A historical novel set in the late 1940's through early 1950's in which a North Carolina farm boy enlists, is wounded on the cliffs at Port Du Hoc in the early hours of D-Day, and is treated at the Woodrow Wilson Army Hospital in Augusta County before being discharged. Realizing that his wound has ended any future on the farm, even doing enough of the old men's jobs to be productive, he returns to the Shenandoah Valley to drive an oil-delivery truck servicing crossroads general stores, which he figured "loads and unloads itself." His war had been short, but long enough that he has to learn to cope with the truths, spoken and unspoken, that the Old People knew about the consequences of the War, which applied equally well to those that had followed. His journey ends in a state mental hospital in Staunton, Virginia, in the last years before the availability of psychotropic medication, his condition improved and his circumstances eased by his understanding of beekeeping, remembered from childhood.