The Lonely War Read Online Free

sir.”
    Mitchell felt the crew’s hostility level jump a dozen notches. He knelt at the edge of the pile, a few feet from Andrew. From that distance he could smell Andrew, an odor reminiscent of fresh-baked bread. The scent shielded him from the sour odor of the forecastle.
    Mitchell stared at Andrew’s face. He flinched at the intensity of those eyes that gazed deeply into his own. The sunlight pouring through the porthole caused tiny golden flecks to sparkle within Andrew’s black pupils, giving off a soft, nearly imperceptible light. He inspected the face surrounding those eyes. A yellow stain clouded the flesh under the left eye, obviously from a blow a week ago. The right cheek had purple discoloration from more recent blows, and one side of his lower lip was raw and puffy, looking as if he had been smacked hard only a minute before Mitchell entered the compartment.
    Mitchell was surprised that he had only now noticed this bruising. The face had a pleasing quality, delicate and finely boned. But, the officer thought, this kid had been on the losing end of plenty of fights recently.
    Mitchell noted that Andrew appeared relaxed, as if he had expected this confrontation and it was playing out exactly as he had planned. Andrew’s self-control seemed all the more amazing given the crew’s tense confusion.
    The halo of calmness surrounding Andrew touched something within Mitchell. It seemed to bear his own signature in some way, reminding him of himself, or a part of himself he had forgotten. He couldn’t help liking the look of this kid with a beaten face and mysterious eyes.
    He felt some stimulus form between them, a connection that was neither friendship nor sexual, but had attributes of both. He tried to analyze this feeling, wondering if this wasn’t a moment full of significance, in the hope that some meaning of his life, some epiphany, some poetry, would come to him, but it was beyond his understanding. He simply chalked it up to his old tendency of being drawn to wounded things, like the hawk with a broken wing he’d once mended, and his three-legged dog, Smoke, who had lost his front leg in a bear trap.
    Looking down so as not to stare, Mitchell caressed the uneven binding of a scripture book while admiring the rough, handmade paper. He reached further, to a stack of Western-bound books, and noted the titles—Shakespeare’s Tragedies , Moby Dick , The Iliad , Plato’s Symposium , The Analects of Confucius , and Yeats’s complete works. Again he felt that nameless force ripple between them.
    “You read more than scriptures.” Mitchell lifted the volume of Yeats’s poems, opened the cover to the index page, and scanned the table of contents. “I haven’t read Yeats since college.” He recognized several poem titles. “I’ll have to confiscate this evidence for a few days,” he said with a smirk, “and I’ll need to sequester these other books from time to time in order to make a proper judgment.”
    Andrew looked up at the other sailors before focusing on Mitchell again. “I care not what the sailors say: all those dreadful thunder-stones, all that storm that blot out the day can but show that heaven yawns.”
    Mitchell glanced up, staring into those dark eyes, now so bright. His lips parted but he couldn’t speak, not quite believing he was hearing a sailor quoting Yeats.
    Andrew whispered, “I bring you with reverent hands the books of my numberless dreams.”
    Mitchell remembered that line from one of his most cherished Yeats poems. He shook his head. All he had ever heard spewing from the crew were strings of four-letter words, some less vulgar than others. He smiled and winked at Andrew, who offered a shy grin. That grin seemed oddly complicated, disarming, and now his entire face, like his eyes, shimmered with life. It was hard, nearly impossible, to associate this young man with all the other rough and odious sailors aboard.
    Mitchell stood. “Chief, this man has every right to