Book of the Month: Notes from a Deserter by C.W. Towarnicki

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Under the backdrop of rural Montgomery County, Pennsylvania during the Civil War, Notes from a Deserter delivers a fictionalized account of a real local soldier, William Henry Howe, a war deserter whose grave still sits on his Perkiomenville farm, near where Towarnicki resides. Much of Howe’s life remains largely unknown, but as Towarnicki dove into America’s deadliest conflict and the effects on local farmers joining the cause, he connected the dots between Howe’s 275-mile journey from the Battle of Fredericksburg to a reported firefight with a bounty hunter at Howe’s homestead to the end of a rope at Fort Mifflin, where Howe’s initials are still carved into the jail cell wall. Branching from the main character, Towarnicki captures the period through the points of view of many secondary characters, among them farmers, doctors, soldiers, runaway slaves, and business owners, linking their stories around Howe’s journey.

Towarnicki, born and raised in Warminster, PA, where he graduated from Archbishop Wood, followed his love of the outdoors to the University of Montana before returning home to earn his M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Arcadia University, where we first met. As a writer of historical fiction, he encapsulates the natural world prior to industrialization and the surrounding Philadelphia counties that still cling onto those ideals. While spending a week of residency in Edinburgh, Scotland, with our Arcadia cohort, Towarnicki took several of us to Dunbar and the home of John Muir, the unofficial father of the U.S. National Park and one of our country’s greatest preservationists. He also introduced me to the writings of John McPhee, whose work has had a tremendous impact on my own writing the past ten years.

Here, in the book’s opening, Towarnicki introduces the reader to the main character among his surroundings.

The early glow of dawn emerged with the light of a hovering moon, and blushing red clouds cast faint shadows over the open meadow beside the farmhouse. A barred owl called out in echo of herself, with only a rooster answering.

In that dim beginning of day, William emerged from the wood line holding two rabbits hanging stiff by their feet in one hand, and the traps he pulled in the other. He was a thin man with the hint of a beard. He walked with short, stiff strides as if carrying an invisible sack of feed at all times.

Stepping into the field, he looked uphill toward the stone farmhouse bathing broadside in the sunrise. The window where his wife may have been watching from was a golden mirror of the eastern sky. With a slight tilt of his head, the broad brim of his straw planter’s hat cast his face in a shadow.

The shortening of the days, the recent rains, and his evolving understanding of raising crops had yielded a disorganized patchwork of fields that had not yet produced their potential. He worked the whole growing season in the hopes that his family would be able to rely on the harvest while he was gone to the war. If winter lingered, they would need wild fare to sustain them. He knew this well and laid corners of a springhouse in his mind. Between this imaginary work and dreaming, he could never find the words to tell Hannah of his plans to enlist. Somehow, though, she already knew.

Dealing with tragedies and transformations, Notes from a Deserter effectively portrays the complexity of conflicts that defined our nation’s history through a localized lens.