Caleb, clad in Union blue, and Silas, in Confederate gray, raised their 1853 Enfield rifles and fired, just ten paces apart. Their .56 caliber lead balls collided in midair; a fleeting miracle lost in the chaos of Bloody Manassas. Nearly 25,000 fell on that Virginia battlefield—killed, shattered, maimed—but neither man knew the other’s face, nor that they’d both walk away from an uncivil war.
Two years later, fate raised her other hand. Caleb, his mind still thick with the stench of gunpowder, stumbled into Sarah, Silas’s fiery sister, on the steps of Simpson’s mercantile in Richmond, scattering her parcels. Their eyes met—his on his knees, hers locked and loaded on the man she’d love for sixty years. Silas, now a preacher of local renown, officiated their wedding.
Each kiss from Sarah eased a bit of Caleb’s pain, until he died in peace at eighty-eight. She followed soon after. Together, they ran a 200-acre farm and raised twelve children, who begat twenty more. Silas and his wife, Mary, had ten children, and their line grew by fifteen. Both couples were laid to rest in Shockoe Hill Cemetery, their bloodlines a sprawling clan of thirty-five descendants.
What are the odds? Slim—but oh, so glorious, that hunks of lead met in midair, sparing two men to birth a tale of life, love, and legacy.