The Last of the Ingrams

A lone Puritan scion, Jules Ingram, staggers out of his ancestral manse clutching nothing but a bottle and a bloodline that has curdled into myth; the banker Rufus Moore, a gilded crow in starched collar, swoops in to snatch the timbered ruin, turning hearth-stones into ledger entries. Jules, exiled from his own portrait gallery of dour forebears, collapses into the arms of Mercy Reed—village pariah, scarlet-lettered yet luminous—who lives in a crooked cottage where the wind hums hymns through cracked panes. Under her fierce tenderness the sot begins to shed his snakeskin of shame: he mends fences, milks dawn-lit cows, and learns to fold his hands in prayer without trembling. Their first appearance at meeting-house ignites a puritanical pyre of whispers; bonnets bristle, psalters slam, and Mrs. Agnes Moore fans the embers into open flame. On a frost-bitten evening the righteous brew tar, brandish feathers, and corner the reborn drunkard beside the woman who once loved the wrong man. Mercy, voice cracking like thawing ice, names Moore as the architect of her ruin; the mob swivels, hunger redirected, and the banker becomes the scapegoat hoisted upon the very rails he forged. At sunrise Jules and Mercy remain, two silhouettes against a bleached sky, no longer sin-eaters but citizens of a republic they have rewritten with nothing but confession and courage.