Without thinking, Bowater ripped the paper off and read the note on top, written in Sullivan’s barely legible scrawl.
Dear Captain Bowater,
This here’s the latest chapter I writ and I wood be honored wood you read it and tell me what you thik and don’t go easy on me neither. Like always, I follered yer ideas and they was damned good ones to. I still reckon some of them names you come up with is a bit queer, but you know best on such things.
Yer frend,
Mississippi Mike Sullivan
Bowater smiled as he read it, remembering the look on Sullivan’s face as he handed the pages over. What was it? Sheepishness? Yes, it was that, but something more.
Vulnerability. That was what it was. Mike Sullivan, human mountain, was vulnerable and he knew it. Bowater found himself wondering at the courage it took for Sullivan to expose himself to the possibility of devastating ridicule. No wonder he was so very secretive about their literary endeavors.
But Bowater had to be in the right mood to stomach Sullivan’s “lit-rit-ur,” and at the moment he most certainly was not. He set the manuscript aside, picked up the package from his father, and tore off the paper.
Inside was a wooden box, which Bowater suspected contained a bottle of wine. He slid the cover off. Inside, an 1853 Chateau Petrus, a merlot from the Bordeaux region. And while Bowater the Younger generally eschewed merlot as inferior blackstrap, he was aware that a few of the French vintners were doing some astounding things. And if William Bowater had gone to the effort of sending this wine halfway across the country, there had to be a damned good reason.
Samuel uncorked it, examined the cork, poured a bit in the glass he carried with him, wrapped in cotton and silk. He swirled it under his nose. Excellent. He sipped. A complex but subtle wine, fruity but not obnoxiously so. He could taste the French oak from the cask in which it was aged. It gave the wine a somewhat more manly palette. He held the wine in his mouth a moment, then swallowed. The merlot was fabulously deep and beautifully textured with a lasting finish. He smiled. Held the bottle up and examined the label. A touch of civilization, here in the wilderness. He sat on the bed and tore open his father’s letter, angling it toward the candle burning in the holder on the nightstand.
My Dear Son, he read and he frowned and squinted at the page. His father always began a letter Dear Samuel:. Always a colon. The comma was a new degree of intimacy.
I trust this finds you well and safe. I pray that it does. You have seen hard fighting in the fourteen months since you took that difficult step of resigning your commission and joining the Confederate States Navy, and I have feared for your safety every minute. Those naval officers who remained with the Union sit fat and idle on board their big men-of-war, which every day I can see on close blockade off our harbor, taking no greater risk than chasing unarmed runners, while you and all the brave men of the Confederate Navy, like David of old, go into battle with little more than slingshots and ships in sinking condition. No one has ever praised Goliath for his courage in facing David, and why should they? There is no courage needed when your force is overwhelming.
Bowater studied the handwriting to see if there was any sign that his father had been drinking. There was nothing in the letter so far that sounded like the William Bowater, Esquire, who had raised his son to be a man of honor and discipline, and not some libertine sentimentalist. He wondered what the old man would say if he knew that most of his son’s fighting of late had consisted of brawling with river men.
By now you are thinking that the old man is getting soft in the head, and perhaps I am. Perhaps the war is wearing me down.
Lord, it has been just over a year, not so much time, but how dreadfully sick I am of the death! Young men who march off so full of promise, and all that is ever heard again is a letter describing what minor skirmish or what camp disease has laid him in his grave. And despite the great setbacks our cause has suffered, I do not believe the conflict will soon end. I find myself both proud of our new nation’s determination, and frightened by the terrible toll it will exact.
You will remember Donald Wood, I have no doubt. An affable young man, very capable and with much promise. I do believe he had hopes of courting your sister. In any event, he is the latest of our young men to die, shot down in some minor and already forgotten skirmish on the Peninsula around Yorktown. I fear for his mother’s health, with the grief she has suffered.
Bowater looked away from the letter, let his eyes settle on the dancing flame of the candle.
Donny Wood…?
The name brought back a rush of images. Catching frogs in creeks, watching the big ships warp against the Charleston docks, fishing from leaky rowboats. All those things that boys will do. Playing at soldiers. Running wild with Donny Wood was how the young Samuel Bowater had coped with the rigidity of the Bowater home. He did not understand that then, of course, but he saw it now.
And now Donny was dead and no doubt buried in a shallow and unmarked grave. Samuel had urged him to apply to the Navy School, but Donny wished to follow his father into business, just the thing Samuel wished to avoid, and so they had parted ways, and saw one another only infrequently over the intervening years. And now Donny was dead.
Donny must have made a good soldier. Esprit de corps came naturally to him, which it did not to Samuel. Samuel had envied him that, his easy ways, but he could not emulate them, because that was not how he was raised. Donny had been, as his father said, affable, capable, tough when he had to be. He would not have been one of these malingerers, whiners, and grumblers. A great, great loss. A loss to the Confederate Army, to Charleston, to Samuel Bowater. He felt as if his own childhood had been cut down by a Yankee bullet.
Bowater read through the rest of the letter, but quickly, because his head was still full of Donny Wood. He read about his sister’s grief and made some vague promise to himself to write to her.
He set the first page aside. Between the first and second was a bank draft for the amount of five hundred dollars. Confederate money, but still it was a significant sum. This too was utterly unprecedented. His father had never done the like before.
I have enclosed a bank draft for a certain sum, Bowater read, the last paragraph of the letter.
Perhaps funds will buy you some small comfort, replace what you have lost in the destruction of your last ship. I don’t know. I wish there were more I could do. I wish I could come there and shield you from harm, as I did when you were a boy, but God help me I do not know what to do so I send money. It is a hollow thing, Samuel, and made more hollow still as money does us little good in Charleston these days. There is precious little to buy, with the blockade squeezing us tighter.
I am proud of you, son, and love you dearly. Your affectionate father, Wm. Bowater, Esq.
Affectionate father… He had never been that. Over the past year, Samuel Bowater’s well-ordered life had been twisted around and spun off in so many directions, he felt sometimes as if there was nothing left that was certain and solid. And here was another surprise. Donny dead, William now his “affectionate father.” Battered, exhausted, depressed, grieving, and confused, Samuel Bowater lay down, fully dressed, and slept.
