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your mama's got lots of things for you to do.” She would never mention his stepfather or his half brothers and half sister. They did not exist to her. He was the only product of her son and his mother, the only Hodges left, last of his father's family.
    Since he was the last it had become perhaps the most important thing in her waning life that he should know of those who went before him. All the campfire stories and the front-porch chronicles, of the wilderness days and the Hodges who had fought and fallen, had dwindled down to him and her. And these tales, these forgotten pieces of history, would be passed to him or die. All the pain and misery and minor successes and major sacrifices would be learned by him or forgotten by the entire world. She was intent, compulsive: she would not let them be for nothing.
    So she taught him all the Ghosts, over the years of Sundays, inside the shadows of her kitchen. And this is what he learned, under the patient drone of a suffering voice grown old and dry.
    THEY took Abednego, he was a Hodges same as you, Scotch and Irish, mean as a curly-haired old dog, and he went to Buford's regiment. He was a private there, in Woodson's company, they say. He was a mountaineer already and this was only the Revolution, but you see we always been out here, since the first days when we took the wilderness, all the low blue mountains from Cherokee and Saponi and Tutelo. Those were some fights, what I mean, when it was just a man and his family against them Indians.
    But they took Abednego and he was a private and when Buford fought the British over at Greenspring, Abednego was took a prisoner and they marched him and some others off to Richmond and kept them there. But finally they traded for some Redcoat prisoners so he was let go and he come on home. Then after the war they give him some land out in the mountains but then they took it back with something called a mortgage. You never could keep a Hodges out of debt, you know that. And when they got him with this mortgage they asked him if he didn't want one of them soldier's pensions but Abednego he didn't want to burden the government with no pension, said he didn't fight for no pension. So they put him in the debtor's prison for two years. And him a man of sixty-eight by then.
    Then Isham, that was his son, he was in the militia for that War of 1812, but after it was finished he moved on over into Tennessee. Said they done killed off all the British in Virginia, and maybe there was a few left over in Tennessee. He married him a half-Cherokee gal named Polly Long and they had themselves a brood of kids.
    One of them was Welcome, your great-great-grandaddy. He was the fifth man down. When they were hardly teenagers, him and his brother Mibau went up into Kentucky. They say Mibau killed a man down in Tennessee for trying to smooch his sister, and Isham sent Welcome with Mibau up into Kentucky because Mibau was hardly more than a boy and hadn't never been away from kinpeople. Well, they settled in the ridges here and they took up with some local gals. Welcome, he married a Hargrove, as I recall. Had more childrens than they could rightly count.
    Then that terrible war come and old Welcome didn't hardly have him a boy left, time it was over. He lost three of 'em just in Pickett's Charge. You know, up to Gettysburg. Oh, he had him some fighting mean boys, ain't no doubt. They come down from the ridges, they were in the Ninth Kentucky, they wore just some old rags and called it a uniform. But they were fighting mean.
    When the others finally come back they told old Welcome of it. They talked about a dusty, summer heat, and all of them sweating. Fifteen thousand of them in the field! I can hardly picture it, boy. They said that the dust come up from the ground like wind, blowing from their feet up to their eyes, straight inside their noses. And they walked inside it, couldn't even wipe it or keep from breathing it or even see beyond it. And they said you