"Sold", the high sheriff rapped the gavel on the crude pine plank desk on the south side of the square in Fayetteville, Tennessee. Alex, Lou and Grand John L. stood near the back of the dozen or so bidders this cool, overcast April morning. The three days of rain had broken, but the sticky mud of farm lot, field, roads and streets was evident on everything that moved, man or beast. John L.'s mud heavy work boots made sucking sounds as he moved forward toward the county clerk sitting on the new bandstand at an old campaign desk.
"Name?" asked the bespectacled little man who looked exactly like a small rural county government scribe should. Appearing at first impression like a clerk or schoolmaster, a covered stump where his right hand should be identified him as a veteran and survivor of the war. He placed the damaged appendage on his papers to hold them in place as he prepared to write with his left hand.
"M. L. Fields and A. A. Fields. $250 in gold," John Longstreet Fields, a 69 year-old new face to the county, told the record keeper. The clerk wrote those names down on a half page piece of paper. "Mr. Fields is it? Take this letter of sale to Mr. Gleghorn over at the Lincoln State Bank and pay for this farm. Bring the receipt to me in the courthouse after dinner and we'll work up and record the deed."
"Yes, Sir, we'll do just that," Grand John L. said smiling.
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Lou had returned home in late August, 1864. Alex and J. N. were to stay two days and then return south to join up with the major and general in north Georgia. The cousins found Grand John L., Mama Bear and Nancy Bird well but besieged by Unionists and Partisans. Alex's and Lou's mother, Nancy Bird, was well but still distant. Her husband and son's deaths a little over a year ago was still a daily presence in her living. She let the grief have its' way and she was slowly claiming a life that was different from her last twenty years. These three who tended the two Fields' places were watched over by Mary Jane and Joe T. across the valley, John L. and Mama Bear's daughter and son-in-law, J. N.'s parents.
Union partisans had been bold and ruthless up and down Sequatchie Valley over the last few months. With Grant's buildup of Yankee forces in the Chattanooga region and the absence of Confederate military presence in the area, raiders, self-styled as Union raiders, had hit several real and suspected Confederate sympathizers' places; stealing stock, food and threatening folks with worse if they felt like it. Over the last year, five barns in the county had been torched and several residents had been horsewhipped. The sheriff hid out in his Dunlap jail.