A Hope Divided by Alyssa Cole (25)

CHAPTER 24

He hadn’t ever thought of his virginity as something sacred, despite holding on to it for longer than most of his compatriots. Men spoke of sexual relations in terms of conquering, claiming, owning, as if they were pillagers instead of lovers. Perhaps Ewan had done something wrong because he was the one who’d felt vulnerable, who had been left vanquished. At first he’d been focusing on their joining as if it were a problem to be solved, but Marlie’s cries, her face, the squeeze of her around his penis—all of those had stripped his control away until he was a grunting, panting, sweating bundle of nerves. Marlie had been sated though, so perhaps he hadn’t been so wrong after all. The problem was, without other reference points, he wasn’t sure if the tenderness and calm he felt as he watched her sleep was normal or not. Or wanting to kiss her awake and slide into her again.

He wasn’t entirely calm though; Marlie kept speaking of separating once they’d reached Tennessee. He had avoided thinking of the eventuality in depth before, when he’d decided there was no chance of anything further between them because of who he was and what he had done. She hadn’t changed any idea Ewan had of himself—but if he maintained the belief that Marlie was intelligent and kind, but not foolhardy, he had to take her words into account. She thought him deserving of forgiveness. She thought it was all right that he had been hurt by what he’d had to do, instead of thinking him weak. Thus, any plans for them to go their separate ways was a problem, and like any problem Ewan was presented with, he needed to solve it.

He got up and ate a handful of blackberries and some of the sweet corn Henry had given them, letting Marlie sleep. It was a short walk to the larger cave, but he moved carefully in the waning sunlight, unsure if the Home Guard or wandering soldiers watched for signs of movement.

He paused when a shadow caught his eye, but it was only a group of the skulkers coming up the pass. More were stationed in front of the cave, some sitting and cleaning their weapons, others doing drills. Upon their first arrival, Ewan had thought the deserter camp like Randolph Prison in miniature, but now he could see it was more like his time spent with his battalion. This was not just some sad, starving group of men, but a trained militia.

He walked into the cave in a manner that showed deference, but not cowardice; that skill was learned in the army and prison both, and at home before that.

The scent of corn and pork and grains, most assuredly stolen from some of the local secessionists, emanated from several cook fires, and men queued up to gather their portions. Some men cleaned the mess that had accumulated overnight, and others were busy packing gunnysacks for a march.

Toward the back of the cave, Henry knelt beside Colonel Bill, who was still recovering. He was looking much better, though Ewan doubted he could get very far without assistance. Marlie’s skills had their roots in mysticism, but she wasn’t a sorceress.

Henry pointed something out on a map spread on Bill’s lap, getting input from the semicircle of men crowded around them.

Ewan approached and paused a few feet away, and the men all stopped talking and looked up at him, marking him as an outsider.

“You and your lady getting back on the road? We might need more of her doctoring soon, depending on how the night goes,” Bill said.

Ewan looked around at the deserters, watching their movements more closely. He could now see that what he had taken for the completion of daily tasks was more likely preparing to move out before a battle.

“That decision is up to Marlie,” Ewan said. It was true, but he was also hedging. While he accepted that the skulkers had good reason for deserting, and found the men themselves to be as well acquitted as the Union soldiers he had fought beside, he wasn’t sure where he stood with them. Marlie had wanted to help, and Ewan had wanted to help her. Now that the men were preparing to go into battle, he didn’t know how to proceed. “What exactly will necessitate the need for her doctoring, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“We’re going after the Home Guard,” Bill said. He leaned forward as if he would stand, then winced. “Well, not me. My men. We’ve suffered too many losses this last week, and we’ve got to send the message that they need to leave us be or face the consequences.”

“I ain’t slept in my bed in seven months,” one man said. “Ain’t sat at the table with my wife and kids, or plowed my land. I’m tired of living like this.”

“And you think going after the Home Guard today will change things.” It wasn’t a question: Ewan was trying to figure out what exactly would drive these men to think this was the best course of action.

Henry shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Won’t bring my brother back, but if I can say I killed them that killed my brother, that’s better than nothing.”

When would tit-for-tat be enough? But he looked at the men with their hunched shoulders and weary eyes and understood that they were war, stripped of all the glory bestowed upon it by nation-states and government rhetoric. War was attacking or waiting to attack, seeking vengeance or freedom or, generally, some combination of both. It was both illogical and the most logical of human behaviors, and attempting to deter them would have been as useless as trying to stop Menelaus from laying siege to Troy.

“Indeed it is,” he said. “I can tell you what I know of Cahill, if you think it would be of assistance.”

“What do you know that we don’t?” Bill asked.

“That he’s a hard man to break. Physically and mentally. I won’t call him evil, because that word makes him more than he is. At the base of it, he’s just a man who sees no good in himself or in others, and he doesn’t care who he hurts because of it.”

Ewan felt a bit of something unclench inside of him as he spoke aloud thoughts that had long been shrouded by his estimation of himself. He’d been holding Cahill up as some malevolent force to measure himself against, but if he were truly like the man he wouldn’t have cared what anyone, Marlie included, thought of his actions. He had done wrong, in a setting where right and wrong were muddled up with God and country; he wasn’t offering himself deliverance, simply the acknowledgment that while he wasn’t a good man, as Marlie believed, perhaps he could be. When this was over, the country would have to wash away the bloodstains and move forward. Why shouldn’t Ewan have the same opportunity?

“That sounds personal,” Bill said. “Maybe this fella has as good a reason to go to Lynchwood as we do.”

“Lynchwood.” Ewan didn’t realize his demeanor had changed until the men in front of him stood, holding their rifles casually, but not as casually as one would if a threat wasn’t present. He took a deep breath, unclenched his fists.

“I think there might be a misunderstanding,” he said. “Do you mean to say that you are preparing to head for Lynchwood, home of the Lynches of Randolph County?”

Ewan wasn’t one for wishing, but in that moment everything in him pulled forward with the hope that perhaps he’d misheard, or there was another Lynchwood in Yalkin or Davidson.

“Yup,” Bill said. “One of our scouts got word that the Home Guard is planning a big rout, aiming at flattening us once and for all. They come after us where we live and we go after ’em where they live, simple as that.”

And it was simple, terrifyingly so. This was the war for the Union reduced from its grand scale to a few miles; would he have told Lincoln not to muster troops after Sumter? McClellan to pack it in after Gettysburg? There would be fighting until there was some unifying reason not to do so. There was no way to dissuade these skulkers with logic: Was there any more essential distillation of logic than “an eye for an eye”? And if Ewan told them the real reason why they should change their plan of attack, would that turn Marlie from a savior into a pawn?

Their eyes left his face and focused on something behind him, something that reduced the tension in the cave the slightest bit and had the semicircle of men easing up on their guns.

“Dammit,” Ewan muttered before looking over his shoulder.

Marlie was taking in the scene as he had when he entered, and when her gaze settled on him, the self-conscious smile turned up her lips, reminding him of what they had shared hours before. She looked away quickly, though. His heart was full, but the horrible, maddening tickle began in his skull. Marlie had walked right into the middle of danger and his thoughts bounced frenetically about as he tried to figure out how to get her out of the situation. His skin was hot and his jaw was clenched tight. The cave suddenly felt as if it were closing in around him.

Marlie’s smile faded as she approached. She put her hand on his sleeve, and the sensation both calmed him and focused the tumult in his mind into one objective: protect Marlie.

“Did you have a batch of bad berries again, Socrates?” she asked. Her silly question was like a pin to a boil, lancing the frantic thoughts that had been swirling in his mind just enough to allow him to think clearly.

“We have a slight problem.” His voice came out strong and natural sounding, as if it had picked up on Marlie’s calm and adjusted itself accordingly.

“Do we now?” Henry stepped forward. “It seems the only one with a problem here is you. Don’t think just because you’re an enlisted man you can come in here judging us for what we do and how we do it.”

“Ewan?”

“This is a bit more complicated than berries, Marlie.” He wanted to haul her up and run, to start swinging wildly to clear a path through the men. But he wasn’t going to lie to her anymore, even by omission. “Bill and Henry have decided that their next target is Lynchwood.”

He prepared himself for tears, or to catch her as she fainted away, but her hand left his arm as she whirled on Henry so fast that her skirts kicked up cave dust.

“Is this true?” There it was, hidden beneath her query, the quiet fury that welled up in her every now and again like the geysers out West. Ewan glanced at Henry and Bill, who didn’t understand her sudden change in demeanor. Henry nodded resolutely.

“Lynchwood is my home,” she said. “After all I’ve done to assist you, I believe it’s within my rights to ask that you not attack my family.”

“Maybe your family shouldn’t be putting up Rebel pigs,” a man said.

“Well, maybe your wives shouldn’t let the Home Guard pillage your homes,” she retorted sharply, causing an angry stir amongst the men. “Oh, is it not that simple? Can you not just tell the Home Guard to leave once they decide to take what’s yours?”

“Marlie.”

He knew she heard him, but she didn’t even look his way.

“I understand your battle is with Cahill, but you cannot win by burning down the home of the very people who feed the wives and children who struggle to survive while you play this game of cat and mouse.” She looked around at the men. “Do you think the Lynch farm is going to be quite as charitable if my family is killed in an attack by deserters?”

Ewan saw the moment the realization hit the men closest to them. Her initial tack, trying to get them to empathize, may have backfired, but getting them to realize they were attacking their own interest was a sure thing.

“Well, what are we supposed to do? Just let them get away with pushing us out of our homes and making us live like animals?”

“I didn’t say that. I only wonder if you’re going to burn down every house in three counties. Because he’ll just move on to another if you burn down Lynchwood,” Marlie said. Ewan heard that sinister tone in her voice, the same one he’d heard when she mentioned she could poison Cahill to get rid of him. “If you want to fight him, then fight him. I can tell you personally that he leaves Lynchwood every evening for reconnoitering, so if you go to burn it down this night I can only imagine it’s only because you’d rather avoid a true confrontation.”

Bill looked at Henry, and then back at Marlie.

A little of the anger went out of her then, and her gaze was pleading when it met his. “Cahill has already forced me out of my home. Knowing that it was destroyed because of him, that even the possibility of going back has been taken away, would be too much to bear. Please. Reconsider.”

Bill sighed and then readjusted his propped-up leg. “You know, we were on our way to Lynchwood when we ran into the Home Guard the other day and I got injured. We could have burned that house with you inside, you who came and tuckered yourself out doctoring us. The Lord works in funny ways, don’t he?”

Ewan stepped forward. “I can help you, if it means leaving Lynchwood be. I can lure Cahill and his men to some place away from the house.”

The perfection of the idea coalesced in his mind. How everything since he’d enlisted had been leading up to a confrontation between him and Cahill. He could help these men, and—

“No, that’s all right,” Henry said, abruptly interrupting the glorious showdown that had begun playing out in Ewan’s head. “We can handle that on our own.”

Ewan nodded, chastened. This was a militia, even if it wasn’t sanctified by the state. He couldn’t expect to just stroll into the cave and take over command—he freely admitted he hadn’t been a good soldier, yet he had momentarily assumed this group of skulkers would have some need for him, as if they hadn’t been waging war on their own for months. His hubris shamed him, and reminded him how easy it was for a man’s ego to convince him he could be a savior when, in fact, no one was in need of saving.

“Right,” Ewan said, nodding. “Marlie, what do you want to do?”

She stood twisting her hands. “Perhaps we should wait here with the wounded men. And that way when Henry and the others return, I can be of assistance. Before we get on our way.”

“Just let me know what you need from me,” he said.

“We can have a couple of our men guide you a ways toward Tennessee and connect you with some pilots who will take over,” Bill said. “Our way of saying thanks.”

“We’d appreciate that. The sooner I get to Tennessee the better,” Marlie said with a nod, then turned and began making her rounds of the injured and ill men.

Ewan watched, feeling that heart-full sensation in his chest again, like he was balancing a cup that was filled to the brim and threatened to spill over with each step. The sooner the better?

Ewan tried to think of it logically, but there was none when it came to her. He couldn’t force her to change her mind, but the thought of letting her go was unfathomable, a pain that was worse than the headaches he suffered. His brother, Malcolm, despite being a lady’s man, had often spoken of love as if it were a plague that would only lead to one’s undoing. He’d assumed Malcolm was wrong once he heard he’d taken a wife, but now, watching Marlie move through the men with her back to him, as if he were already out of her thoughts, Ewan realized just how erroneous he had been in straying from his ship. The problem was that the vessel he had clung desperately to for so long had now set sail. There was no going back and, if Marlie would not have him, no going forward, either.

He steeled himself against the pain of the realization and followed silently in her wake, ready to assist. If that was the only way to remain close to her for now, he’d take it.