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both seeking copies of Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (which I am now ashamed to admit, but which you can perhaps forgive). I had momentarily slipped the leash of my Tanté Marie, who had become increasingly watchful since I had begun to fill out my dresses. When our hands accidently touched while reaching for the only copy of the Warner book in the store, we both blushed.
    We both apologized and insisted the other take it. I agreed, but I suggested that since I was a fast reader, he could call for it in a few days. But neither of us wanted to part, and we lingered near one another, silent.
    Then, impulsively: “You have the most beautiful aura I have ever seen.”
    â€œWhat’s an aura?” I asked.
    â€œIt is a radiant band of color that outlines a person’s body,” he said. “It’s from the Greek, for ‘breath’ or ‘breeze,’ and it represents the essence of a person.”
    â€œYou mean like a halo?”
    â€œNo,” he said, and smiled. “Only Jesus and the saints have halos, but everyone has an aura, like everyone has a shadow. Your shadow is something that is cast by your body, yes?”
    I nodded.
    â€œYour aura is the shadow your soul casts.”
    â€œA soul shadow,” I said.
    â€œExactly,” Jonathan said. “And they come in all colors and sizes. Angry or passionate people have red auras, great thinkers or leaders have green ones, and melancholics dark brown.”
    â€œI’ve never seen one.”
    â€œIt takes a bit of practice,” he said. “I can teach you how, if you like.”
    â€œAnd what, exactly, do you find so beautiful about mine?”
    â€œIt is a remarkable mixture of colors,” he said. “Violet and yellow and blue, all swirling in harmony. All the best colors, in my opinion. Inspiration, joy, and love.”
    Jonathan’s visits to the Wolf River Plantation became frequent. He taught me to see auras. His was a beautiful magenta, the signature color of the nonconformist. We practiced table tilting and automatic writing. He brought me books and read me poetry and taught me every secret thing.
    When the war came in April, he quit Stewart College and volunteered to fight for the Yankees with LaDue’s Company, an act that scandalized Memphis society. When we secretly wed when I was fourteen years of age, the discovery mortified my family. My mother cried for days, my uncle threatened to bullwhip Jonathan, but my Tanté Marie understood.
    â€œDi moin qui vous laimein, ma di vous quie vous yé,” she said.
    It was an old Creole proverb: “Show me who you love, and I’ll show you who you are.”
    All I wanted in this world was Jonathan, and I was terrified that he would die—killed in battle, dead by disease, or extinguished in any of the hundred ordinary ways that people depart this earth every day.
    Jonathan laughed, saying there was nothing to fear, and he quoted Whitman:

    What do you think has become of the young and old men?
    And what do you think has become of the women and children?
    They are alive and well somewhere,
    The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

    He created a secret message, shared only with me. He promised that if he died before me, he would send over a message, proving survival of the spirit—and our eternal love.
    Hank began appearing to me less and less after I met Jonathan. The mud clerk’s image was as wind-blown as ever, but he began to fade, until at last he was just a shadow in my bedroom mirror. There were no more jokes. By the time Jonathan and I were married, Hank was gone.
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    While Jonathan marched off with LaDue in the spring of 1861, I waited at home. Life in Memphis changed very little during the first year of the war, and then there was a river battle just above Memphis, and ten thousand people turned out on the bluffs to see it.
    There were eight or nine Union gunboats and rams against a