Thieves Of Mercy

FIFTEEN

The great craft building in Memphis has been taken up the Yazoo to be finished, and a mechanic from there says it will be fifteen days before she will be ready. We must catch her there before she can be fitted out.

LIEUTENANT SAMUEL L.PHELPS TO FLAG OFFICER A.H.FOOTE

The next morning, Samuel Bowater went to Shirley’s yard and saw that things were moving apace. With the Arkansas already towed off downriver, Shirley could dedicate what men he had to work on Tennessee. A dozen shipwrights, house carpenters, and day laborers were climbing over her hull, planking up, port and starboard.

After he had satisfied himself with the work taking place, and moved by his father’s newfound spirit, Bowater went shopping. It was near noon when, cardboard box in hand, he stepped through the big front door of the military hospital and let an orderly guide him to the ward in which Hieronymus Taylor lay.

He stood beside the bed for a moment, looking at Taylor, whose eyes were closed and who was apparently asleep. The engineer was propped up with pillows to a near sitting position. He looked bad, with a week’s growth of salt-and-pepper beard, face paler than usual, with a waxy look to it and a sheen of sweat. He had lost quite a bit of weight, Bowater realized. Taylor seemed to be suffering in his own personal hell, and Bowater did not know what it was.

At last Taylor opened his eyes, slowly, and let his head loll over until he was looking at Bowater. “Cap’n.” He spoke slowly and his voice was weak. “I heard all the celebratin goin on last night, on account of our great victory. You lookin pretty smart for a fella been drinkin, whorin, and brawlin all night.”

“Just drinking and brawling, actually. And it’s the whoring that really takes it out of one.”

Taylor managed a thin smile. After a pause he said, “Ain’t this where you tell me how good I look?”

“It would be, if you didn’t look like absolute hell. Chief, you got to try and get some rest, do you understand?”

“Yeah, yeah… been hearin that from the damn doctors all mornin. Well, if it’s any comfort, reckon I’d drop like a rock was I to try standin up, so it looks like I ain’t goin anywhere for a while.”

“Good. Good.”

They were quiet for a moment and Taylor closed his eyes. He opened them again. “ ‘Mississippi Mike’ don’t look too good this mornin.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“He was by, hour or so past. Brought me a nice little flask, some cigars.”

“Just what the doctor ordered.”

Taylor smiled again. “Sullivan’s lookin to get rid of Guthrie, I reckon. He’s tryin to scout himself up a new engineer.”

Son of a bitch, Bowater thought. “He’s made a few veiled references to having my men sail aboard his boat. Laying the groundwork for stealing my crew, I suspect. Now he’s after my engineer?”

“He and Guthrie never did see eye to eye, and from the sounds of it, it ain’t gettin better. Never thought much of ol Sullivan, but I gots to say, Guthrie is one royal pain in the ass.”

“Certainly. But so are you, Chief.”

“Course I am.” Taylor closed his eyes for a moment, rallied his strength. “But I’m a damned good engineer, which fact compensates for me bein a pain in the ass. Guthrie ain’t even a good engineer. They like to go to fisticuffs here any day, Guthrie and Sullivan. Sullivan’ll cut him loose, soon as he finds a new man.”

Bowater was suddenly afraid that Taylor would take Sullivan up on the offer. They were river rats of a feather, after all. As a warrant officer, Taylor could resign anytime he wished and join the army, which had authority over the River Defense Fleet. And while Bowater certainly would have been pleased to swap Taylor for a more agreeable man, or at least one who kept to himself, he did not care to find himself without any engineer at all.

“So what did you tell him?”

Taylor closed his eyes again and chuckled. “As if I’d sail with a damn peckerwood calls hisself ‘Mississippi Mike.’ Hell, I’d rather be engineer on board the Tennessee, with the damn engine a hundred miles downriver, than sail on that ol General Page.”

Bowater nodded, oddly relieved. For a long moment they were silent. “Chief,” Bowater said, and felt himself flush with embarrassment even as he approached his prepared speech. Taylor opened his eyes and looked up. “I happen to see this on sale for an absurd price, so I picked it up for you.”

Bowater held up the box, two feet long and a foot wide. Taylor shuffled himself to a sitting position, frowned at the box as if he had never seen the like. At last Bowater had to thrust it at him just to get the engineer to take it.

Taylor set the box on his lap and opened the cover. Inside lay a violin and bow and a little bag of rosin and spare strings. In the daylight streaming in through the big windows the varnish on the dark wood gleamed as if it were wet.

Taylor said nothing. He just stared at the instrument.

“I don’t know a thing about violins, and the price was so good I fear it may be a very inferior instrument,” Bowater lied. He actually knew a fair amount about violins, though he did not play himself, and at two hundred and forty dollars he expected this one to be reasonably good. “In any event, I know you lost your old one with the Yazoo River and I imagined it would help pass the time if you could play. And I suppose…”

Bowater was rambling but Taylor was not listening. He reached slowly into the box and with his left hand lifted the instrument by the neck, gently, as if he was lifting something of unknown fragility. Bowater stopped talking.

Taylor tucked the violin under his chin and plucked at the G string. Bowater had insisted that the shopkeeper tune the instrument before he took it, but Taylor was not satisfied. He gave the tuning peg the slightest twist and there was a barely perceptible rise in the note coming from the vibrating string. He did the same to the D, A, and E strings, tweaking them ever so slightly. He listened with eyes closed to the last dying note, then his right hand reached for the bow.

Bowater smiled. Whatever torment Taylor was suffering, it was made worse by not having the release that music gave him. He understood that, because he found the same release in painting, an emotional blowdown, pouring his unconscious self out onto the canvas.

If William Bowater had found in his heart a new degree of empathy and concern for his brethren, then Samuel guessed he could as well. And what better use to put his father’s money to?

Samuel waited for Taylor to say something, but he did not. Instead he lifted the bow and brought it down on the strings and drew a long note. Bowater looked around, embarrassed, considered suggesting that perhaps Taylor should not play in the hospital ward. Several of the patients were looking over, their expressions ranging from curiosity to annoyance.

Hieronymus Taylor, eyes closed, was utterly unaware of the stares of his fellow sufferers. He seemed unaware of anything. Bowater had seen men in such a state before, sailors in port after long months at sea, looking at the taverns or whores on shore, completely mesmerized by desire. He had never seen such a reaction to a classical instrument.

Taylor tried the bow on each of the strings, listening to their notes, and then he set in. Bowater had expected “Camptown Races” or “Roll the Old Chariot Along” or “Shenandoah’’-the best he could hope for-or any of the various crude, barbaric popular ditties with which Taylor had once amused the men and driven Bowater nearly to distraction.

But he did not play any of those. Instead it was Mozart, Mozart’s Quintet in G Minor, one of Bowater’s personal favorites. He looked at Taylor to see if this was for his benefit, or if the engineer was mocking him, but Taylor ’s eyes were closed and his lips moved a bit and he was oblivious to everything but the instrument.

He played as if the music had been dammed up inside of him and now, finally, the dam had burst and the notes were flooding out. The music filled the ward, which Bowater noticed had surprisingly good acoustics. Those who could sat up in bed. Nurses and doctors filtered in, stood off to the sides, watching and listening. Bowater, caught up in the beauty of the sound, did not even register the fact that he was as much the center of their collective gaze as was Taylor, not until the last few measures played out and Bowater looked around and flushed with embarrassment.

Taylor let the bow bounce off the strings and the patients and the hospital staff applauded, but the engineer did not seem to notice any more than he had noticed anything since he had lifted the instrument from the box. He leaned back on his pillow and smiled, a sort of tired yet sated smile. He ran his eyes over the violin, shook his head. At last he looked up at Bowater.

“I thank you, Cap’n. I surely do. I can’t recall a greater kindness done me.”

Bowater shrugged, even more embarrassed. “It’s not much of an instrument, I fear.”

“It’s fine, fine. Just lovely.”

“Yet I perceive it does not have quite the depth and timbre of your old one.” And that was true; Bowater had noticed as much midway through the piece.

Now Taylor shrugged, a dismissive gesture. “The old one was a Guarneri, been around since the 1650s. We ain’t gonna see its like on the Mississippi agin.”

Bowater’s eyes went wide, despite himself. “A Guarneri?” Some people held the Guarneri family to be superior even to the Stradivari in violin-making. “Dear God, and you took it to sea? Into battle?”

“Only fiddle I had.”

Bowater was speechless. His head was filled with images of that exquisite instrument being blown to splinters by a Yankee shell. “How did you happen to come by a Guarneri?”

Taylor smiled. “Gift from my pa.”

“This would be the pa you told me spent his whole life loading freight on the docks of New Orleans?”

Taylor smiled, a smile of shared and unspoken understanding. “It was somethin like that,” Taylor said.

“What a terrible waste,” Bowater said.

“Lost a lot worse’n a fiddle that night, Cap’n,” Taylor said, and there was a catch in his voice, as if a word had caught momentarily, blocking the rest in his throat, just for an instant. He choked it out, looked down at the violin, coughed as if trying to clear the source of his discomfort.

So that is it, Bowater thought. “In any event, I had best be running along,” he said, trying to breeze through the awkwardness of the moment.

“Yeah, yeah… and thanks, Cap’n, again, for the fiddle.” Taylor met his eyes. There was sincerity there. It was an unusual look for Hieronymus Taylor.

“You’re welcome. I’ll come again.” The men shook hands and Bowater took his leave.

In the lobby of the hospital he paused, stared out one of the windows. Was it the nightmare of death on board the Yazoo City, in that last desperate hour below New Orleans, that had so affected Taylor ’s mind as to set him on this path of self-destruction? It was certainly possible.

And what, Bowater wondered, does that say about me? Taylor ’s reaction was perfectly understandable, but what kind of a person became more upset over the destruction of a rare violin than over the deaths of ordinary men?

Bowater shook his head. He had seen death before, of course, more than Taylor, he imagined. He had seen the casualties of the Mexican War, the men blown apart by naval gunnery at the bombardment of Veracruz. Men died all the time at sea, from falls or disease or any of a countless number of shipboard accidents, circumstances unknown on riverboats.

Death was a constant, as much as foul weather or rocks and shoals. Bowater had seen more men go over the standing part of the foresheet than he could remember. He had been aboard the captured slavers during cruises off the African coast, had seen the horrors of the lower decks. Was he beyond feeling now?

He thought of Thadeous Harwell, first officer aboard his first command, shot down at the Battle of Elizabeth City. Young, enthusiastic Harwell, and the memory gave him a sharp knife thrust of sadness, and with it came genuine relief that he could still feel such an emotion.