Glory in the Name

36

New York Daily Tribune, Thursday, February 13, 1862:

BURNSIDE’S EXPEDITION

ITS FIRST TERRIBLE BLOW

CAPTURE OF ROANOKE

DIRECT NEWS FROM THE ENEMY

Rebel Fleet Completely Destroyed

THE PANIC AMONG THE PEOPLE

ELIZABETH CITY ABANDONED

THE TOWN DESTROYED BY FIRE

GOV. WISE NOT IN THE FIGHT

Only 50 Rebels Escaped from the Island

2,500 TROOPS TAKEN PRISONERS

O. JENNINGS WISE WOUNDED

A Major and 300 Privates Killed

OVER ONE THOUSAND WOUNDED

WILD STORIES OF UNION LOSSES

REPORTED LOSS ON OUR SIDE

Fortress Monroe, Feb. 11, via Baltimore, Feb. 12.

By a flag of truce today we learn the complete success of the Burnside Expedition at Roanoke Island.

The Island was taken possession of, and Commodore Lynch’s fleet completely destroyed.

Elizabeth City was attacked on Sunday, and evacuated by the inhabitants. The City was previously burned, but whether by our shells or the inhabitants is not certain.

All the gunboats but one were taken, and that escaped up a creek and was probably also destroyed.

There appears to be no bright side of the story for the Rebels.

Stephen Mallory, Esq.

Department of the Navy

Richmond, Virginia

Sir:

I am a private citizen with great dedication to our noble cause. In my effort to aid in throwing off the yoke of tyranny, I have, at my own expense and endeavor, purchased and fitted out a private ironclad man-of-war. I have been able to make some use of the vessel, participating in the attack on the Union fleet at the Head of the Passes and the subsequent shelling at the bar, an action of which you have no doubt heard. My vessel is the Yazoo River, though, being a private man-of-war and not an official naval vessel, she received less attention than the efforts of my valiant crew warranted.

The Yazoo River currently sails under a letter of marque and reprisal, not because I entertain hopes of reaping some profit from her (I look for no pecuniary gains whatsoever) but rather that she might carry the war to sea with some degree of legitimacy. I would gladly risk myself, my ship, and my men to the last measure for the good of the cause, but I would not give the Yankee barbarians excuse to hang my men as pirates.

I find, to my dismay, that the people available for employment on private men-of-war are not what one might wish, generally foreigners, weaklings, and cowards, as any true Southern man is already in the service, be it the army or navy, or employed at some indispensable trade. For all of the effort and money I have poured into my ship, I find I cannot make decent use of her for want of good men. It has become clear to me that this fine ship must be manned by men of the Confederate States Navy, for only such men as have voluntarily and selflessly joined in the fight can be counted upon to act with zeal, dash, and bravery when the hard and dangerous work is to be done.

This is the reason I appeal to you. For the good of our cause, I would like to offer my ship to the Confederate States Navy, at no cost to the service. She is an ironclad, side-wheeler, three hundred tons, 147 feet length overall. She has two boilers and two noncondensing engines with eighteen-inch cylinders, all in good repair. She currently mounts a ten-inch Dahlgren forward and two six-pound smoothbores aft, which are of limited use. I would be grateful if the navy was able to supply more and better ordnance.

I say I will give the Yazoo River to the navy at no cost, and that is true, but I would make one demand. It is no longer possible for me to sit idly by while others fight the Northern vandals. Since I have some knowledge of the waters here, I would insist that I be retained aboard in the capacity of pilot, so that I might aid in my way in the great fight. I do not require pay for that service, but do insist upon an official appointment to serve in that capacity.

I look forward to your reply, and remain,

Your obedient servant,

Robley Paine

Norfolk, Virginia, February 12, 1862

Dear Mrs. Jefferson,

My name is Hieronymus Taylor and I am the Chief Engineer aboard the ship CSN Cape Fear, aboard which your son Lafayette volunteered. I regret to inform you that Lafayette was killed during the fight at Roanoke Island on February 7.

Lafayette was a good boy and a hard worker, very much liked by his shipmates. He stood his post bravely to the end and he is sore missed.

I know that money can never make up such a grievous loss, but perhaps it might help some to make up for the support a lost son might have provided. I have enclosed one hundred dollars for you in Lafayette ’s memory, and I hope it is pleasing to him as he looks down from heaven on our suffering here on earth, now that he is in the hands of Jesus and his suffering is at an end.

I am very sorry for your loss, and remain, Your obedient, humble servant,

Hieronymus Taylor

Mrs. Ada Jefferson

Wilmington Street

Elizabeth City, North Carolina

From the report of Captain Samuel Bowater, CSN :

Norfolk, Virginia, February 12, 1862

…and upon realizing the Cape Fear was in a sinking condition, the enemy returned to their own vessel, at which time those men remaining aboard the Cape Fear made preparations to abandon ship. Gallantly, Lt. Simms brought his vessel Appomattox alongside, despite the great danger of enemy fire at close range, and took off the surviving crew of the Cape Fear and the wounded, as well as the body of Lt. Harwell.

I will not attempt to explain Lt. Simms’s decision to make for the canal, except to say that it is a decision I myself would have made, given the fact that the Confederate fleet was lost and there would have been no purpose served in fighting on, and the only result would have been the loss of the last ship and crew. It is unfortunate that the Appomattox proved to be two inches too wide to fit in the lock and Lt. Simms was forced to burn the vessel there. I cannot speak too highly of the gallantry of this officer, and the debt owed to him by the men of the Cape Fear.

Of the men of the Cape Fear, they all performed well and to my full satisfaction, but I would like to single a few out for special commendation. First Assistant Engineer Hieronymus Taylor stood his post despite the grave danger of enemy shells hitting the boiler, and when called upon joined in the hand-to-hand fighting and displayed calm and leadership in that capacity. Seaman First Class Ruffin Tanner was ubiquitous during the fight, serving as helmsman, repelling boarders, and aiding the wounded off the ship. He was the last man, besides myself, to leave the sinking vessel.

In particular I would like to praise Lt. Thadeous Harwell, who manned the bow gun and was foremost when the fighting became hand-to-hand. He was a brave and gallant officer, displaying the finest qualities of the Southern officer and gentleman, and he was tragically killed in the final moments of the fight. He will be missed.

In all, the Cape Fear suffered one coal passer, four seamen, and one officer, Lt. Harwell, dead, and seven wounded, one of whom it is thought will not survive his wounds.

After the forced abandonment of the Appomattox, my crew showed a laudatory desire to remain together. As a unit we traveled to Norfolk, and now take lodging at the naval shipyard. If it is necessary, for the need of the service, that we should be split up, then we are of course perfectly agreeable to that. But I would suggest that, since we are, as a crew, now well trained and used to working with one another, we might better serve if transferred as a whole to another vessel, if such a one is available. I await your pleasure in this matter, and have the honor to be,

Samuel Bowater

Lieutenant, Confederate States Navy

Hon. S. R. Mallory,

Secretary of the Navy, Richmond

Instructions from the Secretary of the Navy to Flag Officer Farragut, U.S. Navy, regarding the operations of the West Gulf Blockading

Navy Department, January 20, 1862

SIR: When the Hartford is in all respects ready for sea, you will proceed to the Gulf of Mexico with all practicable dispatch and communicate with Flag Officer W. W. McKean, who is directed by the enclosed dispatch to transfer to you the command of the Western Gulf Blockading Squadron.

There will be attached to your squadron a fleet of bomb vessels, and armed steamers enough to manage them, all under command of Commander D. D. Porter, who will be directed to report to you. As fast as these vessels are got ready they will be sent to Key West to await the arrival of all, and the commanding officers, who will be permitted to organize and practice with them at that port.

When these formidable mortars arrive, and you are completely ready, you will collect such vessels as can be spared from the blockade and proceed up the Mississippi River and reduce the defenses which guard the approaches to New Orleans, when you will appear off that city and take possession of it under the guns of your squadron, and hoist the American flag thereon, keeping possession until troops can be sent to you.

As you have expressed yourself satisfied with the force given to you, and as many more powerful vessels will be added before you can commence operations, the Department and the country will require of you success.

Destroy the armed barriers which these deluded people have raised up against the power of the United States Government, and shoot down those who war against the Union, but cultivate with cordiality the first returning reason which is sure to follow your success.

Very respectfully, etc.

Gideon Welles

Flag Officer D. G. Farragut,

Appointed to Command West Gulf Squadron

37

We cannot, either with cotton or with all the agricultural staples of the Confederacy put together, adopt any course that will make cotton and trade stand us as a nation in the stead of a Navy.

— Commander Matthew F. Maury, CSN

A cold front rolled through Yazoo City, foul weather out of the north. Robley Paine pulled the collar of his heavy coat up around his face, felt the scraggly growth of ill-tended beard scrape on the cloth. He squinted into the wind, looked out across the water.

Yazoo City. The Yazoo River was tied up at one of the docks that jutted out from the trampled riverfront, a few miles west of the town. At the base of a series of low hills covered with a tangle of scrubby trees, coarse grass, the place where businesses that catered to the river traffic clustered. A few dilapidated machine shops, some carpenters, blacksmiths, boiler shops, they gave service to the great fleet of vessels which, in the days before the birth of the Anaconda, would come upriver to load cotton from Yazoo City’s wharfs.

Paine looked upriver. He could see part of the town itself from where he stood on the Yazoo River ’s hurricane deck, the brick buildings and perfectly parallel roads, the bare trees like skeletal hands. The river looked as if it came to an abrupt stop right at the town’s waterfront. In fact it made a hard turn left at Yazoo City, a bend of nearly 170 degrees, as if the river had been rushing right for the town and had deflected off the waterfront, bounced back in the direction from which it came.

It was a dead time. February in Yazoo County had never been a bustle. Too cold for Southern blood to do much, nothing to be done in the cotton fields, no bales piling up on the wharf for transport to the cotton mills of the North, and England.

It was even more dead now. Most of Yazoo County’s young men were off to war, commerce quashed by the blockade.

The Anaconda was circling, Robley could feel it, as if it was breathing down his neck. New Orleans would be next. Farragut was in command of the Western Gulf Blockading Squadron. He had big steam frigates. He had mortar scows.

The forts to the north, Fort Henry, now Fort Donelson, on the Tennessee River, fallen to Grant. The Union gunboats would push down the Mississippi River, and Farragut would hit New Orleans, and the head and the tail of the serpent would move toward one another, down the Father of Waters.

Robley Paine shook his head. Can’t think on that, can’t think on that … He let his mind wander down that route and it would dead-end in a brilliant red rage. The Anaconda closing in, and he was sitting on a river gunboat—just the thing that the Confederates needed to hold the snake off—and he could get no help in running the thing. Letter after letter with no response, gold sent out with an utter lack of discretion, but neither patriotism nor greed seemed to move anyone to help him in his quest.

He climbed down from the hurricane deck, down to the side deck and down the brow to the dock. It was a Tuesday morning, but there seemed to be no one around. He unhitched his horse and led it over to a step from which he could mount. His old wound ached too much now to allow him to put a foot in the stirrup and swing himself up.

He rode slowly into town, and as he approached he began to see people, who waved to him, bid him good day. Yazoo City was not the paradise he had dreamed of; there were no mechanics and carpenters and engineers and sailors who swarmed to help him, to fight the Yankee. But neither was it New Orleans, den of iniquity. He was known here. Respected. The people of Yazoo City thought he was mad—he could see that, he was not delusional—but still they treated him with the deference and respect that the name Paine warranted in that county.

He rode down the main street, stopped at the post office, and slid off his horse. With teeth clenched against the pain he climbed the granite steps, pushed the door open.

“Mr. Paine, good day,” the postmaster called out.

The first time Robley had shown up there, six weeks before, he had seen the fear in the man’s eyes. Robley seemed to inspire fear these days, but he did not care.

The postmaster told him then, coughing, hemming, stammering, that they had run out of room in the box, that he had sent all of the Paines’ mail down to Paine Plantation.

Robley did not care about that. That was before he began writing to Secretary Mallory, before he had begun shipping gold for railroad iron and guns and shells, before his real work had commenced. That mail was the detritus of the dead, something that had relevance once, when he was alive, but it meant nothing now, like Katherine’s dresses, which, he imagined, still hung in her wardrobe.

He had not returned to Paine Plantation to retrieve the mail, had not gone back to that place at all. He did not think he could bear it. He had steamed past, on his way to Yazoo City, looked at the hideous gargoyle he had made of the old oak, wondered what he had been thinking. Had he thought that was enough? Painting a tree? He did not understand then, as he did now, the sacrifice that needed to be made.

“I’ve got a letter for you, Mr. Paine,” the postmaster said. It took a moment for the words to register. A letter? Paine had been coming in every other day for a month and a half, and nothing had arrived for him. He had come to expect that, and the postmaster’s words caught him by surprise.

The postmaster held the letter out and Robley took it, stepped away, staring at the envelope. It was addressed to Captain Robley Paine, Yazoo City. In the upper left hand corner, preprinted, it read “Department of the Navy, Richmond, Virginia, Confederate States of America.”

For a long moment Robley just stared until his hands were trembling too much for him to read the return address any longer. He tore at the envelope, dropped it, retrieved it, tore it open. He pulled the letter out and unfolded it.

Dear Captain Paine:

I beg you to forgive my long delay in replying to yours of January 16th, but I am certain you can appreciate that matters of the service have me much diverted and in many different directions.

Your offer of the ironclad gunboat Yazoo River is a generous and patriotic one, and much in keeping with the grand spirit of the South and the magnanimous spirit of her people. It is a particularly timely offer, as it has become clear to me, by recent events, particularly those on the Tennessee River, that ironclad gunboats will be the deciding factor to winning the war on the Western Rivers, which, in turn, will be integral to winning the war overall.

On behalf of the Confederate States Navy I enthusiastically accept your offer to make the Yazoo River a commissioned vessel of the Confederate States Navy, and your offer to act as her pilot, as our experience has shown that skilled pilots are very difficult to come by.

As to the manning of the Yazoo River, I am currently reviewing the names and qualifications of those men currently available, but I am in no doubt that the kind of men you seek will be found and transferred to the Yazoo River as expediently as possible.

Once again, allow me to commend you on your patriotism and selflessness as displayed by this act. I remain,

Your humble and obedient servant,

S. R. Mallory

Secretary of the Navy, Richmond

Robley read the letter, fast. He was breathing shallowly. He forced himself to breathe normally, read it again, then read it again. Thoughts crowded his head, fought for attention, the emotions swirled like smoke.

Confederate States Naval Vessel Yazoo River …The words sounded like music in his head. At last, at last…

Then the darker thoughts clawed their way up. He had exaggerated some in his description of the vessel. He had called her an ironclad. And if he had his way, so she would be. He had written, sent orders, money, to iron foundries throughout the South, had written follow-up letters, had his attorneys write follow-up letters. So far, nothing. Not a scrap of iron had arrived. The Yazoo River was still a cotton-clad.

He had overstated his own qualifications as well. Mallory called him “Captain.” Naturally, the Secretary would assume an experienced river pilot would merit that title. Not a big problem—he could get around that one. Take a real pilot at gunpoint if he had to, so long as he was aboard when the CSS Yazoo River got underway.

He read the letter again. He had to get back to his office in the Yazoo River ’s wheelhouse. He had to write follow-up letters, find out where his gunboat iron was.

Jonathan Paine pushed open the back door of Miss Sally Tompkins’s house, clomped down the back steps. He held a big basket crammed full of filthy sheets and bloody bandages. The wind plucked at the red-and-white strips, pulled them out, set them flapping like banners. Jonathan turned a shoulder into the wind, hurried across the yard, along the path worn down to dirt and fringed with brown grass.

Bobby stood at a cauldron hanging from a tripod over a blazing fire. He agitated the contents with a big stick, like one of Shakespeare’s witches.

Othello plays in Macbeth, Paine thought, and the thought made him smile. He stepped quickly across the yard. He was moving well with his prosthetic leg now, walking more like a man with a hurt leg than a man with no leg at all. The limp reminded him of his father. Of the three boys, he had always favored his father’s looks the most. Now the effect was even greater.

He moved within the radius of the fire, caught what warmth he could. He and Bobby dumped the bloody bandages into the water and Bobby began stirring again.

For some time they just stood, enjoyed the warmth of the fire and the fresh air outside the stuffiness of the hospital, and said nothing. They were perfectly comfortable in one another’s company, could enjoy silent companionship. Jonathan wondered if this could have happened anyplace outside a hospital, where his wound and Bobby’s nursing had put black man and white on something like even ground.

“Been two months now,” Bobby said at last, never taking his eyes from the boiling water. A few itinerant flakes of snow began to whip around the yard.

“Month and a half. Since the last one.”

They were talking about letters home. Jonathan had written three, had been waiting for a reply. When he was healed enough that he could no longer stay on at the hospital as a patient, he stayed on as a helper, assisting Bobby in changing dressings, washing bandages, wrapping the dead. Not so many wounded now, mostly dysentery, ague, camp fever. What wounds there were were more often from accidents than the enemy. He nursed and he waited. He heard no word from his father.

“That like you daddy?” Bobby asked, looking up at last. “He the kind would jest not write?”

Jonathan shook his head. “No. No, that is not like him at all.”

Bobby nodded and stirred.

“Could be the mail isn’t getting through,” Jonathan said. “I can’t imagine things are running too well, as far as mail.”

“Could be. ’Course, ya sent three letters.”

Jonathan nodded. He did not believe that all three letters had failed to arrive. He could not imagine why his father had not written back.

“I have to go back,” Jonathan said at last. “I can’t wait to hear. I just have to go.”

He had not said that out loud before, because it frightened him. His world was closed down to Miss Tompkins’s hospital. The one time he left it had nearly killed him—he had been another two weeks in bed. Now the very thought of crossing the line of the white picket fence was terrifying.

He had never said it out loud, because doing so was like an announcement, a commitment, and he had not been ready.

Bobby nodded his head, and they were silent for a moment. “Yassuh. You gots ta go. An if ya likes, well, I’ll go wid ya.”

Jonathan smiled. “That’s right kind of you, Bobby. But it ain’t like you can just up and leave.”

“Why can’t I?”

“Well…well, hell, Bobby, you belong to Miss Tompkins, for starters.”

“No I don’t.”

“You don’t?”

“No suh. I’s a free man.”

“You are? How come you never told me?”

“How come you jest reckoned I’s a slave?”

Jonathan smiled, shook his head. He had just assumed. He did not know why.

John Scofield sat in his office, elbow on his desk, chin in hand. He stared out the big window that looked out over the outer office. The window made the office seem more a fishbowl than private work space.

Cold air blew in from the outside window, which was opened a crack. Late February in Atlanta, Georgia. Generally not so cold, but a norther was blowing through, and temperatures plummeted.

He could hear conversation drifting up from the yard below, heated conversation, the hottest thing going in Atlanta. Generally, when the Scofield and Markham’s Gate City rolling mill was in full production, when the iron was pouring and the rolling mills rolling it out, when plate and bar and railroad iron was being loaded onto flatbeds in the siding, he would never have been able to hear something so quiet as a conversation three stories down. Not even a shouted conversation, as this one was.

But he could hear it now, because nothing was happening, no work being done. Prices were going up all over the Confederacy. Skilled men such as ironworkers were in great demand, and they knew it. The fact that their jobs kept them out of the army did not seem to impress them any more. They wanted higher wages, and just as Scofield came to expect from their ilk, they were not subtle about it.

He shook his head. He sighed. He could not make out all of the words, but he caught a few, mostly damns and y’all gonna be surprised when we… and you sons of bitches… It did not sound as if it was going well.

The conversation below stopped abruptly. Scofield swiveled around, looked at the door beyond the empty outer office, wondered who would come through. He waited. Finally it opened. Frank Ouellette, haggard, defeated, came in, closed the door behind him with more force than necessary.

He walked into Scofield’s office without knocking. He flopped down in a chair. Scofield thought of the Yankees retreating after Manassas. They must have looked like old Frank.

“Well?” Scofield asked.

“They ain’t budging. Another ten cents a day, and they ain’t too happy with Confederate scrip no more.”

Scofield shook his head. The war was less than a year old. If the Confederacy lost, he wondered if it would be due to the Yankees’ fighting prowess or the greed of the Southern mechanics and laborers.

“I don’t know as we can do that…” Scofield said.

Ouellette shrugged. “I told ’em. They think you and Markham, and me, we live like damned kings, think we making money hand over fist here.”

The two men were silent for a moment, and then Scofield felt the first stirring of an idea. “I wonder if we might give them some little token, something that will inspire them to get back to work…”

“Such as?”

“Everyone’s worried about this here Confederate scrip. How’s about if we pay them—even give ’em a bonus—in specie. Gold. Ain’t a thing satisfies a greedy man like real gold.”

“Sure, but…” Ouellette began, paused, saw where Scofield was heading. “That fellow, wrote last month…”

“Exactly. Never did count what he sent, but I’m certain they’s enough to go around, a couple of times. That should get them all fired up for work.”

Ouellette nodded. It had been something of a shock, the day the package arrived. Gold in coins and an order for iron, preferably rolled out into gunboat iron, drilled for six bolts. Some rich lunatic building himself an ironclad.

They marveled, shook their heads, put the gold in the safe, set the order aside. The Confederate Army and Navy were desperate for milled iron. There was no time to fulfill an order for some civilian with big dreams in the naval line. Perhaps in a year or so, but not now.

“You never had any intention of filling that fella’s order,” Ouellette pointed out. “You just gonna hand out his gold and let him flap in the wind?”

“No, no…I can’t do that. Wish I could, but I can’t.” Scofield rummaged through a pile of papers in a basket on his desk, pulled out a letter from near the bottom of the heap. “We’ll start handing out gold to our malcontent workers there, and if that induces them to get back to work, then I reckon this…Robley Paine…gets the gunboat iron he’s asking for.”

38

About 1,000 tons of iron plating is being manufactured by rolling mills in Atlanta, Ga., for an iron-plated frigate nearly completed at New Orleans.

— Stephen R. Mallory to President Jefferson Davis

They arrived back in Newport, weary, battered, wounded in mind and body. Bowater saw his men safe in barracks at the Gosport Naval Shipyard. Ten-thirty at night, he had finished his reports, oral and written, told his tale to Forrest and the others, been dismissed.

He wandered out of the shipyard, too torn up to sleep, or even to remain in one place. He walked the streets. He knew where he would end up.

He approached the old house quietly. No lights burning. Behind it, within the tended yard, he could see the carriage house. A light shone in the window. Late, but not that late, and Samuel did not care much for convention at that moment.

He hopped the picket fence, landed soft on the grass, crossed to the carriage house. He rapped on the door, realized as he did that he might scare her to death, that she might not answer. But he heard soft footsteps across the floor, and the door opened.

Wendy was there, the light from a candle diffused through her long, dark hair. She was wearing a loose night dress, holding a book. Bowater saw a sudden flash of fear in her face, which softened to recognition, concern.

“Samuel…I thought it was my aunt. Dear God, what has happened to you?”

She opened the door wider, stepped aside, and he stepped in, looked around without seeing anything. “I have been in a fight, Wendy…” he said.

She put the book down, stepped up to him, wrapped her arms around him. For a long moment they embraced, and then Samuel pushed her gently back. “Do you have a canvas?” he asked. “Might I borrow some paints?”

Wendy nodded, stepped away. She picked up a small canvas, set it on the easel that stood in the corner, offered him her paint set, the one he knew so well.

He shed his frock coat and hat, let them fall on the floor, rolled up his sleeves. He stared at the canvas, let the picture form on the white surface, let his mind create it so that his hands had only to fill in the places where paint had to go. He took up a pencil, slashed a few lines across the surface, general outlines. He dabbed paint on the palette, began to work with a wide brush.

Wendy pulled up a stool and sat beside him and a little back and watched silently as the picture emerged. Samuel was hardly aware of the time passing, minutes, then hours, as the foredeck of the Cape Fear grew out of the white field before him, the gray skies and brown water, the sharp points of muzzle flash. And on one edge, dimly seen, Lieutenant Harwell’s face in the instant of death.

Samuel felt himself a part of the scene on the canvas as much as he had been a part of the real fight, he felt like a participant in the picture, painting from within the scene. He felt the tears roll down his cheeks as he rendered not the horror of the thing, but the suggestion of that horror, which was more frightening by half.

Three hours, four hours he worked, letting it all come out through his brush. Wendy sat on a small fainting couch, fell asleep with her head on her arm, and Bowater painted on.

At last he stepped back, set the brush down. Wendy came awake, as if she sensed this was the moment. She stood, joined him.

“That’s it…” she whispered, as if she knew what it was he was trying to render. “That is it exactly.”

Bowater looked long and hard at the canvas, and for the first time he felt a mesh, a perfect fit, between what he saw in his head and what he saw created in paint.

He turned away from the painting, hoped he had managed to get what was in his head out and plant it permanently on canvas. He ran his hands around Wendy’s waist, pulled her near. He could feel her smooth skin through the thin material of her night dress. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulled his head down to hers, and kissed him, and he kissed her back, with a desperate urgency.

Wendy cocked her head aside and Samuel ran his lips down her long neck, buried his face in her hair, kissed the soft place behind her ear. She pushed him away, took the top button of his shirt in her fingers, unbuttoned that, and the next and the next, and then eased the shirt over his head. She ran her hands over his chest. They felt cool and small against his skin. He ran a finger down her cheek, down her neck, took up the end of the tie that held her night dress up, tugged it free.

The garment fell open and Wendy shrugged it off, let it fall to the floor. The light of the three candles by which Bowater had been painting played over her white skin, the curves of her thighs and back and hips, and Bowater traced them with his hands. He stepped out of his shoes, let his trousers fall to the floor, led her over to the small bed in the corner.

He lay down with her, half on top, let the feel of her skin against his overwhelm him. She was beautiful, loving, warm. She smelled of violet water and soap. She smelled alive and good and like everything that the fight at Elizabeth City was not, and Samuel tried to envelop himself with her, to become a part of her and let her drive away everything else.

They made love, desperate and slow, consuming one another, and when it was over Samuel was spent in every way he could be, and he slept in a way he had thought he would never sleep again.

The weeks wound past. The Cape Fears lived at the Gosport Naval Shipyard and they waited. Bowater waited with them by day, raced to be with Wendy Atkins when his few duties were done.

They waited for orders. They waited for news from the Western Rivers. They waited for the Yankees to come overland from Albemarle Sound and take the shipyard back. They waited to see if the CSS Virginia would roll over like a dead whale, jam in the dry dock, or sink.

February 13, 1862. Float test for the nearly complete ironclad. For no reason other than curiosity, Samuel Bowater and Hieronymus Taylor stood near the edge of the dry dock and watched the water creeping up, lapping over the twenty-two-foot-deep hull of the former United States steam frigate Merrimack, now the Confederate States ironclad Virginia.

Bowater stared down into the water swirling into the dry dock. He recalled the night he was down there, looking for the bitter end of a burning fuse, the cold water knocking him around. With the Cape Fear they had assisted in getting the old wreck up and into the dry dock, had witnessed nearly every inch of her transformation from burned-out hulk to modern war machine.

He ran his eyes over her ugly, boxy shape. Merrimack had been no sleek clipper ship, but still she had had some elegance to her. There was nothing lovely about the ironclad. She was all function. But that was all right with Bowater, because he saw no loveliness in war, and he no longer felt that aesthetics had a place aboard the engines of war.

The water came up and up and the shoring dropped away and finally the Virginia floated free. Around the dry dock there was a shared sense of tension, like the shared sense of fear prior to combat. No one cheered, no one spoke loud. There was an undercurrent of muttering as several hundred navy men expressed several hundred opinions.

“Well, damn…” Taylor said, soft. “She didn’t roll over after all. I’ll be damned…”

Three days after that, the dry dock was flooded again, the gates opened, and the Virginia was christened and floated out into the Elizabeth River.

It was the most solemn christening that Bowater had ever attended. No political speeches, no flags, banners, fireworks, music. It was a quiet, thoughtful christening by professional navy men, who understood the profundity of the moment, who understood the change in their world that the 275-foot iron-skinned monster represented.

They watched in silence as CSS Virginia moved slowly out into the stream, pulled by silent warps. It made Bowater wish that no one other than professional navy men ever be allowed to any christening.

Fitting out, provisioning, began in earnest, and an air of anticipation blew through the shipyard, lifting the gloom of winter and past defeats. And so it was with mixed emotions that Samuel Bowater reported to Commander Forrest for orders he guessed would take them away before the iron monster could sally forth.

He was right.

They were on a train the next morning: Bowater, Taylor, Tanner, Seth Williams, Eustis Babcock, Dick Merrow, Harry McNelly, all of the surviving members of the Cape Fear ’s crew, transferred bodily to a new vessel, rattling along over a thousand miles of mediocre, terrible, and sometimes nonexistent railroad, to a riverport town that only a few of them had ever heard of.

Some of the men had friends, wives, girlfriends on the platform to see them off. Wendy arrived. She had two baskets with bread, cheese, cold roast beef, wine. She gave one to Hieronymus Taylor, who was more than a little surprised to see her there, and to Samuel Bowater, who was surprised she had brought a basket for the chief.

“Hieronymus and I met once, before that night at the concert,” she said. “I will tell you the particulars someday. Oh, don’t look like that, it was nothing at all.”

They held one another. They kissed. Neither cried. Neither thought of the likelihood of that being their last embrace, on a windswept, sooty railroad platform in Norfolk, Virginia.

The former Cape Fears were five days in transition. They walked a total of forty-three miles between different rail lines, past torn-up track, washed-out track. They slept on train seats that shook as if the earth was opening up beneath them, and on the floors of train stations. They ate greasy food bought from vendors on platforms which Samuel Bowater paid for from his own pocket.

They arrived at last on the crowded docks of Memphis. It was February 24. From there they were two days on a stern-wheeler, running south, a considerably more comfortable means of travel.

They docked at Vicksburg in the shadow of the high hills, the Gibraltar of the West. They boarded a smaller steamer, made their way northeast, up the Yazoo River. They steamed into Yazoo City. They looked for an ironclad. They did not see one.

The steamer nosed into the dock, the brow was lowered, the men disembarked. Samuel Bowater looked around. Yazoo City was a moderatesized town, neat roads, brick buildings that suggested that money flowed through the place.

The wind was out of the north and cold, colder than he would have expected for central Mississippi. He wondered if that was typical. He had no idea what he would do next.

He saw the captain of the steamer, busy in the wheelhouse. “Y’all wait here,” he said to the men, climbed back up to the wheelhouse. “Captain?” he said through the open door.

The steamer captain looked up. “Yes, Lieutenant?” Bowater was wearing his best uniform frock coat, in anticipation of coming aboard his next command.

“My men and I have taken passage here to report aboard the ironclad Yazoo River. Do you know where she is tied up?”

“Ironclad?” The captain looked confused. And then he chuckled. “Oh, sure. The Yazoo River. That’s the boat old Robley Paine bought. You seen her when we was steaming by the docks, downriver. Side-wheeler, painted black. That’s her.”

“You’re…sure?”

“Sure.”

“Ahh…but she is not an ironclad.”

“No,” the steamer captain agreed, “she surely ain’t.”

Bowater nodded. You will make contact with one Captain Robley Paine, a civilian, who has undertaken to build the ironclad Yazoo River at his own expense. You will engage Captain Paine as pilot of the Yazoo River. Orders, direct from Stephen Mallory, Secretary of the Navy.

“This Paine, he is a riverboat captain? A pilot?”

“He’s a planter, like all the gentlemen lives along the river here. He ain’t no pilot, don’t know a damned thing about boats, as far as I know.”

Bowater nodded. He felt sick.

Down from the wheelhouse, back over the brow to the hard-packed dirt landing where his men stood huddled, braced against the wind. “All right, men. Follow me,” Bowater said, led them south along the dirt road the captain had pointed out, the one that would lead to the work docks, the side-wheeler Yazoo River.

With each step Bowater’s heart sank deeper. The dilapidated machine shops, the boatyards whose buildings were in need of basic carpentry themselves, the tall grass shooting up around discarded engine parts, coils of rotten rope, rusted anchors, all made him depressed and angry.

They marched on, came at last to the dock to which the side-wheeler was tied, and now that he looked at it he saw that indeed she had a name board on her bow and the name board said Yazoo River. He had hoped, right up until that moment, that the captain had been mistaken, that the real, gleaming, powerful ironclad was somewhere upriver of them.

Bowater drew the men up at the bottom of the brow and no one said a thing. They hunched their shoulders against the wind and looked. They saw the peeling black paint. They saw the twisted rails and shot-up superstructure, battle damage unrepaired. They saw the bales of cotton piled up on the deck, forming a sort of barricade around the bow and stern where the vessel’s three antique guns were mounted.

After a minute of that, Bowater saw a face peer out of the wheelhouse window. The face disappeared, and then a tall, gaunt man in a long coat stepped out onto the hurricane deck, sized them up, disappeared again.

A moment later he stepped out of the deckhouse, having apparently come down an inside ladder. He stood at the top of the brow. He held a shotgun in his hands, a heavy revolver on his belt.

“Ain’t this fella heard of Southern hospitality?” Taylor wondered out loud.

“Who are you?” the gaunt man demanded.

“I am Lieutenant Samuel Bowater, Confederate States Navy. I have come to assume command of the ship Yazoo River.”

The man was silent for a moment, scrutinizing the cluster of sailors. He set the shotgun aside, stepped down the brow, stopped five feet away.

“I’m Robley Paine. Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, I do.”

Paine was a frightening sight, not at all what Bowater had envisioned. Bowater had been thinking of a plump, jolly, well-dressed individual who was looking to play at sailors, a Southern version of a Henry Fielding squire. Paine was not that.

Thin in an unhealthy way, eyes sunk deep, peering out from dark circles, darting side to side. There was a nervous, agitated quality to him, and a deadness to his eyes that was unsettling. He had not shaved in some time.

Bowater had an instant dislike for the man, which made his anger at Paine’s deception that much greater.

“This is it?” Paine said at last. “This is all the men to crew the boat?”

“This is the boat?” Bowater asked, taking a step forward. “You represented to Secretary Mallory that she was an ironclad. What the hell is this?” It had been a long trip, and Bowater was tired. He was beginning to lose his reserve.

“She will be an ironclad. She is not yet. She is a cotton-clad.”

Taylor stepped up, which further irritated Bowater. “She is a what, sir?”

“Cotton-clad. She is not the only one on the river.”

“‘Cotton-clad’?” Taylor chuckled. “You mean to say that she is armored with the lightest, softest, most flammable material known to man? I’m not sure that would be my first choice. Iron, I would think…”

“The cotton is effective against small-arms fire.” Paine turned on Taylor like a snake striking. “We do not wait for everything to be perfection. We fight the Yankee with what we have. Men do. Cowards and weaklings hang back and complain.”

An ugly silence. Everyone waited for Taylor to respond, but Taylor just gave out a low whistle, made his eyes go wide, smiled, and wandered off, assessing the Yazoo River.

“Be that as it may,” Bowater said, “we were led to believe that we were manning an ironclad, and that you were a qualified pilot, and I am not pleased, sir, by what I see.” This was not going well at all.

“Nor am I, sir. I have sunk no small part of my fortune into this ship, I have driven her into combat already, and I intend to do so again. I gave her over to the navy because I wished to man her with men who would fight. I will not be happy to find officers and men of the Confederate States Navy who are backward in their willingness to do battle with the enemy.”

Bowater stiffened. Paine’s insinuations were coming very close to intolerable insult, and it was only the wild intensity with which Paine spoke—as if Paine was not responsible because he had no control over what came out of his mouth—that made Bowater hold his tongue.

Taylor came ambling back, and before Bowater could reply he said, “This here’s the Star of the Delta, ain’t she?”

“Pardon?” Paine said, the word shot out like a bullet.

“This here riverboat, she’s the old Star of the Delta, ain’t she? Used to run N’Orleans to Natchez, regular.”

“I believe that is her former name,” Paine said.

Taylor shook his head, grinned, stuck an unlit cigar in his mouth. “This jest gets better an better.”

Bowater rounded on Paine, ready to give him the full broadside; Paine rounded on Bowater, ready for the same. From up the road came the clomping of hooves on the hard-packed dirt. The men on the landing, as one, turned, looked, happy for some diversion.

A young man on a sorrel mare rode up, reined to a stop. “Mornin, Mr. Paine,” he said.

“Morning, Billy.”

Billy paused, as if he felt he should say more, but could think of nothing, and the moment became awkward. “Got a telegraph for ya.” Billy held out the note. Paine took it from him, unfolded it, read it in silence. Billy rode off.

“‘To Robley Paine,’” Paine read aloud from the paper. “‘From Stationmaster, Jackson, Mississippi. Sir, have received shipment eight hundred tons iron for you, stop. Please retrieve at earliest convenience, stop.’”

Paine looked up at Bowater, and there was a different look in his eye. In another man the look might have been triumph, but not in Paine. Paine seemed too far gone to appear triumphant over anything. “There is your ironclad, Lieutenant. It is on the siding in Jackson. Tomorrow we will go and fetch it.”

39

In conversations with the Secretary, I always have been under the impression that, for purposes of coast defense, he conceived that ironclad rams were the best vessels.

— Commander John M. Brooke, CSN

Robley Paine hunted wagons. He mounted his horse, rode the countryside north of Yazoo City, visited plantations he had first visited before he was old enough to walk. He spoke with fellow planters he had known since he was a boy.

They were polite. They kept their distance, did not invite him in. They had no wagons to lend.

Robley explained the situation. He had eight hundred tons of railroad iron, rolled and drilled, and another half ton of nuts and bolts, sitting on a railroad siding in Jackson. He needed wagons to haul it to the Yazoo River, to build his ironclad gunboat, to protect them, all of them, from the filthy hordes of shopkeepers and mechanics sweeping down from the north, and up from the south, closing in. He spoke emphatically and sometimes he caught himself speaking too loud, sometimes shouting.

The planters never took offense, which was the worst of it, as if it was pointless to be offended by the ravings of a madman. They nodded, shook their heads. “Not like I don’t know about them damned Yankees, Robley,” they would say. “My boy’s with Beauregard right now.” But they had no wagons, and they thought he was mad. He could see it in their eyes.

He rode all day, plantation to plantation, talked with his oldest friends, who treated him with the wariness with which one treats an unfamiliar dog. He got no wagons.

The next day he dispatched five of Bowater’s men with a local boy to lead them back to Paine Plantation to retrieve the three serviceable wagons in the barn. He told them there had been horses once, and there might still be, or perhaps not, he did not know. Robley continued his search, covering the plantations south of town.

There were no wagons to be had.

He found himself rubbing the butt of his Starr as he talked with his reluctant neighbors, found himself imagining how it would be to jerk the gun from his holster, take horses and wagons at gunpoint, frighten some cooperation into his fellow planters.

Once, riding along the empty roads from one house to the next, he thought he had done so. He stopped, tried to recall if he had used his gun on someone.

No… he concluded. No… He had only dreamed of it. It worried him some, that he could not always differentiate.

On the third day, near desperation, Paine hired three teamsters in Yazoo City, all that were to be had. The sailors returned from Paine Plantation with two wagons, eight horses, the worst of what had once been there, but all that was left. Like some pathetic parade they rolled south toward Jackson. Five wagons to move eight hundred tons of gunboat iron over forty miles of mediocre road. It was not a job that would be quickly done.

And all the while, every minute, Robley Paine felt the snake, squeezing, squeezing.

Samuel Bowater was happy to see Paine ride off mornings, felt his stomach fall when Paine returned after sundown. The whole thing—Yazoo City, the Yazoo River, the ugly weather, the feeling that he had been shunted off to the end of the earth and left there—it all made his mood bleak and desperate.

But to have Robley Paine watching over him, those sunken, crazy eyes boring into him, to field the inquiries delivered with no inflection, no sense of curiosity or companionship, as if he was a different species from Robley Paine and not worth any empathy, made him edgy and depressed. Robley Paine struck him as a man who, for whatever dark reason, no longer cared in the least for his own life or for anyone else’s. And if he had no care for life, then he certainly had no care for more mundane things, such as courtesy or any of the niceties that allowed men to coexist.

Robley Paine was not an easy man to be around, and so, when he left, Bowater was, if not happy, then at least less miserable.

He stood on the hurricane deck, in huddled conversation. The weather had moderated quite a bit, the cold north wind backing and dropping. The sun fought its way through high haze, and the temperature climbed to near fifty degrees.

“Very well…” Samuel said. “Mr. Polkey, what do you have to report?”

Artemus Polkey was one of three shipwrights for hire at Yazoo City. Somewhere in his fifties, grizzled, fat, he did not inspire a great deal of confidence. The two missing fingers on his left hand inspired even less. But of the three ship’s carpenters, Bowater judged him most competent, based on the necessarily brief interviews he had conducted. And so Artemus Polkey was hired to oversee the refit of the cotton-clad Yazoo River into an ironclad.

“Wellll…” Polkey drew the word out, worked the plug in his mouth, spit artfully over the side. “Her bottom ain’t too bad, an that there’s the chief of your concern. Seen a couple o’ planks is a bit punky, but ain’t nothin I’d worry about. Deck beams, carlings, clamps, it all looks good to me.”

Bowater nodded. “Good. So how do we make her an ironclad?”

“Wellll…” Polkey spit again. “Reckon we take all the goddamn superstructure off her, jest strip her right down to the gunnels, jest leave the weather deck and a big damn hole where the fidley was. Build us a casement along the whole length where the deckhouse is now. ’Bout eight foot high. Build her out of live oak, say, foot thick on the sides, foot and a half fore and aft bulkheads. Bolt that ol’ iron right onto that.”

“Can you do that? Do you have the men?”

“Ah, shit…ain’t talkin but four flat sides, like a cabin. I don’t need no shipwrights to do that. Hire house carpenters. Even hire out some darkies, know how to swing a hammer.”

“The sides of the casement cannot be vertical. They must be sloped, say at a thirty-five-degree angle.”

Polkey chewed some, nodded. “Makes things a bit harder, now, but we can do that.” Bowater was beginning to like the man.

“Good. Chief Taylor?”

Taylor wore his battered cap back on his head, his uniform frock coat unbuttoned over a stained and coal-dust-smeared shirt, pants glazed with dirt. Since the sinking of the Cape Fear he had not enjoyed the silent insubordination of clean clothing.

“Me and the ol’ Star of the Delta go way back,” he said.

“Did you serve on board her?” Bowater asked.

“No. No. Towed her a bunch, when she was broke down, which was damn near a weekly occurrence.”

Bowater frowned. He thought he was over the stab of nausea that followed bad news, but he realized he was not. “What is the condition of her machinery now?”

“Seems someone gone over it recently. Someone who knows his business, I’m pleased to say. Overall it ain’t so bad. Burgess and me, we got steam up in both boilers, got turns on both her engines and they held together. Reckon they will for some time more. They’s a power of things I could do. You jest let me know how much time I gots to play down there.”

That was the question. How much time? If they never found more wagons for hauling iron from Jackson, the ironclad Yazoo River would not be underway for the next two years. But how might they haul it faster? How many men would they get to work on rebuilding the ship? Could he recruit from the nearby army units? Would Mallory send more men?

So many variables. Absolutely no way to know how long it would take to do anything. He did not know what move of the Yankees he needed to be ready to counter.

“Six weeks. We must be underway in six weeks,” Bowater said decisively. They needed a goal, a definite date, even if it was only one that he made up, right off the top of his head.

Incredible…

The word echoed around David Glasgow Farragut’s mind.

Incredible…

He was not sure to what specifically he might apply the word—there were so many things.

Incredible how swiftly a man’s fortunes could change.

Number 38 on the captains’ list of the United States Navy after fifty years’ service. A Tennessee man who had never blinked in his support of the Union, but who, he assumed, was still considered questionable thanks to his place of birth. Just two and a half months before, he had been festering away on the Navy Retirement Board, dying an interminable death. His nation was consumed by war—the one thing for which he had trained his entire life, boy to man—and he was behind a desk, shuffling papers.

But no more. He looked around the day cabin on his flagship, the USS Hartford, 225 feet long, forty-four feet on the beam, 2,900 tons. Solid. Indefatigable. His.

Incredible.

Farragut was sixty years old, his square jaw clean-shaven. The sun that came in through the aft windows glinted off the bands of gold braid that circled his cuffs, winked off the double row of buttons down the front of his dark blue frock coat. His lean, hard body was perfectly complemented by the frock coat. He had been wearing navy blue for forty years. It seemed very odd to him when, on one of those few occasions, he found himself in civilian clothing of a different color.

He read over the report, one of an endless stream of reports he was writing.

USS Hartford

Ship Island, March 5, 1862

DEAR SIR: The Pensacola arrived here on the 2d, just in time to escape a severe norther, which has now been blowing for nearly six hours. Had she encountered it, God knows when she would have arrived. They represent the engines as perfectly worthless. The engineer is afraid for the lives of his men, and said it would not last an hour longer; that I will test.

He set the report aside. His eyes, which were not terribly strong, were starting to hurt. Reports, orders, requisitions, dispatches, he was sick of it all. He had come to fight the enemy and all he did was sit at his desk. For now.

He looked down at the sundry papers spread over the desk in front of him—newspapers, reports, personal correspondence. Stolen material, all. He felt a flush of guilt. Absurd. This was war.

Warm, briny air wafted through the open window, rustled the paper. A month before he had been in New York City, where bitter, numbing wind funneled in through the Narrows and made the waterfront a frigid misery. His hands, he recalled, had been so numb he was hardly able to hold a pen. But now he was riding at anchor at Ship Island, off the coast of Mississippi, lovely, semitropical, water the color of turquoise. He enjoyed the sun and the warm air. He enjoyed looking out over the ships under his command.

The warm air carried on it the smell of coal smoke. USS Colorado had arrived an hour before, was picking her way slowly though the anchorage. She was a big bastard, a forty-gun steam frigate, eight-to ten-inch Dahlgren pivots. She drew nearly twenty-three feet aft. Farragut did not know if he could get her over the bar and into the Mississippi River.

They would be fighting a river war with a blue-water navy, making ships do something they were never intended to do. Foote’s fleet, the “Pook Turtles,” they were made for this kind of fighting, perfect for the Western River Theater. But not the Hartford, and certainly not the Colorado.

The marine at the cabin door announced Henry H. Bell, captain of the fleet, responding to the summons Farragut had issued moments before. Farragut called, “Come!” and Bell stepped sharply across the cabin’s deck, stopped at the desk, saluted, crisp and businesslike.

“Captain,” Farragut said, returning the salute. He spread his hands, indicating the papers on the desk. “Here is the booty from our raid on the Biloxi post office.”

“You should have had them take gold, sir. Laurens de Graffe or Jean Laffite could have made their fortunes with such a raiding party.”

Farragut smiled. “There’s gold enough here for me. You should see what is in these papers.” He picked one up, held up the headline. Surrender of Nashville!

“Nashville, sir?” Bell looked taken aback, and then he smiled.

“The Rebels suffered a defeat at Donaldsonville as well. Grant and Foote are sweeping south along the Mississippi. New Orleans is in a panic. The papers speak volumes of discontent. It’s all collapsing around them, Henry. When we take New Orleans, I do believe the Southern morale and their will to fight will just melt away.”

“Wonderful, sir.”

For just over twenty days now, Farragut had been admiral in charge of the Western Gulf Blockading Squadron, chosen by Welles and Lincoln not just because they trusted him to blockade but because they trusted him to fight.

The rumble of an anchor chain, and Farragut and Bell looked out the starboard windows to see Colorado ’s anchor kick up a spout of water as it plunged into the harbor.

“Captain Alden should have news of Porter, sir,” Bell said.

“Yes, he should. I hope it is good.” Farragut was already sending ships up the Mississippi, up to the Head of the Passes, up as far as the forts, probing the Rebels, feeling them out. But the first real attack would be David Dixon Porter’s. Porter had with him a convoy of old schooners and scows, each mounting a squat thirteen-inch mortar, able to lob heavy exploding shells over the walls of the Confederate fortifications. This mortar fleet would soften Forts Jackson and St. Philip up some before Farragut’s big ships blasted their way past.

“If I may, sir…” Bell was hedging, wanted to ask a question he was not certain would be well received.

“Yes?”

“If I may, when do you think we will make the push to New Orleans?” As it happened, Farragut had been thinking along those very lines, and so was well prepared to answer that question. He had been calculating when Porter would arrive, how long it might take to get the big ships over the bar, how much pounding the forts would need.

He planned to head up to the forts himself in a few days in one of the smaller ships, take a firsthand look at what they would be facing.

“Six weeks,” Farragut said decisively. “I do believe we will be ready to take New Orleans in six weeks’ time.”

40

There was neither foundry nor machine shop in the place Yazoo City. The ship was in a very incomplete condition. There was not a sufficiency of iron on hand to finish the entire ship.

— Lieutenant George Gift, CSS Arkansas

They tore into the Yazoo River ’s deckhouse with iron bars.

Samuel Bowater stood on the foredeck, watched Artemus Polkey wander back and forth, looking over the deckhouse like a sculptor looking at a block of marble, trying to decide where to make that first, crucial cut.

The sun was just up, the river and the boat were still bathed in blue-gray dawn light, and already Samuel wanted to scream, It’s not a work of art, just tear the damned thing apart! But he held his tongue.

At last Artemus nodded, patted the planking right around the door to the galley. “Right here,” he said. “We’ll start takin her down from here.” He hefted a four-foot wrecking bar, and with a swiftness and economy of motion which surprised Bowater he slammed the chisel end into the plank and with half a dozen levers of the bar dropped a five-foot section of plank onto the deck.

He nodded again, issued orders to the men milling about, the ship’s carpenters Polkey had hired and the Yazoo Rivers who were assigned to him, essentially every man who was not on the iron wagon train.

“Let’s rip her up, boys!” Polkey shouted, and the men fell to with a will. The morning was torn apart with the crack of wood, the squeal of protesting nails being wrenched free. The men were sweating in the cool air. Wanton destruction was in their blood.

Bowater wandered down to the dock, watched the progress for a few minutes. He had been wrong about Polkey, and he was glad of it. Artemus Polkey deliberated, chose wisely, but for all his age and girth, he was a hurricane once the decision was made.

Satisfied with the destruction taking place, Bowater walked over to the carpenter’s shed which had been transformed into an office for him. He opened the protesting door, stepped on nails and sawdust and wood chips on the floor, sat on the stool in front of the high desk. He looked at the papers, preprinted forms, pen, ink, laid out in front of him, and he sighed.

This was his lot for now, the lot of the ship’s captain. Reports, requisitions, requests. Write to Mallory, update him on the state of things, beg for sailors and money, two things the Confederate Navy never had enough of. Write to the local army commander, beg that any sailors or machinists or engineers or carpenters in the ranks be reassigned to him. Best of luck. Write to local bakers and butchers and meat packers for victuals.

He wrote for the bulk of two days, and then the first wagon train arrived, each creaking wagon half filled with gunboat iron, the most that the weary horses could pull. They unloaded the iron, stacked it on the landing, tended the horses. The next morning the wagons left again.

Bowater did the math. At that rate, and assuming none of the wagons broke or horses died, it would take 250 days to transport all the iron to Yazoo City. He tucked that information aside and did not think about it again.

When he had written all he could, and could do no more until he received replies, Samuel took up a wrecking bar and went at the deckhouse. In ten minutes he was sweating. In half an hour his arm muscles were protesting and he had cut his hand. In an hour and a half he had torn his sailor’s pullover in three places, cut the other hand, and was walking with a slight limp, but he felt better than he had in a week at least.

He looked with satisfaction at the wreckage on the deck. He had personally torn out a good portion of what had been the first-class passenger cabin, could see daylight where bulkheads had been, where iron casement soon would be.

Well, perhaps not soon.

“Captain Bowater?” He heard a man asking after him, looked up. A fellow on a big black horse, wearing the kind of riding clothes worn by those wealthy enough to afford clothes just for riding, a tall black silk hat on his head, thick silky black mustache under his nose. “Artemus, where might I find Captain Bowater?”

Polkey spit, jerked his thumb at Samuel. Samuel set his wrecking bar down, wiped his hands on the pullover, and stepped down the brow as the man dismounted.

“I am Captain Samuel Bowater.” Bowater extended a hand and the man took it, shook. Samuel caught the quick glance up and down, the man’s eyes noting the torn and filthy clothes, bloody hands.

“A pleasure, sir. ‘Officers will haul with the men,’ and all that, eh, just like old Drake?”

Bowater looked down at his clothes. He wondered when he had decided it was all right for him to appear in public, on duty, in such shabby attire. “We do what needs to be done. How may I help you?”

“My name is Theodore Wilson, sir. I own the plantation a mile north of town, five hundred acres of the finest cotton land. In any event, I was in town collecting my mail and the postmaster mentioned there was mail for the ship, so I thought it would be a friendly gesture to carry it down to you.”

“Friendly, indeed. Thank you, sir,” Bowater said. He waited while Wilson fished the canvas bag out of his saddlebag, waited to see why the man had really come.

Wilson handed the bag to Bowater. It was light and the letters made only a small lump in the bottom. They had not been there long enough for the bulk of the mail to catch up with them.

Wilson ran his eyes over the Yazoo River. “Robley Paine was by my place the other day, asking after something. Wagons, I think.” Wilson was quiet as he surveyed the boatyard with a half-amused smirk. “I have always had a keen interest in river navigation, Captain. In fact, I own a small screw steamer, often pilot her myself, runs to New Orleans and such.” He paused again. “So this here’s Robley Paine’s boat, is it?”

“No. No, it’s not.”

“No? I had thought…”

“This ship belongs to the Confederate States Navy. Mr. Paine has donated it for his country’s use.”

“I see…There is a story abroad that ol’ Robley intends to make her an ironclad.”

That was it. Curiosity. Amusement, perhaps. Come down and see what the fools were about, make great conversation over billiards and mint juleps.

“She is being converted to an ironclad this instant. You see the iron plate there.” Bowater waved toward the pile, a sad little stack of rail.

“Not much iron for an ironclad vessel.”

“That’s the first of it. We are moving it from Jackson as fast as we can, but are hampered by a lack of wagons. It seems not all the people hereabouts are as great patriots as Mr. Paine.”

That barb made Wilson stiffen, just a bit. “There is no man in Yazoo County, you will find, who is wanting in love for his country, and support for the cause.”

“I don’t doubt it, sir. Don’t mistake me. The men who put their lives in jeopardy for a cause, like my sailors there, or Mr. Paine, are often the ones who grumble the most. After all, didn’t our Lord Jesus himself doubt the wisdom of his cause on the night before his death? No sir, I find the staunchest patriots are often those who remain safe by their own hearths.”

Wilson’s eyes flashed with anger now, but Bowater did not care because he had had his fill of the Wilsons of the world. “You come close to insinuation, sir, and I do not care for it. I have a son fighting in the army, as do most of the men around here.”

“Yet when Robley came to you with the simple request for help, just a damned wagon and some manpower, you would deny him? When every bit of stubbornness on your part makes the Yankee—the Yankee who would kill your son—stronger?”

Wilson looked at Bowater for a long moment. “I will forgive your remarks, sir, as you are a stranger here, and do not know the recent history.”

Bowater said nothing.

Wilson chewed on a stray hair of his mustache. “Robley Paine’s gone mad. Surely you have noticed?”

Of course he had noticed. Curiosity battled with disgust at listening to such gossip. “I am satisfied with Mr. Paine’s dedication to the cause. Beyond that I am not interested.”

At that Wilson smiled, and Bowater could see he was not fooling the man. “It’s not a surprise he’s lost his mind, of course. I might have myself, under the circumstances…”

Silence. Stand-off. Finally Bowater surrendered. “What circumstances?”

“Robley had three boys. Fine lads, he doted on them. His entire world. They joined Hamer’s Rifles, the company that mustered out of Yazoo County in April of last year. His oldest boy, Robley Junior, made lieutenant. Anyway, they were all killed at Manassas. All three.”

Bowater nodded. Dear God! That bit of information fit like the last brick in the wall, made sense of everything he had seen Robley Paine to be.

“You impress me, Captain,” Wilson continued. “I was afraid that Paine had collected together a cadre of madmen, undertaking some fool thing. I just hope you are not wasting your time here, on some madman’s dream.”

Bowater straightened. Wilson’s approval felt like a dirty thing, like Judas’s handful of silver. He saw, in that instant, Robley Paine for what he was, and Theodore Wilson for what he was, and he could not hate Paine, and he could only hate Wilson.

“Mr. Wilson,” he said, picking the words carefully, “I have never been deluded about the state of Mr. Paine’s mind, not since meeting him. And now that you tell me the cause, I must say, I can hardly find fault or weakness in him for what he has become. But understand this…Robley Paine has thrown everything that he is and everything that he has into fighting for the cause for which his sons died. His is the purest, most unadulterated patriotism. He will die like his boys, fighting for his country, fighting for all you men who lie abed while the guns are firing, and I, sir, as an officer of the Confederate States Navy, will be proud to be with him.”

Bowater picked up the mail sack. “Thank you for delivering the mail to us. Now if you will forgive me, I have an ironclad that requires building.”

He turned, walked back into the office. After a few minutes he heard the jangle of Wilson’s horse’s tack, heard the clomp of hooves as he rode away.

For a long time Samuel was too angry to move. Angry that he had been saddled with a madman’s project. Angry that men such as Wilson, who had the means to make the ironclad Yazoo River a real thing, would not. Angry that in this modern time, this age of reason, men could still fight a war in which some sorry bastard could lose his three sons in an afternoon and become the shell that was Robley Paine.

“Son of a bitch…” he muttered and dumped the letters out on the desk, shuffled through them, set them in piles. Three for Hieronymus Taylor, that was unusual, a few more for various men in the ship’s company, some addresses written with a neat, well-practiced hand, others with the nearly illegible scrawl of the barely literate. Bowater separated them out.

Three letters for him; his father, Wendy, and his sister, Elizabeth. He looked at his letters, considered opening them, stared for a long time at Wendy’s name. The anger was still burning in him, and he liked it, did not want to lose the sensation, like the taste of a fine meal in one’s mouth, and so he left all news from home aside, even word from Wendy Atkins, and it surprised him that he could. Time for amusements and distractions some other time. He set the rest of the letters aside to distribute to the men at the dinner break.

Richmond, Virginia, felt somber, oppressed. The string of Confederate defeats at Port Royal and Roanoke Island, Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, made it feel like a city under siege, even though the nearest enemy was one hundred miles away—General George “Little Mac” McClellan did not seem inclined to move out of Washington.

Jonathan Paine felt the dull panic. He knew he had to go, and he felt sharp fear. He felt the fear turn into frustration, and then anger, and that was good.

For some weeks after the decision to go home, after Bobby’s essential offer to accompany him, Jonathan still did not leave Miss Tompkins’s. A seeming epidemic of dysentery swept through the Confederate camp, boys skinny and weak and gray-faced were brought in in regular succession, crowding the already crowded rooms, filling the beds and then the extra beds brought in and then the pallets piled with straw on the floor. They moaned, called out, clawed the clothing of the people who came to help. They got better and went back to their units or they died and were buried outside of Richmond.

It was a nightmare scene, under cold, gray winter skies, and neither Bobby nor Jonathan felt they could leave until it was over. Finally, on the day that three young soldiers were dismissed from the hospital and sent back to their regiment, and not one new patient arrived, Bobby suggested that they go to the Mechanics’ Institute and find out what Jonathan needed to do to be officially discharged from the army, and to get a bit of money for his trip home.

Jonathan tasted the panic in his throat, felt the slight tremor in his palms. This is just damned stupid… he assured himself, but that did nothing to ease his fear. Indeed, if Bobby had not brought the buckboard around, had not helped him on with his coat, led the way out, if Bobby had not in his subtle way forced Jonathan to leave Miss Tompkins’s house, Jonathan doubted that he ever would have.

They arrived at the Mechanics’ Institute, and it was in every way the bedlam that Jonathan recalled from his previous visit.

Bobby battered a path through the crowd, excusing himself with bowed head and sincere pleas of “Beg pardon, suh,” “I’se sorry, suh,” “Massah, he gots a leg missin’, beg pardon…” He had the ability to cover his insolence and pushiness with a veneer of respect, and thus get away with it. It was just what soldiers did, Jonathan realized, what they called “flanking” the officers. Give them just enough respect so they could not call you for insubordination.

They came at last to the Office of Orders and Detail, stood in line until Jonathan’s stump began to throb. When finally they came up to the tall oak counter, Jonathan leaned his elbows on it, took as much weight as he could off his legs.

“How may I help you, Private?” the clerk asked.

“I lost a leg at Manassas. I’d like to go home. But I don’t believe I have been officially discharged from the army. Also, I’d like what pay is due me.”

The clerk looked at him for a long moment, then let out a sigh. “What was your regiment?”

“Company D, 18th Mississippi, but…” The clerk turned and left the room before Jonathan could explain the complicated circumstances of his situation.

They waited ten more minutes and then the clerk returned and informed Jonathan Paine that he was dead. Or missing.

“Well, sir, I never was dead, but I was missing for some time, but now I’m here.”

“Your discharge will have to come from your commanding officer. We will have to write to him and get him to sign the papers. Without that, you stand the chance of being taken up as a deserter.”

“Deserter? My damn leg’s been shot off. That isn’t proof enough I’m legally discharged?”

“You are not legally discharged, Private, without the letter from your commanding officer. And unless you have one written on your wooden leg, signed and sealed, I suggest you do this proper.”

Jonathan stared at the clerk, tried to think of some rejoinder, but he was beat and he knew it and the clerk knew it, too. The clerk reached under the desk, pulled out a preprinted form, lifted his pen from the inkwell and said, “Eighteenth Mississippi, was it?”

41

Thanks to the patriotism of the noble people of Yazoo City, I shall not need the guard that I asked for. The citizens here, though but a handful are at home from the army, will sustain me so long as I shall deserve their support.

— Lieutenant Isaac N. Brown, CSN, to General Daniel Ruggles, C.S. Army

Two days after Wilson’s visit, the wagons returned from Jackson with their sorry load of iron. The horses and men looked played out, as if they had been wandering in the wilderness for forty years.

None of them looked as tired as Robley Paine. Bowater physically helped him down from the driver’s seat of his wagon, leaned him back against the big wheel, not sure if the man could stand on his own. “We’re getting there, Mr. Paine, bit by bit,” he said with a concern he had not felt before. Paine looked up sharp. He heard the change in tone.

“It is not enough,” Paine said. Exhaustion stripped the words of their bite.

“It will be enough. Let me help you to your bed. You must rest.”

Paine nodded, put his arm over Bowater’s shoulder, and let himself be led away. They would leave again in the morning. But half a day of rest between trips was not enough, not enough for Paine or the other men or the horses. They could not keep this up.

The iron was unloaded, stacked, the horses tended. That night Bowater lay in his bunk in the makeshift barracks in the old carpenter’s shop, stared at the dark. He read and reread Wendy’s letter, five pages long. Tales of nursing, conditions in Norfolk. She had a flawless sense for how newsy a letter should be, and how sentimental and how serious and how lighthearted, the ingredients tossed together to form a perfect confection.

He loved it, he loved her, but it was not enough to pull him from his black mood. He fell asleep at last, woke with head pounding, joints aching, as if he had slept tensed on the edge of a cliff.

He woke to the sounds of wagons on packed dirt, the jangling of traces, voices loud in the early morning. He woke thinking that the wagon train was ready to roll out again, that they had organized and prepared while he slept.

He climbed out of bed, wearing only the sailor’s slop trousers he had taken to wearing, now that the bulk of his work involved manual labor. He pulled on his pullover, and looking like a hungover Jolly Jack Tar stumbled out of a whorehouse.

There were wagons there, but not the wagon train. These were different wagons, bigger, with fresh teams of draft animals, black men sitting on the driver’s seats, long whips held lazily across their laps, waiting. He could see none of his own men abroad. Bowater did not know what was happening, but he realized that whatever it was, it had nothing to do with him.

“Captain!” Theodore Wilson stepped up, and again gave Bowater’s clothes a half-amused glance up and down, and if Bowater had not been so groggy he would have been angry with himself for having not worn his frock coat and gray pants.

“Mr. Wilson…”

“I have a confession, Captain. When I came down the other day, it was not simply to deliver the mail.”

“Really?”

“No, sir. I was curious. Curious to see if this thing, this ironclad, was really a viable enterprise. Not going to back a loser, sir. Never have. But I am impressed by what I see. And in truth, Captain, and I mean this with all humility, when I am impressed, I see to it that others are impressed.”

“I am impressed with your due humility.”

“Laugh if you will. I can get things done in this county. Behold, sir. Wagons.”

Bowater looked out over the wagons. Twenty that he could count, and more coming down the road. Big, sturdy vehicles. Suddenly the Yazoo River was a real possibility.

Robley Paine approached, limping but moving fast. “Wilson, what’s happening here?”

“Good morning, Robley.” Wilson smiled, but the warmth and concern in his voice was a cover, a sham. Beneath it, Bowater could hear only discomfort and fear. “I have spoken with the others, and we have decided we must help you in building your boat.”

Robley squinted at him. The old man was not fooled by any of it. Robley Paine, mad as he might be, understood the entire situation in an instant. “Captain Bowater is in charge here, you understand? His orders are final, and neither he nor I give a goddamn how much land you have, or how many darkies or how much money. You understand that, then your help is welcome.”

Wilson shifted uncomfortably. “Of course, Robley, of course…”

“Good,” Robley said, and then, as if forgetting his caveat of a second before, said, “See your men and horses fed. We leave for Jackson in one hour.”

It was pandemonium for an hour, with the teamsters and the horses and the shipwrights all getting their breakfast and their coffee and then getting horses and wagons ready, and the first screeching of nails as boards were pried from the side of the Yazoo River. And then the wagons rolled off and the noise dropped off to a fraction of what it had been and a sort of peace seemed to settle over the boatyard.

Samuel Bowater found himself in such good spirits that he was able to face the ream of paper needing his attention.

“Cap’n Bowater?” Hieronymus Taylor stuck his head in the door, interrupted beef requisitions.

“Come in, Chief.”

Bowater had seen little of Taylor in the past week. The chief and Burgess and Moses had disappeared down into the engine room and mostly remained there, like bats, or some other nocturnal animals. They would appear at mealtimes, and after work, filthy, drenched in their own sweat. They would tear off their clothes and plunge into the Yazoo River, and sometimes some of the others would join them. Beyond that, they were absent, down in their own underworld of steam pipes and boilers and condensers and pumps and cylinders and pistons.

“I do hope you are not here to report some insurmountable problem,” Bowater said, wondering if this was the end of his buoyant mood.

“No, no…ain’t nothin like that. We havin’ some problems with the damned valve linkage on the starboard engine. We don’t get it squared away, we like to do nothin’ but steam in circles.”

“It is something you can fix?”

“Oh sure, sure…but, well, fact is, I need to head on down to Vicksburg. I know a shop down there, can make me what I need. Ain’t a damn thing ’round here, ’cept some country blacksmiths, and what I need’s a bit more refined, ya understand? So if it ain’t a problem, reckon I’ll take the packet on down to Vicksburg.”

Bowater nodded. He did not doubt Taylor’s veracity, but there was something the chief was not saying. He considered probing deeper, but did not.

He did not like Taylor, but he trusted the man enough now that he would take him on his word. Whatever it was he sought in Vicksburg—reversing gears, a good drunk, a fancy girl—whatever Taylor felt he needed, Bowater was ready to let him have it. He did not ask what it was. He imagined he would find the answer repugnant.

“Very well, Chief. When will you be back?”

“Next Wednesday, reckon. Burgess and Jones gots their jobs, they’ll carry on without me.”

“Very well. And since you are venturing into civilization, please ask Polkey and Johnny St. Laurent if there is anything they need.”

“Aye, sir,” Taylor said, with the most respect and relief that Bowater had ever heard from the man, and disappeared.

Samuel turned back to his beef requisition, then set the letter aside. Time to start tearing into the Yazoo River. He felt more ready than he had since arriving.

They worked all that day until the sunlight was gone, and the next day, being Sunday, Samuel Bowater gave the men the day off, because he still could and because the men needed a break, and so did he.

He took easel, canvas, and paints and wandered a bit down the riverbank, to a place one hundred yards from the ship. The weather had turned warm with the first appearance of spring, and with his back to the shore Samuel looked up the winding length of the Yazoo River, the bursts of new green on the trees, the dots of color that represented the early spring flowers, the old black paint and fresh-cut wood of the Yazoo River. It was lovely. He pulled a pencil from his paint kit, made thin lines across the canvas.

The hours melted away as the canvas was crisscrossed with fine gray lines, the outline of the riverbank and the stands of trees, the sandbars and reeds like underwater obstructions laid down to stop a tiny armada, and far away, the building ironclad. He mixed paint on his palette, dabbed away at the canvas, filling in the lines, making the colors before him reappear on the canvas.

He was happy for a while, lost, and then he heard footsteps behind. He turned and looked. An older couple, around his parents’ age, wandering down along the riverbank, looking as if they were out for a stroll. Locals come down to see the ship being built. Sometimes Bowater felt like Noah, with all of the town coming down to watch the madmen building their boat.

He turned back to the painting, which he was liking less and less. He hoped the couple would leave him alone, but he knew they would not. He knew they would approach, look over his shoulder, make some comment that would reveal their absolute ignorance of art.

He made fine green lines where the reeds emerged from the river, heard the sounds of the couple’s feet on the gravel behind him.

“Captain Bowater?” the man asked. Bowater put his brush down, turned around.

“I am he. How may I help you?”

“Good day, Captain. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. We have followed your actions in the papers with great interest.” The man was red-faced, with a grand white mustache. He wore a black frock coat, a tall silk hat, walked with a gold-headed cane. His wife wore broad hoops, kept the sun at bay with a silk parasol. The man’s voice was soft, dignified, educated.

“Please,” the man continued, “allow me to introduce ourselves. My name is Eli Taylor. This is my wife, Veronica.”

Taylor…?

Mrs. Taylor gave a curtsy, which Bowater returned with a shallow bow.

“We were hoping, Captain, to see our son,” Mrs. Taylor said. “Hieronymus Taylor? We understood he is engineer aboard your ship.”

Bowater looked at Veronica Taylor. She must have been a beautiful woman in her youth. She was still a beautiful woman, all poise and dignity. “Forgive me, ma’am, I think perhaps you are mistaken,” Bowater said, and even as the words left his mouth he thought, How many Hieronymus Taylors might there be in the navy?

“It’s no surprise you should think so,” Eli Taylor said, and his voice sounded sad. He held up a little photograph, a tintype in a stamped tin oval frame, such as were produced by the thousands all over the country.

“This is our son,” the man said, and Bowater took the picture. Staring back at him, in shades of gray, was a younger, cleaner Hieronymus Taylor.

“I apologize,” Bowater said. “It’s just that…”

“We understand, Captain,” Eli interrupted him. “Hieronymus can be…difficult, at times.”

Indeed? Bowater thought.

“He has simply rejected all of his upbringing,” Veronica said, with a tone of exasperation mixed with disappointment. “His brothers and sisters are not like that, I can assure you.”

“We live in New Orleans and took ship up,” Eli prompted. “We heard from friends in the Navy Department that he might be here.”

“Yes, yes he is…no, I mean, I’m sorry, he is assigned to this ship. But he had to go away for a few days. He had business in Vicksburg.”

Eli frowned and Veronica sighed and said, “I knew we should not have written ahead, Eli.”

“Yes, dear, perhaps you are right.”

“I am so sorry you missed him,” Bowater said, and meant it, though he did not know if his disappointment was for the parents or for himself at missing Taylor’s discomfiture.

“Yes, well…” Eli said, and let the rest die off.

“He should be back by Wednesday.”

Eli nodded. “Perhaps it is best we missed him. I fear when he left home there was some…trouble. We have not been as close as I might wish.”

“I’ll tell him you came,” Bowater suggested, but Eli shook his head.

“No, no, Captain. If it is all the same, I suppose if Hieronymus does not care to see us, I won’t have him think we are thrusting ourselves on him.”

It was a very sad scene, and Bowater was looking for something helpful to say when Veronica noticed the painting.

“You are an artist, Captain?”

“Oh, no. I dabble. It passes the time.”

Veronica and Eli Taylor took a closer step, scrutinized the canvas.

“It is very good,” Veronica said.

“I do believe I see the influence of the Hudson River School, sir. A Charleston man, you must be familiar with the work of Washington Allston?”

“I have seen his painting, yes.”

“We have two Allstons in our collection,” Veronica Taylor said.

“Your work is reminiscent of Durwood, as well, but not nearly as pretentious. Of course, we have seen only your work in progress. Are you familiar with Fitz Hugh Lane?”

“Why yes, I am…” Bowater stammered. “You are well versed in painting, I see.”

“Oh, we are great patrons of the arts, sir. Every bit of it.”

“All our children were raised to appreciate the finer things, Captain,” Veronica said. “Painting, music. Hieronymus has a great gift for music. They were trained in the classics since childhood.”

Bowater nodded. He did not know what to say.

“You might say we’re overboard on the subject,” Eli said. “We named Hieronymus after Hieronymus Bosch, you know, the fifteenth-century Dutch painter.”

“Did you indeed?”

“Oh yes. His middle name is Michelangelo.”

42

I have spent my life in revolutionary countries and I know the horrors of civil war, and I told the people what I had seen, and what they would experience. They laughed at me and called me “granny” and “croaker.”

— David Glasgow Farragut

The mighty USS Hartford, mounting twenty nine-inch Dahlgren smoothbores, two twenty-pounder Parrott rifles, one heavy twelve-pounder, and one light twelve-pounder, flagship of the Western Gulf Blockading Squadron, was stuck in the mud.

Farragut stood on the quarterdeck, leaning on the rail, looking across the deck, over the brown, slow-moving water, over at the low, marshy shore three hundred feet away. South West Pass, one of five ways into the Mississippi River.

Black smoke roiled out of the Hartford ’s stack, drifted off to the west. Beyond the bow, Farragut could see another plume, smaller, just as black. The side-wheeler Calhoun, with a towline to Hartford ’s bow. The two ships, Calhoun and Hartford , were stoking up their boilers, building up steam enough to drag the deep Hartford through the mud. They reminded Farragut of bulls pawing the ground in preparation for the charge.

From the foredeck, over two hundred feet away, the executive officer called back, “Ready, Captain Wainwright!”

Wainwright, captain of USS Hartford, waved, called to the quartermaster, “Four bells!”

The quartermaster rang out the bells, and underfoot Farragut could hear the engine room respond, a tremor in the deck as the engines dug in, two horizontal condensing double-piston-rod power plants with thirty-four-inch strokes and cylinders sixty-two inches in diameter. Farragut looked over the side. The river was boiling and the mud was swirling like brown storm clouds.

He felt a slight jerk as the Calhoun took up on the towline and pulled. He looked across the deck, lined up one of the mizzen shrouds with a stunted tree on shore. The seconds ticked off, and slowly, slowly, the shroud seemed to draw away from the tree. They were moving.

“I believe it took Brooklyn an hour to tow across, sir,” Wainwright said. “We might go a bit faster, with Brooklyn having dug a trench for us.”

“Perhaps.” Farragut knew all that, and Wainwright knew he knew it. Saying it was Wainwright’s not too subtle way of pleading for patience, patience for a situation over which none of them had control.

Patience. It was something Farragut was running out of as quickly as he was running out of coal. They could not begin to attack New Orleans until Porter’s gunboat flotilla arrived, and the last he heard they were in Key West. They could not attack until they took their big ships over the bar, but it was all they could do to get Hartford and Brooklyn over. How they were going to get Colorado over, with her nearly twenty-three-foot depth, he could not imagine.

These ships were not built to fight this war… he thought. Most of the ships under his command had been laid down with the thought that they would be fighting the British navy on the high seas. It certainly had not been contemplated that they would be used in an attack on New Orleans.

From the main topmast crosstrees, now the highest point aboard Hartford, the lookout called, “Boat approaching! Steaming from the south! Looks like one of our dispatch boats, sir!”

Wainwright turned and looked south, but Farragut did not. With his eyes, he had no hope of seeing the boat until it was almost up with them. Nor was he that curious. He had seen enough dispatch boats in the past month to satisfy him for life.

With creaks and groans and billowing black smoke and the occasional jerk, the Hartford drove over the mud. Forty minutes after the Calhoun took up the strain, the ship gave a little lurch as she broke free from the last desperate grasp of the river bottom and surged ahead into deep water. Forward, Farragut could see the Calhoun sheer off as the towline was dropped.

“All stop!” Wainwright said. “Stand by the anchor!” he shouted down the length of the deck.

The Hartford was just settling on her hook when the dispatch boat pulled up alongside.

“Admiral, sir!” the lieutenant in command called up.

“Yes, Lieutenant?” Farragut called down. What news it was that could not wait for the lieutenant to come aboard he did not know, but he could guess.

“Admiral, sir, Commander Porter’s compliments, sir, and he reports his arrival at Ship Island with his mortar fleet.”

“Excellent!” Farragut replied. He looked upriver. Brooklyn was lying to her anchor, head to stream, three hundred yards away. “Lieutenant, steam up to Brooklyn and tell Captain Craven, with my compliments, to give his people their dinner and then I will signal to get underway. We’ll anchor at Head of the Passes.”

The lieutenant repeated the orders, saluted, spoke to someone in his wheelhouse that Farragut could not see, and the little steamer chugged on its way.

The Head of the Passes… He would plant the Union flag on Louisiana soil, and pray God it would remain.

Let the festivities commence…

On May 10, the newspapers in Yazoo City ran banner headlines, and those headlines proclaimed the death of the wooden walls.

Theodore Wilson arrived on his black horse, reined to a stop in a shower of small stones and dirt, leaped off, paper in hand.

“Captain Bowater! Captain Bowater, sir, did you see this?”

He handed Bowater the paper, shifted from foot to foot as Samuel read the article. CSS Virginia had sailed two days before. She rammed and sank the USS Cumberland, burned the Congress, which had run aground. Sent the Yankees into a panic, gave new hope to an emotionally battered Confederacy. It had been a hell of a maiden voyage.

Bowater read the account with the kind of interest only a professional navy man could have. He read the breathless claims of the obsolescence of all wooden vessels and smiled. The Virginia was too unseaworthy for the open ocean and of too deep a draft to get up any of the big rivers that emptied into the Chesapeake.

CSS Virginia was not the future. She was only a glimpse of it.

But one would not know that looking at the gleam in Theodore Wilson’s eyes. “What do you say to that, Captain?”

“Very impressive.”

Hieronymus Taylor ambled over. He had returned from Vicksburg, bleary-eyed, with a tear in his frock coat he did not recall getting. Had behaved a bit cagy at first, as if he was feeling Bowater out, but that did not last long.

“What’s so impressive, Cap’n?” Taylor asked, took the paper, read the first few paragraphs. “Well, damn. Looks like your ironclad done some good, Cap’n.”

“‘Your’ ironclad?” Wilson asked.

“Hell, yes,” Taylor said, looking up at Wilson. “Whole damn thing was Cap’n Bowater’s idea. What the hell you think we was doin in Norfolk so long? Cap’n here suggested it to Mallory, drew up the first plans. Weren’t no one thought it would work, but then, sure enough, once them others smell success, hell, they all come around like dogs to a…somethin. Anyhow, that’s why they sent Cap’n Bowater out here, figured he could do the same to the ol Yazoo River.”

Taylor folded the paper, handed it to Bowater. “Congratulations, Cap’n,” he said, then ambled off.

Bowater turned to Wilson. There was a light in the man’s eyes he had not seen before. “None of that is true,” Bowater said, but he could see Wilson would not be disabused of his fantasy.

Nor was Wilson a man to fantasize alone. The enthusiasm which he had displayed in organizing the wagons seemed to double up on itself. More wagons arrived, and carpenters, blacksmiths, machinists, laborers, black and white, from plantations all over Yazoo County. They set up their makeshift foundries on the shore, in a semicircle around the now cut-down riverboat. Wilson brought his screw steamer Abigail Wilson down and tied her astern of the Yazoo River. Her hoisting engine was made to drive several steam drills on shore, and her cabins became housing for the officers of the Yazoo River.

Newspaper reports two days later of the battle between Virginia and the Yankee ironclad Monitor did nothing to cool the ardor. Southern papers shaded the story in such a way as to make it sound like a Confederate victory, but any experienced navy man, reading the bare facts of the thing, could see it was a stalemate.

It was also the first time in the history of naval warfare that two ironclad vessels had battled it out. The future seemed to be arriving at an alarming rate.

Not only did the plantations send help, but the men of the town began to arrive as well, to lend their brawn and in some cases valuable skills to the work. Women came at noon with lunch in baskets. Children gathered up scraps of wood, swept sawdust into piles, scurried for tools.

The train of wagons arrived every third or fourth day, and eager hands pulled the plates of iron off the beds, stacked them carefully on the landing, and soon the once sorry pile was transformed into an impressive mountain of iron. And still it came.

Ironclad fever swept like the plague through Yazoo City. The people had read of the future in the papers, and they wanted a part of it. Suddenly the vision of a madman had become the most effective means of keeping the Yankee at bay. They were like Noah’s neighbors, who began to see the wisdom of the thing as the water crept up around their ankles.

All of the Yazoo River’s superstructure was gone, and in its place rose a casement, a low deckhouse with angled sides, and a small wheelhouse, no more than a four-foot-high hump on the roof through which captain, pilot, and helmsmen could see. The side wheels, delicate spider structures, were encased in oak two feet thick, a housing with flat, angled sides intended to protect that most vulnerable part of the ship from enemy fire. Paddle wheels were ideal for riverboats. They were not ideal for men-of-war.

The sides and bulkheads of the casement, foot-thick live oak, were pierced for ten guns—two pointing forward, two aft, and three on each broadside. It was optimistic, since they still had only the guns that Robley Paine had purchased for the ship, but Bowater was firing off a continual barrage of letters and he hoped one of them might have an effect.

Hieronymus Taylor tore the engines apart. He checked the cylinder bores and replaced piston rings with new ones he had had turned in Vicksburg. He checked the piston-rod packing and rebuilt and realigned the engines so that they would not tear themselves apart driving the big side wheels.

With block and tackle and crowbars they lifted the paddle wheels off their bearings and checked for wear and pitting and cracks. They checked crosshead bearings and mapped them with lead wire to see where they were worn and scraped them to get the proper clearance. They ground the steam valves and scraped the flues in the boilers.

Two days before they began bolting iron to the casement, the crew arrived. Fifty men, twenty-three of whom were genuine able-bodied sailors, the rest ordinaries, culled from the army and from the coastal defenses and sent to man the newest ironclad. At their head was Lieutenant Asa Quillin, executive officer, quiet, efficient, a thoroughgoing navy man whom Bowater had known briefly on the South American station.

Six weeks after the former Cape Fears had arrived in Yazoo City, a month and a half after Samuel Bowater had been greeted with the possibility that the ironclad Yazoo River might be no more than a madman’s dream, there were over 150 men working on the ship, six forges set up on the riverbank, a crew of seventy-five experienced seamen, and any number of local men ready to sail aboard the ship in the unskilled berths.

Once, Samuel Bowater recalled, he had told Taylor the Yazoo River had to get up steam and leave in six weeks’ time. He had made that number up. He would never have guessed then that they would actually be underway just a week later than that.

Richmond was getting nervous, and so was Jonathan Paine. On the 1st of April, General George McClellan had begun loading his vast army on board steamers, bringing them down the Potomac, down the Chesapeake Bay to Fortress Monroe for a push up the Peninsula to Richmond. He would be only fifty miles from the Confederate capital before he encountered his first Southern soldier. Grant and Farragut were moving on the Mississippi, to Jonathan’s worried mind closing in on Yazoo City.

It was just a few weeks shy of one year since the moment his body, riddled with bullets, had been flung to the dirt on Henry House Hill. During that time, the long slow climb out of despondency and self-flagellation, the difficult work of regaining interest in his life, Paine Plantation had taken on a mythical quality, an El Dorado, a Canaan, promised but unattainable. It called to him. It frightened him.

The Army of the Confederate States would not give him leave to go there.

Then finally, as the spring flowers were beginning to dot the drab landscape with color, and green leaves filled in the spaces between spindly branches like a painter adding another layer of pigment on a canvas, just when Jonathan Paine was considering going once more to the Office of Orders and Detail, though it was clear from the last three visits that his badgering was not appreciated, a letter arrived.

Bobby brought it into the drawing-room ward, where Jonathan was writing a letter for a corporal of the 4th South Carolina who had broken his arm in a fall from a horse. “Jon’tin, you gots a letter…” Bobby said and for a moment Jonathan could only look at him, and down at the letter.

Confederate States Army, Office of Orders and Detail… The words were printed in neat block type on the envelope, and Jonathan’s name and address handwritten below. He tore it open, his stomach twisting. He knew what it should be, but he still feared it was something else.

He pulled out the paper within, unfolded it. A preprinted form, lifeless save for the intricate decorations featuring eagles and flags and cannons sprawling across the top. The blank spaces were filled in in a hurried, largely illegible hand, but Jonathan Paine could certainly read it well enough to puzzle out his own honorable discharge from the Confederate States Army. There was as well a bank draft for the amount of ten dollars.

Jonathan looked for a long time at the two documents. There was a time when ten dollars would have been meaningless to him; his family spent more than that on sundry amusements on any given month. But now it represented his entire net worth. It was not just money, it was the way out of the desert.

“You still want to come to Paine Plantation with me?” Jonathan looked up at Bobby. “Help me get home?”

“Yassuh.”

“Then let us go.”

It did not take them long to pack. Jonathan had only his knapsack, the tattered remnants of his uniform with someone else’s uniform pants, someone not so fortunate as he, he imagined, in regards to wounds. Everything that Bobby had fit easily into a haversack and a bedroll. They said their goodbyes to Miss Sally Tompkins, the volunteers and patients at her hospital, ambled out into the crowded streets. Jonathan was not afraid. It was springtime.

They purchased tickets to ride the Richmond amp; Petersburg Railroad out of town. Bobby helped Jonathan aboard the car, making a path with his finely honed ability to knock people aside in a subservient, humble way. He set Jonathan down on a seat, set his haversack beside him, said, “All right, then, Missuh Jon’tin, you gonna be jest fine here. I’s gonna go to da car where da colored folks ride.”

“Very well, Bobby. Remember, we get off at Petersburg, at the junction with the Weldon amp; Petersburg Railroad.”

“Oh, I remembers, Missuh Jon’tin,” Bobby said, and with a smile he disappeared into the crowd.

It was a scene they played out many times over the next ten days, as they made their way laboriously south, then west. The trip would have been a simple matter, except Tennessee was in large part in Union hands.

So they went south on the North Carolina Railroad, the Wilmington amp; Manchester Railroad, the South Carolina Railroad, rattling up over the Appalachian Mountains before falling back down to Atlanta, Georgia, where they changed to the Alabama amp; Georgia Railroad, which took them through the low, hot, humid country of Alabama, to the old Confederate capital of Montgomery, and from Montgomery, by steamboat and rail, to Jackson, Mississippi. Eleven hundred miles of choking, rattling railcars, of waiting at depots while soldiers, bound for the front, took precedent over wounded soldiers going home, of eating just enough to stave off hunger, and no more, because they had so little money and no idea of how long it needed to last.

During those long hours flopped on benches in deserted depots or standing off to one side while men jostled for the cars, Jonathan told Bobby about Paine Plantation, about the beautiful lawns rolling down to the water, about the welcoming oak tree, about the summer nights when the fireflies made their own living constellations in the tall grass by the Yazoo River. They talked about all that, but they did not discuss Jonathan’s parents, because he had not heard from them and he was afraid.

From Jackson they had just enough money to secure a ride on the coach to Yazoo City, with Jonathan riding inside and Bobby on the box with the Negro driver. They walked from Yazoo City south, following the river.

It was all so familiar, it all fitted into place like the pieces of a puzzle. The smell of the bougainvillea and the pine, warmed in the sun, the river smell, mudbanks and rotting weeds. From the woods that lined the dirt road came the raucous call of the blue jay, the chickadededede of the Carolina chickadee. Cardinals flashed red against the dark green. The cooling breeze carried on it woodsmoke and warm, turned earth. It was delightful to Jonathan. It made him afraid.

At last they came to a dirt drive that branched off the road and Jonathan stopped and Bobby stopped and Jonathan said, “Here we are.”

“This you home?”

“This is it.”

They were quiet for a moment, Bobby letting Jonathan do as he wished, in his time. No bullying now, there was no need. “Very well…” Jonathan said at last. “Let’s go.”

They walked down the drive and soon, from the distance, the edge of the white house peeked through the trees. They walked on, the trees yielding to open space, the house emerging from its hiding place.

The lawn was overgrown; little care had been given to it. He could hear no sound from the house, nothing to indicate it was occupied. He felt his stomach churn, wondered who he would encounter first, if he would encounter anyone at all.

They pushed through the knee-high grass, Jonathan leading the way, circled around the house, giving it a wide berth, as if it was something to be wary of. The edge of the wide porch and the distant river came into view. Jonathan stopped short.

“Dear God…”

The limbs of the oak tree had been hacked off, save for the two lowest, which stuck out like skeletal arms. The remaining trunk had been painted, the paint peeling off in big flakes but still visible.

Jonathan limped slowly around the front of the house, eyes on the tree, mouth fixed. From the front he could see that the tree had been cut to look like some sort of monster, a gargoyle or some such. It rose thirty feet off the ground, leered at the river with its hideous mouth, hacked from the living wood and painted. Above the mouth, the painted remnants of eyes glared north. There was no new growth on the truncated limbs. The tree was dead.

“Dear God…”

Jonathan looked at Bobby, and Bobby’s eyes were wide, as if he had seen the thing that the tree had been painted to represent. “That ain’t right, Missuh Jon’tin…” Bobby managed to stammer.

Jonathan looked up at the front of the house. Paint was peeling there, too, and the path to the porch was all but overgrown. Just a narrow strip of flattened and trampled weeds indicated that anyone had gone in or out of the house recently. The front door gaped open. There was no one around.

“Come on,” Jonathan said. He began walking slowly toward the porch, and after a pause he heard Bobby following behind. He climbed the steps with the now-familiar sound, creak, clomp, creak, clomp, of leather shoe and wooden leg. He crossed the porch slowly, stepped through the door.

The smell hit him first, the familiar smell of the plantation house. It was wood polish and leather and cooking smells and dust. It was a living smell, and it made Jonathan think the house was not a dead place, that there was still life there.

Behind him, he heard Bobby stepping into the foyer. He turned. His friend was looking around, his eyes still wide.

“Welcome to Paine Plantation, Bobby,” Jonathan said. “I fear it is not everything I made it out to be.”

Bobby nodded. “You gots any notion where da folks is?”

Jonathan shook his head. “Hallo?” he shouted, and his voice bounced around the empty space. “Hallo? Is there anybody here?”

The two men waited. There was no answer. “Come along,” Jonathan said, led Bobby deeper into the house, every inch a perfect fit with his memory, every little bit of the place sparking one memory or another. Bobby was absolutely right to think the place haunted.

He led Bobby into his father’s study. There was dust on the surfaces, unlike in the foyer or the hall, as if it had not been entered in some time. That did not bode well, not for any hope of his father’s being alive. Jonathan could not recall a day going by that Robley Paine, Sr., had not sat in his study.

On the desk was a stack of mail, and Jonathan began sorting through the letters. Letters from agents, creditors, letters to his mother and father, a few to him or his brothers. He found the letters that he had written, unopened, halfway down in the stack. He went through them all. They told him nothing, save that his father had not read his mail in the better part of a year.

He saw a few papers scattered on the floor, stooped with some difficulty and picked them up.

Dear Sir:

We regret to inform you of the death of Lt. Robley Paine, Jr., Company D, 18th Mississippi Regiment, 3rd Brigade…

Jonathan dropped the letter. It was old news. Old news to him, old news, apparently, to his parents.

He crossed the room, picked up two more papers, lying one on top of the other.

Dear Sir:

We regret to inform you that, as of this date, Private Nathaniel Paine, Company D, 18th Mississippi Regiment, 3rd Brigade, and Private Jonathan Paine, ditto, are missing…

He turned the other over, sucked in his breath when he saw it. It was a message from another world, a message written by him in a former incarnation. Nathaniel James Paine, Company D, 18th Mississippi, 3rd Brigade, son of Robley and Katherine Paine, Yazoo, Mississippi. Please God send me home to be buried in my native earth.

Jonathan read the words, and as he did he was back on Henry House Hill, the bullets plucking at his garments, the grief pouring from him as his beautiful brother Nathaniel lay dead at his feet.

Robley confirmed dead, Nathaniel confirmed dead. Their father would take it for granted that Jonathan was killed as well, with no word from him, the army calling him missing.

Oh, God, Father, where are you? What have you done? Jonathan wanted to fling himself to the ground, wrap himself in the house, the only familiar thing left to him. He would have fallen then and there, pressed to the floor by his grief, if a noise from beyond the room had not jerked him from his sorrow.

He looked up sharp, and Bobby did, too. There were footsteps in the hall, soft, approaching stealthily. Jonathan had opened his mouth to demand identification when the person in the hall called out, “Who dere? Who dat?”

It was a woman’s voice and it sounded very much like Jenny, the old cook. “Jonathan Paine,” Jonathan replied.

They heard a sound like a grunt, and then the back door of the room burst open and there stood Jenny, fat and squat, a shotgun in her hands. Their eyes met and Jenny’s eyes went wide and her mouth dropped open and the shotgun fell out of her hands and discharged, blowing the leg off a Queen Anne chair.

Jenny clasped her hands to her mouth, began backing away. “Oh, Lord, you’s a ghost fo sartin…”

“No, no, Jenny…” Jonathan took a step toward her, reached out his hand. “It’s me, really me…I’m alive…”

Jenny still shook her head, but she stopped backing away.

“Jenny…where is everyone?” Jonathan asked, as soft as he could.

“They’s all run, Massa Jon’thin…they’s all run in-country, on account o’ dem Yankees, comin’ down de river…”

“Yankees?” Jonathan could not imagine the Yankees had penetrated that far into Mississippi.

“Yassuh. I’s de only one dat stayed…” Her voice trailed off, and she cocked her ear toward the front door. “Oh, Lord, I hears dem now!” she exclaimed, apparently as frightened as she had been of the vision of Jonathan’s ghost.

In the silence Jonathan listened, and he heard, far off, the huffing of a steam engine. “Come on,” he nodded to Bobby, and the two of them crossed out of the study, down the hall, and onto the porch once again.

Half a mile upriver, and heading down, trailing twin plumes of black smoke from two stacks, a paddle wheeler was brushing the water aside. Jonathan looked for a long time, let the boat get almost abreast of the plantation, before he could figure out what it was he was looking at.

He had seen paddle wheelers all his life, but he had never seen one like this. It rode low in the water, and the superstructure was flat and not ten feet in height, save for a small house on the top and forward, where the wheelhouse would be, though the one on that boat was more the dimensions of a doghouse.

There were three square windows in the side, and two in the front bulkhead. The entire thing, including the wheelbox, seemed to be made up of wide planks painted a dull brown.

“Dear Lord,” Bobby asked, speaking softly. “What in da hell is dat?”

Jonathan watched the boat as it steamed past. “It’s an ironclad. An ironclad gunboat.” Jonathan had read of such things in the papers in Richmond, but had never laid eyes on one.

“Dey Yankees?” Bobby asked, but even as he asked, Jonathan’s eyes were resting on the flag, flapping astern from the tall ensign staff. The stars and three broad stripes, red, white, red.

“No,” Jonathan said. “It’s a Confederate ship.” The serpent was close. Men in Yazoo City were sallying forth to beat it back. He had returned just in time.

43

April 15-The enemy brought up his whole fleet… Orders were repeatedly given to Captain Stevenson, of the river fleet, to cause the fire barges to be sent down nightly upon the enemy; but every attempt seemed to prove a perfect abortion…

— Report of Brigadier General Duncan, C.S. Army, Commanding New Orleans Coast Defenses

The order came from Secretary Mallory.

NAVY DEPARTMENT, C.S.

Richmond, April 15, 1862

Sir:

Work day and night to get the Yazoo River ready for action. The preparation of ordnance stores and the drilling of the crew should all progress simultaneously. Not an hour must be lost. Spare neither men nor money. Put the best officers you can get on board the ships, if those we send don’t arrive in time. Proceed at the first possible convenience to New Orleans and place yourself and your vessel at the disposal of Commander Mitchell, CSN.

S. R. Mallory

Secretary of the Navy

Lt. Samuel Bowater, CSN

Yazoo City

New Orleans, Bowater thought, as he read the terse order. So it is to be New Orleans … There did not seem to be much consensus as to the direction from which the chief threat was coming, north or south. Hollins and his fleet had been sent upriver from New Orleans to meet the Yankee ironclad gunboats, leaving New Orleans with little in the way of naval protection.

Now there seemed to be a shift in policy.

The Yazoo River was, happily, a far way toward completion when the telegraph arrived. Hieronymus Taylor had pronounced her engines as fit as they were going to get, and nothing short of running them under load could reveal any further defects. The gunboat iron was bolted in place, so it looked as if the entire upper works were covered with wide wood strips painted dull brown.

The guns and ordnance had arrived the day before Mallory’s telegram; three nine-inch shell guns and six thirty-two-pounder smoothbores. That left one gunport empty, and into that went the ten-inch Dahlgren of Yazoo River ’s original battery. The old six-pounder was left on the landing.

They hoisted the guns aboard, set them at their gunports. They finished off the last of the armor, the iron over the wheelboxes. The officers’ quarters were no more than a few roughed-in bulkheads, the crew quarters were hammocks slung along the gundeck, but that was how it had to be. Bowater did not think they would have to endure that inconvenience for long.

On the 18th of April they were underway. The crew numbered 153. They included the original Cape Fears, the new men sent by Mallory, and eager volunteers from Yazoo City, men who were not sailors, but who were perfectly capable of hauling on a gun tackle or carrying shot and charge to guns, or heaving coal in the engine room. Artemus Polkey signed on as ship’s carpenter. A pilot by the name of William Risley, thickset, heavily bearded, volunteered to take the ship south and to fight her if need be.

There was no place for Robley Paine. He was not a pilot, not even a sailor. His leg had become so lame that he could hardly walk at times, and his health was not good.

Still, when he came to Bowater, and admitted to all of those imperfections, and begged to nonetheless accompany his ship on what they all understood might be her death run, Samuel was much moved. The Yazoo River was there because of Robley Paine, and him alone. Bowater knew he could not leave Robley Paine on the beach, force him to watch his ship sail off without him.

They got off the dock under their own power and steamed down the Yazoo River. Four miles above the Mississippi, one of the main bearings on the starboard engine cracked in two, bringing the engine to a halt with a sound that made every man aboard wince. They limped into Vicksburg on the port engine. Taylor and Burgess worked for seven hours straight, right through the night, and the next morning they were underway again.

From Vicksburg it was 250 miles to the Crescent City. They steamed all day, all night, with both engines wide open, slowing only when they had to shut down the port engine to replace a throttle valve that jammed half-open.

Samuel Bowater looked out the narrow window at the forward end of the wheelhouse. It was not really a window, more a long rectangular opening in the armor plating, but then it was not really a wheelhouse either, but more of a low pilothouse, a four-foot-high ironclad box with sloped sides sitting on top of the casement.

Six feet below the roof of the box, mounted on the gundeck, was a platform that formed the deck of this truncated pilothouse. On that deck was mounted the wheel and the two telegraphs to the engine room. Crowded onto the platform, the lower part of their bodies in the casement, upper half, from the chest up, in the short wheelhouse, stood Bowater, the pilot, Risley, the helmsman, and a midshipman to relay the captain’s orders. It was the oddest lash-up Bowater had ever witnessed, but he reckoned it would do.

He moved his head from the port beam forward beyond the bow, to the starboard beam. The great, wide, brown Mississippi lay before them, over a mile wide, and crowded with shipping as they closed with New Orleans. Amazing. He had very little experience with the river, had never been stationed in New Orleans. It took no imagination to see why this was where the lifeblood of the Confederacy flowed.

“How far to New Orleans, Pilot?”

“Fifteen miles. Be another sixty-five downriver to Fort St. Philip, which I reckon is where the fleet is. Ain’t no use in stationing at New Orleans. Time the damn Yankees get to New Orleans, it’s too damn late to stop them.”

Bowater nodded. “Carry on,” he said, and stepped the four steps down from their little pilothouse deck to the gundeck below. Four steps, and the heat rose by twenty degrees, from what Bowater guessed to be around eighty to around one hundred. Sweating and shirtless men struggled with the big guns, loading and running out in dumb show, those experienced in naval gunnery instructing those who had never been this close to a cannon.

Bowater walked slowly through the odd twilight of the ironclad. In sixteen years at sea he had been aboard nearly every type of vessel afloat, but he had never seen anything like this. They were in a box, a rectangular box with sloping sides. The rough-cut wood of the deck and the sides and bulkheads was painted white to aid in visibility, and it helped, some, but still the interior of the ironclad was gloomy. A row of lanterns hung along the centerline, despite the brilliant sun that poured in through the open gunports.

Samuel paused and looked along the port battery. If he looked at just that, just that small section of the gundeck, he could almost believe he was on the lower deck of a regular man-of-war. The broadside guns, the gunports, the sloping side like a ship’s tumble home, were all familiar things.

It was when he looked forward, when he saw the forward bulkhead, the forward-facing guns at right angles to the broadside, that the illusion was blown away. He was not on a proper man-of-war. He was on an ironclad ram, a newfound engine of war.

Ironclads at sea, armies moving by rail, communicating by telegraph. Rifled cannons, rifled rifles, exploding ordnance. They were all Americans, Yankees and Confederates, like it or not, all children of that particular genius that was America. How apt then that in less than a year of war, Americans fighting Americans, they should alter forever the very nature of warfare.

Bowater stepped forward and was joined by Lieutenant Asa Quillin, stripped down to shirtsleeves, his shirt clinging to him, as wet with perspiration as if he had been doused by a bucket. Together they strode the length of the deck, gave words of encouragement to the men working the guns. Bowater stopped to talk with Ruffin Tanner, whom he had promoted to acting master’s mate and given command of the starboard battery.

“How do you fancy being an officer, Mr. Tanner?”

Tanner gave a long, slow chew of the tobacco in his mouth. “Ain’t bad.”

“How are your gun crews coming along?”

“Good. Gettin better. I don’t reckon aiming will be much of an issue.”

“No, I think not. Rate of fire, that’s what we’re looking for.”

“That’s what you’ll get, Cap’n.”

The Yazoo River steamed through New Orleans, the crowded docks, the sailing vessels, the paddle wheelers, the screw tugs, crisscrossing the river like water bugs. There was wild activity there, frenetic activity.

Hieronymus Taylor came up the steps from the engine room to the gundeck, joined Bowater in the pilothouse. He stoked up his cigar and the smoke was sucked through the narrow windows and out into the evening.

“Home sweet home,” Taylor said, smiling as he peered out at the waterfront. “This won’t be the first time I got my ass whopped ’round these parts, far from.”

“Is it always this busy, Chief?” Bowater asked.

“Yeah…” Taylor said, and then, a moment later, “Well, maybe not…somethin strange about it, seems like one damned big hurry. What you think, Mr. Pilot?”

“I think everyone with a boat’s tryin to get the hell out of town afore the Yankees gets here.”

Taylor nodded. “And fools we be, we goin’ in the opposite direction.”

They passed the city, made the 180-degree bend in the river ten miles south, and then another ninety-degree turn before the Mississippi straightened out for its final run to the Gulf.

They were fifty miles from Forts St. Philip and Jackson when they heard the gunfire.

Bowater thought it was thunder at first, a late-day storm brewed up by the sea and humidity of the Gulf. It seemed too massive to be gunfire. But it rolled on and on, distant and muted and constant, long after thunder would have died away.

“Do you hear that?” He turned to Risley and the pilot nodded.

“Mortar boats.”

“Mortar boats?”

“Yeah. Twenty or so. Old schooners, mostly. They towed ’em up, got ’em tied up to the riverbanks. They each have a thirteen-inch mortar on board, dropping them shells right into the forts. They must be murdering them poor bastards garrisoning them places. Idea is to knock the forts out and wreck the chain they got across the river, then Farragut can take his ships right up.”

Risley took his eyes from the low gray cloud of smoke, visible now over the low marshy land to the south. “Hell, Captain, don’t they tell you nothin?”

Theodore Wilson stood on the dock, looked down the Yazoo River as far as he could see. Behind him rang the noise of packing up a shipyard, a shipyard which had come together out of nothing, had formed like Adam from the dust, a new thing. All of Yazoo County rallying to his, Wilson’s, call, and through his influence and leadership they had turned a madman’s dream into a reality, into a formidable weapon of war.

Wilson had to admit it, to himself, at least: the past month and a half had been the best time of his life. The energy surrounding the rebirth of the Yazoo River as an ironclad had been terrific, like an electrical storm, and him in the middle of it. In the directing of resources, the delegation, the supervising, he had felt like a brigadier general. In the sheer physical work he had found a new devotion to the cause of Southern liberty, more profound than he had thought possible.

When he had first confronted Samuel Bowater, he had thought himself a patriot. Now he could not even recall that person he had been, what that Theodore Wilson had thought and felt.

The Yazoo River steamed off for New Orleans, and Wilson felt as if he had, by mistake, left some part of himself aboard, forgotten to retrieve it before the ship sailed, like a coat left draped over a rail or a box of tools. He thought of tomorrow with dread. What was there now, now that the ship had gone without him?

He had considered sailing with her, of course. He had some seamanship, some piloting skills, from running the Abigail Wilson. But not enough to pilot a vessel like the Yazoo River. He had arranged for Risley to sail as pilot, aware of his own limitations.

So what else could he do? Nothing. He had no military experience, had never even seen a gun fired in anger. Manual labor, haul a gun tackle, run ashes up the ash hoist, that was it. Shovel coal. He would be subservient to Bowater, subservient even to Robley Paine, and that would not do. So he stood on the dock, watched her steam away, supervised the disassembly of the ad hoc shipyard.

He heard footsteps behind, a shuffling, limping walk, two people, someone to ask him what they should do next, and he did not know. He was tired of this work. It was anticlimax.

“Mr. Wilson?” The voice was strong, familiar, but he could not place it.

“What?” he said, exasperated, and turned around. His eyes met the face staring at him and he sucked in his breath, felt his heart charge, his limbs jerk with the involuntary reflex of shock and panic, an encounter with the supernatural.

“Dear God…” It was nothing supernatural—Wilson realized that in the instant he was sucking in his breath—but just as surprising.

“Jonathan Paine? What in hell are you doing here, boy? We all thought you were dead.”

“Nearly was.” He lifted up his pant leg, and Wilson looked with horror at the wooden appendage. “Lost that at Manassas. Robley Junior, Nathaniel, they weren’t so lucky. Both got killed. I got the idea my daddy thinks I’m dead, too.”

Wilson nodded. God, this sorry son of a bitch looks like hell!

Skinny as a stray dog, his cheeks sunk, unshaved, in a uniform that was torn and patched. He looked old, twice his twenty or so years. Of all the boys, Jonathan had always favored Robley the most, and now he looked even more like him—the wasted, mad Robley Paine.

Behind him stood a Negro of about Jonathan’s age, one Wilson did not recognize, a slave, perhaps, he had picked up along the way.

What am I going to tell him? Wilson wondered, but Jonathan spoke again.

“I been down to Paine Plantation. My mother’s dead.”

Wilson nodded. “I knew that, son. I’m sorry.”

“There’s only a few of the servants left. No one knew where my daddy was. Someone thought he was at Yazoo City. Fellow in town told me to look here.” Jonathan looked around, as if he still might find his father.

What do I tell him? His father went mad with grief, spent all of his money—all of his boys’ money—to build a machine with which to kill himself?

“Your daddy was here. You missed him by two days. He had a dream to build an ironclad gunboat, and damned if he didn’t do it. They went down to New Orleans, to fight the Yankees. Folks reckon there’ll be a hell of a battle.”

Jonathan nodded. There was a strange look in his eyes, not the flash of impetuous youth, not the wild, undisciplined thing that Wilson was used to seeing in the youngest of the Paine boys. “New Orleans…” Jonathan looked out at the river, as if he might fling himself in, let the brown water carry him to his father, to the sea.

Wilson looked down at the ground, the few blades of grass shooting up between the gravel, kicked at the loose rocks. He looked up. The old six-pounder from Yazoo River was sitting on its carriage near the edge of the landing. Robley Paine’s gun. Jonathan’s now, he reckoned.

He had opened his mouth to tell Jonathan that, that he was the proud owner of a six-pounder smoothbore—he could think of nothing else to say—when he stopped, and involuntarily he shifted his eyes to the Abigail Wilson, still tied to the dock. He ran his eyes over her bow, pictured the sweep of foredeck, then glanced back at the six-pounder.

“You looking to go to New Orleans, then?” Wilson asked.

The gunboat USS Itasca, 150 feet long, five hundred tons, steamed up the Mississippi River, farther than any Yankee had come in a year.

Lieutenant C.H.B. Caldwell, commanding the Itasca, stood by the big wheel, aft. He had been charged by Admiral Farragut with removing the heavy chain, supported by half a dozen derelict schooners, which the Confederates had stretched across the river. He and his consort, Pinola, had labored for hours under the fire of Forts Jackson and St. Philip. They had managed to pull one schooner free. Their mission so far, a failure. Caldwell was not ready to report as much to Farragut, doubted he ever would.

The mortar flotilla was firing a covering fire, trying to distract the Confederate gunners, keep their minds off the two Yankee gunboats moving upriver. Streaks of light arched up high overhead, dropped into the wide area between the walls of Forts St. Philip and Jackson, made great billows of light as they exploded.

The forts were firing too, blasting at the riparian intruders with rifled shells. Exploding ordnance tore up the river, peppered the Itasca and Pinola with iron, but Caldwell was too angry to care. He steamed through the narrow opening left by the removal of that one schooner. He was playing his last hand.

He turned to the midshipman beside him. “Go down to the engine room, give the chief my compliments, and tell him that when I ring full ahead again, I want every ounce of steam I can have. Tell him to throw pitch, turpentine, whatever on the fires. I need it all.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” The mid saluted, ran off.

Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred yards upriver the Itasca steamed, until the line of schooners was lost to sight, and visible only in the light of exploding ordnance. The shells dropped all around the gunboat, screamed down the deck, took off the head of the mainmast; it was like steaming into a hornet’s nest.

“Port your helm, hard aport!” Caldwell said. Fort St. Philip, which had been right ahead, its walls bristling points of light where the guns were firing at them, was now on the port side, now astern, as the gunboat turned to run with the stream.

Caldwell grabbed the telegraph, swallowed hard, rang full ahead.

The deck vibrated as the engineer stoked the fires up and the prop churned the water and the speed built. The gunboat was moving fast now, with the current, covering the distance that she had just steamed. Against the stars overhead Caldwell could see great quantities of smoke rolling out of the stack, and he wondered what the chief was throwing on down there.

Fort Jackson to starboard was firing madly, but Caldwell could see the schooners now, the chain between them, could see the point he intended to hit, the place where the chain hung lowest between two hulks.

“I’ll take this,” he said softly to the quartermaster, and the surprised man stepped aside, let the captain take the wheel. Caldwell gave a half turn, brought the helm amidships. He could not risk the possibility of the helmsman misunderstanding his command. They had one try, and one try only. No practice run, no drill.

They were coming on fast to the schooners, one, two, three, and between schooners three and four he pointed the bow of the gunboat. He could feel the engines throbbing below, could hear the sound of the hull pushed as fast as she could go through the water. And then they hit.

The bow of the Itasca hit the chain and kept going, up, up, as if she was leaping a wave, and the pounding engines drove the ship on, higher and higher. The gunboat seemed to be crawling out of the water as it lifted up, as it rode up on the chain.

And then it stopped and the throbbing engines could push her no more. She sat there, hung on the chain, and it dawned on Caldwell that they might remain in that position, hung up on the chain under the Confederate guns. The forts would blow them to pieces at first light, a failure on his part much worse than failing to break the raft.

The first tendrils of panic were creeping up his throat when the chain broke under them. The bow of the Itasca dropped down, sent the spray flying high over the rails, rocked the vessel with the waves created by her own impact.

The straining engines shoved the gunboat ahead. To port and starboard, the old schooners that had held the chain were now caught in the fast-flowing current. They swept downstream, swinging on the chain, making a gap in the obstruction like barn doors swinging open.

Caldwell smiled and would have shouted if he had not controlled himself. Forward, someone with less control whooped, and more followed suit.

Lieutenant Caldwell looked at the wide gap in the chain, big enough for the flagship, big enough even for the side-wheeler Mississippi. He had done his job. Now there was nothing but the forts and the Confederate mosquito fleet between Farragut’s big ships and the city of New Orleans.

44

I wish you to understand that the day is at hand when you will be called upon to meet the enemy in the worst form for our profession.

— Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, General Orders to Captains

They worked as hard and as fast as they could: Theodore Wilson, Jonathan Paine, Bobby Pointer, the crew and new volunteers of what “Captain” Wilson was calling the “CSS” Abigail Wilson. They removed the towing bitts, rigged up gun tackles, swayed the gun carriage and six-pounder aboard. They procured shot and powder, topped off potable water, brought aboard food and sundry other supplies.

The days ticked by: April 18, 19, 20…The Jonathan Paine of a year before would have been frantic, yelling at everyone to hurry, arguing with Wilson over every new thing he had to have aboard. The Jonathan of a year before would have made an insufferable pain of himself, would no doubt have been thrown off the boat.

The one-legged, sunken-cheeked Jonathan was no less frantic, though he kept it to himself now, and simply worked as hard as he was physically able.

He had picked up the story of his mother’s death, his father’s life, piece by piece, from dozens of sources, like reconstructing a mosaic from a disorganized heap of tiles. He did not like the picture forming.

The servants remaining at Paine Plantation told him how his father had cut the limbs off the tree, turned it into what it was, for what reason they did not know. He did it at the same time his mother took to her bed, never to rise again. It was at the same time, Jonathan surmised, that they had received word of the death of their sons.

He heard the rest—travel to New Orleans, spending money wildly, the boat, the fight with the Yankees at the Head of the Passes, the return to Yazoo City, the conversion of the ship into an ironclad. None of it, none of it, sounded like the methodical, stable, well-considered father he knew. When the mosaic was put together it revealed a picture of a man who had gone mad with grief, who was flinging himself at the enemy as a form of suicide.

And now, Jonathan knew, the enemy was coming in force at the river defenses below New Orleans. It was a good opportunity to die. Jonathan could not bear the thought of his father’s going to his grave without ever knowing the truth, without knowing that the Paine line would live on. So he worked until the stump of his leg throbbed in agony, and then he stuffed cotton between the stump and the wood and worked some more.

They took on coal on the 20th, ready to get underway that afternoon.

“Bobby,” Jonathan said. They stood on the landing as the coaling commenced. “If you wish, you are welcome to wait my return at Paine Plantation. You know how to get back there.”

“I was figuring on comin wit you, Missuh Jon’tin.”

“This is not going to be a fine thing, Bobby. As I understand it, there aren’t but a few Southern boats against all the Yankee fleet. I don’t know as any of us’ll come through this one.”

Bobby nodded. “But I do love a boat ride, and I ain’t never seen N’Awlins. I gets to do dem tings, I reckon I’m fit to die.”

Jonathan smiled, slapped Bobby on the shoulder. “Good,” he said. Bobby was part of the journey, part of the entire thing. Jonathan did not like the thought of undertaking the last part, playing the final act, without him.

An hour later they left the dock, steamed out into the stream. They were a day and a half getting to Vicksburg, with “Captain” Wilson putting the Abigail Wilson hard into the mud half a dozen times. They tied up at Vicksburg and the captain, in a tacit admission of incompetence, hired a river pilot to take them to New Orleans.

They were underway again just a few hours later, steaming downriver through the night. Wilson was anxious too, Jonathan could see, eager to get into the fight. Driving him, no doubt, was the thought that Robley Paine might die a hero in combat and Wilson himself would never see a shot fired. Whatever it was, Jonathan did not care, as long as they were steaming for New Orleans, and doing so with all dispatch.

The pounding of the forts by the mortar flotilla downriver had been frightening at first, in its lethal potential. The round thirteen-inch shells fell with uncanny accuracy, exploding as they hit, the Yankees having worked out the elevation, trajectory, charge, and fuses exactly. The shells exploded with a deep, angry-God sound, sent shards of iron screaming. One shell through the roof of the casement, which served as a hurricane deck for the Yazoo River, would be the end of them all.

For all the daylight hours and well into the night, the sky was slashed apart with the streak of burning fuses as the thirteen-inch mortars lobbed shell after shell into the forts. Twenty-one mortars all firing together; the sound of individual guns was lost until it was all one big rumble of mortar fire, whistle of shell, explosion of shell. The twilight hours, the night, were lit with the continuous flash of detonations, muted through the pall of smoke from expended power which hung permanently over the water.

The men of the Yazoo River could do no more than stand on the hurricane deck, watch the awesome fireworks, and shake their heads at the resources the Yankees were able to array against them. Twenty-one specially equipped ships just to blast two forts? Would they never run out of shells?

Finally, after a few days, when the wonder of it all had worn away, the shelling became simply monotonous, and soon they hardly heard it at all. None of the shells were being lobbed at the fleet, huddled upriver of Fort St. Philip. The Confederate Navy and the River Defense Fleet did not seem to be a great concern to the Yankees.

The storm was building, Hieronymus Taylor could feel it. Like so many times out on the Gulf, when the sky would get blacker and blacker and the water would turn a weird grayish blue and you could feel the change in the atmosphere, feel it on some primal level, and you knew when the sky opened, and the wind began to whistle, and the seas rose, that it was going to be bad.

That was how he felt, early evening, April 23, 1862, sitting on the hurricane deck of the Yazoo River, worrying the cigar in his mouth, looking downriver at the desultory fireworks. The bombardment had slowed around noon, for the first time in five days. There were rumors the ships of the Yankee fleet had shifted their anchorages around. Change. It meant something was going to happen. The storm had to break soon. The pressure was too great.

He turned and looked at the boats on the Confederate side. An odd assortment, and none too menacing. Besides the Yazoo River, there were the McRae and Jackson, old wooden steamers, veterans of the river war. There were two vessels from the Louisiana State Navy, the Governor Moore and the General Quitman, both wooden steamers mounting two guns each. There was part of the ad hoc River Defense Fleet, the commander of which, John Stephenson, had such an aversion to taking orders from a naval officer that Commander Mitchell finally decided to just ignore him and his boats.

There was the low, whale-backed ironclad ram Manassas, the oddest thing that Taylor had ever seen afloat. But she had proved her worth before, at the Head of the Passes, and Taylor hoped she would again, and perhaps with greater results.

Lastly there was the ironclad Louisiana. She was a massive affair, 264 feet long, sixty-two feet wide, with an eclectic collection of sixteen guns. She was potentially the greatest threat to the Union forces, another CSS Virginia, let loose among the wooden walls. Unfortunately, her odd combination of paddle wheels and screw propellers was inadequate to maneuver the huge vessel. She was unable to steam under her own power, and even with tugs could not get upriver against the current. She was tied up at the foot of Fort St. Philip, a floating iron battery, no more.

First Assistant Engineer Hieronymus Taylor sat for a long time on the hurricane deck, looking out over the water, thinking. There was much to ponder. The sun sank into the marshes. To the north lay his beloved New Orleans. Would there be Yankees in those narrow, ancient streets in the next week? The next day?

It was near midnight, most of the ship asleep, when he sighed, stood, tossed his cigar overboard. In the evening quiet he heard it hiss in the water. He stepped forward to the small pilothouse. The officers were maintaining watch as if at sea, and Bowater and the pilot Risley were standing on the pilothouse roof, talking in low tones about the river, the current, what they would be up against.

“Evening, Captain,” Taylor said, in a neighborly way, looking up at Bowater, standing on the four-foot-high roof.

“Good evening, Chief.” Bowater was in shirtsleeves, rolled up, his braces dark against the white shirt. He was smoking a cigar as well, the first time Taylor had ever seen him do so.

“Expecting some excitement tonight, Cap’n?”

“Could be. Could well be.”

Taylor nodded. “I think so too. Tonight’s the night. I can feel it in my bones.” With that he turned and climbed down to the deck, then through the small door into the casement. Only a few lanterns were lit. The guns lurked in the dark, and between them, men sleeping at quarters, like grown bears and their cubs, all hibernating.

Taylor threaded his way through the men, found Acting Master’s Mate Ruffin Tanner lying on his back, mouth open, snoring. He nudged him with his toe, nudged harder until the sailor woke up.

“What the hell…?” Tanner muttered, looked up through half-closed eyes.

“Tanner, you awake?” Taylor asked.

“Am now, you son of a bitch…”

“Good. I need ya to get a couple of your sailor boys, launch the starboard boat.”

“Starboard…why? This on the cap’n’s orders?”

“No, it’s on my orders, and I would be damned grateful if you would stop arguing and do it.”

Tanner climbed to his feet, stretched, looked Taylor over. Then he nodded. “Starboard boat.” They understood one another, the sailor and the engineer. Taylor knew he could count on the man.

Taylor opened the hatch to the engine room and climbed down, climbed into the familiar heat and Stygian atmosphere.

“Jones! Where the hell you at? You hidin in the damn coal bunker again?”

Moses Jones, fireman of the watch, stepped out from behind the engine, an oil can in his hand. “I’se here, boss. What da hell you needin now?”

“I need you to round up all the darkies we got in the engineering division. They’s you and Tommy, they’s William and Noah and Caesar we got up in Yazoo City…” The men from Yazoo City were slaves whose owners had hired them out to the navy as coal heavers. Taylor wondered if their masters thought themselves patriots for such sacrifice. “What other darkies we got aboard?”

Moses cocked his head, squinted at him, trying to divine the man’s motives. “What you wants ta know for?”

“Will you stop yer damned arguing, you black son of a bitch?”

“They’s the two fellas in the steward’s division and Johnny St. Laurent.”

Johnny St. Laurent. Taylor wondered how he could have forgotten him.

“All right, see here. You round up all them fellas from the engineering division, Tommy and them new hands from Yazoo City, an y’all meet me on the fantail. Just do it,” he added to Moses’s forming question.

Taylor climbed back up into the casement, made his way aft to the makeshift galley where Johnny St. Laurent slept. He shook the sleeping cook until he got a response.

“Johnny, come with me,” Taylor said, and Johnny, who had been with Taylor on many a misadventure, stood and followed without question.

They met on the fantail, Hieronymus Taylor and a cluster of black men in Confederate sailor’s garb. On the starboard side, Tanner and two seamen held one of the Yazoo River ’s boats against the ironclad hull.

“All right, you boys,” Taylor began, and then he was interrupted by footsteps in the casement, stepping through the door. Captain Bowater.

“Chief, what are you doing?” Bowater asked. It was not a friendly tone: anger, confusion, but mostly suspicion.

“I’m lettin’ the darkies go, Cap’n. They ain’t got a dog in this fight.”

“You are…what?”

“Letting the darkies go. Givin them a boat. Let ’em sail on down to the Yankees. We don’t need ’em, don’t need no divided loyalties for the fight we got comin.”

“What makes you think their loyalties are divided?”

“Well, let’s jest see.” Taylor turned to the men on the fantail. “Any you men don’t want to go over to the Yankees, wants to remain in the Confederate Navy, stay and fight, step on over there.”

Taylor pointed to the port rail. There was a long pause. No one moved.

“Who is going to pass coal, Chief?”

“I can pass coal. Burgess can pass coal. Got two white coal passers, don’t need so damn many down there anyhow.”

Bowater was silent, clearly did not know which way to go on this.

“How ’bout you, Cap’n? You gonna let your boy Jacob go?”

“Jacob’s been with me all his life. He certainly would not think of deserting.”

“That a fact? Why don’t we ask him?”

The two men stared at one another. The moon was rising, and gave just enough light that they could see one another’s eyes, but just barely.

“Very well. Tanner, go fetch Jacob,” Bowater said.

Silence on the fantail, an ugly silence, like two men holding one another at gunpoint. And then a moment later Tanner and a very confused Jacob climbed out the small door onto the deck.

“Jacob,” Bowater said. “Mr. Taylor here wishes to let all of the Negroes go, let them get into the boat there and row down to the Yankees and ostensible freedom. He suggests I allow you to go, so I will.

“The choice is yours. Remain where you are, and stay with me, or step over with those other men”—Bowater pointed to the cluster by the starboard rail—“and go with them to the Yankees. What will it be?”

The silence settled down again, and every eye was on Jacob, and Jacob clearly was not happy about it. His eyes shifted between Bowater and the men at the starboard rail. At last he made some little sound—it might have been a muttered word—and with three quick steps he crossed to the starboard rail and took his place there.

Jacob shook his head. Taylor could see the sorrow in his face, his eyes. Finally he spoke. “Massah Sam’l, I’se sorry. Really, I’se sorry. But what the hell else you expect me ta do?”

Bowater looked from Jacob to Moses, to Johnny, then to Hieronymus Taylor. Then, without a word, he turned and disappeared through the door into the casement.

“All right, y’all, this here’s your chance and you best take it!” Taylor said, loud, and his voice moved the men to action. They climbed down, one after another, into the boat, faces frightened and expectant, all at once.

“Boss.” Jones stopped, as Taylor knew and feared he would. “This here, this here’s a fine thing you doin’…”

“Shut up. Think I wouldn’t rather see your black ass stop a shell before mine? Git the hell in the boat, afore I change my stupid mind.”

Moses nodded, and to Taylor’s irritation smiled and then climbed into the boat and took up an oar.

“Go on, y’all!” Taylor shouted. “Head on downriver, that’s where you’ll find them Yankees, lead ya to the Promised Land!”

The men at the thwarts dipped their oars and pulled and the boat began to fade into the night.

“Go on!” Taylor shouted. “Go work in one of them damned factories up North, see how damned good ya had it here!”

Then from the dark, from the amorphous white shape which was all he could see of the boat, Moses Jones’s voice cut though the dark like a knife. Oh, Shenandoah, I’m bound to leave you…

Then all of the men in the boat together: Away, you rolling river…

Then Moses again: But Shenandoah, I’ll never grieve you…

Hieronymus Taylor stood on the fantail and watched until first the boat and then the singing were swallowed up in the dark. He smiled despite himself, shook his head, stepped into the casement, and shut the ironclad door.

Samuel Bowater stood on top of the pilothouse roof, alone, watched the boat pull away downriver. Jones’s voice, deep and clear, floated back to them.

Jacob’s desertion had moved him in a profound way. He would never have guessed it, was certain, when he agreed to test his conviction, that Jacob would remain by his side. That he had opted instead to leave the Bowaters’ service for the uncertainties of freedom in the North shocked Samuel, changed his outlook in a fundamental way.

He toyed with these thoughts, but his mind wandered. His father, his mother, Wendy, Robley Paine, they all stepped up for consideration, vague, half-formed thoughts. He sat on the hurricane deck, leaned back against the pilothouse.

He did not know what time it was when he awoke, nor what woke him. He opened his eyes, looked into the dark. There were footsteps on the hurricane deck. He did not move.

A figure stepped past the pilothouse, stepped to the forward end of the hurricane deck. In the moonlight Bowater recognized the beaten-down frame of Robley Paine.

For a moment Paine did nothing. Then with some difficulty he knelt down on the deck, bowed his head. Clasped his hands. For a long time he remained there, in silent prayer, and Bowater was not sure what to do.

Finally Bowater rose, and his foot scraped on the deck and Paine looked up.

“Ah, Mr. Paine, I did not see you there,” Bowater said.

“Quite all right, Captain,” Paine said. He stood painfully, stepped over to Bowater. There was something different about his face. The muscles seemed less tense, the edge of madness dulled. “A fine night,” he said.

“Lovely…” Bowater said, and then, before he knew he had said it, added, “Why did you do this, sir? The ship, all of it?”

Paine looked at him with a look that seemed to peel the buffers of secret thought away. “I don’t know. I don’t know why I did most of what I did, this past year. I don’t even recall a lot of it. I did it for my boys, I suppose. Their memory. My wife was able to let herself die, but I did not have that trick. I guess I did it because I was doomed to live when I did not want to, because the Everlasting has set His canon against self-slaughter.”

His voice was stronger, more clear than Samuel had ever heard it. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “In any event, here we are. And even if what I did can do nothing for my boys, it can at least help my country, and that is something.” He turned to Bowater. “You are the only one who has ever had the grit to ask me that.”

Bowater nodded. This man before him was not the mendacious lunatic who had greeted them at the landing at Yazoo City. The transformation of the ship had somehow transformed him as well. Or maybe it was the proximity of eternal rest that revived his mind.

Then, like punctuation to the thought, the guns of Fort St. Philip opened up, two hundred yards away. Instant change, like waking from a dream, the dark and quiet blasted away as gun after gun hurled iron and fire over the water. And lit up by the muzzle flashes of the big guns, the Yankee fleet, moving slowly, line ahead, upriver, through the boom, through the crossfire of the forts.

The lead Yankee ship staggered under the hammer blow from the fort but did not stop, did not even slow. Her sides flashed with gunfire as she hit back, wooden warship against fixed fortification. Fort Jackson began to blast away, and then the next Yankee ship in line, and the next. In less than half a minute a full-scale battle had appeared, right under their bow.

Below, Bowater could hear his officers and petty officers shouting, could hear the tramp of 150 men rushing to battle stations, but he remained, transfixed. He considered sending for Jacob, having him fetch his frock coat and hat, but he rejected the idea. Too hot for that. He wondered at himself. There was a time when he would not have considered going into battle without his proper uniform, despite the heat.

And then he remembered that Jacob was no longer aboard. He wondered about him and Moses and the other Negroes, if they had made it through or were caught up in that.

No, they had had time. They would have made it through.

Robley Paine turned to him, one side of his face lit with flickering orange light. “Our time has come,” he said.

“It has indeed,” Bowater replied. “It surely has indeed.”

45

On the morning of the 25th the enemy’s fleet advanced upon the batteries and opened fire, which was returned with spirit by the troops as long as their powder lasted, but with little apparent effect upon the enemy.

— Major General Lovell, C.S. Army, Commanding Defenses of New Orleans

There was no plan, no organized waterborne defense. There were not enough Confederate ships to warrant it, and with the River Defense Fleet doing what it wished to do in any event, it had never seemed worth trying. Sally forth and fight, that had been the only plan. Captain Bowater rang up half ahead, called down to Lieutenant Asa Quillin to slip the stern anchor which held them head downstream.

The noise of the chain running out came rattling through the deck. The bitter end went overboard and the Yazoo River twisted in the stream, free of the muddy bottom. The quartermaster, wide-eyed with the shock of being roused from sleep by cannon fire, still trying to button his pants, turned the wheel with one hand, held his pants with the other, brought her on a heading for the battle.

Risley, the pilot, climbed up to the platform beneath the pilothouse. Without a word he took the wheel, let the helmsman get his pants in order. “Heading, Captain?”

Bowater watched the battle for a moment before replying. It was as if the night had exploded, great flashes of red and orange, the concussion of the great guns making the casement of the Yazoo River shudder, even half a mile upstream. In just a few moments of fighting the smoke had become thick enough to make some of the gunfire look muted, dull bursts of color in the dark and the gloom.

Quillin appeared in the pilothouse looking for orders.

“You recall, Mr. Risley, Horatio Nelson’s words, just before Trafalgar?” Bowater said. “‘No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy.’ That must be our strategy tonight, because I think we’ll get no instructions from the flag. So let us plunge right in.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Risley said. The quartermaster took the helm again. “Find the closest damn Yankee and steer right for her,” the pilot instructed.

More footsteps on the platform and Hieronymus Taylor appeared, ubiquitous cigar in mouth, his frock coat open, his hands in his trouser pockets. “Forgive my intrusion,” he said. He looked forward, out the slit of a window, at the panorama of violence under their bow. “Ho-ly God…”

“What is the report from the engine room?” Bowater asked, irritated. He was irritated about the Negroes, irritated about Taylor’s being there in the pilothouse, irritated in general with the man.

“All’s well, Cap’n Bowater. Boilers blown down, fires are clean, grates are clean, steam’s up.”

“You have coal heavers enough?”

“We have coal heavers enough.”

Bowater turned back to the fight before him, tried to ignore Taylor. The rest of the mosquito fleet was scrambling, slipping anchors, steaming downriver. Risley ordered a hard turn to starboard to avoid collision with one of the River Defense Fleet. It was helter skelter, with no organized line of battle, and Bowater wondered if there wasn’t as much danger of colliding with friend as there was of being run down by their enemies.

“Well, reckon I’ll crawl back in my hole,” Taylor said, and when Bowater failed to respond, added, “Captain?”

Bowater turned. Taylor wore a strange look on his face. Not contrition, not arrogance, not apology. Something else. A touch of sentiment, perhaps.

“Cap’n Bowater, we have been through quite a bit together, you and me. I got to say it now. You are one cold, patrician son of a bitch, but you got grit. It’s been a pleasure.”

Taylor extended his hand, and the words and the gesture were so genuine that Bowater was taken aback. He would not have credited the man with such sincerity.

Bowater took the extended hand, enveloped it in his two hands, and shook. “Chief Taylor, you are one insufferable pain in the ass, but you are a hell of an engineer.”

Taylor smiled around his cigar. “Cap’n, if you live through this here jaunt, and I don’t, I would surely admire it if you could see that put on my headstone.”

“It’ll be done.”

Taylor regarded the men in the pilothouse. He snapped a crisp salute. “Morituri te salutamus,” he said, then turned, disappeared into the gloom of the ironclad’s lower deck.

They had halved the distance in the time that he had spoken with Taylor, the fast-flowing Mississippi River sweeping them down on the enemy. The fight had mounted in its intensity, the smoke and noise and gunfire building on itself. The first of the Yankee ships was just now coming between the forts, blasting away with both broadsides, pushing on upriver.

And the forts were giving it back. Five days of shelling seemed to have made no difference. The big guns were blazing away so that the walls of the forts might have been on fire, so solid was the sheet of muzzle flash.

The smoke rolled over the river, more and more smoke, hanging like an acrid fog, glowing orange. And through that smoke the ships moved, the big, slow-moving Yankee screw steamers, the little ships of the Confederate defenders. Into that hailstorm of iron, Samuel Bowater pushed the Yazoo River.

He turned to the midshipman, Mr. Worley, and said, “Go below. Tell the gun captains to fire at any target on which their guns will bear. They are to fire at will.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” the mid said, a bit too loud and high-pitched, and he hurried off.

A gunboat was leading the Yankee line, a schooner-rigged screw-driven craft, 150 feet or so in length. “There! Steer for her!” Bowater said, pointing through the slot, and as he did a tugboat appeared out of the gloom, crossing their bow, starboard to port. In the flashing gunfire Bowater could make out the Confederate flag on her stern. He got out no more than the first syllable of a helm command before they struck.

The men in the pilothouse staggered as the two vessels hit, and Quillin shouted, “Damned idiot!”

Bowater looked out the slot. The tug was hung up on their bow and men were rushing along her deck, shouting, waving arms. The gunfire was so continuous now that the whole scene was lit in orange, the tug silhouetted against the flames of Fort Jackson’s barrage.

Bowater grabbed the telegraphs, gave a ring, shoved the handles to full ahead. No time for this horseshit… The engines responded immediately, the Yazoo River surged ahead, pushing itself into the tug. With a snapping and crunching sound, audible over the gunfire, the tug peeled off the Yazoo River’s bow, bumped against her side, disappeared astern, and the ironclad was once again racing toward the fight.

The Yankee gunboat was surrounded, Confederate ships pounding her from all sides, more maneuvering to board. No room for another. “Pilot, do you see that big ship, the one coming up next?” Bowater was shouting now, he could not be heard otherwise over the gunfire.

“Aye!”

“We’ll make for her!”

The broadside below opened up, the guns of the ironclad Yazoo River firing for the first time in anger. The casement shuddered, the smoke swirled up from the gundeck, sucked out of the slits in the pilothouse. With it, the squeal of carriage wheels on the deck, the rumble of the guns being run out, and another gun, and another. The flames from the muzzles lashed out from the side of his ship, the muzzles themselves hidden from his view over the edge of the casement.

The embattled Yankee gunboat passed down the Yazoo River ’s port side and the next ship in line loomed up, and Bowater sucked in his breath. It is the Pensacola! Dear God, it is my Pensacola!

Four years he had served as second officer aboard that ship. There was not one inch of her that he did not know, that he had not been personally involved with in some way or another. Four years of his life played out on those decks, and though he would not admit to the sentiment, he had come to love her dearly, as much as any man had ever loved a ship, and that was very much indeed. And there she was and she was trying to kill him.

Forward and below, the Yazoo River ’s guns fired away, point-blank range, nine-inch shells and thirty-two-pound round shot, right into the guts of his old ship. Bowater clenched his fists. Pensacola must hit back, and no one knew better than he how hard a punch she could throw.

They were just abreast the Pensacola ’s foremast when the Yankee sloop opened up on them, eleven nine-inch Dahlgrens to a broadside, a forty-two-pound rifle. For an instant there was nothing to be seen through the pilothouse slot but a sheet of flame. A shell glanced off the casement, whirled past with a hysterical scream, but more hit square, made the iron ring out with a deafening clang—like being trapped in a church bell—made the entire vessel shudder and roll.

The Yazoo River fired back, even as the last of the Pensacola’s shells were slamming into her armored sides, but now there was a new sound that cut though the gunfire. Screaming. The wounded.

Bowater looked around for Quillin, but the luff had gone below to supervise the guns. “Mr. Risley, you have the con! Back and fill to keep alongside Pensacola …the big Yankee there! I’m going below for a moment!”

“Aye, sir!” Risley said. Bowater took the steps at a run, plunged down into the gloom of the gundeck. It was a dark place, even on a sunny day, but in the night, with the smoke of battle, it was like a place from another world. The row of lanterns amidships swayed with the slight rocking of the ironclad in the river and cast their pools of pale light over the scene. Men swarmed around the guns, toiling at their charges-they put Bowater in mind of Roman slaves condemned to the mines.

It was hot in the casement, certainly above one hundred degrees. Samuel felt the sweat stand out on his forehead and back, felt the running perspiration trace cool lines on his skin and sting his eyes. He blinked it away, wiped a shirtsleeve over his face.

The place was filled with smoke and noise, men shouting, guns running out, the wounded screaming. Minie balls pinged like hail against the armored sides, thudded in the deck when they managed to find an open gunport, twanged off the muzzles of the guns. Quillin appeared out of the gloom. “Sir, we have five down, three of them are dead.”

“Did shot pierce our armor?”

One of the Yazoo River ’s guns went off, then another, then the Pensacola ’s broadside hit again. The casement shuddered and rang, the ironclad staggered under one hammer blow after another. The air was filled with the scream of metal, the sound of shrapnel slamming into the wooden sides.

Bowater could do nothing but stand, arms out, trying not to fall as the deck shuddered under him. There was Harper Rawson in front of him, pulling a swab from the muzzle of his gun, stepping back to give the loader room. He saw Bowater, gave him a half-smile, and then another shell hit the casement outside and Rawson’s chest seemed to explode as if a grenade had gone off inside him. He lunged at Bowater, a surprised expression frozen on his face, as something hit Bowater’s shoulder and sent him spinning to the deck.

“Sir! Sir!” Quillin was kneeling beside him.

“What the hell…?”

“It’s the bolts, sir! The bolts holding the iron plate! The impact of the enemy’s shells sends the nuts flying!”

Dear God… The nut would have killed him if Rawson’s body had not slowed it down. He struggled to sit up, with Quillin’s help, put his hand down in a pool of Rawson’s warm, slick blood. He struggled to his feet. The men were working like madmen in the gloom, apparently oblivious to the threat from their own vessel. They had their fighting blood up—Bowater recognized it—they would not be frightened by the proximity of death.

“Get some hands to clean this up! Try to keep the blood off the decks! Get the wounded out of the way!”

“Aye, sir!” The hammer blows fell against the Yazoo River ’s side; the ship staggered under the impact. Iron screamed across the casement, slammed into the wooden framework, but Bowater’s fighting blood was up too, and he took no notice as he climbed back up to the pilothouse.

Pensacola was nearly past them now, pushing upriver, working her way across the stream as if she had lost her bearings. “She’s too fast, sir, I couldn’t keep on her!” Risley shouted, and Bowater nodded. His shoulder hurt like hell but he did not think it was broken. He stared out the slot at the night and the smoke and fires.

Behind Pensacola came another of the big ships. A side-wheeler. Mississippi, Bowater had no doubt. Not too many like her in the navy anymore, her big paddle wheels so exposed and vulnerable. She was twenty years old, Commodore Perry’s flagship when he opened Japan; now she was an anachronism in the age of the screw propeller and the ironclad.

“Here is Mississippi! ” Bowater shouted, pointing to the bull of a ship charging upstream. “Right for her! We’ll ram her if we can!”

“Aye, sir!” shouted Risley, with the first hint of hesitation. But ramming was their only hope. Their pathetic battery could do little against the frigate’s thick sides.

Bowater looked at the telegraph. Risley had ordered slow astern to keep the Yazoo River where she was. He grabbed the handles, rang the engine room, shoved the indicator to full ahead. Ramming, like the ancient galleys, but with two condensing horizontal side-lever engines to take the place of the poor bastards chained to the benches, working the oars.

Bowater felt the speed build, felt the deck tremble, the Mississippi looming ahead. Her paddle wheels dug into the river and her broadside lashed out at the night, but her shot went high. Bowater fixed his eyes on the place abaft her paddle wheels where he would hit.

“Captain!” Risley shouted. “Look at that sumbitch!”

Bowater looked though the slot on the port side. A low hump in the water, the wake washing over her bow, the flash of gunfire glinting off her round, wet sides. The ironclad Manassas was steaming for the Mississippi, her throttles wide, smoke rolling from her stack.

“Come right! Come right!” Bowater shouted to the helmsman. They were on a collision course, Yazoo River and Manassas, would hit one another before either hit the Yankee.

The Yazoo River sheered off, her bow turning from her intended target, her chance to ram the side-wheeler gone. Bowater watched with some irritation as Manassas raced forward. The Mississippi was firing wildly, blasting away, like a man frantically slapping at bees, but her guns could not be depressed enough to hit either ironclad.

Hit them, hit them, hit them… Bowater thought as he watched the whale-shaped former tug charging the big side-wheeler. He could see it all, in shades of orange and black, the man-of-war pushing hard upstream, the half-submerged ram racing for her side.

And then the Manassas struck. The Mississippi rolled hard to starboard with the impact, her paddle wheel thrashing as it lifted out of the water. The current swept Manassas past; Bowater could see the gaping hole the ironclad had ripped in the big ship’s side. The Mississippi rolled back on an even keel, a great bear baited by dogs, and as she did she fired her broadside, the flash of her eight-inch guns dancing off Manassas’s wet sides.

Bowater felt the deck jerk underfoot as a shell entered one of the Yazoo River ’s gunports and exploded. The dark gundeck below the pilothouse was filled with brilliant light for just a fraction of a second, the already noisy place filled with the blast of exploding powder, the shriek of flying metal.

Jonathan Paine watched Theodore Wilson as Theodore Wilson watched the battle through the wheelhouse window. The Abigail Wilson was making turns for slow astern, holding her place in the river, half a mile upstream from Fort St. Philip.

Wilson said he wanted to think about his strategy. Wilson was afraid, Jonathan Paine knew it.

Wilson did not know that he had less than sixty seconds to either steam ahead or die. Less than sixty seconds to grab on to the bell rope for the engine room and ring up full speed ahead before Jonathan would pull his pistol—a.44 Adams and Deane he had retrieved from Paine Plantation—and shoot him in the head.

Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five…

Wilson had been all bluff talk steaming downriver, but his bravado had begun to waver when the sounds of the gunfire mounted, the flash of the ordnance became visible over the low-lying marsh. Now he toyed with the bell rope, twisted it in his fingers, stared downstream.

Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty…

It was a mesmerizing sight, the big ships moving through the clouds of smoke, half hidden, lit up orange with the flash of guns, the smaller Confederate vessels thrashing around in a disorganized attack. Jonathan understood the effect that such a scene could have. He recalled looking down the slope of Henry House Hill, watching the chaos of battle, wondering how he could ever plunge into it himself.

But he had done so, and the fear of it was gone, and though he understood Wilson’s trepidation, he had little time for it. He did not doubt that his father was there, somewhere in that maelstrom. Nothing would prevent Jonathan’s finding him. There was no time to waste. Less than thirty seconds, in fact.

Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three…

“The thing of it is, I’m not quite sure what we should do…” Wilson broke the uncomfortable silence. “I had hoped to get here in time to meet with the commanding officer, get orders from him. Now…?”

“Time for orders is gone, I reckon,” Jonathan said. He did not much care what Wilson decided to do. He figured he would have to shoot him at some point, and hold the pilot and helmsman at gunpoint, in order to use the Abigail Wilson to locate Robley Paine. “Looks to me like it’s every man for himself, those boats getting in where they can hit the hardest.”

Wilson nodded, considered the strategic situation.

Fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five…

“All right, damn it!” Wilson said with finality. “Let’s go!” He rang the bell, three bells, full ahead. He grinned with the relief of having made a decision. Jonathan took his hand from the butt of the.44.

With turns ahead and the swift-moving current, the Abigail Wilson surged forward, steaming from the anonymity of the dark river into the fire and the light. A quarter mile from that stretch of river where Forts St. Philip and Jackson covered the water with their withering crossfire, where the big Yankee ships were struggling through the smoke, blind, firing away, where the Confederates swarmed like feral dogs, biting, dodging, biting again.

Wilson stepped out of the wheelhouse and Jonathan followed behind. Down below on the foredeck, the men were gathered around the old six-pounder smoothbore.

My gun… Jonathan thought with some amusement. Wilson had been careful to tell him that, to ask permission to put it aboard the tug. As if Jonathan Paine could care about such a thing, as if he could ever wish to own, or even see, a cannon.

“Here we go, boys!” Wilson shouted to the gun crew, his voice a little too loud, a little too exuberant.

Bobby was standing back some from the bow, leaning on the rail, keeping out of the way, ready to jump in and help, the way he always was. The flash of gunfire lit his dark skin. Like the others, his face was turned to Wilson, but his eyes shifted, met Jonathan’s. Jonathan gave him a little wave and Bobby gave a half-smile and waved back.

The men at the six-pounder cheered, waved their hats. Jonathan knew where they were at, in their heads, knew the blood lust and the apparent insanity that made men willing, even desire, to charge into such a fight. He did not feel it himself. Nor did he feel fear, or anger, or hatred of the Yankees, or much of anything at all, beyond a profound need to look into his father’s living eyes, at least one more time.

Then they were there, like steaming into a hurricane, right in the middle of the gunfire. The shells screamed over their low deck and wheelhouse, the smoke embraced them so that everything beyond the Abigail Wilson’s bow became dull and indistinct. The fires and the muzzle flashes lit the smoke from within. The guns were deafening.

Dead ahead of them loomed one of the big Yankee ships, a ghost ship in the smoke, and the Wilson’s gun crew fired at its dull outline. The six-pounder sounded puny against the backdrop of serious artillery. There was no way to know if they had hit the Yankee, or if they did, whether their shot had done any damage.

A tug emerged from the smoke astern, passed close, the Confederate flag snapping at the ensign staff, a raft of some sort made off to the bow. One hundred feet beyond the Wilson and the raft burst into flames, lighting up the tug and the big Yankee for which she was steaming.

Fire raft! Jonathan thought. He had heard of such things. The idea went back to Sir Francis Drake, and further. He watched, fascinated. The tug looked for all the world as if she was on fire, with the mounting flames of the raft sweeping back toward her, and Jonathan figured if she was not, she soon would be.

The Yankee was turning, trying to avoid the threat, but the big ship could not outmaneuver the smaller tug. The flames on the raft cut through the smoke, illuminated the tug and her target.

The fire raft slammed into the Yankee, the impact making the flames leap high, catching the Yankee ship’s rigging, sweeping along her painted sides. She was engulfed. Jonathan could not see how she could avoid burning to the waterline.

The tug backed off, leaving the raft against the Union ship’s side, turned hard, making her escape. But the flames had not distracted the Yankee gunners. From the ship’s side, ten guns opened up, point-blank range, ripping the tug to pieces. The wheelhouse and deckhouse were shattered, the boat slewed around as the helmsman was killed, the steering gear wrecked. She turned a half circle and began to settle fast, water pouring in through some unseen rent aft. She listed to starboard, her bow lifted from the river.

“Helmsman!” Wilson shouted. “Make for the tug there!” He was pointing at the sinking vessel. “We’ll see if any of those poor bastards are still alive!”

The Abigail Wilson turned north, turned toward the blazing Yankee ship and the thundering fort beyond. The Confederate gunners in the forts had seen the Yankee man-of-war’s distress, were concentrating their fire on her, while she was hitting back as hard as she could. Jonathan could see men swarming around the flames, heard the hiss of steam as hoses played on the fire. On her stern he could read the name Hartford.

They came up with the sinking tug. Wilson stepped over to the rail, oblivious of the shells whistling past, the occasional minie ball hitting the deck.

“No one alive there,” Wilson said and turned his back on the sinking tug. Jonathan looked for himself. The vessel was a wreck, torn apart, sinking fast. There was no sign of life aboard, no one yelling for help. With one broadside the Yankee ship had reduced it to a complete wreck, as if a furious storm had been pounding the hull against a reef for two days.

“That son of a bitch is done for! Let’s get downriver!” Wilson shouted. It was not clear to whom he was speaking or to whom he was referring, but the helmsman put the helm over to port and the tug turned, plunging into the fight, the men at the bow firing at anything too big to be a Confederate vessel.

Jonathan Paine could not have imagined a scene such as the one around him. The Battle of Manassas seemed a well-organized, leisurely affair compared to this. It was madness, the dark night lit up only by cannon fire and burning ships, the war elephants of the Yankee fleet pushing upriver. Confederate vessels everywhere, ripping around the water, looking for their chance, or listing from shots below the waterline, or in some cases fleeing upstream. There were Rebel boats surrounded on all sides, blasting away at every point on the compass, Union ships hounded by gunfire on every quarter.

Into that madness the Abigail Wilson steamed, engine full ahead, her bow gun barking out as fast as the men could load and fire. Bobby was hauling on one of the train tackles now; three men lay dead or wounded against the bulwark. Minie balls were splintering the wood, a shell took off part of the boat deck as it screamed past.

Jonathan looked up. A big side-wheeler was passing them, firing into the night as it went. Most of the shot was high—perhaps the gunners were concentrating on the forts, perhaps it was the accidental shell that had hit the Abigail Wilson. It would take only one well-placed accident to end them.

“There!” Wilson shouted, slapping Jonathan’s arm, pointing.

Jonathan followed his arm. There was a boxy-looking ironclad, two hundred yards downstream, just visible through the smoke. She looked to be in some difficulty, did not look as if she was fully under control.

“What?”

“That’s her! That’s the Yazoo River! Your father’s ship!”

Jonathan sucked in his breath. After all this long journey, the proximity to his father seemed unreal, and suddenly he was afraid. He looked again at the ironclad. Smoke was coming from her stack, and from the many holes in her stack, and from her gunports it seemed. Jonathan could see the smoke in the bright light that seemed to pour out of her, and stupidly he wondered why they had her lit so bright below, how many lanterns it would take to do that.

The Abigail Wilson closed with her, and the shock of coming up with his father’s boat passed and with it the dull stupidity that had numbed Jonathan’s mind. Of course they were not lighting up the interior of the boat with lanterns. The ironclad’s gundeck was on fire.

46

A few moments after the attack commenced, and the enemy succeeded in passing with foreseen ships…the battle of New Orleans, as against ships of war, was over.

— Report of Major General Lovell, C.S. Army,

Commanding Defenses of New Orleans

Robley Paine opened his eyes to brilliant light and heat, and he thought for one confused moment that he had fallen asleep in the summer sun, on the bank of the Yazoo River, at Paine Plantation.

That thought passed quick, washed away by a wave of pain in his leg, an ache that seemed to encompass his entire left side. He pushed himself off the hard surface on which he was lying, moved by instinct, compelled to get out of the way.

It came into focus—the gun deck of the Yazoo River. His ship. It was on fire.

He grabbed on to the wheel of one of the broadside guns, pulled himself to his feet as if climbing a steep cliff. He turned, leaned against the gun. He could no longer ignore the pain in his left side. He made himself look.

He was burned, all along his side, his frock coat and shirt, his trousers charred and in some places burned away, revealing ugly, cooked flesh, black and red and raw, through the holes. He sucked in his breath as the pain came again, worse, somehow, now that he had witnessed the damage.

He had been serving as gun captain, he recalled, of the second gun aft on the port side, in the place of a man who had been decapitated by a flying bit of metal. He remembered reaching down for a cartridge, and nothing else.

Robley turned his attention from his wounds to his ship. The whole forward bulkhead, the two guns pointing forward, and the forwardmost starboard broadside gun were all engulfed in flames. The fire seemed to fill the gundeck, blazing and spreading, lighting up that dark place with a brilliance it had never seen. The white paint was curling, bubbling, dripping from the sides. He could see the dark shapes of bodies, motionless, resting in their crematorium. The casement was filling with smoke and the smell of burning paint and the sweet sickish smell of cooking flesh.

Robley looked around for an officer, a petty officer, someone to take charge. He found Quillin on the starboard side—his head and his shoulders, one arm, and a part of his torso. Where the rest of him was he did not know.

Ruffin Tanner was bleeding from his forehead but keeping his gun crews at their work, seemingly oblivious to the fire. Babcock, the boatswain, came running aft, carrying a bucket, leading a line of men carrying buckets, and they flung the water and sand at the fire, a useless gesture, as far as Robley Paine could see.

Midshipman Worley came racing down the deck, stopped, began to back away.

“Mr. Worley! Mr. Worley!” Robley Paine pushed himself off the gun, limped across the deck, grabbed the young man’s arm. Worley flinched, looked up at Paine, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open.

“Worley, is the captain alive?” Paine shouted. The midshipman shook his head, but from the look of unreasoning panic in his eyes, Paine could not tell if the gesture meant the captain was dead or that Worley thought it incomprehensible that someone should ask such a thing at such a time.

“Is the captain alive, damn you?” Paine shouted again, shook the midshipman, who offered no resistance.

“We’re played out…we must strike…” Worley managed at last.

“Strike? We’ll not strike.”

Worley seemed to come to his senses, or whatever senses were available to his terrified mind. He jerked his arm from Paine’s grip. “We must strike!” he shouted.

Paine grabbed his arm again, leaned close. “Listen to me, Mr. Worley,” he said, and spoke as gently as he could and still be heard. “We will fight, and we will die if we must, but we will not strike!”

Worley shook his head again, and Paine could see the boy thought him mad. He twisted free again, turned, and raced aft. Paine could see him in the light that the fire was throwing clear down the length of the deck. He could see him race past the pilothouse deck, even as Captain Bowater was coming down, could see him continue aft, and he had no doubt as to where the boy was headed.

“Damn!” he shouted, limped after him, each step a searing agony. Captain Bowater raced past him, heading forward, did not even notice him, but Paine did not care. Bowater had his job, he had another. He hobbled past the gun crews that worked their big guns as if at drill, oblivious to the flames, the shells pounding against the armor, the nuts whizzing across the casement, the dead and wounded mounting on the deck.

He came to the after end of the casement, where the flames at the forward end were making weird shadows on the overhead and the sides and the deck. The door that led to the fantail gaped open, and Robley Paine stepped through.

If he could have stepped from one planet to another, Paine doubted the change could have been more drastic than stepping through that casement door. The temperature was fifty degrees cooler in the night air. Instead of the tight, crowded deck, the muffled sounds of battle, the brilliant illumination of the burning casement, here it was dark, black, save for the blooms of orange that shone through the heavy smoke.

Here the noise of battle was not muffled by two feet of oak and iron. Here the sound of the gunfire was thunderous and sharp, the kind of sound that was once the exclusive purview of angry gods. This was not the tight, insular world of belowdecks. Here big ships loomed out of the smoke and the night, great broadsides blazing away. Here a dozen Confederate vessels flung themselves at the big ship, firing away, enduring the disproportionate battering.

Clear aft, his outline black against the distant gunfire of the forts and the Union fleet, Worley struggled with the flag halyard. Had he been less panicked, Paine knew, he would have had the flag down and overboard already, and then how could the Yazoo River honorably continue to fight, when to all appearances she had surrendered? This could not happen. Paine hobbled on, drew the Starr from his holster.

Worley managed to get the halyard off the cleat, began to pull the flag down, when Paine came up with him, raised the pistol to shoulder height. “Mr. Worley! Mr. Worley!” The midshipman turned, startled, frightened. “Mr. Worley, raise that flag again, or by God I will shoot you like a dog!”

They stood for a moment, facing one another, and then Worley shook his head and continued to haul the flag down. And Paine would have shot him, would have put a bullet through his head and felt not the least twinge, but in that instant when Worley turned and looked at him, with the terror in his eyes, Paine saw in that instant his youngest, Jonathan, four years old, terrified of the thunder in a summer storm, curled on his lap in the study, looking up at him, wide-eyed, yet trusting in the safety of his father’s embrace.

Paine took his finger from the trigger, flipped the gun around, took a step toward Worley, and hit him with the butt of the gun, a solid blow, not a lethal blow. Worley went down fast. Paine holstered his gun, hauled the flag up the ensign staff again.

Ping, ping, ping, a sound like hail hitting the casement. Paine turned. He had been looking upriver and north at the Union ships steaming line ahead past them, but this new sound was from the south, and downriver. Paine crossed to the starboard side. Another column of ships was coming up, a line of ships, stately and impregnable. That was what Tanner’s gunners were shooting at.

Ping, ping —they were minie balls, striking the iron plate. Then made little sparks like a train’s wheels on the tracks as they ricocheted and Robley knew it was time to get back in the casement. He looked at the midshipman at his feet, wondered if the boy was safer inboard or out.

Thud, thud, thud, the bullets began to hit the deck, kicking up little furrows in the wood, and the question was answered. Paine bent over, grabbed Worley under the shoulders, screamed with agony as he tried to lift and drag the motionless young man.

Come on, come on, come on… Paine ran the words over and over in his head as he pulled, inch by inch. A bullet clipped Worley’s foot and Worley rolled his head, moaned, but did not come to.

Paine lifted and pulled. He felt a bullet pluck at his frock coat, felt another graze his arm. He wondered if this was how it had been for his boys, at the end, the bullets teasing them, like a cat toying with a mouse.

And then a bullet hit, hit him right in the arm, right above the left elbow, shattering bone. He dropped Worley, howled in pain and in outrage. Another bullet seared across his belly, he could feel the line it tore in his flesh. He jerked the Starr out of his holster, leveled it at the ship ranging up alongside, two hundred feet away.

“You bastards!” he shouted, fired the Starr into the night. The minie balls pinged and thudded around him, tore at his clothing. The hammer of the Starr came down on an empty chamber.

What now?

A minie ball hit him in the shoulder, sent him reeling back.

Shove Worley against the bulwark and get inside!

He took a step forward, like walking into a hailstorm. Another bullet hit him in the leg. He crumpled to one knee. A bullet tore into his stomach and he fell over, rolled on his back, looked up at the dull blanket of smoke overhead.

This is it… He had seen men enough with belly wounds in the Mexican War, knew it was over for him. If the Starr had had one round left he would have blown his brains out, but it did not, and Robley knew that God would not allow him so quick an end, not after all the suffering he had inflicted on others over the past year.

That was all right. He would take it, endure it manfully. It was a gift, really, a chance to repent what he had done, to beg the Lord’s forgiveness, and in the end he would see his Katherine, his boys…

The world seemed to explode around him, and at first he thought it was his wounds, but then he knew it was not. The Yankee ship was firing on them, firing its great guns, paying the Yazoo River back at last for whatever hurt Tanner had managed to inflict.

There was something else as well, some other sound, some other excitement. He turned his head. Another boat was coming alongside. Not a big ship, just a boat, like a tug or some such. Paine watched with a vague interest as it ranged up beside them, hit the Yazoo River with a thud that made the ironclad tremble. Someone came up over the side with a rope in his hand, and then another man and another. Yankees attacking? No, the Yankees did not seem willing to bother. Friends, then.

He closed his eyes against a wave of pain, listened to the sounds of men rushing around. He could barely hear, for the pounding of the blood in his head. He felt hands on him, on his face. He opened his eyes. Someone was kneeling over him, a dark shape, familiar somehow.

The big Yankee ship fired again, the light of the muzzle flash illuminating the face of the man looking down at him. Robley gasped, did not know what to think. Twenty years older, hurt, come from the grave, it was his son, Jonathan Paine. His son.

In the engine room: smoke, noise, heat, steam, an edge-of-disaster feel. Full ahead with both engines, fires carefully tended, maximum achievable steam pressure in both boilers. There was no chance the safety valves would blow. Hieronymus Taylor had tied them off, considered them a nuisance in such circumstances.

The boiler-room temperature was 132 degrees. One of the coal heavers had already passed out, had been dragged into the engine room, splashed with water, allowed to lie there. No time to manhandle him up onto the gundeck.

The glass water gauge on the starboard boiler shattered, spewing boiler water, water right on the edge of steam, all over another of the coal passers. He howled, plunged his arm in a bucket full of tepid water, but then manfully picked up his shovel again.

Burgess raced to the gauge, pulled on the chain that shut off the valves above and below it, whipped a screwdriver from his pocket. He danced around the piles of coal on the deck plates, twirling screws, as the coal passers fed the beast, the firemen pulled ashes from below the grate.

Chief Taylor stood by the reversing levers and throttles, looked around. Chaos, controlled insanity. The whole thing pushed as hard and as far as it could be pushed. Under the hiss of steam, the roar of the fires, the clank of pistons and rods and shafts, sounded the leitmotif of war, the hollow, jarring concussion of shells striking the casement above, guns going off, the uncertainty of what was happening beyond those superheated confines, the possibility of a shell coming through the side and through the boilers, scalding them all, killing them instantly, if they were lucky.

Taylor did not like the looks of the starboard feed-water pump, the “doctor.” He did not like the way the mounting bolts were working in the starboard engine, did not like the color of the rapeseed oil he lifted off the crankshaft. He was not pleased with the sound emanating from the shaft bearings. Four stay bolts were leaking on the starboard boiler, six to port. There was a lot he did not like, a hundred things within his fiefdom that he feared might let go at any moment. But so far the gauge glass was the worst disaster they had endured.

He glanced up at the telegraph. It was pegged full ahead, had been for the past hour. But full ahead now was not what it had been an hour before. The stack was shot full of holes and not drawing well, the grates were clogging with clinker from the poor-quality coal—no time to clean them now. The fires were not as hot as they could be, steam pressure falling.

Taylor pulled a rag, wiped his forehead and eyes. How much longer until a major catastrophe? How long could they push this hard?

The gundeck hatch opened, and Taylor looked up. “Holy mother…” He could see flames leaping around the casement, could see the brilliant light of a full-on fire raging in the tween decks. How long has that been burning? What the hell else is going on up there?

Dick Merrow came scampering down the ladder. His face was blackened, holes charred in his clothing. “Chief, Chief, captain says we can’t charge the fire hoses! Whole casement’s going up!”

Taylor clamped on his cigar, and while Merrow danced around as if the floor plates were red-hot, waiting for an answer, Taylor traced in his mind the entire firefighting system, from auxiliary steam to the water pump to the intake, to the piping to the casement, to the hoses. “All right,” he said at last, “tell the old man he’ll have water as soon as humanly possible.”

Merrow nodded, got some relief from the words, raced up the ladder.

Bang, bang, shells hit the casement above, made Taylor stagger. Damn… Whatever ship was hitting them now, it was much closer, or throwing heavier metal. The sound of the impact was deep and dull, a visceral sound. The Yazoo River staggered as if it had been hit with a fist, pushed sideways through the water. Taylor wondered if a shot toward the waterline would blow its way into the engine room, into the boiler room. Probably.

Fire pump… He pulled himself back to the immediate threat. Problem had to be with the fire pump, or the steam line going there. He cursed under his breath. The pump was in the most awkward of positions, aft, behind the port engine, right up against the after bulkhead. He thought of sending Burgess to crawl into that filthy, dark place and fix it, but he could not do it. Too lousy a job to delegate.

“Burgess!” Taylor shouted. Burgess looked up, held up a hand to signal he heard. “I’m going to see to the fire pump!” Taylor pointed aft. “Take over here!” Burgess nodded.

Taylor grabbed up some tools and a lantern. He worked his way around the engine, ducking under the piping, skirting the condenser. Shells slammed into the boat; Taylor staggered, put his hand against the cool, damp metal of the condenser, steadied himself. He inched on, following the steam line that led to the pump. Found the steam gauge-pressure enough to drive the thing. Reckoned the pounding of the shells had knocked something on the pump galley west.

He pushed aft, moving fast. The shells came faster, slamming into the ship, the dull, ugly sound frightening in the sweltering shadows of the engine room. He dropped to his knees, crawled along under the long shafts driving the paddle wheels, the creaking pillow blocks.

Got to damn well move… he thought, picturing the fire above, and then he was tossed aside as if he had taken a swift kick in the ribs, slammed into one of the pillow blocks.

The engine room filled with a flash of light; Taylor had a second’s image of lightning and deep shadows on the engine and the bulkheads and sides of the engine room. Filling the room: the sound of gushing water, flying metal, the deep sound of an explosion, but muffled, like a bomb going off in a pile of sand. The furious hiss of steam, then dark again, and a hot, fine mist enveloped him, fell on his hands and face, just on the edge of painful.

A shell had hit a boiler. The starboard engine stopped, the noise in the engine room cut in half. Taylor closed his eyes, prayed that everyone had been killed in that instant. And as he prayed, the first horrible, insane shriek of agony rose up from the shadowy place forward of the engine, followed by another, and a third. Taylor clenched his teeth. The sound did not seem human, could not come from a human throat, save for a person in unimaginable agony, the flesh seared from his body.

“Die, damn it, will you die!” he cried out. There were three men shrieking—there was no way to tell which three—the screams in no way resembled human voices, or indeed anything earthly at all.

Taylor hesitated. Go back? Fix the fire pump? He crawled on, dragging his tools and his lantern. He found the fire pump, his hands moving on their own, reaching for tools, twisting, banging, wrenching.

The pump leaped to life—it took its steam from the port boiler—and even as Taylor heard the water sucking up through, pushed up the pipe to the hose above, he could not have told anyone what he had done to fix it. The screams of the dying men filled the engine room, pushed every other thing out of Taylor’s head. He was sobbing loud, bawling like a baby, completely consumed by the sound of his men screaming their lives away. He was too aware of the twitching agony he felt in his head to know or care about the pump.

He left the tools, grabbed the lantern, crawled back the way he had come, banging his head, lacerating his hands and arms, oblivious.

Die, please, God, why don’t y’all die? He wanted them to stop, he wanted their pain to stop. He crawled on. He did not want to see them.

He skirted around the condenser, stepped into the open space between the engine room and boiler room, blinked away the tears, held the lantern up. The exploding boiler had blasted the other lanterns away—his was the only light below. Its feeble flame glinted on the wet deck, the jagged edges of the shattered boiler, the twisted fire tubes and flues, the insane web of mangled piping.

Screaming, screaming, it was like a physical thing. Taylor could see one of them, off to the side, writhing on the deck, and from the place where the dying man had fallen, right by the reversing levers, he knew it had to be Burgess.

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!!” Taylor sobbed, more frightened, more sick, more desperate than he thought a sane mind could endure. He ran over to his workbench, reached up to the shelf above, laid his hand on his sawed-off shotgun. It was wet with boiler water, the metal warm to the touch. He grabbed up a box of cartridges, a box of percussion caps, shoved them in his pocket.

The hatch overhead opened, a voice shouted, “What’s happened here?”—the question hardly cutting through the screams of the scalded men. Taylor tried to put a percussion cap on the nipple of his shotgun. His hands shook and he dropped it, heard it ping on the deck plate, grabbed another. In six tries he managed to get two caps on, one for each barrel, and all the time the screaming, the horrible screaming, more awful than any pain Taylor had ever endured.

He picked up the lantern, crossed the engine room. The glow from the port boiler’s firebox threw an orange light on the deck plates and the pile of coal. Taylor moved quick, stopped. Took a step forward. Made himself look down at the man in the pool of light on the deck, who had to be Burgess.

Every bit of exposed flesh had been scalded from Burgess’s body, but he had been too far from the boiler to die instantly. Instead, the lantern revealed wet, bloody, pulped flesh, reds and pinks, the hideous form of a man with nothing recognizable as human save for his shape and the frantic, thrashing movements.

Taylor blinked hard, trying to see, and his sobs were nearly as loud now as the shrieking man at his feet. He lifted the shotgun, cocked the hammer.

“Please forgive me, oh, Lord God, please forgive me!” he wailed and pulled the trigger. The gun jolted his shoulder, filled the place with the sharp crack of the gunshot, a good, honest sound. Burgess jerked once, lay still. The screaming was cut by one third.

Taylor grabbed up the lantern, turned toward the boiler. Two bodies, lying still, killed mercifully in the blast. Taylor could not tell who they had been.

He moved around the port boiler, still intact. Two men were tossed up there, one of them, or what was left of him, a coal heaver named Collins they had picked up in Yazoo City. Flayed alive, and still alive; Taylor could see white teeth through the horror that was his face, the dark hole of his mouth as he screamed. Taylor lifted the gun, aimed, closed his eyes, squeezing the tears out, fired the gun.

The blast of the shotgun, then quiet. He swung the lantern around, around to where the third screaming voice had been. One of the men sent by Mallory, Travis something. His pants were shredded, the skin nearly gone, nothing of his leg but half-boiled muscle and skin draping off. He looked at Taylor, his eyes wild, a trapped animal look.

“Don’t kill me, Chief! Please, God, don’t kill me!”

Taylor looked at the boy. He lowered his gun. “I won’t kill you, boy. Gonna hurt like a son of a bitch, getting you outta here, but I won’t kill you.”

“Chief Taylor! Captain wants to know what’s goin on!” The voice from the hatch. Taylor turned, saw Ruffin Tanner drop from the ladder to the deck plates, saw his eyes move around the shattered engine room.

“Lost the starboard boiler, whole black gang’s dead, but me and him.” Taylor jerked a thumb at Travis. “We need some hands to get that poor bastard out of here.”

Tanner nodded. “Fire hose is working, they’re getting the fire down some. You need more hands down here?”

Taylor looked around. One boiler, one engine. “How much longer you think we gonna keep up this fight?”

“Not long. We ain’t long for it now.”

Taylor nodded. “No. You don’t want to send any of them poor bastards down here.”

Tanner nodded, stuck out his hand. Taylor took it, shook. Tanner disappeared up the ladder.

Taylor looked around. The firebox on the one remaining boiler was gaping open, the fire glowing red. Red meant too cold; it should be white-hot. He grabbed up a shovel, dug it into the pile of coal on the deck plate, heaved it into the boiler.

Coal passer. Twenty-five years ago he had begun his engineering career as a coal passer, the first lesson in years of education, formal and otherwise. Runaway from affluence, lured by a passion for machinery that his parents could not understand. Changed his clothes, changed his accent, been playing the peckerwood so long he did not know how to play any other part.

He dug up another shovelful, tossed it in, spread it around, watched with satisfaction as the fire began to change color. Twenty-five years, coal passer to chief and back to coal passer, and now it would end like this. All right, then. He would die like a man, with a coal shovel in his hand. That would do. He did not want to live anyway, not with the things he had in his head now.

They were really getting pounded this time. One of the big Yankees alongside, Bowater did not know which. Brooklyn, perhaps. It did not matter. She was moving slow upriver, giving back double what the Yazoo River could deal out.

The fire was raging in the forward end of the casement, Babcock leading his pathetic bucket brigade against it, the fire hose lying limp and useless on the deck. The ironclad shuddered with the impact of shells against her sloped sides, shuddered with the recoil of her own guns as Tanner kept his men at it, despite the fire and the carnage around them.

And there was carnage. Like nothing Bowater had ever seen or imagined. He once thought, having fought in Mexico, that he knew what war was. That memory embarrassed him now. He had had no notion. At Elizabeth City he had had a taste. Now he was having the main course, more bitter than he could have imagined.

Black smoke and the stink of burning paint and burning men roiled out of the blaze, the light from the fire revealed it all; the half-bodies, the sprays of blood, the odd limbs. Men lying as if asleep, save for the fact that their heads were gone. Bowater could not count the dead, the bodies were not intact enough for that, nor could he tell how many were being consumed by the flames. His officers were gone. He had seen what was left of Quillin. He had not seen the second officer or Worley for some time.

He looked at the hose. If the water did not start running soon, they would have to abandon ship. He was not sure how they would do that. Run her aground, he supposed.

Another shell struck, not the casement this time, but low, under his feet, somewhere aft. He turned, and as he did he felt the entire ship shudder, shudder in her guts, heard a muffled blast, and a whoosh and gasp, like the last breath of some giant beast. The hatch to the engine room lifted on its hinges, a great rush of gray steam blowing up in a hot wet blast from below.

Boiler… Bowater closed his eyes. A shell had hit a boiler. He could not imagine what horror it had done below. He could not imagine that anyone in the engine room had lived through that.

He heard the note of the engine change, the sound running through the casement drop off as one of the engines faltered and died. He had to get back to the pilothouse, could no longer remain below, directing the firefighting, but all his officers were gone.

“Babcock! Take over here! Do your best—I don’t think we’ll get fire hoses now. Tanner! Drop down to the engine room, see what’s happening, report to me in the pilothouse!”

He had turned to head for the pilothouse when he saw the fire hose jerk and twist, like some animal one had thought dead suddenly springing to life. Water spurted, hissed, then streamed from the end, and Babcock snatched it up, charged the fire like a knight with a lance.

Incredible… Bowater thought. But too late…

He climbed back to the pilothouse. “Starboard engine’s gone, Captain,” Risley said. “Rudder’s hard over, just keeping her going straight.”

“Very well.” Bowater looked out the slot. The ship that had punished them so greatly was pulling ahead, steaming upriver, past them, and in her wake, another ship, of around the same size and class. USS Richmond, Bowater thought, wondered if they had changed her name.

One by one, leisurely, Richmond ’s broadside opened up, with the precision of a salute, the shells screaming by, clanging on the armor. Smoke and steam from the fire down below rolled into the pilothouse, obscuring everything, setting Bowater and Risley and the helmsman to coughing, gagging. But still the Yazoo River fired back, one shot to the enemy’s three.

The smoke drifted away, Bowater had a clear view again. The night was on fire, the wild reflections of red and orange, the flames through the smoke, the noise. Noise such as he had never heard. He felt his head swim, felt an unreality come over him. If only it would stop, even for a minute, give him time to think, to organize. If only the noise would stop.

And then, from Richmond, amidships, another gun fired, bigger than the others, a deep roar, a giant waking up, angry.

Eighty-pound Dahlgren rifle… was all Bowater had a chance to think. Richmond carried one, on slides. Eighty-pound Dahlgren rifle.

The shell hit aft, made the Yazoo River slew around, exploded with a noise that stunned Bowater. He was thrown forward with the impact, slammed against the side of the pilothouse, bounced back, flailing for a handhold but finding nothing. He fell, down, down, saw the stairs coming up, reached out a hand to stop himself, and then he was tumbling to the deck below, and then, at last, it was quiet.

47

April 27, 1862. New Orleans gone—and with it the Confederacy. Are we not cut in two? The Mississippi ruins us if lost.

— Mary Boykin Chesnut

Bowater crawled out of the blackness, was dragged out of the blackness, a voice pulling him up by the weight of its authority. Bowater realized, as he kicked toward the surface, that the voice was Hieronymus Taylor’s.

His eyes fluttered open. Taylor was bending over him, the light of a fire flickering off his stained, soaked shirt, his unshaved face, his plastered hair.

“Come on, Cap’n, wake up now!” Taylor was saying. A command. Bowater kept his eyes open.

He sat up on an elbow. His head was pounding. He looked around. The fire in the casement was not the blaze it had been, but it was not extinguished either. “How long have I…”

“Not above five minutes.” It was Tanner who spoke now. Bowater saw him standing behind Taylor.

Why are they here? Bowater shook his head, to clear it, to indicate he did not understand.

“Last shell took out the starboard paddle wheel. We dead in the water, Cap’n,” Taylor said.

Bowater struggled to his feet and Taylor helped him and together they climbed up the few steps to the pilothouse. The port side of the pilothouse roof was bent up and back, like a tin can wrenched open. Risley was lying on the deck, wide-eyed and dead. The helmsman was gone, Bowater did not know where. They did not need a helmsman anymore.

He looked to starboard, where the roof had once obscured his view. The round hump of the iron-encased wheelbox was ruined. Where it had stood in its elegant arc there was now a gaping hole with shards of iron and wood jutting out at every angle, the wrecked bits of the paddle wheel, buckets and arms and shaft, tucked inside what was left of the box.

They were adrift, sweeping downriver on the current. Yankee gunboats were passing them by, but the Yazoo River was not firing at them, and they were not wasting powder on an obviously dead ship.

Bowater looked aft. The fight was upriver of them now. He could see the smoke, like a fog bank seen from a distance, the glow of fire rafts, gunfire, the blazing defiance of the forts, and the Union fleet steamed past, as if all the preparations the Confederacy had mounted to defend their greatest seaport were no more than an annoyance, a show with lights and smoke.

He watched for a moment, two, looked at the battle the way he would look at a grand canvas depicting some long-ago sea fight, the Battle of the Saints, or Trafalgar or some such. Because that was what the Battle of New Orleans was to him now. History. He was no longer a part of it, any more than he was a part of the fight against Napoleon’s tyranny.

He turned to Taylor. “No engines?”

Taylor shook his head. “Concussion shattered the main steam pipe, port side. No steam, no fire pump.”

Bowater nodded. They could not maneuver, they could not fight the fire in the casement. Half the crew were dead or wounded. It was over. The Yazoo River was a shooting star which had arced across the dark river in a blaze of violence, burned out on her way to earth.

So how do we get off of her? Bowater wondered. No power…

And yet he was hearing a steam engine, and not so very far off. He turned and tried to look down the port side, but his view was obscured by the twisted metal of the pilothouse roof. He put his hands on the top of the casement, hoisted himself up so he could look around the edge of the wreckage. To his surprise he saw a tug, very like the Abigail Wilson, tied alongside, all the way aft. A voice, sounding very like Theodore Wilson, called, “Ahoy, the Yazoo River! Do you need to abandon ship?”

On Bowater’s orders they searched the casement, located the wounded, made certain the dead men were truly dead. The Yazoo River would serve as a funeral pyre for them, they would go down to their graves with the Confederate flag flying proud on the ensign staff.

Back on the fantail, Bowater was the last to step out of the sweltering, smoke-filled, burning casement. The air was cool and sweet in contrast, the sounds sharper. Someone was holding a lantern, the light falling on the miserable remnants of his command.

On the starboard side, Robley Paine lay on the deck, held in a man’s arms. Bowater stepped over, knelt beside him.

“Robley? Robley?” Paine’s head lolled over. Blood was running out of his mouth, a thin, dark line down his chin. He smiled a weak smile.

“Captain Bowater…” he said.

“We’re going to get you off,” Bowater said, but Paine shook his head and the man holding him said, “He’s bleeding bad…” He choked the words out, was on the edge of sobbing, and the emotion surprised Bowater. He had not believed anyone cared so much for mad Robley Paine. And then he realized he did not know this man.

He looked up sharp, into the face of a young man, but not so young. The face of a veteran, young eyes grown quickly old. He saw a patched army shell jacket, a battered kepi. Bowater squinted.

“I’m Jonathan Paine. I’m his son.”

Behind Jonathan Paine, a young black man was squatting, looking down at the old man as well. The situation was so odd, requiring so many questions, Bowater did not bother. He turned back to Paine.

Robley lifted a long, blackened hand, the fingers like the thin branches of a winter tree, and Bowater took it, gentle. “I am the lucky one, Captain…” he said, his voice so low Bowater had to lean down to hear over the distant artillery fire. “I have got everything I wanted, and merciful God has brought one of my boys back. Despite all my sins, he has brought my boy back…” He coughed, but he was too weak to cough with authority. “I am the lucky one. I can rest now. But you, Captain, you must fight on and on…”

Bowater gave his hand a little squeeze. “Godspeed, Robley Paine,” he whispered. He eased the man’s hand to the deck, stood, gave him his last minutes alone with his son.

One by one the men clambered over the tug’s low bulwark and spread out along the deck, helping their shipmates over. They moved fast, every man aboard aware of the fire creeping toward the powder magazine. As far as Bowater could tell there was no more than half of the original crew left, perhaps less. He looked for Babcock but did not see him. The old man would go down with the ship.

When the fantail was cleared of healthy men, they began to pass the wounded over, some able to help themselves a bit, some who seemed near death, who no doubt would be dead soon.

Last of all they passed Robley Paine over to the tug, and when he was over the young black man followed, and then Jonathan. Bowater noticed how very much he looked like his father. He limped as well, as had Robley, and needed a hand getting across to the tug.

And then it was Samuel Bowater, Hieronymus Taylor, Ruffin Tanner.

“Guess I don’t get my headstone,” Taylor said.

“Battle ain’t over yet,” Tanner said.

“War is not over yet,” Bowater said. Together they grabbed on to the tug’s bulwark, hoisted themselves over, as the men crowding the side deck made room for them. Fore and aft the lines binding them to the Yazoo River were let go. The Abigail Wilson turned hard, peeling away from the ironclad, her propeller digging in.

Bowater climbed up into the wheelhouse. Theodore Wilson was there, grim-faced. He seemed to have none of the boy-playing-at-soldiers quality Bowater had associated with him.

“Captain Bowater,” Wilson said.

“Captain Wilson,” Bowater said without irony.

“Don’t rightly know where to go. Can’t go upriver, unless we care to be blown out of the water.”

“Battle’s over. No sense in killing these men. You’ve done what you could.” They were silent for a moment as the tug continued her aimless course downriver. “Have to imagine there’s still a blockade at the Head of the Passes. I don’t imagine we’ll make it to sea,” Bowater continued.

Theodore Wilson nodded, and then the wheelhouse was lit up with the brilliant orange light of the Yazoo River exploding, followed by the deep rolling boom of the blast, as thunder follows lightning, and the concussion of the shock wave, the sudden heat that engulfed them.

Wilson, Bowater, the pilot, all the men in the wheelhouse spun around, looked upriver, beyond the tug’s starboard quarter. A great column of flame was rising up from the ironclad, like Moses’s pillar of fire shining forth in the night. The sound kept coming and coming. The great mountain of flame seemed like a solid thing as it hung there in the air.

The Abigail Wilson began to pitch and roll, and debris began to rain down around her, splashing in the water, on occasion hitting the deck or the boat deck, flaming bits that were stamped out by the crowds of men on board.

The column of flame collapsed, fell back down onto the shattered remains of the Yazoo River and burned there, a blazing patch of fire on the otherwise dark river. The funeral pyre of those brave men, the end of a ship for which so many had struggled, died, and still would die. Those men, that ship, they had fought their lives out, and now it was up to history to decide where in the whole story that struggle fitted.

Bowater watched the dying ship. He guessed that the casement had contained the blast, had funneled the shock wave straight up. That must have been the case, because, incredibly, in the light of the burning vessel, he could see the Confederate flag, still run up the ensign staff, still intact, still waving in the land breeze filling in with the coming dawn.

They steamed downriver to a mile or so above Pilot Town, but with the coming light they could see the Federal ships getting up steam, could see the Stars and Stripes waving over the town, so they turned and steamed upriver again. They tied up at a half-forgotten landing fifteen miles south of Fort Jackson. They buried their dead.

Bowater suggested they burn the Abigail Wilson, but Wilson hesitated, demurred, found reasons why that was not the best plan. In the end they left her tied up, hoofed it down the dirt road from the landing to the road running north. They carried the wounded on stretchers improvised from material aboard the tug. They found transportation among the growing convoy of wagons fleeing the coming bluebellies.

In New Orleans they were swept up in the general exodus, the panicked retreat from the city. The wounded were brought to hospital. Half of the remaining men melted away. But Bowater had saved enough money from his cabin, and Wilson had funds enough, and enough gold was found in Robley Paine’s coat pocket, to secure transportation for the rest of them. Samuel Bowater led his men north to Yazoo City. He had no other place to go.

And so it was, on a grim 1st of May, 1862, that Samuel Bowater and Hieronymus Taylor and Ruffin Tanner found themselves seated on an old oak log, staring out over the remains of what had once been their shipyard, out at the slow-moving Yazoo River. Telegrams had been dispatched to Mallory, reports, lists of dead, wounded, missing. They waited on orders.

Taylor sparked a cigar to life. Tanner took a long pull from a bottle of whiskey, which he then handed to Taylor, who drank and then handed it to Bowater. Bowater drank, returned to his thoughts of Wendy, handed the bottle back to Tanner.

New Orleans was lost. The Confederate Army had been beaten at Pittsburg Landing, and the Yankees were pushing downriver, closing the gap between the head and tail of the snake. The Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf were blockaded. McClellan was on the Yorktown Peninsula with more than 120,000 men and marching for Richmond. Soon the Gosport naval yard would have to be abandoned. Banks was chasing Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley with crushing superiority in numbers. McDowell threatened Fredericksburg and Richmond.

The elation that had followed Manassas was gone. In one year the swaggering confidence of the men who had fired on Fort Sumter had been changed to something else. Acceptance of war, a long war. Resignation. Despondency, in some cases.

But not defeat. Never defeat. The fire of resistance burned on, and it was not close to burning itself out.

The bottle came around again. Bowater took a pull, handed it back to Tanner. “Know what Robley Paine said to me? There when we were abandoning the ship?”

The others murmured no.

“He said he was the lucky one. Said he was getting what he wanted. The rest of us, we would have to keep fighting, fight on and on.”

The three men were silent.

“That’s what he said,” said Samuel.

Taylor took the bottle. Lifted it high. “Here’s to Robley Paine.” He took a drink, handed it to Bowater.

Bowater lifted the bottle. “Here’s to getting what you want.” He drank, passed it back to Tanner.

Ruffin Tanner lifted the bottle, looked at the reflection of the abandoned shipyard in the glass and dark liquid. “Here’s to fighting,” he said. “Here’s to fighting, on and on.”

Wendy Atkins brushed the tears away, gulped a deep breath. Happiness, relief, sadness, loneliness were all mixed together. She sat on the edge of her iron bed, read the letter again.

Postmarked Yazoo City. May 1st. A brief sketch of the Battle of New Orleans, assurance that he, Samuel Bowater, was safe, had come through with just the usual bruises and scrapes. But they had lost, the Union fleet had brushed them aside. They would make a stand elsewhere, Samuel said. Once he received orders.

She felt the tears come again, and now they were all sadness, now that his survival was assured, and the relief that came with that passed into memory. She cried because she read the profound sadness in the words. She cried because the loneliness was palpable and because she knew about loneliness, could take it herself, but could not endure the thought of Samuel, her Samuel, having to suffer so.

Wendy Atkins knew about loneliness. She had known about it all her life. But when Samuel Bowater left for Mississippi, she learned that there was a whole other level of which she had not been aware, like discovering a room in a house which you had not suspected was there.

She put the letter down, took a deep breath. Looked around the little carriage house, now crammed with a year’s accumulations. She looked down at the bed and remembered their night together.

Wendy stood and knelt by the bed, ran her hands underneath. At last they fell on what she was looking for and she pulled it out; an oversize carpet bag, empty now. She set it on the bed, opened it, considered what to pack.

It was just growing light when Jonathan Paine rose, sat up in the bed he had occupied since the time he had been taken from the family cradle, deemed old enough for a real bed. He looked around the familiar room. It was all gray-and-blue shadows in the weak light, but he did not need any light at all to know what was there. He was like an old man, visiting the scene of his youth, the shadowy remains of a life he had once had.

He swung his one leg over the edge of the bed. He fastened his prosthetic leg in place, pulled his pants on and his shirt. He did not wear his uniform anymore, the only clothes he had known for more than a year. He did not have to. All of his things were there, just as he had left them. His clothes fit loose now, but they fit.

All his things were there. Only his family was gone.

Jonathan stood, limped across the room and down the stairs. He could hear Jenny moving about in the kitchen. Bobby would be rising soon. He would want to help, but Jonathan did not want his help this time. Later, perhaps, but now it was his task alone.

He stepped quietly out the front door, climbed down the steps. The morning light was spreading, the scraps of fog hanging low over the river and twisting around the clumps of trees on the bank. Jonathan walked around the house, up the slight hill to the family plot. He stood for a long moment, looking at the place where his mother was buried, the fresh-turned earth beside it that marked his father’s grave.

Robley had died before the Abigail Wilson tied up. Jonathan had seen the body carried back with him. His father had been born and raised on Paine Plantation, had known all his greatest joys on that patch of land. When his body rotted away and mixed again with the soil, it had to be that soil, it could be no other.

At last Jonathan tore his eyes from the twin headstones, walked back down the hill. In the shed he found a big felling ax. He swung it over his shoulder, headed back to the house.

Jonathan hobbled past the porch, up to the old oak, the earthly remains of his beloved tree. He looked it up and down, the horrible thing his father had created there. But not his father, not really. The gargoyle had been cut by a man driven mad by grief, and that man may well have looked like Robley Paine, but it was not him.

Jonathan hefted his ax, let it rest on his shoulder as he adjusted his grip, then brought it back and swung it at the base of the tree. He felt the good, sharp steel bite into the ancient wood. He wiggled it free, brought the ax back, and chopped again, and this time a chip flew.

It would not be easy. It would take a long time. He was alone now, with only Bobby to help him. His family was gone and the Negroes had mostly all run to the Yankees. But still he knew he would not stop until he had cut down this terrible thing that had once been the Paines’ precious tree, this nightmare the war had made. Rip the stump out, roots and all.

And then he would plant a new oak. It would not be the same—it could never be the same—but it too would grow tall and strong. He would raise it up from the ground, this new and beautiful and good thing.