Glory in the Name

11

Richmond Dispatch

TUESDAY MORNING…APRIL 23, 1861

BURNING OF THE NAVY YARD!

DESTRUCTION OF GOVERNMENT ARMS AND STORES

FIVE FEDERAL SHIPS BURNT!

ESCAPE OF THE PAWNEE:

THE CUMBERLAND TOWED DOWN AND ASHORE!

EXCITING INCIDENTS,etc., etc.

Passengers from Norfolk last evening assure us that the amount of guns, stores and ammunition secured by the Virginia forces after the burning of the Navy-Yard, was enormous, and our correspondence confirms the fact. The guns in many instances were imperfectly spiked in the hurry and alarm of the Federal incendiaries, and are in no respects damaged.

THE DRY DOCK

Appearances indicated that it was intended to cripple this admirable and useful work, by blowing up the gates, but from some cause this work was not done, and the dock was found to be altogether unhurt.

We cannot bring ourselves to believe that an officer of a Navy, distinguished hitherto by a high sense of honor and chivalrous courage, could willingly condescend to such an inglorious mode of warfare as this. We rather regard it as an emanation from the wretched cabal at Washington, and a practical carrying out of the tactics laid down by the villainous Sumner, and other orators of the Black Republican party. Burn, sink and destroy is the word with them.

The Petersburg Express has the following by telegraph from Norfolk:

The prisoners taken this morning are Capt. Wright of the army, and young Rogers, a son of Commodore Rogers of the navy.

The enemy took two of our young men prisoners last night. They were reconnoitering on their own account.

To: Stephen R. Mallory

Norfolk, April 22, 1861

North left for Charleston to-day; I answer your dispatch. The Pennsylvania, Merrimack, Germantown, Raritan, Columbia, and Dolphin are burned to the water’s edge and sunk. The Delaware, Columbus, and Plymouth are sunk. All can be raised; the Plymouth easily; not much injured. The Germantown crushed and sunk by the falling of shears. Her battery, new and complete, uninjured by fire; can be recovered. Destruction less than might be expected. The metal work of the carriages will be recovered; most of it good. About 4,000 shells thrown overboard; can be recovered. The Germantown’s battery will be up and ready for service to-morrow. In ordnance building all small arms broken and thrown overboard will be fished up. The brass howitzers thrown overboard are up. The Merrimack has 2,200 10-pound cartridges in her magazine in water-tight tanks. Everything broken that they could break. Private trunks broken open and officers’ clothing and that of their wives stolen.

Glorious news! General Gwynn just read me a telegram; it comes from a reliable source; the New York Regiment, attempting to march through Maryland, was met half way between Marlborough and Annapolis and cut all to pieces.

– G. T. Sinclair

From the Journal of Lieutenant Thadeous Harwell :

April 20 and 21, 1861

What strange and awful spirits were abroad that night! Which our brave Captain sensed, and handing the field glasses to me did most nobly ask that I give him my opinion of just what mischief might be afoot! To my eye I put the glass. And what was that I saw? To our good captain said, “Indeed, there is some ignoble thing here! Something is rotten in the State of Virginia!”

And so on my urging the captain steered our humble vessel down the Elizabeth River to Norfolk. What is that we see? Just what the cowardly debased Yankees had wrought-not but utter destruction to the grand and valuable naval yard which by right and location does and should belong to the Sovereign State of Virginia, and the Grand Confederacy.

With never a thought toward his own life nor limb, our gallant Captain Bowater went at the head of his own small army and extinguished the very flame that would have destroyed the dry dock and rained down on the heads of those poor innocents abed in Portsmouth untold hundred tons of granite! And thus did the bold Bowater save for the Confederacy that grand edifice, the dry dock, with which we now might hope to build grand and vast men-of-war to sally forth and vanquish those sea-born vandals who have come south to do us gross injustice!

I made much protest that our bold captain should not thus expose his life to the cowardly fires of our enemies, but rather it was the place of his subordinate officer, myself, who so longed to charge into the lion’s mouth with guns blazing. What is that that our brave captain replied? He would hear none of it, but did assure me (with that nobleness and honestness of character that is the birthright of those noble Sons of the South) that on the next occasion I should have my chance to distinguish myself in mortal combat with those who would deprive us of our liberties! O, how I long for that day, hour, moment!

Mrs. Bertrand Atkins

9 Elm Street

Culpepper, Virginia

Dearest Mother,

No doubt you will have heard of the terrific excitement we have had down here! I daresay it has been building for the past month, ever since my arrival here in Portsmouth, the way the storms build up in the summertime. You could just feel it, with more and more soldiers arriving in town, and talk everywhere of attacking the naval yard, and the Yankees making their preparations to leave. Two nights ago the storm broke, as it were. Of course I remained safe at home with Aunt Molly, well away from any danger, but the flames were perfectly visible, and the sounds of the gunfire and explosions quite clear, even though we were more than a mile away from the yard.

Now things are settling down some, with our troops in command of the yard and the Yankees fled to Fort Monroe and Washington. Still, it seems as if Portsmouth and Norfolk are to be the center of much activity, in the military and naval line, as the Yankees were not able to destroy as much as they thought. It is a very exciting place to be, during an exciting time, not unlike being in Boston or Philadelphia in 1776. But I am getting too full of all this excitement and playing the poet again, as Father has always accused me of doing.

I trust all is well with you and Father, and that Father has become more sanguine about my moving down here. Aunt Molly is well and sends her love, and I am well also.

Love to everyone there.

Your daughter,

Wendy Atkins

12

The officers and men all being raw recruits, discipline was very galling to them…but soon the boys began to learn the “Old Soldier” tricks and learned to yield gracefully to the inevitable when they could not dodge the officers.

— James R. Binford, 15th Mississippi Infantry

Lieutenant Robley Paine, Jr., trudged through the tent-lined, makeshift streets of Camp Walker, bivouac of 3rd Brigade, of which the 18th Mississippi was now a part. The summer sun pushed him down into the dusty path. He and his men had been there for two weeks already, but it seemed much longer than that.

It was July of 1861, and Lieutenant Paine reckoned he knew most of what soldiering was about.

He knew the weary, hot, dusty marching, as he and the rest of the young men had tramped to Yazoo City and then north to Corinth, over two hundred miles by paddle wheeler, by foot, and by rail.

He knew the muttering and the growling and the insubordination of the men, silent and otherwise. He learned when to cajole and when to yell and when to deliver a cuff to the ear or a boot to the ass. He learned how to do it in such a way that it got the job done and left no permanent and festering hatreds.

In Corinth he learned what an ungodly mess a cluster of officers could make of trying to create an army from a rabble. Officers who, a month before, had been cotton planters and merchants and politicians.

But not all of them. There were a handful of real soldiers, men who had resigned their commissions in the old army and come south to fight for their states. These men Robley watched close, and imitated, and tried to learn what he could about real soldiering.

He learned about indecision and infighting, about intrigue, about toadying and backstabbing and bootlicking. By his own inbred good sense and natural aversion to such things, and the honor instilled in him by his father, he learned to avoid it all, and to go about his business and look after the welfare of his men.

As a result of that policy, Robley Paine remained an officer, because in the Confederate Army the men voted their officers in, with a democracy that harked back to the army of 1776. Robley Paine was a near-unanimous choice for third lieutenant.

At length, under the direction of General J. L. Alcorn, the disparate young men from Mississippi were formed into companies: Company A, the Confederate Rifles, Company B, the Benton Rifles, Company C, the Confederates, and so on. The boys from Yazoo County formed Company D, named, to no one’s surprise, the Hamer Rifles. And finally the great lot of them were formed into the 18th Mississippi Regiment and sent north once again.

They traveled for eight days, marching, jostling onto railroad platforms, crushing into sweating railcars, rattling northeast. They covered nearly seven hundred miles and landed at last in the great ad hoc tent city of Camp Walker near Manassas Junction, Virginia.

Robley paused in his deliberate wandering, pulled off his kepi, wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his frock coat. He squinted around him, at the bored men on guard duty, the companies off in the distance, kicking up dust as they drilled, the men lounging around, reading, writing letters, playing cards. Things were getting mighty relaxed at Camp Walker. Laundry hung out in the sun, tables and chairs were set up outside the little tents, chickens ran around the dusty ground. They were only about twenty-five miles from Washington, D.C., the heart of the Union, and all the bluebellies gathering there, but no one of either side seemed overeager to do anything about it.

From the moment that he had signed his name to the enlistment roll, through the long march and wait and the endless drilling at Corinth, over the misery of eight days’ travel to Manassas, Robley had known several fears.

One was that he would miss the great battle that would decide the war. That one was a common fear. It was the only fear that the boys would gladly own up to, and did, often.

But also, in his heart, tucked away, he harbored the secret fear that that was what he wanted, that he hoped to miss the battle, that he was afraid to stand up in that great fight. That, too, was not an uncommon fear, but it was not so popular a topic.

All of that seemed long ago, and those fears were smothered under the weight of drilling, guard duty, mess duty, general boredom, and now fear that he or his brothers would fall victim to the measles, which were spreading like plague through the 3rd Brigade. After weeks of dull camp routine, the possibility of battle seemed so unlikely as to not warrant concern.

Yes, Robley figured he had already experienced just about all there was to soldiering. There were only two things left, that he knew of. One was the misery of a winter march or encampment, and the other was the horror of battle. The former he reckoned he could do without. The latter he was desperately eager to try, to be done with it, if only to discover the truth about himself.

Robley put his kepi back on, trudged to the end of the 18th Mississippi’s encampment. Coming from the other direction was Nathaniel Paine, alone.

“Couldn’t find him?” Robley said.

“No, sir.” Nathaniel pulled his kepi off, just as Robley had done, wiped his forehead. As soon as Robley had been promoted, Nathaniel had begun to address him as “sir,” with not the least hint of irony.

Robley frowned, looked around again. Miles of identical tents, thousands upon thousands of men. The Confederate Stars and Bars hung limp from a flagpole near the center of the camp. The two-story brick home of Wilmer McLean, headquarters of Brigadier General David Jones, stood brooding over the rows of Lilliputian tents.

Far off in the distance they heard the flat boom of cannon fire, the artillery units around Washington, D.C., exercising at their pieces. It had caused a stir in camp the first time they had heard it, but now it was hardly noticed.

“Fella told me he saw him with his bird, heading for the South Carolina boys,” Nathaniel added.

“All right. We’ll try there.” Robley headed off, with Nathaniel behind, and soon they crossed the largely invisible divide between the 18th Mississippi camp and the 5th South Carolina, with whom they were brigaded.

Near the center of the 5th South Carolina’s camp the tents were arranged in such a way as to form a parade ground, and at the far end of the parade there was a cluster of men in a circle, and Robley had a good idea that Jonathan might be among them. He was not a fellow to miss a frolic of any kind.

The brothers crossed the parade, peered through the group of men standing and kneeling, and Robley was not surprised to see Jonathan at the center of the circle, holding the fighting cock he had been training up for a week now. Money was passing around the circle of men.

Jonathan was in his shirtsleeves and his kepi was tilted back and his face was red with exertion and excitement. His light brown hair was plastered to the sweat on his forehead and he was grinning, and even Robley could appreciate how handsome and vital his brother looked.

“What y’all say your chicken’s name is?” Jonathan called to his opponent at the far end of the circle, a big Irish-looking fellow who also clutched a straining rooster. “Y’all said his name is Abe Lincoln, didn’t ya?”

“Abe Lincoln, my ass. Yankee Killer. Gonna git himself some practice now.”

“Yankee Killer? Well, hell, just put a uniform on him. He’s as much a man as any of you South Carolina boys.”

Robley could not help but smile. Jonathan had a quick wit about him. It got him in trouble more often then not.

Then, on some unseen signal, the birds were released. In a great welter of feathers and flying dust the fighting cocks fell on each other, flailing and lashing with dagger spurs. The roosters screamed and the men screamed and shouted and urged the animals on to greater violence.

A stream of blood made a red slash across the tan earth, and Robley winced and felt a rush of shame that he should have such a reaction. They were birds. How would he fare when men were being shot down around him?

The shouting of the men and birds built and Robley pushed his concerns aside, watched the battle of brilliant red and yellow and black feathers. Some of the watchers let out a wild, unearthly whoop, a pagan battle cry that came from some place deep inside, and it sent shivers down Robley’s spine.

And then it was over and Jonathan Paine’s bird lay in a crumpled heap of bloody feathers.

“What the hell you say the name of your bird is?” the victor taunted Jonathan. “Winfield Scott, ain’t that what you said? Or wasn’t it Bluebelly?”

Jonathan grinned. He did not get angry. He rarely did. He picked up the rooster’s limp body. “His name, suh, is Stew Meat.” Jonathan bowed, turned to leave the circle, saw Robley watching him.

“Ah, brothers, you had to witness my bird’s ignominious defeat. He left a great string of dead fighting cocks in his path, and the one time you see him fight is when he gets beat by that cheating South Carolina son of a bitch.”

“He left one rooster dead in his path, and I think that one was sick with consumption to start,” Nathaniel said.

“Come on, Private,” Robley said, “there’s been a reassignment and you have picket duty tonight.”

“Picket duty?” The three brothers stepped off across the dry, dusty parade ground. “If y’all are putting me on picket duty,” Jonathan said, “you must reckon them Yankees’ll be coming down the road tonight.”

“You don’t mind fighting them single-hand, do you?” asked Nathaniel.

“Who else is gonna do it?”

They marched back toward the 18th Mississippi’s camp, slower now, as the sun reached its zenith. “Tell me true, Lieutenant,” Jonathan said. When he used Robley’s title with sincerity, it meant he was looking for a real answer. “When you think we’re gonna be at them bluebellies?”

Robley stopped in the middle of the wide central street. His wool clothing itched intolerably and he wanted some relief.

“Can’t be too much longer,” he said, scratching with abandon, which got his brothers scratching as well. Robley heard enough talk around camp to know that speculating about future action was the quickest way to sound like an idiot. But with his brothers it was different. “Uncle Abe’s three-month enlistments are up soon. He’s got to do something, before his army goes home. Got to be a battle soon.”

Nathaniel and Jonathan nodded. For all the casual, hunting-trip quality of Camp Walker, there was always that, the impending battle, hanging there. The Sword of Damocles, it would have to fall eventually.

“You afraid?” Jonathan asked Robley, and again there was a sincerity that the youngest did not generally show. Standing there, his dead rooster in his hand, he looked like the little boy that Robley remembered, holding a broken toy, a bit bewildered in a world where his father imposed no strict rules. The boys had always turned to Robley for structure in their lives.

Now Robley just shrugged, spit on the ground. “You mean am I afraid there won’t be a fight?” he asked, though he knew that was not what Jonathan meant.

“No, I mean, you afraid of the fight?”

Robley looked away, collecting his words, making sure there was no one else to hear them. These were his brothers. He did not always have to be Lieutenant Paine in front of them.

“Yeah. I’m afraid of the monkey show. I’m afraid I’ll run. Won’t have the nerve to stand up to it.”

Jonathan smiled, chuckled, shook his head. “That it? Aren’t you afraid of being killed? I’m…seems to me a Yankee bullet’s a more frightening prospect than doing a skeedaddle.”

The words took Robley by surprise, and he realized that his thoughts had been so directed toward how he would perform when the bullets started to fly that the thought of being killed had never occurred to him.

“No, I’m not afraid of being killed, I don’t reckon. Rather die with honor than live with the shame of running,” he said, and that seemed true, but was it?

Here now was a whole new question with which he would have to wrestle.

13

I had purposed offering some remarks upon the vast importance to Virginia and to the entire South of the timely acquisition of this extensive naval depot, with its immense supplies of munitions of war, and to notice briefly the damaging effects of its loss to the Government at Washington; but I deem it unnecessary…

— William H. Peters, Commissioner, to John Letcher, Governor of Virginia

Hieronymus Taylor sat on the stool at his workbench and puffed his butt end of a cigar to life. The Cape Fear was riding at her anchor. The fires were banked in the boiler and the doors and vents of the deckhouse that enclosed the fidley, the section of the deckhouse directly above the engine room, were open to the afternoon breeze, and the engine room was almost comfortable.

Taylor shook the flame out on his lucifer and tossed the smoldering match onto the workbench. He never took his eye off of Fireman First Class James Burgess.

Burgess had spent the past half hour tapping threads into a hole he had drilled into the side of one of the shoes on the eccentric—a circular piece of metal mounted off-center on the crankshaft that worked the engine’s valve gear. When the threads were cut, he screwed a bolt into the hole. Then he screwed an eye-bolt into a deck beam a few feet above the eccentric.

All this Taylor watched without comment. He could not figure what Burgess was about. He thought about asking him, but the Scotsman was never very enlightening, even when questioned directly.

If it had been O’Malley fiddling with his engine without permission, he would have stomped him underfoot. O’Malley had no feel for engines. He suspected O’Malley’s engineer’s papers had been supplied by some fellow Mick working in some navy shithouse office.

Burgess was different. Burgess understood engines. With Burgess, Taylor just watched.

When the eyebolt was in place, Burgess pulled a length of quarter-inch manila line from his pocket. He tied a bowline in one end and looped it over the bolt on the eccentric, then threaded the bitter end through the eyebolt. That was as much as Hieronymus Taylor could endure. The chief slid off the stool, ambled over to where Burgess was working.

“Awright, Burgess, I give,” he said to the Scotsman’s back. “What in hell are you about?”

Burgess made a grunting noise that might have been a word. It sounded like “Wawarr.” Then, when Taylor did not respond, he elaborated, saying, “Feer kaws.”

“Forgive me, but I can’t understand a goddamned thing you are saying.”

Burgess turned around. He spoke slowly and deliberately, as if to a child. “Washer. Fer washin clothes.”

Taylor nodded. “And how does it do that, exactly?”

Burgess pointed to the deck below, where the end of the rope dangled. “Put a barrel there. Fill it full of water. Get ’er good an hot with steam. Cut the barrel head down, put a ruddy great weight on it, hang it from the line.”

Hieronymus nodded. That was all the explanation he would get. He knew that. But he understood. Dirty clothes go in the barrel of water, hot from the boiler. The round barrel head, cut down so there is clearance all around, goes on top. The line goes from an eyebolt in the barrel head, through the eyebolt overhead, to the bolt on the eccentric shoe. When the engine is turning the shoe goes up and down and the line from the shoe to the barrel head makes the barrel head go up and down, like the plunger in a butter churn. The clothes are agitated until they are clean.

“Well, damn. You are one clever son of a bitch. Fer a foreigner, I mean.”

“Do it on errey Scottish ship,” Burgess grunted and went back to his task.

Taylor smiled. This was a hell of an idea. “Moses!” he yelled.

“Yassuh?” Moses and a couple of the coal heavers were knocking clinker from the boiler grates.

“Git some of your boys topside, find us a barrel. Cut the head down, ’bout an inch around. Damn me, we gonna have the cleanest damned black gang in the navy.”

“Yassuh.” Moses left off what he was doing and took Billy and Joshua topside.

Taylor liked Moses. Moses did not argue and he did his work well without playing sullen, petty games, and he could sing like a son of a bitch, and that was about all Taylor could ask of a coal passer, or any man, for that matter.

“Chief?”

Taylor looked up. Jacob, Bowater’s servant, was leaning into the deckhouse door, one deck up. “Captain’s compliments, Chief. Dinner in twenty minutes.”

“Aye.” Damn. Taylor usually ate by himself, or with his engine-room gang. But once a week Bowater invited him to dinner, and much as he would have liked to, he did not think he could refuse. Bowater might be a blueblood, slaveholding navy martinet, a man incapable of action, a yachtsman who would rather lounge about on the deckhouse roof and dabble with his paints and have his darkie bring him mint juleps than fight a war, but he was still the captain.

Hieronymus tossed what was left of his cigar into the furnace, climbed grudgingly up the ladder and aft to his cabin. He wished Burgess had finished the clothes washer the day before. Taylor could not help but feel like slovenly white trash in Bowater’s patrician presence. It annoyed him, and it annoyed him more that he let Bowater get to him in that manner. He wished they had a bath down in the engine room. Or a shower bath, that would be even better. Rig a barrel to the overhead, run a steam line into it, tap in a valve…

Taylor stopped in midstride, saw the whole thing form in his head. Yes. He wondered if Burgess or any of his damned Scots had ever come up with that one.

“Massa Samuel?”

Samuel Bowater looked up from the reports from department heads, Hieronymus Taylor’s insufferably dreary description of the state of the engine.

“Yes, Jacob?”

“Dinner in twenty minute, suh. Chief Taylor and Missuh Harwell joinin’ you, suh.”

“Right. Very well. Thank you, Jacob. Please get my painting gear together. I’ll be going ashore after lunch.”

“Yes, suh,” Jacob said, then, good servant that he was, disappeared.

Bowater sighed and set the reports aside. They had been puttering around the same ten-mile stretch of river, from Gosport to Sewall’s Point, for two months now. Two months, while somewhere beyond that waterfront, somewhere up the river and in the country beyond, the pressure of war built like steam in a boiler. Bowater knew it would blow soon, and he did not want to be at a safe distance when it did.

They had been busy enough; they had not been idle. At the end of May they joined in the effort to raise the remains of the Merrimack from the river bottom. They had sealed her up as best they could, pumped her out until her own buoyancy lifted her out of the mud.

With the Cape Fear alongside, she was eased into the flooded dry dock and her keel was allowed to settle down on angle blocks and her blackened sides were supported with shores wedged between her timbers and the side of the dry dock. The water was pumped out of the dock. The Merrimack, charred on the topside and unscathed below, rested safe and dry in Confederate hands, while Confederate minds wrestled with the question of what to do with her.

Captain, now Flag Officer, French Forrest, whom Samuel knew from the old navy, had been given charge of the navy yard. Under his able command the yard was made whole and defensible. The buildings that the retreating Yankees had burned were rebuilt. Batteries were erected along the outer walls.

The Cape Fear and the smaller tug Harmony were set to work as ordnance transports, hauling guns to the newly erected batteries on Craney Island and Fort Powhatan and Aquia Creek, distributing the largess that the Federals had left in their wake.

Twice they made the 120-mile trip down the canal through the aptly named Great Dismal Swamp to Albemarle Sound, past Roanoke Island and into Pamlico Sound. There, on the sandy, windswept Hatteras Island, south of the massive and blind Cape Hatteras light, the Confederate Army was erecting two sand-and-mud forts to keep the Yankees out of the protected sounds and the rivers that ran deep into Confederate country. The tugs from Norfolk brought guns, ammunition, supplies, all former property of the United States.

The work was hot, dull, uninspiring. The Cape Fear had hauled tons of ordnance, but she herself remained unarmed. There was no chance that she could be anything but a tug. And as long as that was true, then Bowater knew he could be nothing more than a spectator to the greatest military undertaking he was likely to see in his lifetime. The thought made him desperate.

Samuel Bowater stood and stretched. He was certain that the others, Harwell and Taylor, blamed him for their inaction, thought that perhaps he was backward in his effort to join the fighting. They did not know about his constant requests of Forrest that the vessel be mounted with a gun for offensive action, his letters to the navy office at the new capital in Richmond for new orders, the repeated instructions to remain at Norfolk under Forrest’s command until instructed otherwise. They did not know and he would not tell them, because it was not their business.

He smoothed his pants and pulled on his blue frock coat. Generally he ate by himself in his cabin, but today was the crew’s day off and his weekly Saturday dinner with his officers. On so perfect a summer day, the roof of the deckhouse made a wonderful spot to dine.

Landsman Dick Merrow walked around the front of the wheelhouse and rang the bell, two sets of two. Four bells in the afternoon watch, two o’clock in the afternoon. Dinnertime. Bowater stepped out of his cabin, stepped through the door to the boat deck, which formed the roof of the deckhouse. Lieutenant Harwell was already there, trying to look casual but not too casual as he waited for his captain. Taylor was not yet there.

“Please, Mr. Harwell, sit,” Bowater said, and the lieutenant nodded his eager head and sat to the right of the captain’s place. The boat, hanging in its davits, cast a shade over the table, and that and the soft breeze made the setting most idyllic. The table was set with the silver and bone china service and crystal glasses that Samuel had brought with him for his captain’s table.

Jacob stepped forward and poured wine for the two officers. “So…” Bowater began, but he was interrupted by the sound of Taylor’s shoes pounding the ladder and he climbed up to the deckhouse roof.

“Forgive me, Captain, for my tardiness,” he said, his tone just shy of insubordinate. He was dressed in his uniform coat and hat, though the coat was unbuttoned and hanging open, and the visor of his hat was creased and pulled low over his eyes. But he had made an obvious effort to clean up, and that was something, though he had stopped short of shaving.

“Damn.” Taylor looked around, breathed deep. “It is a fine day indeed for dining al fresco, ” pronounced as if referring to a man named Alan Fresco. “I have got to get out of that damned engine room and up here on the boat deck more often.”

“Please, Chief, be seated,” Bowater said. “Have you decided to grow a beard?” He recalled the promise he had made to himself to be more tolerant of Hieronymus Taylor. He was a fine engineer, for what that was worth.

“Thankee, sir.” Taylor sat. “Beard? Perhaps I will.” He picked up the wine bottle before Jacob could get to it, poured himself a glass. “I’ll just have a taste, here, if you don’t mind, sir,” he said.

“Please, Mr. Taylor, help yourself.”

More shoes on the ladder, and the coal heavers Billy Jefferson and Nat St. Clair appeared carrying silver trays with silver covers, their white gloves in sharp contrast to their dark skin. Behind them, imperious, Johnny St. Laurent fussed and directed, like an overzealous lieutenant dressing his lines.

When at last the trays were set to the cook’s satisfaction, Billy and Nat stepped back while St. Laurent whipped off the covers with a magician’s flourish. Underneath, a leg of lamb, roasted to a brown perfection and nestled in a bed of new potatoes. St. Laurent allowed them only a glance before he returned the covers and Billy and Nat distributed bowls of soup.

“We start wid a fine malecotony soup today, and for de main course, roast leg of lamb on a bed of pomme de terre a la Maitre d’Hotel and fresh asparagus, followed by a claret jelly and fresh fruit.”

“Excellent, Cook,” Bowater said, and the chef nodded, as if there was no question, then snapped his fingers and the servers disappeared down the ladder, with St. Laurent following behind.

“Well, hell, Captain, I don’t know how I managed to find the one darkie cooks all this Frenchified stuff. Don’t even know how to make a decent gumbo or fried chicken,” Taylor said.

“Hardly a failing. Was he really the chef at the Chateau Dupre Hotel?”

“Aw, hell no. He was the fella mixed up the sauces or something. He’s jest putting on airs. I reckon he learned a thing or two about cooking, jest watchin them real chefs.”

“He did indeed. So how did he happen to come with you?”

“They was some mess he got himself in. Something to do with the wife of one of the cooks there at that hotel. I never did get the whole story. Just knew he had to get the hell out of New Orleans, but fast. I was heading to Wilmington, took him along.”

Bowater nodded. “You were friends?”

“He used to shovel coal for me. Paddle wheeler we used to work, New Orleans to Vicksburg on a regular run.”

“I see.” Samuel could sense the layers upon layers of story that formed the bedrock of their acquaintance, Hieronymus Taylor and Johnny St. Laurent. He wondered briefly if there was anyone who would come to him if they were in dire need of help. No one that he could think of.

“Sir?” Harwell interjected. Bowater looked at the luff and could see that he had something to say and was ready to burst if he did not say it.

“Yes, Mr. Harwell?”

“When I was ashore this morning, sir, I found out what they are planning for the old Merrimack.”

“Oh, yes?” Judging from the lieutenant’s expression, it was something more than just rebuilding her as a steam frigate.

“Go on, Lieutenant,” Taylor said. “I am like to perish with anticipation.”

“Well, sir,” Harwell said, addressing himself only to Bowater, “it appears they are going to rebuild her as an ironclad.”

“Do you mean like that French monstrosity, Le Gloire ?”

“No sir. No masts at all. More like a floating battery, but with engines. They will use Merrimack ’s old engines. An iron casement and bows and stern, submerged I believe.”

For a moment, no one said a thing, and in silence they considered that. An ironclad, with no sailing rig. A self-propelled floating iron battery.

“She’ll look like a damned turtle,” Taylor observed and grinned at the thought. “Be just like a turtle, slow and strong.”

“She will be a vulgar monstrosity,” Bowater said. Merrimack, with her shortened masts and her tall, black, ugly stack, was no beauty herself. All of these steam vessels, these hermaphrodites, half sail, half steam, lacked the grace and beauty of the old sailing navy. Was there any steamer that could compare to the beauty of a sailing frigate?

Once, not long after his graduation from the Navy School, Bowater had seen from the deck of his ship the USS Constitution underway, a full press of canvas to topgallant studding sails. The image was clean in his mind, like an etching. There was nothing else made by the hand of man that could compare to that for grace, beauty, and silent and unassuming power. She was from a different time, a more elegant time, and the men who sailed ships like that were very different from the men who mucked about in dark and filthy engine rooms.

“She will be ugly, Captain, but she will be lethal as well,” Taylor said. “I’ll take power over beauty any day.”

“Of course you would, Mr. Taylor.” It was what Samuel Bowater would expect from the engineers and mechanics of the world. A new direction for mankind, a rhumb line to the end of civilization.

“Anyway, they should have guns enough for her,” Taylor said through a mouthful of lamb. “Don’t reckon we’ve hauled away everything the Yankees left behind.” Then, in another tone, sotto voce, he added, “Reckon there should be guns enough for any boat in the navy…”

Bowater stiffened. It was not the words—he had not heard for certain what Taylor said—but the tone. Insinuation? Was the engineer hinting at something backward in Bowater’s nature?

“What are you saying, Chief?” Bowater saw Harwell tense.

“I’m saying, if there was a gun on this here tugboat, we might stand a chance of getting into some fightin’.”

Bowater leaned back, eyes on Taylor’s unshaven face, his carefully arranged look of innocence.

What am I supposed to say? He had been pleading with Forrest since the flag officer’s arrival to mount a gun on the Cape Fear’s foredeck, but Forrest had refused him every time, told him they could not waste ordnance arming tugs.

But Bowater could not tell Taylor that. It was none of Taylor’s affair. He did not wish to set the precedent of inferiors asking after the captain’s business. But neither could he let Taylor think he was shy about wanting to get into the fight.

Checkmate…with one question he has trapped me…

“Chief, these questions are not the business of the engineering division. But let me say that I am attempting to improve our armament by way of the proper channels.”

Taylor grunted, made a laughing sound. “Proper channels ain’t gonna get you a goddamned thing, we both know it.”

“And so that is an end to it.”

“Is it?” There was a smoothness to Taylor’s tone, like a snake-oil salesman, and it made Bowater wary and intrigued all at once.

For a long moment they sat there, silent, each holding the other’s eyes, each needing the other for his existence and hating it.

Bowater spoke first. “Go on,” he said. He said it softly, as if afraid to speak loud, afraid to admit that he wanted to listen. Here was forbidden fruit, Bowater could sense it. It frightened him, attracted him. He wanted to arm the Cape Fear, wanted it more than anything he could recall. He could feel that he was about to cross a line. He did not know what to think.

The ordnance house reminded Samuel Bowater of a buffet table laid out for the gods of war.

All of the guns that the retreating Yankees had spiked and rolled into the river had been recovered and the spikes removed from their vents. Stretched out in great rows were gun upon gun, some in carriages, some lying on the granite floor. There were massive 9-inch and eleven-inch Dahlgrens, howitzers of every size; twenty-four-pound, twelve-pound, six-pound. Long, sleek rifled barrels were lined up like fish on ice at the market, from the enormous, crushing hundred-pound Dahlgren through thirty-pound, twenty-pound, twelve, and ten.

There were James rifles and mortars and old smoothbores of antiquated design, the venerable thirty-two-pounders, and twenty-four-pounders, once the mainstay of the sailing navy’s broadside. There were twelve-pounders, nines, and fours. But like the smoothbore rifles that so many of the infantry were carrying, North and South, those guns were of another age, quickly being eclipsed by the rifled barrel and the exploding shell.

“Well, damn, Cap’n Bowater,” Taylor whispered. “I do not know where to begin.” He said it soft. They had no business doing what they were doing.

“Not with the Dahlgrens, I shouldn’t think,” Bowater said. Taylor nodded. All the reinforcement in the world would not render the bulwark and decks of the Cape Fear strong enough to support one of those monsters.

They walked down the rows of guns, looking them over, like buyers before a horse auction. “It would be a waste of time to put a smoothbore on board,” Taylor suggested, and Bowater concurred, so they moved quickly past the older guns.

They came at last to the Parrott rifles, and they stopped there and ran their eyes over the long tapered barrels with their distinctive reinforcement at the breech.

“Now this might be more of what we need,” Bowater said. In fact, he had worked out long ago exactly what gun he would like to see on the Cape Fear’s foredeck, but for some reason he could not bring himself to admit as much.

Taylor nodded again. “Ten-pound Parrott weighs just under a thousand pounds… That kind of weight would put the boat down by the head, I should think.”

“It just might.”

Taylor looked up and met Bowater’s eyes, and there was something mischievous in his expression. “Might balance her a bit…one gun off the bow and another off the stern…”

Bowater took a deep breath. He and Taylor had worked out this ruse de guerre over dessert, in the shade of the boat on the Cape Fear’s boat deck. They talked in elliptical, half-finished sentences. Bowater could not bring himself to speak more boldly. This sort of trickery was antithetical to everything Bowater was and believed and was trained to be. If honor and ethics were a rope to climb, then he had just slid down many feet. But he had to get into the fight.

The two men looked down at the guns again.

“Ten-pound Parrott forward. Two twelve-pound howitzers aft,” Bowater said in a tone that suggested the matter was settled.

Footsteps on the granite floor echoed around the building, and Bowater and Taylor looked up to see Commander Archibald Fairfax approach. Fairfax was in charge of ordnance at Norfolk, an able and active officer. He had managed to rework a number of the old smoothbore thirty-two-pounders, reinforcing their breeches and rifling them, bringing them into the modern age.

He was also in charge of fitting out the vessels stationed at the yard. “Captain Bowater, a pleasure, sir,” he said.

“Commander, good day,” Bowater said, extending a hand. “I do not believe you have met my chief engineer. Mr. Hieronymus Taylor, Commander Fairfax.”

“Commander,” Taylor said, shaking his hand. One glance told him Fairfax was old navy, through and through.

“What can I do for you, Captain Bowater?”

Bowater felt a tingling in his hands, an unsettled feeling in his gut. Up until now it had all been theoretical, which was bad enough. But now the moment was there. Now he had to lie to a superior officer, or give it up.

“We came by to see about the new guns for Fort Powhatan,” Bowater said, and when Fairfax looked understandably confused, he added, “The ten-pound Parrott and the two twelve-pound howitzers.”

There…that wasn’t so bad… He felt the rope slip though his hands.

Fairfax shook his head. “I was not aware that Fort Powhatan was to get more guns. Who gave you that order?”

“We were up there yesterday. Captain Cocke said he had sent word to you. He was under the impression it was all arranged.”

“No…this is the first I hear of it.”

“Well, hell, sir…beg your pardon, Commander,” Taylor said. Bowater hoped he would not make a hash of things now. “I can draw the fires, but now we’re going to have to take on more fresh water before we get head up steam again. We’ll need more coal, too. Got just enough on board to steam there and back with steam up now.”

“Very well, Chief,” Bowater said. “There is nothing for it.” He shook his head, turned to Fairfax. “I swear this happens every time, sir. One bureaucratic mix-up and we are set back two days.”

“Well, perhaps not,” Fairfax said. “If Cocke intended to ask for those guns, I should think the paperwork is somewhere. Be a waste for you to leave empty-handed. Why don’t you take those guns aboard and I’ll see what became of Cocke’s requisition.”

“Thank you, sir,” Bowater said. “That sort of efficiency is not something you would have heard of in the old navy.”

“No, indeed, Mr. Bowater. If we have any advantage at all over the United States Navy, it is that we are not so entrenched and somnambulant. Feel free to press whomever you need from the yard to help with the guns. Mr. Taylor, a pleasure to meet you. Good day, gentlemen.”

“Good day,” the officers of the Cape Fear said in chorus. Commodore Fairfax turned and walked away.

Done. They had their guns. And Bowater felt like a new-minted whore, just finished with her first trick. He wondered if that sort of thing got easier, and what the implications were if it did.

14

Our hands nervously toying with the hammers of our rifles, each one felt that his final departure was near at hand and busily repented him of his sins.

— Alexander Hunter, 17th Virginia, Blackburn’s Ford, Bull Run River

A sharp jerk of alarm, a twist of fear. The long slide back into boredom. Alarm, fear, boredom, the cycle went round and round, a grindstone wearing Robley Paine down. Six days now. It was more exhausting than any drill or long march he had encountered yet.

He stood and stretched arms and legs, tore a piece of bacon off with his teeth. It was raw—fires were not permitted that morning—and the meat was chewy and slightly noxious, but he made himself eat. He followed the bacon up with a cracker, and then a drink from his canteen, filled with gritty river water.

The air was warm and sweet-smelling, the sky just growing light through the tangle of young trees along the riverbank. Over the muted conversations of the other soldiers, muttering over their inadequate breakfast, the incompetence of their leadership, he could hear the sounds of the Bull Run River, coursing through its choked and tangled bed, running over the shallow place they were protecting, McLean’s Ford.

It was July 21, a Sunday, and though there would be no church service that morning, Paine did not doubt that there would be a power of praying going on. He had done enough of it himself already, and he reckoned there was more to come.

“Morning, Lieutenant.” Jonathan Paine ambled up, scratching with one hand, rubbing his eyes with the other. “Got any more of that bacon?”

“Where are your rations, Private?”

“Ate ’em last night. I was fearful hungry.”

Robley scowled at his youngest brother, but cut a slice of bacon from his own remaining piece and handed it over. Jonathan, skinny as he was, ate more than any other person Robley had ever met.

“Today’s our day,” Jonathan said through a full mouth, but it was more a question than a statement.

“I reckon.” It had been six days since the great flurry of excitement that saw 3rd Brigade decamp from near the McLean house and tramp the mile down gently sloping hills and through clustered stands of young trees to the banks of the Bull Run. For six days they had been in the proximity of battle, but had yet to enter into it themselves, like so many Moseses looking down on the Promised Land.

On the day after they had taken their position at McLean’s Ford, the firing started, muted, distant, and sporadic. It was Brigadier General Milledge Luke Bonham’s 1st Brigade, lobbing shells at the pursuing Yankees as they fell back from Fairfax Courthouse to the Confederate lines behind the Bull Run.

It had been worse the following day. Then the Yankees had come in force down the road from the cluster of wood-framed houses known as Centreville. They hit James Longstreet’s 4th Brigade hard and repeatedly, not half a mile from 3rd Brigade’s left flank. The soldiers of 3rd Brigade grabbed up their rifles and rifles, yawned with nervousness, fiddled with their equipment, joked, prayed, waited for their orders to splash across the river, to turn the bluebellies’ flank. But that order did not come.

Colonel Jubal Anderson Early’s 6th Brigade, held in reserve behind Longstreet, came up in support and drove the Yankees back until they came no more. The men of the 3rd stood tensed, listening to the bang of artillery, the crack of small arms like a pitch-pine log in a fire, watched the clouds of smoke building over the trees. They stood ready until the tension began to ebb away and they headed down that slope to boredom, and there they would stay until the big guns began to fire again.

“We’re in the right place for a fight, I reckon,” Jonathan continued. He was nervous. The only time he showed any interest in what the army might do was when he was nervous.

“General Beauregard seems to think so,” Robley said. Nearly all of the Confederate troops were massed at that end of the line, the Confederate right. Bonham, Longstreet, Jones, Ewell, Early, and Holmes had all been positioned there, strung out behind the Bull Run.

The day before, as brigades of Joseph Johnston’s Army of the Shenandoah had begun to arrive by train—to the great relief of the Confederates, from Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, in overall command, to Private Jonathan Bonaventure Paine—they too had been massed near the McLean house. Now they stood in the rear of Bonham, Longstreet, and Jones, ready to come up to support the regiments along the river that would surely take the brunt of the Yankees’ massed assault.

The sun was breaking the horizon and the sky above was blue, clear and blue, and promised more unrelenting heat. The 3rd Brigade, like a great animal coming slowly out of sleep, began to move and shift and shuffle into place. Nathaniel came up, carrying two canteens, one of which he handed to Jonathan.

“Morning, Lieutenant,” he said.

“We drew cards to see who would fill canteens,” Jonathan explained. Robley frowned and shook his head as an officer should.

He ran his eyes over his two younger brothers, recalled how they had looked standing under the big tree in the front yard of Paine Plantation, their uniforms new and perfectly fitted, the leather of their belts and cartridge boxes gleaming black, their faces red-cheeked and eager. They looked like theatrical soldiers then, boys in costume.

They did not look that way anymore. They had lost so much weight that their clothes hung loose on them, and they wore their uniforms with the casual air of professionals. The leather belts and cartridge boxes were cracked and dusty and faded. Only their rifles retained the luster of newness, and that was only through meticulous maintenance. They had been soldiers long enough to know what was important and what was not.

In the distance they heard a gun fire, the flat bang of a cannon, field artillery.

“Shush!” Robley said to Jonathan, who was opening his mouth to speak. The three boys cocked their heads. The gunfire was far off, three or four miles at least.

“Sounds like it’s up by the Warrenton Turnpike,” Robley said in a whisper, pleased for the chance to display a knowledge of the terrain. “Fifth Brigade might be getting it…”

“You reckon that’s the Yankees attacking?” Nathaniel asked, also whispering.

“No. It’s a feint, I’ll wager. Real attack is going to come here.” And then, as if in support of his prediction, they heard artillery opening up much closer and to the north, a battery that must be aimed at them. Robley felt the sharp jab in his stomach, the sweat break out on his palms. So many times had the charge of excitement come and then drained away that he thought he would never feel it again. But with the sound of the guns he was flashed up in an instant, ready to go.

“You scared?” Jonathan asked, speaking soft.

Robley considered his answer. “No. You?”

“No.”

“I’m not either,” Nathaniel offered, but they were all lying and they all knew it.

Captain Clarence F. Hamer came stamping up the line, his tall boots in high polish, his tailored gray coat buttoned snug around his midriff, the top of his kepi a swirl of gold lace. “Lieutenant Paine! Get the company in order! We move out in half an hour. You hear?”

“Yes, sir!” Robley fairly shouted. He turned to the soldiers closest to him—his brothers—and began to issue orders. “Fall in, there! Get ready to march, men!” The order to move, to actually move, pitched his excitement even higher. And when Nathaniel and Jonathan said nothing but “Yessir!” and stumbled off to fetch their gear, he knew that they felt the same.

It was an hour and a half after Hamer’s orders that Private Nathaniel Paine splashed into the Bull Run River. The warm, brown water quickly filled his shoes so that each step was accompanied by a sucking, squishing feel. He wished he could shed them, go barefoot, as he had for half of his life, but Robley would not like that.

Nathaniel felt twisted up, alternately nauseated and jubilant. He wanted to get into the fight, he wanted to run, he wanted to move just to release the awful tension boiling inside. Robley could issue orders and yell at the beats, Jonathan could make jokes and get the ranks roaring with laughter. Nathaniel did not have those safety valves, so he marched, and that was some relief. But the pace was agonizingly slow, stopping, starting, stopping, until he wanted to scream with frustration.

They crossed through the river and trudged up the bank on the north side, and Nathaniel considered how he was now at the northernmost point on earth he had ever been. It was pretty, with the rolling green fields and the darker trees and the brown roads crisscrossing the country. Pretty, but not the place he would care to spend eternity.

Off to the left, northeast of their position, he could hear artillery making it a hot morning for someone. Longstreet’s brigade, he imagined. Third Brigade was marching now, and he wondered where they were going, what they were trying to accomplish. March on Centreville? Hit the flank of a Union attack? What was it like, to hit a flank? It was an expression he had heard again and again from the many would-be generals in camp, but he had only the vaguest idea of what it meant.

Still, they were moving toward something, and that alone buoyed him. The marching was good, the final call to action. And just as his shoes were starting to dry, and he was taking some joy in the long, rhythmic strides of the army advancing, someone called a halt.

The sound of tramping feet died away, and in its place came groans of frustration, muttered curses. Some said, “Aw, now what the hell is it?” loud, so the words carried over the ranks.

Jonathan, at Nathaniel’s side, shouted back, “We got to wait for the Yankees to change into their brown pants!” It was not a particularly funny reply, but in that charged atmosphere the men would have laughed at anything, and they laughed at that.

For twenty minutes or so they remained in place, on the road, standing ready to move out. Then slowly, like a cube of sugar in coffee, the tight ranks began to dissolve. Men leaned on rifles, then sat on the road, then stretched out on the roadside with their heads on their knapsacks and fell asleep. Others wandered down into the fields that bordered the road and began to eat the ubiquitous blackberries off the tall, dense, thorny bushes.

To the northwest the artillery continued to pound away, and farther off, five miles or so, on the Confederate left, where there was not supposed to be a battle, they could hear sounds that sounded very much like a battle indeed. Over the tops of the trees, smoke like low-lying fog rose from the field and hung there. And on the Confederate right, where the 3rd Brigade waited, the insects buzzed in the grass, the songbirds flashed through the trees, and the men ate blackberries and dozed.

The morning grew hotter, the men more lethargic, and the gunfire off to the far left grew more intense. Jonathan sat on the road, leaning on his knapsack, and Nathaniel sat beside him. From his knapsack he pulled a battered leather-bound journal and the pencil that he kept stuck in the binding.

July 21. Woke up and called to arms. Thought we were going into battle for sure, and it made me damned scared, I’ll admit it. Jonathan joking around as usual, but I think he is scared too. He tricked me into filling our canteens. Robley is ordering everyone around, but that is his way and I think he is just nervous and does that to shake the nerves off.

“You writing to Ma?” Jonathan asked.

Nathaniel looked up with a flush of embarrassment. “No.”

“Well, you should. And when you do, tell her I love her too, all right?”

“Why don’t you write yourself?”

“I will. But you’re the one always writing. You planning on publishing your memoirs? Get rich that way?”

“Might. Once I get famous.”

“Oh? When you gonna get famous?”

“Once I get a chance to start licking Yankees.”

“Humph. Good thing your daddy’s got money.”

Nathaniel put the book and pencil away, lay on his backpack, and pretended to sleep. At last the officers came riding and racing down the line, stirring the men of 3rd Brigade, urging them back into ranks. Nathaniel felt the languor drain away as he snatched up his rifle, shuffled back into line. He could see grins on the other men’s faces, nervous shuffling of feet as they prepared to plunge forward.

But they did not. Rather, they were ordered about, marched back toward where they had come from. Fifty-five minutes later, Nathaniel Paine’s now dry shoes once again plunged into the lazy Bull Run. Twenty minutes after that, he found himself at approximately the same place he had started that morning. If his rifle had not been loaded he would have thrown it down in disgust. The fight was out of him now. Not spent but worn away, and he did not think he would get it back, not that day.

Jonathan Bonaventure Paine saw the disgust on Nathaniel’s face and told himself that he felt the same. And he did. To a degree.

He leaned on his rifle, took off his kepi, and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. It was terribly hot, and not yet noon.

“Hey, Nathaniel?”

“What?” His brother’s tone disgusted, resigned, weary.

“Got any water left in your canteen, there?”

“Yeah.” Nathaniel pulled the half-empty canteen off his shoulder, handed it to Jonathan. Jonathan took it, tipped the water into his mouth. It was warm, near hot, and he could taste the mud of the Bull Run, but he was grateful for it.

Here was the difference between them, Jonathan thought. Nathaniel had saved half his water, while he had drained his an hour ago. He imagined that if they checked Robley’s canteen they would find it near full, that the lieutenant was saving the entire thing for when it was really needed.

Jonathan handed the canteen back, looked off to the country that lay south of the Bull Run. That morning there had been regiments spread out around the McLean house, held in reserve for the attack that was to come their way. They were not there now. They had been ordered off to reinforce the left flank, when it became clear that that was where the fighting actually was. Only the trampled grass and the dark circles where fires had once burned indicated that armies had once bivouacked there.

He turned and looked toward the northwest. The smoke was thick over the low hills, and the sound of the firing, soft and distant though it was, was continuous. Someone was catching hell.

“Reckon they were right about a battle today,” Nathaniel said. “But someone was wrong about where.”

“Reckon.” Cresting one of the low hills between themselves and the battle line, and about a mile away, Jonathan could see a battalion heading for the fight. They were marching fast, a long, gray line, the sun glinting off bayonets. The sight moved him in a strange way, and he felt the emotions rush one way and another until he thought he might go quietly mad, standing there in the Virginia sun.

It had frightened him, marching across the Bull Run. And yet he had been disappointed when they halted, confused when they were ordered back over the river. At one moment he wanted to be at the Yankees, the next he wanted to skulk off into a stand of trees and hide.

There was Nathaniel, obviously angry about missing out on the fight. Jonathan had always thought his brother felt as he did, though they certainly had never discussed it. But in the final instant, he wondered, was Nathaniel more of a fire-eater than he?

Robley was afraid, he had said so, but he was afraid of running, not of stopping a bullet. Well, Jonathan was afraid of that too. He was afraid to miss the fight, afraid to join the fight, afraid he was a coward, unsure how he measured up against the others. He wanted to take the butt of his gun and bash himself on the head, just to drive the thoughts away.

He looked at the distant brigade, the diamond flashes of sun on polished steel, and in that instant, with no consideration given to it, he made a decision, and with that decision, everything else was wiped away. There was no more room for any of it.

“Nathaniel, see that brigade yonder?”

“Yeah. Jackson, I reckon.”

“I’m gonna go join up with them.”

Nathaniel had no reply to that. Finally he said, “What are you talking about, Jonathan?”

“I’m going to go. Right now. Catch up with them. Go see the monkey show.”

He pulled his eyes from the bayonets, looked his brother square in the face, and to his surprise, he saw a smile growing on Nathaniel’s face.

“Damn…I’m going too.”

Jonathan bit his lip. How many times had he instigated Nathaniel into joining him on some stupid venture or other, only to catch it from Robley? Here it was again, and while this was surely different from lighting fires in the woods, or taking off down the Yazoo River on a homemade raft, it was the same thing as well.

Jonathan grinned. “Let’s go!”

The boys picked up their knapsacks and rifles, shuffled out of what was left of the line of march. The men of the 3rd Brigade were spreading out again, going after blackberries, ambling down to the river to fill canteens. There were no officers that they could see, so they walked along, slow and inconspicuous, as if they were in search of a blackberry bush of their own.

“Hey, you.” Jonathan heard a voice, Robley’s voice, behind.

Damn… He turned around. “Lieutenant! Are we going to attack them Yankees, or what?”

“Where y’all going?” Robley ran his eyes over his brothers. “Nathaniel, where y’all going?”

“Looking for blackberries,” Jonathan supplied, because he knew Nathaniel could not lie with conviction.

“That’s a damned lie. Where the hell you going?”

Nathaniel straightened a bit. “We’re going to join that brigade yonder. Going into the fight.”

Robley squinted at them, shook his head. “You can’t do that. This here’s your regiment. You can’t just go off where the hell you like. This isn’t playing soldier back home.”

“Well, goddamn it, Robley, there isn’t anything going on here!” Jonathan replied. “I’m not going to spend the whole damned war marching back and forth over that infernal river.”

“There is a reason we are here, you ever think about that? What if them Yankees come down that road, try and flank us?”

“The Yankees aren’t coming down that road! The Yankees are over there! That’s why every damned brigade but us is over there. I’m going. You can come or not, but I’m going.”

“I order you to get back in line!” Robley pointed back to where the 18th Mississippi was milling about.

“There’s no damned line. I’m going. Have me arrested or don’t, but I’m going.” He tossed his rifle over his shoulder, turned on his heel, as he had been taught in drill, and marched off on the double quick, his eyes on the tail end of Brigadier General Thomas Jackson’s 1st Brigade, Army of the Shenandoah.

Robley Paine scowled, clenched his teeth, balled his fists in fury at the sight of Jonathan, marching double-quick away. Issuing another order was pointless. He could summon the provosts, have his brother arrested. If they charged him with deserting, he could be shot. The thought made Robley sick.

Besides, Jonathan was not deserting. In a way, he was doing just the opposite.

Robley turned and glared at Nathaniel, who remained where he had stopped. He was about to say something about Jonathan’s damned insubordination, how he would regret it, but the expression on Nathaniel’s face stopped him. Nathaniel looked apologetic, and sorry, and determined, all at once.

“Nathaniel…”

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I have to go.” He snapped to attention, gave a flawless salute, then turned as Jonathan had and hurried after his brother.

Robley stood alone and watched the two boys march away, and for that moment he hated them, hated them profoundly. He hated them for ignoring his orders and making a mockery of his rank. He hated them because they were going off to be in the fight and he was not, and they would find out if they had the brass for this work, and he might never know.

He hated them because they were privates and could get away with what they were doing, but he was an officer and could not.

And mostly, he hated them because he knew that he was using his lieutenancy as an excuse. He could follow them if he chose. There were nearly three thousand men in the 3rd Brigade. No one would see him, no one would care. At the core of it all, they had the courage to do the thing that they were doing, and he did not, and he hated them for it, and he hated himself.

15

They look for a fight at Norfolk. Beauregard is there. I think if I were a man I’d be there, too.

— Mary Boykin Chesnut

Sunday was perfect, the sun just shy of being too hot, a light breeze off the water, but Bowater felt guilty and exposed as he crossed the naval yard and left through the iron gates. He was still reeling from the terrible thing he had been led into doing, pulled apart by the opposing forces of his humiliation over having lied—there was no other word for it, no softer term—and his delight at seeing the big guns lowered onto the deck.

Bowater skirted the wall of the navy yard to a little waterfront park just to the north of the shipyard. It was no more than a strip of grass and a few trees and benches running along the Elizabeth River, but it afforded a nice view of the water and the town on the far side, a pretty view that Bowater had been working to capture on canvas for the past four Sunday afternoons.

He stopped at the place he had been working, set up his easel, and placed the half-finished canvas on it. He dabbed paint on his palette, stared at the canvas, the river, the canvas. It was the same view he had been staring at from the deck of the Cape Fear for over two months. He wondered why he had thought to paint that scene when he was already so sick of looking at it.

He wondered why he bothered to paint at all, when he was so utterly incapable of capturing that essence that he was seeking. The colors were rendered true, the proportions, the perspective. There was a nice sense of framing with the after end of one of the yard tugs taking up the foreground. It should have been a nice painting, but it was not. Something was not there, like a forgotten word on the tip of the tongue, tantalizing, but he could not find it.

Maddening. Painting was supposed to be his passion, the thing that drew his mind away from the horrible sameness of the rest of it. Now it, too, was becoming a burden.

He dabbed at the oil-paint river, coaxing some of the reflected sunlight out of it, and soon, despite his frustration, he was immersed in the work. There was no Cape Fear, no Hieronymus Taylor, no war that he was in danger of missing, no shame in compromising his integrity. There was only him and the river in front of him and the river he was making appear on the canvas.

“I should not have done that, but the effect is interesting.” A woman’s voice behind him, as if they had been carrying on a conversation, and Bowater jumped, nearly ran his brush right over the canvas.

He turned around. The speaker was perhaps in her mid-twenties. Long, dark hair fell out from under a wide straw hat. She wore a short jacket and skirts-no hoops. Drops and splatters of paint dotted her clothing.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“You most certainly did not frighten me.”

“Startle you then. That’s not bad.” She nodded toward his painting. Samuel felt himself bristle.

“Thank you, ma’am, for so insightful a commentary.”

“You needn’t get in a huff. Just a friendly critique, one painter to another.”

She took a few steps forward, bent and studied the painting while Samuel Bowater studied her, tried to think how this person had managed to squeeze so many damnably irritating comments into two simple sentences.

“If you don’t mind…” Bowater said. The girl straightened, said, “Oh. Sorry. My name is Wendy Atkins.”

She held out her hand in a very masculine gesture and Samuel took it, shook, said, “I am Lieutenant Samuel Bowater, at your service.”

“‘Lieutenant’? An army officer?”

“Confederate States Navy.” Samuel heard the irritation creep into his voice, and Wendy heard it as well.

“Forgive me, Lieutenant, I don’t want to interfere with your artistry.” She turned and walked off, and Samuel watched her, despite himself. There was something about her, something of the libertine, that made Samuel think of the suffragettes or one of these radical, thoroughly distasteful women’s groups.

Forty feet away she stopped and set up an easel and rested a canvas on it. She had been holding a paint kit and canvas in her hand, but Samuel had not even noticed, and he only now caught her phrase “one painter to another.”

Samuel had been watching her preparation, the graceful, practiced way that she set out her paints, but his eye was drawn to the canvas. It was not a big painting, twenty inches by twelve, perhaps, and hard to make out at that distance. It was approximately the same view that he himself was painting. But even from forty feet there was a quality that seemed to radiate from the picture, an ambiance that dovetailed perfectly with the actual river in front of him, the smell of the trees and grass and hints of smoke. It seemed to have…Bowater did not know the word. It.

He frowned. Now he would have to deal with the distraction of having her close at hand, along with all the other damnable distractions that made his life a misery and his painting a mediocrity.

He turned back to the canvas, and soon the world and his own self-pity were lost in the pure focus of applying paint to canvas. He touched the tiny buildings on the far shore—darks and lights, brick reds and pale yellows—the suggestion of buildings. He ran an eye over what he had done, gave a tiny nod of approval.

“Nice, nice…” Wendy’s voice again, and again Bowater jumped.

“I’m sorry, did I frighten…startle you again?”

Bowater rounded on her, and the first thing that leaped into his throat was the kind of tongue-lashing he was accustomed to giving a subordinate, but he held it back. He cleared his throat. “I find such peering over someone’s shoulder to be the height of intrusiveness,” he managed.

“Oh, come now. People do it to me all the time. It doesn’t bother me.”

“What people do all the time, ma’am, and what you are willing to tolerate are hardly benchmarks for decent society.” He had meant for the words to cut her like a very sharp knife, but instead they sounded pompous and absurd, and Wendy just smiled and leaned over again and looked at his painting.

“And yet…” she said.

“What?”

“I don’t know…technically it is quite right, you know, except perhaps for your color choice there…” she pointed to the water in the shadow of the far shore. “…but there is something…I don’t know…missing.”

“The painting is not complete.”

“Are you familiar with Fitz Hugh Lane?”

“Yes.”

“I should think that sort of thing…why do you not paint naval subjects?”

Bowater was thrown off by the question, and forgot to be indignant about this entire line of interrogation. “The navy is my entire life. I paint, in part, to forget the navy for a while.”

“Perhaps that is the problem.”

“What?”

“Well, you do not let your real life get into your painting.”

This was absurd, and moreover it had destroyed Samuel’s enthusiasm for painting for the day. He took out his bottle of turpentine and began to wash his brushes.

“I do hope I have not chased your muse away,” Wendy said. Bowater looked up, tried to give her an Are you still here? expression.

“My muse, I fear, did not choose to come south with me and is now trapped behind enemy lines.”

Wendy laughed, flashed white teeth. “A sense of humor! Who would have thought it of the stoic lieutenant. On what ship do you serve?”

“The gunboat Cape Fear.” He almost said “tugboat” but did not. “I am her commanding officer.”

“Indeed? I have always been drawn to the sea.”

“Then it is a pity you were not born a man.” Bowater put his paints away and set his canvas on the grass. This Wendy seemed the type who might not realize she was not born a man.

“I have never been aboard a naval vessel,” she said.

“I fear you have missed your chance,” Samuel said. “On board the larger ships, it is not uncommon to stage entertainments that are appropriate for ladies to attend. But the larger ships are all in the Union navy. The gunboats of our Confederate Navy are hardly appropriate places for a woman.”

“Including your Cape Fear ?”

“Most certainly including my Cape Fear. Good day now, and good luck with your painting.”

Bowater left her there, walked back to the navy yard, caught a boat to the Cape Fear. He needed the mental holiday that painting afforded him, but his afternoon had been ruined by that Wendy Atkins person. Her words seemed to buzz around his head like a swarm of bees, as noisy and as hard to get rid of. Why, he wondered, did the mind have such a capacity for self-torment? He had allowed himself to be pulled into Taylor’s confidence game, and he had been beating himself over it ever since. Now, try as he might to stop them, his thoughts kept coming back to the person he least wished to think on.

Wendy Atkins dabbed paint on the canvas, looked out across the languid water of the Elizabeth River. There was no traffic moving, not much going on.

She glanced south, toward the navy yard. Wondered if Lieutenant Bowater would make an appearance. It was three weeks ago that she had met him, and she had seen him twice since. They had exchanged something like ten words. He had returned again and again to her thoughts.

She pulled in a big lungful of the brackish air, reveled in it. Wendy was drawn to the sea, though she did not know why. There were no sailors in her family, no grizzled old grandfathers to balance her on their knee and tell her tales of far-distant lands, of storms and golden sunrises at sea, no brothers returning from year-long voyages bearing exotic gifts. Her people were farmers and storekeepers. They showed little interest in traveling to the next town over, let alone distant lands.

Yet there it was; dreams of the romance and beauty of the sea wrapped around her like an old quilt, ever since she was a little girl. Growing up in Culpepper, Virginia, 160 miles from salt water, she based her first childish paintings of ships on magical voyages entirely on woodcuts in books and magazines and on her own imagination, since she had seen neither a ship nor a sea. She filled in the colors absent in the black-and-white images: golden hulls and red and green and yellow sails, oceans of brilliant aquamarine.

The reality, first observed at age thirteen on a visit to her paternal aunt in Norfolk, had been both a thrill and a disappointment. Ships, and the sea on which they traveled, were much more chromatically understated than she had imagined, yet much grander than she could ever have guessed.

She chafed through her teens, chafed through her early twenties, eager to return to the sea, to live by salt water. She read whatever she could get her hands on, stories of Columbus and bold Francis Drake, of John Paul Jones and Nelson. Her fantastic ships became peopled by fearless sailors who strode the quarterdeck in gales of wind and flying metal.

Wendy could not go to sea, she could not even live by the sea, but she could paint. Ships and seascapes done from memory, and the mountains as well and the people in her family, she painted them all with a skill that grew year after year. By the time she was seventeen there was nothing more that anyone in Culpepper or the surrounding area could teach her, because she knew more about art, and painted with more skill than anyone she knew.

She fended off suitors, defended against becoming trapped in Culpepper with a husband and children to care for. And after a while, as her reputation as an eccentric grew, the young men stopped coming, which was fine. They thought of her as some sort of bluestocking, assumed her to be a suffragette, which she might well have been if she had cared enough about politics to pay attention.

But she did not. Painting. The sea. Those were the things she loved. And when the war came, and the possibility of the grand men-of-war sailing from Southern ports, she could stand it no more. Weeks of arguing, pouting, stubbornness won her her parents’ approval to move to Portsmouth and live with her Aunt Molly. Despite the fact that Molly was, in many ways, as suspect as Wendy.

She took the carriage house behind Molly’s larger place as her own, began painting the ocean and river views around Portsmouth and Norfolk. In the month that she had been there, the place had provided more excitement than over two decades in Culpepper. The energy was palpable.

When it exploded on the 20th, Wendy was there, down by the naval yard, walking the streets, unescorted, but she did not care. She let herself get caught up in the swirl and madness of the crowd. Sucking it down. The shouting, the gunfire, the bitter smell of smoke, rolling over the low walls surrounding the yard, the towering columns of flames—it was all so thrilling that she could barely tear herself away with the coming of dawn and the bone-weariness that dragged her back to her little carriage house.

Living in Portsmouth, she was learning a great deal about the reality of the maritime world, discovering that real sailors were not necessarily the gentleman heroes of her dreams, the lovable rogues.

But Wendy Atkins was a romantic, and like any good romantic, she would not let the empirical truth trounce the fine fantasy world she had created. She longed, above all, to get underway on a ship, a man-of-war. She still felt there was romance and excitement to be found there. She longed to see it from beyond the passenger’s perspective. But that did not seem possible.

Or had not seemed possible. She was growing more hopeful of her chances. There were a lot of navy men around. And while none of them was the Hawkins or John Paul Jones of her dreams, there were some possibilities there.

She seemed to draw them like a lodestone, standing on the bank, brazen with her hoopless skirt and paint-spattered clothes, painting. They were an odd lot; boys who would look over her shoulder and try and fail to think of some insightful comment; they usually ended up with something along the lines of “Boy, ain’t that pretty!”

Those she dismissed out of hand.

There were others who were more intriguing, officers, mostly, some of whom knew a thing or two about art. And officers, she understood, were the ones to know if one wished to see a man-of-war in some significant way.

And there was Samuel Bowater. Most intriguing of all, because he was a painter, and not an altogether bad one. He did not make an attempt on her affections, hardly spoke to her when he did see her, and she did not know if that was his means of piquing her interest or if he genuinely did not care.

Wendy laid her thin brush aside, picked up the thicker one, touched it to the white paint, and began to build high cumulus clouds. There were some men who were more subtle. By way of example, the man sitting on the bench twenty yards away, ostentatiously tuning his violin. He wore a blue frock coat with some kind of shoulder boards, but what rank or position he might hold she could not imagine.

He dragged the bow across the strings, made a horrible noise that set her teeth on edge as he fiddled with the pegs.

If he can’t play that thing, I am going to have to move, she thought. Her concentration could not suffer through amateur fiddling twenty yards away.

Finally the man stopped tuning, rested the bow on the strings, looked out over the water. Wendy stole glances at him. Unkempt, to some degree, he could use a shave, but his features were strong and he was not unattractive.

He closed his eyes, moved the bow across the strings. Wendy paused, brush hovering over her painting, listened. The tune was familiar, some folk song, though this fellow played it slow and solemn, not the way she had heard it before.

She listened. He was no amateur, he made the instrument speak, threw in delicate fingerwork, flourishes of music where the original, simple melody had none.

“Rosin the Beau,” Wendy realized. That was the tune, “Rosin the Beau.” Her father used to sing it to her when she was a girl. But there was magic in the way this fellow played it, the simple folk tune as foundation, the clever but subtle improvisation on the old song.

Wendy went back to her work as the music floated over her, as if it was the leitmotif of her art, orchestral accompaniment; it dovetailed with her mood, or pulled her mood along with it, she did not know which. The effect was the same.

She built oil-paint clouds and the violinist ended his song, moved on to “The Dark-Eyed Gypsy” and from there to the tunes she knew as “forebitters,” the songs of the sailor men, not the chanties, the work songs, but the plaintive songs they sang on the forecastle head at night. The music entranced her.

She painted on, wrapped in the sound, and then somehow the folk songs and the forebitters were over and she was getting snatches of Mozart and Bach and Beethoven. She smiled as she dabbed paint. And then the music stopped and soon she heard footsteps. Here we go… she thought.

“Forgive me, ma’am,” the man said, and she turned and he tipped his hat, a wool cap with a leather visor, the kind the naval officers wore. “I have been terribly rude. I do hope I haven’t disturbed you.” His accent was not Virginia, but Deep South.

“Your question is disingenuous, I think,” she said, turning back to her canvas.

“Pardon?”

“You are being disingenuous. It means…”

“I know what it means.”

“Then you know you are being that.” She turned to him and smiled. “You play wonderfully, and a very catholic repertoire, but I do not think you were worried about disturbing me.”

The man lifted his cap, scratched his head, gave her an odd sort of smile. “Maybe not.”

“Are you just a musician, sir, or do you fancy painting as well?”

“Oh, I don’t know much about painting…I know what I like.” He looked at Wendy’s painting, all but finished. “I could say somethin’ like ‘My, ain’t that pretty,’ but I don’t reckon that would be what you call an insightful comment.”

“I reckon not.”

She turned back to her painting, let the man hang in the uncomfortable silence, and just as she heard him begin to shuffle in preparation of walking away, she said, “Are you a naval officer, sir? I do not recognize your insignia.”

“Well, they still gettin all that insignia nonsense straightened away. I am a naval officer. Chief engineer on a gunboat.”

“Chief engineer…” Wendy had never cared for engines and such. She thought them dirty and vulgar. They were the barbarians at the gate, ready to drive off the tall, elegant sailing ships of which she had dreamed for so long.

“That’s right,” the man said, as if reading her mind. “I am one of those loathsome and dirty mechanics who labor in those Stygian depths.”

Wendy turned and met his eyes. He was smiling at her, playful and ironic. She tried to see into him, tried to look through his brown eyes. He is a tricky one, she thought. If Samuel Bowater was a hard man to plumb, this one seemed more complicated still. Stygian?

“My name is Hieronymus Taylor,” the man said, held out his hand.

Wendy took it and shook. Most men did not offer to shake hands with her. “Wendy Atkins, a pleasure. ‘Hieronymus’?”

“Now, you ain’t gonna ask if I’m named after some ol painter, are you?”

“Well, yes…I was. Were you?”

“Damned if I know…beg pardon. My daddy never did tell me, an he’s dead now, so I reckon it’s too late to ask. Though where the old man would have heard of a fella like that, on the docks of N’Orleans, I can’t figure.”

Ahh… Wendy thought. New Orleans, waterfront, dock rat… She filed him away in the right pigeonhole. “Wherever did you learn to play the violin like that?”

“Old black fella taught me. Rollin Jones was his name, somethin of a legend down in the delta. He seen I had a natural ability, taught me up.”

“Surely he did not teach you Mozart.”

“No. Was I playin Mozart?”

“Yes you were. How could you not know that?”

“Well, I hear bits of music, they stick in my head. Can’t forget ’ em if I try. Guess I heard that somewhere. Which one was Mozart?”

Wendy hummed a few bars and Taylor took up with her and they hummed together. “Right, right…I sure do love that bit of music.”

“It is lovely,” Wendy said, and she was quiet again, but it was not uncomfortable now. “You know,” she continued, and the words came out way ahead of any thought, “I have always wanted to sail aboard a man-of-war. Just once.”

Taylor nodded. “You might be talkin to the right fellow.”

“During a fight at sea,” Wendy added, firing the second barrel. Insane…

Taylor laughed out loud. “That’s getting a bit trickier.”

Wendy nodded. “Forgive me. Girlish daydreams of Lord Nelson and such. I don’t know where that came from.”

Taylor folded his arms and regarded her with a curious look. Then, to Wendy’s full amazement, Taylor clarified. “I said that was a bit trickier. I didn’t say it was impossible.”

16

Our brave men fell in great numbers, but they died as the brave love to die-with faces to the foe, fighting in the holy cause of liberty.

— Captain Thomas Goldsby, 4th Alabama

Jackson’s brigade was moving fast, honed by months of hard marching through the Shenandoah Valley. Jonathan and Nathaniel Paine hurried to catch up, but the long gray line was like a mirage, and no matter how fast they tramped, they seemed to get no closer to it.

Sweat was running freely down their faces and under their wool shell jackets and down their legs. There was nothing they would have liked more than to strip naked, to leap into cool water, as on hot summer days when they were boys on the plantation.

They tramped downhill from the McLean house, across grass that crunched under their shoes, dried to tinder from the heat. They crossed a narrow stream, some branch of some branch that trickled into the Bull Run. It was hardly deep enough to get their shoes wet, but they managed to shove the canteens into the mud so far that the brown water ran into them. They drank as much as they could stand, filled them again, and continued on.

At last they came to the dry, brown dirt road down which Jackson was leading his men, three regiments of Virginians, the 2nd, 27th, and 33rd. The boys hurried on in pursuit. The dust from the tramping brigade hung in the air, rising up above the men like their own personal dust storm, and the Paine boys felt it stick to their faces and clog noses and chafe throats as they pressed on. They had come about a mile, and had three more to go to get where the fighting was.

Along the route of the march they encountered men who had fallen out, some from Jackson ’s brigade and others from the 2nd and 3rd Brigades of the Army of the Shenandoah, which had come before. Some sat and some lay passed out, perhaps dead, from the heat. Some leaned on their guns and watched with no interest as the boys hurried past. Occasionally one would call out to them for water, but they had no water to spare, and even if they had, they would not have shared it. They had no interest in beats who had dropped out of the fight when they were so eager to get into it.

They marched on in silence for as long as they could, and then, by tacit consent, stopped and had a drink of hot, silty water.

“Reckon we’re catching them up,” Nathaniel huffed. His face was a worrisome shade of red, his hair plastered to his forehead, wet as if he had just come from a swim.

Jonathan just nodded, not ready to speak. He looked up the road. The tail end of the brigade did appear closer. Hard and conditioned as Jackson’s troops might have been, a brigade on the march could not move as fast as two motivated and well-rested young men.

“It would be an unhappy irony,” Jonathan gasped at last, “if we was to die of the heat just before we get to tangle with them bluebellies.”

Nathaniel nodded. With his mouth hanging open and his eyes glazed he looked remarkably like a dead fish. “Let’s move it out,” he said, and the boys shouldered their rifles and headed off again on the double quick.

They could not see the fighting, but still they were in no doubt that the battle was joined, and the fighting was hot and intense. Beyond the low, rolling hills, the lines of forest that ended abruptly where the farmers’ fields began, they could hear the gunfire. It was not the burst of fire, followed by quiet, that they had heard the day before, as skirmishers and pickets felt each other out. This was a blanket of noise, a mosaic of noise, a single whole made up of thousands and thousands of tiny parts.

And through the wall of sound, the big guns blasted away like kettledrums punctuating the lighter melody. The clouds of smoke rose in the still air, great banks of gray, roiling smoke, rising up from behind the patchwork hill and settling in a thick layer.

On the road ahead of them was a house, a big, imposing affair with massive brick chimneys on either side. But Jackson’s brigade had turned off the road and was now making its way across open fields and up the slope of a hill—what appeared to be the final hill—between them and the great battle of the war.

“I swear…” Nathaniel said, “I swear, I expect to see them Yankees come swarming up over that crest, any second now.”

“Well, we still got the Virginians between us and them, if they do.”

They tramped on, heads down, through a patch of piney wood. The shade of the trees was a relief from the sun. And then they broke out and Jonathan said, “Lookee here, brother.” Jackson’s brigade had nearly reached the crest of a hill and stopped. Mounted officers were riding in the front of the battalion, spreading the men out into a line of battle, until the serpentine mass of troops, marching toward the fight, was now a wall of men, poised just below the high ground, ready to sweep forward.

“Come on!” Nathaniel said, quickening his pace, and Jonathan did likewise. Jackson’s men were spread along the rise, the far end disappearing into a tangle of scrub and trees. If 1st Brigade was going forward, the boys did not want to miss it. They were no more than a couple hundred feet behind the line when Jackson’s men did the one thing they would not have expected. They lay down.

“Now what in hell? They having a little nooning?” Jonathan huffed.

“Beats me.”

The two boys quickly covered the distance, came up with the troops near the crest of the hill, spread out over a thousand feet of hilltop and packed tight. They found a gap in the line into which they stepped and fell to the ground with the others. For some time they did nothing, just lay there and gulped air, grateful to be done with marching.

Overhead, the shells screamed by, nearly deafening as they passed, the bullets whipped by with a wild buzzing sound, so it seemed as if there was a great current of flying metal just feet above them, as if, were they to stand, they would instantly be caught in the maelstrom and hurled clear down the hill, carried away on the riptide of artillery and rifle fire.

At last Jonathan rolled over, propped himself up on his elbows, turned to the soldier on his right-hand side. “Say, pard, what’s going on here? What’re y’all doin?”

The soldier looked at Jonathan, said nothing, just chewed a stalk of grass he held in his teeth. He did not look like the men of the 18th Mississippi looked. He looked more like what a soldier should look like, by Jonathan’s lights. He was lean to the point of looking unwell, but there was a hardness in his gaunt face, an unhurried professionalism in his demeanor. His uniform, such that it was, was torn in some places and patched in others. His kepi had a dark and permanent sweat stain an inch high all around. The butt of his gun was chipped and the finish nearly worn off, but the metal gleamed in a way that spoke of the care the weapon received.

At last the soldier spoke, as unhurried as if he was leaning on a rail fence, talking with his neighbor of a summer evening. “We’re layin down,” he said.

Jonathan nodded. “Why are we laying down? Isn’t there a battle going on over there?” Jonathan nodded toward the crest of the hill.

The soldier considered him for a minute more. His eyes wandered over Jonathan’s uniform. “Where the hell you come from?”

“Eighteenth Mississippi. We were down at McLean’s Ford.”

The soldier sat up on his elbow, looked back down the hill, toward the woods. He looked back at Jonathan. “Where’s the rest of your regiment?”

“Back at McLean’s Ford, I reckon. My brother and I, we didn’t want to miss the fight.”

The soldier nodded. “Y’all ain’t seen the elephant yet?”

“No. And now we’re just laying down. What does a fella have to do to kill a few Yankees around here?”

The soldier smiled at some private joke. “Don’t you worry, young Mississippi. You want fighting, you come to the right goddamned place.” Then his expression seemed to soften a bit, and he said, “Say, you got any water in that canteen?”

“Some.” Jonathan struggled out of the strap, handed the canteen over. “It’s half mud.”

“No matter. Hour ago I was drinking out of a hoofprint, and glad for it.” The soldier took a couple of swallows, with evident pleasure, and handed the rest back.

Jonathan looked to his left. Nathaniel was lying on his back, looking up at the artillery screaming overhead. Somewhere down the line to their right, a Confederate battery was returning fire. They could feel the concussion of the heavy guns going off, feel the rumble in the ground.

“I sure as hell would like to know what was going on in the front there,” Nathaniel said.

Jonathan looked up at the crest of the hill, twenty feet away. He could see nothing but blue sky through the tall, coarse brown grass, and the black streaks of shells screaming past.

Let’s go have us a look. He thought the words, almost spoke them, but checked himself. He was having doubts about this whole thing, now. It was bad enough that he might have made a grand mistake with his own skin, but he had got Nathaniel in on this as well. He felt a flush of guilt for having once again lured his brother into some mischief.

Mischief, hell…I might’ve got us both killed…

This was not their regiment, of course, not where they were supposed to be. Were they obligated to go forward, if the others did?

What was going on out there? Am I my brother’s keeper?

“Hey, Nathaniel…”

“What?”

“I’m gonna crawl over to the edge of the hill there, see what’s what.”

Nathaniel was quiet for a second. “I’ll come, too,” he said at last.

The two of them crawled forward, walking on elbows and pushing with knees. Over the crest of the hill behind which they were lying, through the tall, stiff dried grass, they could see there was a dip in the ground and then a second rise, thirty feet away.

They stood straighter, ran down into the dip and up the farther slope, dropping and crawling as they approached the crest. They came up over the last rise, approached the top carefully. Beyond the last rise the land was flat for a couple hundred feet and then it sloped away steeply. To the right was a small white house, riddled with holes from the Yankee guns. Beyond that was a great sweep of countryside, brown fields and patches of trees, a dusty road running off to the north.

And the enemy.

“Sweeeet Jesus! Look at all those damned Yankees…” Nathaniel said.

It was nothing that Jonathan could have imagined. The wounded and dead were everywhere. Hundreds upon hundreds of men scattered like heaps of tossed-off rags and spread over the hill. Before he saw the Yankees, thousands of them, before he saw the field artillery blasting holes in the Confederate lines or the Confederates giving ground to the blue-clad hordes, before he saw any of that, he saw the dead and he pictured himself among them.

He looked off to his right. Thirty feet away, a soldier lay on his back, eyes and mouth open and his lower half turned away at an odd angle, as if he had been broken in two and his insides spilled out. Jonathan looked long enough to understand what he was looking at, then turned his head quick, squeezed his mouth and throat closed tight to fight the rising in his stomach.

“Jonathan!” Nathaniel slapped him on the shoulder. “I said, did you see all them damned Yankees?”

Jonathan looked down the hill, avoiding the dead men, avoiding the horror to his right. Thousands upon thousands of bluebellies were massing at the base of the hill, and many, many more behind. Not disorganized clumps of men, but neat blocks of soldiers, marching regiments, coming on in a relentless way. They fired by volleys, shot clouds of gray smoke out in front of them, like some fire-breathing creature of mythology. Some were coming on, but most were marching to and fro, getting into formation, assembling into a grand and unstoppable line of men and guns, ready to sweep forward and roll over the weakened Confederate lines.

There was another, smaller hill beyond the one on which they lay, and between the points of high ground, a thin tributary of the Bull Run River wound itself, crossing and recrossing a turnpike that ran in a straight line between. From the distant hill, perhaps a mile away, a Union battery was pouring shot and shell into the Confederate lines.

More big guns were coming. Jonathan could see teams of horses dragging field artillery across the turnpike and up the grassy fields of the hill from which they watched, ten guns churning up dust with the big wheels of their carriages and leaving twin lines in the grass as they were hauled along.

“I don’t think this is our day, Jonathan!” Nathaniel shouted over the din.

“Those guns are going to knock hell out of us, once they’re in place!” Jonathan replied.

The Confederate line, such as it was, was backing away from the Union march, backing up the hill toward where Jackson’s men were lying. Some units were retreating in good order, but others were breaking and running for the Confederate lines, desperate to put the hill between themselves and the killing volleys.

The panic was infectious. One by one the units broke and ran, and the Union juggernaut came on, slow and relentless and seemingly unassailable.

“Look there!” Nathaniel said, pointed down the hill. In the wake of the artillery, which was now moving up the hill to a position not 200 feet away, came a regiment of Yankees. Their jackets were blue, but their pants were bright red. Others were clad entirely in brilliant crimson, short jackets and pants that were loose-fitting from the waist right down to where they were drawn in tight by white gaiters.

“Zouaves…damn…” Jonathan said.

The regiment was a thing to behold, a thing of beauty on that field of horrors. Their lines became muddled as they made their way over a rail fence, but once on the other side they reformed with startling symmetry and marched on, uphill, coming in support of the battery.

“They’ll make better targets with them red outfits, anyway,” Nathaniel said.

“I reckon…I reckon it’s time we got out of here.”

They did not take their eyes from the field below, as if the enemy was waiting for them to turn their backs before shooting them. Instead they backed away, crawling backward, and slowly the crest of the hill came up between them and the fight beyond. When at last they could see nothing but sky, they turned and scrambled back to the lines, hunched over, half crawling, half running, until they were once again part of the line of waiting men.

The soldier with whom Jonathan had spoken turned to him now. “You seen the elephant? What’d he look like?”

Jonathan opened his mouth for a flip response, but the image of the dead man, torn apart, swam in front of him. He closed his mouth and shook his head. No words would come.

The soldier nodded. “He gets uglier,” was all he said.

Then with a roar that made Jonathan jump, the Union artillery opened up. The gunfire was from nearly in front of them, but the Yankees were aiming elsewhere, and only the intimidating sound of the blasts threatened the men with whom the Paines had joined.

“Them Yanks brought up some guns, I reckon,” the soldier at Jonathan’s side commented.

“Yes, a dozen or so.” Jonathan was eager to tell this man something that he did not know. “And Zouaves to support them. You should see their red uniforms!”

The soldier smiled. “Pretty uniform don’t make a soldier. I hope for their sake them uniforms is bulletproof.”

An officer came running down the line, waving a sword over his head. “Stand and prepare to fire! Stand and prepare to fire!” he shouted.

The soldier looked over at Jonathan and smiled. “Here we go, boy,” he said, and Jonathan, who thought he would be sick with the thought of standing up in that hail of iron, got some comfort from the words and the calm in the man’s voice.

All along the line, soldiers rose to their feet, shouldered weapons, pawed at the ground with battered shoes.

“I don’t know, Jonathan,” Nathaniel said in a low voice. “I’m so scared, I’m like to shit my pants…”

“Yeah, me too.”

Then from somewhere came the order to advance. Jonathan did not hear it, but suddenly everyone was moving forward, and so was Nathaniel. And he was, too, though he still had not decided whether he would go. They tramped forward to the crest of the hill, over the ground they had just covered on their stomachs. To their left, more men were emerging from the trees and scrub, and before them, terribly, terribly close, the Union battery, with the red-clad Zouaves out in front to protect it from the Southern threat.

The same officer who had ordered them up was back, telling them to halt, which Jonathan did, gladly, and when all the line was stopped the order came to prime.

Jonathan’s hands moved with no thought, so often had he gone through this routine. His right thumb pulled the hammer back to half cock, then he reached for the percussion caps in his pouch, fished one out, pressed it onto the nipple.

“Ready! Aim!”

The gun came up to Jonathan’s shoulder and he sighted down the barrel, was dimly aware of red-clad men swimming at the end of his muzzle.

“Fire!” The word was not all out of the officer’s mouth before Jonathan squeezed the trigger, felt the familiar jar of the butt plate against his shoulder.

The smoke and the noise and the concussion of the whole line firing at once was unlike anything Jonathan could have imagined, the numb calm that he felt now unlike anything he might have guessed at. He was standing up in the flying river of iron, the minie balls and shells screaming past, making their terrible sound, and his arms and hands were performing the manual of arms, and he was hardly aware of any of it.

He felt the paper cartridge in his teeth, tasted the powder as he bit into it and tore off the top, but he was not sure how it had come to be in his mouth. His thoughts, such as they were, revolved around the stunning fact that he had just aimed his rifle at a human being and pulled the trigger. He had tried to kill the man, and he seemed not to care. He was more like a distant observer, watching this young man perform in his first battle, than he was a part of the scene.

His rifle came up again to the firing position, but this time he hesitated and looked at the scene beyond the shining barrel. The smoke was lifting and he could see the line of field guns, but the former military perfection was gone.

There were dead men everywhere, humps of crimson cloth and red legs sprawled out at odd angles and terrified horses and wounded horses screaming, an ungodly sound.

Some of the troops, the Zouaves and the red-pants regiment, were standing to fire, then dropping to their knees to reload. Still more were backing away down the hill, and some actually running, leaving the artillery units unprotected. And still the guns fired, as if they were unaware of the battle among foot soldiers taking place around them.

Jonathan looked to his left. Nathaniel was going through the drill, biting cartridge, pouring powder down the barrel, ramming the ball home.

Someone raised a shout, somewhere down the line, and a ripple of excitement moved through the men and Jonathan checked himself as he put his rifle to his shoulder and looked down the hill. From the woods on the left burst ranks of horsemen, Confederate cavalry, and with sabers flashing in the sun they charged down on the retreating Zouaves.

Jonathan watched, transfixed, as the battle played out just a few hundred feet away, horses prancing and whirling and sabers hacking up and down and the men on foot lunging with bayonets and firing up at riders, knocking them from the saddle. It was a macabre ballet, and the music to accompany it was the crash of artillery, the scream of minie balls, the wail of shells passing overhead.

Jonathan remembered the rifle in his hands. He shouldered the weapon, pointed it in the general direction of the battery, fired. The butt dropped to the ground, his hand found a cartridge.

The dance of horse and infantrymen was over, the cavalry retreating back to the woods, the Zouaves moving farther down the hill.

And then that officer was there again, racing down the line, sword raised, and he was shouting, “Advance! Thirty-third Virginia, advance!”

The line of men took a step forward, the great mass of soldiers building the first bit of momentum. The officer turned toward the front and then his head seemed to explode, as if a charge in his brain had been fired off. He flew back, landed on his back, arms outflung, sword still in his twitching fist, but the Confederate line pushed past him and moved down the hill.

Jonathan looked at the dead man, half his face and head gone, the one remaining eye staring at the sky, but he felt nothing, no sensation in his gut, just a casual interest, and then his eyes were forward, on the artillery park, because that was where they were going.

Over the crest of the hill and they climbed over a rail fence and on the other side the officers formed them up in a line, shouted some words that Jonathan could not hear.

“Here we go, now!” Nathaniel yelled. Jonathan turned to look at his brother. He was grinning an odd grin and Jonathan knew his brother was as charged as he, as ready to go forward.

“Advance!” the word came rolling down the line and then the 33rd stepped out, and Jonathan and Nathaniel with it. A few hundred feet from the artillery and Jonathan could see two of the big guns swing around, their round mouths pointing at the Confederates, and he tensed, turned his head slightly away, readied himself for the blast, but it did not come.

One hundred and fifty feet and the colonel of the 33rd neatly turned the regiment so they were coming more directly at the battery. The two guns still stared silent at them, but now some of the other guns were being limbered up, ready to move. It seemed all confusion among the artillerists. Jonathan wondered why they did not fire. He wondered if the 33rd’s blue uniforms were confusing them.

The Zouaves at the bottom of the hill were massing, and now someone was swinging one of the guns around to bear better on the advancing Confederates, and Jonathan thought, That’s it, then, the jig is up.

“Fire! Fire!” The order moved along the Confederate line and as one they stopped, shouldered weapons, fired from just over a hundred feet. The last rifles were still going off when the Confederate line rolled forward again, and as they jogged through their own smoke they could see the destruction and panic they had wrought. Dead men were everywhere, Zouaves, red-legged infantrymen, artillerymen. Horses thrashed out their lives still bound by their traces. Hundreds of men raced down the hill, tossing aside any encumbrance—knapsacks, rifles, canteens.

The 33rd rushed into the gap and then they were among the guns and only the dead and wounded of the Yankees remained behind. The rest were racing for their lines. A cheer went up from somewhere on the left and it was taken up along the line and soon among all of the 33rd, and Jonathan and Nathaniel Paine were shouting like madmen, whooping it up over their captured artillery.

A gang of soldiers tossed their rifles aside, grabbed the trails of one of the guns, swung it around to bring the weapon to bear on the fleeing Yankees. Others busied themselves pulling shoes of likely-looking size off the bodies of the late artillerymen. And off to the right, the rest of Jackson’s 1st Brigade began to move forward. The Confederates, on the verge of being crushed, were now on the offensive.

But the Yankees had some fight left in them. Even as the jubilation of taking the battery was fading, Jonathan became aware of small-arms fire. Minie balls were whipping past, buzzing by, at a furious rate, the noise much louder, the air even thicker with iron and lead. He looked down the hill. A regiment of bluecoats was making its way up the hill, firing in volleys as it came. A Virginian not ten feet away was knocked from his feet, a dark hole in his chest. Another screamed as his leg buckled under him, his knee shot through, and he fell to the dry grass, landing on top of a dead Yankee.

“Here they come!” Nathaniel shouted, raising his rifle and firing, dropping the butt to the ground and reloading.

Damn, damn… Jonathan had forgotten about his rifle. He set the butt on the ground, reached for a cartridge. Fingers were plucking at his sleeve and his pants and he looked to see who it was and saw nothing but a series of holes where bullets had passed.

Damn… The calm was deserting him, and he could feel panic rising up like the sickness he had felt before. He took a step back, could see more of the 33rd backing away from this onslaught. He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger.

To his left he heard his brother grunt, as if he had stubbed his toe, and he turned but Nathaniel was not there.

He looked in the other direction, but his brother was not there either, and he wondered if Nathaniel had panicked, had run for the crest of the hill. And then he thought to look at the ground.

Nathaniel was lying half on his side, turned away from Jonathan, as if sleeping. Jonathan dropped his gun, dropped beside him, rolled him over.

The bullet had hit Nathaniel in the chest, just to the left of his breastbone. Blood gleamed through the rent in the fabric of his shell jacket, spread a dark stain through the cloth. A line of blood trickled out of the edge of his mouth.

“Nathaniel…” Jonathan did not know if he had thought the name, or whispered it or shouted it. His brother’s eyes shifted over and then they were looking at one another, looking into each other’s eyes.

Nathaniel blinked once, slowly. His mouth opened and Jonathan leaned closer, to hear what he would say. But no words came, just a soft gurgling sound, a horrible sound, then a rattling noise. Jonathan leaned back. The life was out of Nathaniel’s eyes.

Jonathan’s eyes filled, the tears made hot wet tracks down his cheeks. He felt them fall on his hands. “Nathaniel, Nathaniel, what have I done, what have I done? Oh, God, oh, God, forgive me…”

He looked up to the sky, the blue, blue sky. A bullet screamed past, he felt it graze his scalp, tear through his hair, but it made no impression on him. He had no thought of moving, could not even if he had wished to. There was nothing for him to do but to wait there with his brother. He could not leave Nathaniel, not after he had brought him so far.

A hand grabbed him by the collar, jerked him to his feet as if he was a doll, shoved him on his way, never letting go. Jonathan found himself running, half pulled, half dragged up the hill. The rail fence swam in front of him and then he was on it and someone was shoving him over the top. He fell in a heap on the other side, looked up. The soldier with whom he had shared his water was climbing after him. He landed beside Jonathan, scrambled to his feet, pulled Jonathan up again. “Come on, boy!” he shouted.

“My brother is dead!” Jonathan shouted back, even as the man pushed him back into a run for the crest of the hill.

“Don’t mean you have to be!” the soldier replied. They huffed up the hill, Jonathan staggering, nearly falling, running only because this man was pushing him along, not through any will of his own.

And then they were past the crest of the hill and the man stopped and gasped for breath and let Jonathan Paine collapse at his feet.

The tears came fast now, the grief so consuming that it was like a pressure inside, with no way to get out. “My brother is dead…” he said again.

“He ain’t the only one,” the soldier replied, but there was kindness and sympathy in his voice.

17

The top of the hill was occupied by a battery of artillery, and a body of infantry, belonging to the Federal Army. We sprang out of the ravine and went up the hill at a double-quick. The Federal battery and infantry opened fire on us as soon as we emerged from the ravine, killing and wounding a number of us as we climbed the hill.

— Private George Gibbs, 18th Mississippi, describing the Battle of First Manassas

Jonathan Paine lay in the coarse grass. Eyes closed, floating in a world of noise and grief. He could make no sense of the sounds around him. The minie balls, the shells, the shouts of officers, the screams of wounded, all melded into one horrible din of war.

He had left Nathaniel there on the field, his beautiful brother, tall and strong, all life and potential. Now he was nothing, just a corpse, everything that was Nathaniel blown out of him.

“Hey, Mississippi…” the soldier said. Jonathan looked up, saw the man as if looking through rain-streaked glass. “Looks like we’re advancing again. You want to kill some Yankees for your brother, best come.” He held out Jonathan’s rifle, which he had, apparently, snatched from the field. Jonathan could not recall.

Jonathan got on his feet and the soldier handed him his rifle and he looked at it as if for the first time. Kill some Yankees for your brother… It would do Nathaniel no good that he could think of. He was not sure, for all his high talk, that Nathaniel had ever really wanted to kill Yankees. He, Jonathan, might well be shot down too, and his body and Nathaniel’s would be rolled into a common grave and their bones would mix with the bones of others and there would be no indication at all that they had ever been.

Nathaniel buried in an anonymous grave. The thought horrified him. Their father and mother never having a notion of what had become of their son, their beautiful Nathaniel. He could not let that happen.

The soldier was five paces ahead and walking away and Johnathan chased after him, fell into step at his side. The man looked up at him, nodded his approval, then turned his eyes to the front, where the enemy waited.

They were up at the fence again. Jonathan looked to his left and right. He could see Jackson ’s brigade stretched across the crest of the hill, thousands of men in various shades of gray and blue, thousands of men who were ready to kill, men who were prepared to walk into that flying river of iron, when sane people would cower or run.

First Brigade poured like a river over the fence. They paused and shouldered rifles and pointed them at the blue lines in their front. Jonathan saw cannons and horses over the top of his barrel. He pulled the trigger and the hammer snapped down on the nipple but the expected jolt did not happen because the gun was not loaded.

He dropped the butt to the ground, reached for a cartridge. He could hear bullets splinter the rail behind him. His kepi moved a bit as some flying ordnance passed by. He felt as if he himself was in a different place, some place where those bullets could not reach him.

He finished the manual of arms, raised the rifle, pulled the trigger, stepped off with the rest as they advanced on the bluebellies. The bullets danced on the dry ground and sent up tiny dust clouds like the first drops of heavy rain on a dry summer afternoon. The thunder of the guns rolled on and on.

The line stopped and they loaded and fired and moved on, their advance accompanied by the weird yelping battle cry that had spread through the army. The Yankees seemed to be backing away. Advance, stop, fire, advance; the Confederates slowly gained back the ground they had already won and lost once that afternoon.

Jonathan could see the artillery park now, the heaps of dead men and horses, the guns that the Yankees had not managed to pull back to their lines. He could see Nathaniel, lying as he had left him, on his back, arms flung out, and he started toward him.

“Hey, Mississippi, where the hell you going?” the soldier called, but Jonathan just crouched and ran forward, as if running through a hailstorm. A bullet grazed his arm, it felt like a cut from a knife, but it did not slow him.

Jonathan covered the distance fast and then he was among the dead and the guns, kneeling at Nathaniel’s side, crouched low as the bullets whipped over his head. He rolled his brother’s body half over. It felt stiff and unyielding, not like a living thing at all. He plunged his hand into Nathaniel’s pack, felt around for the old journal he knew was there. His fingers brushed against the soft leather cover and he grabbed it and worked it out of the knapsack, held it in his hands, glanced up.

The Yankees were still falling back in the face of Jackson’s advance, but there were more bluebellies forming at the base of the hill and tramping up, their units still in good order, tight squares of marching men.

Jonathan paused in his task long enough to load and aim and pull the trigger once more. He laid his rifle aside, snatched up the notebook. He flipped to a blank page, pulled the pencil out of the binding.

Nathaniel James Paine, Company D, 18th Mississippi, 3rd Brigade, son of Robley and Katherine Paine, Yazoo, Mississippi. Please God send me home to be buried in my native earth.

Jonathan tore the page from the journal and tucked it in the front of Nathaniel’s shell jacket. He felt an easiness in his mind. It was not peace, not by any means. He did not think he would feel at peace ever again, not after luring Nathaniel to his death, not with the things he had seen on the battlefield that day.

He looked at his brother’s face, gray-colored, mouth open, the skin growing tight around his features. Jonathan wondered how many Yankees he himself had killed, how many young men had been turned into so much clay by his bullets.

He looked up. The Confederate line was approaching, the Yankees falling back, but he was still far out ahead of his own people. He snatched up his rifle, reached for a cartridge. He bit the top off and tried to spit it out, but his mouth was so dry he could not spit at all, so he pulled the paper out with his fingers, then poured the powder down the barrel and pushed the bullet in. He pulled out his ramrod and thrust it down the barrel but he could not push it even halfway in. He slammed the ramrod down the barrel, twisted it, but it would not go.

He stared dumbly at the thing, tried to recall if he had been putting percussion caps on the nipple. He could not recall having done so. Was his rifle filled with unfired bullets and power?

He shook his head, tossed his weapon away. No time to puzzle it out. He grabbed up Nathaniel’s rifle, lying beside his brother. He paused. Nathaniel was forever getting mad at him for borrowing things without asking. He had been apoplectic the time Jonathan took his painting kit and used it to create genuine Red Indian designs on their canoe.

“Sorry, brother,” he said and took the rifle and ran, crouching, for the Confederate lines.

The gray-and blue-clad Virginians were still advancing, walking slowly into that murderous fire. Men took bullets two and three at a time, twisting in their macabre dance that ended with them crumpled and left behind by the advancing line. The shrieks of agony were like nothing Jonathan could have imagined, but they were far less disturbing than the pitiful cries for help, for water, for mother.

Jonathan loaded and placed a percussion cap on the nipple and looked through bleary eyes over the barrel and fired. The butt of the gun slammed into his shoulder, and something else slammed into his side and half spun him around. He looked down and saw strips of his shell jacket hanging down and blood and torn skin. He put his hand on the wound. It felt warm. He pulled his hand away, and his palm was bright red with blood. He stared at it for a moment, then stepped off again with the advancing Confederates. He could not think of anything else he might do.

Load, fire, advance. The bluebellies had been joined by more troops coming up the hill, and now the Virginians were not stepping forward so fast, and in places they were even beginning to back away.

Jonathan pulled a percussion cap out of his box and placed it on the nipple and then his right leg was swept out from under him and he fell and twisted as he went down, saw the blue sky, the blinding sun, swirl past, and he hit the ground, screaming, screaming.

He propped himself up on his elbow. His leg from the knee down was hanging at an angle that was not right. He could see white, jagged bone sticking out from rent gray cloth and bright blood, and he screamed again.

Can’t fall here…can’t fall here… The words ran through his head. He could not stop there, right in the line of the Yankees’ advance. He rolled over, grabbed up his rifle, and held it like a post in the ground. He worked his hands up its length, pulling himself up on his one good foot. The pain was like a brilliant white light in his head, eclipsing everything, but he gritted his teeth and he screamed when he had to and he pulled himself up.

He balanced on his remaining foot and flipped the rifle over so that it was more or less like a crutch. He tucked the butt under his arm, took a hop forward. The pain ripped through him, not just in his leg but all-consuming. He screamed, panted, waited as the pain passed. Much more of that and he would pass out, he knew.

He gasped for breath, looked around. The Confederates seemed to be falling back, he seemed to be alone on the field, save for the writhing wounded and the dead.

He looked in the other direction. The Yankees were coming strong up the hill, firing in volleys, advancing.

Oh, hell, hell… He had to move, but he knew what the pain would be and he could not bring himself to do it. He looked at the advancing blue line, and out of all of those men, he saw one look at him, look right at him, and raise a rifle to his shoulder.

Son of a bitch…that Yankee son of a bitch is trying to kill me…

Three hundred feet away and he could see that little round black spot that was the muzzle and for the briefest instant a blossom of red and yellow, and then nothing.

For Lieutenant Robley Paine, Jr., it had been the worst day in memory. Twice more the battalion had shuffled into line, marched forward, splashed through the Bull Run River, then stopped. They milled around, the lines drifted away, and all the shouting of the officers could not keep the men in order. It was as clear to the men as it was to Robley that they were not going into a fight.

Robley did his share of shouting at them, more than his share, despite his own admission of the futility of it all. He kicked men in the ass to get them back in line and in the legs when he caught them sleeping in the grass, shoved them back into formation. Once he made his company go through the manual of arms. He was furious and taking his fury out on the men and he knew it and did not care.

All the day long, taunting him, the sounds of the fight off to the left grew louder, the cloud of smoke denser. From the south and the east and the north they could see dust clouds where more and more regiments rushed to the battle, and all the while the 18th Mississippi crossed back and forth at McLean’s Ford, or sat and did nothing at all.

With each hour that crawled by, with each muffled escalation of the fighting off to the left, Robley grew angrier by degrees. He felt utterly betrayed, that his brothers should march off and leave him that way. He felt sick at the thought that they might well be in the thick of the fighting, while he sat on his hands.

How would it be if this was the first and last battle of the war? How could he endure it, the rest of his life, listening to his younger brothers tell tales of the fighting they did while he sat silent? And when pressed, he would say only, “Third Brigade, we never did get into the fight.”

But your brothers were in 3rd Brigade. How did they get into the battle ?

He almost went off to the fight himself, half a dozen times at least. Once he even took two steps in the direction of the gunfire, but even then he stopped. He could not do it. He was an officer, it was not his business to go. He felt as if his soul was being drawn and quartered.

It occurred to him, more than once, that his brothers could be wounded, terribly disfigured, perhaps dead. But even that thought did little to mitigate his misery. How would it be, back home, if his brothers were killed in the fight, and he never even showed the courage to go? Would he be able to make the others understand that he could not go? That his duty lay in doing as he was ordered to do?

He says it was his duty, but Jonathan and Nathaniel, they went into the fight anyway. Gave their lives for the cause. They understood the real meaning of duty. And honor. That was what people would say. Could he ever convince himself that duty, and not cowardice, had held him back?

The long afternoon dragged on, and Robley sank deeper into his funk. He found himself engaged in mock arguments in his head, eloquent explanations of why he had not left his regiment to join the fight, discourses on how, heroic as his brothers might seem, it was he, Lieutenant Paine, who was the real soldier, for wars could not be fought with renegade troops, rushing off where they pleased, but by steady, reliable men who obeyed orders.

As the sun was moving toward the horizon, and the sounds to the left of the line changed once again, two rumors ran through the 3rd Brigade, one to fill Robley with horror, one with hope.

The first was that the enemy was routed, that Jackson and Evans and Bee and the rest, aided by the timely arrival of reinforcements and Stewart’s cavalry, had sent the Yankees fleeing for the Bull Run and the defenses of Washington. The word was that it was not a retreat but panicked flight, that the great Union army had crumbled completely, that it was every bluebelly for himself.

Robley could think of no news that he less wanted to hear. The Yankees whipped, his brothers a part of it, and him having not fired a shot? It was too much to bear.

Then on the heels of that dreadful news came word that the 18th Mississippi was moving out, going in support of Longstreet’s 4th Brigade. They would be advancing on Centreville, hitting the Yankees from the other side, cutting off their retreat. It would be real fighting, finishing off what the men on the left had started.

Oh God, oh, God, let it be so…

Twenty minutes later they were moving out again, following the Bull Run River northwest to join up with the 4th Brigade, which even now was halfway across Blackburn’s Ford and marching north.

There was artillery fire somewhere ahead, from the direction in which they were marching, and Robley felt the sound lift his spirit. This could be it. He looked to his left. The sun was moving fast toward the horizon. Soon this long day would be over, but there was still time for them to get into it, if they would only hurry.

The 18th Mississippi splashed across Blackburn’s Ford and marched up a narrow, dusty road flanked by scrubby trees. Robley could feel the line tense as the marching men waited for skirmishing fire to burst from the undergrowth. But there was no fire, and they marched on, and to Robley’s joy the artillery fire increased with every yard they covered.

They broke out into open country and Robley could see that the men were spreading out in a line of advance. The sun was lower now, washing the fields and the trees in orange and casting the lines of men in lovely, warm tones as they stood ready to advance into the face of the artillery.

He could see the Union guns up ahead, or more precisely the muzzle flashes, brilliant in the gathering dusk. The gun smoke was pink and orange and the guns belched their pinpricks of light and now the shells were screaming by. For the first time that day, Robley considered the reality of what he was doing. Suddenly the discomfort in his gut was not from fear of missing the fight, but from fear of the fight itself.

Ah, hell… he thought. His personal demons had worn him down.

Captain Hamer was issuing orders now for Company D to take its place in the line, and Robley echoed those commands, directed men here and there, shuffled them from a marching unit to a unit ready to attack. They moved forward, stood among the yawning men, the grim men, the pale-looking men who faced the Union batteries and readied themselves to advance into the guns.

Robley took his place in the front and off to one side of his company. He scuffed his feet in the dirt, checked the percussion cap on his rifle, checked to make certain the company’s line was dressed properly. And finally, there was nothing to do but wait.

The artillery was firing faster now, the muzzle flashes getting brighter as the daylight grew more dim, the shadows deeper. The order came to advance, and there was no room for anything else in Robley’s mind, there was only himself and the line of guns and the broken, uneven ground between them, the real estate he had to cover to get to those guns and make them stop.

The long line of men moved forward and the pace began to build and Robley saw the Confederate Army as one solid whole, and himself one small part of that, and he saw the whole as an unstoppable force, rolling forward. Other men were yelling, the peculiar yell that had become so popular in the camps, a weird, twisting, yelping sound. A frightening sound. Then Robley found himself doing it too as his pace built from a walk to a fast walk and the line of guns on the road ahead grew closer.

The shells were screaming overhead. Robley could feel their wind as they passed and the shriek filled his head so that no other noise, not even his own voice, could get through the sound.

He looked to his right, at H Company, to see that they were advancing evenly, and it was only then that he realized the artillery was finding its mark. There were big gaps in the line, as if God had cut away a section of men with a shovel, just scooped it away. Even as he watched he saw a shell plow through the line not fifty feet away, saw men and parts of men tossed into the air, heard the screams of the wounded take up where the shriek of the shell left off.

Dear God… Robley thought. Dear God… He had never conceived of anything so horrible. He pulled his eyes away, fixed them on the guns, the flashing muzzle, marched on with determined step.

Perhaps it was an illusion, perhaps the Yankees were being reinforced, but Robley could not help but think the artillery was coming faster now, the guns served quicker, the scream of the shells and the buzz of minie balls nearly continuous. The Yankees’ guns were telling more. With the Confederate lines so close they could hardly miss.

Robley could feel the momentum wane, could see the men slacken their pace, wince as the guns went off, shy away as if turning a shoulder to a cannon could ward off the shot. He had heard of how panic could sweep a unit, how they could, as if by mutual consent, turn and run. He could sense that they were there, that Company D would, at any second now, stop going forward, and when the forward momentum stopped, it was only a matter of time before they ran.

“H Company! Hamer’s Rifles! Stand fast!” Robley shouted, holding his rifle above his head, his voice competing with the artillery fire, the blast from the guns and the song of the shells.

“Men of Yazoo! Advance!” Robley turned determinedly toward the guns, stepped into the onslaught of shells. He wondered if Captain Hamer had been killed, wondered why he was not rallying the troops. No matter. He, Lieutenant Paine, was doing it. Through the fear, the numbness, the confusion brought about by the relentless noise, he felt a spark of pride. He had not flinched, he had not run. When he saw his company ready to break, he had rallied them, led them forward. Two hundred yards and they would be swarming over the artillery and he, too, would be a victor that day.

“Advance!” He turned to make sure the lines were dressed properly and instead saw nothing. He was alone. He turned farther. The Confederate line was twenty feet behind him and backing away. Not breaking, not panicking, but backing away from those lethal guns.

“No! Hamer’s Rifles! To me!” he shouted, but if anyone heard him, no one responded.

“Son of a bitch!” he shouted. He was on the verge of heroism and his men were leaving him. “Son of a bitch!”

He whirled around, looked right at the guns. He would charge them himself, come in like a fury, drive the gunners away. The others would join him when they saw his courage, saw how real determination could win the day.

He took a step forward. This is madness, he thought. The shells screamed past him and he stood in the middle of their hail and he was locked in indecision.

He glared at the guns, hating them. In the gloom he could hardly see them, save for when they fired and threw their flash of red and yellow light over the black barrels.

A gun directly ahead fired, the sound of the shell close and simultaneous with the flash of the gun. And in that flash he saw the gun beside it, and realized he was looking right into the muzzle.

Goddamn you… Robley Paine thought. A shout built in his throat and he ran forward, hating that gun, hating the bluebellies, ready to kill them all himself.

And then the gun fired. Robley Paine saw the flash of red and yellow as it discharged its canister shot, and then a thousand rifle balls tore him apart.

18

I deem it proper to bring to the notice of the Department the inefficiency of the battery of this ship when exposed to the fire of heavy rifled cannon, as was clearly shown in the attack…by a very small steam propeller, armed only with one large rifled gun.

— Captain J. B. Hull, USS Savannah, off Newport News, to Hon. Gideon Welles

Flag Officer’s Office, Dockyard,

Gosport, Va., July 21, 1861

To: Captain Samuel Bowater, CSN

CSS Cape Fear

Sir:

You are directed to take the steam tug Cape Fear, currently under your command and mounted with one rifled gun and two howitzers, and carry with you all the projectiles you deem necessary, as well as such additional hands as you might require, to be secured from among the company at the dockyard, and proceed along the coast in shoal water to Sewall’s Point; to exercise your best judgment in an approach to the enemy’s vessels at anchor off Newport News or Hampton Roads, and take a position out of reach of their guns, to try the range of yours, to near the enemy cautiously and do them as much damage as possible. You are at all times to exercise your best judgment and above all to avoid loss of your crew or your vessel to the enemy. Upon completion of whatever action you deem appropriate you are to return to the dockyard and report to me.

Respectfully,

Captain French Forrest,

Flag Officer, etc.

Bowater read the orders over again, and then a third time. They were fairly typical, in his experience, ranging from the obvious (“exercise your best judgment”) to the absurdly obvious (“avoid loss of your crew or your vessel to the enemy”), but beyond that they really said nothing, other than ordering him to attack the enemy as he saw fit.

He stared out the window of the wheelhouse, down at the ten-pound Parrott rifle mounted in the bow. He had come to loathe the sight of the gun. Every time he looked at it, it reminded him of his shame and humiliation, scheming like some criminal, lying to a superior officer. And just as bad—worse, perhaps—allowing himself to be talked into the act by Hieronymus Taylor, of all men. How had he come to a point where he would follow the lead of men like Taylor?

He had come to loathe himself, loathe Taylor, loathe the gun for what it represented. But now, orders in hand, he was not so certain.

It had come to a head that very morning, Commander Archibald Fairfax giving him a verbal keelhauling the likes of which he had not endured since his first year at the Navy School. But it was no more than he deserved for playing the low trick he had played, and so he faced up to, and to some extent even welcomed, the humiliation he suffered.

Those issues of honor and humiliation so occupied Samuel’s thoughts that he hardly heard a word that Commander Archibald Fairfax said, or rather shouted, neither the commander’s insinuations concerning Bowater’s fitness for command nor threats of dismissal from the service.

Samuel stood in Fairfax ’s office, in front of the commander’s desk. Fairfax, seated, ranted and jabbed a pencil in the air as if he was trying to stab it through Bowater’s chest, if only Bowater would come a bit closer.

It was not until Fairfax demanded a response from him that Bowater came back to the reality of the moment.

“It was a…fabrication, was it not? The whole thing?” Fairfax would not go so far as to say “lie.” Even military discipline had its limits where a man’s honor was concerned.

“Yes, sir. A fabrication. There was no order from Captain Cocke. I fabricated the entire story simply to secure those guns for use aboard the Cape Fear.”

Once Fairfax had, under false pretenses, given Bowater and Taylor permission to load the guns aboard, they rounded up a dozen yard workers, augmented them with the crew of the Cape Fear, and set them to it. It had taken all of the afternoon and into the evening to wrestle the ordnance aboard, the ten-pound Parrott rifle, six and a half feet long and weighing nearly nine hundred pounds, and the twin twelve-pound howitzers, two feet shorter but almost as heavy.

It would have been easiest, of course, to set the gun carriages down first, and put the guns right in place. But that would have looked as if they intended to arm the Cape Fear all along, and not carry artillery to Captain Cocke. Instead, to maintain appearances, they set everything on deck and lashed it in place and then steamed away, up the Elizabeth River in the general direction of Fort Powhatan.

They returned the next day with the guns still conspicuously lashed in place. It seemed to Bowater that there was something particularly unethical, even unseemly, about concocting an excuse in advance. He figured, if pressed about why the guns had not been delivered, he would count on his ability to fabricate some innocuous explanation on the spot.

To his relief, no one asked. For three days they steamed around with the guns lashed in place while, unseen, the men strengthened the deck and bulwarks that were to become gun stations and Eustis Babcock was set to work making up train tackles and breeching.

When that was done, and sufficient time passed, they put the gun carriages in position and with the aid of improvised shears lifted the barrels onto them. In that way they cunningly transformed their tug into a man-of-war.

Unfortunately, they had not fooled anyone. Least of all Commander Archibald Fairfax, who did take the precaution of inquiring of Captain Cocke if he had, in fact, requested the guns, before ripping Bowater apart like a bear.

“Would you care to tell me why, Lieutenant? Why you felt the need to participate in this elaborate charade?”

“I hoped that arming the vessel, sir, would lead to our engaging the enemy.”

“This navy will decide whether or not you engage the enemy, with no prompting from you. For the moment, Lieutenant, you command a tug. And you are hardly fit for that. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

Samuel Bowater was not terribly concerned with losing his position or his command. He was going mad, puttering around Norfolk while the war was being fought elsewhere. He had even toyed with the idea of resigning, of looking for a berth, or whatever one called it, as an officer in an artillery company.

“I apologize, sir,” Bowater said.

Fairfax stared hard at him, and Bowater stared at a point just above Fairfax’s head. At last Fairfax made a snorting noise and tossed the pencil on the desk.

“Your apology is accepted. And you may rejoice to know that your scheme is working out just as you had anticipated,” he said, and the change in his tone caught Bowater’s attention. “Seems Forrest saw the way you loaded your boat down with guns and liked the looks of the thing. He intends to send you upriver, see what you can accomplish against the Union fleet.”

For a moment Samuel did not know what to say. He was not certain he had heard correctly. “You mean, sir…send us upriver to fight?”

“Fight? I don’t know what the hell kind of fighting you envision, Lieutenant, a tugboat against all the fleet there at Fortress Monroe. I think he had more in mind a reconnaissance, and a few shots if you can take them.” Fairfax’s anger had moderated considerably, Bowater noted. He wondered if the commander had been genuinely angry at all, or if he had simply felt obligated to berate an inferior for trying to pull the wool over his eyes.

“This might be an opportunity for a little more action in the offensive line,” Fairfax continued. “Forrest is talking about arming the Harmony the same as you have done the Cape Fear. Let me take her upriver and get my blows in as well.”

Ahhh! Bowater thought. His insubordination had put a new thought in the head of Captain French Forrest, flag officer in command of the dockyard. And that thought might lead to Fairfax’s getting the opportunity to take a vessel in harm’s way, a thing denied to most Confederate naval officers.

No wonder you’re not so mad as you make out…

“In any event, Bowater, it looks as if you get to keep the guns you so cleverly acquired. I wish you joy with them. Do you have steam up?”

“The fires are banked, sir.”

Fairfax handed Bowater a sealed envelope. “Here are orders from the flag. I don’t know what is in them, but I suspect you will want to get a head up steam.” He lifted a canvas bag from the floor, dropped it on his desk. “And here is your crew’s mail. You are dismissed, sir.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“And Bowater?”

“Sir?”

“I reckon you know better than to ever try and pull such shit as this again? At least with me?”

“Yes, sir,” said Bowater, far more contrite this time, and far more sincere. He snatched up the mail bag, saluted, turned, and left quick, before Fairfax could say anything that might ruin his newfound happiness.

Now he looked at the orders in his hand and the gun on the bow and he felt quite differently about the once despised ordnance. The gun had led to the order he had dreamed of, a chance to show some initiative and dash. No more hauling guns, now he would be a fighting captain. Fourteen years in the United States Navy had nearly worn his initiative away to nothing. The Confederate States Navy was threatening to do the same. But now this. It was the chance he had hoped a fledgling service would provide.

But the Cape Fear could not move until the boilers had head up steam, and the speed at which water turned to steam was ordered by the laws of physics, not Samuel Bowater.

He had to move, to expend some of his restless energy. He climbed down the ladder, around the side deck. Find out how long until steam was up? No, he couldn’t ask Taylor that. Couldn’t show his eagerness. Think of something that would lead to the answer.

He opened the engine-room door, looked down the fidley. Chief Taylor was not there, not that he could see. He closed the door, walked farther along to the door of Taylor’s cabin. He wrapped on the door, which swung open under the tap of his knuckles.

“Chief Taylor?” Bowater leaned into the room. It occurred to him that he had never seen the inside of Taylor’s cabin. “Chief?” No response.

The yellow sunlight spilled in from the cabin’s only window. On the desk beside the door, a big, leather-bound book lay open, with papers and pencils scattered about.

“Hmm…” Taylor did not strike Samuel as a reading man. He took a step closer, lifted the cover. The Principles and Practice and Explanation of the Machinery Used in Steam Navigation; Examples of British and American Steam Vessels and Papers on the Properties of Steam and on the Steam Engine in its General Application, Originally compiled by Thomas Tredgold, CE. MDCCCLI.

Bowater laid the book down again, read part of the page to which it was open. Let t ₁ be the temperature of the water at a dangerous pressure; t the temperature at the working pressure; Q the quantity of heat, in British units, transferred to the water per minute—then the equation T=W(t ₁-t) is approximately correct.

He shook his head. Hieronymus Taylor was the kind of engineer who started as a coal passer and picked up bits and pieces along the way—learned how to clean a grate, wield an oil can, rebuild an air pump, until at last he was running the black gang. Perhaps he had an aptitude for such things, which would help. But Samuel did not think him the kind of engineer to delve into such theoreticals. He would not have credited Taylor with the education to read even the title of that book.

And yet there were the notes and equations and comments on the text, written in the cramped scrawl that Samuel recognized from countless engineering division reports.

Curious as he was, Bowater recalled that he was doing something utterly improper. He stepped out of the cabin, eased the door shut. Walking forward, he met Chief Taylor coming aft.

“Ah, Chief. I was looking for you. I just wanted to double-check that we had clean fires for our work today.”

Taylor was in shirtsleeves, and with the sun full on him it was difficult for Bowater to look directly at his white shirt. He had noticed, just in the past week or so, that the formerly unkempt black gang were now wearing uniforms and work clothing of pristine cleanliness. Not just Taylor and the firemen, but even the Negro coal passers seemed to have crisp, clean outfits when they gathered on the fantail for their evening sing-alongs.

Bowater’s clothes were washed on the foredeck by Jacob, who also washed Mr. Harwell’s clothes as a courtesy. The deck crew were given buckets and soap and allowed to do their wash once a week, dipping fresh water straight from the river. But Samuel never saw any of the engineering department wash their clothes, and yet, here they were, the cleanest on board, even though they worked in the filthiest environment.

Samuel did not begrudge them their superior cleanliness, but he was damned curious as to how they did it. He would not, of course, ask, because he was certain Taylor wanted him to. He would rather not know.

“Grates are all clean, bunkers full, black gang scrubbed and dried. Head up steam in one hour. I have some of my boys ashore, gettin’ some piping I need. Boat should be back, twenty minutes or so.”

“Very well. See that they are. I want to be underway the minute steam is at service gauge.”

“The very minute, Cap’n,” Taylor smiled.

Bowater climbed up to the wheelhouse, sat at the small desk in his cabin. Mail had come that morning. He picked up the letter on top, smiled as he looked at the printed stationery. NAVY DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C. He had received enough of those over the course of his career. He had not reckoned on receiving any more.

He snatched up his scrimshaw whalebone letter opener, cut the letter open. He could well guess at its contents.

NAVY DEPARTMENT, May 7, 1861

SIR: Your letter of the 22d ultimo, tendering your resignation as a lieutenant in the U. S. Navy, has been received.

By direction of the President your name has been stricken from the rolls of the Navy from that date.

I am, respectfully, your obedient servant,

GIDEON WELLES

Secretary of the Navy

Bowater read the terse words, read them again and again, and an unexpected sadness came over him, a touch of shame, that all the arguments about the legitimacy of his actions could not entirely erase.

An officer had always held the right to resign his commission. There was nothing dishonorable about it. If the officer’s conduct was under question, however, there were several options available to the navy by which they might censure that officer, even at the very moment he moved beyond their grasp.

One such punishment was dismissal from the service, throwing him out before he had the chance to honorably resign. Worse, dismissal with striking the officer’s name from the record, as if he had never been.

But the ultimate censure was the one that Bowater held in his hands: dismissal and striking of the officer’s name by order of the President. There was no equivocation, no appeal. The officer was cashiered.

In the early days of secession, officers had been allowed to resign without dismissal of any sort. When Gideon Welles took over, that changed. His was a scorched-earth policy, no quarter given.

Bowater stared at the note. He had never really expected anything else, had never thought to preserve his place in the old navy in case seccession didn’t pan out. Still, an Academy education and fourteen years of service were not so easily dismissed.

To hell with you, Gideon Welles, my “obedient servant,” he thought, and crumpled the letter up and tossed it in the wastebasket. That was the past, a life that was gone, and he was blessed to have a second life now, a thing denied most men. I do believe I will go punch a few holes in your ships, Mr. Secretary.

He looked at the next letter, from his father, and opened it up. It was written in the neat, tight hand that Samuel knew so well. He read it through. It was a very businesslike report: effects of the blockade, the state of Charleston’s defenses, who was off in military service, price increases. Samuel smiled despite himself. William Bowater, Esq. He wondered sometimes if his father had not been some dour Boston Puritan in an earlier life, as those dabblers in mysticism were wont to believe.

He went through his father’s letter again. There was something comforting in the stolid and unexcitable prose. With everything falling apart, with the entire order of his universe in flux, it was nice to see that one thing at least remained unchanged.

Lord, he is a stoic, and I am some kind of damned poet… He hated the thought as he thought it. The idea of himself as an artist felt facile and shallow.

From the top of the ladder, Hieronymus Taylor could look down the fidley on his engine room and his beloved engine, with the great maze of pipes: steam and return water, eduction pipes and intake pipes and discharge pipes, running to cylinder, air pumps, hot well, condensers, boiler, feed water, so amazingly complex, such a tangled web, unfathomable to the uninitiated, and yet not an inch of it that he did not fully comprehend, and hardly a bit of it that he had not laid hands on at one time or another.

A thing of beauty, like a symphony wonderfully written and wonderfully played, all the disparate parts, iron and steam, working together to create that final whole, pssst, clunk, pssst, clunk, pssst, clunk, thirty rotations per minute.

He ran his eyes over the entire space, the engine room, the boiler room on the other side of the open bulkhead, the bridge from one side to the other, the deckhouse with its windows and skylight and vent above, enclosing the fidley. Gloomy, hot, bad-smelling, and loud, it was his fiefdom and he was well pleased with it.

At the workbench below, fireman Ian O’Malley was seated on Taylor’s stool, his face hidden behind a newspaper, and the sight of the man deflated the good cheer the chief felt at looking upon his engine and its domain. He clattered down the ladder and across the engine-room deck.

“Y’all hold her dere, now…” Moses’s voice came from behind the engine, a place deep in the recess of the engine room, inconspicuous and hard to see from the engine-room door above. “Good, now gimme dat wrench…”

Taylor ducked under the piping for the condenser and straightened. Coal heavers Joshua Beauchamps and Nat St. Clair were holding a three-foot-square metal box, the hot well from a small steam engine, against the overhead, while Moses bolted it to the deck beams. The hot well had been Moses’s idea—he had noticed it in the yard one morning while they were taking on coal, and Taylor agreed that it was an improvement over his initial idea of a barrel as a water tank.

He watched for a moment while Moses tightened the bolts, then said, “Secure that tank, then belay the thing, Moses. We got to get underway.”

“Damn!” said Moses, never taking his eyes off the bolt head. “Can’t we ever finish one damned thing ’round here?”

“Not as long as we got a master’s division.”

“Massa’s division?” Moses tightened the bolt until it was snug, then lowered his arms and stepped back. “You de only massa we gots, Massa Heronmus. You de massa of dis whole fine plantation here.” With a sweep of his arm he gestured toward the engine and boiler rooms.

“And don’t you forget it, neither. Now hurry it up.”

He left them at it, ducked back under the piping, ambled over to where O’Malley was lounging. “Morning, O’Malley,” he said cheerfully.

O’Malley looked over the top of his paper. “Morning, Chief,” he said and raised the paper again.

“Say, O’Malley…the captain has a notion to get underway. Think you might stoke up them fires?”

O’Malley lowered the paper once more. “I reckon one of them niggers can do it,” he said and raised the paper again.

Taylor smiled, nodded, waited until the urge to pull the paper from O’Malley’s hands and stuff it down his throat had passed. “I can see you wouldn’t care to get them new dungarees all covered with coal dust. Where’d y’all get ’em?”

O’Malley lowered the paper. “I got ’em up to Norfolk last Saturday, and a right bargain they were. Are they not the handsomest you’ve seen?”

Taylor nodded. The cloth was dark blue, and the light from the skylight overhead danced on the new steel buttons. “Very nice. It grieves me to ask you to get them all soiled, but Moses and the others are still working on the shower bath.” Which, he added silently, I told you to do, you lazy Mick.

“Ah, very well,” O’Malley put his paper down with a sigh. “I’ll do it me self. Easier than trying to get a bloody darkie to do a job of work…”

He slid off the stool, ambled over to the boiler, on the other side of the open bulkhead. “’Tis no great hardship, soiling me clothes, now that me and Burgess have that famous clothes washer set up.”

The Irishman whipped a rag around his hand, opened the door to the furnace. He picked up a shovel and spread out the coals banked in the firebox, then began to scoop more coal from the hopper and feed it to the glowing orange bed.

Taylor picked a match up off the workbench, scratched it, and lit his cigar. He leaned back to watch the fun.

O’Malley continued to feed coal into the firebox, and Taylor heard the first hiss of steam beginning to form.

“Easy with the coal, O’Malley. Don’t smother it. Want to get her nice and hot.”

“I’m not goin ta bloody smother it,” O’Malley growled. He paused in his shoveling because in fact he was.

The fire was getting hot, Taylor could feel it from the engine room. O’Malley was starting to do a weird little dance, squirming a bit, as if something might be in his pants.

“We’ll need some speed today, O’Malley. Get her good and hot!”

“Aye!” O’Malley called, his back to Taylor. Taylor hurried to where the coal heavers were working on the shower bath. “Moses, you all, come see this!” He got back to his stool in time to catch O’Malley give a little jiggle, as if he was trying to shake something out of his new dungarees.

“Good and hot, O’Malley!” Taylor prompted, grinning around his cigar.

“Aye!” the Irishman shouted, more irritated this time. He scooped another shovelful, then another, leaned forward to spread the coals out. He paused for a second, then dropped his shovel and whirled around.

“Ahh! Ahh! Ahhh, bloody shit, bloody hell!” He leaped up and down, plunged his hands in his pants, screamed again, pulled his hands out. “Ahhh!” He jerked his belt loose, tore the buttons of his pants open, and dropped his dungarees around his ankles. He stood there, mindless of who might be watching, and clasped his private parts, sighing with relief.

It was a minute at least before Hieronymus Taylor could open his eyes and wipe the tears from them enough that he could see. What he saw, not surprisingly, was Ian O’Malley, staring hatred at him.

“Do ya think it’s bloody funny? A man burns himself, acting on your rutting orders?”

“O’Malley, you stupid bastard. Every coal heaver been on the job a week knows you don’t wear pants with goddamned steel buttons. Burn your pecker clean off, if you got one. Where the hell did you get your papers?”

“Shut yer bloody gob, you bastard, I’ll do for you.”

Taylor stood, spread his arms in a sign of welcome. “I’m waiting…” he said, but O’Malley just stared and said nothing.

“That’s what I reckoned,” said Taylor. “Now go and put some engineering pants on and get your ass back here. We got a war to fight, in case you ain’t been informed.”

“Chief?” Johnny St. Laurent called down the fidley. “Boat’s puttin off, Chief!”

“Thank you, Johnny.” O’Malley forgotten, Taylor climbed up the ladder and onto the side deck, walked quickly around to the fantail. He could see the boat pulling for them, brilliant white on the blue water. In it, the hands he had sent ashore. And one he had not.

He waited impatiently, glanced up at the wheelhouse, but neither Bowater nor Harwell was to be seen. He drummed his fingers on the cap rail. At last the boat pulled alongside and the sailor in the stern sheets called, “Toss oars!” and the boat came to a gentle stop at the Cape Fear ’s starboard quarter.

One by one the men hopped out. Taylor met Wendy’s eyes, gave her a quick wink, then paid her no more attention. He resisted helping her out of the boat, and she managed well enough without his help, despite an obvious unfamiliarity with watercraft.

The bowman pushed the boat off, and Taylor was able to get a better look at her. She was dressed in sailor garb, the wide-bottomed trousers, loose-fitting frock, and wide-brimmed straw hat; the uniform of men-of-war men the world over. She looked like a kid playing dress-up.

“Come on,” Taylor said, led her forward and then down the fidley ladder to the engine room. It was only there, in his fiefdom, that he finally felt safe to turn and look at her directly, and address more than two words to her.

“Everything go all right?” he asked.

“Perfect!” she said low. He could see she was thrilled by the adventure of the thing. They had been planning it for weeks, had put all the elements in place. Taylor had needed only to hear that they were going into battle. He was beginning to think it would never happen. And then, that morning, Bowater had informed him of their orders. Johnny St. Laurent was dispatched to town with a confidential message, on the pretext of buying fresh galley stores, a mission that Bowater the gourmand, who adored all that hoity-toity slop, would never refuse or question.

“Welcome to my little kingdom! Burgess, Moses, this here is Ordinary Seaman Atkins. He’s gonna sail with us today, observe, if you will.”

Burgess and Jones nodded to Wendy, their faces expressionless, and Wendy nodded back. She looked around the engine room. “It’s very nice,” she said, her voice uncertain.

“Oh, that it is!” Taylor said with enthusiasm. “Let me show you around.” He was warming to his subject. “The engine is a horizontal-mounted compound…”

“Chief,” Burgess interrupted, the word like a grunt. “Service gauge.”

“Forgive me for a moment, Seaman Atkins,” Taylor said with a little bow. “We gots to go to war.”

19

SIR: I have the honor to report that at 11:45 a.m. this day a small steamer under the Confederate flag…approached this ship and commenced firing upon us with a rifled gun from her bow, our ship being at anchor.

— Captain J. B. Hull, USS Savannah, to Hon. Gideon Welles

Able-bodied seaman Seth Williams rang four bells in the afternoon watch.

The Cape Fear was vibrating with the thrust of her propeller as Bowater backed down on her spring line and swung the bow off the seawall. He grabbed the cord that communicated with the bell in the engine room and jerked twice, two bells, slow ahead. He felt the vessel shudder as somewhere below Taylor shifted the reversing lever, changing the rotation of the screw instantly from turns for slow astern to turns for slow ahead.

The tug stopped dead, and Bowater could hear the water churning up under her counter, a wonderful sound, the sound of a powerful vessel digging in, and then she gathered way.

“Cast off!” he heard Babcock shout. Bowater stepped out of the wheelhouse, looked down as the seawall slipped away and the lines that held them to the dock were brought dripping aboard. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, a bright, hot July afternoon, and they were going to war.

“Come left, leave Harmony to starboard!” Bowater called into the wheelhouse, and Littlefield replied, “Harmony to starboard, aye!” and eased the wheel over. Bowater stepped back into the wheelhouse, rang up more speed. Moments later he felt the turns increase, felt the stern dig deeper, as the deep-draft tug gathered more way.

“I’ll give the chief this much,” he said to Harwell, who was just stepping up onto the deckhouse roof. “He knows when he can ignore commands from the wheelhouse, and when he cannot.”

“Mr. Taylor, sir, if I may be so bold, thinks a little too highly of himself and his engineering division. He would have us believe he was doing us a favor, getting steam to service gauge and turns on the propeller.”

There was more bitterness in the lieutenant’s tone than perhaps he had intended. Harwell’s was not a personality that could easily suffer the likes of Hieronymus Taylor. Bowater did not have an easy time of it himself. But Bowater could ignore attitude—to a degree—if a man did his job, and Taylor was scrupulous about the maintenance of the engine and all the Cape Fear ’s systems. Also, Bowater was captain. Taylor might get the last word, but that last word would always be “Yes, sir.”

“Had we sails, like a proper ship,” Bowater said, “Mr. Taylor would not be in so commanding a position.”

“Yes, sir. Sir, may I drill the men at the guns?”

“Yes, please. You have…” Bowater looked up at the sun. “…about three hours to get them ready to fight.”

Harwell hurried off, and Bowater stepped forward, leaned on the rail that ran along the forward edge of the deckhouse, and watched the city of Norfolk to the east and Portsmouth to the west slip past. Below him, up at the bow, Harwell was arranging the gun crew like a little girl setting her dolls around a toy table for make-believe tea.

They had taken on coal at the Gosport Naval Shipyard, and as many shells for the guns as they could lay hands on, around a dozen for each gun. They had requested twenty volunteers to augment their crew, enough to work the ship and all three guns at the same time. Thirty-seven men had stepped eagerly forward, and Bowater had had to choose among them. He was not the only one chafing at the inactivity of the dockyard.

Craney Island was in sight when Hieronymus Taylor climbed up to the deckhouse roof, squinting in the brilliant sun. His shirtsleeves were rolled up over powerful forearms and he wore only his gray vest, cap, and trousers. His formerly bright white shirt was wilted and smudged now. He stopped, took a long look around, puffing his cigar like a locomotive getting up speed.

“Beg pardon, Cap’n,” he said at last. “I was wonderin, and I ask purely to increase the efficiency of the engineering division, but what’re you plannin for this day’s activities?”

“Well, Chief…” Bowater equivocated. “I wish I could tell you exactly what we will be doing, but I cannot. The circumstance of the Union fleet will dictate our actions.”

“No, really, Cap’n,” Taylor said. “What’re you meaning to do, now?”

“I mean to steam up to the Union fleet, Mr. Taylor, and blast away and see what mischief we can do.”

“Ain’t much of a plan, if you’ll pardon my saying so,” Taylor said. His cigar was clenched in his teeth, but his mouth seemed to be smiling around the obstruction, and his tone suggested more approval than concern over Bowater’s boldness.

“I am willing to take suggestions, Chief.”

“No, no. I don’t presume to know better, Cap’n. For a man of your breedin, you seem to have an aptitude for this sort of craziness.”

“I would thank you for the compliment, Mr. Taylor, were I certain it was one. Now please see to your engine.” He wondered if perhaps he was winning the respect of First Assistant Engineer Hieronymus Taylor. And if so, he wondered if that was cause for concern.

For an hour they steamed north, up the Elizabeth River, then rounded Craney Island and stood out toward the middle of Hampton Roads, that wide patch of water where the James, Nasemond, and Elizabeth rivers joined forces to pour into the Chesapeake Bay.

A good portion of the seaborne power of the United States was arrayed out in front of him, stretching in a loose line of anchored ships from Newport News Point across Hampton Roads to Fortress Monroe.

He could pick out the sailing ship Savannah, and the Cumberland, towed to safety the night that the dockyard burned. There was the Wabash, which had arrived since the last time Bowater had been up that way, the mighty USS Minnesota and the screw steamer Seminole, the St. Lawrence and the Congress. In the distance he could pick out the Harriet Lane, which he had last seen off the Charleston Harbor entrance, mere hours after the start of the Rebellion.

There were other ships as well, transports and tugs, schooners, store ships. It seemed as if more and more vessels arrived all the time, massing for something or other, ready to fall on some Southern shore.

They plowed northwest, through the blue-green water and the lovely late afternoon, looking for all the world as if they were heading up the James River, a little Union tug out on some job or other. The sun was moving fast toward the west, lighting the Union ships up with a soft, rosy tint. From a distance they looked tranquil and quiet.

Bowater put his telescope to his eye. Up close the ships still looked tranquil and quiet. Not a wisp of smoke from any stack, not one of them had steam up. The Cape Fear was two miles distant and he could detect no alarm on any of the decks, no frantic running as men raced to quarters, no bells, no rattles, no drums.

“Helmsman, start coming right. Slowly.”

“Slowly right, aye…” Littlefield turned the wheel right, one spoke, two spokes. The Cape Fear ’s bow swung to starboard, bit by bit, and her course changed from northwest to northeast, and soon her bow was pointing not up the James River but rather at the anchored fleet.

Bowater swept the ships with his telescope. Still no alarm. He looked down onto his own foredeck. The wheelhouse cast a shadow all the way forward, to the breech of the ten-pound rifle. The sun was setting behind them. It would not hide them, but it would make it more difficult for the Union gunners to aim.

The gun crew were sitting and squatting on the deck, out of sight behind the bulwarks. Bowater could see the tension on their faces, the nervous tapping of fingers, feet wagging back and forth like a dog’s tail. He felt it himself; the sweating palms, the quickened pulse, the sense that everything appeared sharper. He had chosen his side and he was fighting and he felt alive, and he had not felt that way in a long, long time.

Lieutenant Thadeous Harwell crouched behind the bulwark with his forward gun crew, though he did not know if he should. He was not certain an officer should be crouching. But the captain had said crouch, and he did not say for the luff not to crouch, nor had he expressed any obvious displeasure with an officer crouching, so Harwell continued to crouch.

This is it, this is it, this is it… Harwell had never been in combat. He had missed the Mexican War. That conflict had been no great shakes in the naval line in any event, and only a few had managed to distinguish themselves, such as the young Ensign Samuel Bowater. But still it was a war, which Harwell had never seen.

He had suffered with his fear that he would not see war, would never find out if he had the stuff to be a Nelson or a John Paul Jones. He had pictured himself often enough with upraised sword leading a screaming horde of bluejackets over the rail of some first-rate ship of the line. Harwell’s Patent Bridge. He knew it was foolish, that those days were over, that armor-clad steamships were spelling the death of the great sailing navies, with their thundering broadsides and boarders swarming through the smoke. But logic did not stop the dreams.

I regret…no, no…Gladly do I give my one life …“one life ”…that hardly needs saying…Gladly do I give my life for this, my beloved land… Great last lines did not, Harwell believed, happen spontaneously. Hadn’t Nelson uttered one each of the many times he thought he was done for? Sure he must have practiced ahead of time. Harwell would not allow himself to be caught short.

Gladly do I lay down this life for my beloved Southern home, and only regret that I shall not live to fight on…

That’s not so bad.

Gladly do I lay down this life for my beloved South…

Good…so even if I only get the first part out, it will still stand.

“Mr. Harwell!”

The lieutenant looked up. Bowater was standing at the forward edge of the deckhouse roof, calling down. He felt his face flush. How many times had the captain called his name?

“Sir?”

“You may remove the cover from the gun, lieutenant, and prepare to fire.”

“Aye, sir!” Harwell leaped to his feet, figured the order to cease crouching must have been implicit in the order to fire.

“Your target will be the large ship to the south.”

“Aye, sir! Wabash, sir?”

“Yes, that is correct. The Wabash. ”

“Aye, sir!” The Wabash. He had served for five years aboard that ship, gone from ensign to lieutenant on her decks, boy to man. But sentimental pining for ships was an emotion of the lower deck, not fit for an officer.

Gladly do I lay down this life for my dear…no…my beloved Southern home, and regret only that I shall not live to fight…to struggle…on…

They were within a mile of the nearest ships of the Union fleet, the Savannah and the Wabash, and, incredibly, Bowater could see no sign of alarm. It was beginning to make him nervous.

On the Cape Fear ’s foredeck, the canvas was peeled off the ten-pound Parrott and the crew bustled around the big gun. Seth Williams, designated gun captain, hooked a friction primer to the lanyard and inserted the primer into the vent, then stretched the lanyard out. The lanyard was a pretty bit of ropework, with Flemish eyes tucked in either end, coach whipped and capped with Turk’s heads and ringbolt hitching around the eyes. It had been lovingly crafted by Eustis Babcock, starting the moment the gun came on board, so that the Cape Fear might have something attractive and seamanlike with which to fire her heavy ordnance.

Lieutenant Harwell mounted the ladder to the roof of the deckhouse and stood beside Bowater, who was pressed against the forward rail. “Ready to fire, sir,” he reported, even before he was done saluting.

“Then fire away, Lieutenant,” said Bowater, with a calm he did not feel.

“Take aim and fire!” Harwell shouted.

“Aim and fire, aye!” Williams shouted. He sighted down the gun, called for a bit of an adjustment, stepped back, bringing the lanyard taut.

Bowater felt the excitement build, clutched the iron rail tight, pressed his lips together. They were still approaching, their distance-off less than a mile, and the big Parrott was accurate up to a mile and a half. What…

Bowater’s thoughts were interrupted by the blast of the gun, the jet of gray smoke, the surprisingly violent recoil as the gun flung itself inboard, making the Cape Fear shudder from keel up.

Harwell was staring at the Wabash through his field glasses. He pointed to the sky and Williams waved his acknowledgment.

“Over, sir,” Harwell explained to Bowater. The gun crew jumped back to their places, swabbing and ramming home another shell.

A little more than two minutes passed before the big gun was run out again. Williams adjusted the elevating screw to his satisfaction, then stepped back and pulled the lanyard taut. A pause, and then he jerked the rope and the ten-pound Parrott roared out again.

Bowater kept his glass pressed to his eye, the Wabash filling the lens, and to his delight he saw a hole appear in her bulwark, blue sky where before there had been black hull, splinters big enough to see from a mile away tossed into the air.

“Hit!” shouted Harwell and the men cheered, waved hats, then fell to loading again.

“Well done, Lieutenant!” Bowater fixed the Wabash in his field glasses. It was chaos, as he reckoned it would be, an anthill kicked over. From less than a mile, Bowater could see perfectly well what was happening on the big steamer’s deck. Men were racing about, officers were crowding the quarterdeck, waving arms, men rushing over the foredeck and up the rigging. It was bedlam, Gulliver waking to find himself the captive of the Lilliputians.

Wabash carried nine-and ten-inch Dahlgrens. But her guns were not rifles, but smoothbores, already antiquated. After hundreds of years during which little changed in the way of naval warfare, things were suddenly developing so rapidly that it was difficult for any navy to keep pace.

Still, smoothbore or no, the Wabash ’s guns could blow them to kindling with one broadside, if Wabash could come to grips with them.

The Cape Fear hurled another shell and a hole appeared in the Wabash ’s side, and Bowater wondered what destruction that must have done to the lower deck. He wondered if Wabash was getting steam up. It would do them no good. Cape Fear would be gone before their screw bit water.

The forward gun went off once more, and Bowater saw wood fly off the after rail. It is like a turkey shoot, just an absolute turkey shoot. And once again, he found that the ease with which they were attacking the Union fleet left him feeling edgy and nervous.

He crossed over to the port side, looked out at Wabash with his telescope. There was another vessel now, a smaller one, side-wheeler, schooner rig, steaming around from behind the big steam sloop. Not much bigger than the Cape Fear. Was she going to tow Wabash off?

Bowater shifted his focus from the ship to the side-wheeler. Not towing Wabash off. She was, in fact, coming bow on to the Cape Fear. And then the puff of smoke, the scream of shell, the water plowed up forty yards away, and with it, at last, the flat report of the distant gun. A gunboat! For all the Yankees’ sea power, the only vessel that could get underway fast enough, the only one with a rifled gun that could reach out that far, was one not much larger than the Confederates’.

Harwell, beside him, was dancing with excitement. “Mr. Harwell, please have your gun crew redirect their fire to the gunboat.”

“Aye, sir!” Harwell practically shouted, and relayed the order.

They were closing fast, both vessels charging like knights-errant. The Cape Fear fired, missed, but not by more than a dozen yards. The Yankee fired again and charged on.

He must have more shells than we do… Bowater was counting the valuable projectiles as his gun crew blasted away. He wondered if the Yankee captain had to do the same. He wondered if he knew the Yankee captain, if they had been shipmates once.

The Cape Fear ’s gun went off, the deck shuddered under Bowater’s feet, and in the deafening blast, the Yankee’s gun seemed to fire in absolute silence, less than half a mile away. The last of the reverberations from the Cape Fear’s rifle were dying, and from that noise rose the scream of the Yankee’s shell, fast and loud. Bowater could see the black streak in the sky, right in line with his vessel, and then the shriek was like sharp pegs in his ears and the shell crashed through the cabin behind him, exploding in a great shower of shrapnel and wood and glass.

Before Bowater’s shocked face, an image of painted wood and dark paneling and Littlefield the helmsman, all exploding as if from some internal force. And then he was down, and the darkness washed over him, like the cold water in the dry dock, and once again he could not crawl free.

Hieronymus Taylor did not care for this, did not care for it at all. He paced back and forth, worried the cigar in his mouth, glared at the wheelhouse bell.

Generally, he preferred to be below. He would rather be in his engine room, surrounded by his beloved machinery, than up there in the light with the idiots and prima donnas of the master’s division. He preferred the precision of machinery to the vagaries of wind and tide and politics and chains of command.

It was a preference, and a passion, which he tried to convey to Wendy. He gave her a tour of the engine room, spoke passionately about Scotch boilers and fire tubes and blowdowns. He was absolutely poetic on the subject of winging fires with slice bars, on hot wells and feed water, on Stephenson links and trunks and rods and shafts and pillow blocks.

There was so much he wished to convey to her. He wanted to tell her about the monster that he and his men were able to conjure up, like wizards in storybooks. How they made this monster rise in the boiler, how they drove it under pressure through the pipes, made it work for them, contained it, dangerous beast that it was.

He wanted to tell her how the monster-invisible, deadly hot-was forced into the trunk, made to push the piston, and there it died. He wanted to tell her how the watery remains of the beast were pumped back into the boiler and the thing was raised again from the dead, how they performed this miracle in a continual circuit, again and again, drove this gunboat along in that manner.

It was just like the fellow said, “What immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry…” Except it wasn’t an immortal hand at all, just a man, an engineer. That was the miracle of the thing.

He wanted to tell her because he thought she would understand. He had never shared that vision with anyone, never tried. The beats that haunted engine rooms would have looked at him as if he had two heads. The general run of mechanics and engineers could never see the poetry in the machine. They saw pipes and valves and condensers and such, but they could not see the magic, the absolute beauty, in such mechanical perfection. There were times when Hieronymus Taylor would look on his engine, with all its parts running with interlocking grace, knowing that inside those pipes and trunks and hot wells and condensers the beast was living and dying, and he would tear up—actually cry—for the sheer beauty of the thing.

That was not something you shared with the black gang.

But Wendy, she was a different matter. Women by their very nature were more attuned to such things, more able to recognize beauty where men could see only function. And a girl with the imagination to paint as well as she did, and the grit to dress as a sailor and sneak aboard a man-of-war going into battle, she, of all people, should have the ability to see in the engine the elegance of mathematical grace. If anyone could get it, Wendy should.

But Wendy did not get it. She nodded as Taylor pointed out the steam dome and traced the main steam line aft, said “Indeed?” as the chief showed her the throttle and Stevenson links, looked politely at the things Taylor pointed out. But there was no passion there, only politeness. She asked intelligent questions until somewhere around the hot well pump her eyes began to look as if they were encased in thin glass. For all her imagination, she could not see in the machine what Hieronymus Taylor saw. She was not interested.

Taylor stopped his tour of the engine before coming to the part where the water returns to the boiler, and Wendy did not even notice. “Reckon if you want to see somethin, you best get topside,” Taylor said, a muttered, taciturn admission of defeat.

“Topside? On deck?” Wendy looked by parts elated and afraid. “But sure I’ll be discovered there.”

Taylor shook his head. “More’n half the hands we got aboard are shippin the first time today. Doubled our crew for this here excursion. Ain’t no one knows everyone aboard. Jest keep out of the way, act busy if you can. Won’t be no problem.”

Wendy smiled, and the look nearly compensated Taylor for his disappointment. “Thanks, Chief!” she said and scrambled up the ladder, left him alone, as he usually was, with his passions.

Now things were heating up, and he was not sure about it. He had been below before during times of great excitement—steamboat races, violent storms, collisions with other vessels—and still he preferred his engine room above all things.

But this was different. This was fighting, killing Yankees. Arrogant damn Yankees, like used to swagger around the docks at New Orleans, off their Boston-built ships, loading cotton for England, treating them all like they were field hands, white men and black.

Bowater. He was not much better. Just the fancy Dan that Taylor had expected, prim as Queen fucking Victoria, but now he was driving this little boat into combat, going to kill Yankees with unprecedented boldness, and Taylor wanted to be part of it. Not down below, not this time, but up on deck. This time he wanted to see the fun, because there had never been this much fun before.

It was crowded now in the engine room. Normally, there would only have been one fireman, Burgess or O’Malley, and one of the coal heavers, along with Chief Taylor. But now, at quarters, both firemen and all three coal heavers were down there, standing by for an emergency.

Navy fashion… Taylor thought. Six men to do the work of two. “What the hell you starin at, Moses?”

“Well, Massa Taylor, I ain’t ever seen you in sich a state. You ain’t afraid of dem Yankees, is you?”

“Afraid? Shut up, ya damned darkie.”

Moses smiled at that, which just further infuriated Taylor. “Clean the ash out of that damned boiler, you lazy son of a bitch,” he said and stamped off.

Taylor stood by the wheelhouse bell, peered up through the fidley. The sky beyond the skylight in the deckhouse roof was clear blue, as if the glass was painted that color. Behind him, he heard Moses’s shovel scraping up the ashes, heard the black man singing, just loud enough so that Taylor could hear, a song to the tune of “Dixie.”

O, I wish I was clear of ol’ Chief Taylor

Lock you down like a mean ol’ jailer

And the other stokers joined in, soft,

Heave away, heave away, heave away, Taylor-man.

Well the engine room, it’s his frustration,

Thinks he’s on a fine plantation

Heave away, heave away, heave away…

Taylor turned, ready to put a stop to their nonsense. He was in no mood for it. Then, overhead and forward, the ten-pound Parrott fired with a roar that sounded through the vessel like the end of the earth. The deck below their feet shuddered and the blast of the gun echoed and died and suddenly it seemed very quiet below, despite the roar of the fire and the hissing and clanking of engine and pumps. Everyone stopped and stared up at the roof overhead, as if they could divine something from looking at it.

For a long time they stood like that, staring up at the deckhouse roof. The Parrott went off again, with its visceral roar. It was more than just sound. It was sound and reverberation down to the ship’s fiber, a shudder in the deck, the smell of spent powder in the air, sucked below by the boiler’s air intake, mixing with coal dust and oil, a full sensory experience as up in the sunshine the gun crew blasted away at the Yankees.

“Goddamned…” Taylor muttered, not certain who or what he was damning. He pulled his eyes from the overhead, paced back and forth, paused in his pacing. “Burgess, ya Scots ape, get some oil on them drive gears, they’re squealing like a couple of rutting pigs,” he shouted—a problem the Scotsman was well aware of—then set in pacing again.

The gun crew, raw as they were, were getting their shots off every two minutes. Taylor kept count without realizing he was doing so—three, four, five; he wondered if they had found their target, if he was justified in going topside to see.

Gettin’ to be like a damned old woman… Taylor thought, and then a crash from above, the shattering of wood, an explosion as some part of their ship was blasted apart.

The Cape Fear shuddered again, an entirely different sensation, and Hieronymus Taylor was on the ladder, racing topside, shouting, “Burgess, you’re in charge here! Look to the bells!” as he burst through the fidley door and onto the deck.

Taylor stepped into a scene of confusion. He looked forward. Men were crowded on the side decks, staring around. No one moved.

He looked aft. Wendy was there, by the door. She looked frightened. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could Taylor said, “What happened?”

“A…bomb…of some sort hit. Up there.” She pointed to the wheelhouse.

“All right. Come with me.” He turned and ran forward, heard a few hesitant steps before Wendy caught up. He did not know why he had told her to come along. He would figure that out later.

A quarter mile ahead, a paddle wheeler was bearing down on them, pushing aside the smoke from her bow gun, churning the water white under her bows and her paddle wheels. One of the ad hoc Yankee river fleet, slapped together to combat the ad hoc Confederate fleet. The Yankee fired again, flame and smoke shooting from her forward gun, the shell screaming so close overhead that Taylor flinched and ducked, involuntarily.

Where the hell is Bowater? Taylor pushed through the stunned and stupid men toward the bow and the ladder to the top of the deckhouse. Could the vaunted Samuel Bowater be frozen in terror, unable to issue orders, stammering with indecision?

Son of a bitch patrician son of a bitch… Taylor raced up the ladder and when his head cleared the deckhouse roof he paused. The entire after end of the wheelhouse—the master’s cabin—was blown to splinters. There was nothing more than jagged bits of bright-painted wood sticking out at odd angles, and the cabin roof, caved in in the middle and draped like a shroud over the wreckage

Taylor took the last few steps slower. What was left of Able-Bodied Seaman Littlefield was flung half out of the wheelhouse and was hanging on the window frame, shredded clothing and skin draped over a spreading pool of blood on the deck below him. Lieutenant Harwell was lying toward the starboard side, a pool of blood spreading around his head. The blue-gray heap to port was Bowater, apparently. There was no one moving on the upper deck.

20

SIR: I deem it proper to bring to the notice of the Department the inefficiency of the battery of this ship…as was clearly shown in the attack…by a very small steam propeller, armed only with one large rifled gun.

— Captain J. B. Hull, USS Savannah, to Hon. Gideon Welles

For a second, Taylor did not move either. He had dealt with any number of emergencies—fire, taking on water, boilers on the edge of exploding—but this, fighting a ship, was something new to him, and he knew no more about it than he did about celestial navigation or requisitioning barrels of beef.

On the port side of the boat deck, Wendy was kneeling and vomiting, and that did not help his concentration.

Just stop…got to just stop and sort this here mess out… They were steaming head on toward the Yankee gunboat, and that did not seem like a very good idea. Taylor reached through the wreckage of the wheelhouse windows and grabbed the bell cord, jerked it for one bell, slow ahead.

First time I ever pulled that damned thing… Hieronymus mused. From ahead, another shot, and the shell screamed by so close he felt he could have caught it like a baseball.

What the hell now? And then he heard a voice, Bowater’s voice. It lacked that clear and commanding tone that Taylor associated with Bowater and all those who felt they ruled by birthright, but it was strong enough, and Taylor was glad to hear it.

“You men!” Bowater shouted down to the men on the deck below. “Do you want to be blown out of the water? Quarters! Load and run out!”

Bowater had pulled himself to his feet, was leaning heavy on the rail, but even as he shouted his strength seemed to come back to him. He stood straighter, then pushed himself off the rail, took a step toward the wheelhouse, moving carefully, as if the tug was rolling hard, and not in a near dead calm.

He noticed Taylor for the first time. “Chief, what in hell are you doing here?”

“Reckoned someone had to run the damned boat.”

“Where’s Harwell?”

“Starboard side. He’s out, don’t know if he’s dead. I’ll check.”

“No, leave him, no time for that.” Bowater was standing straighter now, the strength and presence of mind returning. He stepped into the wheelhouse, seemed not to notice the wreckage. He laid a hand on the big polished wheel, miraculously preserved, and gave a half turn to starboard. “What is the state of the engine?”

“All’s well. I rung slow ahead.”

Bowater said nothing. He grabbed the shredded jacket of Seaman Littlefield and jerked the body off the windowsill. He spun the corpse around, and as he did Taylor was presented with the full view of the horror of what had happened to the man and he thought he might be sick. Then Bowater tossed the body aside as if it was so much dunnage, rang up full ahead.

The Cape Fear began gathering way. Taylor could see the water slipping by as the big prop churned a wake under her counter. One, two, three knots, they were building speed, running straight toward their attacker.

“You gonna run her right up to the Yankee fleet, Cap’n?” Taylor asked, genuinely curious. He was feeling chastened by his own inability to think tactically. He wondered if Bowater would do any better.

“Got two shells left. We’ll make the best use of them.”

The Yankee fired again, but the shell flew clear. Bowater grabbed the wheel, looked over at Wendy for the first time. “Who is that, Chief?”

“Coal passer. Brought him with me, case we needed a hand.”

“You there!” Bowater called, and Wendy looked up. Her face was streaked with soot, her eyes red. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

Least she sure as hell don’t look like a woman, Taylor thought.

“Take the helm! Chief, go forward and see the gun crew ready to fire. Williams is captain of the gun, if he’s still alive. We have two shells. That’s all.” Bowater issued the orders clear and calm, as if he was calling for the tug to be washed and the brass polished.

“Hell, Cap’n, I don’t know nothing about cannons.”

“Just see the gun crew doesn’t panic.” Bowater looked over at Wendy, frozen with fear and uncertainty, and for a sick moment Taylor thought he would see through the clothes and the dirt. But instead, Bowater shouted, “I said, take the helm!” and Taylor, behind his back, pointed at the wheel and jerked his head in that direction.

Bowater followed her with his eyes as she stepped into the wheelhouse, laid her tentative hands on the helm. Her eyes were wide. The vomit was imperfectly wiped away.

“And send up someone who knows what the helm is.”

It was unreal, far worse than any nightmare. Wendy Atkins felt the warm, oiled wood of the wheel under her hand, had absolutely no notion of what to do with it. From the corner of her eye she could see the shoes and legs of the boy who had held the wheel before her, she could see the horrible thing that had once been his face. Her gorge rose again and she focused on other things.

Samuel Bowater! It was too much to believe! It had never occurred to her to ask Hieronymus who the captain of the boat was, had never dawned on her that it could possibly be Bowater. But now, as she made herself concentrate on things remembered, made herself not think of the dead boy or how she would look when the next shell hit, or what she would do if Bowater gave her an order, she could recall they had both said “gunboat,” but since the term was largely meaningless to her, she had ignored it.

Samuel Bowater. Standing at the forward rail, hands clasped behind his back, looking out at the approaching enemy as if he was taking in the view of the gardens at Versailles. How could he be so calm in all this? She thought of the way he had tossed the boy’s body aside. What kind of monster is he?

“Come left, two spokes,” Bowater said. She heard him clearly, as there were no windows left in the wheelhouse. She wondered to whom he was issuing these imperious orders.

He hands down orders like Caesar on the throne! Wendy thought. She had always envisioned naval officers of steely calm, but now, presented with real calm in the face of such carnage, she was not so sure. Surely some sense of humanity was appropriate? She thought perhaps she despised Bowater, so callous with human life.

Then suddenly he turned on her, as if she had done something wrong. “Come left, two spokes, damn it!” he said, his voice near a shout.

“I…I…” Wendy had not even realized he was speaking to her. Then with a sound like disgust in his throat, he stepped into the wheelhouse and grabbed the wheel, turned it, just a bit, said, “Just hold it like that!”

She grabbed the spokes hard to keep her hands from shaking. She had never been so afraid. Bowater had looked her right in the face—how could he not recognize her? But apparently he did not, because he turned his back on her once more, looked forward.

Somewhere beyond the edge of the deckhouse the big gun fired, so loud that Wendy jumped, let out something like a scream, which was thankfully muffled by the thunderous cannon. She thought she might vomit again, if there was anything left in her to vomit. It was such insanity, such confusion. Noise, bloody death, smoke, shouting, screaming, how could anyone think, how could anyone do anything but cower in a corner and hide?

But she was not cowering, she realized. Frightened as she was, she was not hiding from the gunfire, but rather standing straight in the very spot where another had met brutal death just minutes before. And with that she felt an odd calm come over her.

A sailor came bounding up the steps, paused and saluted Bowater. “Tanner, sir, here to relieve the helm!”

Bowater jerked his thumb over his shoulder, did not look back.

Tanner stepped into the wheelhouse, said in an official tone, “Here to relieve the helm.” He paused, as if waiting for a response, and when Wendy could think of none he said, “What course?”

“Course?”

“Where are we heading?”

Wendy shook her head. “I have no idea.”

Damn, damn, damn… Taylor watched their penultimate shell pass close over the side-wheeler and plunge into the sea three hundred yards astern. Close. Not close enough.

He was standing behind the gun, having raced down the steps from the wheelhouse. Harwell was moving a bit, he noticed, was not dead yet. A gash on his head, blood matting his hair. Taylor could not tell how bad it was and did not pause to investigate. He had grabbed the rails of the ladder and slid down to the deck, pictured Bowater tossing Littlefield’s body aside. Cold son of a bitch…

The gun crew was swabbing out, ramming home, going through the drill which Mr. Harwell had tortured into them.

“Ready!” Williams stood back, lanyard taut.

From on high, Bowater’s voice. “This is your last shot, Mr. Taylor!”

Last shot, Mr. Taylor? How the hell did this become my responsibility? He stepped up to the gun, sighted over it. I should have stayed in my damned engine room!

The side-wheeler, bow on, was right in the sights. But, Taylor recalled, it had been before, and the shot had gone over. He grabbed the elevating screw, cranked it up, depressing the muzzle, thought, If this gun goes off now I am one dead bastard… Heard Williams make some noise, but the devil take him.

“Give me that lanyard, Williams!” Taylor demanded. Williams paused, could see resistance would be futile, if not dangerous, handed the fancy line over. If Bowater was going to make him responsible, then he was not going to let anyone else make a hash of it.

He looked over the barrel again. The Cape Fear and the Yankee were coming bow on, both armed the same, both equally vulnerable.

But not quite. That Yankee whoremonger has side wheels! Gotta take out one of them side wheels! “You there!” he shouted to the men with the handspikes. “Move this here around to starboard, just a hair!”

The handspike men jammed their bars in the deck, levered the gun over. There it was!

“Git back! Git back!” Taylor shouted, and he jumped back and the handspike men jumped back and Taylor pulled the lanyard. The gun went off with a terrific roar, painful, since Taylor had forgotten to clap a hand over his ear. It leaped back against the breeches but Taylor’s eyes were on the side-wheeler alone, the side-wheeler steaming down on them, the side-wheeler whose port wheelbox suddenly burst into a spray of shattered wood and broken buckets and twisted metal, flung up in the air.

“Sum bitch! Sum bitch! Yeeeeha!” Taylor shouted, and he knew he was shouting as loud as he could, and so were the men around him, but he could hear only a muffled version of the noise, as if he was listening from underwater. No matter. They had hit him, right where it hurt.

The side-wheeler slewed around to port as the starboard wheel drove her on, then stopped dead as her captain rang out all stop to sort out the damage.

Now what? Taylor wondered. His blood was up, he was ready to go and board them like pirates of old. He looked up, grinned up at Bowater, but Bowater was staring forward at the disabled Yankee, hands behind his back, expressionless. He was not shouting.

Cold son of a bitch…

Samuel Bowater stepped into the wheelhouse, eyes still on the disabled Yankee, rang slow ahead. Close enough. Decision time.

He wanted to shout. He wanted to yell and wave his hat the way the others had. But of course he did not.

“What’s your name, sailor?” he said to the new helmsman. This one had the hard, casual look of a real sailor, not the whimpering incompetence of that boy Taylor for some inconceivable reason had dragged up there.

“Ruffin Tanner, of Mobile, sir, by way of the Congress, which were my last ship.”

“Welcome aboard the CSS Cape Fear, Tanner. How do you like it so far?”

“I like it fine, sir, mighty fine.” He gave the wheel a quarter turn, brought it back amidships. “Man’s blood gets a bit thick, sittin’ around one of them Yankee men-of-war.”

“Indeed.” Bowater remembered Harwell, lying in a pool of his own blood, remembered his own shocking disregard for the man. In a flush of guilt he stepped out of the wheelhouse and around the front, knelt beside the lieutenant, lifted his head.

“Mr. Harwell? Mr. Harwell?” The lieutenant’s eyes opened, his lips moved to say something, but Bowater could not make out the words, so he ignored him, examined the wound on his head.

A splinter had opened up a nasty gash, which had bled profusely, and had no doubt rattled the luff’s brains, but as far as Bowater could tell, he was not seriously injured. He was a horrible sight, with the blood streaking his face and congealed in his hair. He looked as if he had no business being alive, but he did not seem mortally wounded.

“I’m…I’m all right, sir…” Harwell said in a stronger voice, and put a hand down on the deck to prop himself up.

“You just rest here, Lieutenant, as long as you need,” Bowater said. Harwell looked as if he was going to protest, but happily he passed out again and that was an end to it. Bowater laid him out, stepped into the wheelhouse again.

From the long black side of the Wabash, a puff of smoke, and then a shell plunged into the water nearby, and then another puff, another shell. They had steamed right into the range of the smoothbores.

“Hard a’port, Tanner,” he said and rang up four bells, full ahead. Time to leave.

It was 114 degrees in the engine room, hotter than that in the boiler room, and the firemen were struggling to get the fire hotter still.

Hieronymus Taylor wiped his forehead with a filthy rag. It was bad enough when you were in the engine room all day, but coming from the relative cool of the upper deck made it seem much worse.

He wiped the face of the pressure gauge on the front of the boiler. Nineteen pounds and building. That was just about all the pressure the boiler would take. He turned to Moses. “Get some more coal on, spread her nice and even, she’ll take more than this!” he shouted.

“Oh, we cookin now, boss!” Moses shouted, spreading the white-hot coal with his shovel.

“Goddamn it, man!” O’Malley shouted. “Yer gonna blow us all to hell, damn it! The boiler can’t take it!”

“What the hell do you know about it, Ian? You just make sure there’s water enough, and you can bet I’ll kill you before the boiler does!”

“You’re mad!”

“Get!” Taylor pointed toward the boiler and its gauge glass. O’Malley scowled, turned, and stamped off, his boots loud on the metal plates on the deck, even over the groaning, straining, hissing, clanking engine.

Taylor resumed his pacing fore and aft. Through the fabric of the hull, he heard something, some muffled detonation. The Cape Fear ’s hull was like an eardrum, picking up the vibrations, turning them into something else. Taylor could not tell what it was—he had never heard such a thing—but he guessed it was ordnance exploding in the water. The side-wheeler or the Wabash getting in her shots. Might be time we got out of here, he thought, and as he did, the bell rang four times, full ahead.

“Here we go!” Taylor shouted, twisting the throttle open. He felt the deck plates tremble with the increased turns of the engine, and then the helm was put hard over, the Cape Fear heeling into the turn.

Taylor managed to grab hold of a stanchion and keep himself from tumbling to the floor. Billy Jefferson, shovel jammed in a coal pile, stumbled, fell sideways, put his hands out to steady himself, flat against the steam pipe. Smoke rose from his palms and Billy screamed, a piercing, high scream that made Taylor wince.

He launched himself off the post, raced forward, but Moses was there first, grabbing Billy around the waist, pulling him back from the boiler to the deck.

“St. Clair! Water! Cold water, here!” Taylor shouted. St. Clair hurried off and Taylor looked quickly around, counted heads. Some of his men were standing, some lying where they had fallen, but he could see no other injuries.

He stepped back to the pressure gauge. With the throttle opened, the pressure in the boiler had dropped off, but it was still high.

“Moses! Let St. Clair tend to Billy there! You stoke her up! Coal now, you hear? O’Malley, bear a hand there!”

“Yassa!” Moses knocked open the firebox door with his shovel. The fire was white-hot, an undulating bed of heat, throwing weird shadows and light through the gloom of the engine room, the eternal twilight of that lower region.

Burgess was there. “Bearins runnin hot,” he grunted.

“They’ll hold for now.”

“Lotta damned pressure,” he said, nodding toward the boiler.

“That’s why we have safety valves.”

Actually, they didn’t. Taylor had tied them down, figured he knew better than a damned bit of iron and springs when he was pushing his boiler too hard. One of the advantages of the navy, he found: no damned inspectors poking around his engine room.

“O’Malley!” Taylor shouted. The Irishman was sulking in a corner. “I told you to tend the water!”

“What? I’ll not go near that damned boiler, and you running twenty and more pounds of steam! That’s work for one of the niggers, that is!”

“Niggers are too busy, and if there ain’t any niggers we got to use a Mick! Now go!”

O’Malley stamped over to Taylor, but he did not seem inclined to check water levels in the gauge glass.

“I’ve about had it with yer abuse, do ya hear? I’ll not stand for it, and me, a white man, and treated worse than yer darling niggers!”

“You work as hard as my niggers, I’ll treat you as well as my niggers,” Taylor said, stopped as he heard a hissing sound—water or steam getting away. He looked up just in time to see the crack in the feed-water line opening like a grinning mouth, hot water—not boiling, but hot enough—spewing out.

“Ah, shit! Stand clear!” Taylor shouted, and Burgess and O’Malley and Moses and St. Clair scattered and the pipe burst with a groan and a snap and the feed-water pump forced hot water in a great spray over the engine room, hissing off the pipes, showering the floor plates, spraying over Billy Jefferson, who lay beneath it, screaming and trying to shield himself.

“Damn it! Get the valve, Burgess!” Taylor held his arm over his face, raced forward, slipped on the wet steel plate, and came down in a heap, skidding to a stop with feet against the boiler face. The hot water was lashing at him, burning his face like snake bites, and Billy was screaming, unable to stand with his burned hands.

Water was spewing from both ends of the broken pipe, pushed out by the feed-water pump and draining from the boiler, and if the water in the boiler got too low, there would be hell to pay. The fusible plug would melt, but that would be the least of their problems.

Taylor looked up as best as he could, trying to keep his face from the blowing, scalding water. He rose unsteadily to his feet, the slick decks and the hot water and the burning pipes threatening from every direction. He grabbed the valve on the boiler face—it was painfully hot but Taylor was accustomed to that—and he cranked it shut, heard the sound of the water flow die off.

He turned and looked aft. Burgess, his face red from the hot water, had reached the feed-pump valve. The water was off. Billy was lying on the floor plates, whimpering in pain. O’Malley was nowhere to be seen.

“Burgess, check the gauge glass, keep an eye on that boiler!” With no water going to the boiler, and quite a bit lost, they did not have too much steaming left before the thing began to melt down.

There was a snap to his right, a crack like metal giving way. Ten inches from where he had been standing, the steam gauge blew clean off the pipe, flinging itself up and off to one side. The flying gauge shattered against the boiler-room bulkhead and a whistling white plume of condensing steam came bursting out of the hole where the gauge had been.

Might be pushing it now… Taylor admitted to himself. “Moses! Shut off the valve to that gauge,” he shouted as he moved quickly aft, “and close that damper on the fire door, you hear?”

“Close the damper!” Moses called, and Taylor heard the reassuring sound of the damper slamming shut and hoped he had not pushed his luck too far.

Hail Mary, Mother of God, the Lord is with thee… he muttered, feeling like the Lord’s own hypocrite, but childhood training died hard and he hoped the prayer might do some good.

He looked around, at the dripping engine room, the dripping, burned men. Burned but still alive. “Damn,” he said. That was all he could think to say.

Ian O’Malley raced up the ladder, desperate to get out of the engine room before the boiler blew. He was frightened, to be sure, and angry and wounded in his pride. But most of all he was bitter about the treatment he received. He had spent the better part of his life being bitter about the way he was treated. The emotion fit him like a well-worn pair of trousers, enveloping and comfortable.

Bloody bastard… he thought, throwing open the fidley door and stepping aft, stomping through the sunshine and relatively cool air.

Bloody Southerner and he treats his niggers better than me…and me a fireman first class…

That was another sore spot. His mother’s second cousin, chief engineer of an oceangoing packet, no less, had given him recommendation enough that it should have garnered him first assistant engineer’s papers, at least, despite what little experience he actually had. It should have been him telling Taylor to check the feed water and clean the damned grates…

Suddenly he was aware of gunfire. Far off, but he could hear it, shells whistling past. He looked outboard. They had turned, and he could see the Yankee ships astern, and the big one was firing.

I made a bloody mistake, didn’t I? he thought. Should have joined with the bloody Yankees…

He heard a voice behind, a soft voice. “Mr. O’Malley?” He turned. The boy Taylor had brought with him was there, but O’Malley had his suspicions. In fact, if he was right, it would be enough to get Taylor cashiered from the navy, which would be justice done. “You…” O’Malley said, took a step toward the speaker, hand reached out, and then his whole world was consumed by the whistle of a shell that seemed to suck the air out of the day, and then it blew up.

Wendy felt an odd sort of calm as she walked around the decks, even with the iron flying. It was like being in a bell jar, looking out, able to see everything, protected. It was an illusion, a dangerous one, and she knew it and told herself as much, but she could not shake it, so instead she enjoyed it, experienced it.

After fleeing the wheelhouse she had hunkered down by the forward end of the deckhouse, watched Taylor lay the gun, disable the Yankee. She had cheered with the rest, spontaneously, until she realized her voice might give her away. But Taylor had been right. No one seemed to care who she was or what she was about.

She watched Taylor go back into the engine room, but she could not bear to go down there. She had remained on deck, inconspicuous, reveling in her genuine taste of battle. It was exhilarating, now that it was over, now that the gunboat had turned and was steaming away from the Yankees.

Wendy was buoyant as she walked down the side deck, unconcerned about the last desperate shots the Yankees were taking. She saw Ian O’Malley storm out of the engine-room door, and she even felt kindly disposed to him, though she had seen in him a sullen malingering villain. Still, she looked on him, and all the men aboard, as her shipmates now, her Band of Brothers.

“Mr. O’Malley?” she said. O’Malley turned and his face was not a kind one, and she could see the anger in his eyes, the suspicion as he squinted at her, took a step toward her. She took a step away, the fear suddenly back. O’Malley sneered, said, “You…,” hand reaching for her, and then the distant whine of a shell grew suddenly to an overpowering scream, a noise that cut right through both of them, and then the forward end of the deckhouse exploded in a burst of wood and glass.

Wendy saw the sides of the cabin blow out and O’Malley lunged at her and she screamed, thought he was going to kill her. His eyes were wide and he hit her, full-body, knocked her back, and he was on top of her, and she swung and punched at him, kicked as they went down, but it had no effect.

She hit the deck hard, flat on her back. Felt the impact through her whole body. It stunned her, but all she could think was to get O’Malley off her, to get away before he killed her. She pushed him off, and to her surprise he moved, did not resist, and she scrambled to her feet.

She jumped back, pressed herself against the deckhouse, ready to kick O’Malley if he came for her. She looked down, saw he would not.

A shard of wood, three feet long, part of the frame of the cabin, was jutting from his back, and now that she looked she could see the jagged forward tip sticking out from his chest where it had gone clean through. A trickle of blood ran from his mouth.

Wendy stared at the lifeless eyes, the dead man in a growing pool of blood, and she felt nothing. She felt like Bowater, tossing the dead helmsman aside. Oh God, is this all? Is this all it takes, for a person to lose humanity entirely?

Taylor came up the engine-room ladder, stepped out onto the side deck. Wendy was there, pressed up against the deckhouse. O’Malley was dead at her feet. For a fleeting instant he thought she had killed him, but then he realized that was absurd.

“What happened?”

“Shell hit, up front, there. That piece of wood went right through O’Malley.”

Taylor nodded. She did not seem as upset as he might have thought she would be. “You best go down to the engine room. We’ll be heading in now.”

They looked at one another. There was something strange in Wendy’s eyes, something that had not been there that morning, and Taylor was suddenly afraid that he had made a great mistake, allowing her to see this. She pulled her eyes from his and disappeared below.

Taylor stepped forward again. Through the gaping hole that had once been a wall, Taylor looked in at the space that had once been the galley. The place was unrecognizable; only a few bits of cookware and sundry pieces of twisted gear looked at all familiar. The destruction was incredible, as if someone had picked the Cape Fear up and shaken her, then dropped her again. And right in the middle of it, sitting on a twisted and cracked stewpot, sat Johnny St. Laurent, wide-eyed, shaking his head, seemingly oblivious to the battle still raging.

He looked up and met Taylor’s eyes, shook his head in disbelief. How he could still be alive Taylor could not imagine. Then St. Laurent said, with evident grief, “All morning…I have been making de homard a la creme with a Felbrigg sponge cake for dessert, and now…” He spread his arms to indicate the destruction of his fiefdom.

“We’ll set her to rights, Johnny, don’t you fret,” Taylor said, as soothing as he could be, then left the galley and went up the ladder to the wheelhouse. “Cap’n, we lost the feed-water line, we gonna have to shut her down, ten minutes or so.”

Bowater nodded. “Ten minutes will be all right. More than that I do not think will do. We are not in the best place to be drifting.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Very good. What was the damage from that last shell?”

“Galley’s a wreck. Lunch is ruined. O’Malley was killed. But nothing beyond that, I don’t reckon.”

“The homard a la creme, ruined?” Bowater met his eyes for the first time. “Devil take those shopkeeping, mudsill Yankees…”

The sun was an hour gone, and the last orange strips of sky fading in the west, when the Cape Fear came alongside the seawall at Gosport Naval Shipyard and Babcock saw to the dock fasts. The damage to the vessel was considerable, but they had inflicted worse than they received, had crippled one of the Union’s James River fleet, had put a few shells through one of the Federal navy’s most powerful men-of-war, had shown the Confederate flag on waters that the Union had considered inviolably theirs. Samuel Bowater was eager to report all of that to Flag Officer Forrest.

Even as the Cape Fear had steamed her way down the Elizabeth River, Bowater had thought of his uniform. He and Jacob rummaged through what was left of the master’s cabin, and it was not much. Nearly everything that Bowater owned was now in more parts than it had been that morning. His uniforms were charred and shredded. Only a quarter of his oil painting of Newport remained, but he was not sorry to see that gone, and might well have done the same to it himself.

So, when the tug was tied alongside, Bowater was still wearing the uniform he had worn during the fight, and though he was openly unhappy about appearing in such tattered attire, he was secretly proud of the numerous burn marks, bloodstains, and sundry tears in his frock coat and pants. They were clothes that showed hard fighting.

He stepped through the shredded wheelhouse, climbed down the ladder to the foredeck. The Parrott rifle was secured now, the giant put to bed, and for the first time since it had come aboard, Bowater looked on it with pride. He had washed himself clean of the guilt and shame, burned away the humiliation in the fire of battle. He may have allowed Hieronymus Taylor to talk him into the ruse, but he, Samuel Bowater, had led them into the fight, and the gun and the armed Cape Fear had proved their worth. He felt better than he had in a long, long time.

He stepped quickly across the shipyard. He intended to try Forrest’s office first, but was not confident of finding him there. It was, after all, nearly nine o’clock on a Sunday night.

Bowater could see lights in various windows, could hear people moving about, shouting. There was a charged quality to the air, an atmosphere of excitement, and Bowater wondered if news of his fight had reached the shipyard already, if the word of their deeds had preceded them.

He reached the administration building and stepped inside and he could see, at the far end of the hall, that Forrest’s office was occupied, which made him think all the more that news of his battle had reached the flag officer.

Samuel Bowater stepped up to the office door, looked inside. Forrest was there, along with Fairfax and several others of the shipyard’s ranking officers. He knocked on the doorframe.

“Sir?” he said.

Forrest turned, his lined, weathered face spread with joy. “Bowater! Bowater, come in. Are you just back now?”

“Yes, sir.” Bowater stepped through the door. The room seemed to be bursting with joy, and Samuel wondered if his actions were regarded as grander heroics than even he had dared think.

“Well, you have not heard then!” Forrest said. “It just come in over the wire. Beauregard met the Yankees at Manassas, fought ’em all day, and absolutely routed them! Sent ’em on a grand skedaddle clear back to Washington, the dirty dogs! They are saying it is the greatest victory since Waterloo!”

Forrest looked around at the others, as if for confirmation, and the other officers nodded their delighted agreement. Then Fairfax looked Bowater up and down and said, “Dear Lord, sir, what has happened to you?”

21

GREAT BATTLE AND GLORIOUS VICTORY

The greatest battle since that of Waterloo was fought yesterday, in the neighborhood of Manassas, between 50 and 60,000 Southerners on one side and 95 to 100,000 Yankees and Hessians on the other. The loss is not known, except that it was great on both sides.

— Richmond Whig, July 22, 1861

The Great Battle was two days gone when word reached Paine Plantation, just south of Drumgould’s Bluff on the Yazoo River. Robley Paine read about the event with a strange back-and-forth pull of emotions. It was the birth of his nation, and like the birth of his sons a bloody, wrenching, frightening affair. Like the birth of his sons, it should have filled Robley with an irrepressible joy.

But that was not what he felt, sitting on the wide porch, under the blue-painted ceiling, reading the newspaper accounts, the bold type that heralded victory, last-minute arrivals that turned the tide of Yankee and Hessian attacks.

What Hessians? Robley wondered. All the papers were filled with allusions to the Hessians.

Despite these accounts of Southern heroism, brilliant leadership in the field, feats of courage, Robley’s eyes moved again and again to the single line: The loss…was great on both sides.

How will I know about my boys ? he wondered. If they are hurt or killed, will the army write me? If not, I will have to wait until the boys themselves write, to find out what has become of them.

Paine thought of the boys’ mother. He glanced up at the front door, as if she might be standing there. His sons had not been overly vigilant about writing, as he had suspected they might not. That silence had only added to Katherine’s already great misery. News of the battle had sent her to her bed. He wondered if she could endure a long wait to hear from the boys.

What if they are hurt? Or…

The papers were reporting that nearly 160,000 men had participated in the fight, Union and Confederate. Even if twenty thousand were casualties, that was still only one man in eight. And of those, most would only be wounded. An even smaller number would actually be dead.

When his boys marched off, Robley Paine had been dreadfully worried that they might receive wounds, but now that was hardly a concern. It would not be so very bad if they were wounded, he caught himself thinking. Not so much as to cripple them or kill them, just enough that it took them out of the fighting, let them come home with honor.

He shook his head, tried to distract himself from those dark thoughts. There was a dispatch from Norfolk, the paper reporting some minor victory by an armed tug of the Confederate States Navy. Robley smiled at the thought of the Confederate States Navy, wondered at what a motley collection of tugs and paddle wheelers and barges old Mallory was calling a navy. Still, they had managed to effect something, this navy, so there must be some merit in the idea.

He could not concentrate. He put the paper down, stepped down off the porch and walked the familiar downward slope to the riverbank. His beloved Yazoo rolled on past, that wide, disinterested stream. Did she care if the Yankee vandals were coming, if Yankee steamers would part her with their sharp bows? No, she was just water.

Paine turned back to look at the big house, the open-armed oak, his favorite view in the world. He imagined his boys tramping weary home from the war, seeing that big tree, its limbs like open arms, welcoming then back to the one place of earth that would always be their sanctuary. How much more beautiful would that tree look after the terror of war? Robley ached for that day to come. He ached to get word of his boys.

Four days later he did.

The letter was from Richmond, a printed envelope with the name of the Department of War. The very look of the thing was ominous, loathsome. Robley carried it unopened into the library. He felt sick to the point of nausea just holding the horrible thing, still sealed, in his hand. Finally, with trembling fingers, he tore it open.

Dear Sir:

We regret to inform you of the death of Lt. Robley Paine, Jr., Company D, 18th Mississippi Regiment, 3rd Brigade, during the late Battle of Manassas. Lt. Paine fought bravely in defense of his country.

Regretfully,

E. R. Burt, Colonel, 18th Mississippi

Robley fell back in the winged chair, staring at the stark, cold, typed words. He thought of his beautiful boy, four years old, blond hair and smudged face, running across the lawn, whooping like a wild Indian. He thought of him in his lieutenant’s frock coat, lying splayed out on the battlefield, dead eyes open and staring skyward, flies buzzing around open wounds. Robley Paine had seen enough battlefield casualties to know what they looked like, to guess how his lovely, handsome boy had ended up. The tears rolled down his cheeks and the sobs rose from his chest.

He heard soft steps in the hall, approaching the study, and he panicked. He did not want his wife to see the letter, but he could not hide it, and he could not lie to her.

“Robley, whatever is it?” But he did not have the strength to reply, or even move. She crossed quickly, plucked the letter from his hand. She gasped, dropped the paper, fled from the room.

It was several hours before Robley could find it in himself to stand up, to drag himself upstairs to the bed on which his wife had flung herself in her grief. He tried to comfort her, but there was little comfort in him.

Three days dragged by in a purgatory of grief, and then another letter arrived and it was in an envelope like the first. Robley opened the envelope in a numb, mechanical way, thinking vaguely that the regiment had by accident dispatched two letters announcing Robley Junior’s death. He unfolded the letter.

Dear Sir:

We regret to inform you that, as of this date, Private Nathaniel Paine, Company D, 18th Mississippi Regiment, 3rd Brigade, and Private Jonathan Paine, ditto, are missing. As their names have not appeared on any of the lists of prisoners taken by the enemy, we fear they must be presumed deserted or dead.

Regretfully,

E. R. Burt, Colonel, 18th Mississippi

Robley did not know what to think. Even if his mind had not been so muddled with grief for his eldest son, he would not have known what to make of it.

Not prisoners, so deserted or dead. For a hopeful second he thought that perhaps they had deserted, perhaps they had left the army, were coming home that very moment, coming back to the proper side of their moat, their Yazoo River, where he would keep them safe. Let a provost try to extract them from Paine Plantation. It would never happen. The Yankees would seem a trifle compared to the way Robley Paine would fight to protect his boys. They would be safe there, within the family kingdom.

No sooner did that happy thought occur to him than he banished it away, and in its place came a new level of grief. His boys would not desert. He knew them too well to find hope in that thought. They would willingly die, side by side, but they would never desert.

And that left death. Their perfect bodies shot down by Yankee killers, left to rot in the hot sun. Robley Paine had seen the bloated, bursting corpses, the black faces of the battle dead. He saw his boys in their toy-soldier outfits, shot dead in some thick tangle of brush, some impenetrable wood where they would never be found, where their flesh would become carrion.

Robley felt the sickness and the tears coming again. He stood up quick from his wing chair, paced vigorously for a few moments. The letter said nothing of the sort, just that the boys’ whereabouts were not known. No reason to give in to more grief. Certainly no reason to tell Katherine, who had just that morning emerged from their bedchamber, dressed in black, sallow and sunken-eyed, but nonetheless up.

He crumpled the ambiguous note, tossed it into the wastebasket. He would give no thought to the younger boys until he had some definite news, something irrefutable.

Two days later it arrived, in an envelope wrinkled, smudged, battered from hard use. The handwritten address said only “Robley and Katherine Paine, Yazoo, Mississippi,” but it had found them. The return address read “Headquarters, 1st Brigade, Army of the Shenandoah.”

Robley took the envelope, carried it into his library, staring at it the whole time, as if trying to divine something from the terse address. Army of the Shenandoah? He did not see how this could have anything to do with his boys. But any correspondence from any army was cause for dread.

At last he tore it open and extracted a piece of paper more wrinkled and dirty than the envelope, and splotched with the chocolate brown of dried blood. It was written in pencil on lined paper imperfectly torn from a notebook. It was in Jonathan’s hand.

Nathaniel James Paine, Company D, 18th Mississippi, 3rd Brigade, son of Robley and Katherine Paine, Yazoo, Mississippi. Please God send me home to be buried in my native earth.

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God…” Robley stammered the words as if gasping for breath. Dumbly he stared at the other paper enclosed in the envelope.

Dear Sir:

The enclosed note was found on the remains of a private soldier from Mississippi who had apparently joined with our brigade in the great battle at Manassas. I regret that the exigencies of our current military situation make it impossible for us to comply with the request herein. Please be assured that Private Paine fought nobly and was given a Christian burial.

Regretfully,

Colonel A. Cummings

33rd Virginia

Robley’s head fell back. The letters slipped from his fingers, fell fluttering to the floor. There it was. His boys had gone off with another regiment, thrown themselves into the hottest fighting, had died for their enthusiasm.

That was his Nathaniel, his Jonathan. Not deserters, quite the opposite. They had joined with another regiment, another army, had died unrecognized among strangers. If Jonathan had not lived long enough to scribble that note, then they would have simply disappeared, tumbled into unmarked graves.

A great deadness spread over Robley Paine, Sr., spread from his chest to his arms and legs and his head. A deadness that was more than death, because in death, he knew, his spirit would take flight, would join his beloved boys in Paradise. But now his soul was trapped on earth, trapped in this aching mortal coil, on this horrible, wretched earth, where Yankees could come down from their filthy cities and kill his beautiful boys.

He heard the swish of silk and his eyes shifted to the door of the library and he wanted to stand, to do something, to hide this from his wife, who could not take another of these hammer blows, but once again he could not move.

She stepped into the doorway, stood there in her black dress, stared at him with sunken eyes, and he stared back, silent. Robley wondered if this was how it had been for their Savior, Jesus, staring down from the cross into his mother’s eyes. Such unspoken grief passing between them, grief far beyond words.

Katherine Paine’s eyes shifted down to the letters on the floor, then back up to her husband’s. She stood there, unmoving, and Robley could see that she understood, even without reading the letters that lay on the rich carpet at his feet, she knew. She probably knew all along. Without a word she turned and glided away.

After a while, Robley stood and wandered out of the library. He had no notion of how long he had been sitting there, whether that time could be measured in minutes or days. His feet took him down the hallway and out the front door, onto the wide porch and its view of the Yazoo River.

He stepped down off the porch and walked the green lawn, down, down to the water. For a moment he thought he might throw himself in, let the water envelop him, sweep him away. He thought he might let himself sink down into the river’s warm embrace, but he was not certain. He seemed to have no power one way or another, as if it was not his decision to make. He would just have to wait and see what happened.

He stopped at the edge of the stream and stared into it and realized that he was not going to throw himself in, though he was not sure why not. Perhaps there was something else he was supposed to do.

Robley turned, as he always did, looked back at the house, the great oak tree with its spreading limbs. He squinted at the tree, cocked his head. There was something not right with it. He could see nothing different about the tree, but still there was something not right.

And then it occurred to him: the spreading branches, the welcoming arms. Who was it that the tree would welcome? The arms of the tree were open to the northward, which was why Robley had envisioned them welcoming back his boys, come home from the fight. But his boys would not come home. So who was the tree to welcome?

“Damn that thing…” Robley said. He was breathing hard. He could not endure the sight of it, the great billow of green leaves, the limbs like spread arms. There was nothing, and no one, whom he would welcome now. Just the opposite. His boys had left the sanctuary of Paine Plantation and now they were dead. It was up to him, Robley Paine, to keep the rest of the world at bay. The tree was no longer a reflection of Robley’s heart.

He walked quickly back up the lawn, calling for the overseer. “Mr. Holling! Mr. Holling! Holling!” He stamped up the lawn, stopped twenty feet in front of the hateful tree.

“Holling!”

Four minutes later, Holling came from around the house, walking fast. He was a stout, greasy man with dirty clothes and ugly habits, and Robley did not like him. But he was of that breed who became overseers on plantations and excelled at the work. Robley had never met a good overseer who was also a decent human being. The two traits did not naturally coexist in a man.

Holling approached fast, laboring for breath. “You called, Mr. Paine?” he asked, stopping short, and Robley could see the man’s visible reaction to his employer’s appearance. “Sir?”

“I’m going to do some cutting on this tree,” Paine said, nodding toward the oak. “I need ten of the field hands with axes and saws, boys who can climb. I need ladders and a team to drag the brush away.”

Holling’s eyes shifted from Paine to the oak and back again. “Cutting…on the tree…sir?”

“Yes, damn you.”

“Ah…the niggers is all out in the fields, Mr. Paine, gettin’ in the cotton.”

“Damn the…goddamned cotton, Holling, let it rot! I don’t give a tinker’s damn about cotton. Get the hands and get them now!”

“Yassuh!” said Holling, who knew when to shut up and act. He turned and ran off.

Why did he not go to war? Paine thought. Why did that mean bastard live while my boys did not?

Overseers were too valuable to send off to fight. The meanest, vilest, most violent of men, but they were needed in the South to keep the Negroes in line and could not be spared to march off and fight the Yankees. So the best of the South had to go in their place.

After some time, Holling returned leading a dozen field hands, who carried among them tall ladders and axes and saws, and the last man was leading a two-horse team in traces. Robley could see the black men looking around, could see the apprehension in their faces. Their daily routine did not vary much. Any change was cause for concern.

“Listen here, you all,” Robley addressed his slaves. “I mean to greatly alter the look of this tree. We’ll start at the top. Who here is the best climber?”

The men shuffled their feet, looked at the ground, shot questioning glances at one another. Paine felt the frustration boiling up and he tried to hold it back.

“Very well. Billy, I have seen you shoot up an apple tree like a squirrel. You go to the top branches. Someone give Billy a saw. Set that ladder against the tree, that’ll get you to the lower branches. We are starting at the top, taking the branches clean off.”

Twenty minutes of instructing, bullying, pointing, twenty minutes of ignoring Holling, who kept muttering and rolling his eyes until Paine threatened to dismiss him, to order him to the recruiter’s office, and finally the tree was alive with men, hacking and sawing at the branches.

Billy was as nimble as Paine had remembered, clambering up as high as the branches would bear, going after one and another with a bucksaw until the branches, with their great bursts of green, were raining down around the base of the oak, where those men still on the ground carted them off.

In short order the tree grew thinner and thinner, and Robley could see through the branches in a way that he normally could only in winter. Soon the upper branches were gone, and then the lower branches, too thick for the bucksaws, so the men went after them with axes, chopping them off and chopping the trunk as well.

The task went quickly, with so many men being driven by Holling, now anxious to please. The sun moved to the west and the towering oak was rendered shorter and shorter, like a sugar loaf, sliced off again and again until there was only the wide base left.

The virtual rain of greenery slowed as the men reached the lowest of the branches, as big around as trees in their own right, and they hacked at them and the wood chips flew like dull sparks in the last of the sun. Finally, with the sun down and the light fading fast, the trunk was cut for the last time. With flailing axes the Negroes hacked it through, thirty feet from the base, ten feet above the only remaining branches, those two that had formed the welcoming arms, now bare and spindly things, stripped of their leaves and smaller branches.

“I want a fire, right here.” Robley pointed to the ground twenty feet in front of the tree. “A big damned fire.” The Negroes’ work was done, but he still had to labor on, and he would need light for his task.

Holling dispatched men to gather up firewood, and soon there was a great bonfire burning, leaping ten feet in the air, the red-and-orange light dancing off the thing that the oak had become, thirty feet of massive trunk and two great arms reaching out into the dark.

“Good,” Robley said, his eyes never leaving the tree. “You all can turn in now. Leave the tools.”

The slaves murmured something as they tramped off wearily to their tiny shacks, and Holling disappeared as well. For a long time Robley stared at the tree, trying to see what was beneath the bark, the thing that was in there that he was trying to let free.

At last he picked up an ax, held it over his shoulder, and climbed the ladder up the trunk to a place six feet above where the branches reached out from the body. He steadied himself, brought the ax back, and swung at the tree, felt the sharp blade bite. He jerked it free, brought it back again, swung once more.

For an hour and a half he stood on the ladder, hacking away, and when he was done he had cut a great horizontal gash in the trunk, a slice a foot wide in the living oak. He looked at it, grunted, climbed down from the ladder.

His arms and legs ached, he felt weariness clawing at him, but he pressed on, because he had to have this thing done by dawn. There could not be another day without his dire warning, his Colossus of Rhodes there to frighten off the Northern hordes. He picked up a lantern, lit the candle from the massive bonfire, tramped around the side of the house and across the open area to the barn.

He opened the big door and stamped down the length of the barn. In their stables, the horses shifted nervously, made quiet whinnying sounds. They were not accustomed to visitors at that hour.

Paine stopped at a storeroom at the far end, pulled the door open. Along with various tools and equipment waiting repair were can after can of paint, paint for the plantation house and the stalls, for the carriages, for all the myriad things that required it. Robley held the lantern up, snatched up the cans he needed, stuck a few paintbrushes into the waist-band of his pants, carried the whole lot back to the oak.

Again he stood before the tree like an artist before his canvas, looking it up and down, wanting not to impose his will on the thing but rather to reveal that which was already there. Then, with paint cans dangling from a short length of rope, he climbed the ladder again.

Bright red splashed into the notch he had cut, and white for teeth around the edge. No whites for eyes, but rather red—this was an angry god. Robley moved from the top of the stunted trunk to the base, slathering it with paint, until at last it was not a tree at all, but a hideous gargoyle, a pagan edifice, a frightening vision of death that would attend any who tried to cross the Yazoo River and pollute the perfection of the Paine home.

Horror, remain at bay, it cried. Stay on the northern shore, do not visit my home!

Finished at last, Robley Paine stood before his creation. In the dancing firelight it was a horrible thing to behold, but that was as it was supposed to be. He would fight horror with horror. And before he knew it, he was lying before the tree, fast asleep.

The chill of the predawn mist woke him. He shuddered with the cold, stretched aching limbs, pushed himself to a sitting position. He felt the great weight of anguish on him, but he could not recall, for an instant, what the anguish was for. And then it came back.

He looked up at the oak, at what he had done. The low-lying fog swirled around the thing, making it look like some mythical beast, the red eyes, the gaping red mouth and white teeth, the branches painted with claws dripping blood, the gray coat, an approximation of the Confederate uniform. It was a horror indeed, and Paine nodded his satisfaction.

That will do, that will do, he thought.

But would it? He had slept, and his mind was clear now. It was a good thing he had done with that tree, let the vandals to the north know that there was no welcome there. But would it be enough?

He looked at the river and thought of the great water barriers in history. He was old enough to recall the French Wars, Napoleon’s massive army, poised on the edge of the English Channel, ready to swarm over the water and spread its poison throughout England. The water had stopped them.

“No…” The water had not stopped them. They could have crossed the water, just as the Yankees could cross the Yazoo River. It was not water that stopped the French. It was Lord St. Vincent, Horatio Nelson. It was England’s mighty Channel Fleet.

The realization came to him, a flash, a divine inspiration, and he spoke it out loud.

“I need a ship.”