“Git back! Git back!” Taylor shouted, and he jumped back and the handspike men jumped back and Taylor pulled the lanyard. The gun went off with a terrific roar, painful, since Taylor had forgotten to clap a hand over his ear. It leaped back against the breeches but Taylor’s eyes were on the side-wheeler alone, the side-wheeler steaming down on them, the side-wheeler whose port wheelbox suddenly burst into a spray of shattered wood and broken buckets and twisted metal, flung up in the air.
“Sum bitch! Sum bitch! Yeeeeha!” Taylor shouted, and he knew he was shouting as loud as he could, and so were the men around him, but he could hear only a muffled version of the noise, as if he was listening from underwater. No matter. They had hit him, right where it hurt.
The side-wheeler slewed around to port as the starboard wheel drove her on, then stopped dead as her captain rang out all stop to sort out the damage.
Now what? Taylor wondered. His blood was up, he was ready to go and board them like pirates of old. He looked up, grinned up at Bowater, but Bowater was staring forward at the disabled Yankee, hands behind his back, expressionless. He was not shouting.
Cold son of a bitch…
Samuel Bowater stepped into the wheelhouse, eyes still on the disabled Yankee, rang slow ahead. Close enough. Decision time.
He wanted to shout. He wanted to yell and wave his hat the way the others had. But of course he did not.
“What’s your name, sailor?” he said to the new helmsman. This one had the hard, casual look of a real sailor, not the whimpering incompetence of that boy Taylor for some inconceivable reason had dragged up there.
“Ruffin Tanner, of Mobile, sir, by way of the Congress, which were my last ship.”
“Welcome aboard the CSS Cape Fear, Tanner. How do you like it so far?”
“I like it fine, sir, mighty fine.” He gave the wheel a quarter turn, brought it back amidships. “Man’s blood gets a bit thick, sittin’ around one of them Yankee men-of-war.”
“Indeed.” Bowater remembered Harwell, lying in a pool of his own blood, remembered his own shocking disregard for the man. In a flush of guilt he stepped out of the wheelhouse and around the front, knelt beside the lieutenant, lifted his head.
“Mr. Harwell? Mr. Harwell?” The lieutenant’s eyes opened, his lips moved to say something, but Bowater could not make out the words, so he ignored him, examined the wound on his head.
A splinter had opened up a nasty gash, which had bled profusely, and had no doubt rattled the luff’s brains, but as far as Bowater could tell, he was not seriously injured. He was a horrible sight, with the blood streaking his face and congealed in his hair. He looked as if he had no business being alive, but he did not seem mortally wounded.
“I’m…I’m all right, sir…” Harwell said in a stronger voice, and put a hand down on the deck to prop himself up.
“You just rest here, Lieutenant, as long as you need,” Bowater said. Harwell looked as if he was going to protest, but happily he passed out again and that was an end to it. Bowater laid him out, stepped into the wheelhouse again.
From the long black side of the Wabash, a puff of smoke, and then a shell plunged into the water nearby, and then another puff, another shell. They had steamed right into the range of the smoothbores.
“Hard a’port, Tanner,” he said and rang up four bells, full ahead. Time to leave.
It was 114 degrees in the engine room, hotter than that in the boiler room, and the firemen were struggling to get the fire hotter still.
Hieronymus Taylor wiped his forehead with a filthy rag. It was bad enough when you were in the engine room all day, but coming from the relative cool of the upper deck made it seem much worse.
He wiped the face of the pressure gauge on the front of the boiler. Nineteen pounds and building. That was just about all the pressure the boiler would take. He turned to Moses. “Get some more coal on, spread her nice and even, she’ll take more than this!” he shouted.
“Oh, we cookin now, boss!” Moses shouted, spreading the white-hot coal with his shovel.
“Goddamn it, man!” O’Malley shouted. “Yer gonna blow us all to hell, damn it! The boiler can’t take it!”
“What the hell do you know about it, Ian? You just make sure there’s water enough, and you can bet I’ll kill you before the boiler does!”
“You’re mad!”
“Get!” Taylor pointed toward the boiler and its gauge glass. O’Malley scowled, turned, and stamped off, his boots loud on the metal plates on the deck, even over the groaning, straining, hissing, clanking engine.
Taylor resumed his pacing fore and aft. Through the fabric of the hull, he heard something, some muffled detonation. The Cape Fear’s hull was like an eardrum, picking up the vibrations, turning them into something else. Taylor could not tell what it was-he had never heard such a thing-but he guessed it was ordnance exploding in the water. The side-wheeler or the Wabash getting in her shots. Might be time we got out of here, he thought, and as he did, the bell rang four times, full ahead.
“Here we go!” Taylor shouted, twisting the throttle open. He felt the deck plates tremble with the increased turns of the engine, and then the helm was put hard over, the Cape Fear heeling into the turn.
Taylor managed to grab hold of a stanchion and keep himself from tumbling to the floor. Billy Jefferson, shovel jammed in a coal pile, stumbled, fell sideways, put his hands out to steady himself, flat against the steam pipe. Smoke rose from his palms and Billy screamed, a piercing, high scream that made Taylor wince.
He launched himself off the post, raced forward, but Moses was there first, grabbing Billy around the waist, pulling him back from the boiler to the deck.
“St. Clair! Water! Cold water, here!” Taylor shouted. St. Clair hurried off and Taylor looked quickly around, counted heads. Some of his men were standing, some lying where they had fallen, but he could see no other injuries.
He stepped back to the pressure gauge. With the throttle opened, the pressure in the boiler had dropped off, but it was still high.
“Moses! Let St. Clair tend to Billy there! You stoke her up! Coal now, you hear? O’Malley, bear a hand there!”
“Yassa!” Moses knocked open the firebox door with his shovel. The fire was white-hot, an undulating bed of heat, throwing weird shadows and light through the gloom of the engine room, the eternal twilight of that lower region.
Burgess was there. “Bearins runnin hot,” he grunted.
“They’ll hold for now.”
“Lotta damned pressure,” he said, nodding toward the boiler.
“That’s why we have safety valves.”
Actually, they didn’t. Taylor had tied them down, figured he knew better than a damned bit of iron and springs when he was pushing his boiler too hard. One of the advantages of the navy, he found: no damned inspectors poking around his engine room.
“O’Malley!” Taylor shouted. The Irishman was sulking in a corner. “I told you to tend the water!”
“What? I’ll not go near that damned boiler, and you running twenty and more pounds of steam! That’s work for one of the niggers, that is!”
“Niggers are too busy, and if there ain’t any niggers we got to use a Mick! Now go!”
O’Malley stamped over to Taylor, but he did not seem inclined to check water levels in the gauge glass.
“I’ve about had it with yer abuse, do ya hear? I’ll not stand for it, and me, a white man, and treated worse than yer darling niggers!”
“You work as hard as my niggers, I’ll treat you as well as my niggers,” Taylor said, stopped as he heard a hissing sound-water or steam getting away. He looked up just in time to see the crack in the feed-water line opening like a grinning mouth, hot water-not boiling, but hot enough-spewing out.
“Ah, shit! Stand clear!” Taylor shouted, and Burgess and O’Malley and Moses and St. Clair scattered and the pipe burst with a groan and a snap and the feed-water pump forced hot water in a great spray over the engine room, hissing off the pipes, show
ering the floor plates, spraying over Billy Jefferson, who lay beneath it, screaming and trying to shield himself.
“Damn it! Get the valve, Burgess!” Taylor held his arm over his face, raced forward, slipped on the wet steel plate, and came down in a heap, skidding to a stop with feet against the boiler face. The hot water was lashing at him, burning his face like snake bites, and Billy was screaming, unable to stand with his burned hands.
Water was spewing from both ends of the broken pipe, pushed out by the feed-water pump and draining from the boiler, and if the water in the boiler got too low, there would be hell to pay. The fusible plug would melt, but that would be the least of their problems.
Taylor looked up as best as he could, trying to keep his face from the blowing, scalding water. He rose unsteadily to his feet, the slick decks and the hot water and the burning pipes threatening from every direction. He grabbed the valve on the boiler face-it was painfully hot but Taylor was accustomed to that-and he cranked it shut, heard the sound of the water flow die off.
He turned and looked aft. Burgess, his face red from the hot water, had reached the feed-pump valve. The water was off. Billy was lying on the floor plates, whimpering in pain. O’Malley was nowhere to be seen.
“Burgess, check the gauge glass, keep an eye on that boiler!” With no water going to the boiler, and quite a bit lost, they did not have too much steaming left before the thing began to melt down.
There was a snap to his right, a crack like metal giving way. Ten inches from where he had been standing, the steam gauge blew clean off the pipe, flinging itself up and off to one side. The flying gauge shattered against the boiler-room bulkhead and a whistling white plume of condensing steam came bursting out of the hole where the gauge had been.
Might be pushing it now… Taylor admitted to himself. “Moses! Shut off the valve to that gauge,” he shouted as he moved quickly aft, “and close that damper on the fire door, you hear?”
“Close the damper!” Moses called, and Taylor heard the reassuring sound of the damper slamming shut and hoped he had not pushed his luck too far.
Hail Mary, Mother of God, the Lord is with thee… he muttered, feeling like the Lord’s own hypocrite, but childhood training died hard and he hoped the prayer might do some good.
He looked around, at the dripping engine room, the dripping, burned men. Burned but still alive. “Damn,” he said. That was all he could think to say.
Ian O’Malley raced up the ladder, desperate to get out of the engine room before the boiler blew. He was frightened, to be sure, and angry and wounded in his pride. But most of all he was bitter about the treatment he received. He had spent the better part of his life being bitter about the way he was treated. The emotion fit him like a well-worn pair of trousers, enveloping and comfortable.
Bloody bastard… he thought, throwing open the fidley door and stepping aft, stomping through the sunshine and relatively cool air.
Bloody Southerner and he treats his niggers better than me…and me a fireman first class…
That was another sore spot. His mother’s second cousin, chief engineer of an oceangoing packet, no less, had given him recommendation enough that it should have garnered him first assistant engineer’s papers, at least, despite what little experience he actually had. It should have been him telling Taylor to check the feed water and clean the damned grates…
Suddenly he was aware of gunfire. Far off, but he could hear it, shells whistling past. He looked outboard. They had turned, and he could see the Yankee ships astern, and the big one was firing.
I made a bloody mistake, didn’t I? he thought. Should have joined with the bloody Yankees…
He heard a voice behind, a soft voice. “Mr. O’Malley?” He turned. The boy Taylor had brought with him was there, but O’Malley had his suspicions. In fact, if he was right, it would be enough to get Taylor cashiered from the navy, which would be justice done. “You…” O’Malley said, took a step toward the speaker, hand reached out, and then his whole world was consumed by the whistle of a shell that seemed to suck the air out of the day, and then it blew up.
Wendy felt an odd sort of calm as she walked around the decks, even with the iron flying. It was like being in a bell jar, looking out, able to see everything, protected. It was an illusion, a dangerous one, and she knew it and told herself as much, but she could not shake it, so instead she enjoyed it, experienced it.
After fleeing the wheelhouse she had hunkered down by the forward end of the deckhouse, watched Taylor lay the gun, disable the Yankee. She had cheered with the rest, spontaneously, until she realized her voice might give her away. But Taylor had been right. No one seemed to care who she was or what she was about.
She watched Taylor go back into the engine room, but she could not bear to go down there. She had remained on deck, inconspicuous, reveling in her genuine taste of battle. It was exhilarating, now that it was over, now that the gunboat had turned and was steaming away from the Yankees.
Wendy was buoyant as she walked down the side deck, unconcerned about the last desperate shots the Yankees were taking. She saw Ian O’Malley storm out of the engine-room door, and she even felt kindly disposed to him, though she had seen in him a sullen malingering villain. Still, she looked on him, and all the men aboard, as her shipmates now, her Band of Brothers.
“Mr. O’Malley?” she said. O’Malley turned and his face was not a kind one, and she could see the anger in his eyes, the suspicion as he squinted at her, took a step toward her. She took a step away, the fear suddenly back. O’Malley sneered, said, “You…,” hand reaching for her, and then the distant whine of a shell grew suddenly to an overpowering scream, a noise that cut right through both of them, and then the forward end of the deckhouse exploded in a burst of wood and glass.
Wendy saw the sides of the cabin blow out and O’Malley lunged at her and she screamed, thought he was going to kill her. His eyes were wide and he hit her, full-body, knocked her back, and he was on top of her, and she swung and punched at him, kicked as they went down, but it had no effect.
She hit the deck hard, flat on her back. Felt the impact through her whole body. It stunned her, but all she could think was to get O’Malley off her, to get away before he killed her. She pushed him off, and to her surprise he moved, did not resist, and she scrambled to her feet.
She jumped back, pressed herself against the deckhouse, ready to kick O’Malley if he came for her. She looked down, saw he would not.
A shard of wood, three feet long, part of the frame of the cabin, was jutting from his back, and now that she looked she could see the jagged forward tip sticking out from his chest where it had gone clean through. A trickle of blood ran from his mouth.
Wendy stared at the lifeless eyes, the dead man in a growing pool of blood, and she felt nothing. She felt like Bowater, tossing the dead helmsman aside. Oh God, is this all? Is this all it takes, for a person to lose humanity entirely?
Taylor came up the engine-room ladder, stepped out onto the side deck. Wendy was there, pressed up against the deckhouse. O’Malley was dead at her feet. For a fleeting instant he thought she had killed him, but then he realized that was absurd.
“What happened?”
“Shell hit, up front, there. That piece of wood went right through O’Malley.”
Taylor nodded. She did not seem as upset as he might have thought she would be. “You best go down to the engine room. We’ll be heading in now.”
They looked at one another. There was something strange in Wendy’s eyes, something that had not been there that morning, and Taylor was suddenly afraid that he had made a great mistake, allowing her to see this. She pulled her eyes from his and disappeared below.
Taylor stepped forward again. Through the gaping hole that had once been a wall, Taylor looked in at the space that had once been the galley. The place was unrecognizable; only a few bits of cookware and sundry pieces of twisted gear looked at all familiar. The destruction was incredible, as if someone had picked
the Cape Fear up and shaken her, then dropped her again. And right in the middle of it, sitting on a twisted and cracked stewpot, sat Johnny St. Laurent, wide-eyed, shaking his head, seemingly oblivious to the battle still raging.
He looked up and met Taylor’s eyes, shook his head in disbelief. How he could still be alive Taylor could not imagine. Then St. Laurent said, with evident grief, “All morning…I have been making de homard a la creme with a Felbrigg sponge cake for dessert, and now…” He spread his arms to indicate the destruction of his fiefdom.
“We’ll set her to rights, Johnny, don’t you fret,” Taylor said, as soothing as he could be, then left the galley and went up the ladder to the wheelhouse. “Cap’n, we lost the feed-water line, we gonna have to shut her down, ten minutes or so.”
Bowater nodded. “Ten minutes will be all right. More than that I do not think will do. We are not in the best place to be drifting.”
“Ten minutes.”
“Very good. What was the damage from that last shell?”
“Galley’s a wreck. Lunch is ruined. O’Malley was killed. But nothing beyond that, I don’t reckon.”
“The homard a la creme, ruined?” Bowater met his eyes for the first time. “Devil take those shopkeeping, mudsill Yankees…”
The sun was an hour gone, and the last orange strips of sky fading in the west, when the Cape Fear came alongside the seawall at Gosport Naval Shipyard and Babcock saw to the dock fasts. The damage to the vessel was considerable, but they had inflicted worse than they received, had crippled one of the Union’s James River fleet, had put a few shells through one of the Federal navy’s most powerful men-of-war, had shown the Confederate flag on waters that the Union had considered inviolably theirs. Samuel Bowater was eager to report all of that to Flag Officer Forrest.
Even as the Cape Fear had steamed her way down the Elizabeth River, Bowater had thought of his uniform. He and Jacob rummaged through what was left of the master’s cabin, and it was not much. Nearly everything that Bowater owned was now in more parts than it had been that morning. His uniforms were charred and shredded. Only a quarter of his oil painting of Newport remained, but he was not sorry to see that gone, and might well have done the same to it himself.
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