated battlefields of northern Georgia and Tennessee. He was going home to his daughter and his pregnant wife.

He very well remembered the wearisome train trip with soot and ashes blowing into the windowless car, and his great sense of relief that he was finally leaving the killing fields. The days were warm as he watched Middle America go by—moving out of Chattanooga crossing the Cumberland Plateau, down into the green meadows of Kentucky, then near his original home in southwestern Indiana and finally across the vast river into Illinois. Now, 65 years later the memory seemed a dream, as he had watched trees in full foliage in the south give way to the beauty of newly blooming dogwoods, laurels, and redbuds as he traveled north. Enoch had long waited for the coming reunion with his family since he had not been home to Akin for many months and when he last left, he could not be sure he would ever return.

Jennie finished in the garden. Enoch rose from the chair. He shook his head sadly; he never expected the reunion with his family to be so awkward and difficult.

. . . Enoch had lived on muddy flats, among mosquito-laden woods, and in steamy wild grass sometimes in tents and sometimes rolled into his blanket on the hard ground. He shared what broth and meat might emerge from the mess pot or separately ate hardtack and dried meat from his haversack. He oiled his tattered boots with bear grease and walked 15 miles the next day. Enoch bathed when water was near and unfouled with blood or dead horses. And he got up before dawn to kill people he did not know and prayed they would not kill him. His only goal in life had become survival a day at a time, an hour at a time, a moment at a time. During the war, he was usually hungry and always dirty, tired and bored or fearful. He lived among hardened men in a culture dominated by fear and death. He had almost no control over his time and his life. Whether receiving orders or giving them as an officer, he participated in no grand discussions. As an officer, he made only short-term tactical decisions. His life was largely ordered for him. Enoch was alarmed and frustrated in Akin to return to an unstructured world where he needed to make choices and decisions.