Gwyneth Atlee Read Online Free PDF Page B

jabbed the air with his pipe
to emphasize his words.
“No son of mine is going to shirk his duty.”
“But you said I’m more useful working on artillery design,”
Gabe argued. A part of him did want to go with his friends, to
join in the grand adventure of the war. But Mama’s tears, her
whispered pleas, had stayed him. That and the satisfaction of
working in his father’s factory to build the weapons that would
help the Union win the day.
Flint Maxwell Davis made a ring of his pipe smoke and sent it floating
toward the ceiling. In a moment it dissolved into a sweet, ashen
fragrance, like the ones that came before it.
“I can do without you, Gabe.”
That was God’s truth if he’d ever heard it. It always had been,
ever since his father realized that Matthew shared so many of his
interests, which Gabe found somewhat alarming. But Father had
gleefully taught his younger son the workings of a dozen games of
chance and encouraged him to breed bloodthirsty roosters for illegal
cockfights. More and more, Flint Davis ignored his eldest, whose
interest in sketching trees and animals he proclaimed unmanly.
When Matthew drowned, Gabe could all but hear resentment
buzzing in his father’s skull.
Even so, hearing him admit what Gabe had long sensed stunned
him. He remembered a wave of nausea rising, like one of Father’s
damned smoke rings.
“This draft notice cannot, will not, be ignored,” Father insisted.
“Don’t ignore it, then. Pay a substitute,” Mama told his father.
Though she didn’t give it voice, her terror hung in the air, fear that she
would outlive yet another son. “It isn’t as if we can’t spare three hundred
dollars. You’ve said yourself how well the business is doing.”
“Like hell I’ll pay a substitute!” his father roared. “And have everyone
saying that Flint Davis, the man who built a fortune in artillery, was
too cowardly to send his own son off to war? Or thought his money
made him too grand? I’ve told you before, I’m not one of those
damned blue bloods who thinks that a few dollars set me above
the rest!”
“Plenty of families we know have kept their boys at home!
There are men who need that money just as much as we need
Gabe,” she pleaded.
“No. We don’t need him; you do. You need Gabe tucked under your
wing so he won’t die like him.”
The tears filling Mama’s eyes spilled over. In the three years since
his brother’s death, as if by consensus, his parents never spoke his
name. When forced to refer to Matthew, they said only him . As if by
pretending Matthew had never existed they could assuage the pain of
losing Father’s favorite.
His mother straightened her spine and glared into his father’s eyes.
“Mr. Davis, you know very well you’re only using this draft notice as
an excuse! You mean to punish Gabriel!”
She didn’t have to say for what. Though no one asked the
questions, they hung heavily among the surviving family members.
His sisters stared them at him. His mother wept them into lacy handkerchiefs. And his father, especially, hinted at them in dozens of
furtive looks and conversations that danced around the point. Why
couldn’t you save Matthew? How could you have let him drown?
That Gabe had nearly died, too, jumping in after his younger brother,
was not an answer. Flint Davis was consumed by the mystery of why
one son climbed out of the icy river while the other hadn’t.
God knew Gabe had tried to make it up to his father. He’d turned
his talent from sketching landscapes and horses to drawing precise
artillery designs. He’d followed the old man into the factory out of a
sense of duty and the hope that he could prove useful enough to earn
his father’s forgiveness, if not his love. Flint Davis never thawed, but
after a time, the work became its own reward. Gabe had discovered art
in three dimensions among the gleaming rows of cannon with his family
name stamped on the barrels.
Until his father made him join the army and Gabriel saw with