Glory in the Name

22

CSS Cape Fear

Gosport

Naval Shipyard

Portsmouth, Virginia

July 25, 1861

Dear Father,

You have no doubt heard by now of our Army’s glorious victory at Manassas this weekend past. It gives me great joy, as I am sure it does you and all true Southern gentlemen.

I am pleased to say that my crew and I, with our small tug, were able to act some small part in our present fight for independence. We peppered the enemy very well at Newport News, and even disabled one of their steamers. It was no Trafalgar, to be sure, but I was pleased with what we were able to do with our little boat.

Our casualties were not terribly bad, though any loss of life is to be regretted. And though I would never hold material goods in the same esteem as the lives of my men, I must say that the loss to me in personal effects was quite complete, as a shell burst apparently right in the middle of my cabin. I am able to replace most of what I lost here in Norfolk, but I would ask you to compel M. LeGrande to run up a half-dozen shirts for me, white linen, and ditto pants. I should ask for navy blue, but I have heard of late that the navy will be setting gray as the uniform color for naval officers, which is absurd. Blue is the standard the world over—who ever heard of a navy man in gray? Also, please apply to Mr. Scribner, the cobbler, for a new pair of dress shoes and a pair of boots. He should have the particulars of my size…

Samuel Bowater

To: Mr. William Cornell 42 Water Street

Charleston, North Carolina

Sir:

In April of this year, you hired out a Negro in your possession, name of Billy Jefferson, as coal heaver aboard the Confederate States Ship Cape Fear. As chief engineer of the vessel, Billy has been under my supervision. I regret to inform you that, during action with the Yankee navy, Billy was badly burned on his hands, rendering him unfit for duty. As I am sure you have no use for a Negro who is no longer capable of labor, I have enclosed a bank draft for $500 which I think you will agree is a reasonable price for a Negro who can’t work. Please fill out a bill of sale and a receipt for the money and send it to me at the address below.

Respectfully,

Hieronymus M. Taylor,

Chief Engineer, CSS Cape Fear

Naval Dockyard

Gosport, Virginia

From the Diary of Wendy Atkins:

I have seen the elephant, as the soldiers say, and it is a horrible, horrible beast. I have been in combat, as sure as any man in the service. Indeed, I would venture that now I have seen worse than many. I was frightened to death by the sights around me, the blood and the carnage. And then soon, I found myself frightened more by my reaction to it, the casual disregard I soon had for death, including my own. I understand now something I had always wondered about: how soldiers and sailors can face such things and not go mad. Or perhaps they do, and I have as well. I don’t know.

Before this cruise I had seen my Two Gentlemen, Samuel and Hieronymus, in one light, and now I have seen them, and myself, in another. I believe I will go to Richmond for some time to visit friends. I must get away from here and from my memories for a while and sort them out. I want to be with Samuel and I want to be with Hieronymus and I cannot bear to be with either, so I must leave and see how it falls out.

Office of Ship Maintenance

Gosport Naval Shipyard

Sir:

Per your orders I have completed a thorough inspection of the tug CSS Cape Fear and submit the following report:

Hull and Machinery: Despite the severe fire that the vessel received, it appears that no shot struck her between wind and water, and none below the waterline, leaving her hull and machinery in generally good shape.

Superstructure: A majority of the damage done to the vessel appears to have occurred in her superstructure, due no doubt to the enemy’s tendency to aim high. A direct hit was made on the forward bulkhead of the deckhouse and the shell apparently exploded within the confines of the galley, resulting in the total destruction of that area, save for the icebox, which is located on the after side of the steel bulkhead which separates the galley from the fidley. (Incidentally, I am told that at the moment the shell hit, the boat’s cook, a freedman named St. Laurent, was completely within the icebox, searching for a bottle of heavy cream. Had he not been, he would surely have ended up the consistency of heavy cream himself.) The forward bulkhead and all of the galley’s structures and equipment will require repair or replacement. The crew is currently cooking all meals ashore.

An additional shell exploded in the master’s cabin right abaft the wheelhouse, destroying the master’s cabin and its contents completely and doing significant damage to the wheelhouse, including the total destruction of the chart table and all of the charts, and the destruction of all windows and frames and the collapse of the roof. There is but a small section of the wheelhouse and cabin that may be salvaged.

Conclusion: Despite the ferocious mauling that the Cape Fear received at the hands of the Yankees, she emerged with little damage to her hull. The preponderance of the damage was to her superstructure, which is much more easily repaired, and at lesser expense. It is my estimate that she might be restored to her former condition in a week or less, and at a cost of approximately $300.

Respectfully submitted,

James Meads, Master Carpenter

To: Flag Officer Forrest

Flag Officer’s Office, Dockyard

Gosport, Virginia, July 25, 1861

To Whom It May Concern:

Know all ye who read this, that the bearer, Billy Jefferson, a Negro, five foot eight inches tall, of dark complexion with burn scars on both hands, is a free man, made free by Hieronymus Taylor, his rightful owner, as of April 25, 1861, and on my direction is traveling to Canada.

Respectfully,

Hieronymus M. Taylor

From the Journal of Lieutenant Thadeous Harwell:

…and then through blood-soaked lashes I opened my eyes to gaze on the noble visage of the Captain. How very concerned he looked! And for me, but a lowly officer! But such is the nobility of the man’s heart.

“Nay, lie here, good man, till you have strength enough to stand,” quoth he, but I struggled to my feet and with barely strength enough I saluted as crisp as I might and reported myself ready for duty.

23

Went to Miss Sally Tompkins’ hospital. There I was rebuked. I deserved it. Me: “Are there any Carolinians here?”

Miss T: “I never ask where the sick and wounded are from.”

— Mary Boykin Chesnut

“Hello, Mississippi.”

Jonathan Paine opened his eyes. There was a young black man looking down at him, about his age, a few years older, perhaps. Black hair cut close. A day’s growth of beard over a deep mahogany face. He was smiling.

Jonathan fixed the face with his stare for half a minute, a minute. It was not like the other faces, from before, not ghostly and indistinct. It seemed real. So did the bed he was lying on, the room around him.

He had been caught in an undertow of nightmare, swirling images, dreams that were not dreams, jarring motion that made him cry out but would not stop, dark and light shadows, faces moving like phantoms in front of his eyes.

But this was not like that.

“Water…” he said. He could barely hear his own voice.

The young man nodded. He reached down and Jonathan could see he wore an apron and the apron was covered with blood. It was an image right from the nightmare, but it was more solid than those ephemeral things had been.

The man lifted Jonathan’s head, pressed a glass to his lips. The water was tepid but clean, and Jonathan sipped it, felt the liquid wash over the dry, raw patches in his mouth and throat, cool them and wet them. He drank some more, and then drained the glass.

“More…”

They repeated the procedure and then Jonathan let his head fall back, exhausted. He closed his eyes for a moment, but this solidness, this new reality, was too intriguing for him to ignore. He could recall coming to a vague and unconscious understanding that he was dead and in hell. He opened his eyes again. The young man was still there, and that was a relief.

“Where am I…?”

“ Richmond. You inna hospital.” The young man seemed to find delight in the questions, as if he had been waiting for Jonathan to ask.

Jonathan turned his head, just a bit. He was in some kind of sitting room, a big one, like the sitting room at the Paine plantation, but beyond the molding and the light fixtures and the fireplace, there was nothing else that suggested a private home. All of the chairs, the tables, the bookcases that one might expect were gone, and in their place were beds, perhaps twenty beds in that one room.

There were men in the beds and others bustling around them, and women, too. Men in tattered uniforms, walking on crutches or sitting on the edges of beds. Sunlight streamed in from big windows, filling the place with brilliant light. Far from hell, this place with its white sheets and brilliant sunlight looked more like heaven. But it was not that. In heaven, Jonathan was sure, he would not be in such agony as he was.

“My name’s Bobby,” the young man offered. “Bobby Pointer. I work for da missus, runs the hospital. I take care a da stables, most times, but now I’s helping out here. Nurse, you might say. We gots more wounded boys den we gots horses, now.”

Then a woman appeared, beside Bobby, seemed to just float into place. A young woman, not thirty. She had dark hair and wore a white apron, spotted here and there with dark brown stains.

“Is our young man awake, at last?” the woman asked. Her voice was musical. Jonathan could not recall the last time he had heard such a voice.

“Yes, ma’am. Jest opened his eyes.”

“Hello, Private. My name is Miss Tompkins. How are you feeling?”

Jonathan tried to nod but could not. He opened his mouth to speak, but there were too many things he wanted to ask, and so he just shook his head.

Miss Tompkins watched his struggle and said nothing. She did not seem impatient or surprised at his inability to speak. After a moment she just smiled again, a lovely smile, patted his arm, and said, “I must go attend to the others, but I’ll be back. You are in good hands here, with Bobby.” And with that she seemed to float away.

Bobby leaned close, and said in a conspiratorial tone, “She call herself ‘Miss,’ but da truth is, she ‘Captain’ Tompkins. Jeff Davis hisself done give her a commission as captain in da army. Imagine dat!”

Jonathan nodded again, still could think of nothing to say.

“You was at da battle at Manassas, you recall?” the young man asked. “You done took a hell of a knock on da head.”

Jonathan tried to think. Battle at Manassas… Yes, he could recall that, but just images. Not like the fleeting nightmare images, but close. He recalled thirst. He recalled noise. He recalled the horror of bullets whizzing past, men screaming and dying.

“Nathaniel…”

“Nathaniel? That your name?”

“No…” He paused for a long moment, felt consciousness slipping away, thought he might pass out, but the lightness faded. “He was my brother…I’m…Jonathan.”

“Well, howdy, Jon’tin. We been waiting to see if you gonna live or not. You be one tough sumbitch…”

Jonathan stared at the young man. Tough son of a bitch? He felt weak as a baby. “How did I get here?”

“You was at Manassas. Somehow you gots in wid da 33rd Virginia, got shot up awful bad. Near left for dead, but someone seen you was still breathing, so they patched ya up, sent ya here. You been crazy wid da fever for a week or more. No one knowed who you was, on account of you not bein’ with you regiment. We jest called you ‘ Mississippi.’ ’Cause dat’s what it says on you buttons.”

Jonathan swallowed and nodded. He could recall the bullets plucking at his coat, the waves of blue Yankees coming on, up that hill. He felt points of pain all over his body, places where the ache was not general but rather concentrated, as if he was being stabbed repeatedly in the same spots. But of all the aches, one clearly pronounced itself the worst.

“My leg…it hurts like hell…”

“Which one?”

Jonathan closed his eyes and thought about where the pain was. “Right…” he said. He opened his eyes again. Bobby was looking at him, and his expression was part sympathy, part amusement.

“I hates to tell you dis, but you ain’t got no right leg.”

Jonathan frowned at him. I just told you it hurts like hell… He struggled to lift his head and look down at his body, lying on the bed. He was covered with a white sheet, clean and sweet-smelling. At the far end of the bed he saw the point of white cloth made by the toes of his left foot. To the right there was nothing.

He fell back on the pillow, stared up at the ceiling.

“You be surprised,” Bobby was saying, “how often dat happens. Fella feels pain in a arm or a leg that ain’t even there no more.” He was trying to sound cheerful. Jonathan would have strangled him if he had had the strength to lift his arms.

It was coming back now, not a trickle of memory, but a flood tide. He had led Nathaniel to the fight and Nathaniel was dead. He recalled the look in his brother’s dying eyes, the death rattle as the life ran out of him on the field. He recalled the note he had written, stuffed in Nathaniel’s uniform.

His brother’s body would be back home now. Robley would have written their parents, told how Jonathan had persuaded Nathaniel to march off, just like all those other times he had lured his brother into trouble.

He closed his eyes against the grief and the hurt. He was crippled, his leg cut off by some army butcher. His parents and Robley Junior would despise him for what he had done, as well they might, the loathsome creature, to lure a brother to his death.

He felt the bed shift as Bobby stood and walked softly away and left Jonathan to lie there and envy the men left dead on the fields south of the Bull Run.

The Union navy was massing for something. Samuel Bowater had not been wrong in thinking so.

As the shipwrights swarmed over the Cape Fear, rebuilding her wheelhouse and galley, replacing panels in the sides of the deckhouse, patching holes and strengthening the bulwarks where the gun breeches made off, reports continued to come downriver of more and more ships gathering at Newport News and Hampton Roads.

As the burned-out wreck of USS Merrimack was transformed slowly into the ironclad CSS Virginia, Merrimack ’s old consorts, the Minnesota, Wabash, Monticello, Pawnee, and Harriet Lane , gathered as if for a reunion off Fortress Monroe. Also in attendance were the chartered steamers Adelaide and George Peabody, and the tug Fanny, all ships of the United States Navy. There were others as well, transports and battered old schooners, whose purpose was not clear.

Little, in fact, was clear, save that the United States Army and Navy were preparing to fall on some part of the Confederate coast.

July turned to August. The Cape Fear was returned to service, her superstructure repaired, her master’s cabin made better than it had been, with oak paneling, hinged windows, and a compass mounted over the bed. It was even extended by two feet aft, adding significantly to the volume therein. The former cabin had, after all, been no more than a bunk for a tugboat skipper, but now it was the great cabin of an officer of the Confederate States Navy.

August crept by, with its sweltering heat and dripping humidity. During the soft Virginia evenings, when the sun began to incline toward the west, and the Cape Fear was tied to the seawall or swinging on her hook, Hieronymus Taylor made his way aft to the fantail, violin under his arm, and sitting on the after rail coaxed lovely soft melodies from his instrument.

Moses Jones would soon drift aft, as if by pure chance, and he would lend his voice to Taylor’s music. They reminded Samuel, who would sometimes listen from the roof of the deckhouse, of two dancers in perfect sympathy with one another.

An illiterate coal passer and a poor, barely educated Southern peckerwood, but somehow, to Bowater’s amazement, they made music as if they were one person, and even he, who had no tolerance for the dreary sentimentality or the shallow joviality of popular music, found some merit in their performances. As did the other Cape Fears, who gathered every night to listen.

Early in the month the Yankees sent hot-air balloons aloft from the deck of a small steamer, with men in baskets suspended beneath to take a look at the Confederate works at Sewall’s Point. It was a novelty that warranted a few days’ discussions. And still the Union ships assembled, until they were so much a part of the coastline that neither Bowater nor any others of the Confederates on the shore south of Hampton Roads paid them any mind.

Until the afternoon of August 26, when they left.

It was a Monday. The day before, Bowater had wandered over to the riverfront park with a new canvas and easel. There had been several weeks of inclement weather, which had kept him from his usual painting, and that had made him anxious, a reaction which surprised him. It would not have occurred to him that he was anxious to see Wendy Atkins again, though thoughts of her still haunted him. More curiosity than anything, he told himself, a self-flagellating tendency to stoke his own irritation.

The Cape Fear was at the dock at Sewall’s Point, just south of Hampton Roads, off-loading ordnance. Despite the big Parrott gun in the bow and the twin howitzers, the tug was once again transporting supplies around the Elizabeth River. Bowater hoped to get into action again, indeed he never thought otherwise, but it would not be shelling the Union fleet. No one thought the United States Navy would be caught napping twice.

“Fleet’s getting up steam,” a captain of artillery noted as he and Bowater and Taylor watched the Cape Fears swaying a smoothbore thirty-two-pounder off the fantail and onto its waiting carriage.

“Is that a fact?” Here was some interesting news. The sharp edge that Bowater had felt after his fight with the steamer was now growing dull again.

Bowater and Taylor followed the gunner up the wooden steps, past the dusty earthworks, the mounds of dirt piled up to augment the fortification already in place.

They climbed up to the top of the rampart, above the black barrels of the guns that leered out over the water. Before them, spread out like a lake, the blue water of Hampton Roads. A little over three miles to the north, Fortress Monroe. Five miles off and a little north of west was Newport News Point, and between them, like a series of black dashes on the blue water, the massed fleet of the United States.

Bowater pulled his telescope from his pocket, snapped it open, and focused it north. He could pick out the Wabash and the Minnesota. Plumes of black smoke were crawling up from their stacks. Steam frigates getting underway. The wind was light out of the south. When Samuel Bowater was a young boy, no man-of-war could have left the Chesapeake Bay in those conditions. But the steam engine had changed that, had changed the entire nature of war at sea. Now schedules, and not wind and tide, dictated fleet movements. Now engineers lorded it over captains.

“That’s a lot of damned ships.” The artilleryman’s observation yanked Bowater from his reverie.

“And that don’t count the ships still on blockade. Or comin’ in from foreign ports,” Taylor added.

The three men stood silent for several minutes and looked at the fleet. The profile of one of the big steamers began to change, to foreshorten.

“Wabash is underway,” Bowater said.

“Where you think they’re goin’?” the artilleryman asked.

“Hard to say. Charleston? Cape Fear? New Orleans? They have more choices than ships, to be sure.”

“Wherever it is,” Taylor said, “some poor Southrons are in for a whole lot of hurt.”

Thirty hours later, as the Cape Fear picked up her mooring off the dockyard, with the sun just a few hours from setting, they discovered where the fleet was bound, and who was in for the hurt.

“Boat’s putting out, sir.”

Ruffin Tanner, who had remained with the Cape Fear, was lashing the helm, looking out the wheelhouse window, as Bowater wrote in the log, 4:43—Done with engine.

Samuel turned and stepped across the wheelhouse and looked where Tanner pointed. A longboat pulling for them. Odd. He picked up the field glasses that he kept near the wheel, fixed the boat in the lenses. Flag Officer Forrest in the stern sheets. Odder still.

“Mr. Harwell!” The luff looked up from the foredeck. “It appears that Flag Officer Forrest is coming aboard. Please arrange for some kind of side party,” he said, and Harwell, who absolutely lived for such pomp, saluted and hurried off.

Five minutes later, Forrest stepped aboard to a credible display involving rifles and cutlasses and Eustis Babcock’s bosun’s pipe. Forrest exchanged salutes with the officers and Bowater led him up to the wheelhouse.

“They did a good job here, damned good,” Forrest said, looking around the rebuilt bridge and cabin and nodding his head. “They do good work, when they do work. Now see here, Bowater. Just got word. That damned Union fleet’s anchored at Hatteras Inlet. Got a chart?”

“Yes, sir.” Bowater pulled the chart of the coast from Cape Lookout to Cape Henry, unrolled it, and placed weights on the corners.

“There.” Forrest put a meaty finger down on the narrow Hatteras Island. “All those ships, you saw them. They’re going to blow hell out of the forts. We have two forts there, Hatteras and Clark. Gibraltar they ain’t.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve been there. Delivered ordnance to them twice now.”

“Yes, yes. ’Course you have. Good. Because you’re going to do it again. We’ve got to try and reinforce them. They don’t have above four hundred men, against all those abolition kangaroos Welles sent down there. Commodore Barron will be going down with Winslow soon as he can get underway. You’ll report to him. Get your ship alongside and get all the ordnance you can take.”

“And we are to leave?”

“Immediately, Captain. Immediately. As I hear it the Yankees are already knocking the stuffing out of those forts.”

“Aye, sir.” Bowater stepped over to the engine-room bell, gave a single jingle. Stand by. He waited to hear Hieronymus Taylor cursing from two decks down.

Twenty minutes later, they were tied up alongside the dockyard. With the fires freshly banked it took no time to get head up steam again. It took longer for Bowater to explain to a fuming Chief Taylor why his engine, which he had put happily to bed, was being called on once more. At last, when he seemed sure that Bowater understood the great favor being rendered, Taylor stooped to spread the fires in the boiler.

Goddamned engineers…

The ordnance workers were ready for them: a wagonful of shells and fuses, powder and round shot, whatever could be spared for the beleaguered forts on Hatteras.

With the sun an hour from setting, they cast off and headed downriver, to where the wide Elizabeth grew more and more narrow and channeled at last into the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, a thirty-five-mile cut through the wild Great Dismal Swamp.

The canal was mostly straight, and not terribly wide, only one hundred feet or so in most places. The vegetation grew right up to the banks, tall stands of cyprus trees lining the canal so that, in the gathering dusk, one had the sense of steaming down a city street, with tall buildings to port and starboard.

Samuel Bowater stood just outside the door of the wheelhouse, peering into the deep shadows that fell over the water. They were steaming at half ahead, the fastest that he dared go down that dark river.

“Come left, just a bit there…” he called into the wheelhouse, and Tanner repeated, “Left, just a bit…”

“Good…steady as she goes.” Bowater did not know how long they could keep this up, how dark would be too dark to steam down the canal. The sun was gone, and just the last tenacious threads of light were hanging in the west.

“A little right now…” And then the Cape Fear eased to a stop. Not a jarring crash, like hitting a rock, just a gentle cessation of movement, hardly noticeable, really, the feel of a slow-moving steamer running up on the mud.

Bowater reached up and gave the engine-room bell two jingles, stop. He looked forward, as far as he could, down the waterway, which was not far. The cyprus trees and the swamp grass seemed to melt into the water, so that he could not tell where one began and the other left off.

He grabbed the bell again, rang three jingles: done with engine.

All hands were called at eight bells in the night watch, four o’clock in the morning. In the predawn dark they ate and went to quarters.

Down in the engine room a grousing Hieronymus Taylor, bleary-eyed and rumpled, ordered Moses Jones to spread the fire while he stripped down, stumbled behind the condenser, and washed away some of the sleep and the film of grime and sweat under the warm spray of the engine room’s now functioning shower bath. He toweled off, dressed, lit a cigar, and was feeling something near content when the wheelhouse rang down one jingle, stand by, followed two minutes later by three bells and a jingle, full astern.

Taylor nodded to himself as he shifted the reversing lever and twisted the throttle open. Patrician put her in the mud…thought so…

Samuel Bowater leaned over the rail of the deckhouse. The water of the Dismal Swamp Canal, dyed brown by the tannin from the ubiquitous trees, was churning into a white froth, boiling up from the turns of the Cape Fear ’s big prop. He looked up at the tree line, slipping ahead, as if the trees were marching on without them, but in fact it was the Cape Fear moving, backing out of her mud berth. He let out a quiet sigh of relief. It would have delighted Hieronymus Taylor to no end if they had had to use a steam winch to pull her off. The chief would have made simply giving the order a nightmare of humiliation.

They backed into the canal, and Bowater rang half ahead, then twenty minutes later, full ahead. It was warm and still behind the bulwark of cyprus trees, and the Cape Fear plowed her furrow south, and with each mile Bowater felt more and more anxious to get his cargo of ordnance to the forts before they were overrun by the Yankees.

They broke out of the Great Dismal Swamp before noon, steamed past Elizabeth City and down the Pasquotank River and into the wide-open water of Albemarle Sound, like a great saltwater lake. They chugged across the sound and past Roanoke Island and turned south toward Hatteras. To the east, the low, sandy dunes of the barrier islands. From the wheelhouse Samuel could catch glimpses of the Atlantic, stretching away to the horizon, beyond the barren yellow strips of land.

“Sir?” Thadeous Harwell stood forward of the wheelhouse, peering south with the big telescope. “Sir, perhaps you should see this.”

Bowater took the glass, pointed it in the indicated direction, sweeping along the line of low sand dunes and swatches of stunted trees, only just visible from the wheelhouse. He saw the dark vertical line that was the Cape Hatteras light. And then, south of that, he stopped.

It looked like a fog bank, or a low-lying cloud, but Samuel knew it could not be those things. It was smoke from artillery, the cumulative output of the guns of the United States fleet, billowing up high in the air, a dull gray cloud rising as high as the lighthouse itself.

“Dear God…” Bowater muttered. It took a frightening number of big guns to make a cloud like that. He wondered if they were too late. It did not seem possible the Confederates could stand up to such pounding.

For the rest of the morning and afternoon they plowed their way south. The Cape Fear was moving as fast as she could, a bit more than five knots. Samuel Bowater, graduate of the Navy School, understood displacement and theoretical hull speed, was familiar with William Froude’s latest Wave Line Theory, but that did not stop him from hating it all, and wishing a little more speed from the deep-draft tug.

They were still miles away when they heard the cannon fire, a deep rumble, very like thunder, but continuous, absolutely unrelenting. Soon they could see the spray of dirt and sand as the shells exploded on the low forts and the island, the infrequent jets of water as the Yankee ordnance overshot its targets and dropped into Pamlico Sound, on the landward side of Hatteras Island.

It was late in the afternoon when Bowater conned the Cape Fear into the shallow harbor, more an indentation in the beach, behind Hatteras Island. The screams of shells through the air, the constant explosions on the fort and the beach around, blotted out any other sound; the Cape Fear ’s engines, the anchor chain running out, the wind, which was brisk, everything. It was as if the fort was under a rain cloud, an isolated cloud that poured its deluge down on that spot alone. Hardly a shot fell that did not kick up a spray of earth from the ramparts. The gunfire from the fleet was deadly accurate.

Bowater picked up the field glasses, focused them on Fort Hatteras. The dirt was flying in tall brown spouts with each explosion of the Yankee ordnance, flying skyward like surf hitting a rocky shore. He could see no movement from the fort, save for the flying earth and the Confederate flag, standing straight in the stiff wind.

He shifted his gaze to the north, three-quarters of a mile. Fort Clark seemed to be spared the Yankees’ attention. He could see no explosions there, no rain of shells.

“Oh, damn…” It was not clear at first. He had to take a longer look. But then he saw it was not the Confederate flag flying on the flagpole, it was the Stars and Stripes.

Too late for you…

He swung the field glasses south again, looked past the beleaguered Fort Hatteras, over the low sandy island on which it stood, to the broad Atlantic, stretching away beyond.

The Union fleet was at anchor, the massive men-of-war nearly swallowed up in their own gun smoke, bright flashes stabbing through the gray cloud, as they poured their lethal shot on the poor mud walls of Fort Hatteras.

Bowater watched, mesmerized. All those ships. It was a terrible, terrible thing. He could recall the pride he once felt, looking upon those very ships, some of the most powerful in the world, enjoying the awe that their potential power could inspire. What could he do against them with his own tiny man-of-war, though she was nearly as fine as any that the Confederate States Navy could boast?

“Mr. Harwell, you may cast off the Parrott gun and try a ranging shot at the Yankee fleet,” he said. Harwell acknowledged the order, ran forward, nearly collided with Hieronymus Taylor coming up the ladder from the deck below.

“Good afternoon, Captain,” he said and paused to bite the end off a new cigar, spit the torn bit over the side, and light the noxious thing. He looked up, and for a long moment he just stared out at the Union fleet and the hail of iron they were hurling at the Confederate fort.

“Oh, Lordy…” he said at last.

“Behold, Chief Taylor,” Bowater said. “This, I believe, is why the Yankees do not lie awake nights for fear of the Confederate States Navy.”

24

Every effort that nautical skill, invention and courage can put forth must be made to oppose the enemy’s descent of the river, and at every hazard.

— Stephen R. Mallory

It was not difficult, Robley Paine discovered, for a man of means to get what he wanted, the increasing constrictions of war notwithstanding. Because the one thing people wanted more than anything was hard currency, gold, and that Robley Paine had.

Robley Paine had never been one for bank accounts, drafts, scrips, ephemeral bits of paper. He had all those things, of course. The world was too complicated for one to do business without them. But Paine’s primary concern, his raison d’etre, had been his boys’ legacy, and he would not trust that to preprinted forms and bankers’ promises. He would see, before all else, that his boys were set, that the Paine plantation and the Paine fortune would be there for them.

He was not alone in that, of course. It was the dream of every planter in the South. But the wealth of most other men was measured in land and slaves. What cash they had was paper currency issued by banks, or now by the Confederate States, which was already showing signs of devaluation, though the government had been issuing the notes for less than a year.

Robley Paine, however, kept a good deal of his wealth in gold, solid gold, bullion and coin.

Gold was a real thing, something one could hold in one’s hand, currency traded the world over and not subject to the machinations of government and finance, inflation, devaluation, the crash of the stock market. The worth of gold would not fluctuate with the fortunes of armies in the field.

Robley had been building his gold reserve for years, had resisted increasing his land-and slaveholdings to make certain the money was there for his boys. Nothing on earth would have induced him to spend it. Let the fiscal world crumble around him, let King Cotton lose his throne, Robley Paine’s boys would be sitting on a small pile of gold, that precious metal that had always been and would always be considered wealth.

But now his boys were gone, his reason for keeping that wealth blown away by Yankee invaders, and there was no reason in the world for him to hang on to it. Quite the opposite. Now he had real purpose in the spending of it.

He took passage to Vicksburg, the town draped like a blanket over high hills looking down on the twisting Mississippi below, walked along the river, stepping fast, his cane clicking on the stone quays and the wooden docks. His ancient wound ached until he was limping as if freshly shot, but it did not slow him in his search for a vessel.

He did not find one in Vicksburg, had not really thought he would. From there he took passage south, down to the great port city of New Orleans, a place he knew well, a place where he was known and where he knew people who could help him, a place where he knew he would find what he needed, every article. It was all to be had at New Orleans.

Robley was welcomed into the offices of Mr. Daniel Lessard, his shipping agent, with a greeting befitting an old friend, one who had been a steady source of income for many years. Lessard met him with hand extended and a smile that faded a bit as he looked on Paine’s face. “Robley, this is a surprise…” Lessard led Paine into his office, seated him in front of the big desk. “Are you well, sir? If you will forgive an impertinent question?”

“I have had a loss,” Paine said, in a tone that brought the discussion to a close. He fidgeted, adjusted the pistol he wore under his frock coat, a.44-caliber Starr Model 1858 Army revolver he had purchased a few years back. Most of the gold he had with him was in the hotel safe, but he carried a significant amount on his person, and he would protect himself. “I am interested in purchasing a riverboat. Do you know of any that might be suitable?”

“I know of many that are for sale,” Lessard said. Daniel Lessard was a wealthy man, and he had become such by knowing and establishing a relationship with everyone on the waterfront, from the meanest grifters to the most powerful merchants. “It would depend on what it must be suitable for.”

“River defense,” Paine said, and Lessard smiled, chuckled, then stopped as he realized that Robley Paine was not joking.

“‘River defense’?” Are you thinking of going into privateering?”

“No, I am thinking of stopping the goddamned Yankees from overrunning our home, that is what I am thinking of,” Paine said, feeling the words slip out, himself unable to contain them. He was not able to keep the menace from his voice. Lessard was visibly taken aback.

Oh, damn, oh, damn, Robley, get ahold of yourself… He could not always distinguish between the dialogue in his head and the words coming out of his mouth. “Forgive me, we are all under a great strain now, with the war…”

“Never think on it, sir!” Lessard waved his hand. “I know of several vessels might answer. There is Star of the Delta. About three hundred tons, hundred and fifty feet long, around thirty on the beam. Side-wheeler. She does not draw above seven feet. Two high-pressure, noncondensing engines, two boilers, all her machinery just recently gone over, in excellent condition.”

“She is for me, if she is what you say, sir,” Robley said. He scratched at his face, at the coarse growth of beard, wondered when he had last shaved. No bother. “When might we see her?”

“Now, I should think,” Lessard said brightly. He had some interest in this vessel, Robley could tell. The old Robley Paine would have been more cagey, would have discovered Lessard’s interest, driven a hard bargain. But now he was too pressed to argue or haggle.

“Show her to me.”

The Star of the Delta was tied up bow first not two blocks from Lessard’s office. She had the look of a vessel which had not moved in some time, but for all that she was in tolerably good order. Paine climbed up to her hurricane deck, stuck his head in the wheelhouse, ran his fingers over the wheel. He climbed down into the engine room with Lessard carrying a lantern to light the way. It cast wild shadows over the masses of piping and hulking bits of iron machinery. Paine looked at it, nodded, realized that he knew nothing whatsoever about ships and engines and such.

At last they returned to the deck above, stood on the fantail, looking out over the wide brown river. “She looks the thing, as far as I can tell,” Paine said. He looked Lessard in the eyes, and for the first time since he had resolved to defend the rivers of his home, he felt vulnerable, like a child, out of his depth. “I confess, sir, I am ignorant of these things. I look to you, as a friend, to advise me. Is this the vessel that I need? Is she in decent shape?”

Lessard put his hand on Paine’s shoulder, gave him a half-smile, a reassuring look. “Star of the Delta is a fine vessel, strong and well cared for. She will certainly serve you well.”

For a long time Robley held his old friend’s eyes. Then he said, “Thank you. This is a trying time for me, but you have helped me along. And now I must look into the next thing, the harder thing by far, and that is arming her.”

“Arming her? What sort of armament did you have in mind?”

Robley shook his head. “I don’t know. A shell gun, forward? Smoothbores? At close range the smoothbores have the advantage, you know, with their higher muzzle velocity. But I do not know what I will be able to acquire. Or how, to be honest.”

“Well, sir…” Lessard said. “This is New Orleans. For a price, my friend, all things are to be had here…”

It was ten days before the Star of the Delta could get underway. She bore a new name then, Yazoo River. Changing the name had been the only simple part of her transformation.

There were two significant differences between the Star of the Delta and the Yazoo River. One was the addition of a four-foot iron ram on her bow, a foot below her waterline. It fit snugly around the cutwater and protruded forward like an iron shelf, a foot thick. Heavy bolts went clean through the ram and the Yazoo River ’s cant frames and held the weapon securely in place.

The second addition was a letter of marque and reprisal, making the Yazoo River an official privateer. Robley had tramped through one office after another, filled in government forms, slipped bribes to greasy officials. It was the way of things in New Orleans. He had always understood it and accepted it. But it was harder now. His country was at war, and wicked people were making profit by obstructing the efficient prosecution of that war. It was insufferable, but Paine clenched his teeth, handed over the gold, tolerated it because he had to.

It was a formality, the letter of marque, as far as Robley was concerned, a bow to the legitimate authorities. Privateers captured prizes. Robley Paine was not interested in capturing anything. He intended only wholesale destruction, and he did not need a license for that.

The Yazoo River was a cotton-clad. Her armor, piled high on the foredeck and around the wheelhouse and the side decks, consisted of tightly compressed bales of cotton. They might help against small arms fire, Robley imagined, might make the men at the guns a bit more bold with the absurd belief that they were protected by the bales, but they would do no more than that.

Paine had actually purchased the cotton bales to pile on the decks, and that could not fail to amuse him. His fortune was based on growing and selling cotton; he had never purchased it in his life. Fortunately, it was not expensive, with the Union blockade already resulting in surpluses of the crop piling up in warehouses and docks.

Ten days of feverish work, of fighting with shipyard workers and recruiting sailors and engine-room crew, of getting his hands dirty working on the ship and kowtowing to corrupt officials, and spending gold at an extraordinary rate, buying coal and engine parts and food and charts and oil and shovels and slice bars and dockage. All things were to be had in New Orleans, and everyone had his hand out.

Ten days, and finally they cast off from the dock and Mr. Kinney, whom Paine had engaged as pilot, backed the Yazoo River out of her berth and into the Father of Waters. He spun the wheel once, rang up the engine room for half ahead, spun the wheel some more. Robley listened to the sounds of the big paddle wheels stop, a moment’s quiet, then the clank and splash and creak as they reversed direction.

“How does she feel, Mr. Kinney?” Paine asked. He was nominally captain, but he made no pretensions of knowing anything about boats. He left that aspect to Mr. Kinney and Brown, the engineer, both of whom treated Paine with a veiled contempt, and neither of whom Paine particularly liked. Paine did not think a fit Southern man had any business not being in the armed service. The very fact that Kinney and Brown were available made them suspicious in his mind.

“She’s fine, so far.” Kinney chewed thoughtfully at the plug of tobacco in his mouth, spit a stream into a spittoon, wiped a brown streak from his thick beard with the back of his sleeve. “Don’t know how long them goddamned engines’ll go, ’fore they blow all to hell, but so far she ain’t bad.”

Paine nodded, looked past the piles of cotton on the bow, at the brown water moving past. For all of his concerns about the ship and her crew—most of them were foreign, a surly and uninspired lot—he felt buoyed to be underway. If nothing else happened, nothing at all, he had a ship with a ram and he could end his life plowing it into the side of a Yankee man-of-war and have that to take to his grave, to tell his boys in heaven that he had done that much at least for them.

They steamed south from New Orleans, through the low delta country, the wild marshy places where the big river began to make its slow segue into the sea. The sun moved toward the horizon, but Kinney, for all of his objectionable qualities—and they were many—knew the river, and day or night, it made no difference.

It was well past dark, with the moon coming up, a thin gold sliver, when Paine began to worry. “We’ve not missed it?” It seemed as if they had been underway for some time, but Robley had never been that far down the river before.

“We ain’t missed it,” Kinney said. “Misser Lessard said the long pier north of St. Philip. We ain’t missed it.”

Daniel Lessard had helped with every step. He arranged the dockyard, located Kinney and Brown, put Robley in contact with the foundry that cast the ram. He had put Paine in the way of heavy guns. All that was needed now was to pick them up.

Another fifteen minutes and Paine could see lights on the high bank to the north, where the river made a dogleg turn, and Kinney rang up slow ahead. “There it is,” he said, nodding his head toward the dark window, but Robley could see nothing, so he simply nodded.

Kinney spun the big wheel, rang full astern, spun the wheel again, rang stop. He leaned out of the wheelhouse, called, “Git them goddamned dock lines ashore, you hear?” to someone below, and then with a bump the Yazoo River was there.

Where, Paine was not sure.

Kinney turned to Paine, working the tobacco in his jaw. “Here we are, Misser Paine. Long pier north of Fort St. Philip. Whatever business you got here, I ain’t got no part of it, hear? You go ashore, do what you want. Me, I stay here.”

Paine glared at the man, unsure of what he was implying. They were here to complete a transaction set up by Lessard, and Paine could not imagine there was anything illegitimate about it. So he said nothing, stepped out of the wheelhouse and over the gangplank the crew had set over the side.

It was dark where they had landed, and Paine had to wonder how Kinney had found the place, never mind bringing the Yazoo River alongside. He could hear the sound of a million insects carried on the humid air, along with the saline smell of brackish water, the swamp smell of decay.

Thirty feet away, a lantern unshuttered, the light spilling on the hard-packed ground and the sturdy wooden pier on which Robley stood. From behind the lantern, a voice that carried nothing but accusation said, “Who’s there?”

“Robley Paine.”

“Who sent you?”

“Mr. Daniel Lessard, of New Orleans.”

Quiet for a moment, then, “Come on over here.”

Robley stepped forward, trying to see the man who spoke, but he was holding the lantern in such a way that no light fell on him. Then, when Robley was no more than ten feet away, the man raised the lantern, let the light reveal him. A stout man, stout in the way of men who did physical labor, several inches shorter than Paine. He wore a Confederate uniform that did not fit him well, hugging his midriff too tight. The butt of a pistol showed from his holster. Another man stood a few feet behind him, a rifle conspicuous in his hands.

“Who are you?” Paine asked. It occurred to him that Lessard had never told him whom he was to meet.

“You don’t ask no question. You got money?”

“Perhaps…” Paine said. He was not too happy with the way this was playing out. “Do you have guns?” This greasy fellow, more of the overseer type than the soldier, did not seem to be a man in a position to be selling guns. How would a soldier get cannons to sell?

“Come on,” the man said, led Robley back down the pier. At the far end, half on the road, half on the pier, stood a heavy wagon, and behind it another, the sorry-looking draft animals standing patient in the traces.

Paine followed the soldier around to the back of the wagon. The man looked at his partner, gave him a nod of the head, and the other man leaned his rifle against the wheel and climbed into the wagon. He pulled back a piece of heavy, stained canvas. Underneath, the gleaming barrel of a ten-inch Dahlgren.

“New-cast, fully rifled. Come right out of the dockyard at Norfolk,” the man said, as if he was the proprietor of a store. Paine looked at the barrel, awestruck by the potential power of the thing.

“Lessard didn’t say nothin’ about carriages,” the man said. “Carriages you got to get on your own. See here.” The man led Paine to the second wagon, and once again his partner jumped in the back, pulled the cover off two six-pound smoothbores, just as Lessard had promised. Paine shook his head in wonder.

“Where did these come from?” he asked.

The greasy man exchanged a smile with his partner. “Oh, we know people. Railroad people. Things gets diverted, you understand.” He was grinning.

Paine squinted at the man. The light from the lantern, held at his waist, threw deep shadows over his face, making him look even more evil. “You stole these…” Paine said at last. “This is Confederate property, and you stole it and now you are reselling it.”

“You watch what you say, hear?” the man said. “Stole it? I’m a Confederate soldier, and you calling me a thief…”

Robley Paine felt a deep loathing in his gut. Confederate soldier? His boys had been Confederate soldiers, not this pig. His boys were dead, killed for the Confederacy, and this filth was profiteering from the cause, the cause for which his boys died.

“See here,” the greasy man said in a more conciliatory tone, “the Confederate Army gots no idea who needs what or where. We gonna lose the war, waiting for them politicians in Richmond to figure where supplies should be. So you think of me as like a private supply officer. It’s my business to see gentlemen like you gets what they need to fight proper.”

Paine’s hand moved for his gun, a practiced move; the muscles of his arm and hand had not lost the motion from his army days, even after all those years. His palm hit the butt, his fingers wrapped around the grip, found the trigger as he pulled the weapon free, his eyes on the startled face of the greasy man who was flailing for his own weapon.

The Starr came up, right in the man’s face, hammer back. The gun banged out and Robley let his arm absorb the strong, satisfying kickback. He turned, found the second man in the light of the fallen lantern, and from four feet away put a bullet neatly through his forehead.

Robley Paine looked down at the man at his feet, flung back, one arm stretched behind his head, the other still reaching for his holstered pistol.

A private supply officer … “I disagree, sir,” he said.

25

On Tuesday afternoon, the 27th of August, about 4 o’clock, I discovered a large fleet in sight off Hatteras… On the morning of the 28th, between 8 and 9 o’clock, a heavy fire was opened from the steamers Minnesota, Wabash, Susquehanna, and other war vessels…Being a fire of shells only, it might well be spoken of as a flood of shells.

— Report of Colonel William F. Martin, 7th Regiment Infantry, North Carolina Volunteers

The Cape Fears fired five shells from the ten-pound Parrott rifle, at maximum elevation, before they decided with absolute certainty that they could not reach the anchored Yankee fleet. Their gunfire did, however, attract the Yankees’ notice, and soon shells were falling all around them, sending plumes of water as high as the boat deck as they dropped in Pamlico Sound.

Hieronymus Taylor clumped up the ladder to the wheelhouse. He was in shirtsleeves, the wet patches of sweat radiating out from under his arms and under the straps of his braces, turning his otherwise brilliant white shirt gray. In his mouth, the ubiquitous cigar. He paused, squinting around, the corners of his eyes crinkled with amusement.

Samuel Bowater, in the middle of issuing his orders to Lieutenant Harwell, paused, turned his head, as the spray from a shell, landing no more than thirty feet away, lashed across himself and the lieutenant and Taylor.

“Damn,” Taylor said.

“They are getting the range on us, I perceive,” Bowater said, changing the course of his orders. “Once I am away, please shift the anchorage, say, one hundred yards north. That should put us out of most of their line of sight. No need to expose ourselves to fire if we cannot return it.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“We’ll keep steam up, then, Cap’n?” Taylor asked.

“I think so, Chief.”

“Pity the fort can’t shift one hundred yards off,” Taylor said.

Fort Hatteras did not seem to be returning fire. Bowater wondered if the garrison was out of ammunition, or if the fleet was out of range. With a small garrison and an enemy pounding them mercilessly, it did not seem a very hopeful situation.

“See that there?” Taylor said, nodding south, and Bowater turned and looked.

“What?”

“Ocracoke Island. That’s where Lieutenant Maynard come and ambushed Blackbeard the pirate. Cut his head right off, hung it from the bowsprit. Another case of them damned Yankees comin down here and givin grief to a good Southern boy, just lookin for his fun.”

“Hmm. I’m not certain your history is entirely correct there, Chief Taylor.”

“No, I…” A shell whistled by, passing close, and plunged into the sound right astern of Cape Fear. “No, I’m sure it happened right there.”

“I mean about Maynard being a Yankee. Or Blackbeard being a Southerner, for that matter.”

“You sure? Blackbeard spent a power of time in the South. Spent some time in Charleston, I do recall. Where you’re from. Hell, he may be your great-great-granddaddy. They say he had fourteen wives.”

“He most certainly…” Another shell came in, screaming down on the starboard side, exploding inches above the water, and Bowater’s comment was drowned in the rat-tat-tat of shell fragments hitting the Cape Fear ’s side and shrieking past their heads.

“Sir?” Ordinary Seaman Dick Merrow was standing on the wheelhouse roof, scanning around with the big telescope.

“Yes?” Bowater said, happy for a distraction from the silly conversation into which Taylor had drawn him.

“Small side-wheeler coming down sound…I reckon she’s about three miles off.”

“Let me see.” Merrow handed the glass down and Bowater focused it in the direction the sailor pointed. He could see the side-wheeler, smoke belching from her stack, could see the dot of white under her bow as she drove hard. From her masthead flew a flag, and though it was blowing straight aft, it appeared to be the broad pennant of a commodore, which made Bowater smile despite himself.

“This would be Barron in Winslow, ” he said to Harwell. “Let us hope he comes with some plan for salvation.”

The Cape Fear’s boat was lowered and Bowater climbed down to the stern sheets, with Eustis Babcock as bow man and Tanner at stroke oar. They pulled for the beach, ground up on the barrier island, splashed out, and pulled the boat up on the sand.

Bowater tramped up the beach, stopped, and looked around. Extraordinary. Shells were falling in a nonstop hail, exploding on the ramparts, within the fort, on the beach around the fort. With the sun heading toward the west, the fort and the sprays of dirt from the exploding shells were washed in an orange light. The noise was constant—the scream of the shells, the blast of exploding ordnance. And then every so often, by coincidence, there would be no firing, just silence, which was strangest of all. But it never lasted above ten seconds, and then the next shell, and the next, was hurled at the fort.

Bowater led his crew up the sloping shore. A young army lieutenant—he introduced himself as Lieutenant Evans—let them in through the thick oak door set in a rough wooden frame embedded in earthen walls. The Cape Fears huddled under the parapet with the rest of the garrison, while the lieutenant led Bowater up to the ramparts.

The Yankees were hitting the fort hard. With a relatively calm sea, and anchored ships firing on a fixed target, it was not too difficult for the invaders to hone their aim until nearly every one of their shells found its mark.

Bowater walked through the storm of iron, amazed at the amount of ordnance dropping on the fort, amazed that he had not yet been blown away. He moved with a strange calm, as if he was encased in ice.

He was not afraid, despite the shelling, despite the fact that any rational person would be terrified, cowering under whatever might offer some protection. It was a phenomenon he had experienced before. It was what they called bravery under fire, but he knew it had nothing to do with bravery. It was more a trick that the mind played on itself, a turning off of the machinery of fear, in the face of insupportable terror.

When he thought of it, he imagined a Stephenson link and reversing lever, the long iron bar that shifted an engine from forward to reverse. But in his mind the link shifted from fear to fight. The real courage, Bowater knew, was in getting yourself to the place where your mind could shut off.

Bowater mused on these things as he followed Lieutenant Evans up the rough wooden stairs, past craters of brown dirt where the shells had landed, past guns that stared silent and impotent out at the Union fleet.

Fort Hatteras was no marvel of engineering. It was mostly wood-frame, dirt-filled walls, the work of slaves who had been ferried out to the low island to throw up some defense against the inevitable arrival of the Yankees. Albemarle Sound was the gateway to the rivers that ran deep into Confederate country, and Pamlico Sound served as a base for privateers to race out and snatch up Yankee prizes as they labored around Cape Hatteras. Hatteras Inlet was too important for the Yankees to leave alone.

“Colonel?” Lieutenant Evans stopped and addressed an officer, sitting on the top of a small barrel and slumped against the earthen wall of the fort, one arm resting on the top of the parapet. “Colonel Martin, this is…”

“Captain Samuel Bowater, Confederate States Navy, sir, at your service.”

Martin looked from the lieutenant to Bowater, his head turning slowly from one to the other, as if it was a great weight that needed to build momentum. His eyes looked sunken and his face pale. Colonel Martin was very tired.

“Captain,” he said and made to stand, but Bowater said, “Please, sir, don’t stand on my account,” and Martin, without protest, remained seated.

“It has not been a good day for us, Captain,” Martin said, staring over the low wall at the Union ships. “The firing has gone on like this since daybreak. We were forced to abandon Fort Clark this afternoon. No ammunition for the guns, Union troops landing on the beach…spiked the guns as best we could. Had to use nails, didn’t even have proper spikes. Got most of the boys over here, but we still didn’t have enough to man the guns proper.”

Bowater nodded. It was a hopeless situation that Martin found himself in, and he had done what he could.

“Shelling’s slackened,” Lieutenant Evans noted.

Bowater and Martin looked around, as if they could see the absence of shells. The lieutenant was right. The artillery was coming in sporadically now, shells exploding once a minute, perhaps, or less, the fall of shot tapering off like the rain at the end of a quick-moving squall.

“It’s getting a bit dark for naval gunnery,” Bowater noted. The fleet was getting underway; some of the ships had already moved out to sea, where they could spend the night away from the beach and the guns of Hatteras.

“Well, it is some relief to see the Yankee navy is not immune to the laws of nature,” Martin said. “They are damn near immune to everything else. Hardly a shell has missed, and nothing we could do but take cover and endure it. I don’t know what more we can do.”

Bowater nodded and looked out at the anchored fleet, the big men-of-war washed in the evening light. They mounted nine-, ten-, and eleven-inch guns that could easily hurl shells from a distance that the fort’s eclectic artillery could never match. If they so chose, they could batter Fort Hatteras until it was indistinguishable from the sand dunes on which it sat. Samuel felt a bit of Martin’s despair play over him.

Damn, he thought, I am too damned late… And then he corrected that notion. The moment that the Union navy sailed for Hatteras, it was too damned late.

“Sir,” said Bowater, “I do believe Commodore Barron, who is in command of naval forces here in the sound, is underway and will arrive in an hour or so. Perhaps he has news of reinforcement.”

Martin seemed to brighten at that, just a bit. “Perhaps. Lieutenant Evans, please send word to the commodore that I would like a conference with him, at the earliest possible convenience.”

“Yes sir,” the lieutenant said, and he saluted and hurried off.

The shelling tapered away and then stopped as the evening settled down on the ocean and the tortured sands of Hatteras Island. Bowater sat on the parapet, looked out over the water, at his old navy, looked down the length of Hatteras Island, his old flag now flying over Fort Clark. The few stands of trees on the island looked like black patches on gray as the day faded to night, and lights like low-lying stars began to appear on the distant ships. Colonel Martin slept where he sat, his breathing sometimes rhythmic, sometimes labored.

It was full dark when Commodore Barron arrived, tramping up the wooden steps, led by Lieutenant Evans, who brought a lantern with him, and trailed by three other men, who turned out to be Colonel Bradford, colonel of artillery and engineers and chief of ordnance of North Carolina, and Lieutenants Murdaugh and Sharp, C.S. Navy.

Barron was a trim and energetic man, with thick white hair swept back over his head. Bowater guessed him to be in his sixties. They had crossed paths on a few occasions during their time in the old navy. He knew that Barron had entered the United States Navy on the first day of the year 1812, had been aboard the Brandywine when she conveyed General Lafayette to France in 1825.

“Commodore Barron,” Martin was saying, and it seemed a great effort for him to speak. “Our fort is armed with naval guns, as you can see, and my men are strangers to such ordnance, and I am played out, sir, I will freely admit it. Allow me to formally request that you take command here, Commodore, and do what you can.”

Barron made some grunting noise, looked up at the string of lights on the water where the fleet lay at anchor. He could refuse. He was a naval commander; forts were not his affair. He would put himself in the way of no glory by accepting responsibility for an effort that was certainly bound for failure. But for all that, Barron said, “I will accept command, sir, and do what I am able.”

Colonel Martin’s relief was evident, and he said nothing as Barron began to issue orders. “Captain Bowater, what have you brought down with you?”

“We have powder in barrels, sir, shell for the Columbiad and for the other guns, fuses, round shot, and some cartridges. We have not yet landed any of it, not knowing the state of things here.”

Barron looked around the fort, which, with the moon now rising, was all dark shadows and deep blue light. He pointed to the gun that looked out over Pamlico Sound. “No point in leaving that there. Yankees aren’t going to pass through the inlet till they’ve beaten us into the sand. We’ll shift that gun around so it can do us some good. Bowater, detail some of your men to get the ordnance you brought ashore, and whoever is left, get them on shifting that gun. Lieutenant Murdaugh, Sharp, same for you. We’ll take whatever men your ships can spare. We’ll fill out the gun crews with navy men. We have to make every effort, be ready for them when they open up on us at first light.”

Bowater returned to the Cape Fear, issued his orders, led his detail back to the fort. They joined with the others in the onerous task of creating a new gun emplacement and shifting tons of guns and carriages so that every available weapon was bearing on the Yankee fleet.

Barron was relentless. He drove the men hard and expected as much from the officers, and he got it. Sweating in the cool night, grunting, shouting, cussing, they hauled the big gun from its former position, used levers and block and tackle, staging and brute force to wrestle it to the newly created artillery platforms, one hundred feet away.

Two hours before dawn the men were stood down, allowed to sleep on the dirt parapets around the guns to which they were assigned. They dropped as if they had been drugged, and were not easily stirred when the first streaks of light appeared over the ocean, and the bells of the Yankee fleet rang out, two bells in the morning watch, 5:00 a.m.

They stood, cussed, staggered about, scratched and stretched. They gulped what passed for coffee, ate the porridge served out from the big cast-iron pot.

The men were still eating when signal flags broke out at the masthead of the flagship Minnesota and Barron, watching through a long telescope, announced, “That’s ‘Prepare to engage and follow my motions.’”

Bowater nodded. He was standing thirty feet away at the thirty-two-pounder smoothbore that he and the Cape Fears were manning.

Prepare to engage… It seemed there must be something they should do to prepare the fort for the coming onslaught. But there was nothing. Every gun that would bear was manned, loaded, run out. There was nothing that they could do now but wait.

Ruffin Tanner sat on the dirt parapet, looked out over the water, and Bowater looked at his face in profile, the morning light falling on him. “Tanner?”

The sailor turned. “Yessah?”

“Have we met before?”

“Yessah. I was the one steerin’ the boat when we fought that Yankee side-wheeler,” he said, but seeing that Bowater was not in a joking mood added, “And I think I seen you once, up to the dockyard in New York, oh, five years back. But we didn’t talk, sir.”

Bowater nodded. “I suppose not,” he said, but still there was something about Tanner’s face, some vague recognition, almost like that fleeting sensation of having experienced a place before, but more solid than that, more real.

The morning was quiet, just the sound of the surf on the beach and the scream of the sea birds, and soon the distant clank of chain coming aboard, as steam windlasses hauled up the Yankee fleet’s anchors.

It took the Union fleet an hour to get underway, and another hour to close with the fort. It was eight o’clock, the day already hot under the brilliant sun, when Susquehanna, leading the big ships, opened up. The shell whistled through the air with a sound that, once heard, was perfectly familiar. It landed on the beach, one hundred feet away, exploded in a spray of sand.

“Here they come, boys!” Commodore Barron shouted from where he stood on the parapet. “Get ready to fire on my word.”

Bowater watched the ships, felt the sweat on his palms, the crackling of electricity in his fingers, the jerky, excited motion in his limbs, the churning in his stomach. They were under fire now, and he wanted nothing more than to run and duck under the parapet. It was grit time, and all he could do was to stand there and fight it until his mind was merciful enough to shut down that instinct for self-preservation.

Another shot from Susquehanna, and then Wabash, both shells falling short as the Union gunners worked to get their range again. And still Barron stood unmoving on the parapet and did not give the order to return fire, as certain as was Samuel that Hatteras’s guns would not reach.

One by one the big ships paraded past, then backed their engines and dropped anchor. Together they made a movable fortress with seventy big guns bearing on the fort, against the three guns with which the fort could fire back.

Soon they were all firing, all the Yankee guns, the rain of shells coming in again, the burst of dirt and sand marching closer and closer to Fort Hatteras as the gunners adjusted aim from their stable platforms.

“Let ’em have it, boys!” Barron shouted and hopped down from the parapet as the Confederate gunners cheered. Bowater felt exuberant as he leaned over the barrel of his gun and sighted down its length; he felt charged and ready and all trace of fear was gone now. He yelled with the others, despite himself, yelled to let off the tension like a relief valve on a boiler.

He stepped back, pulled the lock cord taut. No need to adjust the lay of the gun; they had been fiddling with it obsessively for half an hour, waiting for the order to fire. The old thirty-two-pounder was aimed square at the high black side of the steam frigate Wabash, once the command of Samuel Barron. Bowater stepped back and jerked the cord, and the gun blasted off with a deafening roar, flung itself back against the breeching.

Bowater kept his eyes on Wabash, hoping to see splinters fly, but instead he saw a spout of water where his shot fell three hundred feet short.

“Another pound of power in the charge, Tanner,” he instructed, as he stepped over to the breech, twisted the elevation screw to raise the muzzle another few inches. He looked at the screw. Not much travel left. That had better do.

“Look, sir!” Tanner pointed over the parapet and Bowater followed his arm. Cumberland was underway, standing into the line of battle under a reefed fore course, topsails and topgallants, with no ugly plume of smoke belching out amidships. She was the only pure sailing vessel there, on either side.

Bowater shook his head. “Lovely.” But she was an anachronism, a ship from another time, from Lafayette’s age, and not the present. One had only to look at the Union fleet and the manner in which they moved onshore and off, oblivious to the state of wind and tide, to see that the days of the sailing ship were over, rail though the likes of Samuel Bowater might. He watched the stately, silent progress of the sailing man-of-war and felt a soft kind of a sadness come over him.

And then the first of the Union shells to find the parapet exploded, shook the earthworks on which Bowater stood, pelted him with dirt, and romantic notions fled.

“Run out!” he shouted, and the heavy gun was hauled up to the wall, Johnny St. Laurent and Nat St. Clair, landsmen Francis Pinette, Harper Rawson, and Bayard Quayle, Ordinary Seaman Dick Merrow, Cape Fears all, hauling on the gun tackles.

Bowater leaned over the barrel, called for the handspike until the gun was pointed again at Wabash ’s midships, stood back, and fired. And once again, a spout of water for their efforts.

Boom, boom, the shells were coming in regular now, marching up the beach, landing on the parapets and the grounds contained within the fort. Bowater guessed that for every Union shell that dropped short, six hit the fort. He heard another gun, from the north, and when he looked in that direction he could see that Fort Clark was opening up on them as well, their own guns now loaded with Yankee shells and turned on them.

Oh, dear God…

A shell hit near enough that the flying dirt stung him in the face, made him flinch, but his men did not hesitate in their swabbing, loading, running out. Bowater twisted the elevation screw until it would turn no more. The gun was pointed as high as it would go, the barrel stuffed with all the powder it would bear.

Run out, aim, fire. A white spout of water, in perfect line with Wabash. Two hundred more feet and they would have smashed the heavy ball right through her side. But there was no physical way to coax another two hundred feet from the gun.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Barron shouted, the exasperation as clear as the words, and the sound in the fort of men working guns died away, and the only sound left, and it filled the air, was the whistle of shells, the explosion of shells, the flying earth, and the screams of the men whose luck had run out.

Samuel turned toward Number 8 gun, mounted on a naval carriage alongside his own. It was commanded by Lieutenant Murdaugh of the Winslow. Bowater met Murdaugh’s eye, and the lieutenant frowned in dismay, shook his head, and Bowater nodded his agreement.

And then Murdaugh and the gun and the men around it and the parapet seemed to be ripped apart in a blast of dirt and noise and brilliant light and screaming fragments of metal. Bowater saw the sky and the earthen wall spin past him, heard men screaming and metal screaming and a ringing in his ears like the note of a huge bell, sustained for an impossibly long time.

He hit the dirt with a jarring blow that knocked the wind from him, and for a second all he could do was thrash around, gasping, wide-eyed, thoughtless of anything but getting air into his lungs.

And then he caught his breath, pulled a deep lungful of air into his chest. He felt a burning pain in his leg and arm and shoulder, isolated points of hurt amid the general ache. He could hardly hear through the ringing in his head, and what he could hear was more and more shells dropping on the fort, exploding around him, a percussion section gone mad, and, under that sound, the men shouting and running were like the orchestra’s other instruments, fighting to be heard.

He pushed himself up on his arms, struggled to achieve a sitting position. Strong hands grabbed his shoulders, and he looked up to see Tanner and St. Laurent easing him up. They leaned him against the wall, and Tanner pulled roughly at the buttons of his coat. Bowater was too shaken to speak.

He looked over Tanner’s head. Number 8 gun was pointing skyward at a crazy angle, its carriage smashed. The bloody, distorted corpse of one of the gun crew lay sprawled over the rough boards of the gun platform. Lieutenant Murdaugh, with whom Bowater had just a second before been silently commiserating, was leaning against the gun, his right arm a horrible, bloody, mangled wreck. White bone jutted out from the torn fabric of his sleeve and the arm lay on his lap at an unnatural angle, and Murdaugh, silent, just stared, as if he was unsure of what he was looking at.

“This ain’t too bad, sir, I don’t reckon,” Tanner said, looking at the bleeding gash in Bowater’s arm and shoulder. Bowater turned his head, looked at the blood and the shredded shirt. One of the best shirts to be had in all Charleston, and now it was a rag.

Samuel swallowed, summoned the energy to speak. “Leg…” he said and Tanner looked down.

“Oh, damn,” the sailor said. He pulled his knife, slit the pants. A pool of blood spilled out from the pant leg. The wound swam in front of Bowater’s eyes. He was reminded of fresh butchered meat. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back, breathed hard. He gritted his teeth as Tanner’s hands, rough but sure, lifted his thigh and passed bandages around the deep laceration.

Through the din of the shells and the ringing in his ear he heard Barron’s voice, ever in command, issuing unequivocal orders. He opened his eyes. Lieutenant Murdaugh was lying on his back and men were attending to his shattered arm, and more men were swarming around the other injured gunners. There were men enough to tend to the wounded, with the Union fleet beyond the range of the guns and the gun crews idle.

“Sharp, get Murdaugh back to the Winslow, get Dr. Greenhow to attend to him.” Barron turned to Bowater, standing over him, and Bowater had the impression of a stern father looking down on his young son. “Captain Bowater, how are you?”

“I’ll live, sir, I should think.” Some of the sense which the shell had knocked from his head was coming back, the reality of the fort and the shelling and the silent Confederate guns resolving again.

“Good. Get your men to bear you back to your ship. Get steam up and get the hell out of here.”

“Get…out?”

“Yes, Captain, get out. Another hour and I’m going to surrender the fort. No reason to lose your ship as well.”

Bowater nodded. Of course. Barron was not making a bad choice. There was no choice at all.

26

We came with the Moses family…with a wounded soldier they were taking care of. They averred we had fifteen thousand such as he (i.e., wounded, sick, and sore) in Virginia.

— Mary Boykin Chesnut

Jonathan Paine spent two weeks washing back and forth in a tide of grief and agony, guilt and shame. His dreams were filled with battle and grim death and Nathaniel and Robley, his days filled with an all but unbearable agony in a leg that was no longer there.

Captain Sally Tompkins ministered to him, fed him, saw that he was comfortable, as she did for all the boys in her growing hospital. Bobby, assigned to that room, tended to Jonathan every day. During the clear-headed times, Bobby was someone with whom to speak, when Jonathan felt like speaking, and during the other times Bobby was a ghost, just another ghost that haunted Jonathan’s fevered sleep.

Two weeks, and then the fevers passed and the pain subsided into something that could be endured, even while awake, and Jonathan’s mind cleared to the point where it began to formulate questions.

“Hey, Bobby…”

Bobby was washing and dressing the stump of Jonathan’s leg, which terminated just above where his knee had once been. That morning the doctor had been by, had sniffed the stump, said something about “laudable pus,” which was apparently a good sign. Jonathan did not understand how the doctor or Bobby or anyone could stand to look at the hideous thing.

“Yeah?”

“What all happened, anyway?”

Bobby paused, looked up from the stump. “What happened wid what?”

“The Battle of Manassas. What happened? We win?”

Bobby smiled and shook his head. “You serious?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“Well, damn! I’d say you gots to be the last person in all these Confederate States don’t know that! Yeah, we won. We whipped them Yankees good, whipped ’em like dogs.”

Jonathan nodded. This was good news. His last image of the battle, the waves of blue-clad soldiers coming up the hill, had not been an encouraging one. He realized that he had, for all that time, harbored a vague idea that the Confederate Army had been badly beaten, though he had never given it any real thought. The pain, and the memory of how he had led Nathaniel to his death, had occupied all of his conscious mind.

“So is that it, then?”

“What?”

“The war. Is the war over?”

“War over?” Bobby seemed more incredulous than before. “No, da war ain’t over. What’d give you a notion like that?”

“Before…folks used to say that one big battle would settle the thing.”

“Well, folks was wrong. It ain’t over. Them Yankees ran like rabbits, sure, clear back to Washington, D.C. And now they safe up there and folks reckon it’s jest a matter of time afore they come south and we gots to do it all again. That’s if the Southern boys don’t march north and whip ’em good and for all before dey gets the chance.”

Jonathan nodded. “You know…” he said, and for the first time his mind wound its way back to the days before Manassas, “…we used to think there would just be the one battle. We used to be scared to death we’d miss it, have nothing to tell. I recall how we used to say if only we could lose an arm or a leg or such, go home with an empty sleeve to show the girls…”

“Well,” Bobby said brightly, “now you surely can do that.”

“Sure enough.”

Go home… The words burned and tore like the bullets that had grazed and lacerated him. Go home… He had no home now. His parents would never wish to see him again, after the horrible thing he had done. And even if they did welcome him back, out of Christian charity, he could not face them. He could not face Robley, who would come home a hero and would, for the rest of his life, hold Jonathan in smoldering contempt for disobeying his orders and getting their brother killed.

So what was there for him? He had no money, beyond the family fortune, which was lost to him now. He had no skills, no way to earn a living, even if he was not a cripple. A beggar on the streets, one of these broken, wretched creatures such as he had seen by the docks in New Orleans, that was all that was left to him. He felt the tears well up. Paine Plantation and all its goodness gone, like being denied heaven. He was lost among strangers who, when he first came to them, did not even know his name.

That thought sent his mind wandering down another road. If no one in the 33rd Virginia knew who he was, then no word of his fate would have been sent to his parents.

No doubt Robley would have written, told them about how he had led Nathaniel off to the fighting. He hoped someone had found the note he had stuffed in Nathaniel’s jacket and honored the request. He hoped Nathaniel’s body was at peace in his native Mississippi soil, in the family plot surrounded by the iron fence, overlooking the Yazoo River.

But they would not know what had become of the third Paine boy.

Most likely they do not care…

Still, he had to send word. Loathe him or not, his parents should know what had become of their youngest son.

“Bobby?” Bobby was putting the last wraps of a fresh bandage on Jonathan’s stump.

“Yeah?”

“Is there someone here can write a letter for me? I don’t think my arm’s up to the task, yet.”

“Sure enough,” Bobby said. He eased the stump of Jonathan’s leg back down on the bed, pulled the sheet over him. He walked off and came back ten minutes later leading one of the white nurses, whose name was Douglas, and carrying a pencil and a few sheets of white paper and a Bible for a desk.

“All right, go on ahead,” Douglas said, settling back onto the stool by the bed.

“Very well…” Jonathan was surprised Douglas had his letters. He had never struck Jonathan as the brightest of fellows. “Dear Mother and Father…By now you will have heard of what became of…”

“Hold on there, hold on, partner…I’m a little out of practice here.” Douglas’s pencil moved with deliberate strokes. “…‘and Father’…all right, what all’s next?”

“By now you will have heard…” Jonathan continued on, slowly pronouncing each word, as if he was talking to someone just learning English. Douglas’s lack of skill was no great handicap; there was not much Jonathan had to say to his parents in any event.

When he was done, Douglas handed the letter to Jonathan and Jonathan held it up and read it.

Deer Mother and Father,

By now yo will have heerd from Robley and he will have told yo the sirkem stanses…

Jonathan wished that Douglas’s pride had allowed him to ask for the spelling of some words.

…sirkemstanses of Natanyals deth. All I can say is I am sufering as yo are, and alweys will. I am woonded but am likly to liv. I jest thot it my duty to tell yo that.

Your son,

Jonontan

Jonathan nodded his head. “Thank you, Douglas, that is fine. If you could fold it and seal it and perhaps you can help me address it, that should do. There’s money for postage in…my knapsack. Bobby, is my knapsack here?”

“Yessuh. It’s under you bed, along with what’s left of yer uniform and such.”

“Is that a fact? Can you help me sit up?”

Bobby gave Jonathan his hand, helped pull him up to a sitting position, stuffed pillows behind his back. The bright room whirled around Jonathan’s head and the dream state washed over him and he thought he would pass out. He closed his eyes, sat very still, and soon it passed and slowly he opened his eyes again.

Bobby was standing beside him. “You all right, Missuh Jon’tin?” In his hands, Jonathan’s knapsack, a battered square canvas bag coated with rubberized paint, which was glossy black when it was new, but now was dusty and muted and cracked.

“Yes, yes…may I see that?”

“Sure t’ing.” Bobby handed the sack to Jonathan, and Jonathan took it as if it was an ancient relic, which it was, to some degree. A relic of a life now gone.

He fumbled with the buckles and managed to get them undone and flipped the flap open. The contents were just as he had last seen them, more than a month before, though it seemed much longer than that. His toothbrush, his hairbrush, deck of cards, extra shirt. His copy of The Soldier’s Guide: A Complete Manual and Drill Book, with which he would sneak off to a private place and study, more intently than he had ever studied a lesson as a boy. He never wanted the others to see him at it, to think that he lacked any confidence in his soldiering ability.

He shook his head as he thought of it. What did any of us know of soldiering? Why did I think anyone would believe I knew any more than they did? Why did I care?

There was the Bible his mother had put in his knapsack without his knowledge, as she had in Nathaniel and Robley’s as well. He picked it up, ran his fingers over the embossed gold cross on the black leather cover. He flipped the book open. The delicate pages fluttered by, stopped at a piece of paper inserted between them.

Jonathan pulled the paper out and unfolded it, unsure what it was. He read the words.

Dear Mother,

I am sorry that I have not written more, as I know I should, but they drill us here, night and day, and with guard duty and inspections and such it is hard to find a minute. We are still at Camp Walker, waiting for something to happen. We are all well but many here have the measles. Robley thinks that

It ended there. Jonathan recalled now. He had finally sat down to write it when a fellow from Company C had told him that a cockfight was about to commence at the south end of the camp. He had tucked his mother’s letter away, put off writing to his mother to watch a couple of damned chickens killing each other.

Why not? There was plenty of time to write. That was how he had felt. Plenty of time. He was just a boy, and so were his brothers. They had their whole lives.

He leaned his head back on the pillow and felt the warm tears roll down his cheek, and a moment later he heard Bobby walking softly away.

27

If I have erred in all this matter, it is an error of judgment; the whole affair came upon me so suddenly that no time was left for reflection, but called for immediate action and decision.

— Captain John Pope, USS Richmond, to Flag Officer William W. McKean, Commanding Gulf Blockading Squadron

It was October, but it was sweltering in the captain’s sleeping cabin of the U.S. steam sloop Richmond , and Captain John Pope could not sleep.

He lay on top of his blankets, still wearing shirt and pants, but with buttons undone. He considered getting undressed, could think of no logical reason why he should not, but he made no effort to do so. He felt too vulnerable undressed, too unready. In that place, the Mississippi River, the Head of the Passes, within the boundaries of the Confederacy, he felt vulnerable enough even in full uniform. He did not need to compound his disquiet.

He sat up with a frustrated sigh, swung his legs over the edge of his bunk. From beyond the great cabin he could hear the sound of shovels in coal, the tramp of men carrying coal bags up the gangways, the muted thump of the schooner tied alongside. The watch on deck was taking on coal, though, from the sound of it, with no great enthusiasm.

Pope ran his hands through his muttonchop whiskers, over his bald head, and down the fringe of hair that encircled his head like the grass skirts the South Sea Islanders were supposed to wear. Overhead the ship’s bell rang, clang-clang, clang-clang, clang-clang, clang. Three-thirty a.m. He sighed again and stood, pushed open the door of the sleeping cabin and stepped into the wide expanse of the great cabin.

It was cooler there, by several degrees. The few lanterns burning cast a warm light on the polished oak paneling. The sundry brass handles and knobs and hinges glowed dull. A lovely place, fine as any drawing room in any mansion in New York or Philadelphia, if not quite so large. But it was big enough for any reasonable man, and Honest John Pope was certainly that.

He grabbed his trousers, which were slipping down his legs, pulled them up, fastened the buttons, and then buttoned his shirt. He considered pulling on his coat and hat but could not bear the thought. Seven bells in the night watch, no need to be so damned formal, he thought. He wished his steward was awake so he could snap at him. It was a sickly climate in the Mississippi Delta, and it made him irritable.

He mounted the ladder that ran from the great cabin directly up to the quarterdeck above and stepped through the scuttle and into the black night. He closed the scuttle door and stood motionless for some time, letting his eyes adjust. The great cabin had been dimly lit, but even that was enough light to render him quite blind on deck.

Damned dark tonight…

The wind was out of the north and blowing a steady five knots or more. It wrapped itself around Pope’s heavy, sweating frame, gave him a chill, raised goose flesh on his arms, but it felt good. Over the sound of the shovels and the rattle of coal spilling down the chutes and into the bunkers, Pope could hear the swamp sounds, the thousands of frogs and insects and Lord knew what else, chirping away at their nightly choir.

He advanced to the rail, which he could just barely see, and only because the inboard bulwark was painted white, and leaned against it, staring out into the night. The wind carried on it the brackish smell of the river and the smell of rotting vegetation and smoke from some far-off place. He looked east to west but could see nothing beyond blackness from the shore.

The Head of the Passes, the two-mile-wide convergence of the channels leading in and out of the Mississippi. New Orleans was second only to New York in the amount of shipping that flowed through. Or it had been, anyway, before the Rebels set about destroying themselves. It was staggering, the amount of river traffic that had crossed that spot of water on which the Richmond was anchored.

But now, with the blockade having brought waterborne commerce to a halt, on that black, moonless, hazy night they might as well have been riding at anchor halfway between the earth and the moon, for all the activity that Pope could see. It was unsettling, that wild, foreign delta all around, harboring snakes and alligators and diseases unknown to a Northern man like Captain John Pope.

“Lieutenant…” Pope made his way forward, to where he could see the outline of Lieutenant James Whitfield, silhouetted against the tiny bit of light thrown off by the lanterns on the schooner and down in the hold. Suddenly Pope did not care to be alone on his own quarterdeck.

“Captain?” Whitfield turned, and his voice sounded a bit startled, and Pope wondered if the swamp and the darkness were unnerving the luff the way they were him. “Is everything all right, sir?”

“Fine, fine. Can’t sleep. This damned heat down here. Man isn’t born to the climate, he can hardly tolerate it.”

“Yes, sir. And it’s not even the heat so much as the humidity.”

“You’re right, Lieutenant. I hadn’t even considered that.”

Pope looked forward, down the length of the deck, which was just becoming dimly visible as his eyes adjusted to the dark. The Richmond was a big ship, 225 feet long, forty-two and a half feet on the beam, displacing 2,700 tons. A sister ship to Hartford, and heavily armed. She drew over seventeen feet aft, which made her less than ideal for river work, but Pope was not going to complain. He had worked hard, had spent many years in the navy, to rise to command of such a ship.

And Richmond, at least, was a steamer, her twin screws driven by two horizontal condensing engines, sixty-two-inch cylinders, each with a thirty-four-inch stroke. The other ships of his squadron, the Preble and the Vincennes, were entirely sail-driven, making them considerably less adequate for river work.

The thought of the other ships under his command made Pope lift his eyes from his own deck and the line of big, black nine-inch smoothbore Dahlgrens like sleeping bears at their gunports, and look outboard again.

Off their port side and downriver was the sloop Vincennes. Pope could see the dull loom of a lantern on her deck. She was one hundred feet shorter than Richmond and less than a third of the bigger ship’s tonnage, but with her four eight-inch guns and fourteen thirty-two-pounders, she was still a powerful man-of-war. Certainly more ship than the Rebels could muster.

Pope turned, looked forward, past the Richmond ’s starboard bow, though in the dark he could hardly see even the black shrouds angling up the Richmond ’s masts. He moved his head a bit, to make sure his vision was not blocked by the rigging. One hundred and fifty yards upriver he could see a single pinprick of light, a lantern on the deck of the sailing sloop Preble. Just the one light, and the enveloping darkness, and the sound of frogs and insects and the lap of water around the hull.

“Well…” Pope began, then stopped. He had heard a noise. A shout? He cocked his head.

Then another shout, loud, an order being issued, but he could not make it out. The furious beat of a drum, feet pounding on the deck. Pope looked around, trying to find the source, but he saw only Lieutenant Whitfield, who met him with eyes wide.

The sound was muted, far off, but insistent, something happening.

“The Preble! ” Whitfield shouted, pointed forward. A red light was moving aloft with awkward jerks as it was hoisted to the peak of the gaff.

“They’re beating to quarters!” Pope shouted. He looked around his own ship, unsure what to do. The night had the quality of an anxious dream. What was happening aboard Preble? Pope felt the first inkling of panic creep over him. He had once considered posting picket boats upriver—why had he not?

“Beat to quarters, sir?” Whitfield asked, and he sounded no more composed than Pope felt.

“Yes, yes, Luff, beat to quarters!”

“Beat to quarters!” Whitfield shouted, and suddenly the deck was alive with racing men, men pouring up from the hatches, running to the big, sleeping guns, casting off breeching, men racing to their battle stations even before the startled drummer was able to find his sticks.

“Port side, Lieutenant! A steamer, port side!” a voice shouted up from the waist, and Whitfield and Pope both rushed across the quarterdeck, hit the rail, peered outboard and forward.

The night seemed to be exploding around them, from dead still to wild bedlam. Pope turned to a midshipman who had appeared beside him. “Pass the word to light off the boilers! I want steam up, now!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“Sir!” Whitfield pointed out into the dark. A white, undulating wave, the bow wake of a vessel, closing fast, and above it, great roiling clouds of black smoke, visible even against the night’s sky. But between them, no vessel that Pope could see.

“What the hell…” Pope muttered, then shouted, “Gunners, run out!” and the air was filled with the rumble of twenty big guns hauled bodily up to the bulwark, and then, again from the waist, a voice shouted, “It’s the ram! It’s the ram!” and Pope sucked in his breath and stood frozen on his spot of deck.

The ram! Reports of this terrible machine had been floating down from New Orleans for months, so many and so differing that Pope had ceased giving them any credence.

The ironclad ram!

“She’s gonna hit!” came another voice from forward. Pope leaned over the rail. The white bow wave was frothing wildly, the smoke coming thick from the stack, rolling down over the quarterdeck, and with it the peculiar puffing sound of a high-pressure engine. He could see her hull now, unlike anything he had ever seen floating and built by man. A round black hump, a whale back, a stack like a column standing straight up.

“Dear God…”

And then the ram hit, drove itself into the Richmond ’s side, making the ship shudder as if from a hammer blow. The fasts holding the coal schooner parted with the impact, bang, bang, like a series of rifle shots, and the schooner pulled from the Richmond ’s side, swirled away downstream.

They could hear the working of the ram’s engines, a terrible screeching and banging. As if something terrible was happening within the iron turtle.

Lieutenant Whitfield turned to another midshipman. “Find the carpenter, tell him to check the damage, report back!”

“Port side!” Pope shouted. “Fire!” Wildly, in ragged order, the Dahlgrens blasted away, throwing great long arms of red-and-yellow flame into the dark delta night. Pope saw part of the ram’s stack blown away, but there was no chance of hitting the low-lying vessel itself.

The gun crews fell to reloading, and Pope did not stop them. His eyes were glued to the ram, the horrible ram, backing away, slipping down the side, coming aft, coming for him. It gleamed in the light of the muzzle flashes and battle lanterns, a terrible black monster, and Pope felt frozen to the deck, unable to move. He could not take his eyes from the beast.

“Sir?” Whitfield shouted, and Pope finally looked away, shook his head. He felt sick to his stomach, utterly unable to think. They were surrounded here, wrapped up by the wicked delta and all its horrors, caught in Rebel territory, and under attack.

Room! He needed room! Sea room! “Slip the cable!” Pope shouted. “Get a red lantern aloft!” His hand reached for the grip of his sword, where it rested during times of such crisis, but his sword was not there, and he recalled that he was in shirtsleeves.

Damn… He thought of dashing below, but could not leave the deck. He had the sensation that the Richmond was listing to port. Has that damned ram sunk us? he wondered, and the panic began to creep in like the imaginary water rising in the hold.

“Sir?” Pope’s steward appeared in front of him, holding his coat and hat and sword and pistol. Without a word Pope slipped his arms into the sleeves of the coat, fastened the buttons, put his cap on his head, allowed the steward to buckle the sword around his waist. He experienced a new sense of calm as he donned the uniform and felt the weight of the weapon hanging from the belt.

“Sir?” Whitfield was in front of him. “It appears that Vincennes has slipped her cables. I see her getting her fore topsail set.”

“Very good.” From the foredeck came a great rumbling sound as Richmond ’s own anchor chain was let go, rattling through the hawsepipe, making the entire ship vibrate as the chain disappeared into the brackish water of the delta.

Pope whirled around suddenly, remembering the ram. She was a few hundred yards away, downstream, lurking, waiting her chance, it would seem, a black shape on the near-black water. Pope fastened his eyes on the iron hump as the river lapped around the thing, and he loathed it, loathed it more than any thing or any person he had ever encountered.

Then the noise of the running chain ended, and then a final splash as the bitter end hit the river, and then nothing.

“Slow ahead!” Pope shouted, and the master, stationed by the helm, rang up slow ahead and Pope hoped there was steam enough to move the vessel against the stream. He could see the smoke coming in puffs from the tall stack amidships. The firemen were probably throwing oil or resin or whatever on the coal to get it to light off fast. He could feel the turn of the screws, the Richmond inching ahead.

“Keep firing on that damned ram, Mr. Whitfield!” Pope shouted, and the port battery began to blast away again in a frenetic, frantic way, like a blinded man lashing out with his fists.

From upriver, more heavy guns, as Preble joined in, the round shot from her port-side thirty-two-pounders churning up the river. They were making a deadly crossfire over the ram, iron and flame hurling out over the water, but Pope could not tell if they were having any effect whatsoever.

He could sense the Richmond turning, her head swinging downriver. He looked forward, saw the Preble, now on the port bow, now on the starboard as the Richmond slewed around.

He turned to the helmsman, a curse on his lips, but the man at the wheel was turning it hard, trying to correct. “She don’t answer, Captain!” the helmsman shouted, bracing for the old man’s wrath.

Not enough steam! The boilers did not have enough steam pressure to give the ship headway, and the rudder would not bite. The Richmond was out of control, turning sideways to the current, helpless, with the ram out there in the night.

“Goddamn it!” Pope shouted out loud. It was chaos and he could not make it slow down. Everything seemed to be exploding at once; he could not think.

“There goes the ram, sir!” Whitfield shouted, and Pope’s heart leaped, thinking the terrible thing was coming for them again, but it was not. Pope followed the luff’s pointed finger. The ram was steaming upriver, making for Preble ’s port bow, away from the Richmond and the Vincennes, which was already standing into South West Pass.

“Damnation…” It did not appear as if Preble had slipped her cable. “Get underway, damn it!” Pope shouted, uselessly.

From the back of the turtle, a light sputtered, a tiny yellow light, and a second later a red rocket arched up and away, making a bold slash of color against the night sky.

“What in hell is that for?” Pope wondered out loud.

“Sir.” The carpenter was in front of him now, saluting. “Ram stove in three planks, sir, about two feet below the waterline. Hole’s about five inches, I’d say. Pumps can keep up, sir, till I’ve plugged it some.”

“Very good. Carry on.” At last, some good news, and Pope felt reason to hope that he might pull this off, that his career might not be destroyed by the attack of the infernal machine.

“Sir, look here!” It was Whitfield again. Pope was coming to loathe the sound of his voice. The luff was looking upriver. Three bright spots of light, low down on the water; they looked like three evenly spaced bonfires.

What the hell now? Pope snatched up his telescope, fixed one of the bright spots in the lens. Flames leaped and danced across his vision, illuminating the water around the raft on which the fire burned.

“Fire raft! Dear God, they are sending fire rafts!” Pope shouted. They were sending fire rafts and he was broadside to the current, out of control, with barely the steam pressure to turn the screws. And suddenly, where there had been optimism, there was now the vision of his squadron engulfed in flames.

Robley Paine stood in the wheelhouse of the Yazoo River, watched the fireworks on the water. The ship trembled underfoot as the twin paddle wheels turned slowly astern, holding the riverboat in place against the current.

First to attack, per the plan, had been the ram, the Manassas. Formerly the towboat Enoch Train, she was now an ironclad, her topsides a rounded hump of half-submerged narrow iron plate, about 150 feet long, thirty feet wide. On her bow was mounted a pointed iron ram, and from her rounded foredeck a sixty-four-pound Dahlgren peered forward.

She was an amazing engine of war, and the more Robley looked on her, the more he wanted such a thing for himself. The Union navy would not be beaten by ships of equal size. The Confederacy was unable to build ships of equal size. The Yankees must be defeated by technological advances, such as the Manassas, the first ironclad built in the Western Hemisphere.

Spread out over the river, upstream of the Yankees, was the Confederate fleet. The flagship was the 830-ton steam sloop McRae, armed with a sixty-four-pounder mounted on a pivot, four eight-inch Columbiads, and a rifled twenty-four-pounder. With her navy crew and complement of Confederate States Marines, she was run with an efficiency that made Robley despair for the sloppy, disinterested civilian mercenaries he was forced to ship.

The rest of the fleet: the five-hundred-ton side-wheel steamer Calhoun, with one twenty-four-pounder and two eighteen-pounder Dahlgren guns; the steamer Ivy, just a bit smaller than Calhoun, with one eight-inch rifle; the steamers Jackson and Tuscarora; and the cutter Pickens, with an eight-inch Columbiad and four twenty-four-pound carronades. An odd hodgepodge of former merchant ships and assorted guns, but it was the waterborne defense of the southern Mississippi. Between the five of them they did not carry the firepower of even the Richmond alone. But they had surprise, and they had the ram, and those seemed to be working well.

One of the Yankee ships was blazing away, and Paine guessed it was the Richmond and that the ram had done her business.

Then another ship, closer to the Confederate fleet, began to fire the guns of her broadside. The two ships were lashing out. There was a desperate, panicked quality to their firing. Robley nodded his head as he watched the fusillade. Good, good… At last, something was being done. The filthy invaders who had murdered his sons were paying for it now.

Mr. Kinney, the pilot, was showing no sign of approval. He had in fact been muttering curses under his breath for some time. But now, as the second ship opened fire, he became more vocal.

“I signed on here to pilot a boat, I did not sign on to get my damn ass blown off. Didn’t say nothing about no goddamned battle with no Yankee fleet.”

“You signed aboard a river defense ship, I made no secret about it,” Paine said, never taking his eyes from the action downriver. It was the most cathartic thing he had experienced since the death of his boys. He could not wait to fling himself into the fight, to fly at the head of the serpent, guns blazing.

They called the serpent “Scott’s Anaconda.” The overarching plan of Union General-in-Chief Winfield Scott—wrap a blockade of ships around the coastline of the Confederate States, drive down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, from the United States to the Gulf, until the coils of the thing completely encircled the new Southern nation, and then squeeze.

They laughed at this “Anaconda Plan,” North and South. But Robley Paine was not so sure, and he was not laughing.

“River defense ain’t the same as attacking no damned men-of-war,” Kinney pointed out, though what he thought river defense was Robley could not guess.

Paine turned at last from the window, regarded the pilot in the dim light of the binnacle. Kinney’s jaw was working furiously at a plug of tobacco. The light glinted on a line of spittle on his beard. He met Paine’s eyes with defiance.

“Are you a coward, sir?” Paine asked. “Or merely a Union sympathizer?”

“I ain’t none of them, you son of a bitch, and don’t say it again. But I’m a civilian, hear? I ain’t no navy man, and neither are you.”

“I can’t disagree. You certainly are not ‘no navy man.’ But tonight you had best play the part. You have been well paid to do so.”

Paine turned back to watch the fight on the river, but Kinney troubled him. They all did, all the white trash he had collected aboard the Yazoo River. His initial concern was right, he was sure of it now. Any able-bodied Southern man worth a damn was already in the army or navy, or working at some job vital to the war effort. And everyone else was a shirker, a coward, a craven dog.

The serpent haunted him. It haunted his days, kept him thrashing in a cold sweat at night. He thought of little else. The money he doled out every day for food and coal and wages and maintenance made no impression on him. The letter from his attorney in Yazoo City, telling him in the gentlest terms of the death of his wife, Katherine, failed to move him beyond a certain sadness, and even a bit of envy, at the way her agony was over, while his continued on.

It would be his turn soon. The promise of eternity with his Katherine and his boys was the only point of hope left to him. He would die battling the serpent.

A rocket shot up into the sky, a long streak of red coming right up from the midst of the Union ships.

“There’s Manassas ’s signal!” Robley said, with an excitement unmatched in the Yazoo River ’s wheelhouse. Thirty yards away, right ahead of the Yazoo River ’s bow, the nearest fire raft sputtered and flickered as the combustible material heaped on board was lit off. The flames took hold at last, creeping along the edge of the oil-soaked logs and bales of cotton, then climbed up the heap, engulfed the raft—a fifty-foot-long derelict river barge—throwing brilliant light out one hundred feet in every direction. Robley could see the light of the flames dancing on the Yazoo River ’s bow and the bales of cotton stacked around her deck as armor.

There were three rafts, strung out across the river and attached to one another by a long chain. Controlling the string of rafts at one end was the towboat Tuscarora and at the other end the Watson.

“Them tugs ain’t never gonna keep them rafts under control,” Kinney said with a subtle, gloating tone. Paine did not reply.

“Slow ahead, Mr. Kinney. We’ll keep just behind the string of rafts.”

Kinney hesitated, just long enough to show he followed orders under duress, then reached up and rang the bell. A moment later the big paddle wheels stopped, then slowly started up again, forward this time, barely pushing the Yazoo River ahead, while Kinney let the current do the rest.

Paine could see the few lights onshore slipping by, could see the out-of-control Yankee ships lit up in the light of the fire raft, and he felt satisfied. It had all gone exactly to plan, and his only disappointment—and it was a small one—was that the Richmond was not now heeling over and sinking fast from the injury doled out by the ram.

“Rafts are out of control,” Kinney observed, then stuffed a wad of tobacco in his mouth, ripped off a chunk. The towboats had apparently cast the fire rafts off, and now the current had them, swirling them around, pushing them toward the bank.

Damn… Paine thought, but Kinney was right. The unwieldy things were too much for the towboats to control, and the river current could not be relied upon to sweep them down on the fleet.

“Keep her going ahead, Mr. Kinney,” Paine said, watching the chaotic flight of the Union ships down South West Pass. They were still blazing away with their great guns, the shells whistling around, the fire rafts and the broadsides lighting the river and the dark night in a macabre, bellicose show.

“You want to steam into that ?” Kinney asked.

“Keep her going ahead, Mr. Kinney,” Robley said again. He rested his hand on the butt of the.44 Starr. He would drive the Yazoo River into battle even if he had to fight his own people to do it.

28

I immediately commenced an investigation for the purpose of learning all the circumstances of the affair Pope’s retreat, and am sorry to be obliged to say that the more I hear and learn of the facts the more disgraceful does it appear.

— Flag Officer William W. McKean, Commanding Gulf Blockading Squadron, to Hon. Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy

The current was sweeping the USS Richmond sideways down the South West Pass, and there was nothing Captain John Pope could do.

They were in a world of warm, humid blackness. The only lights visible beyond the confines of the sloop were the taffrail lights of Vincennes and Preble, downriver from Richmond, and the three great fire rafts above, massive trunks of flame, sweeping down on her, no more than two hundred yards away. There was nothing Captain Pope could do but hope the Richmond drifted faster than the rafts.

He tapped his fingers on the cap rail for as long as he could stand it, then turned to the master, said, “Port your helm and come full ahead.”

“Port your helm!” the master shouted.

“Port your helm!” the helmsman replied and spun the wheel over. “Helm’s aport!”

The master rang the engine-room bell, and Pope could picture the engineer down among his pipes and boilers and shafts, cursing at the captain, who once again rang for steam he did not have. But there was only the jingle of the bell in reply, the low vibration underfoot as the throttle was opened and the propeller began to churn water.

They stood fixed in place on the quarterdeck, waiting to see what the big ship would do. The screw made a gurgling sound as it roiled the water under the counter, but it did no good. They did not have the steam to turn the ship’s bow upriver. The Father of Waters swept them along through the night.

Pope began to compose his report. The Vincennes and the Preble proceeded downriver, while I maintained a position broadside to the enemy in order to cover their retreat …

No, no, no…who in hell would believe that? They’ll ask the pilot for a report, he’ll say we could not get our head around…

“Captain?” The pilot, Wilcox, stepped up, one hand on the rail, looking out into the dark.

“Yes?” Pope said. His voice sounded guilty in his own ears.

“We’re getting mighty close to the right-hand shore. I’m afraid we’ll be aground directly.”

“I’ve tried to get her head around but it won’t answer.”

“Perhaps if we go astern on the engines we can work off?”

“Perhaps. Ring full astern.”

The bell was rung, the engine room jingled in response, and moments later came the jerky, screeching, clanging, hissing noise of two big steam engines turning in reverse, engines that were anything but reliable, particularly in reversing.

The fire rafts, drifting fast downstream, threw the occasional cast of light over the shoreline, illuminating the scrubby trees and dense marsh grass. The engines protested. All eyes on the Richmond ’s quarterdeck were fixed on the shore, what they could see of the shore, in the fire rafts’ light. The minutes ground by and the big ship swept downstream and the engines turned with the cacophony of something going terribly wrong, until, foot by foot, they succeeded in pulling the Richmond backward into midstream.

“Perhaps we have steam enough now to turn her head upstream?” Pope asked hopefully, but Wilcox shook his head.

“We don’t have room here to turn, sir,” he said. “We’ll have to wait until we are down by Pilot Town. Should be room enough there.”

For a moment Pope said nothing. Continue on like this? They were floating sideways down South West Pass, with fire rafts in pursuit and enemy gunboats behind them. There was an unsettled, nightmare quality to the whole thing. But what could he do?

“Very well, Mr. Wilcox, we’ll try again at Pilot Town.”

Robley Paine looked at his watch. Five twenty-three a.m. An hour and forty minutes after the initial attack. The ram and the fire rafts had scared hell out of the Yankee fleet, sent them skedaddling, but they did not seem to have done more than that.

The rafts had grounded on the western bank and were now burning themselves out. The ram had limped off after her initial attack. Lieutenant Warley, who had command of her, was no coward, Robley knew that, so Robley had to imagine that she was disabled in some way. The engines, he knew, were hardly reliable.

But that was fine. They had done their work, the Manassas and the fire rafts. Now was the moment for the gunboats to plunge ahead, to blast holes in the fleeing Yankees, to make sure the Anaconda understood it was not the only dangerous beast in those waters.

“First light,” Paine observed. In the east, a band of gray was glowing dull near the horizon. Robley could see the bow of the Yazoo River and the bulwark of cotton bales bathed in the dull, blue-gray dawn. Beyond that, the Confederate fleet and the Mississippi River were still lost in gloom.

Kinney grunted, said nothing.

They had been waiting. In the dark, it was hard to know what was happening downriver. The fire rafts cast their wide circles of light, which reflected on the black hulls of the panicked Yankee ships. The mosquito fleet was able to follow behind the rafts, keep an eye on the enemy, until at last the fire rafts grounded out and the Yankees were swallowed up by the darkness down South West Pass.

The head of South West Pass loomed like a cave, and they dared not enter, because there was no way to know what was in there. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps the Yankees had fled clear to the Gulf. Or perhaps the Confederates would meet up with three heavy men-of-war, anchored, spring lines rigged, heavy broadsides waiting for the gunboats.

That possibility gave Robley Paine no pause. He would have gladly steamed ahead, attacked whatever he found, thrown himself and his ship at the Yankees, offered all up to the memory of his sons.

But Hollins was not so inclined, and Hollins was in command, so they waited. Paine stepped out of the wheelhouse, paced the hurricane deck, glanced up now and again. It was growing light fast. He could see the shapes of the other vessels of the squadron, to the east and west of him, shadowy vessels with plumes of dark smoke coming from their stacks. He could see the far banks of the river now, dark against the lighter sky.

He could not see the Yankee fleet. They were gone, driven from the Head of the Passes.

The sight of that empty water, where just two hours before a powerful enemy squadron had anchored, spread joy through Robley Paine like the light of the rising sun.

And then, hard on the heels of that good feeling, fear.

Hollins would never give up the fight as won? he thought.

He looked up at the Calhoun, Hollins’s flagship, wondering how he might determine the flag officer’s intentions. He saw a belch of black smoke pour from her stack, saw the water churn white as her side wheels began to turn and the five-hundred-ton steamer began to inch ahead, the eighteen-pounder rifle on her bow pointing the way, like the nose of a hunting dog on its quarry’s scent.

Paine stepped eagerly back into the wheelhouse. “Half ahead, Mr. Kinney,” he said. He had been puttering about the river long enough that he was beginning to feel comfortable in his role of captain. “Keep pace with the flagship.”

Kinney grunted. “Flagship… ” he muttered in a derisive tone, and it did sound a bit foolish, said that way, but Robley did not care. They were plunging ahead, down South West Pass, chasing after the fleeing enemy, and that was all he needed to know.

Kinney rang the requisite bells, and down in the engine room Mr. Brown jingled back. The Yazoo River seemed to come awake. The big stern wheels began to turn and the bobbing, erratic motion of a ship stopped in the stream—underway but not making way, in the parlance of the mariners—changed into the steady rhythm of a ship steaming ahead.

Paine looked east and west. The others, the McRae, the Ivy, the Tuscarora, the Calhoun, and the Jackson, they were all gathering way, heading downriver in line abreast. Here was the bold advance, the waterborne cavalry charge. The fleet looked to Robley like a line of mounted knights, rolling forward.

And on this charge cried “God for Henry, England, and St. George!” Robley Paine was not happy—happiness was a thing from his past—but he was at least satisfied.

They eased their throttles open, Commodore Hollins’s squadron, and churned the brown water white and under parallel trails of black smoke steamed the fifteen miles down the South West Pass to the sea.

Kinney fidgeted, chewed hard, spit on the deck and the sides of the spittoon. “Don’t know what in hell y’all think you’ll do, if you come on them Yankees…” he muttered, and Paine was not sure if he was looking for an answer, but he gave it to him anyway.

“We will go to battle with them, Mr. Kinney. We will fire on them and endeavor to do as much damage as we can.”

“‘Fire on them…’” Kinney muttered. Paine did not answer again.

The fleet was capable of eight knots over the ground, with the boost they got from the current, and the marshy shore seemed to fly past. The sun broke the horizon and turned the sky a light, hazy blue. Two columns of smoke rose from stacks somewhere down the South West Pass, and the Confederate fleet was closing fast.

“Come left, you stupid son of a bitch,” Kinney growled at the helmsman, who turned the big wheel a few spokes. The pilot was becoming visibly more nervous with each mile made good and turning his fear into abuse.

“Steady, Mr. Kinney,” Robley said, hand resting on the butt of the Starr. “Don’t lose your nerve yet. The iron has not yet begun to fly.”

“‘Iron fly…’ Ain’t what I goddamned signed on for! How many time I got to tell you? You never said nothing about fighting no Yankees.”

“Mr. Kinney…” Robley pulled the Starr from his holster, spun the cylinder to see that each chamber was loaded. “Please be assured that you have much more to fear from me than you do from the Yankees.”

Kinney looked from the pistol to Robley’s face. He turned, stared out the window at the water under the bow. “‘More to fear from me…’ Crazy son of a bitch…” he said, lower this time, low enough so as not to invite response, which Robley did not provide.

South West Pass was all but straight, a boulevard of water through the delta, and soon the Yankees were in sight, clustered around the bar, one ship on the Gulf side and two still inland of the muddy shallows. The largest of them, the steamer, was pouring smoke, which made a sharp angle as it roiled from her stack and blew away to the south. The ships were motionless, as far as Robley could tell, the steamer broadside to the river, the smaller one with her stern pointed right at the Confederate fleet.

Robley picked up his field glasses, swept the ships on the bar. “They are aground,” he said. “I do believe they are aground.” It was too much to hope for. The enemy stranded in the mud, right under his bow gun.

He stepped from the wheelhouse and forward, to the edge of the hurricane deck. Below him, the gun crew sat on the deck, leaning against the cotton wall, or stood gazing forward at the distant Yankee ships.

“Gun crew!” Paine called, and the men looked up. “The Yankees are aground! Load and run out!”

The men went through the drill, silent and fast, just as they had done so many times dockside in New Orleans.

“Fire!” Paine shouted out, much louder than necessary. The gunner pulled the lanyard and the ten-inch Dahlgren fired with its great throaty roar, flung itself back against the breeching. Paine could see the shell make a black streak in the light blue sky as it sailed toward the Yankees, shrieked through the rigging, and plunged into the water beyond the bar.

“Lower! Lower! You’re firing right over their damned heads!”

On either side of the Yazoo River the other gunboats were opening up, firing their heterogeneous collection of artillery, an eighteen-pounder Dahlgren, an eight-inch rifle, an eight-inch Columbiad; they all fired as fast as they could, pouring shot and shells into the stranded Yankees, hitting back in a way that the Confederate Navy had yet to do, after seven months of war.

The Yazoo River ’s bow gun fired again, but Robley could not see where the shot fell.

And then the Yankees replied, the big steamer, firing her broadside guns at the mosquito fleet. The muzzle flashes looked dull and insignificant in the sunlight. A series of water spouts shot up from the river, two hundred yards short.

“Kinney,” Paine called, stamping back into the wheelhouse. “Slow ahead. We’ll creep up to point-blank range.”

“Son of a bitch! We ain’t in range of them Yankees here. We should stay here.”

“If we ‘ain’t’ in range, then we should get closer. But see here, I don’t need you just to ring a bell. I can ring the bell myself, and that will save me the cost of paying you your wages.” Robley reached for the bell cord, but Kinney was there, moving across the wheelhouse with two quick steps, snatching the cord practically from Robley’s hand.

“All right, all right, goddamn it…slow ahead!”

Robley nodded, left the wheelhouse, took his place on the front edge of the hurricane deck, where his view of the enemy and his own gun crew was unimpeded.

He looked right and left. The line of pugnacious gunboats blasting away, from the 830-ton, bark-rigged side-wheel steamer McRae to the fast river tug Jackson, made his heart sing. Fighting back, that was the thing. Was there anything more terrifying then sitting idly by, while the serpent wrapped itself around his new nation?

The turn of the Yazoo River ’s stern wheels began to slow, the creaking note lowering in pitch, and the boat’s forward motion was checked. Paine whirled around, caught Kinney’s eye, and Kinney looked quickly away.

Paine crashed the wheelhouse door open as he burst in. “I give the goddamned orders! I say when to go, and when to stop, is that clear, Mr. Kinney?”

“I reckoned it was time to stop. We getting damned close to being in range of them Yankees.” The shot from the steamer’s smoothbores was beginning to fall just a hundred yards or so beyond the bow, and some even falling around the boat.

“Slow ahead, Mr. Kinney,” he said, soft, and once again Kinney reached for the bell cord and tugged.

I will have to shoot that coward before we are through here… Robley thought. He held Kinney fixed with his eyes until he felt the stern wheels begin to turn again, felt the Yazoo River ’s momentum build. She was out ahead of the others now, but that was where Robley wished to be.

Then, from deep below them, from somewhere near the bottom of the ship, a terrible wrenching sound of metal. Something snapped with a sharp report. The starboard paddle wheel stopped instantly, as if the hand of God had been laid on it, and the boat began to slew.

“Meet her, meet her!” Robley said to the helmsman. They had gone through this drill before. The helmsman spun the wheel, compensating for the off-center thrust of the single paddle wheel.

“Well, shit, reckon that’s it,” Kinney said with a hopeful tone.

“We have two engines, Mr. Kinney, and we have lost only one.”

“You don’t mean to keep on here?”

“Slow ahead, Mr. Kinney. I shall signal you when to stop.”

Paine walked out onto the hurricane deck. Am I mad? he wondered. He knew it was a terrible risk he was taking, driving the Yazoo River forward until she was within range of the Yankee’s guns. He could not muster even the slightest concern for his own welfare, or for that of his ship and men, which he considered no more than an extension of his own will.

Madness!

But can I be mad, if I understand that what I am doing is madness?

The bow gun fired again, and he traced the trajectory right to the big steamer’s hull. They were not above five hundred yards away, easy for their big rifle, and well within range of the Yankee’s broadsides.

The round shot was falling all around them now, kicking up spray that fell on the Yazoo River ’s deck, but the gun crew was performing well, loading and firing, seemingly as oblivious to the shot as was Robley. He was proud of his crew. Were it not for Kinney, all would be perfect.

From the Yankee ship, a muzzle flash, a foreshortened black streak, and Robley watched as it slashed toward them, screaming by his ear, leaving a jagged hole in the wheelhouse astern. He was standing in the hail of iron, leaning into it, as if it was a cool rain at the end of a hot, humid summer day. He was revived by the gunfire, refreshed by the proximity of death.

You sulfurous and mind-tempting flames, vault couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, singe my white head!

A Yankee ball came in on a flat trajectory, plowed down the hurricane-deck rail on the port side, snapping off the stanchions like a scythe through wheat.

Now what are the chances of that? Robley wondered as he looked at the unusual site, the twisted metal posts and rails, hanging at odd angles.

He turned to the wheelhouse, held up his hand for Kinney to ring slow astern, which would hold them on that spot in the river.

From the Yankees came a new note, a sharper crack, not like the flat, dull boom of the smoothbores. Robley brought his field glasses up to his eyes. The smaller ship, the one run bow first on the mud, had moved two guns aft and run them out of the after gunports. These were not smoothbores but rifles, Robley could tell by the higher pitch of their report.

As he watched through the binoculars, the port gun fired, the crack of the gun and the scream of the shell whirling past coming one on top of another. Exploding shells. This was dangerous stuff, much more so than the round shot. Robley felt exhilarated.

The air was filled with the sound of battle, a continuous rolling fire from the Rebels and the Yankees, the buzz of round shot passing close, the scream of the rifle shells, the occasional crash of shot hitting the Yazoo River, taking off bits of the superstructure, chipping away at the wheelhouse. And under it all, the hiss and puff and clank of the single engine, driving the single paddle wheel slow astern. And then it stopped.

Paine was aware first of the change in sound, some part of the tapestry of battle noise gone. And then the Yazoo River began to turn, to drift downstream, spinning broadside to the Yankee fleet, the current sweeping her into the deadly broadsides.

What…what… Robley was not sure what to do. They had never lost both engines. They had never been under fire.

Kinney appeared on the deck below, running forward with the awkward run of a short, stocky man. “Let the anchor go! Let the anchor go!” he shouted as he ran. Someone let fly the ring stopper and the anchor plunged down into the water and the chain raced out after it.

From the hurricane deck, Robley watched the action take place but did not know what to say. He turned and looked at the wheelhouse, but there were no answers there. How in hell did Kinney get down there so fast? Why didn’t he just call down from the wheelhouse?

The chain ran its length and stopped. The anchor grabbed hold and the Yazoo River spun around, bow upstream, hanging at the end of the chain, the Yankee shot falling all around and passing over her deckhouse to fall in the water beyond.

Now what in hell? Robley was at a loss. Robley, who was starting to feel his oats as ship’s captain, realized he had no idea of what to do.

Boots on the ladder and Kinney appeared on the hurricane deck, and behind him, Brown, the engineer, filthy, sweat-soaked, face streaked with coal dust, eyes red, watery, and utterly disingenuous.

“What is it, Brown?” Robley demanded.

“Lost the rod on the starboard engine. Now it’s a bearing on the port crankshaft. It’s a fucking mess.”

Robley shifted his gaze to Kinney, who met his eyes with defiance. “You best signal one of them towboats to come over here, give us a tow upriver. Fight’s over, Cap’n.”

For a long moment no one moved, no one spoke. Paine, Kinney, and Brown, they stood facing one another.

Paine broke the silence. “I know you two.” He pointed to Kinney, put his finger right in the pilot’s face. “You are cock”—he moved his finger to Brown—“and you are bull, and you are both goddamned liars. Go get that engine going.”

“I done told you, the bearing…”

“Don’t you lie to me, you son of a whore!” Robley could feel his control slipping, the emotional dam he had built up to keep the rage contained crumbling. If it collapsed he did not know what would happen, and he was afraid. The dam was the thing that stopped him from simply roaming the streets and shooting down every son of a bitch who did not deserve to breathe, but still did, while his boys did not.

Brown took a step back. He looked frightened, frightened of what he saw in Robley’s eyes. “Cap’n, I ain’t…”

Kinney’s hand came out of his coat, a five-inch double-barrel Remington derringer in his meaty palm. “You’re a goddamned lunatic, Paine, and all your money don’t change that. Keep yer hand away from that pistol.”

Robley reached across his chest, put his hand on the butt of the Starr.

“I said keep yer hand away from that pistol,” Kinney repeated, his voice rising in pitch. Paine pulled the heavy weapon loose, swung it up.

“Put the goddamned gun down!” Kinney screamed, but Kinney had made a big mistake, because he was a coward, and cared for nothing but his own skin, and was as terrified of hanging for murder as he was of being killed by Yankees, while Robley Paine did not care a whit about any of it.

Robley pointed the Starr at Kinney’s trembling hand and just when Kinney realized he had better shoot, because Paine was beyond being threatened, Paine pulled the trigger. The Starr roared, and the.44 bullet hit the derringer with a sharp pinging sound, blew the gun and three of Kinney’s fingers clean off the hurricane deck.

Robley swung the smoking barrel around so that it was pointing right in Brown’s face, not six inches from the tip of his nose. “Slow ahead, Mr. Brown,” he said, just loud enough to be heard over Kinney’s shrieks of pain and terror and the rumble of the big guns.

Six minutes later, with the shells and round shot still falling like hail around them, the Yazoo River’s port paddle wheel began its slow revolutions, the anchor chain was brought in, and the battered gunboat crept back to her place in the line of battle.

Captain Pope stamped the deck, slammed his fist down on the taffrail in frustration. They were taking fire from the Rebels, and none of the Richmond ’s guns had the range to hit back. The dammed gunboats were too far away, save for the one stern-wheeler that had come so aggravatingly close. They had watched her slew around and come to anchor, and for a happy moment thought they had shot out her engines or paddle wheel. But fifteen minutes later she was underway again.

He felt like an idiot. He did not think this would reflect well on him.

He turned to the signal quartermaster. “Make a signal to the ships beyond the bar—‘Get underway.’”

“‘Get underway,’ aye, aye, sir,” he said and turned to the bag of signal flags at his feet.

Damn, damn, damn… Pope thought. We have to do something. What?

The signal flag snapped up the halyard, fluttered there for five minutes, and then came down again. The scream of the Rebel shells, the boom of the port-side Dahlgrens, continued unabated, the smoke hanging thick on the deck before swirling away south.

“Sir?” Whitfield was crossing the deck, a worried look on his face.

Now what?

“Yes, Luff?”

“Captain Handy’s coming aboard, sir,” he reported with a puzzled tone. “He has his men with him.”

“His…men? You mean his crew?”

“It would seem so, sir.”

“What, has he…has he abandoned his ship?”

“Ahhh…” Whitfield hesitated, but happily for the executive officer Captain Handy himself appeared through the gangway. He was wearing his dark blue frock coat and cap. Around his waist was wrapped the Vincennes ’s battle ensign, great folds of red, white, and blue cloth.

“What the devil…?” Pope said as Handy climbed the quarterdeck ladder, stopped, and saluted.

“I am here, sir,” Handy reported, his voice near shouting to be heard over the din of the Richmond ’s guns and the Rebel artillery.

“I can see you are here, Captain,” Pope replied, shouting and sputtering. “What the devil are you doing here?”

“Your signal, sir. I am obeying your signal.”

“What signal?”

Handy, looking suddenly unsure, glanced around. “Your signal you just ran up. ‘Abandon ship.’”

“I didn’t signal ‘Abandon ship.’ I signaled for the vessel beyond the bar to get underway.”

“Oh. Well, sir, my signal quartermaster saw the signal flag, blue, white, blue, as did I. We interpreted that as signal number one, ‘Abandon ship.’”

“Sir, I do not know what you saw, or thought you saw, but I most certainly did not signal for you to abandon ship!”

“I am sorry, sir,” Handy shouted. “But I most certainly…”

Pope shook his head, cut him off in mid-argument. “Captain, I will not debate this point with you! Get your men and get back to your ship and defend it from the enemy in a manner such as is expected of you.”

Handy shut his mouth, straightened a bit, held Pope’s eyes, but made no effort to move. “The thing of it is, sir, before we abandoned her, so the Rebels would not take possession, sir, we set slow match to the power magazine.”

Pope’s mouth fell open of its own accord. “You…what?”

“Slow match, sir. The Rebels…she’s going to blow any minute, sir.”

For two hours, the mosquito fleet pounded the Yankees, and then they were done. Ammunition all but gone, coal bunkers running low, crews near the point of exhaustion, they put up their helms and stoked their fires to provide steam for their tired engines to stem the flood of South West Pass, steaming upriver to New Orleans.

Robley Paine sat on the stool in the Yazoo River ’s wheelhouse, holding the Starr cradled in his lap. Five feet in front on him, sobbing and cursing, Captain Kinney piloted the boat north. Paine was confident that Kinney would do a proper job, because Kinney was aware that the next bullet would part his skull, the moment the Yazoo River touched bottom. It seemed a wonderful motivator.

Paine did not like the sound of the single engine. It was growing noticeably louder, crashing and clanging. But he had confidence that Brown would keep her turning as long as she was physically able to turn. The motivational techniques he used on the pilot seemed to work even better with the engineer.

Robley Paine felt satisfied. It had been a good expedition. It could have been better, could have been much better—they could have sunk or taken or crippled one of the Yankees—but still it had been good.

It was his first experience with naval warfare, and he had learned a great deal. It would take weeks, he knew, to sort out and codify all the lessons from those twenty hours. But two of them stood out, big and bold, like headlines in a newspaper, two things he required to wage proper war.

He needed a crew of proper navy men.

He needed an ironclad.

The Vincennes did not blow up. A quarter gunner, who had been ordered to light the slow match, a man with more sense than the captain, understood that blowing the ship to kingdom come in the face of the mosquito fleet was absurd. He followed orders, lit the fuse, then cut the burning end off and threw it overboard.

He did not, however, tell anyone. For two hours Pope and Handy and the combined crew of two ships stood anxiously waiting for the massive shock of the sloop’s powder magazine to blow. When at last it was clear that the ship was not going to explode, Pope ordered the Vincenneses back aboard.

For the next ten hours they worked to get the ships off the mud and over the bar to open water, where they belonged. They set kedge anchors and heaved, they passed towlines to the small screw steamer Water Witch, and she pulled until she all but buried her stern, but it did no good. Aboard the Vincennes they started the water and pumped it over, threw round shot and spare anchors and finally the great guns into the river, but still they remained fast in the mud.

When darkness came they stood down. Pope sat on a quarterdeck hatch combing, his coat unbuttoned, his fringe of hair sticking out at odd angles. The deck seemed to pull at him with a force greater than gravity.

He heard shoes on the quarterdeck ladder and looked up. The midshipman of the watch approached tentatively, which further annoyed Pope.

“What is it?” the captain snapped.

“Boat from Vincennes, sir, brought this note.” He held out a folded letter as if he was feeding a dangerous animal. Pope snatched it away, unfolded it, angled the paper so the light from the lantern behind him fell on the words.

SIR: We are aground. We have only two guns that will bear in the direction of the enemy. Shall I remain on board after the moon goes down, with my crippled ship and worn-out men? Will you send me word what countersign my boats shall use if we pass near your ship?

While we have moonlight, would it not be better to leave the ship? Shall I burn her when I leave her?

Respectfully,

Robert Handy

Good God! That son of a bitch is more eager to destroy his ship then the damned Rebels are!

“Is Vincennes ’s boat still alongside?”

“Aye, sir. Waiting your reply, sir.”

“Go fetch my steward. Tell him I need paper and pen.”

Four minutes later the steward came hurrying aft, the midshipman leading the way. No one was slacking off in the old man’s presence tonight.

Pope stood and wanted to groan but would not in front of his subordinates. He smoothed the paper out on the wide quarterdeck cap rail and the midshipman snatched down the lantern and held it up for the captain, maintaining a discreet distance. Pope dipped the pen and wrote:

SIR: You say your ship is aground. It will be your duty to defend your ship up to the last moment, and not to fire her, except it be to prevent her from falling into the hands of the enemy.

He paused in his writing, looked at the note. He knew the words he wished to use in the second paragraph, but he could not write them. It was not fitting for an officer and a gentleman to write the sort of thing he was thinking. Instead, he continued in a more even tone.

I do not think the enemy will be down tonight, but in case they do, fight them to the last.

You have boats enough to save all your men. I do not approve of your leaving your ship until every effort to defend her from falling into their hands is made.

Respectfully, your obedient servant,

John Pope

He folded the note, handed it to the midshipman, said, “That is for Captain Handy.”

The midshipman saluted, hurried away. Pope stepped across the deck, looked out over the dark water at the glowing lanterns on Vincennes ’s deck.

…Crippled ship and worn-out men…Shall I burn her when I leave her? Good God…

“The damned Rebels have the grit and the will to come down and attack us in paddle wheelers and towboats armored in cotton,” Pope said out loud, certain that no one was near, “and that idiot Handy wants to abandon and burn a ship more powerful than the whole Rebel fleet because he is tired and stuck in the mud!”

Pope shook his head. Dear God…here is why this damned war will not be over anytime soon.

29

After twenty rounds from the Fort the ammunition became exhausted and the entire garrison, under the command of Capt. Barron, late of the United States Navy, surrendered, and were made prisoners by Butler and his vandals…

— Richmond Whig, August 31, 1861

Samuel Bowater stared at the face in the mirror over the washbasin in the master’s cabin of the CSS Cape Fear. Thinner, more tired, lines more prominent. His facial hair shot through with considerably more gray. But overall, not too bad.

Da, da-da, da-da-da-da-daaa…

He smoothed his mustache and goatee and hummed the strains of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Quintet in C Major. In two hours’ time, he would be sitting in the cramped, drafty, not excessively clean theater, a block from the waterfront in Elizabeth City, a theater generally relegated to minstrel and burlesque shows, and enjoying an uncertain performance of the work as interpreted by the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Quintet.

Da, da-da, da-da-da-da-daaa…

Samuel did not expect great things from the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Quintet. If they could come at all close to the sound he heard in his head, he would be content.

Those reservations aside, he was eager for the performance. It had been a long, long time since he had enjoyed real music. He was so starved for the genuine article that he would catch himself turning his ear to his cabin window, actively listening to Hieronymus Taylor’s violin, Moses Jones’s singing. He found himself tapping his foot to the tune of “ Maryland, My Maryland,” waving an imaginary baton to coax out the strains of “The Leaving of Liverpool.”

They were very good, Taylor and Jones, Bowater had to admit. Such a waste of talent. What a fine Don Giovanni Moses could make. With some work, Taylor could be a first violin. First violin for the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Quintet, certainly.

A blast of wind hit the Cape Fear, whistled around her superstructure, made her dock fasts groan. It was mid-November, cold and bleak. Hard on one’s optimism, with the gales coming in off the Atlantic, churning Albemarle Sound into steep chop, gray water capped with marching rows of white horses, cold, driving rain.

They were dockside at Elizabeth City, just in from a week’s patrol of the sound, running supplies down from Norfolk to the 3rd Georgia, dug in on Roanoke Island, taking long shots at the Yankees in Pamlico Sound. Uninspiring, miserable business, but Samuel was glad to be back at it. There had been moments enough during the past two months when he thought he might never step foot on shipboard again.

It was more than two months before, on August 29th, that Fort Hatteras was surrendered to the Yankees. The ten-inch shell from Wabash that had destroyed the fort’s Number 8 gun carriage, killed one of the gun crew, shattered Lieutenant Murdaugh’s arm, and knocked Flag Lieutenant Sharp galley west had nearly done for Samuel Bowater as well. He was tossed into a sea of hurt. He lost a lot of blood.

He had, besides the wounds to thigh and shoulder and arm, three broken ribs, a fractured humerus, and a mild concussion. He could not remember most of what had happened that morning at Fort Hatteras, even less of the trip back to Norfolk. He recalled some sort of shouting match between Hieronymus Taylor and the lockkeeper at the Great Dismal Swamp Canal locks, but little else.

The first sensation that he felt, once the doctor had backed off the laudanum a bit, was anxiety.

The Cape Fear, he was told, had been sent back to Albemarle Sound to join with the little fleet defending Roanoke Island. Roanoke sat square in the middle of the single passage between Pamlico and Albemarle Sound. It was the key to Albemarle Sound and so the key to control of the rivers that wound their way into North Carolina—the Roanoke, the Chowan, and the Pasquotank, as well as the inland passage between Elizabeth City and Norfolk.

It was inconceivable that the Yankees would not push up Pamlico Sound, fast and in force, and capitalize on their victory at Hatteras Inlet. Indeed, it was no more than half a victory if they did not.

While Samuel had no doubts about Lieutenant Harwell’s enthusiasm, he was deeply concerned about the luff’s ability to command the ship in his absence. Every day Bowater asked for the news from North Carolina. And every day the news was the same. The Yankees were in possession of the inlet, the Confederates held Roanoke Island, and they all seemed content to stay where they were.

Finally he stopped asking, and contented himself with the newspapers.

Jacob, whom he had kept to aid him during his convalescence, was dispatched daily for the Richmond Examiner or the Whig, in which Bowater read, “Whose fault it may be, that the little garrison at Hatteras was so poorly provided with ammunition, we leave the proper authorities to enquire. We take it for granted that the marauders will not be permitted to stay long where they are.”

Bowater smiled. If you had stood in that rain of shells, sir, you might not take that so much for granted.

When he could find it, Jacob also picked up the New York Post or Tribune. Samuel read the gloating headlines:

THE WAR ON THE COAST

GOOD NEWS FROM BUTLER’S FLEET

FORT HATTERAS BOMBARDED

SURRENDER OF THE REBELS

CAPTAIN BARRON AND 300 MEN TAKEN

THE TRAITORS OUT OF POWDER

He read about the panic and dismay that had seized the South in the wake of Hatteras, the first successful Union invasion of the Confederacy. From the highs of Manassas to this new low.

In Washington and points north, just the opposite reaction. Elation, renewed hope. Samuel wondered if anyone on either side still had any sense of proportion. To compare the successful shelling of an undermanned and poorly built fort by a vastly superior enemy to what the Confederate Army had done at Manassas was simply absurd. If the people of the South—or the North—allowed themselves to play at such emotional tug-of-war, they were all in for a sorry time.

Back in early September, Samuel had been confined to bed, weak, arm hurting like hell, drifting in and out of sleep. He was tossing in feverish dreams when he heard a soft voice call. “Captain Bowater?” The voice incorporated itself into his dream, a woman calling from far off, and he was running to her, but he could not seem to move, for all his flailing legs.

“Captain Bowater?” His eyes fluttered open. He looked Wendy Atkins straight in the face and could not place her.

“Captain…? It’s Wendy Atkins…”

“Wendy Atkins…” Samuel said the name as the memory came back with the sound of her voice. It had been two months at least since he had seen her. He tried to picture her by the riverfront park, in paint-spattered clothing. She had annoyed him to no end, he recalled, but with all he had been through he could not recall why.

“What are you doing here?” It was all Bowater could think to say.

“I am volunteering as a nurse,” she said. “Oh, I know, the height of scandal, a female nurse.” She sat on the edge of his bed, leaned down, and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “They think we women will become too aroused, working among the men. I tell you, after all the blood and wounds and pus and worse I have seen, I am in danger of never being aroused again!”

Bowater smiled, smiled at what he understood he would have considered shockingly forward half a year before. But not now. He felt bits of his old propriety flaking off, like paint from an unprimed canvas.

“And how do you happen to be here, Captain?”

Bowater told her, in the barest terms, of Hatteras and the awful shelling, and she listened and she nodded and she did not say any of the stupid things—“Oh my…how dreadful…surely you were afraid”—that most people who had not been under fire said. Instead she just listened, which was just what Samuel Bowater wanted, though not even he himself knew it.

By midmonth, Samuel’s strength was coming back, and he made a point of walking up and down the whitewashed, airy halls of the naval hospital, to the limits of his endurance. On these jaunts Wendy accompanied him, lent an arm when necessary, and sometimes they talked and sometimes they did not and it was fine either way.

The broken arm still hurt, but he could move it now, and rather than remain in bed he often sat by the big windows that looked down over the water, or strolled around the hospital grounds. Then one afternoon Wendy appeared, carrying canvas and easel and paints, all quite new.

“Are you going to paint?” Bowater asked. “I would love to watch you, if you would not mind.”

“No, these are for you,” Wendy said, and there was hesitancy, uncertainty, in her voice.

Insouciance…that is it… Bowater thought. He had tried to pin it down, the thing he had so disliked about Wendy Atkins. Insouciance. That was the word. An arrogant boldness.

But the insouciance was gone now, and in its place a kind of calm understanding, a maturity he would not have thought could be gained in a few months. Something had happened, and now he could hardly recall the Wendy who had so annoyed him. Nor could he entirely recall the Samuel Bowater who had been so annoyed.

“Very well, then.” Bowater sighed, set the canvas up. He looked at the paints and the brushes. Something frightened him, and he did not know if it was an inability to get what was in his heart on canvas, or fear that it would all pour out, that he would make it all appear before him, and have to look on it again.

September turned to October and the cheerless days of autumn, with the cold wind tearing brown leaves from the trees, swirling them down the cobbled streets of Norfolk. Bowater, for all the pleasure he was now taking in Wendy’s company—they walked together, set up their easels, painted side by side, working away for hours in companionable silence—was desperate now to get back to the Cape Fear. He extended his walks beyond the confines of the hospital, strolling along the waterfront, looking longingly out over the river, assessing the shipping that plowed the gray water under gray skies.

Wendy urged him not to overtax his strength, and he did not, mostly, but he pushed himself to the brink.

In mid-October he sent word that he would be rejoining the Cape Fear, that he would take passage to Elizabeth City and meet her there. On that very day he read with some amusement how a band of ad hoc Confederate gunboats had chased the mighty Richmond and two other men-of-war from the Head of the Passes below New Orleans. Employed an ironclad ram, first such vessel built on the American continent. The CSN stealing a march on the Yankees.

Rams… That ancient weapon of Athens and Rome, made obsolete with the ascendancy of sail over the oar. Now with the rise of steam, the oldest of naval weapons was voguish once more.

He read of the first of the Yankee ironclad gunboats, the Carondelet, sliding down the ways. He hoped she was as unreliable as this Manassas appeared to be.

At last the doctors pronounced him fit to leave. With great enthusiasm he packed his few belongings, dressed in the new uniform he had ordered, his third, the second of cursed gray cloth. Tailored to the same measurements as the last, but he found it hung loose on him, was ill-fitting. He ignored that, ignored the aches he still suffered, the short-windedness. He would have ignored a missing limb to get out of the hospital and back to his command.

He said goodbye to Wendy, and it was an awkward thing, with a part of him wanting to embrace her, even kiss her, the other part quite unsure of how it was with them. In the end he gave her a hug, she gave him a sisterly peck on the cheek.

“We are in Elizabeth City quite often,” he said to her, a veiled suggestion.

“I could take the train down…” she said.

Bowater took passage aboard the Raleigh, which was transporting supplies from Norfolk to Roanoke Island. He could see the Cape Fear, tied to the dock, a half mile away, as they steamed down the Pasquotank River, leaving the Great Dismal Swamp Canal astern.

Samuel Bowater felt a charge he had not expected, a delight at seeing his little command, as he looked her over through a pair of field glasses. She looked good. Trim, tidy, her paint freshened, the brass howitzers on the afterdeck glowing dull under the overcast skies.

“She look good, Massa Samuel,” Jacob said.

“Here, have a closer look.” He handed Jacob the field glasses. “Are you eager to get back to her?”

“Oh, yassuh. Hospital ain’t no place for no navy men like us, suh.”

The Raleigh ’s skipper brought his boat neatly alongside the Cape Fear. Bowater stepped aboard his own vessel to the kind of formal greeting he would have expected Lieutenant Harwell to organize. There were bosun’s calls and a sergeant’s guard with rifles and lines of men at attention. It was all very stirring, but Bowater did not really notice.

It was the smell that struck him at first. The smell of the Cape Fear. Before, he would not have said there was such a thing, a distinct odor to his ship. But now, coming back aboard after a month and a half absence, he realized there was. Paint and coal smoke and tar and the unique smell of Johnny St. Laurent’s galley—oh, how he had missed St. Laurent’s cooking! They all melded together to give the boat a unique and distinct ambiance. Bowater breathed deep, happy to have that in his lungs again.

He stepped down the lines of men, drawn up to greet him. There was a genuine warmth in their welcome. Bowater was touched, and not a little surprised.

“Tanner.” He stopped in front of the seaman, dressed out in his best uniform. Tanner, and some others, Bowater noticed, had embroidered “Cape Fear” on the silk bands around their caps. “I don’t recall much of what happened that morning at Fort Hatteras, but I do have some memory of your tending to me. Thank you.”

Tanner shrugged, hemmed, looked genuinely uncomfortable. “Whatever I could do, sir…” he managed to get out before Bowater released him from his discomfort, offered him a hand to shake, moved on down the line.

Hieronymus Taylor and his small engineering department were drawn up at the end of the line. Burgess, Moses Jones, Joshua Beauchamps, Nat St. Clair, and two new faces Samuel did not recognize, black men, one a big, burly fellow, the other more slight, around Bowater’s height.

“Welcome back, Cap’n,” Taylor said, hand outstretched. Samuel took the offered hand and shook. Taylor’s clothing, his frock coat and shirt and pants, were perfectly clean, with a crispness that far exceeded even Lieutenant Harwell’s. Bowater looked down the line. It was true of all of the black gang; their clothes were as clean as if they sent them out. How do they do that?

“Cap’n,” Taylor was saying, “these here are two new members of the engineering division, hired on by permission of Lieutenant Harwell. This big fellow is Lafayette Jefferson—how’s that for a patriotic name—and the little fellow is Tommy. Jest Tommy, he says. I took ’em on as coal passers.”

And not just their clothes. There was a generally scrubbed appearance about their persons—none of the coal smudges and sweat stains and matted hair Bowater associated with the engine room, as if they had access to a bathtub, or a shower bath. How do they do that?

“Ahh,” Bowater continued, “is that not an excessive number of coal passers, for one boiler?”

“Well, suh, I’m bringing ol’ Moses along as fireman, see? I think he’s ready for a step up in the world.”

“Very well.” Samuel’s head was swimming. He wanted desperately to sit.

“You will forgive me, Chief…” he said, and making his goodbyes he headed off to the privacy of his cabin, with Jacob close behind.

Da, da-da, da-da-da-da-daaa… He’d been back two and a half months. His strength had returned. With the rolling deck underfoot, the ladders to negotiate two dozen times a day, and Johnny St. Laurent’s cooking, he was soon nearly back to his former self.

The first week in November brought no relief to the monotony of patrolling Albemarle Sound, the Cape Fear now one of the mosquito fleet under the command of Flag Officer William Lynch.

From the south, reports arrived of the Union capture of Port Royal, South Carolina. Big Federal men-of-war pounding the little Confederate forts to dirt—it was a virtual reenactment of Hatteras Inlet on a somewhat larger scale. But on Albemarle Sound, there was little happening. Except a concert by the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Symphony Orchestra, and it was taking on an importance all out of proportion with its promise.

Bowater finished dressing, let Jacob help him on with his coat, pulled his cap over his eyes, and stepped out into the cold. There was the distinct smell of winter in the air, carried on the lashing wind. The Cape Fear thumped against her fenders, rocked hard in the short waves piling up around her hull, a lot of motion for a vessel tied to the dock. Bowater stepped down the ladder and ducked behind the deckhouse, catching a lee from the wind.

He tramped down the side deck, opened the engine-room door. The blast of heat was welcome now. He looked down the fidley. Burgess was hunched over the workbench. At the sound of the door opening he looked up.

“Chief Taylor down there, Burgess?”

“Naw. ’E’s inna gaal-lay, Cap’n,” Burgess said.

Bowater nodded. What the hell did he say? It was not worth asking him to repeat it. “Thank you, Burgess.”

Down the side deck came the scrape of a violin, the first pass of the bow before tuning the instrument. The note had come from forward—they must be staging their evening concert in the warmth of the galley.

Samuel hurried along, stepped into the galley, the smell of baking bread and a simmering cheese sauce like a warm blanket. Most of the Cape Fears were seated around the place, Taylor and Moses on stools at the forward end. It was a very congenial affair, and it made Samuel sad, that such a thing could go on and he, as captain, could have no part of it.

Not that he wished to, with their crude folk ditties and dreary sentimentality.

“Cap’n, come to join us, sir?” Taylor lowered his violin from his chin and called out.

“No, Chief, I fear not. I…ah…I’m off, just now, and I wanted to tell you we’ll be underway at first light, so we’ll need steam up then.”

“Never fear, Cap’n, the engineering division stands ever ready. Got them boys to clean the grates and the fireboxes, blew the boiler down, topped off the feed-water tanks…they don’t get no music unless the engine room’s up to snuff.”

“Very good. Well, then…”

“Where you off to, Cap’n, if you don’t mind my askin? Y’all are dressed to the nines, I mean, and it ain’t often we poor navy men have a chance for such formality.”

“Oh, well…as it happens I am off to a concert. Mozart. What they might term ‘classical music.’”

“Mozart…his music kinda like that Bach fella’s?”

“Yes, sort of. In a broad sense. You should take in some classical music, Chief Taylor. With your interest in the violin you might find it instructive.”

“Well, that’s damned kind of you, Cap’n.” Taylor stood, set his violin back in the box. “Sorry, boys, no fiddlin tonight. I’m goin to hear ‘classic music’ with the Cap’n!”

“Oh, well…” Bowater began, over a chorus of disapproval from the men. “It’s just that I don’t know what to expect from this quintet. Sort of a local, amateur thing. I’d hate to subject you to something that turned out to be awful.”

“Ah, it’ll be all right,” Taylor said, closing and latching the violin case. “Reckon if I started with the best I wouldn’t have nowhere to go.” He straightened, looked around the galley. “Seems a shame, though. These boys were sure looking forward to their music tonight.”

“I should think so, Chief. I don’t think it would be fair for you to deprive them.”

“Not fair at all. All right, boys. Get your shore-goin rigs on. We all goin to listen to classical music.”

“Oh…”

“And Cap’n, what about the darkies?”

“Well, there is generally a place in the balcony for servants to sit.”

“Well, that’s fine. Servants, coal passers, it don’t make no difference. Go on, boys, git your shore-goin rigs on.”

The galley cleared out as the men went to make their preparations for a run ashore. Hieronymus Taylor began to pull his overcoat on, and stopped. “Cap’n, I’m sorry. It just occurred to me, might be you didn’t intend for all the men to come to this here shindy of yours.”

“No, no, Chief, that’s quite all right. I am always happy for the chance to introduce people to the beauty of fine music,” Samuel said, and he knew that if he was a better man he would have meant it.

30

Every day regiments march by. Richmond is crowded with soldiers. These new ones are running in, fairly. They fear the war will be over before they get a sight of the fun.

— Mary Boykin Chesnut

They fitted Jonathan Paine with a prosthetic leg. They made him stand while they did it, made him endure their happy banter about his being as good as new, about how the girls were all swooning for a young soldier with an empty pant leg in his uniform. Jonathan said nothing.

They fitted the thing, took measurements, discussed adjustments. They left and came back another day and made him stand again and strapped it on. Bobby stood beside him—he might have been a tree trunk—and Bobby did not make clever jokes.

They gave him crutches and made him hobble about on the thing and his stump hurt like hell. He could hardly bear to look down and see his own damaged body. The act of standing made the room swirl around him in brilliant lit windows and white sheets and rows of beds and he thought he might fall down, but Bobby was there.

Finally they declared the thing done, set it beside his bed, and went away, and Jonathan got back in his bed and did not look at it again. It was a hateful thing.

Bobby came by to clean and dress his stump. He unwrapped the bandages, looked over the truncated limb as if he was evaluating horse flesh. “Mmm, my. This don’t need no cleanin’. This here looks good and healed-up to me.”

“You let me know when they start giving medical degrees to darkies. Then I’ll be happy to let you treat me.” The November wind made the windows rattle, and the sound chilled Jonathan right through.

Bobby smiled, sat down, uninvited, on a stool beside Jonathan’s bed. “Don’t need no fancy school to tell some things.”

Jonathan rolled his head over, looked into Bobby’s dark eyes. The black man was the only regular thing in his life. “That a fact? So what can you tell me, Dr. Sambo?”

“I kin tell you you bin layin in dat bed for a long damned time. Lot longer den it take for one shot-off leg to mend up.”

“That a fact?”

“Yassuh. Seen plenty a boys come and go, in da time you been layin here. Boys hurt wus den you.”

Jonathan rolled his head back, looked up at the ceiling. He knew every crack, every fleck of chipped paint. It was the landscape of the last part of his life.

Bobby was telling him a true thing. He had seen them too, the young men so grievously injured, seen them come and go while he remained, staring at the ceiling.

“Those other boys, they must have someplace to go,” Jonathan said.

“I tell you true…” Bobby said. He leaned closer and his voice was nearly a whisper. “You best find someplace too. I done heard the doctor talkin to Cap’n Tompkins yesserday. He say dere ain’t no reason you should still be here. He say da provosts, dey makin everyone in town give a bed to a hurt man, ain’t no room for one ain’t hurt.”

Jonathan closed his eyes. Of course, this would happen. He had known all along that it would, someday. He could not stay in that bed for the rest of his life, unless somehow his life were to end that day. But that did not seem likely. The only two things he could hope for—to remain fixed in that bed, or to die there—and neither one a possibility.

He was terrified. More frightened than he had been leaving his home for the uncertainties of war. More frightened than he had been looking down that hill—he now knew it was called “Henry House Hill”—into the swirl of battle, or standing in front of the charging Yankees, bullets plucking at his clothing. None of it was half so frightening to him as the prospect of standing up, tucking the crutches under his arms, hobbling out that door.

“You got no idea what kind of hurt I’m going through,” Jonathan said, and Bobby said, soft, “You think a nigger don’t know nuttin ’bout hurt? You think a boy sold away from his mammy, five years old, don’t know nuttin ’bout feelin sorry fo hisself? Missuh Jon’tin, you gots to go home.”

He was quiet for a long moment. He could feel Bobby’s presence beside him. Finally he spoke. It was just a whisper. “I can’t.”

Bobby replied, and his voice seemed to come from some place beyond the room, “You gots to. An I’se goin to help.” Then he stood and walked away.

With that exchange, everything, for Jonathan, changed. Where before there had been deadness, nothing, there was now terror. Where there had been no thought of the future, there was now obsession with it. And from that obsession, no clear idea emerged of where to go, what to do. Jonathan felt sick to his stomach. His missing leg ached.

Where will I go? He had no money, no home. Certainly the army will give me something? Don’t they owe me wages, at least?

He thought of Robley. Where was he? In camp, no doubt. Jonathan did not follow the military situation, could not bear to think on it. But it was not possible for anyone in possession of his hearing to know nothing of what was going on. It was discussed constantly, and in all quarters. So Jonathan knew that the combined armies of Beauregard and Johnston were still encamped in and around Manassas, that they had done little since the Great Battle.

In October, Jonathan heard there had been some fighting at a place called Ball’s Bluff and the Yankees had been licked again, but he did not know if the 18th Mississippi had been part of that. Beyond that, nothing.

I could go to Robley… His brother tried to be the strict disciplinarian. Sometimes Jonathan thought Robley tried to fill in where their father was deficient, in that regard. But he was not unkind. Far from it. He could go to Robley, beg his brother’s forgiveness, ask for money enough that he could set up somewhere. Get a job. Surely there were things a one-legged man could do? Clerk, bookkeeper. He wrote a good, fair hand, had a head for numbers.

The whole thing overwhelmed him, made him sick with fear.

He thought of Robley, the last time he had seen him. How very angry he was. And Jonathan knew it was not just his and Nathaniel’s defiance that angered him. It was that Jonathan and Nathaniel were going into the fight, and he was not, and he wanted to, as much as his brothers, but his sense of duty would not allow him to walk away from Hamer’s Rifles.

Jonathan heard, subsequently, somewhere, that those troops at McLean’s Ford had in fact got into the show, late in the day. So Robley got what he wanted in the end. And if I had stayed put, made Nathaniel stay put, we would have been together and got into the fight just the same…

And that led to another thought. How do I know that Robley’s all right?

Jonathan sat up on his elbows, waited for the spinning in his head to stop. “Hey, Bobby…”

Bobby, across the room, looked up. He set down the bandages he was rolling, ambled over. He moved fast even while looking as if he was not.

“Yassuh?”

“Is there a way that a fella can find out if someone was killed or wounded in the Battle of Manassas?”

Bobby rubbed his chin. “I do believe they gots lists of all the boys was killed or hurt, down ta da Mechanics’ Institute. It’s where dey gots da War Department, ’cross from de capitol.”

Jonathan lay back again, nodded his head. He had to do it. Stand up, walk out the door, go and see if Robley Junior was still alive, or dead or wounded all this time. He had just compounded the terror. “Will you help me get there?”

“Sure enough,” Bobby said with tempered enthusiasm. He went off to get permission to leave, then came back, helped Jonathan sit up, swung his remaining leg over the edge of the bed. Every movement caused his head to whirl, so long had he remained supine.

Bobby helped him strap on the hateful prosthetic, supported him and helped him on with his pants, a cast-off pair of uniform trousers.

Bobby sat him down again and while he fought for equilibrium the black man pulled his shirtsleeves over his arms, buttoned the shirt down the front. He pulled Jonathan’s shell jacket out from under the bed, shook it out.

“Let me see that,” Jonathan said. Bobby handed it to him.

Jonathan held the jacket in both of his hands. He examined the gray cloth, the brass buttons with “Mississippi” stamped on their faces. They had called him “Mississippi” before they knew his name, because of those buttons.

He stuck his finger through one of the bullet holes. The jacket was riddled with them, as if moths had been at it, and stained with dark patches of blood that had failed to come out, even with the washing Bobby had given the thing.

Jonathan shook his head. All those bullets. How had he lived through it? Why?

“Here, let me help you on wid dis,” Bobby said, gently taking the coat from Jonathan’s hands, as if he did not want Jonathan to further contemplate his melancholy.

“Miss Tompkins, she say we kin take da buckboard. It ain’t too far, but I don’t hardly credit you wid da strength to walk to da carriage house.”

Jonathan pulled on the jacket, buttoned the brass buttons. It was like stepping into a past life, experiencing something from another place and time. Something that seemed utterly alien to the conscious mind but still completely familiar.

Bobby held out a hand and Jonathan took it and allowed Bobby to pull him to a standing position. Bobby stepped beside him and Jonathan put an arm around his shoulder and they stood there while Jonathan’s head settled down.

“I’m all right, I’m all right,” he said at last. “Crutches…”

Bobby tentatively let him go, stepped away to grab Jonathan’s crutches. Jonathan tested his weight on the stump, tried to get a feel for his balance. Not too bad. His shell jacket, cut to fit snug, now hung like a sack coat.

“Here you are, Missuh Jon’tin,” Bobby said, handing Jonathan the crutches. Jonathan tucked the armrests under his arms, set the tips on the floor, eased his weight onto them. Took a step, then another. “Good, good…” he gasped. “Good…show me the way, Bobby.”

They walked, slowly, out of the big room, into a foyer of sorts. Miss Tompkins’s was an elegant house, at least as well appointed as the Paine plantation house, if not quite as big. Now it was entirely given over to the wounded.

Bobby led Jonathan across the carpeted floor—worn and dirty now with the traffic coming and going—and opened the big front door.

Jonathan hesitated. He was breathing hard, in part from the exertion, in part from the panic that seized him. He had not been outside in months, had never really intended to go outside again. It was not a conscious thought—if he had thought about it at all he would have realized that it was absurd—it was just a feeling, understood, never expressed.

But there was the outside, right through the door. A front porch, the roof of which was supported by columns, a Confederate flag flogging in the breeze. Stairs down to the walk, a white picket fence around a narrow yard, sidewalk, cobbled street, people walking by, carriages, the whole world carrying on, waging war, and it did not know or care about Jonathan Paine and what he suffered.

Jonathan breathed deep, hobbled on, out the door. Bobby closed it behind him, helped him down the stairs and around the back of the white clapboard house to where the carriage house stood. In the open area in front of the carriage house stood the buckboard and two black, restless horses in traces. Their breath made gray clouds around their muzzles on that cold day.

Jonathan stopped and leaned on his crutches while Bobby arranged a crate for him to step up on and onto the buckboard’s seat. He gulped breath, felt his limbs trembling from the effort of getting out to the carriage house. His stump throbbed and he was covered in sweat, despite the cold wind that whipped around the courtyard, tumbling leaves and torn papers.

Bobby helped him up onto the buckboard’s seat, and with great relief Jonathan sat.

“You don’t have ta do dis, Missuh Jon’tin,” Bobby said. “You let me know what you wants to find out, I kin go find it out.”

“No,” Jonathan said, gasping the word. “No. I have to do it.” He did not know why. Some kind of penance. Perhaps he would not be satisfied with an answer he did not see himself. Whatever the reason, he had to go.

Bobby flicked the reins, made a clicking noise with his tongue, and the horses stepped out. The buckboard seat bounced and swayed on its springs and Jonathan held on, tried not to think about throwing up.

Richmond was crowded, packed with people, the roads crammed with vehicles. It reminded Jonathan of the docks in New Orleans, that kind of traffic, that kind of bustle. There was nothing else to which he could compare it, he had never seen anything like it.

There were soldiers everywhere, companies and regiments marching past, loitering around, waiting, just as Jonathan remembered, the eternal waiting of military life. Gray-clad privates and privates clad in whatever their home states provided, or whatever they wore off the farm, officers on horses with gold braid swirling around gray sleeves and running wild over the tops and sides of kepis, gold rope twined around slouch hats. Like schools of various species of fish, they moved through the streets.

There were wounded men as well. Men with legs missing, arms missing, men with bandannas tied over their faces to hide whatever horror was left behind when the iron had done its work. In his total self-absorption Jonathan had come to believe that he was somehow unique. Despite the wounded men around him in the hospital, men who had also lost legs, or arms, or their lives, Jonathan had come to believe that he was the worst off, that he had suffered in a way that no one else had.

He sat silent, hanging on as the buckboard jounced, looked around, realized that he had been very wrong in thinking that. He saw a soldier, legs gone, bandanna over one blinded eye, leaning against a building, begging with tin cup extended. I am not so hard off as that fellow, Jonathan thought. When I join him in begging, then I’ll feel sorry for myself. The sight of the man, the thought of himself there on that street corner, rattled him. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the tattered sleeve of his jacket.

Bobby drove the buckboard with aplomb and a hint of aggression, and soon the big capitol building, with its massive columns at the top of wide granite stairs, loomed up in front, and Jonathan was glad because just riding in that swaying seat was taxing his strength to its limits.

They turned right at the capitol, skirted the small park called Capitol Square, pulled up in front of an uninspired four-story brick building set in a block of buildings that fronted 9th Street. Bobby swung the buckboard in against the curb with a deft tug and flick of the reins, swapped curses with another black man who was angling his ice wagon for that spot.

“We here. Let me help you down.”

Bobby climbed out, walked around the heads of the horses, and lifted his arms up to Jonathan, and Jonathan allowed himself to be lifted down like a toddler from a high seat. There was a time, he knew, when he would have been ashamed of that, but he was too tired, too hurt, too afraid to care.

They worked their way through the crowd on the sidewalk, like crossing a fast-moving stream, and into the lobby of the Mechanics’ Institute. It was bedlam there, with civilians and soldiers rushing about, and each with an attitude of utmost importance. For a moment Jonathan just stood, leaning on his crutches, feeling the sweat move under his shirt, and stared. After the months of peace in the makeshift hospital it was all very overwhelming.

“Why don’t you sit, I’ll find out where we gots to go,” Bobby suggested, but Jonathan shook his head.

“No. Let’s press on.”

They forced their way through the crowds, Bobby trying to fend the hurrying crowds away from Jonathan. But he was a black man, and he could be only so pushy, and more than once he had to grab Jonathan before Jonathan was knocked to the marble floor.

They came at last to the Office of Records, which seemed a likely place to start, so they opened the wood door with its opaque window and stepped in. Jonathan crossed to the high counter, leaned his crutches against it, put his weight on his elbows. His forehead felt as if it was burning up. He shivered from a chill, looked around for an open window. His hands were slick with sweat on the polished wood counter.

“What can I do for you?” The clerk came to them at last, harried, but not unfriendly.

“I need…I would like to see a list of the men killed or wounded at the Battle of Manassas.”

The clerk nodded. “That’s the easiest request I got all day. You want it by state, by army, by battalion, how?”

“Regiment. Eighteenth Mississippi. Do you have that?”

“Surely do.”

The clerk left them, crossed to the back of the room, rummaged through a pile of papers, thumbing though various folders. Jonathan felt sick. He was breathing hard. Everything in the room seemed to have a sharp edge to it. He looked over at Bobby, and he could see the worry in the black man’s eyes. Jonathan was terribly afraid.

At last the clerk found what he was looking for, came back across the room. His movements seemed unreal, slowed down, like a dream. Jonathan imagined this was what it was like those final moments marching up to the gallows, the slow, dreamlike unreality of the thing.

The clerk laid the sheet of paper on the desk, slid it over to Jonathan. “Eighteenth Mississippi. There you are.”

Jonathan reached out with a sweating, trembling hand. He tried to lift the paper but could not seem to do it, so he slid it closer, ran his eyes down the list.

Paine, Jonathan, Private, Company D.

Paine, Nathaniel, Private, Company D.

He stopped when he came to the name Paine, Robley, Jr., Lieutenant, Company D. He stared at the name, forced his eyes to focus. What was he looking at? He could not recall what the list was supposed to be.

His eyes shifted right, to the next column, the words that lined up with the names of the Paine boys. Missing. Missing. Killed in Action.

His breath was raspy, loud in his own ears. His eyes would no longer hold their focus on the list.

“What is it?” Bobby asked.

Jonathan looked up at him, his worried eyes, his hands poised, ready to reach out and save him from hitting the floor. “Bobby…” he managed. “I got to go home…” and then he felt the strength run out of him like water through a sieve.

31

SIR: In answer to your letter of 9th instant, asking what is necessary to be supplied…twenty surf boats for landing troops, of a build, except being a little more flat-bottomed, to correspond with those used at Vera Cruz during the Mexican war.

— Flag Officer S. H. Stringham to Gustavus V. Fox

It was an odd sort of concert. Samuel Bowater did not find the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Quintet bad, at least not intolerably so. The first violin knew his business, working through the tragic melody of the Quintet in G Minor, the joyous notes of the Quintet in C Major. He played well for the most part, doing no worse than briefly mutilating the tempo in the second movement and making a hash of a particularly difficult few measures in the third. But overall, not too bad.

Arriving at the hall was worse. It was a terribly improper thing from the outset, inviting Wendy Atkins to accompany him for the evening, with no escort, no chaperon, a young woman all but living by herself. The Samuel Bowater of half a year before would not have considered it.

But now, after the fighting, after the hospital, with the well-established order of things crumbling around him, now, somehow, it did not seem so intolerable. And so he had written to her. And she had accepted. But he had had no intention of displaying his newfound want of morals in front of the men.

Wendy was waiting for him outside as he made his way along the walk, a trail of seamen behind like the tail of a comet. “Miss Atkins, may I present Hieronymus Taylor, my chief engineer,” Bowater said, and Wendy held out her hand to shake and Taylor shook and Bowater was certain he saw something pass between them.

“I think perhaps we have met,” Taylor said. “Didn’t you use to paint them pictures in the park, like the cap’n here?”

“Yes, yes I did…” Wendy said.

So that is it… Bowater thought, and made himself be satisfied with that explanation.

In the concert hall, Hieronymus Taylor sat on one side of him, grinning a wide grin, Wendy on the other. Every once in a while Samuel would meet Taylor ’s eyes and the chief would smile and nod approvingly. Taylor beat the time on his leg, doing so with greater and greater enthusiasm as the concert progressed, to Bowater’s greater and greater annoyance. But Taylor did not stop, save for the moment when the first violin went astray, tempo-wise, and then Taylor just chuckled, waited for the violinist to get back on track.

For the others, it was a mixed experience. Bowater was aware of the shift in mood among the sailors, from anticipation of something new to an uncomfortable realization that a quintet was just a gang of five stiffs like the old man, playing music with no words, and that was as good as it was going to get. There would be no minstrel show, no one in blackface imitating Negroes and singing “Camptown Races” or “Old Folks at Home,” no olio with its crude jests, no burlesque with scantily clad women capering around the stage. Just a bunch of stiffs, sawing away.

Some of the hands tried to remain respectfully alert. Some squirmed, shifted, glanced at the door. Some fell asleep, and Bowater was thankful for that, except for when Jimmy Ogden began to snore and Ruffin Tanner hit him a bit too hard, and he shouted as he jerked awake.

No, it was not the finest musical experience that Samuel Bowater had ever enjoyed, neither the best musicians nor the best audience. He was supremely annoyed to have to divide his attention between Wendy and his cretinous crew.

When it was over the Cape Fears walked en masse back to the docks, with coats wrapped tight around them against the buffeting November wind, as Bowater walked Wendy to the boardinghouse at which she was lodging to have their private farewell.

They stood on the porch, catching a bit of a lee from the house, stood for a long time, not moving or speaking. A part of Samuel’s mind raged against the impropriety of it all, a part wanted to sweep her away, to use the war as his excuse for throwing all of his well-worn propriety overboard. At last he reached out for her, took her in his arms, hugged her, and she hugged him. A real hug, and not a brotherly one. He looked in her eyes. “I have missed you.”

“I have missed you. You’ll send word?”

“I will.” He kissed her, and she kissed him back. They said nothing more, and she pulled herself from his arms.

Bowater caught up with his men at last on the dock, and Bayard Quayle, who was on sentry duty, did no more than peek out from where he was huddled in the engine-room door to see who it was boarding the vessel. The men each thanked Bowater for the experience and disappeared forward.

“Well, damn me, that was somethin,” Taylor said as he and Bowater walked forward.

“Did you enjoy it, Chief?”

“I surely did, Cap’n. I always figured that Mozart and such was too highfalutin for a simple country fiddler like me, but now I see there ain’t so much to it. And all together, with them…whatta ya call ’em, the bigger ones?”

“Violas? Cello?”

“Yeah. Why, it sounds like a choir of angels!”

“I’ll admit the first violin was not the best I have heard. But the music itself is very complicated. It sounds simple, well played, but that is deceptive.”

“Aw, I don’t know,” Taylor said. “Hmmm, hmm, hm, hm…” The chief began to hum the first violin’s part with surprising recall. “Reckon I could scratch that out.”

“You remember that part?”

“Oh, hell, yes. I got a great head for remembering little ditties and such. I hear a tune, I got it”—Taylor snapped his fingers in the air—“like that.”

“Yes, well…” It was irritating that Taylor should think remembering and reproducing a “little ditty” by Mozart was the same as hearing and then playing some campfire song. “I fear it is a bit more than that, you know. Well, good night, Chief.”

Taylor pulled a cigar from his pocket, clamped it in his teeth. “Good night, Cap’n. We’ll have a full head of steam by sunup.”

“Very good, Chief.” Bowater walked to the forward end of the deckhouse, climbed the ladder to the boat deck. He stepped though the wheelhouse and into his cabin. The steam pipes that ran along the deck filled the cabin with glorious warmth, like stepping into a lover’s embrace.

Jacob was asleep below, and Bowater had given him permission to remain asleep and he was glad that he did. He wanted to be alone. He was in an irritable mood. His night ashore had been ruined, and all his telling himself that he was glad to introduce his men to such finer things as classical music was not enough to make him believe it.

Hieronymus Taylor…son of a bitch white trash peckerwood… The chief never failed to irritate him, and then it irritated him further that he let Taylor irritate him, until he had irritation built upon irritation.

It was irritating that Taylor was so damned good at his work. Taylor had a sense for engines that was profound, almost mystical. Every steamer on which Bowater sailed had always had a myriad of problems with the engines. But nothing beyond the most minor of difficulties ever seemed to take place aboard the Cape Fear. Bowater had watched Taylor once fix the small steam engine that drove the steering gear—an engine that had squealed its way to what seemed an untimely death—with just a twist of a wrench and a feather touch of a screwdriver. It was like a laying on of hands. It was spooky.

Samuel unbuttoned his coat and hung it on a hanger, smoothed it out, hung the hanger on a rod. He pulled his braces off his shoulders and took off his shirt and hung it up with equal care.

From the galley below he heard a screeching sound, like straining metal or a cat in great pain. He stopped, cocked his ear, frowned.

The sound again, but less discordant, and he realized it was Taylor’s violin. He was tuning his violin in the galley below.

Is he intending to play at this damned time of night?

Bowater stood in that spot and listened and did not know what to do. He wanted to tell Taylor to quit it, that he did not care to hear his caterwauling when he was going to bed, that he did not care to hear the damned “Bonnie Blue Flag” at that hour, or any. But he did not want Taylor to know he had irritated him.

Then the screeching stopped and there came up through the deck a series of notes that were not “Dixie” or “Roll the Old Chariot Along” but rather Mozart. Mozart’s Quintet in G Minor.

Bowater got down on his hands and knees, held his ear an inch above the deck. Taylor was playing the piece flawlessly, remembering note for note what he had heard two hours before. He went through the first movement, the notes rising and falling with the very passion the old master had infused into them. He did not miss a one. He made the first violin of the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Quintet sound like a hack in a minstrel show.

For ten minutes Bowater remained in his supplicant position, listening to the music coming up through the deck, nodding his head to the rhythm, mouthing the melody as it floated through the deck. He listened to Taylor breeze effortlessly over sections of which, he recalled, the first violin had made a hash. He listened to the chief engineer’s beautiful interpretation of that classic work.

Devil take that peckerwood son of a bitch… Bowater thought, despite himself. Now he was more annoyed than ever.

Hieronymus Taylor sat on Johnny St. Laurent’s stool, in the warmth of the galley, eyes closed, and let his fingers dance over the neck of his violin, let the music flow from his head, down his arm, up the bow, to be coaxed at last out of the body of the instrument.

He hummed softly as he played the Quintet in G Minor. He had not heard it for two years at least before that night, was not sure he could execute it perfectly, but his fingers and his bowing arm knew what to do, once he stopped thinking and just let them go.

The first violin of the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Quintet had not been so very bad, though he had no genuine feel for the music. Still, Taylor could sense Bowater tightening every time the poor bastard made a hash of it. From the corner of his eye he saw the captain shake his head in disgust with each minor imperfection.

Goddamned blueblood, stick-up-his-ass patrician son of a bitch… Taylor thought.

Wendy Atkins…son of a bitch… he thought.

He heard the music go awry as his concentration drifted, and he refocused on Mozart. Not one damned thing good enough for that bastard… Bowater made him feel insignificant, a poor relation, the hired man who lives in the barn. It irritated him and it irritated him that he allowed it to irritate him.

He crept up on the section where the first violin had made a mess of the tempo. He stood, climbed up on an apple crate so that his instrument would be as close to the sole of the captain’s cabin as it could get, played the part with a perfection of timing, as loud as he could.

He heard the galley door open, felt a blast of cold wind sweep away the steam heat. He looked over, expected to see a furious Samuel Bowater. Instead, he saw Ruffin Tanner, framed in the door, lit by the soft light of the single lantern burning in the galley. Tanner stepped in, shut the door behind him, leaned with folded arms against the door.

Taylor looked away, closed his eyes, finished the movement, but the mood was broken with Tanner there, and he felt a bit foolish, having been caught standing on top of the crate.

He bowed the last note, opened his eyes, let the bow fall to his side, and took the violin from his chin. He turned and regarded the sailor, who was patiently waiting for him to finish. He found Tanner gruff, often unpleasant, highly competent at his job. Tanner was the kind of man he liked, a kindred irascible bastard.

“That there,” Taylor said, hopping down from his crate, “is what you call ‘classical music.’”

“That a fact? Reckon I’d call it a lot of goddamned noise for seven bells in the evenin watch.”

“Would you, now?” Tanner’s attitude was something different for the sailor. Aggressive. He wondered if he was going to have to whop Tanner’s ass. Wondered if he could. It would be a good fight.

“Well, lucky for you, you done broke the mood, you know what I mean?” Taylor laid the violin and bow in the case. “You done broke my creative spell.” He snapped the case shut, set the instrument well out of the way on the galley counter. Turned, faced Tanner, arms folded the way the sailor’s were. “I don’t much appreciate that.”

“No? Well, I don’t much appreciate bein kept awake by some white trash peckerwood standin on an apple crate like some kinda dumb ass.”

“‘Dumb ass,’ you say?” Taylor let his arms drop to his sides, shook them out. Didn’t know what was up Tanner’s behind, but he reckoned it was time to beat it out of him. “You want to do somethin about this problem of yours?”

Tanner nodded. He unbuttoned the top few buttons of his heavy overcoat, reached a hand in. Taylor braced for what would come out of there—a knife, a blackjack, a gun.

But it was a bottle, a flask-style bottle more than half full of a liquid that looked very much like whiskey. “Long as your goddamned fiddle’s put away, guess I can give you something, might bring back that ‘creative spirit’ you s’all fired worried about.”

Tanner pulled the cork from the bottle, took a deep pull, wiped the neck on his coat, and handed it to Taylor. Taylor tipped the bottle back. Whiskey. Quite good whiskey, in fact. “Yup. Yup. I hear that ol’ muse singin again.”

He handed the bottle back, and Tanner stepped across the galley, rustled up two glasses, half-filled each with the liquor. Handed one to Taylor.

“Tanner, you got a goddamned funny way of sayin you’d like to have a drink with a man.”

“That ain’t what I want to say. I want to say, you too damned hard on the cap’n.”

“‘Hard on the cap’n? Are you jokin?”

“No, I ain’t. And you know it. Ride over him every chance you got. I don’t know what the hell you was doin up on that crate, but I bet it ain’t no coincidence you was right under the old man’s cabin.”

Taylor took a sip of his whiskey, hoped he was not flushing red, or at least that Tanner would not see it in the muted light. “This here the master’s division gettin all uppity about what us engine-room niggers is doin? Y’all think we should keep to our place? Don’t try to come into the big house, like?”

“Ain’t about that. I don’t give a damn about that. Some of my best friends is black gang. Do what you want to the luff. It’s just Cap’n Bowater. I don’t appreciate the grief you give him.”

“And why are you so concerned about good Cap’n Bowater?”

“’Cause he saved my life, oncet. Man don’t forget that.”

Taylor took a drink, pulled out the remainder of his cigar, sparked it to life. He needed a moment to consider this. Bowater did not seem the life-saving kind to him.

After a long silence, Taylor said, “All right, Tanner. Reckon you best tell it.”

Tanner looked at Taylor, and for a moment seemed to consider whether or not he would. “You got another one of them cigars?” he asked at last.

Taylor frowned, but he reached in his pocket, withdrew his penultimate cigar, handed it over. Waited patiently while Tanner bit off the end, then handed him his own smoldering cigar to use as a light.

“It was in the Mex War,” Tanner said at last. “In ’46. At Veracruz. I wasn’t in the navy but five years or so. Thought I knew it all, ’course, but I didn’t know shit. Anyway, we was bringing ammunition ashore for a navy battery they was setting up south of the city there. Had these big, flat barges, crazy sons of bitches. Couldn’t hardly control ’em, even when the weather was good. They’d get four or five of ’em on a hawser, get one of them little paddle-wheel schooners to bring up to the beach.

“So there’s Ensign Bowater, fresh from the Navy School, looks clean and proper, like a little sailor doll you’d buy for your daughter. He’s in command of this little paddle wheeler ’cause her proper captain’s assigned to the battery ashore. They figured that was the real work, let the green-horn take the barges back and forth.

“We’re bringin our barges on and off the beach, ain’t no thing. Made the last run of the day, sun’s goin down. We got about five miles to steam back to the fleet. They was anchored around that island the Mex call Sacrificios.

“Halfway there, and one of them Mex northers come rippin through. You ever experience anythin like that?”

Taylor nodded. “I know about them northers.”

Tanner nodded as well. “Then you know, they come right outta nowhere, come tearin down like a bull gone mad. Right in the middle of that big bay, and a norther come down on us, just as it was getting dark. First ya feel that blast of cold air, then the wind starts fillin in. Next thing we know we takin green water over the sides, fillin faster than we can bail. Seas gettin bigger and bigger, and mind, them barges warn’t nothin in a seaway in the gentlest of times. Rain’s comin down, lightnin flashin around, and ol’ Ensign Bowater jest drivin that little schooner for all she’s worth, right for the fleet.

“But a mile from the fleet and I start thinkin, ‘Damn, we may live through this after all.’ Then, sure as hell, the hawser parts, right at our bow. We was the last barge in the line, see? So away we go, twirlin around downwind, jest like a leaf in a damn stream. Last I seen of the schooner and Ensign Bowater, he’s jest steamin along still. I don’t reckon he even knew we was gone. And I jest shake my head, don’t even bother to cuss him out, on account of I didn’t reckon we could expect much more, and him a boy right outta school.

“For about an hour we bailed like hell and some prayed and some was cussin and finally we hit the surf, due south of where we lost the tow. It was full night by then—dark comes quick when you got one of them northers—and we didn’t know we was on the beach till the barge grounds out. Two good hits and it breaks all to hell and all us sailors on board, there was about twenty of us, we all in the water.

“’Bout fifteen of us managed to get ashore, the rest drowned, or was beat to death by the surf. Some of us managed to snatch up rifles and even some cartridge boxes and we kept ’em dry, and that was a good thing. See, the Americans was nearly surrounding Veracruz, but surrounding the Americans was all these gangs of Mex irregular cavalry, and guerrillas and any damn Mex got his hands on a gun and reckoned he’d kill and rob him an American soldier.

“So we didn’t know what in hell we was going to do, but we set up some kinda defense, there on the beach, ready to fight off whatever Mex comes at us. Didn’t take too damned long, either. We’d drifted way south of the American lines, right in Mex territory, and them guerrillas come on, just like sharks. Didn’t know they was there till we hear rifles and one of our boys jest falls dead.

“You got to understand, it was dark as hell. Couldn’t see a thing. And most of our powder was wet, and us sailor boys, we ain’t so good at loading and firing in the rain, not like them infantry sumbitches. We figured we was done for, and it was only a matter of time. I seen that first one go down, and I figured that was it. Never reckoned to get it on no damned Mexican beach.

“Then, right out of nowhere, we hear a steam engine! Steam engine, there on that beach, and we don’t know what the hell it was. Then there’s a flash of lightning, and there’s the paddle-wheel schooner, with them barges still behind, but they’re empty now, and backing down into the surf. I never thought no one would come for us. Twenty sailors? On a night like that? Didn’t reckon anyone would think it was worth it. Then I reckoned someone musta relieved Bowater of his command, ’cause I sure as hell didn’t think that toy sailor’d do it on his own.”

Taylor took a last gulp of whiskey, refilled his glass and Tanner’s. “And?”

“And I was wrong. Once Bowater realized our barge was gone, he called for volunteers amongst the other barge crews to go after us. Happy to say they all volunteered. Then Bowater, he jest let the paddle wheeler drift downwind and current, reckoned he’d fetch up where we did. Damned stupid thing to do, but he didn’t know no better. Then he sees our gunfire. Drops anchor, backs the paddle wheeler down on the beach until the last of them barges is right in the surf. He had ’em tied together, see, to form sort of a bridge. All we had to do was climb over ’em.”

“So that’s how he saved your sorry ass?”

“Nope. Problem was, those Mex had us under fire. We tried to go back across the beach, they would have come out and slaughtered us. So after a while, Bowater figures this out. Next thing we know, here he comes, leadin the barge crews, with whatever weapons they got, climbin over them barges and into the surf, and right up to where we was hidin. The Mex is firin at us, and we firin at the Mex and some of those poor bastards is getting shot down. But we held ’em. All night, in the damned rain and the wind, we held ’em off.

“First light we starts movin toward the barges. We had half a dozen of the fellows was United States Marines, and they was the only ones knew how to cover a retreat, like. So they organized the thing, and we backed off down the beach, got on them barges, and all the while we can see the Mex gettin closer, firin the whole time, and we’s nearly out of ammunition.

“’Course, as cap’n of the steamer, Bowater’s duty is to get on board her, get her ready to get underway.”

“That what he done?”

“Nope. He wouldn’t get off that damned beach until all of us was. Stupid bastard, and I told him so, but he wouldn’t go. Me and him, we was the last ones off that beach. See here…” Tanner bent over, pulled up his right pant leg. The lantern light shone on the smooth, hard skin of a scar that wrapped itself halfway around his calf.

“That was a Mex bullet I took just as we was gettin in the barge. Warn’t nothin would kill me, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have got off that beach if Bowater wasn’t there to help. None of us would. He never asked for permission to do what he done, just done it.”

Taylor nodded. “Very impressive. It must have been a tearful reunion, you two, up there at Norfolk, all huggin and carryin on about old times. Be enough to make a body puke.”

Tanner shook his head. “Bowater don’t remember me, and that’s how I keep it. I seen him on and off, over the years. Then when I seen him in Norfolk, and fightin for the South, then I said, ‘Wherever that sumbitch is goin, that’s where I want to go.’ That’s when I finagled my way on board, here.”

“All right. So Bowater saved your flea-bitten hide oncet. That’s got nothin to do with me.”

“No, it don’t. All’s I’m sayin is this. You think Cap’n Bowater’s a fancy, upper-crust sumbitch, got a broomstick up his ass, and I ain’t saying he don’t. But the man’s got grit, you hear? Kinda grit it took to come get us off that beach, that ain’t somethin a man loses. It’s somethin you born with. You seen him go after the fleet back there at Hampton Roads, seen him march right through them shells at Fort Hatteras. You may not like him, but he’s a man deserves respect. That’s all I gots to say.”

Taylor was silent, chewed on his cigar. “All right. You done said it.”

Tanner picked up the whiskey bottle, examined it, drained the last vestiges of whiskey. “Good night, Chief,” he said.

“Good night.”

Tanner opened the galley door. The wind whipped in, made the hanging pots clang against each other like bells on a buoy. Then he stepped out, closed the door, and it was quiet again.

Taylor remained sitting, looking at the door. Tanner was a good man. He had respect for a man like Tanner.

Well, goddamn… he thought. This sure as hell complicates things.

32

…I care not what they say of me there so long as it is evident here that I am trying my best to get ready to strike the enemies of my country and of mankind. That I will hit them hard when ready, if possible, I promise you.

— Lieutenant Isaac N. Brown, C.S. Navy

For the second time in his life, Jonathan Paine woke up to find himself staring up at Bobby’s face. He shifted his eyes. The ceiling behind Bobby was not the ceiling of the sitting room at Miss Tompkins’s. Jonathan remained still, looked back at Bobby.

“Where am I?” he asked in a soft voice. He was afraid.

“You in de Mechanics’ Institute. You done fainted.”

“How long have I been out?”

“Not more’n five minutes.”

Jonathan nodded. Five minutes? It felt as if he had been unconscious for hours. He could feel the sweat on his forehead. He felt disconnected, as if he was viewing the world through field glasses. “I think the fever’s back,” he whispered.

“Sure enough. We gonna git you back to Miss Tompkins, jest as soon as we can.”

“I need to write. To my father…”

“Oh, you gots a father now? Lord, don’t the army provide a power o’ things! This mornin you didn’t have no father at all.”

There was a bustle in the room and Jonathan opened his eyes and two men laid a litter on the floor beside him. They picked him up, feet and shoulders, and shifted him onto the litter and lifted him up. His head spun around. His breath was coming shallow and fast. They carried him out of the War Department building, laid him on the back of the buckboard at Bobby’s instruction.

The fever took hold on the jostling, bumping, agonizing ride back, and it did not relinquish its grip for two more days. And when Jonathan finally kicked his way up from the delirium and the sweats and the nightmare images, Bobby was there, and once again the black man was the only real thing in his world.

The fever broke at last, and Bobby helped him sit up in bed and he said, “Missuh Jon’tin, you wants to write to you daddy?”

Jonathan nodded.

He wanted to write. He had to. He had no remaining brother. He was it, the last of the Paine boys, and his parents would have no idea what had happened there at the Bull Run River. He had to tell them, in his own way. It was no longer a matter of wanting to go home. He had to. Now.

Bobby went away, returned with paper and pen and the Bible on which to write.

Dear Mother and Father,

When I wrote before, I was not aware of the tragic death of Robley Junior at the Battle of Manassas. As you grieve for the loss of your sons, so I too grieve for the loss of my brothers.

My last letter, written from this place, must have been something of a mystery to you. I will not relate the particulars here of the great sacrifice that Nathaniel and Robley Junior made on the field of battle, but rather will tell you all that I know when we are once again together. I am at Miss Sally Tompkins’s on Main St. in Richmond, Virginia. I am wounded with the loss of a leg but have recovered, and long for nothing more than to return home. If you will have me, I beg you send some money to this place, enough for me to pay my passage home. Until then, I will dream every day of being reunited with you, my loving parents, and will remain

Your obedient, humble son,

Jonathan

Jonathan folded the latter, sealed and addressed it, handed it to Bobby.

“I don’ know what you wrote, Missuh Jon’tin, but it sure seems to a done you a power a good!”

“I wrote to my daddy. Reckon you never thought to hear me say this, but it looks like I’m going home.”

Bobby smiled and Jonathan smiled. Home. The word did not mock him now. It sounded in his ear the way the word was supposed to sound, evoked those things that home should mean. He felt something he had not felt since that first bullet slammed into Nathaniel, sent him spinning down to the ground. He did not know at first what it was. It was only later that he realized. It was hope.

Bobby took the letter, carried it to the post office, paid for the postage. For three weeks the letter made its tortured way south, by rail, by steamboat, by coach, until at last the postmaster at Yazoo City plucked it from a pile on a big oak table, read the address, and shook his head. He carried it over to the pigeonhole marked 26, which was Paine’s box, and with some difficulty made a space in the mail already accumulated there and stuffed the letter in.

And there it remained. Because Robley Paine was not around to retrieve his mail, and would not have retrieved it anyway, even if he had been there. Because Robley Paine did not believe that there was any person from whom he wished to hear. Robley Paine had given up on this world, abandoned everything except his fight against the Yankees and his hope of heaven, and there was nothing that could come through the mail that he might care about.

At the very moment that the postmaster was forcing Jonathan Paine’s letter in among the demands from creditors, the letters to Katherine Paine from sundry relations, the reports from agents in New Orleans and England, Robley Paine, Sr., was tapping his fingers with frustration on the top of the big wooden wheel of the Yazoo River.

After shelling Pope’s ships, they had returned to New Orleans, heroes all. Kinney, his hand bound in a bloody rag, conned the boat up to the wharf at the foot of Beinville Street. The deckhands made the vessel off to the pilings and bollards, Engineer Brown shut the engines down, and then they all deserted, en masse, the entire crew, marching off the battered stern-wheeler into the cheering crowd and were never heard from again.

Frenzy time. Robley was all over the docks, looking for more men, more guns, more munitions, another chance to drive the Yazoo River into combat.

He found nothing. Kinney and Brown were well known along the waterfront, knew everyone, knew everyone who knew everyone. They spread the word about Robley, and it wasn’t good. Madman. Lunatic.

Kinney might even have brought Paine up on charges for blowing his fingers off, had he not been guilty of what could be construed as mutiny. As it stood, he was lauded as a great and wounded veteran of what the New Orleans Daily True Delta was calling “a complete success, and perhaps the most brilliant and remarkable naval exploit on record.” So Kinney contented himself with modest acceptance of the praise due him, and silence regarding the particulars.

Robley Paine came in for his share of the praise, but he wanted none of it. He wanted nothing but a competent crew to man his vessel and help him drive it into harm’s way, and that was the one thing he could not find.

He appeared one morning at the offices of Daniel Lessard, was greeted with a certain deference there, a reception almost like fear.

When the clerk hurried off to alert Lessard, Robley glanced at himself in a decorative mirror. Not an encouraging sight. He had not shaved in a week, could not recall the last time he had eaten. His eyes stared out from dark hollows, the stubble on his cheeks was drawn in tight where his face was pinched. His clothes were dirty and stained and torn in places. Over it all he wore a cape. He no longer bothered to hide the Starr hanging from his belt.

I have got to clean myself up…got to do something… But for all of the wild energy he directed at manning and outfitting his ship, he could not manage even the slightest interest in himself.

“Robley, sir, come in, come in, it has been far too long!” Lessard’s voice was smooth as river stones but he could not hide the quick, appraising glance up and down, the uneasy smile he hoped would look genuine.

“Good day, Daniel.” Robley let Lessard lead him into his office, shut the door, which Robley did not recall him doing before. He gestured for Robley to sit and sat himself behind his desk.

“Your fame has spread, sir. Your bold action at the Head of the Passes, and your attack on the Union ships down below Pilot Town…they have made you quite famous.”

“Humph. It was a start, a weak effort. Damned Hollins did us no favors, claiming to have sunk one of the Yankees. Should have. Didn’t.” Hollins, on seeing the Yankees abandoning one of their ships, had assumed her sunk, and reported her so. It detracted from their accomplishment when it was ultimately discovered that the ship was not sunk at all.

“Still, it was a singular victory. The papers…”

“See here, Daniel…I’m not blind. Or deaf. I know what’s being said. ‘Paine’s mad…trying to kill himself…’”

Lessard raised his hands to protest, but Robley cut him off. “Don’t deny it…I know it’s true. You think I’m mad as well, I can see it in your damned eyes. And you know what? I don’t give a goddamn. Hell, maybe I am mad. Got reason enough. But I can’t get anyone to ship with me. Damn engine is broken down again, I can’t get an engineer on, I can’t engage a pilot. I’m stuck here. Got an armed ship and can’t get in the fight and all the while the damned snake, squeezing tighter, squeezing…”

“Well, Robley, it is not you. It’s the war. All the available men are off with the army or the navy. Everyone is scrambling to find…”

“Here’s what I need. I don’t want to get men to fight the ship. Never find ’em. Need navy men. I see that. What I want now is an engineer to get the engines working, a pilot and crew to get the ship up to Yazoo City.”

Robley’s voice took on a plaintive tone, and he tried to fight it but he could not. He felt so lost there in New Orleans, surrounded by cowards and thieves. Yazoo City was becoming his personal El Dorado, a fabled city, his quest—to reach it. If he could get to Yazoo City, free from the corruption of New Orleans, then he could regroup and fight in earnest.

“That’s all I want. To get to Yazoo City. No fighting. Just help me get to Yazoo City, where folks know me, and I’ll get my men and fit my ship out there. I’ll pay in specie. Gold.”

Lessard leaned back and pressed his fingers together and his expression was very different. “Robley…that, I think, I can arrange.”

The engineer showed up at nine-thirty the next morning, and he was no Chief Brown. Clean and groomed, well-spoken, he had an air of competence and professionalism that made Robley furious. The good men were available to take gold for keeping out of harm’s way, it seemed. But Robley said nothing, because the goal was Yazoo City, and he did not wish to compromise that.

Two weeks and fifteen hundred dollars later the Yazoo River ’s engines sounded better than Robley had thought they could sound.

Lessard sent deckhands, good Southern boys, competent, hardworking, not the foreign trash swept up along the docks. Lessard sent a pilot who did not stink of stale whiskey, a pilot who was courteous and professional and did as he was ordered and explained patiently when he was ordered to do something he could not.

And so, a week before the end of the year 1861, the year in which Robley Paine had witnessed the end of his life, and begun suffering the horrible torment of continuing to live nonetheless, the stern-wheeler privateer Yazoo River cast off from the docks of New Orleans and headed up three hundred winding miles of river to Yazoo City.

Victory or death. Victory and death. He would begin that journey there.

Eight hundred miles away, buffeted by the gales that shrieked in off the Atlantic, the CSS Cape Fear butted her plumb bow into the steep chop, sent spray flying up over the wheelhouse, where Samuel Bowater stood, one hand on the rail that ran around the bulkhead just below the windows, as a succession of seamen struggled with the wheel and cursed.

They watched the enemy at Fort Hatteras, brought supplies to the troops on Roanoke Island. They towed wrecks into Croatan Sound, the passage between Roanoke Island and the mainland, entryway to Albemarle Sound, and sank them. They struggled to drive pilings into the muddy channel bottom to stop the enemy’s passing. They watched sickness cut the crew down by a third, working in the freezing rain and the cutting wind. They waited for the Yankees.

Christmas came, and the Cape Fear was tied up dockside at Elizabeth City. Samuel Bowater gave Johnny St. Laurent money from his own pocket to buy a special dinner for the crew, and Hieronymus Taylor did as well, though neither knew the other had, and as a result Johnny had more money than he could spend in a Confederacy beginning to feel the pinch of the blockade.

He prepared a meal-mock turtle soup and fried whiting, Fowl a la Bechamel and Oyster Patties for an entree, with Stewed Rump of Beef a la Jardiniere as a second course and Charlotte aux Pommes and Apricot Tart made with dried fruit for dessert—that was not just the best that Samuel had ever enjoyed aboard a naval vessel, but among the half-dozen best he had ever eaten.

They ate in the forecastle, the single biggest space on board, which still would not have been big enough if a third of the Cape Fears had not been in hospital at Norfolk. The place was scrubbed out fastidiously, and both Negroes and officers were invited, and it was a fine time.

Bowater stayed after, lent his tenor to the songs that Taylor and Jones performed, the words of which he involuntarily knew by heart. Taylor gave him the opening movement of Mozart’s Quartet in C Major, which, at another time, Bowater would have perceived as an elbow in the ribs, but on that night seemed more a peace offering, and Bowater chose to take it as such. The men endured the classical interlude without complaint.

New Year’s followed, and Johnny had money enough left over to stage another grand feast, and once again the festivities were loud and companionable. This despite the howling wind, the spitting snow, the funereal weather. This despite the fact that the Yankees possessed Pamlico Sound and Port Royal, despite the launch of Yankee ironclads on the Ohio River and the buildup of McClellan’s troops in Washington and the apparent inactivity of Johnston.

Despite all of the setbacks that the Confederacy had experienced, there was still the fact that the main armies had met but once, and that once was a Confederate victory, and on that night of December 31, 1861, the men of the Cape Fear, like all men and women of the Confederate States, had every reason to hope and to believe that their glorious cause would be carried on to victory with the next campaigning season.

And so the Cape Fears ate and drank and toasted one another and went to bed and prepared to carry on their dreary patrol.

Which they did, at first light the next morning. And then, twelve days later, the Yankees came.

33

Here is the great thoroughfare from Albemarle Sound and its tributaries, and if the enemy obtain lodgments, or succeed in passing here, he will cut off a very rich country from Norfolk market.

— Flag Officer William F. Lynch to Stephen R. Mallory

Roanoke Island: the tollgate between Pamlico Sound, now in Yankee hands, and the Confederate waters of Albemarle Sound.

Eight big rivers emptied into Albemarle Sound, the North, West, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Little, Chowan, Roanoke, and Alligator, as well as four canals. Two railways had their terminus there. Albemarle Sound was the back door to Norfolk, and with the Yankees guarding the front door, it was the only way in. Possession of Roanoke Island meant, ultimately, possession of Norfolk, Portsmouth, the naval yard, and virtually all the commerce coming into North Carolina.

Roanoke Island was important, and the Yankees knew it, so they sent over one hundred ships, armed vessels and transports, carrying seventeen thousand men, to take it back.

The Confederates knew it too, but they allowed only one thousand men, two hundred of whom were sick, and the seven vessels of Lynch’s mosquito fleet to oppose them.

January 20, 1862. The wind was singing around the wheelhouse and Samuel Bowater could feel the Cape Fear jerk at her anchor chain as Jacob woke him. He looked out the window. The sky was dull, lead-colored, the waves whipped into a froth. The weather had not been agreeable in some time. It promised to get worse.

Bowater dressed quickly, stepped out into the wheelhouse. Jacob brought coffee. Harwell was there.

“Good morning, Lieutenant.”

“Morning, sir.”

“Engine room?”

“Steam’s up, ready to get underway.”

“Coal?”

“Starboard bunker half full, port bunker three-quarters. Fresh water topped off. Chief Taylor reports the problem with the web bearings is fixed. He says the grates are clean as of now, but said…the…ahh…poor-quality anthracite coal produces a lot of clinker.”

Bowater nodded. He could just imagine the way the chief had really phrased it. Taylor took a special pleasure in shocking Harwell because Harwell was so very shockable.

The wheelhouse door opened, and the blast of wet air filled the wheelhouse with noise and cold. Tanner stepped through, shut the door. He was wearing a greatcoat, wrapped tight around him, a tarpaulin hat. “Sea Bird ’s signaling ‘Get underway,’ sir.”

“Very good. Mr. Harwell, let us get the anchor up.”

Harwell saluted, disappeared, and Bowater stepped up beside the wheel and looked out the window. Most of the mosquito fleet was visible to him, riding at their anchors. They were in Croatan Sound, the passage between Roanoke Island and the North Carolina shore, roughly three and a half miles wide. The fleet was clustered off Pork Point on Roanoke Island.

Bowater’s eyes moved to the Sea Bird, flagship of Commodore Lynch. She was a side-wheel steamer, a former passenger boat, now mounting a thirty-two-pounder smoothbore and a thirty-pounder Parrott. Black smoke peeked out of her funnel, only to be whipped away in the wind. The signal flag, “Get underway,” stood out straight and flat in the wind, as if it was painted on a board.

Raleigh had steam up as well. She was a tug, like Cape Fear, but smaller, built for canal work. She sported a thirty-two-pounder forward.

The other vessels in the fleet did not have steam up. Bowater could see CSS Curlew, 260 tons, an iron side-wheel steamer, the most substantial vessel of the fleet. There were also the Ellis, Appomattox, and Beaufort. Each was a tug. Each mounted a single thirty-two-pounder.

Anchored astern of Cape Fear was Fanny, the iron-hulled screw steamer taken from the Yankees a few months earlier, and the former tug, now CSN gunboat Forrest. That was it. The mosquito fleet. The ships that stood between the Yankees and Albemarle Sound.

From forward came the clank of chain coming in, and Seth Williams came in from the wind and blowing spray, took the beckets off the wheel, stood ready.

Clang…clang…clang… Bowater looked out the window. Harwell, bundled up in oilskins and sou’wester, waved his arm in a chopping motion. Up and down, the anchor right under the bow. Bowater rang slow ahead. The Cape Fear began to drift, her anchor free, windborne. The prop caught the water, drove her ahead, Williams met her with the wheel. Underway. To starboard, Sea Bird was butting the chop, steaming ahead, and Raleigh as well.

Those two, Seabird and Raleigh, had gone down sound the day before, scouted out the Yankees. Their report was not encouraging. Dozens, literally dozens, of ships coming in over the bar to Pamlico Sound. Gunboats, troop transports, supply ships. They were struggling with the breakers over the bar, but one by one they were managing to get their vessels over.

No one of the mosquito fleet doubted they would, because the officers of the mosquito fleet were all former officers of the United States Navy, and deep in their divided hearts they believed their old service capable of anything.

So the Confederate Navy would be the Spartans, and Croaton Sound their Thermopylae.

Bowater stepped out of the wheelhouse, out of the envelope of steam heat, into the brunt of the wind. It pulled at his sou’wester, tugged at his oilskins, found every tiny imperfection in the covering.

The Cape Fear rolled with the uncomfortable corkscrew of a following sea, but Bowater hardly noticed. He stared ahead, watched his beloved bow parting the seas, thought about what they would do next. Sink pilings like mad. Bring more ammunition to Roanoke Island. Try to augment the crews of the mosquito fleet. Drill. Wait for the Yankee tidal wave to wash them away.

And that was what they did. For eighteen days they prepared for the coming of the enemy. And then, on the 7th of February, the preparations were over, because the Yankee fleet was underway.

Thirty gunboats and schooners, the hammerhead, led in the van. Their job was to pound away at the Confederate defense, to beat a hole in it, though which the troops, seventeen thousand troops, would pour.

The mosquito fleet was drawn up, line abreast. They were above the northern pile line, near the north end of Croatan Sound, bow guns pointed downriver. They were anchored, with steam up.

To the east, Roanoke Island. Sandy, covered with low, coarse bushes, dune grass lying down in the wind. Like all of the barrier islands, it looked like no place a person would wish to live.

Fort Bartow, on the shore of Roanoke Island, guarded the pile line. Bartow was a sand-and-turf construction mounting six long thirty-two-pounders. To the west, on the North Carolina mainland, Fort Forrest, with twenty-two-pounders.

Fog sat like cotton batting on the water. At nine it thinned, lifted, swirled away, and behind it, a watery sunlight, visibility clear down to Pamlico Sound.

Two divisions of Yankee gunboats steamed north.

Bowater stood on the boat deck, at the rail, looked out over the water. He wore only his gray frock coat and cap. No oilskins, no sou’wester. It was the nicest day, weatherwise, they had enjoyed in a month.

He put the field glasses to his eyes. The masts of the Yankee steamers looked like winter-bare trees; the smoke from their stacks rolled away to the west.

Heavy footsteps on the ladder. Chief Taylor appeared. He was wearing a frock coat as well, clean and pressed. Pants quite devoid of stains or smears of coal dust. He had shaved.

Bowater looked over at him and failed to hide his surprise.

“Ain’t every day a man gets to fight in a gen-u-ine fleet action, Cap’n.”

“No, indeed. And it would seem our Yankee admiral is moved by the same spirit.” Bowater handed Taylor the field glasses and Taylor took them, put them up to his eyes, scanned the approaching enemy.

“It’s a ways off,” Bowater continued, “and I’m not as current on the U.S. Navy flags as I once was, but I do believe he is flying the signal ‘Our country expects every man to do his duty.’”

Taylor held the glasses to his eyes, chuckled. “Now ain’t that original?” He watched the fleet for a moment, then added, “It does appear they are forming in two divisions.”

The Yankee fleet, thirty or so gunboats, was coming on in two clusters. Vessels in the southernmost division were towing troop transports. They peeled off, headed east, made for the sandy beach at Ashby Harbor, four miles down the sound. The advance division of Yankees steamed up sound, made right for the fleet and Fort Bartow. They would keep the Confederate forts and the Confederate ships under fire, see that the Yankee troop transports were unmolested.

“Reckon I’ve seen enough of this here tactical situation, Cap’n. I believe I will retire to the comfort of my engine room.”

“Very well, Chief.” Taylor turned, disappeared down the ladder and aft.

Bowater was alone on the boat deck. He tapped his fingers on the rail, fought the nausea in his gut. Wondered if the other captains, if Lynch and Parker, Hunter and Cooke, felt the same. Probably. Waiting, waiting, it was always the worst. Let the iron start flying, let that linkage in the mind switch from fear to fight.

Four bells, they rang out from the mosquito fleet, a discordant clanging under a thin overcast sky, and the first gun went off. From a mile down Croatan Sound, from the Union gunboats arranged in a long line abreast, dark squares on the water, wheelboxes bulging at their sides, thin, truncated masts pointing up, swaying in the swell, came the sharp bang of a rifled gun. The smoke jetted from the bow of a big side-wheeler, middle of the attacking division. The shell screamed by, not too close to the Cape Fear, plunged into the water a quarter mile beyond the mosquito fleet.

The battle had begun.

Bowater turned his field glasses on the Sea Bird. The gun crew was swarming around her thirty-pounder Parrott forward, running her out, twisting the elevation screw. From the flagstaff on top of her wheelhouse, the signal flag snapped out: “Engage the enemy.”

“Mr. Harwell! When you are ready!”

Harwell grinned, waved, turned to his gun. He twisted the elevation screw, fiddled with the traverse, calling for the men with handspikes to nudge it here or there. He stepped back, jerked the lanyard. The gun went off with a satisfying jar that shook the vessel under Bowater’s feet. He felt himself go calm, as if the smell of spent powder carried with it some powerful drug. He saw the shot fall three hundred yards short of the Yankee fleet.

“You are short, Mr. Harwell!” Bowater cried.

“Aye, sir!”

Harwell fiddled with the elevation screw. Not much thread left—the gun was pointed nearly as high as it would point.

Oh, hell and damnation… Bowater thought. And once more, the guns won’t reach…

The gunfire rippled along the line of Yankee gunboats, blasting gray smoke from the big rifled guns in their bows, sending the shells screaming overhead, plunging around the Confederate fleet. Iron shrieked by, tore up the railing on the starboard side of the boat deck. A shell hit the boat in its davits, turned it into a cloud of white-painted splinters that flew high in the air and then fluttered like autumn leaves onto the boat deck, the main deck, the fantail, the water.

Seven converted tugs and paddle wheelers in the mosquito fleet. Short of ammunition, short of men. They rode at their anchors, fired back as fast as they could, but their shells would not reach the Yankees. It was Fort Hatteras all over again. They could do little but endure the pounding.

And they were not getting the worst of it. The second division of Yankee gunboats turned their attention on Fort Bartow, a larger and closer target. They positioned themselves in such a way that only three of Bartow’s guns would bear on them, and from that place they opened up. At times the fort seemed to be nothing more than a cloud of smoke and flying sand and dust kicked up by the exploding shells. But through it all, the stab of muzzle flash, as the garrison fought on.

Bowater paced, pounded his fist on his thigh, muttered curses. “Mr. Harwell! Hold your fire!” He was sick of wasted effort, wasted shells.

Then, through the din and scream, he heard the sound of anchor chain coming in. He looked to the left. Sea Bird was winning her anchor. A new flag was going aloft: “Close with the enemy.”

“At last!” Bowater leaned over the rail. “Mr. Harwell, let us get the anchor in. We are closing with the enemy!”

“Aye, sir!”

The anchor came aboard, the Cape Fear was underway. Bowater swung her north, let the other vessels find their place, came in astern of Curlew as the mosquito fleet threaded its way through the obstructions that they themselves had set.

They closed with the Yankees. Half a mile away, nearly point-blank range, and both fleets opened up. But the Yankees had more than twice the guns, and the Yankees, it seemed, had all the ammunition they could want.

The shells came through the smoke. They ricocheted off the water, plucked sections of bulwark and cabin away, whistled and screamed through the air. The Parrott banged out, once every few minutes, whenever Harwell had his shot. The mosquito fleet kept up the fire, the Yankees returned it, three for one. The world was reduced to a haze of powder smoke, the blast of artillery, explosion of shells, the howl of flying metal, weird-sounding through numbed ears.

Eight bells, noon, one bell, two bells in the afternoon watch, and the firing did not subside, and Bowater did not know how any of them were still alive in the midst of it, still moving, ships still floating under them.

He paced back and forth. He stood in the wheelhouse, gave directions to the helmsman, rang the engine room when needed. No maneuvering, though, not really. Nothing fancy. The days of weather gauge and raking shots and fleets tacking in succession were gone, the brilliance of a John Paul Jones or Horatio Nelson part of another time, when wind was the chief tactical consideration.

Finesse and seamanship were no longer part of the equation. Two clusters of gunboats, slugging each other, hitting hard, pounding away until someone dropped. They were not fencers, they were brutes with clubs, flailing at one another. It was exactly the kind of fight that the mosquito fleet could not afford. But the only other option was to run, and that was no option at all.

Tanner bounded up the ladder. “Mr. Harwell’s compliments, sir, and he has four shells left.”

Bowater nodded. Then what? The howitzers were worthless at that range. Get closer? The Yankee rifled guns would tear them apart if they tried.

The gunfire was like a rainstorm, it would swell to great intensity, dozens of guns firing at once, a wall of noise, then taper off to a gun or two, clear and conspicuous in the quiet, then swell again.

It fell off now, two guns from the Yankees, a gun from the Ellis. Forward and below, Harwell fired the Parrott.

Three shells… Bowater thought.

Half a mile off, a Yankee gunboat stood bow on to the Cape Fear. Bowater saw the plume of gray smoke, the yellow muzzle flash. He heard the scream of the shell and at the same instant the crash of wood, the tremor through his feet, as the round smashed its way into the Cape Fear ’s deckhouse. He half turned, half spun with the shock of explosion as the shell went off. The boat deck abaft the wheelhouse blew apart, like a volcano erupting out of the guts of his ship.

This is it, this is it… Bowater thought, and he could only marvel that they had stood in line of battle for as long as they had before taking that fatal shell.

Four shells… Taylor thought. He had been counting, through no conscious effort. It was just the way his mind was. He could not keep himself from processing numbers. So he knew how many shells there were, and he subtracted one each time he felt the bone-jarring crash of the Parrott gun going off, delivering a concussion to the tug that she was never designed to endure.

Wonder what the Hero of Veracruz will do now?

It had been a dull battle thus far, his first and likely only fleet action and he had spent most of it standing there with his thumb up his ass. Underway briefly, then just turns to maintain position. A little ahead, a little astern. Finally he turned the throttle and reversing bar over to Burgess.

“How we doin’ there, Moses?” he shouted.

Moses tossed a shovelful of coal into the firebox, straightened, looked at the steam gauge. “Twenty pound, boss! Nice and steady.”

“Tommy! What’s the coal look like in them bunkers?”

“Black, boss, black as my black ass!”

“Shaddup, smart aleck. How much coal’s in there?”

“Little less den half, port side. A quarter, starboard.”

Taylor nodded, chewed his unlit cigar. That was not good. The coal was their only armor, the only substantial thing between them and a shell right in the boiler.

Hieronymus Taylor had to make a conscious effort not to think about what would happen if the boiler exploded. He had seen men scalded, some bad, but never one scalded to death. He could barely imagine what it would be like to stand in the way of a full blast of steam. He saw images of skin falling off, eyes seared out, bloody pulped bodies writhing on the deck plates. If he thought too long about it he knew he would run screaming from the engine room, so he pushed the images from his mind.

He ducked under the piping, stepped aft to where the twenty-inch-wide piston maintained its slow, rhythmic stroke in the big iron cylinder. Psssst, thump, psssst, thump, psssst, thump, steam and metal keeping their perfect beat. He reached down to the crankshaft, touched his fingertips to smooth bearing. He examined the color of the oil that stuck there. Black. The shaft was running hot, but Taylor knew from experience that it always ran a bit hot, and he was not concerned. He threaded his way out of the engine maze, into the ten feet of open space between engine and boiler.

The Cape Fear vibrated, rumbled with the sound of the Parrott going off. Three shells…

And then there was a crashing sound overhead and Taylor looked up and a shell blew apart in the fidley, fifteen feet overhead. The boat deck—the roof over the engine room, two decks up—was torn apart and the air was filled with the explosion and the higher-pitched noise of shrapnel streaming past, smashing into the engine, the boiler, the steam pipes, pinging and ricocheting off metal.

Dull afternoon light streamed in, lit up the cloud of coal dust and steam and black smoke from someplace. Tommy was shrieking, lying on the deck plates, but the rest of the black gang stood frozen and Taylor stood frozen and all he could think was that the boiler was about to blow and there was not one damned second left to get their dead asses topside.

34

As the enemy’s force was overwhelming, we commenced the action at long range, but as our shells fell short, whilst his burst over and around us, we were eventually compelled to lessen the distance.

— Flag Officer William F. Lynch to Stephen R. Mallory

The boiler did not blow, the panic passed, and Taylor shouted, “Moses! The boiler hit?”

He could not see the black man. A shell fragment had ripped a hole in the stack, three feet above the boiler. Black smoke came roiling out, filling the engine room. If the boat deck that formed the roof of the fidley had not been blown out they would have been completely blind, and quickly overcome.

The main steam pipe was fractured and a plume of steam was shooting out, whistling like a banshee’s moan as it poured its white cloud into the engine room, right between Taylor and Jones. It made an impassable barrier of invisible steam and scalding hot-water vapor the width of the ship.

“Boiler near knocked clean off her mounts, but she holding!” Jones shouted.

“Tommy, what the hell’s wrong?” No answer, just screaming. “What the hell’s wrong with Tommy?”

“He got hit. Inna leg!”

Taylor tried to see through the geyser of steam. “Can’t ya help him, for God’s sake?”

“Boss, I’se holdin dis boiler up wid a slice bar! I let go, da whole damn t’ing gonna go!”

Goddamn it…

Steam was hissing out of the fractured pipe in a great white cloud. Taylor could feel the hot, condensed water on his face, like a thousand biting gnats. If the pipe burst, they were dead in the water. If the boiler blew, they were just dead.

“All right, all right…” Taylor inched toward the steam, ducked under the pipe, squeezed between the side of the coal bunker and the jet of hot vapor. He looked over his head at the pipe, hanging precariously. Don’t break, don’t break, don’t break… He eased himself under and then he was on the other side of the steam.

Moses Jones was standing beside the boiler. One of the mounts was shot through, and he had shoved a slice bar under, levered the boiler up. The muscles stood out proud on his arms, sweat was dripping off his face. He couldn’t hold it much longer.

Tommy was screaming, thrashing on the deck plates. Taylor could see a jagged piece of metal sticking out of his leg, another in his stomach.

“Jefferson!” Taylor shouted. He could not see the other coal passer. “Jefferson!” Taylor ran past the boiler, looked down the side of the big metal tube. Jefferson’s body was tossed forward, sprawled out on the deck plates. One hand was on the firebox. Taylor could smell the burning flesh. Where Jefferson’s head was, he could not tell.

Goddamn it! Just when I get these sons of bitches trained up… He raced back, said, “You’ll have to wait your turn, Tommy.” If the boiler blew, then two shrapnel wounds would be the least of his problems. Taylor grabbed on to the slice bar, took up the pressure. “I got it! I got it!”

With a groan Moses let go and Taylor took the full weight, and he could not imagine how the coal passer had held it that long. Son of a bitch… “Burgess! Burgess!”

The Scotsman was there, ducking under the fractured pipe, and in his hand a jack. He ducked low, shoved the jack under the boiler, twisted the screw. Taylor felt the weight coming off the bar, off his arm muscles, and he breathed deep in relief.

All right…all right… The sound of the battle was louder now, with the roof of the engine room blown off, and it was rattling him. He heard the anchor chain rumbling through the hawsepipe. Drifting toward the Yankees. Bowater had dropped the hook. All right…think…

“Chief! Chief!”

What the hell…

“What!”

It was Tanner, looking down through the great hole that was the boat deck. “Captain needs a report, Chief! Will you be able to get steam up again?”

Steam? Got steam coming out our ass. Good thing that whore’s son didn’t ring the bell, I’d wring his fucking neck…

Think…think…

“Tell Bowater, turns on the screw in ten minutes!”

“Ten minutes, aye!”

Taylor looked around. The engine room was dark, a hellish place of choking black smoke and deadly steam. The main steam line was cut through and the return water was leaking as well, and steam was jetting out where a shell fragment had taken a steam pressure gauge clean off. There was hissing back by the engine, but Taylor could not see what was causing that.

It was all secondary to the main steam line. If the steam continued to jet out of the fracture rather than make its way to the cylinder, then the Cape Fear was going nowhere.

“Moses, rig up that fire hose and charge the line. Burgess, get me a mess of them croker sacks up by the ash hoist.”

“Wadda ’ell’s a croker sack?”

“Croker sack, croker sack, you know, them burlap bags up there!”

Burgess nodded, disappeared into the smoke. Taylor skirted the jet of steam, worked his way to the starboard side, the workbench. Steam and smoke swirled around, the smell of condensing water vapor mixed with the output of the firebox. The cloud twisted and swirled and sucked out of the hole in the boat deck above. Dull light from the sky overhead filtered down through the haze. The battle sounded loud, shells flying, bursting, big guns going off. Tommy was whimpering now.

Taylor bumped into the workbench before he saw it, reached out with his hand. The steam from the main steam line was hitting the bench square, but after flying the full width of the ship it had cooled enough that he could reach into it, quick.

His hand darted like a snake, fell on a wrench, pulled it back. The metal was hot and wet. He lashed out again. His hand hit the empty bench, he felt around, one second, two seconds, the steam was starting to hurt. His hand touched heavy leather gloves, and he snatched them and pulled them from the jet.

He pulled the gloves on. They were hot and wet too. He knelt down, reached back into the steam, felt around in the storage bins under the bench. Through the thick leather he felt fishplates—one for the return water pipe, another for the auxiliary steam, and finally one the diameter of the main steam pipe. He pulled it out, worked his way back to the port side.

Moses appeared like a phantom in the smoke. He held the fire hose. Water gushed out. The pump was driven by auxiliary steam not affected by the fractured main steam line. He directed the nozzle at the bilge.

Burgess was there with the croker sacks. “Wrap them around my arms, tight,” Taylor instructed.

“Lemme do this,” Burgess protested, but Taylor shook his head and Burgess knew there was no time to argue. He wrapped the croker sacks around Taylor’s arms, tied them in place with lengths of spun yarn.

Taylor turned to Moses Jones. “You keep that goddamned water on me while I’m near the steam. You know the drill.”

“Yes, boss.”

Taylor took the fishplate in hand. It looked like a short piece of pipe, cut in two lengthwise, with flanges on the edges. In cross section they looked like a flattened Greek. The two halves of the fishplate would go over the break in the main steam pipe. They would be secured together by bolts that fitted through holes in the flanges. A simple five-minute fix if you didn’t have to do it in a smoke-filled engine room with a jet of live steam in your face.

Taylor unscrewed the bolts and separated the two halves of the fishplate. He approached the hissing jet of steam and Moses turned the fire hose on him, soaking him down, keeping a constant stream of brackish water on him to prevent his being scalded by the steam.

Taylor blinked hard. The smoke burned his eyes and made it hard to see. The white plume that formed ten inches from the pipe was the water vapor, steam condensing in the air. That was not the problem. The actual steam coming out of the pipe was clear, invisible. It was that steam, which he could not see, that could turn him into a scalded horror, begging to die.

He reached up and clapped the fishplate over the main steam pipe, near the leak, inserted the bolts, threaded the nuts. It was clumsy work with the heavy gloves. Twice he dropped nuts, wasted six minutes finding them in the smoke.

His eyes burned and his throat burned and he felt faint for want of water, and from breathing smoke. The blast from the fire hose made it hard to stand, and sometimes his balance would shift and the water from the hose would knock him toward the hissing steam and he would have to fight to keep from being pushed into it.

And all the time he was braced for the pipe to break clean through, to hit him square with a blast of pure, invisible steam.

At last the fishplate was on, set loose, and Taylor slid it down the pipe toward the break. It moved easy, covered half the fracture. The note of the steam went up in pitch as the hole through which it passed was cut in half. Taylor pushed. It would go no farther.

Damn… He turned around. There was Burgess with a big hammer, holding it out to him. Taylor took the hammer, tapped it on the flange, tapped harder and harder still. He wound up, swung hard, and it occurred to him, midswing, that he could break the steam pipe that way, cripple them for good, put himself in the way of a faceful of steam.

Too late to check the swing; the hammer struck with a clang like a broken bell. The fishplate shifted six inches aft and the fracture was covered. The note went up again, the steam now squeezing out from behind the plate. Steam was a beast, it had to be contained, it fought to get loose, through any tiny place it could find. It was a malleable beast—no hole was too small. It was a deadly beast if you got too close.

Taylor reached up with the wrench, clapped it on the nuts, began to work them around. He could feel the steam—pure, invisible steam—on the leather gloves, and soon he had to jerk his hand away. Turn, turn, pull his hands away, working the wrench with the blast of water from the fire hose playing over his shoulders, his back, his head.

It took twenty minutes, all told, but finally it was over, the beast was back in the pipe. Taylor ran his leather-clad hand over the fishplate. He could feel no jet of steam, could see no white plume where the steam was condensing.

“That should hold us till the next time,” he announced. He stepped away from the pipe, and Moses directed the fire hose back to the bilge. The smoke was lifting up through the boat deck. Visibility in the engine room was better now.

“Good job,” Taylor said. He was burned, his eyes and throat raw. He was faint with the heat and he was soaked clean through.

“Burgess, you take over here. See what you can do about patching the stack. I have to go report to the old man. Moses, let’s get her up to about fifteen pounds and see how she takes it.”

Taylor found the ladder up to the deck above, climbed it. He stopped, looked back. “Yeah, and see if you can do somethin’ for Tommy, too.” He took the last rungs, stepped out onto the side deck. He had not realized how choked the engine room was until he pulled in a lungful of fresh air. It was the most wonderful thing in the world. He blinked in the light of the dull overcast, stumbled forward along the deck.

The Yankee fleet was half a mile away, muzzle flashes blinking like fireflies. The water around the Cape Fear and the rest of the mosquito fleet was torn up with the falling shells, and the Confederates were returning fire at a desultory rate. Three shells… Taylor remembered; that was all the Cape Fear had left. The others could not be doing much better.

He climbed up the ladder at the forward end of the deckhouse, stepped onto the boat deck. Bowater was standing there, his hand resting on the remains of a mangled rail, looking out over the fight as if he was watching a sporting event, one in which he had little interest.

Cool son of a bitch… Taylor thought. Bowater looked at him, his right eyebrow shot up.

“Chief, are we taking on water?”

“No, no, had the fire hose turned on me. No fire, no leak. Main steam line took a hard one when that shell exploded, fractured but didn’t break. Got a fishplate on it. It’ll hold for now. We should be able to get underway in a couple of minutes.”

Bowater nodded. “Good, good. Any casualties?”

“Washington got his head took clean off. Tommy’s cut up some, but I was a little busy to see how bad.”

“Merrow!” Bowater called out to the deckhand standing by. “Get St. Laurent and the two of you get down to the engine room, see what you can do for Tommy.”

“Aye!”

“How’s the fight goin, Cap’n?”

“It is going the way one might have predicted. Actually, not so bad. We’ve lost Curlew.” Bowater pointed toward the swampy shoreline that formed the west side of Croatan Sound. The side-wheeler was hard aground, listing to starboard. “Shell went right through her, either came out the bottom or buckled her plate. She just barely made it to shore before she sank.”

The boat deck began to tremble underfoot with the familiar throb of the engine, turning slow. “Reckon we have steam up, Cap’n.”

“Good. Mr. Harwell!” Harwell, who had been nursing his last remaining shells, looked up from the foredeck. “Weigh anchor, please!”

Taylor and Bowater stood at the forward edge of the boat deck, watched the battle raging all around them.

“There goes Forrest, ” Taylor observed. The screw tug, which had been standing in line abreast with her companions, was now drifting back, spinning around slowly in the weak tidal flow. They watched her drift away. There were a hundred things that could have put her out, from a thrown prop to a cracked bearing to a shell in her boiler that scalded half her crew to death.

A splash at her bow and her anchor was down. The tug straightened, stopped her drift, but she was out of the fight. Two down. Nearly a third of the fleet knocked out.

They banged away for another hour and a half. Harwell shot off the last rounds, and then they were spectators, like watching a play, like sitting through hours of Hamlet, fully aware that the Prince of Denmark has no hope to live past the curtain.

Five o’clock and the light was fading fast and the Union ships retired. Fort Bartow was a near wreck, the mosquito fleet battered. Coal was running low, there was not above a dozen shells left among all the Confederate fleet.

With the winter night coming on fast, they stripped Curlew of anything worth having. Sea Bird took Forrest, her propeller disabled, in tow, and the little ships steamed north, forty miles to Elizabeth City.

It was a black night, and the ships had no lights showing, because they did not know what the Union fleet was about. Bowater paced the wheelhouse, peered out into the dark, gave orders to the helmsman, the engine room. Nervous work.

And so it was with a lovely sensation of relief that the first gray light of dawn showed the fleet in relatively good order, steaming line ahead, and the mouth of the Pasquotank River opening up before them.

They anchored up at Elizabeth City, hauled the Forrest up on the ways. They could hear gunfire from Roanoke Island, artillery and small-arms fire. It was a horrible thing to hear, but there was nothing they could do. The Yankees were ashore; it was a land fight now. And even if it was not, they had no ammunition, and they were finding there was none to be had at Elizabeth City.

Lynch sent Hunter to Norfolk to retrieve ammunition. He appointed William Parker to organize the town’s defenses. Parker organized the local militia to man the pathetic fort at Cobb’s Point, pressed an old schooner into service as a makeshift battery.

Around noon the firing at Roanoke Island slackened and then stopped, like a dying man taking his last breath, and everyone in the mosquito fleet knew that the Yankee machine had rolled over the Southern defenses. Bowater could not shake the feeling that they had not done enough, but in his most honest, most private analysis, he could not imagine what more they could have done.

The Yankees’ next step would be Elizabeth City and the mosquito fleet, the last ember of resistance. The men on Roanoke Island had stood and fought to the last, until they were absolutely overrun. Now it was the navy’s turn.

They waited through the next day, sent boats down sound to reconnoiter the Yankees, preparing to get underway. That night the captains met. They agreed to fight until the ammunition was gone, then try to escape. Failing that, they would run their vessels ashore, burn them, destroy the signal books, save their men. The fleet was arranged in line abreast, bows pointing downriver. They divided up what ammunition they had.

It was 3:00 a.m. when Samuel Bowater returned to the Cape Fear, staggered into his cabin, fell facedown on his bunk. He did not take off his coat or his shoes, or his sword or pistol. Even in sleep he was careful not to put his shoes on the bed.

Jacob roused him before dawn. He staggered into the wheelhouse. It was bitter cold. The steam pipes were popping and crackling as Hieronymus Taylor got up a head of steam in the boiler and the first wafts of hot vapor blew through.

Men moved about the deck like clumsy shadows, clearing for action, ready to greet the dawn at quarters, as men-of-war in times of conflict had done for a century or more. They cleared away the bow gun and the howitzers, loaded and ran them out, then retreated to the warmth of the galley, with the old man’s permission, to wait for what would happen next. They huddled against the bulkheads, scarfing toasted bread with cheese, sun-dried-tomato-and-chive omelettes, and deviled partridge, cold.

Bowater ate his omelette standing in the wheelhouse, and though his concentration was taken up with the gathering dawn, the slow revelation of the mosquito fleet at anchor, the riverbanks on either hand, he could not help but notice the extraordinary lightness of the eggs, the perfect blend of savory cheese and sharp chive, the subtlety of the tomatoes that St. Laurent had dried himself. Samuel had seen them, months before, spread out on racks on the boat deck, had nearly ordered them struck below. They were very unseamanlike and disorderly. But he held his tongue, guessing he would be glad for it. And he was.

More and more of the river revealed itself: tangled shoreline, rippled gray water, stubby oak and pine along the shores. And downriver, rising above a western bend, columns of dark smoke, bending in the offshore breeze. The Union squadron, underway.

Harwell appeared for orders. “Luff, I imagine they will employ their former tactics, steam in circles around the fort, pound it to rubble. I hope those militiamen will stand up to it.”

“I hope so, sir. They may be militia, but they are Southern militia, and I would warrant them for standing as tall as any abolitionist regular.”

“Let us hope you are right. Now please assemble the gun crews and have them stand ready. We’ll wait for what presents itself.”

“Aye, sir,” Harwell said, saluted, hurried off.

Such enthusiasm, such patriotism… Bowater thought. Is Harwell a naive romantic, or am I a cynical, unsentimental cad? Or is it both?

Samuel Bowater watched the young luff get the men to quarters. He was giving them some words of encouragement, he could tell.

Morituri te salutamus, Bowater thought.

Lieutenant Thadeous Harwell stood behind the breech of the big Parrott gun, hands clasped behind his back, looking down river.

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

No…

Happy am I to lay down my life for my…for this, my beloved Southern…beloved Confederacy…

There, that has more of a classical sound…

Happy am I to lay down my life for this, my beloved Confederacy, and only regret that I shall not live to fight on…

Good.

He ran it over, again and again, in his head. Said it out loud, but softly, like a prayer, so no one would hear. The trick with dying words, he imagined, was to commit them to memory so well that one could not forget them when the time came. He could not imagine what must go through a man’s mind at the time. Probably a lot. If he wanted to go out with some noble words on his lips, he had best be ready.

“Happy am I…”

By eight-thirty the Union fleet was in sight. The ships came steaming around the bend, trailing their black plumes of smoke. Through field glasses Bowater could see the churning white water around their bows. They were coming on fast, fourteen Yankee gunboats stretched across the river, a waterborne cavalry charge. The Confederates were as ready as they were going to get.

Waiting, waiting… Once again. Bowater could feel his stomach twisting like a fish on a hook. He regretted the second helping of omelette.

Wait for it, wait for it… Bowater found himself thinking, over and over. Just a handful of minutes and the Union fleet would be under the fort’s guns, and it would be a three-way exchange of fire—Union fleet, mosquito fleet, Fort Cobb. Roanoke once more.

Line ahead now, they came up with Fort Cobb and the fort opened up on them, the thirty-two-pounders blasting away with their flat, echoing report, kicking up spouts in the river. The Union ships returned fire, rifled shells and spherical case shot. One by one they blasted the fort as they passed.

Bowater waited, waited for the lead Yankee to turn, to start the big circling maneuver that would take the ships by the fort again and again until they had reduced it to nothing. Just as they had done at Hatteras. Just as they had done at Roanoke Island. So fixed was this idea in his mind that nearly the entire enemy fleet was past the fort, and was coming on, before he realized they were not going to do it again.

They were bypassing the fort, giving it one good shot and then ignoring it, giving it the attention it deserved, which was very little. It was the mosquito fleet they wanted, and they were coming straight on, full-speed, right for their quarry. It would be ship to ship this time. It would be Trafalgar in miniature, not Roanoke Island. It would be the Yankees’ advantage, three to one.

35

The desertion of Elizabeth City situated near the head of the Dismal Swamp Canal, would have been unseemly and discouraging, more particularly as I had urged the inhabitants to defend it to the last extremity.

— Flag Officer William F. Lynch to Stephen R. Mallory

“That stern-wheeler, there…” Bowater stood in the wheelhouse, pointed to the onrushing Yankee, three hundred yards downriver. “Right for him. We’ll go in shooting.”

“Aye, sir.” Tanner at the wheel looked grim. Bowater grabbed the engine-room bell, gave three bells, full ahead.

Sons of bitches…It made Bowater mad, in a way he had not been mad before. The arrogance of the damned Yankees, bypass the fort, sweep forward as if they were brushing aside an annoyance. It was the entire Yankee way of thinking; brush aside anything that was in their way, any tradition, any sacred right, anything that prevented their building more factories, more railroads, unleashing more mechanical horror on the world.

Suddenly this fight seemed personal. uddenly Captain Samuel Bowater, detached and professional navy man, a man who followed orders, felt himself a wild-eyed patriot.

He stepped out of the wheelhouse, ent forward. “Mr. Harwell, we are going for that stern-wheeler that seems to be coming for us. Let’s shoot him in the nose as we approach!”

Harwell waved, turned back to his gun. Bowater could feel the deck vibrate as Taylor poured on the steam. Bowater heard the water boiling under the counter, felt the tug build speed and momentum as the riverbanks slipped past. She was not a quarter horse, she was a knight’s charger—heavy, slow, strong as could be.

They closed fast, bow to bow. The Yankee fired; Bowater felt the wind of the shell as it passed. Harwell fired, took the Yankee’s fore topmast clean off. He spun the elevation screw, lowered the aim. He was not used to firing so close.

The Yankees were charging down on the mosquito fleet, coming on line abreast now, picking their targets. Two of the enemy were falling on Ellis, and she was turning, firing, backing, trying to keep from their grasp. Bowater could see Yankee troops on the ships’ decks—they must have augmented their navy crews, while the Confederates were desperate for anyone who could stand.

One hundred yards separated the Yankee from the Cape Fear. Harwell fired again, blew the upper third off the Yankee’s stack. Smoke poured out in an ugly, disorganized cloud.

But now the Yankee turned, presented her broadside, three big guns, the bulk of her armament. Bowater grabbed the rail hard, clenched his teeth, waited for what would come.

Boom, boom, boom, the big guns opened up right in their face. Bowater felt the deck shudder, saw a plume of splinters burst right in front of him, as a shell hit the deckhouse and kept on going. Another whipped the head off the rammer at the bow gun, neat as an executioner’s ax, tossed his body back onto the foredeck as the shell continued down the side deck. Bowater heard it hit the port howitzer, a terrible clanging, a shattering of wooden carriage, a pause, and then the screaming of the men who were in the way.

“Captain! Captain!” Tanner shouted from the wheelhouse. His course was right for the Yankee, steaming to hit her amidships.

“Steady as she goes!” Would the Cape Fear take the impact? Who knew? This was her last fight in any instance, that much was clear.

Fifty yards, forty yards. “Mr. Harwell, get your men away from the bow!”

Harwell shouted, waved, led his men aft, back toward the deckhouse.

Thirty yards. Bowater could see Yankees scrambling now. The broadside guns were running out again. Too late. Smoke pumping from the broken stack, the side wheels gathered speed, as the Yankee gunboat tried to get out of the path of the suicide Rebel.

Twenty yards. The Yankee’s side wheels churned, kicked water; the Yankee inched forward, tried to turn bow on. Bowater felt some bit of sanity return. It was not time to die, not yet.

“Tanner, take her side wheel out! Glancing blow!”

Tanner nodded, looked relieved. He spun the wheel to starboard, angled in, swung it to port. The Cape Fear was moving fast, carrying a lot of momentum. The ships were side to side, passing on opposite courses. The Cape Fear ’s bow struck the wheelbox, blew it apart with the impact, went right on through, spraying paddles, twisting paddle-wheel arms, as the side wheel destroyed itself against the Rebel.

They powered past. Bowater watched running Yankees, shouting Yankees, angry Yankees, so close he could see their faces. Small arms banged away. Bowater could hear the thud of bullets hitting woodwork. The Cape Fears fired back.

On the Yankee’s boat deck, a lone figure, an officer, leaning on the rail. Lieutenant S. P. Quackenbush. Bowater knew him well, had spent long hours on watch with him, in past years. Quackenbush doffed his cap and Bowater doffed his as they passed, as if the entire scene was not bizarre enough.

The Yankee’s forward gun went off, right into the Cape Fear ’s deckhouse, the muzzle not ten feet from the bulkhead. The proximity saved them; the shell just made a hole and kept on going.

“Come left, come left!” Bowater shouted, and Tanner spun the wheel and Bowater looked out over the wild melee on the river. Sea Bird was sinking fast, rammed by a Yankee gunboat. Ellis was side by side with a Yankee and they were going at it, hand to hand, but the Yankees carried marines on board, and they outnumbered the Rebels four to one.

The smoke lay like morning fog on the river, the gunfire was nearly continuous, the gunboats moved in and out of the clouds from their own guns. Boats whirled, steamed ahead, fired, slewed around in the wild dance on the water.

Bowater stood in the wheelhouse door. “Make for Ellis —let us see if we can come to her aid.” Full ahead. They were still going full ahead. He looked at Ellis. He did not think they would reach her in time.

Ellis’s crew was being pressed by boarders from two sides. Cutlasses flashed, small arms fired. Hand-to-hand naval combat. It was something from another era, like this entire wild ship-on-ship fleet action.

The Cape Fear staggered, as if shoved from behind, slewed sideways, and the aft end seemed to explode. Bowater turned to see splinters and bits of rail and wood flying as high as the deckhouse.

“Steady as she goes!” he shouted to Tanner, then ran aft, skirted the huge hole that had been the boat deck, stopped at the after rail. Quackenbush! His ship was disabled but his guns would still bear, and he was firing, had hit the Cape Fear square on the stern. The lovely rounded fantail was gone. The vessel ended three feet shorter in a jagged, gaping profusion of broken frames and shattered planks. But it was well above the waterline, and would not stop them.

Quackenbush! There was a sense of betrayal. Before, Bowater had fought anonymous ships, captains who might as well have been foreign enemies. But Quackenbush? They had laughed together. They had traded bottles of wine, for the love of God, and Quackenbush had displayed a surprisingly refined palate!

Both howitzers were knocked out, the guns on the deck, the carriages in half a dozen pieces. Three dead men lay scattered about, as if they had fallen exhausted, except that they were each missing one or more limbs. The rest of the gun crews were gone, forward, Bowater supposed.

Bowater pushed himself off the rail, ran forward again. Another shot, broad on the starboard beam; the deckhouse shook. Bowater stumbled, fell forward, broke his fall with his hands. He used the momentum to scramble back to his feet.

A Yankee gunboat had broken through the bank of smoke, was steaming down on them, a dark cloud roiling up from her stack. A screw steamer, no vulnerable side wheels. A cable length away, coming right at them with malicious intent.

Bowater ran back to the wheelhouse. “Come right, come right!” Tanner spun the wheel. Ellis would have to look after herself. Bowater glanced back at the tug. Too late in any event.

It was a jousting match once again, the Cape Fear and the Yankee, bow to bow and coming straight on.

Bowater stepped to the front of the boat deck. “Mr. Harwell, you see your target!”

“Aye, sir! I only have two more shells, sir!”

Bowater nodded. Two more shells. Howitzers gone. The only weapons left were the men and the Cape Fear herself.

“Use them now! We’ll ram and board her!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Madness! The fight was lost, it was a suicide run, take one of the bastards down with you. Pointless, but Bowater could think of no other option. Run for Norfolk? He could not do that.

“Merrow, run down to the engine room. Tell Chief Taylor I want the throttles open wide, and then all hands out of the engine room. Tell him to arm his black gang with pistols and cutlasses.”

Merrow repeated the basics of the order, hurried off. One hundred yards; the Yankee fired again, missed. Harwell fired and missed as well. Fifty percent of the Cape Fear ’s ammunition plunged uselessly into the river.

Samuel Bowater watched the water boiling under the Yankee’s bow, the plume of smoke from the stack, the determined, deadly, relentless onrush of the enemy, and for the first time since the first shot at Fort Sumter, he looked on the enemy and hated him.

Chief Taylor prowled. He looked at steam gauges. Creeping past twenty-five pounds, the boiler was pushing out maximum steam. He examined the fishplate, peered into the firebox. There was clinker on the grates, glass that formed from the melting sand in the coal, and it was impeding the draft of the fire. He frowned. They should wing the fire over to the other side of the firebox, break that clinker out of there. But now was not the time.

He prowled back to the engine, ran his eyes over piping, watched the motion of thrusting and rotating parts. All was well.

He was not so sure that was the case topside. They had taken a shell in the transom; he could see places where daylight shone through the hull. The deckhouse was so punched through there was more hole than bulkhead. They had been going full ahead, weaving, turning. That could not be good.

He lit his cigar, puffed it to life. He looked at the coal bunkers. Coal bunkers, by definition, were not always full of coal. Sometimes, such as now, they were only a quarter full. That made them, by Taylor’s lights, a piss-poor choice for the protection of a fighting vessel. Who ever heard of armoring that might or might not be there during a fight?

They were a quarter full now. That meant that for most of the vessel’s side, there was only a single layer of inch-and-a-half white oak planks over live oak frames standing between rifled ordnance fired at point-blank range and the ship’s boiler.

Don’t think about that, can’t think about that…

The Cape Fear heeled into a turn. Taylor staggered, his hand reached out, automatically fell on a nonhot surface to steady himself. Burgess dumped coal on the deck plates. Moses shoveled, flung it in the fire. Jefferson dead, Tommy laid up, they were short-handed.

A voice called down the fidley. Taylor looked up. Merrow standing in the door. He had not even noticed the door opening, so much of the sides, bulkheads, and roof were gone.

“Chief Taylor! Chief Taylor! Captain says open the throttle up and then all hands out of the engine room! Arm yourselves with pistols and cutlasses!”

Pistols and cutlasses? It sounded like a pirate melodrama. He wondered if such an order had been heard on those waters since Maynard came after his hero, Blackbeard.

“You heard him!” Taylor shouted. “Everyone out! Cap’n wants to play rough!” The throttle was already wide open, no need to touch it.

Moses and Burgess looked at him, reluctant. Leaving their engine room for the last time.

“Come on, you damned weepy, sentimental old ladies, get the hell out of here!”

A shell hit the deckhouse, crashed through, took out the after bulkhead, exploded on exit, ripping apart the frames, the knees. With a wrenching, cracking sound half the boat deck sagged down into the fidley, and what was keeping it from collapsing into the engine room Taylor could not tell.

The destruction energized Burgess and Jones. They flung shovels and slice bars aside, leaped for the ladder, scurried up.

Burgess reached the top, paused, looked back, Moses one step below, Taylor a step below him. One last look at their fiefdom, and as they looked the starboard coal bunker exploded in a spray of planking and frames and anthracite coal. The engine room rang with the sound of metal striking metal, of red-hot ballistic shards of steel shell slamming into the boiler.

“Son of a…!” Taylor managed to get out. Burgess leaped through the door and Moses leaped after him. Taylor took the steps, flew up the steps, leaped headlong out of the engine-room door as if diving in the water, hit the deck, rolled, scrambled.

Behind him, the door blew clean out of its frame, flew twenty feet outboard, pushed by a great white cloud of condensed steam that blasted the window out of the sides of the engine room and shot like a geyser through the gaping hole in the boat deck.

Metal clanged on metal, the air was consumed with a great whooshing sound, the muffled sound of an explosion below as the boiler blew apart. Taylor tried to make himself as small as he could, lying prone on the deck, pressed against the deckhouse, arms over his head. He waited until the whooshing and the clanging were gone and then he looked up.

There was an odd quiet now. The Cape Fear did not vibrate, the engine did not thump. Dead in the water. Probably filling fast.

He scrambled to his feet. “Burgess, Jones, y’all still alive?”

They nodded, so Taylor reckoned they were. “All right, git yerselves some weapons. Cutlass, whatever y’all want. I’ll go see the cap’n.”

He staggered forward, rounded the remains of the deckhouse. A Yankee steamer was bearing down, fifty yards away, the son of a bitch that put a shell in their boiler, no doubt.

Taylor grabbed on to the ladder, pulled himself up. The angle was not right, the Cape Fear was listing. Must have blown a hole in the bottom. He came out on the boat deck. Bowater was there, sword in one hand, his engraved.36 Navy Colt in the other. He looked surprised.

“Chief! You’re alive!”

“If you care to call it that.”

“I saw that cloud of steam, I thought y’all were done for.”

“Almost. Next time, I reckon. Shell right in the boiler. I think we are sinkin.”

“We are no doubt sinking. And soon we’ll be fighting these bastards here.” He nodded to the Yankee gunboat, coming on fast.

“Might you have a weapon of some sort handy?” Taylor asked. Tanner stepped out of the wheelhouse, the useless wheel abandoned. He held out a cutlass and a rough sea service pistol. “Here, Chief,” he said. Taylor took the weapons. He glanced at Bowater and Tanner, the easy way they held their weapons, as familiar as a wrench was in Taylor’s hands. He felt awkward, like an amateur. He had not spent the past decades in the naval service, handling such things.

Damned navy, stupid damned navy…

The Yankee was twenty yards away, throttling down, marines and sailors on her bow, ready to board. “Let’s go meet our guests,” Bowater said and led them down the ladder to the foredeck, where Harwell had his men assembled, ready to repel.

Ten yards and the Yankees opened up with small arms, rifles and pistols, and the Rebels huddled behind the bulwark and the silent Parrott and fired back. The gunnel of the Yankee gunboat was ten feet or more above the Cape Fear; it was like firing up at the top of a castle wall.

The Yankee came dead in the water, bumped against the Cape Fear, and suddenly there were shouting, cursing blue-clad men leaping down from the deck above, landing on the Cape Fear’s foredeck, men climbing down the Yankee’s side, finding footholds in hawse pipe and wale, falling on the Cape Fear, wielding swords and pistols.

Wild! Taylor lifted his pistol, held in his left hand, shot a U.S. marine, five feet away. A bullet grazed his arm. A sailor was aiming a pistol at him, so close he could touch him. Their eyes met. Taylor swung his cutlass, knocked the gun aside just as it discharged and blasted its.38-caliber round into the deck. The sailor tried to raise the gun again but Taylor stepped into him, slammed him in the face with the hand guard of the cutlass, and he dropped.

The chief looked around. The fighting was hand-to-hand all over the deck. There was Bowater, firing, parrying, lunging, right in the thick of it. Taylor felt that weird fighting energy he knew so well, not from combat, but from more waterfront tavern brawls then he could ever recall.

He saw a gun aimed at Bowater, ten feet away, saw the finger squeeze the trigger, the trigger deflect, and he raised his cutlass and chopped down. He felt the blade hit bone, the gun go off, the man scream.

He felt a punch in the shoulder, as if someone had hit him hard, but there was no one there. It spun him half around. He clapped a hand over the spot; it came away red.

Taylor staggered, almost fell. Just my shoulder… he thought, did not know why that should affect his balance. And then he realized—it was the Cape Fear. She had lurched, rolled. She was going down.

Lieutenant Thadeous Harwell, for the first time in his charmed life, led his men forward into the face of a boarding enemy. Such heroics were supposed to have gone out with John Paul Jones, with Decatur and Collingwood. They were not part of modern naval warfare. But now he was given the chance to do it—ancient, noble warfare in modern times.

They were marines, but Harwell was not afraid. He shouted as he ran, waved his sword to urge the men on, though it was only twenty feet. He came sword to sword with a graybeard, an old salt, felt bad for the old man. A lifetime at sea, and Harwell, young, strong, quick, turned his blade aside, thrust, ran the sword into the man’s belly.

He pulled it free, did not watch the man fall. A marine aimed his pistol, fired. The ball burned a trail through his side, but Harwell raised his pistol, shot left-handed, knocked the man down.

Bowater was there, heroic Bowater. Harwell wished he could achieve the captain’s quiet stoicism, that lofty air. Sometimes he felt like Bowater’s puppy, wondered if Bowater felt the same.

Another cutlass-wielding sailor, climbing over the Parrott. Harwell met him, blade to blade. He tried to raise the pistol but the sailor did not give him the opening to do so. Their weapons rang against one another, and Harwell felt the shivers down his arm. This one was good.

Harwell pressed the attack, tried to throw him off. The sailor took a step back, came up against the Parrott. Trapped, fending off Harwell’s blade. The opening would come. One stroke, two strokes.

Harwell was flung forward. He thought he had been shoved. He fell, off balance, past the surprised sailor with whom he had been fighting, down to the deck. He hit the hard yellow pine planks, came to a stop. Tried to move but could not.

He opened his eyes. He was looking at the front wheel of the Parrott’s gun carriage. He was jammed up there in the bow and he could not seem to move. He could feel nothing but dull warmth from his waist down, and he was confused.

Get back…in…the fight… The words ran though his head, but somehow he knew he would not be able to do so. He felt a warm, sticking something on his cheek.

Dear God…I have been hit! He tried to cry out but he could not make a sound. He had had dreams like that, where he was trying to shout but could not. This was the same thing. Was it a dream?

Then the pain came, a wave of agony shooting out along legs, arms, head, and he knew it was not a dream. He did not know what was wrong, but he knew that this was it. He was going to die. Frightening and comforting all at once. The pain was so very great, he saw death as a warm blanket pulled over him.

There was terrific excitement on the deck. Men were shouting, guns going off, but not as many. He thought that the deck was at an odd angle, but he was not sure. The Parrott lurched a bit, slid toward him. The pain swelled, eased off, swelled again. He felt cold.

Suddenly he was moving. The gun-carriage wheel disappeared and the world seemed to whirl around. He looked up. Gray sky, smoke. He did not know what was happening.

A face blotted out the sky. Captain Samuel Bowater. The captain had lifted him up, was cradling him. Harwell tried to smile, was not sure if he had managed it.

“We fought them off, Lieutenant!” Bowater said, loud. “Thanks to you, we fought them off!”

Then Harwell remembered. The words! The final words! And here, of all men on earth he would wish to say them to, here was Captain Samuel Bowater, whom he loved so dearly.

Harwell made to speak, and then a panic rushed over him. He could not recall! All that practice, and now the moment, and he could not recall. He wanted to weep.

The edges of his vision were growing dull, and he felt a lightness to his body, and then suddenly in a great rush they were there, the words he had labored over. Joy spread over him like the heat in front of a blazing fire, and he spoke and he could hear his voice was clear and loud and strong.

“Happy am I to lay down my life for this, my beloved Confederacy, and only regret that I shall not live to fight on…”

Bowater was nodding. He had heard the words, understood the sentiment. Of course, such a noble spirit would understand. The world seemed to be growing brighter. Brilliant light seemed to be streaming from around the captain, and soon the captain was lost in the light and then it was all light and then nothing.

Samuel Bowater held the dead lieutenant in his arms and he felt tears roll down his cheeks, surprising and bitter. The poor bastard had been shot right in the back, spine severed, lungs torn up, artery blown apart.

He had lied to Harwell, but he did not feel bad about that. They had not beaten the Yankees back. They had fought to a standstill, fought until the Cape Fear lurched hard, began a death roll, and the Yankees fled from the sinking tug, climbed back aboard their gunboat. Some of the Cape Fears had followed them, preferring prison to death in the river. The rest remained, grabbed on to things that would float.

He had told Harwell they had won because that was what the lieutenant, with his wild, romantic notion of war—a notion that was not dimmed by real and bloody combat—would have wanted in his dying ears.

Harwell had smiled. He had tried to say something, it was unintelligible, a mumble of half-formed words, and then he died. He died with the smile on his lips. Bowater could not take his eyes from the smile.

The Cape Fear rolled again, and Bowater nearly fell over. He looked back. The after end, right up to the middle of the deckhouse, was underwater; debris and dead men were swirling around in the stream.

A hand fell on his shoulder. He looked up. Taylor was there, bleeding from three places, cigar in his teeth, violin case under his arm. “We got to go, Cap’n,” he said.

“Go where?”

“Dunno. Find some damned thing will float.”

“I’m taking Harwell.”

“All right. I’ll help.”

Taylor grabbed Harwell’s feet, Bowater grabbed his shoulders, and they lifted and Taylor grunted and cursed and Bowater guessed that the wounds hurt more than he would let on.

Tanner was there, helping with the weight. They half-walked, half-slid down the deck to the water. No one spoke, no one had any idea of what they would do when the boat sank under them.

Then around the shattered deckhouse, moving fast, churning the water, came the CSS Appomattox. Lieutenant Simms in the wheelhouse pointed, reached up, and rang the engine-room bell. The Appomattox slowed, settled into her wake, stopped beside the sinking Cape Fear. Men on her fantail, anxious faces, grabbed hold of the Cape Fears, pulled them over the tug’s low bulwark. Men on the Cape Fear handed wounded over, scrambled over after them.

The Yankee gunboat fired, too high, the shell screamed past. Taylor and Bowater handed the body of Lieutenant Harwell over. “Go on, Chief,” Bowater said, and Taylor scrambled onto the tug.

Bowater turned to Tanner. “Go…” he said and stopped. This had played out before—him, Tanner, enemy guns, the last men to leave. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“You remember.”

Bowater shook his head. It was too much. Think on it later. “Go on, Tanner, I won’t argue this time.”

Tanner nodded, climbed over the bulwark. Bowater took one last look around. The breeching on the Parrott gave way and the big gun slid down the deck, slammed into the front of the deckhouse. Bowater wanted to weep. He turned, climbed on board the Appomattox, felt the deck shake as Simms ordered up all the steam they had.

Bowater stood on the fantail, watched the Cape Fear, his first command, slip away. She went down fast, the river lapping over her, her deckhouse, her foredeck, her boat deck. Last of all he saw the wheelhouse, his wheelhouse, a place that he had come to love as much as any place he had known, go under with a roil of bubbles, and then she was gone.

He stared at the spot, but it was soon far astern, with the Appomattox running upriver to the Dismal Swamp Canal. Bowater surveyed the scene of the battle. Steamers everywhere, Union ships weaving in and out, but the fight was over. Sea Bird was all but sunk. Ellis was in Yankee hands, Black Warrior on fire, Fanny run aground and blown up, the Forrest set on fire on the ways.

Bowater forced himself to climb up to the wheelhouse, where Lieutenant Simms was looking upriver, giving helm commands.

“Lieutenant,” Bowater said, “on behalf of myself and my men I thank you for your brave and timely arrival.”

Simms smiled, nodded. “Wish I could have been there before you took that damned Yankee shell. My bow gun got knocked out, only had the howitzer, which was of little value.”

Bowater looked back. The steamers were receding in the distance, the fight left astern. “Nothing you could have done…” he said at last. “Nothing to be done.”

They continued on upriver in silence, and soon the locks of the Great Dismal Swamp Canal were ahead, gaping open like welcoming arms. Bowater glanced down at the deck of the Appomattox.

“You’ve taken this boat though the locks before?” he asked.

“No. Reckoned this was as good a time as any to give it a try.”

Bowater nodded. “You think she’ll fit in the lock?”

Simms frowned, shrugged. “I don’t know.”

The river narrowed, the lock gates lay open. Simms rang the engine room. Half ahead. He rang again. Slow ahead. They approached the locks going two knots at most. Simms scanned the opening, looked at the Appomattox. Bowater did the same. Twenty feet away. Bowater had opened his mouth to say he did not think they would make it when Simms said, “It’ll be tight, but I think we’ll fit.”

The helmsman gave the wheel a subtle turn. The bow eased into the lock gates, the granite sides of the lock slid past. The Appomattox lurched to a stop, the men in the wheelhouse stumbled to keep their footing. Bowater looked down the side. The tug was jammed halfway into the lock, stuck fast.