CHAPTER 4
. . . I did find many parts of the book to offer good advice, but all of this talk of logic makes me laugh. Is the desire to master one’s emotions not at its root just another desire? Thus logic seems, to me, to just take those things which a man—or woman—might enjoy, and replace them with concepts that are invested with just as much emotion but simply more dreary. I’m not an ancient Mediterranean gallivanting about in a toga, but I believe I have the right of it. You can stay close to your ship, Socrates, as this Epictetus fellow endorses, but I imagine you can find other, more enjoyable, things to focus such discipline on if you strayed onto land every now and again.
Ewan hunkered in his tent and read the snippet of Marlie’s last letter for what was, at a conservative estimate, the thousandth time in the month since she had left him The Enchiridion. Ewan had probably read the book itself as many times over the course of his childhood.
His original copy had been of a different binding, the wording slightly different, but the feeling it evoked remained the same. The original had been lost to him in one of his father’s violent rages.
“How can this boy be of McCall stock,” his father sneered, three days of nothing but whiskey and corn meal reeking from his mouth as he loomed over Ewan. “I should have tossed him over the side when he did all that caterwauling on the boat, I should have. Always knew there was something wrong with him.”
“Ewan is a good boy,” his mother said. “Like his father is a good man when he has a mind to be.” Her voice was calm but firm, and Ewan felt that itch in his skull at the unfairness of it all, but knew he could not control the situation. Epictetus had given him permission to accept his father’s rants and his mother’s stoicism.
“Always defending him,” his father said. “Maybe he’s a bastard, like little Donella. Maybe those English dogs weren’t the first you opened your legs to, you—”
“I wish I was!” Ewan was on his feet, tears standing in his eyes not from fear but from anger. “I wish I was someone else’s son. Donella is fortunate not to have your blood in her veins.”
“Ewan.” His mother’s voice seemed far away, drowned out by the angry hammering of his pulse in his ears. Years of anger sharpened it to a sharp, precise spear of emotion that he aimed at his father.
“If you hate us all so much, why don’t you just leave! We’d all be happier if you did.”
The door creaked and he heard Malcolm’s quiet footsteps—his brother hadn’t had reason to learn stealth as Ewan had.
Ewan braced for a slap. His father had never hit him, but Ewan wanted him to. He was just a slip of a boy, but if his father hit him he would fight back. He would let loose all his fury and frustration. He wo—
His father snatched The Enchiridion from Ewan’s hands and stormed over to the wood burning stove.
“Pa, don’t,” Malcolm pleaded from somewhere in Ewan’s periphery.
“I’ll be respected in my own home,” his father said gravely. He threw the book into the oven and watched as it burned. Ewan watched too, hands clenched at his sides, fighting the desire to wail and kick and scream only for his mother’s sake.
His father turned to him. His expression was sober, his mouth pulled into a frown. He laid the bottle of whiskey down and left the cabin.
Sometimes Ewan wondered at the cruelty he doled out during his interrogations and wondered if he weren’t his father’s son after all. He sighed and opened the book again.
Ewan had recalled The Enchiridion’s lessons often in the years after that, especially in times of fear and uncertainty, and they had always guided him well. Now Marlie had given it to him out of the blue. Marlie, who was his sole source of uncertainty in life. A prison could be escaped, a war won or lost, but the feelings she stirred in him defied such cut-and-dry categorization. They were not in his control.
He read her letter for the 1,001st time.
He couldn’t even lie to himself as to the why of it—he wasn’t searching for faulty argumentation in her words, although he was sure he could debate her definition of logic and her definition of desire.
Desire.
Her use of that word sent his brain veering sharply into the territory he’d become so adept at avoiding, and therein lay the problem. A life spent with his head buried between the pages of a book had fostered a formidable strength in Ewan’s imagination, and when it came to Marlie, his mind was hell-bent on revealing just how easily it could take simple words and breathe them into life.
Before him stood Marlie in a toga, her smooth brown shoulders revealed by the draped white fabric. The curves of her calves as they emerged from beneath the pleated material as she took agonizingly slow steps toward him . . . perhaps she had just entered the chamber of a steaming private bath, one shared by just the two of them. Perspiration beaded on her skin, collecting in that sweet well just above her bowed lip and in the crevasse between her full breasts. He was already hard for her beneath the warm waters he was submerged in, and she stood before him, untied the belt of her toga, and let the fabric slide down over her curves....
Ewan’s cock throbbed painfully, and he folded the letter and slipped it back into his pocket with the others he’d removed from the books before passing them along. He’d thought destroying a book sacrilege until that first short note he’d received. Simple greed had driven him to carefully fold the page near the binding, first one way and then the other, before ripping it cleanly away. He should have known then he was in trouble.
A pulse of want rippled through him, like a disturbance at the surface of the water caused by powerful currents crashing beneath. His hand strayed down toward the tented groin of his pants. Self-gratification wasn’t grouped with the many other things he denied himself, and yet . . .
He flopped back onto his hard bedroll and let his hand drop to his side. He wouldn’t sully her by conscripting her into his fantasies, but his imagination was no friend to his resolve. When he had given himself release before, he’d thought of some generic woman, cobbled together superficial traits that had stirred attraction in him over the years. Blond hair, rosy skin, a seductive smile. But now the fantasy stranger who’d been his sexual muse for so long was unable to hold her shape. Her hair was now thick, curly, and dark, her skin the color of Carolina clay baked in the summer sun. And her eyes? One green, one brown, both looking up at him as that suddenly luscious mouth moved toward his cock.
Ewan took a deep breath and sat up, squeezing his eyes shut at the need that shot through him at the idea of sharing bodily pleasure with Marlie. And that was why he couldn’t unbutton his trousers and have at it. With his previous erotic muse, he’d been in control of every aspect of his own desire. It had been safe. But when Marlie entered his fantasy world, everything spun out of his control, and all his composure was crushed beneath the weight of his want. Sexual pleasure was one thing. Wishing to lose himself in a woman and never come back up for air was another, even just in theory.
He needed to busy himself. That was the only way to keep his thoughts from straying to that which might be a danger to himself. It wasn’t that he thought Marlie would hurt him, but allowing his want for her to proceed further most certainly could. She was too far from his ship, out along the rosy horizon of things that were not meant for men like him.
Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself, abide by them as they were laws, and as if you would be guilty of impiety by violating any of them.
That was toward the end of The Enchiridion, number fifty on the list, but Ewan thought it should have been at least in the top three. For breaking one’s own rules was the greatest temptation a man could face, and that danger grew the more one knew of logic instead of lessening. If the leading minds of the Southern states could convince themselves this war was just, or it was a simple matter of autonomy, then a man could trick himself into going along with anything that suited his desires.
He reached beside the bed for the stack of small wooden rectangles he’d gathered from the woodpile, and the coil of metal wire. He grabbed the pouch of springs Marlie had given him, ignoring the throb in his chest when he touched the pouch that had been nestled in the pocket of her skirts . . . dammit. Maybe he’d stop obsessing if it hadn’t been exactly twenty-seven days since he had seen her; he saved himself the dignity of recalling the hours. If the prison hadn’t quickly lost the semblance of order that Dilford had managed and begun to descend into hell. If Cahill hadn’t been the cause of it.
Cahill hadn’t only come to Randolph to drop off the deserters he’d rounded up; he’d also been there to tell Dilford that the soldiers who’d been used as prison guards were being drafted into the Home Guard. The deserters were too numerous, and guerrilla warfare had erupted in the battle to bend them to the will of the Confederacy. Thus, the marginally competent guards had been replaced with men unfit for war—and even less fit to be prison guards.
In one fell swoop, all of the connections forged in Ewan’s time at Randolph Prison had been lost. The new guards didn’t understand the delicate balance of the prison economy. The import of food and greenbacks had gone dry because the first few Union men who’d tested the waters and tried to sell clothing or other goods to the guards had been beaten or worse for it.
They’d driven off the men who’d made a pretty penny setting up shop outside the prison gates, using guards as the middlemen for selling their wares. They’d chopped down the trees that attracted birds and other food sources beyond the meager offerings of the prison, which had reached sickening lows since the flow of food from Lynchwood had ceased. Rations had been cut and what they received was often rancid and wormy, as the guards skimmed the better-quality food for themselves and their families. Sadly, the worsening conditions ensured Ewan’s newest venture would thrive.
He bent the wire strip efficiently, the task simple after several days of practice, and fitted each end into pre-gouged holes in the sides of the wood block. He screwed down the spring, building the tension on the little machine, and thought of Cahill. The man hadn’t screamed all those months ago, tied down to a chair, the knee of his trousers soaked through with blood. Ewan had been sweaty, breathing heavily, and angry. Anger was nothing new to him—it was always there, really, just below the surface—and that was why his composure was so very important to him. Cahill had caused Ewan to lose that, and even though the Rebel was the one who now limped, he’d never broken. He’d been the victor in that makeshift interrogation room, and he’d known it.
An excellent reminder of what happens when you allow your emotions to get the best of you.
“Hey, Red, ya in there? There’re some fellows interested in the product.” Keeley stuck his fingers through the tent flap to announce his presence.
Ewan double-checked that his Marlie-induced state had subsided, and then gathered the finished products. When he stuck his head outside the tent, he saw a group of pathetic-looking men huddled around it. Ewan tried not to feel pity for the men—pity served no purpose in this world. But then again, their well-being wasn’t entirely outside of his control. The disturbance created by the new guards had initiated a chain reaction: Lack of trade meant a stagnation in the prison economy, one that matched the desperately deprived one that held the rest of the nation in its grip. Ewan couldn’t do anything about the world beyond the stockade—not yet, at least—but reason dictated that his ingenuity be put to use for the greater good. He’d used the same thinking when gathering evidence from Northern traitors and captured Rebels. Moral laws, indeed.
Keeley, looking gaunter and grubbier than usual, pulled up a wooden crate and made a grand gesture toward it.
“Your audience awaits,” he said, before grimacing through a cough and rubbing at his chest.
Ewan took to the box, imagining himself a great orator for just a moment. But instead of a crowd of Grecian intellectuals, he was met with the piteous sight of sunken cheeks and hollows under eyes. Clothes that hadn’t been washed in weeks, and bodies that hadn’t had access to clean water, made Ewan’s eyes water. He didn’t smell like roses himself—the guards rarely allowed the clearing of the grate that protected the water pipe, meaning now instead of detritus passing through, it was piling up, breeding the disease the grate had been intended to stop.
“Hello there, fine gentlemen of the Union forces,” Ewan began. He paused, feeling suddenly aware that he was the center of attention. He worked past the discomfort, as he would if it were a physical pain.
“We ain’t all Yanks,” one man said irritably, and there were grumbles of approval from the crowd as it grew ever larger.
“Correct,” Ewan said without taking offense. He corrected people as a matter of course; it was only right that he be open to receiving critique. “Hello there, fine gentlemen of the Union forces; deserters of the Confederate forces; Quakers and fallen Friends; Copperheads and Bushwhackers. Whatever offense you’ve committed against Jefferson, one thing is certain: If you’re here, you’re hungry. Food supplies have dwindled. Our new guards seem to enjoy using the five meters inside the dead line for target practice, so we can’t grab birds like we used to. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and we passed desperate two trading posts behind.”
“Get on with it!”
“Interrupting me is counterproductive to my doing just that,” Ewan said.
“Red,” Keeley said, the nickname rolling off his tongue with a lilt of annoyance.
“Apologies. All right. We might be short on food here at Randolph, but if there’s one thing we have plenty of, it’s vermin.” He pulled the project he’d been working on out of his pocket. “I have a solution to both of those problems.”
“It’s a rattrap!” someone called out. “Are you pulling our legs?”
Ewan held the trap up higher for everyone to see. “Yes. It is. No. I’m not.” He looked around at the gaunt men. “We eat rabbit, we eat squirrel, we eat possum—why not rat? It’s the only game willing to enter this reeking stockade.”
There was an uproar but Ewan could sense when the men began to think realistically about their situations. “Believe me, I’d prefer roast chicken to roast vermin. But this is a matter of survival.”
“And how much are you going to charge us for this survival?”
Ewan took a moment to survey the crowd. The interest that brightened the men’s eyes made his stomach turn. This was what they had been reduced to: eager to scrabble over rat soup. He stepped forward and handed the trap to the man in front of him.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean?” the man asked suspiciously.
“I’m not charging anything. Whatever you all have right now you probably need it a sight more than I do. So, I will give the traps freely to several men, with one caveat—they must be used communally. No one person can own the trap or the rats it catches. They must be shared.”
“And what if someone doesn’t follow those rules?” another man asked.
Ewan simply stared at him. He didn’t frown or smile or make any move of aggression. But he stared long after it had grown uncomfortable, until the man’s lizard brain kicked in and realized that it was in a predator’s sights. The man looked away.
Ewan turned to the crowd, and he let himself smile this time. “I assure you the greed won’t be worth having that question answered.” There were some grumbles, but no one challenged him. “Keeley, can you help me distribute these?”
“I can’t believe you’re giving our hard work away,” he grumbled. Ewan refrained from reminding Keeley that “our” was the incorrect pronoun, as Ewan had sourced the materials and constructed the traps himself.
“Good will is more valuable than greenbacks, these days,” Ewan said in a low voice. His intent wasn’t mercenary, but that didn’t make the statement any less true.
“What’s going on here? Prisoners aren’t allowed to congregate!” There was a ripple in the crowd as a few of the new guards began to push their way toward Ewan. Ewan surreptitiously handed out the last of the traps to one of the prisoners as they dispersed.
“Nothing going on here,” Ewan said, holding up his empty hands. One of the young soldiers ran up to him and grabbed him by the collar. Ewan, ever assessing, ran down the list of ways in which he could badly hurt the reckless fool—a quick turn to break his wrist, a chop to the throat to collapse his windpipe, a grab and reversal of that loosely held rifle. It would be so very easy to make the boy cry out in pain, but the easier something was to do, the more one should refrain from it.
“I never seen someone’s arm bend like that without breaking, but you got that Reb to talk. You’re a middling soldier, McCall, but it appears you can be of assistance to the Union in another way. . . .”
Doling out pain had come so easily to Ewan that the Army of the Potomac had seen it as the only worthwhile thing about him.
He held his hands up at his sides.
The boy sneered, grabbed Ewan by his left arm, and pinned it behind his back. It was a clumsy maneuver, and Ewan helped the boy, tucking his arm back, pretending to grimace in pain. No need to embarrass him—a man with wounded pride was likely to act out unexpectedly. The boy angled Ewan toward the watch house, and then he wished he had struggled. There stood Cahill, staring at him with the same disinterested hatred that he’d last seen when the Union medics had carried the bleeding man out of the interrogation room.
Ewan’s instinct was to stop struggling and meet that gaze, but he rejected that. “What’re you holding me for?” he asked the young soldier, playing at shaking off the guard who held him. If he had actually intended to, the boy would be on his back. “Can’t a man talk to his compatriots without being hogtied?”
The boy strengthened his hold and Ewan stopped thrashing.
“Cross,” Cahill called out. “Come report what just happened with prisoner . . .”
“What is your name?” the guard said with a nudge.
“Homer,” he said. “John Homer.”
The guard called out the name more loudly, and from the corner of his eye he saw Cahill nod and go back into the watch house.
The guard released his arms. “You done caught the attention of the wrong man,” he said with a coarse laugh as he pushed past Ewan.
Something ugly and violent rose in Ewan, the urge to run up on Cahill, to hurt him—again. It seemed Ewan hadn’t exorcised himself of that particular demon, the one that was summoned by the sight of heartless men who had no qualms about destroying everything good in this country. Some in the Confederacy were motivated by their own twisted logic, but others, like Cahill, simply sought a venue to cause pain.
Perhaps you should sell mirrors instead of rattraps. Sometimes he hated his sensibility, wanted to rip it to shreds along with everything else, but that was why the same sensibility was so necessary. The uncomfortable itch that had tormented him since childhood stirred in his brain in a maddening whisper that presaged nothing good.
Ewan balled his fists at his sides and turned on his heel. He had no time for anger or what could come of it. It seemed his timetable had just been sped up: Cahill either already knew who Ewan was and that he was lying, or would figure it out eventually. He hurried across the yard, heedless of the cool spring rain that sent men scurrying for cover. The officers’ quarters, where he should have been staying instead of in the tents with the enlisted men, loomed up before him. He’d avoided any mention of his actual standing and didn’t intend to reveal himself, but he needed a quick change. If the guards were on the lookout for a bushy red beard later, and he knew there’d be a later, it would help to be clean-shaven. It wouldn’t buy him much time, but every bit would help.
He walked in. “I need a shave,” he said to the man who operated the rudimentary barber’s chair in the corner of the room.
“This is for officers only, boy,” the man said, a frown pulling at his jowly face.
“I know rank is quite important to a certain type of man,” Ewan said. “But I’m going to have to be quite rude and inform you that I outrank you. So much so that I could make things very uncomfortable for you if necessary. All I’m looking for is a shave and I’ll be on my way.”
The man looked at him hard, and Ewan let everything inside of him go still, like he had when serving his country, by giving up his very humanity. Let this bastard deny him a shave—
Ewan closed his eyes against the buildup of anger and frustration. He thought of his mother’s warm smile.
Breathe in. Breathe out. That’s it, my boy.
He thought of Malcolm spinning a tale. Of Donella looking up at him with pride when he’d donned his Union blues. Of Marlie and her bright two-tone eyes.
He heard the sound of a chair being scraped back. “Have a seat.”
Ewan sat, and the man began gathering his makeshift barber’s tools.
“I’m guessing you don’t feel inclined to tell me who you served under or what battles you been a part of,” he said. Ewan had passed this man hundreds of times in the prison camp, but now the man narrowed his eyes as if really seeing him for the first time.
“No,” Ewan said. “I’m not much for small talk.”
The barber nodded, a grim smile on his face. “Your kind usually aren’t, I suppose. I have to say I’m surprised to see you at this place if you’re what I think you are.”
“Small talk,” Ewan said, and the barber began silently clipping.
Ewan thought about the man’s insinuation as the dull scissors tugged at his beard. There was no good reason for him to still be at Randolph. He could have escaped if he wanted—he had before. But he’d been in various Confederate prisons for over a year now. He supposed it just went to show that he really wasn’t cut out for war. That had to be it—there was no other reason for a man capable of escape to rest on his laurels while his country had need of him. None at all.
He closed his eyes against the sense memory of the shock that jolted his leg when he slammed his boot into Cahill’s knee. He could still feel it, and the vicious pleasure he had gotten from it, if he thought about it too hard.
He focused on the room around him. A pile of muddy clothing was heaped in the corner. There was dirt caked deep under his barber’s fingernails, despite the clean scrubbed skin of his hands. He heard the clomp of boots as a warm towel went over his beard; it didn’t have the fresh barber scent he was used to, that was for certain, but he could bear it.
“We’ve done it,” the officer who entered said jovially, performing a little jig, clapping the barber on the back. He recognized the man as the one who had been talking to Marlie’s Tobias—as one of the officers who had quarreled over the shovel during the construction of the pipeline.
The barber gave the new arrival a quelling look and silently shooed him away, before adjusting the towel to block Ewan’s view. Just before his sight was blocked Ewan took in the mud caked on the man’s boots and pants, his hands dyed red with clay.
Ewan smiled beneath the towel. It was the little details that made all the difference.