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Georgia hill country that owed so much of its provenance to the Scots and English who had trickled down from the Appalachian highlands. It had been in his family for five generations, being shored up and added to by each succeeding family of Winships, until it had attained a somewhat imposing bulk that was belied by the meagerness of its inner creature comforts and its furnishings. There was never more than just enough money to live on in the Winship clan, for this hundred-odd acres of com, cotton, and oat land was farmed only by the current Winships in residence and two or three black sharecropping families, who occupied the precarious shanties along the creek bottom.
    The earliest Winships had come to Georgia from Virginia, but before that they had dwelled in the wild, unnamed hills and secret coves of the Great Smoky Mountains, and before that, had followed the wrong young chieftain into battle at Culloden and had exited Scotland hard on his heels. Winships had, in essence, been backing the wrong horse ever since. In the years of drought, they planted oats. When they put in corn, the deluges came. When they sowed cotton, the boll weevil followed. The land was favorable for crops, but their luck did not seem to be. Nevertheless, after centuries oftending other men’s holdings in Scotland, a fierce and silent passion had been born in them for these, their own few red acres across the western sea, and that passion had burned in their sallow breasts ever since, through good years and bad, like the subterranean fires that burned unseen for a hundred years in the mines of their own bleak north country. Both the land and the passion came down to John Worthy, the last male Winship to bear the name, who was also the first to leave the land since the original Great War (in which the Winships had, predictably, backed the losers), and the first to go away to school to learn to be other than a tender of the land.
    “But I’m not thinking to leave it for good,” John Winship told his bride-to-be, Claudia, when he took her home to meet wary, work-reddened John and Daisy Winship. They were plainly intimidated by this town-bred Dresden shepherdess that their incomprehensible lawyer son had brought home, perched on his arm like an exotic fowl from a strayed caravan.
    “First I’m going to fix up the house in town, something you and our children will be proud of, and make Mama and Daddy comfortable for the rest of their lives,” he elaborated, the dreams near to boiling in his gray eyes. “Then, one day, I’m going to make a real showplace of the homeplace, a real gentleman’s farm. Get rid of the corn and cotton and put in a dairy herd. Mechanize the place, get some good help. Fix up the house from stem to stem, maybe add on some columns. Then we’ll go back. My son is going to be the Winship of Winship Farms, and it’s going to put everything else in this end of the county to shame.”
    Claudia, a celebrated beauty in the medium-sized town just to the east where she had grown up, a canny girl but no scholar and possessed of meager lineage and nonexistent dowry, as well as an abiding fear of cows, dimpled up at the tall young man with the dream-steepedgray eyes and held her tongue. Plenty of time yet to enjoy the Pomeroy Street house and her future status as a lawyer’s wife before the time came to disabuse him of the notion that she would make a good farm wife, even on a gentleman’s farm.
    John Winship worshiped and sentimentalized his taciturn, hardworking parents, even though the flame of ambition warred in his breast with their credo of labor and sacrifice and the immutable sovereignty of the land. By the time they died of exhaustion and sheer boredom, as well as the virulent influenza that decimated Fulton County in the mean years of mid-Depression, they had become in his eyes wise and simple agrarian saints, and the scant and strictured childhood he had spent in the fields of the homeplace had been transmuted into