Brave Enemies (43 page)

10. After all John has seen, he comes to a realization: “I had come to believe there was really no right side or wrong side in war. All killing was wrong and all hatred was wrong” (
page 274
). To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement? How were you affected by the author's vivid depiction of the battle scenes?

11. The book opens with the epigraph from Thomas Jefferson: “Whensoever hostile aggressions . . . require a resort to war, we must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.” To what degree does that hold true in the Battle of Cowpens?

12. Who do you believe is the real hero of
Brave Enemies
, and why?

13. It has been said that in the best fiction there is no character who is entirely bad and no hero who is entirely good. Does that apply to the characters in
Brave Enemies
? And if so, in what ways?

RANDI ANGLIN

Robert Morgan
is the author of seven previous books of fiction, including
The Truest Pleasure
, a Southern Book Critics Circle Award winner for fiction, and the award-winning
New York Times
bestseller
Gap Creek
. He has received the 2007 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the North Carolina Award in Literature. He was raised on his family's farm in the North Carolina mountains and now lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches at Cornell University.

A
LSO BY
ROBERT MORGAN

Fiction

The Blue Valleys

The Mountains Won't Remember Us

The Hinterlands

The Truest Pleasure

The Balm of Gilead Tree

Gap Creek

This Rock

The Road from Gap Creek

Poetry

Zirconia Poems

Red Owl

Land Diving

Trunk & Thicket

Groundwork

Bronze Age

At the Edge of the Orchard Country

Sigodlin

Green River: New and Selected Poems

Wild Peavines

Topsoil Road

Nonfiction

Good Measure: Essays, Interviews, and Notes on Poetry

Boone: A Biography

Lions of the West

A SHANNON RAVENEL BOOK

Published by
A
LGONQUIN
B
OOKS OF
C
HAPEL
H
ILL
P
ost
O
ffice
B
ox
2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

© 2003 by Robert Morgan. All rights reserved.
First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, October 2007. Originally published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2003.

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-712-8

We hope you enjoy this preview of Robert Morgan's newest novel,

available in print and e-book formats from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

A Note from the Author on

When
Gap Creek
was published, I kept telling myself and others I would continue Julie and Hank's story into the twentieth century and even to the Great Depression. After all, the novel was loosely based on the lives of my maternal grandparents, whom I had known as a child in the 1940s and early 1950s. But I'd already begun another novel,
This Rock
, and I'd promised myself to finally finish a story set in the American Revolution, which became the novel
Brave Enemies
. Though Hank and Julie appeared as characters in
This Rock
, I kept postponing the continuation of
Gap Creek
. And then I had the opportunity to write a biography of one of my frontier heroes, Daniel Boone (
Boone: A Biography
), and that led to the writing of
Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion
. But when
Lions
was finished I knew it was time to go back to the lives of Hank and Julie. It had been ten years since
Gap Creek
had been published. Throughout that decade I'd assumed I would continue the story in Julie's voice. As I began writing I saw Julie had already told her story. Her later life should be seen through the eyes and voice of her daughter Annie. And I also saw it was important to have a fresh perspective on the events of Julie's later
life, her marriage, her children, the tragedies and satisfactions of middle and old age.

Once I began to tell the story in Annie's voice I knew I'd made the right choice. Rather than going back, I was moving forward, from a new point of view, seeing Hank and Julie and their world from an intimate but different angle. The events of their move to Green River, the typhoid epidemic, the life of the beloved German shepherd Old Pat, the anguish of the Great Depression, the death of their son Troy in a plane crash in World War II, unfolded with mounting intensity.
The Road from Gap Creek
became a story not so much of looking back to Gap Creek and those trials but of looking ahead to the uncertainties of the future, the struggle to define one's self, and, beyond all the grief and unforeseen losses, the discovery of enduring love.

Robert Morgan

The thing about Mama was she'd never tell you how she felt. When she was feeling bad she'd just go on with her work, washing dishes or peeling taters or mopping the floor. I'd know she was feeling pretty low, but she wouldn't say nothing. Work was what she done, what she'd done her whole life since she was a little girl up on Mount Olivet, and she'd keep on scrubbing the dishes and cups with a rag in soapy water and rinse them in cold water and dry them with a linen towel.

It would make Papa mad that Mama wouldn't say nothing when her feelings was hurt or she had the blues. It was a difference between them that went all the way back to the beginning of their marriage, back to the days on Gap Creek. Papa would argue and say she'd spent too much money on flower seeds or a shrub for the yard. He never could see wasting money on beautifying flowers, while Mama was crazy about flowers and liked nothing better than a rose of Sharon bush blooming in the yard and attracting bees and hummingbirds, or colorful geraniums in pots along the edge of the porch. She once said that it was a sign that God loved us that He put such colors in the world as you seen in the red of geraniums or the pink of dahlias or the dark purple of ironweeds along the road.

“Julie, you're going to break us up,” Papa would say if she paid a peddler a dollar for some bulbs to hide in the ground. Mama wouldn't say nothing back. She'd just go on with whatever she was doing or maybe start something harder, like washing the chicken piles off the porch or sweeping the backyard. I never saw nobody take more pride in keeping the porch clean than Mama did. Chickens would get up on the porch looking for something to peck and leave their piles like big melted coins on the boards. If the piles got baked in the sun they'd be hard to get off, set hard as cement or glue in the cracks of the wood. So almost every day Mama would heat a bucket of water on the kitchen stove till it was near boiling. Holding the bucket with a towel or the tail of her apron she'd splash tongues of smoking water on the planks that made them steam like they was burning. And then with the broom she'd scour the chicken piles off, flirting the dirty water into the yard. She'd splash and sweep until the porch was clean as the kitchen table drying in the sun.

About once a week Mama done the same thing to the yard, splashing and sweeping, running away the chickens, sweeping again, sometimes sprinkling white sand she got from Kimble Branch, till the yard looked smooth as a piece of white twill cloth that had been washed and ironed.

That day when the black car stopped in front of the house and the two men in uniforms got out, my heart sunk right to the soles of my feet. It was November of 1943, and you didn't see many cars then because of the gas rationing, even on the big road, and on our little gravel road you could go half a day and not see a vehicle pass except for the school bus. That car could not mean any good as it stopped there on Mama's swept yard, beside the boxwoods.

Those two men walked across the ground she'd swept so careful, and I wished I could close my eyes and make them disappear. We'd read in the paper about two men coming to deliver bad news from the war. It made me cold in the belly to see them, and then it made me
mad. I wanted to fling open the kitchen door, and tell them to go away. They had no business coming on us all of a sudden like this. I wanted to tell them to get back in their black car and drive back to town or some army base or Washington, D.C., or wherever they'd come from.

They knocked on the kitchen door, and when I opened it the taller one said, “Is Mr. Hank Richards here?”

“No he ain't,” I said. The truth was Papa was out cutting firewood on the Squirrel Hill with my brother Velmer.

“Is Mrs. Richards here?” the second man said. He took off his army cap and put it under his arm.

“No … I'll see,” I said, trying to think of some way to keep Mama from having to see them. But the other man took off his cap and looked past me. I turned and seen Mama standing right behind me, in the light from the door.

“Ma'am, I'm awfully sorry to be the one to bring you this news,” he said and handed Mama a tan envelope. Mama held the folded paper a minute without opening it, then handed it to me. As I ripped open the paper and looked at the telegram I told myself this was a mistake. We'd read in the paper about men reported killed who later turned up wounded in a hospital or lost from their unit.

The telegram was words printed on paper ribbons pasted to the page. “Dear Mr. & Mrs. Richards, it is with profound regret I report your son Troy Richards, Serial No. 34119284, lost in the crash of a B-17 heavy bomber on Nov. 10, 1943, near the village of Eye in East Anglia. Stop. A grateful nation mourns the loss of your son whose sacrifice for his country will never be forgotten.”

I read the words glued to the page to Mama, and she just stared at the door like she didn't see nothing.

“Ma'am, if there's anything we can do for you just let us know,” the tall man said. But Mama had already turned away from him. I thought she was going back to the fire in the living room, but she didn't. Instead she walked to the far side of the kitchen and set down in the
chair by the bread safe. The two men said more things. They talked real gentle, like they was truly sad, and asked again if there was anything they could do. I reckon it was what they done every day, going around and delivering those telegrams and telling people how sorry they was. Finally they said a letter would be coming in the mail, along with a box of Troy's personal effects. And then they put on their caps and walked slow back to the car and drove away.

“Mama, you go back to the fire. You'll get cold setting in here,” I said. But she didn't answer. She just set in that chair by the bread safe looking down at her hands clasped on her apron. I still held the telegram, and didn't know where to throw it down on the floor or fold it back up in the envelope it come in.

“Go tell Hank,” Mama said.

“I don't want to leave you,” I said. Mama's face looked gray, the way somebody with a bad heart looks.

“I can make you some coffee,” I said.

“You go on,” Mama said. “I'll be fine.” She waved me away.