Four black maids in black uniforms with white aprons had just finished serving the first course, turtle soup, under the supervision of the butler, Mason, an old black man who stood, erect and watchful, near the kitchen door. The turtle soup gave Charlie an idea.

  “Hey, y’all!” he boomed out over the hubbub of conversation around the table. “I want’ hall know sump’m!”

  He said it so loudly that even Lettie Withers, the Atlanta grande dame who was seated on his left, stopped talking to Ted Nashford, the surgeon and chairman of the board of the Emory University School of Medicine, in whom she seemed to be taking such a coquettish interest. Even old Billy Bass stopped telling the bawdy story with which he obviously hoped to shock Lenore Knox, the wife of the former governor of Georgia, Beauchamp Knox, who was just across the table.

  “I want’chall to know,” said Charlie, “that this turtle soup comes from turtles rat’cheer at Turpmtine. Uncle Bud caught every one uv’em. You know how he does it? He ties a line to a bough hanging out over the water and baits the hook with chicken. When the bough bends, he knows the turtle’s struck. Turtle don’t come any better’n Uncle Bud’s.” Then he surveyed the table and beamed.

  Putting it into words would have been beyond Charlie, but he knew that the magic of Turpmtine depended on thrusting his guests back into a manly world where people still lived close to the earth, a luxurious bygone world in which there were masters and servants and everybody knew his place. He didn’t have to explain who Uncle Bud was. He merely had to say his name in a certain way, and one and all would realize that he was some sort of faithful old retainer, probably black.

  He had hoped that Uncle Bud’s catching the turtles might somehow serve as a transition to just who had caught the boars and the rattlesnakes. But that wasn’t happening, and so he leaned across the woman on his right, Howell Hendricks’s second wife, Francine, and said to the man next to her, “Well, Herb, whattaya think a yer turtle soup?”

  “Oh, it’s delicious, Charlie,” said the man, with a somewhat embarrassed smile.

  Charlie beamed, hoping to coax a little more conversation out of him. But it wasn’t forthcoming. Herb Richman was going to be a tough pigeon to bag, a hard one to mesmerize with the magic of Turpmtine. For a start, he was Jewish, which in Georgia meant that your paths weren’t going to cross socially all that much. And he was so damned mild-mannered and polite. It wasn’t going to be easy to put him under the Turpmtine Spell with the usual hearty, jolly, manly chatter. Nevertheless, Herb Richman was the pigeon he needed. This whole weekend had been created for the sole purpose of casting the Spell over Mr. Herbert Richman, who was known in the Atlanta newspapers as “the fitness center tycoon.” Herb Richman was the founder of DefinitionAmerica, a network of 1,100 health-and-fitness centers, which he had started in Atlanta and then reproduced thick as shad throughout the country. He was looking for 360,000 square feet of prime office space to create a new corporate headquarters. With luck and the Turpmtine Spell, that might mean seven floors and more than $10 million a year in lease income at Croker Concourse, a financial and public relations coup that would impress even the workout people at PlannersBanc with their “niche focus” and all the rest of it. Practically every big weekend at Turpmtine had its pigeon, a term Charlie had said out loud only once, to his first wife, Martha, who had found it distasteful. So he had never dared utter it at all to Serena, although he had told her exactly why he had invited Herb Richman and why he would be paying so much attention to him. Turpmtine might not be, strictly speaking, an experimental farm, but it had paid for itself many times over in terms of bagged pigeons, a point he didn’t quite know how to get across to those small-brained niche-focused motherfuckers at PlannersBanc.

  Charlie continued to beam at his pigeon. Herb Richman wasn’t much of an advertisement for DefinitionAmerica, which promised its thousands of members sculpted, high-toned, sharply defined bodies. He was only forty-four but already running to fat. His head popped up out of his blazer and polo shirt like a bubble. His skin was pallid and pasty. A few strands of hair the color of orange-juice stains skimmed back across his otherwise bald pate. His extremely pale hazel eyes gave him a look that was at once eerie and washed out. He looked sleepy. It occurred to Charlie that he himself would have presented a better picture for such a firm, even at the age of sixty. Charlie was wearing an open-necked khaki shirt that brought out the girth of his neck, the width of his shoulders, and the massiveness of his chest. Casual dress was very much the fashion at the grand plantations these days, even at dinner, except for a few spreads in South Carolina owned by Northerners who were infected with British customs.

  “I want to make sure you meet Uncle Bud tomorrow,” said Charlie. “Uncle Bud’s a walking history of Georgia plantations. He’s been here at Turpmtine since a long time fo’ I ever was. His folks were all Turpmtine Ni—Turpmtine People from way back, when all you did here was, you harvested resin from the pine trees for naval stores and that sorta thing. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how old he is. I don’t think he could, either.” Charlie shook his head with a salt-of-the-earth significance. “Uncle Bud.”

  “Sounds like an interesting man,” said Herb Richman with a weak smile, great politeness, and utter lack of conviction.

  The table’s conversational buzz had now dropped badly, even though Charlie had managed to stock the weekend with enough loquacious, colorful, prestigious characters to impress Herb Richman, no matter what his personal tastes were. Down at the other end of the table, on one side of Herb Richman’s wife, Marsha, he had put Howell Hendricks, the big, hearty, melon-headed CEO of Serry & Belloc, the second or third biggest advertising firm in the South. On the other side he had put Slim Tucker, the country singer who was one of the first music-business figures to buy a South Georgia quail plantation. They had both been paying a lot of attention to Marsha Richman—who was such a pretty brunette that Charlie figured she had to be a second wife—but now all three of them were silently exploring their turtle soup with their spoons. The old ex-governor, Beauchamp (pronounced Beacham) Knox, who was sitting next to Serena, was doing the same. Even Opey McCorkle, the Baker County judge who could talk a raccoon out of a tree, had stopped talking to Ted Nashford’s young live-in girlfriend, Lydia Something-or-other. In true Opey McCorkle fashion he had turned up for dinner wearing a plaid shirt, a plaid necktie, red felt suspenders, and a big old leather belt that went around his potbelly like something you could hitch up a mule with, but for now he had cut off his usual torrent of orotund rhetoric mixed with Baker Countyisms. So it was up to Charlie himself to put some life back into the proceedings. This he felt well primed to do. Before dinner he had downed a couple of glasses of bourbon and water—“brown whiskey,” as opposed to the Yuppie Lite stuff that was in vogue in Atlanta these days, the white wine and vodka and so on—although he hadn’t made an issue of the point, since Herb Richman had asked for white wine—and then he had brought out some of Uncle Bud’s homemade corn liquor. The ladies had turned it down with appropriately terrified ladylike protestations. But naturally Charlie had to knock back a glass of it, despite the fact that it practically took the top of your head off. It stopped his right knee from aching, in any event, and left him feeling … loud.

  “Hey, Mason!” he boomed out to his butler, who was still standing by the kitchen door. “Don’t we have any honest-to-God logs around here? All’s I see in’eh’s lightwood and kindling.”

  Mason, wearing an old-fashioned white cotton mess jacket and a black bow tie, came forward with a worried, slightly wounded look on his face.

  “There’s logs on’eh, Cap’m Charlie. ’Put logs on’eh, just a while ago.”

  “I don’t see nothing but lightwood, Mason,” said Charlie. “Go get me some logs.”

  The butler hesitated, then averted his eyes and shook his head. He was a tall man with broad shoulders, now turning bony with age, who wore his hair parted in the middle and combed straight back in little marcelled wavelets.

  In a whispery voice, as if they were getting into a subject that didn’t bear discussing in front of the guests, he said, “Put too much wood on’eh, Cap’m Charlie, gon’ th’ow out too much heat.”

  Charlie understood. The problem was that it was warm outside, up in the high sixties even now. But Ronald had given the Gun Room a fireplace big enough to walk into, a fireplace so stupendous it clearly demanded a fire. The only way you could stand the fire on a day like this was to turn the central air conditioning on to the maximum, which Mason had done. Every now and then a frigid draft would sink from a vent overhead and make you feel as if your gums were congealing and your teeth were coming loose. If Mason put a full load of hardwood on the fire, enough to look appropriate for the hearth’s colossal andirons, the fire might overwhelm the cooling system completely. But hell … you just had to have a roaring fire in a hearth that big.

  In a now somewhat softer voice Charlie said to Mason, “Go on. Go ahead and get me some real logs.”

  “Yessir, Cap’m Charlie … but I ’on know …” Mason shook his head.

  Serena spoke up from down at the other end of the table. “Please, Charlie.” Then she looked at Mason. “We don’t need any more logs on there.”

  Mason stared at her for a moment, then stared at Charlie with a pained expression. Charlie was also aware of the expression on his son Wally’s face. Wally was sitting three seats away from Serena, between Doris Bass and Ted Nashford’s little Live-in Lydia, and his eyes were going from Serena to Charlie to Mason, and he seemed to be shrinking in his chair.

  Now Charlie glowered at his wife with resentment, three kinds of it. She was coming perilously close to countermanding his instructions to his butler. Not only that, if he knew Serena, she was capable of describing to the entire table the battle between the fire and the air conditioning, thereby making him look vain and foolish. And to top it all off, she was making Mason uncomfortable. Mason disliked taking orders from her or having her intervene in household matters in any fashion. Mason remained loyal to Martha even now, three years after the divorce. Charlie could feel it every minute Mason and Serena were in the same room.

  Now Mason was standing there awaiting further instructions and a resolution of the conflicting opinions of Cap’m Charlie and his hot new cookie on the subject of the magnitude of the logs in the fireplace. Charlie was afraid to tell him to just do what he said and get the big logs, for fear Serena would jump in and bring up the matter of the air conditioning. Clearly a change of subject was called for.

  So all of a sudden he gave Mason a big smile, and then he gave Lettie Withers a big smile, and he said, “You met Mason, didn’t you, Lettie? You met Mason when you were here last time.”

  “I certainly did,” said Lettie in the sort of smoker’s baritone many older Southern women had from a lifetime of cigarettes. “It’s nice to see you again, Mason.”

  “Fine, Miz Withers.” Mason had the habit of saying “Fine” when he met people, regardless of whether or not they asked him how he was. At the same time, Charlie was impressed that he had remembered Lettie’s last name.

  “Mason’s had a lotta good news since you were here, Lettie.”

  Mason looked perplexed.

  “Tell Miz Withers about your son and your daughter, Mason.”

  Mason hesitated. So Charlie said, “Where’s your boy now?”

  “Georgia Tech,” said Mason.

  “Tell Miz Withers what he’s studying.”

  “Electrical engineering,” said Mason. His eyes were now jumping from Charlie’s face to Lettie’s face and back again. This recitation was making him uncomfortable, which Charlie realized, but he was determined to establish a point—and not for Lettie’s benefit, either. Charlie’s own eyes were beginning to jump from Mason to Herbert Richman.

  “Electrical engineering where?” said Charlie. “Which school?”

  “Which school?” The old butler looked at Charlie quizzically. “Georgia Tech?” It came out like a question.

  “Naw, I mean the graduate school,” said Charlie. “Mason’s boy is in the graduate school, Lettie. He’s already got his BS from Tech. He got that last year. In’at right, Mason?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And now he’s in the graduate school in the best engineering program in the South, if not the country,” Charlie said. “In’at right?”

  “Yessir.”

  “I graduated from Tech, too,” said Charlie, “but they wouldna had … me in the graduate school! I bet you don’t doubt that, do you, Mason?” Yet another glance at Herbert Richman.

  “No, sir.” Mason’s face was now twisted into a terribly embarrassed, tortured smile. “I mean, yessir, I speck they’d a had you if that’s what you wanted.”

  “Naw, Mason,” Charlie said, laughing, “unh-unnh. They’re too smart for that at Tech! Now tell Miz Withers about your daughter. Tell her about Verna. Where’s Verna now?”

  “She’s in Atlanta.”

  “What’s she doing in Atlanta? She’s a nurse, in’she? Where’s she a nurse?”

  “In the trauma center at Emory.” Mason was now standing with his shoulders pulled forward and his hands twisted together at hip level, like a dutiful student.

  “The trauma center at Emory,” said Charlie. “That’s a pretty important job, in’it, Ted?” He looked at Ted Nashford, the surgeon, on Lettie’s left, then swiveled another quick glance at Herbert Richman, to make sure he was paying attention, then looked back at Ted.

  “Oh, yes,” said Dr. Nashford, “that’s a very important job.”

  Charlie smiled. He beamed triumphantly. “I think that’s great, Mason. You oughta feel very proud.”

  “Yessir,” said Mason.

  “And I don’ just mean proud a your children. You oughta feel proud a yourself.” He gave Mason a long, penetrating stare.

  Mason comprehended what his employer now wanted him to say. “Yessir, but I speck—I couldna—couldna done it ’thout you, Cap’m Charlie. You been mighty gen’rous.”

  “Aw, nonsense, Mason,” Charlie said grandly. “All I did was knock on a couple a doors. You’ve got two fine children there.”

  Charlie turned again to glance at Herbert Richman, but in that same moment he noticed that Wally, all sixteen years’ worth of him, was now slumped way down in his chair as if recoiling from something distasteful and looking anxiously toward Serena. For her part, Serena was giving him, Charlie, a look that expressed anything but pride in his benevolence toward his faithful black servant. In fact, the look was accusatory. About what, for godsake? All he was doing was making sure that Herb Richman understood how warm and tolerant and—and—and enlightened things were nowadays down here at Turpmtine. What was so bad about that?

  An immense, cackling laugh broke out halfway down the table. Unmistakably … Billy Bass. Billy’s gangling form was thrust back in his chair, and his head was thrown back and his chin was pointing almost straight up in the air. He had the sort of laugh that was so profound, he would lose his breath. He was a big, tall, untidy man with a paunch and drooping eyelids and wattles like a hound and thinning gray hair that always stuck out this way and that. Seeing him now, reared back in his khakis and looking like a big old aging Cracker, which he was, you would never know what a superb physical specimen he had been forty years ago when he was a senior playing end for Tech just as Charlie was starting off as a sophomore in the backfield. This particular old Cracker roosted atop a fortune. He was one of the few real estate developers who had been smart enough to sell his holdings in 1987, near the peak of the 1980s boom in Atlanta. Although Charlie hadn’t known him when he was a boy, Billy had grown up practically next door, in Dougherty County, and he had grown up the same way Charlie had, dirt poor and common as pig tracks, and for years now he had been Charlie’s great huntin’n’shootin’pal and a fixture, an endless source of good comic low humor, at these big weekends at Turpmtine. The entire table was watching by the time he finally got his breath back and rocked forward, tears of laughter streaming down his cheeks, and looked at Lenore Knox and roared:

  “Did you say … a ball for AIDS? A … BALL FOR AIDS?”

  As the former First Lady of Georgia, Lenore was an old hand at dinner table conversation who had dealt with practically every peculiarity known to that endeavor, but she seemed genuinely nonplussed by this one. She cocked her head defensively.

  “I’ve heard a balls for AIDS,” cried Billy, “but this is the fust time I ever knowed anybody that actually went to one!” One came out wuh-uhn; two syllables; in South Georgia, Billy’s speech became even more Down Home than Charlie’s. The key to his low humor was that he started laughing even before the first words left his mouth, and his laughter swept you along like a wave, no matter what he was actually saying. “I was born at the wrong damn time, Lenore! Hell”—Hale—“when I was growing up, if you got a venereal”—vernerl—“disease, it was a stigma!” Already he was looking away from Lenore Knox and toward the men at the table, as if rallying his troops for a salvo of male laughter. “If you got syphilis or the clap, it was a disgrace!” His eyes sought out Governor Knox’s—the old Governor didn’t know what to do, since his wife seemed to be the butt of the joke—and then they sought out Howell Hendricks’s and Judge Opey McCorkle’s and Herb Richman’s and Charlie’s and Ted Nashford’s and Slim Tucker’s. Charlie and Judge McCorkle were already laughing, because they were pushovers for Billy’s brand of humor when he went on these dinner table jags of his. “I can remember plenty a fellows with vernerl diseases, but I don’t remember anybody throwin’ parties for’m!” exclaimed Billy, bursting with mirth. “I don’t remember any DANCES! I don’t remember any LET’S RAP FOR CLAP nights! Or LET’S RIFF FOR SYPH!”