An Uncertain Abiding Place

It is the cold winter month of January 1865. Somewhere north of Augusta, Arkansas, a young Union cavalryman pulls a shift of guard duty while his patrol is camped at an abandoned farm. In the growing daylight, two figures emerge from the fog walking toward him. Seeing each other, the figures began to retreat back into the fog. His Sergeant comes out of the barn, and spying the running figures, orders the young soldier to shoot, which he does. Alerted by the gunfire, the Union patrol spills out of the barn the men had been camped in. They find a badly wounded Confederate soldier who is obviously dying. The men take a pistol the wounded soldier was carrying and give it to the young soldier who fired the shot as a keepsake. It is the summer of 1916 in Webster County, Missouri. An old man, who is a Union war veteran and recent widower, is beset by problems with his family and farm, as well as frequently recurring wartime memories. He sees his old company commander's obituary in the newspaper one day and begins to reminisce about the war. He possesses a pistol he brought home from the war that bears the initials of another man. Over the years he has concocted a fanciful story of how he came to own the pistol that bore little in common with the truth. He does this to entertain his family and grandchildren and ease his own memory. When his daughter and son-in-law want to sell the farm and move to Oklahoma, taking the old man with them, he balks. He hatches the plan to travel down to Arkansas and visit with his youngest son and family who live in Little Rock. His real reason is to find the place where this incident happened during the war that has haunted him for decades. His visit with his son is somewhat contentious and he must eventually leave to face the crisis at home. On the way back he stops at the town of Augusta and spends an afternoon looking for the farm where the wartime incident occurred. Too much land has been cleared and farmed over for him to recognize the area, and he is unsuccessful in his search. He returns home much dejected. Back home, he refuses to go to Oklahoma with his daughter, deciding to stay on the small lot his house sets on, while his sister takes possession of his farm. Unbeknownst to the old man, his quest made the local newspaper in the small Arkansas town where the incident occurred. Upon returning home he gets a letter from a man, the second man who came walking out of the fog that day in 1865, who read the article and recognized the incident. He explains he and his brother were Confederate deserters merely seeking shelter. They write back and forth, each seeking a measure of closure for this brief, unknown, but deadly wartime incident. With his grandson gone to Oklahoma, he becomes close to his great-nephew. The boy is curious about the old man's war experience, and instead of his usual exaggerated, funny stories, he tells the boy the reality of what he went through as a soldier. These events in the the last years of his life will determine whether the old man can finally able to come to terms with himself.