Chapter 20
Murphy’s Laws of Combat #3
“If you can’t see the enemy, he may still see you.”
Surprised, Melissa said, “Ye told your mother, and she sent him off?”
The rustle of blankets being tugged and pulled came from the captain’s bed, along with a frustrated growl. “No, she told me not to worry about it.”
The captain remained quiet for a time, but finally continued. “She had bruises the next day. Claimed she’d gotten them working with the dogs. He was stealing from us and hurting her.” His voice went lower. “I told her he had to go. She cried and said she didn’t know what to do.”
He blew out air, as if expelling memories. “After hitting Mom, Jake didn’t bother to hide his stealing. Mom’s business started to suffer, and I ended up doing most of the work.”
Mel heard Rig move, followed by the sucking sound of the captain taking a drink from his water bag on the back of his knapsack. He took his time to settle under his blankets again. “Water?” She said no. The chill air made her face tingle. She wiggled deeper into the sleeping bag. She could just see the captain’s profile against the light of the fire in the fireplace. He stared at the far wall.
He finally spoke, the pain shading his tone. “I knew I had to do something.” He didn’t say anything else, laying down again.
Impatient, Melissa asked, “What did ye do?” It was like teasing a hedgehog from his den.
“It was my first campaign.” He chuckled as though realizing it for the first time. Then, in a tone devoid of all emotion, he said, “I told him to leave. When he laughed at me, I hit him.”
Melissa swallowed a gasp. “When ye were fifteen?”
“Yep.” There was a pause. She could hear him take a deep breath. “Some of my scars are compliments of Jake, my nose and chin, a few on my back. It didn’t matter. Once I healed, I’d just come back and slug him again. Finally, during one fight, Jake threw me down the front steps and broke my arm.” The captain gave a morbid laugh. “It kinda derailed sports and my efforts to start a blues band my sophomore year.”
His suffering appalled Melissa, but what disturbed her more was how he dismissed it now, the pain he carried.
“So, what did you do?”
“I told my mom that I fell. The cuts and bruises were from playing sports. She stopped asking quickly enough.”
Melissa propped herself on one elbow to stare down at him, unable to believe his explanation. Highlighted by the fire’s glow, his shadowed expression revealed nothing. “Why didn’t ye tell her?”
“She didn’t want to know. Besides, what could she do? She hadn’t been able to stop the stealing. I was simply keeping her from being beaten again.”
“But you’re her son, she would want to—”
“I found out what she really wanted. I healed and I planned. I started stealing the money back from Jake and hiding the rest of the expense money. I used it for running the farm.” There was a fierce triumph in his tone. “Jake never could catch me at it.”
“Then I started working out more after my arm healed, supposedly for football, but I was preparing for a showdown—one of my choosing. I grew fast my junior year.”
A junior in what kind of school? While he worked on a farm? She could not understand how his mother could have tolerated such a situation.
“The authorities?” Melissa said. “Didn’t ye try to get help? Unless your time’s laws are different, your mother could not appeal to the magistrate, living with Jake outside the laws as she was, but that didn’t include you.”
After a minute, the captain said, “Your laws sound different than mine. If I had brought in the police, Jake and my mom would have told them I, a teenager, was mistaken, and the police would have gone away, or worse, Jake might have sent me off to juvy as ‘out of control.’ I checked out the laws.”
“What is ‘juvy’?
“Jail for juveniles.”
Different jails for the young? Considering that, she said, “You didn’t go to your parish or your neighbors?”
“Uh, no. We call them counties. It was nobody’s business,” he said sharply.
Melissa tried to imagine the awful situation, a boy facing down a grown man alone. “Surely, ye don’t persist in yer battle after he grassed you?”
“Say what?”
“Och, yer arm. Ye didn’t carry on with yer tussling after he broke your arm?”
There was a chuckle. “No, I started ambushing him. I’d catch him with a broom handle across the shins as he rounded the barn. Or he’d start his pickup and get a shock. I rubbed poison ivy in his underwear. I tried everything at least once, but I liked that last one. It drove him crazy.”
She sat up. “Didn’t he try to hinder ye?”
“I didn’t sleep in my room. I found a hiding place to camp out in, and only showed up at the house when my mom was around. He couldn’t get me alone then.”
His home became a battlefield, and he was alone in his war. She hurt for Rig but knew he wouldn’t appreciate her sympathy. His phrases ‘starting his pickup’ and ‘working out for football’ mystified her. She couldn’t understand how the surrounding countryside wouldn’t know about his injuries or care that his mother, owning land, was living with a man unmarried.
She lay down again and rubbed her face with her hand, trying to warm her cheeks. The captain obviously came from a far poorer class than she, where even he needed to work his family’s farm, yet he went to a school as a young man. But if he was poor, as an officer, how did he afford all the marvelous military instruments and weapons? She’d had enough of pestering him. He needed to talk and would when he was ready. She wanted to hear the end of his tale.
“Jake wised up some. He’d catch me at times, but I’d fight him off and run. I’d get him back later. I carried out my little campaign for a year. Then Jake started drinking and I saw my chance. I called him out one night. I was as tall as he was by then, and I wasn’t drunk. It was a tough fight, but I beat him to a pulp and drove him out of the county. I told him I’d shoot him if I ever saw him again.”
Melissa wondered at the sadness she heard in his voice, speaking of his victory. “Did yer mother know?”
“Oh yeah. She saw the whole thing. She screamed at us to stop, then went inside and cried, I guess.” In the dark, the captain took a deep, shuddering breath and blew it out, as though the weight of the world pressed in on his chest.
“I hitched a ride back to the farm, pretty pleased with myself. I’d saved the farm, and that bastard wouldn’t be hitting my mother anymore.” He chuckled. “I thought she’d be relieved, maybe even grateful, and things would get back to normal.”
After a pause, he said, “I’d never seen her so crazy mad. She blamed me for all the problems with Jake, for driving him away. Insisted I had no right to do that, that she loved him.”
“She blamed you?” Melissa shook her head in disbelief.
“Yep. Said I was mean and ungrateful, and she wanted nothing more to do with me.”
Dumbfounded, Melissa tried to fathom what could have caused a mother to act in such a way. She could only imagine what a soul-rending experience it must have been for him. “So ye left?”
“As soon as I graduated. It was a rough last year. We only spoke when necessary. I joined the army. My mother simply said goodbye. I never received a letter from her, though I sent her several. I never saw her again. She died while I was in Afghanistan.” She could hear the ache and regret in his voice.
“The wild country between Persia and India?”
The captain turned his head toward her. “Yeah. You know your geography.”
Melissa couldn’t think of what to say to that, didn’t understand why his army would be there. What did he graduate from? A public school like Eton or a university? It made little sense to her.
He threw more wood on the fire and continued. “When she died, I found out she’d left the farm to another man she’d shacked up with. She’d packed up my stuff and the guy sent it to me with a card. The boxes were waiting for me when I returned to Fort Benning.”
“I’m heartily sorry. She seems a very confused woman.”
“Hmmm. One of us was.”
“Then you have no one waiting for you to return, no family?”
“As I said, I have an uncle and cousins, but we’re not close. My company and the 75th are my real family.”
“No sweetheart?”
“I’ve just—” He made a snorting sound and said, “I’d just started seeing an English girl named Claire, Claire Winston. We were supposed to picnic at the aqueduct in Segovia this weekend.” He mumbled something she didn’t hear, then a “Damn.”
“Captain?”
“Rig.
“Rig.” It felt strange to call him that, such a small word for such a large man. “What did ye say?”
His voice held a confused tone she was beginning to recognize. “Sorry. I said, ‘I have no idea how this time-travel works. If . . . When I go back, will I show up weeks later, or will I return at the moment I left?” She had no answer for that. He laughed. “Shoot, I might still be able to go out with her.”
Melissa burned with curiosity. “What is she like?”
“Oh, she’s an English graduate student from Cambridge, or is it Oxford? She’s studying abroad for the year in Madrid.” He turned his head to look at her. “Claire has dark hair and a couple inches on you.”
Melissa gasped. “She’s allowed to attend university?”
“Women can attend universities in most countries. She wants to get her doctorate and teach.”
Melissa lay staring at the rafters, astounded. In her muzzy state, with her distress over the captain’s story, she struggled to imagine what such privilege meant for women of his time. “She must be very accomplished, fine and knowing.”
There was a pause, then the captain said, a smile in his voice, “No more than you, I’m sure.”
Warmed by the comparison Melissa frowned, confused. How could he compare her to someone wealthy enough to attend university, who could obtain a doctorate? To hide her conflicted feelings, she said the first thing that came to mind.
“Is she bonnie?”
He chuckled. “Here, see for yourself.”