MacCallumsInFD

The patriarch of the MacCallum family, Virginius, was sixteen in 1861 when the Civil War began - not too young to "walk [from Mississippi] to Lexington, Virginia," where Thomas Jackson was at the time, and enlist in "the Stonewall brigade" (332). Sixty years later he remains an unreconstructed Confederate and a cultural link to the Old South. The fact that his father gave him a mule when he married his first wife establishes the family's lower class origins, but he and his six sons are friends and hunting companions with the aristocratic Sartorises, which establishes the difference between this family of yeomen and "poor white" Southerners like the Snopeses. Virginius has had two wives; both are now dead. His adult sons continue to live at the family home in the woods and hills, where they remain connected to a traditional natural world that seems outside the disruptive modern forces that are at work closer to town. Even the youngest son, Buddy, who fought in the trenches of World War I, seems able to return from that experience without any signs of the wounds and traumas that afflict young Bayard, who seeks refuge with the family but cannot ultimately find it. There are, however, a few subtle suggestions that this traditional world is itself endangered: the effeminacy of son Henry, the childlessness of the all the sons, and in particular the odd breeding experiment being conducted by son Jackson, who mates a fox and a hound with grotesque results.