Such a miracle. The sun had never stopped shining and the rain had stopped and a marvelous sunset blossomed. The intoxicating light gave every face a beauty, and the sweetness and freshness of the air lightened every heart. She sat between her mother who was not yet dead and a soldier who was not her father in a countryside she could no longer remember on a road she hardly saw and she thought: I am perfectly happy.

It was the last time in her whole life she remembered having such a thought. She had no idea who the men were. She had no memory of where they were going or how they came to be going together or what happened to them all once they got there. Something ceremonial, the Civil War dead, the endless young boys and men whose ghosts walked the land, some memorial with rising furling flags and trumpets and a long slow beating of drums. She did not know where her father was that day, leaving her mother and herself to drive through rain and rainbows and sunsets with four handsome soldiers.

But now she remembered her lovely mother who had died when she was seven, giving birth to her sister Alice, and she missed her. She remembered the men. She remembered the way they smelled, the way their young arms filled the sleeves of the jackets and the white stiff collars scraping against their razored necks, the rasp of masculinity, and that had been the beginning, the beginning of all that had come after.

It was, she realized now, the beginning of desire. It was glory, the light, and the crimson clouds. It was the face of Jesus. It was love. Love without end. Desire without object. She had never known or felt it since.