“Well, hell, Captain, I don’t know how I managed to find the one darkie cooks all this Frenchified stuff. Don’t even know how to make a decent gumbo or fried chicken,” Taylor said.
“Hardly a failing. Was he really the chef at the Chateau Dupre Hotel?”
“Aw, hell no. He was the fella mixed up the sauces or something. He’s jest putting on airs. I reckon he learned a thing or two about cooking, jest watchin them real chefs.”
“He did indeed. So how did he happen to come with you?”
“They was some mess he got himself in. Something to do with the wife of one of the cooks there at that hotel. I never did get the whole story. Just knew he had to get the hell out of New Orleans, but fast. I was heading to Wilmington, took him along.”
Bowater nodded. “You were friends?”
“He used to shovel coal for me. Paddle wheeler we used to work, New Orleans to Vicksburg on a regular run.”
“I see.” Samuel could sense the layers upon layers of story that formed the bedrock of their acquaintance, Hieronymus Taylor and Johnny St. Laurent. He wondered briefly if there was anyone who would come to him if they were in dire need of help. No one that he could think of.
“Sir?” Harwell interjected. Bowater looked at the luff and could see that he had something to say and was ready to burst if he did not say it.
“Yes, Mr. Harwell?”
“When I was ashore this morning, sir, I found out what they are planning for the old Merrimack.”
“Oh, yes?” Judging from the lieutenant’s expression, it was something more than just rebuilding her as a steam frigate.
“Go on, Lieutenant,” Taylor said. “I am like to perish with anticipation.”
“Well, sir,” Harwell said, addressing himself only to Bowater, “it appears they are going to rebuild her as an ironclad.”
“Do you mean like that French monstrosity, Le Gloire?”
“No sir. No masts at all. More like a floating battery, but with engines. They will use Merrimack’s old engines. An iron casement and bows and stern, submerged I believe.”
For a moment, no one said a thing, and in silence they considered that. An ironclad, with no sailing rig. A self-propelled floating iron battery.
“She’ll look like a damned turtle,” Taylor observed and grinned at the thought. “Be just like a turtle, slow and strong.”
“She will be a vulgar monstrosity,” Bowater said. Merrimack, with her shortened masts and her tall, black, ugly stack, was no beauty herself. All of these steam vessels, these hermaphrodites, half sail, half steam, lacked the grace and beauty of the old sailing navy. Was there any steamer that could compare to the beauty of a sailing frigate?
Once, not long after his graduation from the Navy School, Bowater had seen from the deck of his ship the USS Constitution underway, a full press of canvas to topgallant studding sails. The image was clean in his mind, like an etching. There was nothing else made by the hand of man that could compare to that for grace, beauty, and silent and unassuming power. She was from a different time, a more elegant time, and the men who sailed ships like that were very different from the men who mucked about in dark and filthy engine rooms.
“She will be ugly, Captain, but she will be lethal as well,” Taylor said. “I’ll take power over beauty any day.”
“Of course you would, Mr. Taylor.” It was what Samuel Bowater would expect from the engineers and mechanics of the world. A new direction for mankind, a rhumb line to the end of civilization.
“Anyway, they should have guns enough for her,” Taylor said through a mouthful of lamb. “Don’t reckon we’ve hauled away everything the Yankees left behind.” Then, in another tone, sotto voce, he added, “Reckon there should be guns enough for any boat in the navy…”
Bowater stiffened. It was not the words-he had not heard for certain what Taylor said-but the tone. Insinuation? Was the engineer hinting at something backward in Bowater’s nature?
“What are you saying, Chief?” Bowater saw Harwell tense.
“I’m saying, if there was a gun on this here tugboat, we might stand a chance of getting into some fightin’.”
Bowater leaned back, eyes on Taylor’s unshaven face, his carefully arranged look of innocence.
What am I supposed to say? He had been pleading with Forrest since the flag officer’s arrival to mount a gun on the Cape Fear’s foredeck, but Forrest had refused him every time, told him they could not waste ordnance arming tugs.
But Bowater could not tell Taylor that. It was none of Taylor’s affair. He did not wish to set the precedent of inferiors asking after the captain’s business. But neither could he let Taylor think he was shy about wanting to get into the fight.
Checkmate…with one question he has trapped me…
“Chief, these questions are not the business of the engineering division. But let me say that I am attempting to improve our armament by way of the proper channels.”
Taylor grunted, made a laughing sound. “Proper channels ain’t gonna get you a goddamned thing, we both know it.”
“And so that is an end to it.”
“Is it?” There was a smoothness to Taylor’s tone, like a snake-oil salesman, and it made Bowater wary and intrigued all at once.
For a long moment they sat there, silent, each holding the other’s eyes, each needing the other for his existence and hating it.
Bowater spoke first. “Go on,” he said. He said it softly, as if afraid to speak loud, afraid to admit that he wanted to listen. Here was forbidden fruit, Bowater could sense it. It frightened him, attracted him. He wanted to arm the Cape Fear, wanted it more than anything he could recall. He could feel that he was about to cross a line. He did not know what to think.
The ordnance house reminded Samuel Bowater of a buffet table laid out for the gods of war.
All of the guns that the retreating Yankees had spiked and rolled into the river had been recovered and the spikes removed from their vents. Stretched out in great rows were gun upon gun, some in carriages, some lying on the granite floor. There were massive 9-inch and eleven-inch Dahlgrens, howitzers of every size; twenty-four-pound, twelve-pound, six-pound. Long, sleek rifled barrels were lined up like fish on ice at the market, from the enormous, crushing hundred-pound Dahlgren through thirty-pound, twenty-pound, twelve, and ten.
There were James rifles and mortars and old smoothbores of antiquated design, the venerable thirty-two-pounders, and twenty-four-pounders, once the mainstay of the sailing navy’s broadside. There were twelve-pounders, nines, and fours. But like the smoothbore rifles that so many of the infantry were carrying, North and South, those guns were of another age, quickly being eclipsed by the rifled barrel and the exploding shell.
“Well, damn, Cap’n Bowater,” Taylor whispered. “I do not know where to begin.” He said it soft. They had no business doing what they were doing.
“Not with the Dahlgrens, I shouldn’t think,” Bowater said. Taylor nodded. All the reinforcement in the world would not render the bulwark and decks of the Cape Fear strong enough to support one of those monsters.
They walked down the rows of guns, looking them over, like buyers before a horse auction. “It would be a waste of time to put a smoothbore on board,” Taylor suggested, and Bowater concurred, so they moved quickly past the older guns.
They came at last to the Parrott rifles, and they stopped there and ran their eyes over the long tapered barrels with their distinctive reinforcement at the breech.
“Now this might be more of what we need,” Bowater said. In fact, he had worked out long ago exactly what gun he would like to see on the Cape Fear’s foredeck, but for some reason he could not bring himself to admit as much.
Taylor nodded again. “Ten-pound Parrott weighs just under a thousand pounds… That kind of weight would put the boat down by the head, I should think.”
“It just might.”
Taylor looked up and met Bowater’s eyes, and there was something mischievous in his expression. �
��Might balance her a bit…one gun off the bow and another off the stern…”
Bowater took a deep breath. He and Taylor had worked out this ruse de guerre over dessert, in the shade of the boat on the Cape Fear’s boat deck. They talked in elliptical, half-finished sentences. Bowater could not bring himself to speak more boldly. This sort of trickery was antithetical to everything Bowater was and believed and was trained to be. If honor and ethics were a rope to climb, then he had just slid down many feet. But he had to get into the fight.
The two men looked down at the guns again.
“Ten-pound Parrott forward. Two twelve-pound howitzers aft,” Bowater said in a tone that suggested the matter was settled.
Footsteps on the granite floor echoed around the building, and Bowater and Taylor looked up to see Commander Archibald Fairfax approach. Fairfax was in charge of ordnance at Norfolk, an able and active officer. He had managed to rework a number of the old smoothbore thirty-two-pounders, reinforcing their breeches and rifling them, bringing them into the modern age.
He was also in charge of fitting out the vessels stationed at the yard. “Captain Bowater, a pleasure, sir,” he said.
“Commander, good day,” Bowater said, extending a hand. “I do not believe you have met my chief engineer. Mr. Hieronymus Taylor, Commander Fairfax.”
“Commander,” Taylor said, shaking his hand. One glance told him Fairfax was old navy, through and through.
“What can I do for you, Captain Bowater?”
Bowater felt a tingling in his hands, an unsettled feeling in his gut. Up until now it had all been theoretical, which was bad enough. But now the moment was there. Now he had to lie to a superior officer, or give it up.
“We came by to see about the new guns for Fort Powhatan,” Bowater said, and when Fairfax looked understandably confused, he added, “The ten-pound Parrott and the two twelve-pound howitzers.”
There…that wasn’t so bad… He felt the rope slip though his hands.
Fairfax shook his head. “I was not aware that Fort Powhatan was to get more guns. Who gave you that order?”
“We were up there yesterday. Captain Cocke said he had sent word to you. He was under the impression it was all arranged.”
“No…this is the first I hear of it.”
“Well, hell, sir…beg your pardon, Commander,” Taylor said. Bowater hoped he would not make a hash of things now. “I can draw the fires, but now we’re going to have to take on more fresh water before we get head up steam again. We’ll need more coal, too. Got just enough on board to steam there and back with steam up now.”
“Very well, Chief,” Bowater said. “There is nothing for it.” He shook his head, turned to Fairfax. “I swear this happens every time, sir. One bureaucratic mix-up and we are set back two days.”
“Well, perhaps not,” Fairfax said. “If Cocke intended to ask for those guns, I should think the paperwork is somewhere. Be a waste for you to leave empty-handed. Why don’t you take those guns aboard and I’ll see what became of Cocke’s requisition.”
“Thank you, sir,” Bowater said. “That sort of efficiency is not something you would have heard of in the old navy.”
“No, indeed, Mr. Bowater. If we have any advantage at all over the United States Navy, it is that we are not so entrenched and somnambulant. Feel free to press whomever you need from the yard to help with the guns. Mr. Taylor, a pleasure to meet you. Good day, gentlemen.”
“Good day,” the officers of the Cape Fear said in chorus. Commodore Fairfax turned and walked away.
Done. They had their guns. And Bowater felt like a new-minted whore, just finished with her first trick. He wondered if that sort of thing got easier, and what the implications were if it did.
14
Our hands nervously toying with the hammers of our rifles, each one felt that his final departure was near at hand and busily repented him of his sins.
– Alexander Hunter, 17th Virginia, Blackburn’s Ford, Bull Run River
A sharp jerk of alarm, a twist of fear. The long slide back into boredom. Alarm, fear, boredom, the cycle went round and round, a grindstone wearing Robley Paine down. Six days now. It was more exhausting than any drill or long march he had encountered yet.
He stood and stretched arms and legs, tore a piece of bacon off with his teeth. It was raw-fires were not permitted that morning-and the meat was chewy and slightly noxious, but he made himself eat. He followed the bacon up with a cracker, and then a drink from his canteen, filled with gritty river water.
The air was warm and sweet-smelling, the sky just growing light through the tangle of young trees along the riverbank. Over the muted conversations of the other soldiers, muttering over their inadequate breakfast, the incompetence of their leadership, he could hear the sounds of the Bull Run River, coursing through its choked and tangled bed, running over the shallow place they were protecting. McLean ’s Ford.
It was July 21, a Sunday, and though there would be no church service that morning, Paine did not doubt that there would be a power of praying going on. He had done enough of it himself already, and he reckoned there was more to come.
“Morning, Lieutenant.” Jonathan Paine ambled up, scratching with one hand, rubbing his eyes with the other. “Got any more of that bacon?”
“Where are your rations, Private?”
“Ate ’em last night. I was fearful hungry.”
Robley scowled at his youngest brother, but cut a slice of bacon from his own remaining piece and handed it over. Jonathan, skinny as he was, ate more than any other person Robley had ever met.
“Today’s our day,” Jonathan said through a full mouth, but it was more a question than a statement.
“I reckon.” It had been six days since the great flurry of excitement that saw 3rd Brigade decamp from near the McLean house and tramp the mile down gently sloping hills and through clustered stands of young trees to the banks of the Bull Run. For six days they had been in the proximity of battle, but had yet to enter into it themselves, like so many Moseses looking down on the Promised Land.
On the day after they had taken their position at McLean’s Ford, the firing started, muted, distant, and sporadic. It was Brigadier General Milledge Luke Bonham’s 1st Brigade, lobbing shells at the pursuing Yankees as they fell back from Fairfax Courthouse to the Confederate lines behind the Bull Run.
It had been worse the following day. Then the Yankees had come in force down the road from the cluster of wood-framed houses known as Centreville. They hit James Longstreet’s 4th Brigade hard and repeatedly, not half a mile from 3rd Brigade’s left flank. The soldiers of 3rd Brigade grabbed up their rifles and rifles, yawned with nervousness, fiddled with their equipment, joked, prayed, waited for their orders to splash across the river, to turn the bluebellies’ flank. But that order did not come.
Colonel Jubal Anderson Early’s 6th Brigade, held in reserve behind Longstreet, came up in support and drove the Yankees back until they came no more. The men of the 3rd stood tensed, listening to the bang of artillery, the crack of small arms like a pitch-pine log in a fire, watched the clouds of smoke building over the trees. They stood ready until the tension began to ebb away and they headed down that slope to boredom, and there they would stay until the big guns began to fire again.
“We’re in the right place for a fight, I reckon,” Jonathan continued. He was nervous. The only time he showed any interest in what the army might do was when he was nervous.
“General Beauregard seems to think so,” Robley said. Nearly all of the Confederate troops were massed at that end of the line, the Confederate right. Bonham, Longstreet, Jones, Ewell, Early, and Holmes had all been positioned there, strung out behind the Bull Run.
The day before, as brigades of Joseph Johnston’s Army of the Shenandoah had begun to arrive by train-to the great relief of the Confederates, from Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, in overall command, to Private Jonathan Bonaventure Paine-they too had been massed near the McLean house. Now they
stood in the rear of Bonham, Longstreet, and Jones, ready to come up to support the regiments along the river that would surely take the brunt of the Yankees’ massed assault.
The sun was breaking the horizon and the sky above was blue, clear and blue, and promised more unrelenting heat. The 3rd Brigade, like a great animal coming slowly out of sleep, began to move and shift and shuffle into place. Nathaniel came up, carrying two canteens, one of which he handed to Jonathan.
“Morning, Lieutenant,” he said.
“We drew cards to see who would fill canteens,” Jonathan explained. Robley frowned and shook his head as an officer should.
He ran his eyes over his two younger brothers, recalled how they had looked standing under the big tree in the front yard of Paine Plantation, their uniforms new and perfectly fitted, the leather of their belts and cartridge boxes gleaming black, their faces red-cheeked and eager. They looked like theatrical soldiers then, boys in costume.
They did not look that way anymore. They had lost so much weight that their clothes hung loose on them, and they wore their uniforms with the casual air of professionals. The leather belts and cartridge boxes were cracked and dusty and faded. Only their rifles retained the luster of newness, and that was only through meticulous maintenance. They had been soldiers long enough to know what was important and what was not.
In the distance they heard a gun fire, the flat bang of a cannon, field artillery.
“Shush!” Robley said to Jonathan, who was opening his mouth to speak. The three boys cocked their heads. The gunfire was far off, three or four miles at least.
“Sounds like it’s up by the Warrenton Turnpike,” Robley said in a whisper, pleased for the chance to display a knowledge of the terrain. “Fifth Brigade might be getting it…”
“You reckon that’s the Yankees attacking?” Nathaniel asked, also whispering.
“No. It’s a feint, I’ll wager. Real attack is going to come here.” And then, as if in support of his prediction, they heard artillery opening up much closer and to the north, a battery that must be aimed at them. Robley felt the sharp jab in his stomach, the sweat break out on his palms. So many times had the charge of excitement come and then drained away that he thought he would never feel it again. But with the sound of the guns he was flashed up in an instant, ready to go.
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