Peachtree Road [antikvár]

PROLOGUEThe South killed Lucy Bondurant Chastain Ven-able on the day she was bora. It just took her until now to die. It was a textbook murder, classical in concept, faultless in execution; a work of art, really, as such things go. And no wonder. It's what we do best, kill our women. Or maim them. Or make monsters of them, which may be the worst of all.I was thinking of that as I stood by Lucy's grave in the Bondurant plot in Oakland Cemetery this afternoon, in the pale lemon sunlight of a Georgia autumn. Of that, and of many other things, this being the accepted time and place for reflection: a quiet burial in an old cemetery where your family and friends and everybody you know lie, or will. One of the other things I was thinking was how contented and tranquil I always feel here; mindless almost. I have always loved Oakland. Lucy and I played together here as children, forty-odd years ago.It is not that I am morbid, although there would be plenty of people in our crowd to dispute that. To our collective mind, morbid is synonymous with "funny," and there was not one of the people gathered here today, me included, who would not agree that Lucy's cousin Shep Bondurant is "funny." But morbidity is not the direction my aberration takes. Rather the opposite, I think. I'm pretty cheerful and optimistic, in the main, even if I don't go out anymore, or hardly. If I were morbid, I expect I would be dead by now.No, Oakland is not, to me, a place of shadows and stagnation. Not even of death. There is an air of ongoing bustle and life to it, in a silent and unseen way, of course, which is extremely at-3