Excerpt from Chenneville by Paulette Jiles, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Your uncle sent it," said Lemuel. "Sent all manner of things. Saved them for you. Wasn't easy."

"Why wasn't it easy?"

"People make off with things around this place, especially now, since about everybody's gone home. Except the bad cases like you." Then the young man caught himself and gave John a hearty slap on the shoulder. "But you ain't a bad case no more! Hey?" He poured a handful of nuts into John's palm. They were pecans and smelled of cinnamon and brown sugar. "Here, you need to eat more."

The next week, on one of his lurching walks about the grounds, John came across the boy just outside the main staff office tent. The tent was an enormous thing of billowing white canvas. Young Lemuel was being thrown about like a jointed doll by a huge corporal. There was a lot of shouting going on.

John was down to one cane now; he stalked up to the struggling figures and grabbed the young attendant by the shirt collar. He jammed his cane into the corporal's chest to shove him back. He was far taller than either of them.

"What the hell is going on here?" he said. "I can't stand yelling. Stop yelling."

"Sir!" the corporal said and came to attention. "This ratbag was caught with a box of pralines from the volunteer tent!"

Lemuel hung like a piece of washing from John's big hand as his shirt collar slowly tore loose from its band. "Well, what of it?" said John. "Let him have the Goddamned pralines, would you? Anything for some peace and quiet. We are all sick and wounded around here, in case you hadn't noticed."

The corporal bit his lip and gave one short nod. He stared hard and cold at the boy. "Keep it up," the corporal said in a low voice. "And see what happens."

John let go of the young man's collar and said, "If I were you, ratbag, I would stay out of sight for a while."

Lemuel scrambled away into the grounds, disappearing behind a patient tent as if he had evaporated.

In the ensuing days, John sat in a chair in the chill sunshine and thought through everything: his name, his rank, his family and their names. Where they all were or were not. He was not married, he was sure of that. His father was dead of a heart condition, and after that it seemed his sister had married and his mother had gone to live with the New Orleans Chennevilles for some reason. Or was she dead too? Maybe she had died and he had lost the memory.

This stopped him. It was an alarming thought. Then a young woman's face came to him, and in this recalled image she was lit by sunlight from a tall window, but he could not remember her name, only a wrenching loss that he could not put words to, and so he got to his feet and began walking again as if he could leave that loss in the chair behind him, a tall man like a dark shadow walking until evening, relentlessly moving from shadow to shadow until somebody said, "Sir, sir, it's suppertime, you should rest now."

Then came a letter from his uncle Basile Chenneville.

He spent an hour at it. It said that he, Basile, could not leave family and business in New Orleans to come to Virginia for him, but if John would hire an attendant to accompany him to St. Louis then Basile would come upriver to meet him at Temps Clair.

A view of a great river sprang up in his head; the plantation called Marais Temps Clair was their home, and it was three miles from the village of Bonnemaison.

Bonnemaison itself was fifteen miles north of St. Louis in that blessed land between the rivers where it was always fair weather, where brown floods of water rushed toward those seas that lay at the bottom of the world.

Get to Harpers Ferry, Basile wrote, and then take the Baltimore and Ohio passenger cars to Wheeling, then an Ohio River steamboat to St. Louis. Temps Clair, it is yours now—the place needs you. Have been communicating with your doctors weekly. Are you in want of funds? Tu a besoin de piastre? I will send all you need, dear Jean, cher neveu—how many nights we have prayed for your very life. Your mother, I fear, is not well; we hope for a full recovery, but she sends loving regards.

Excerpted from Chenneville by Paulette Jiles. Copyright © 2023 by Paulette Jiles. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.