ABSTRACT
At that precise moment, Patrick was caught up in the better part of a dream. Having spent his youth in Birmingham, he had a deep reservoir of tragic, sometimes beautiful images of a troubled place: sweetgum trees and Spanish moss, red clay dirt that often resembled blood, acres of abandoned farms where bitter, angry cotton shrubs stretched out to a broken horizon. As a teenager, he had been sent to a school that covered miles of this kind of land. There he had known a boy named Gabriel.
