So, when the tug was tied alongside, Bowater was still wearing the uniform he had worn during the fight, and though he was openly unhappy about appearing in such tattered attire, he was secretly proud of the numerous burn marks, bloodstains, and sundry tears in his frock coat and pants. They were clothes that showed hard fighting.
He stepped through the shredded wheelhouse, climbed down the ladder to the foredeck. The Parrott rifle was secured now, the giant put to bed, and for the first time since it had come aboard, Bowater looked on it with pride. He had washed himself clean of the guilt and shame, burned away the humiliation in the fire of battle. He may have allowed Hieronymus Taylor to talk him into the ruse, but he, Samuel Bowater, had led them into the fight, and the gun and the armed Cape Fear had proved their worth. He felt better than he had in a long, long time.
He stepped quickly across the shipyard. He intended to try Forrest’s office first, but was not confident of finding him there. It was, after all, nearly nine o’clock on a Sunday night.
Bowater could see lights in various windows, could hear people moving about, shouting. There was a charged quality to the air, an atmosphere of excitement, and Bowater wondered if news of his fight had reached the shipyard already, if the word of their deeds had preceded them.
He reached the administration building and stepped inside and he could see, at the far end of the hall, that Forrest’s office was occupied, which made him think all the more that news of his battle had reached the flag officer.
Samuel Bowater stepped up to the office door, looked inside. Forrest was there, along with Fairfax and several others of the shipyard’s ranking officers. He knocked on the doorframe.
“Sir?” he said.
Forrest turned, his lined, weathered face spread with joy. “Bowater! Bowater, come in. Are you just back now?”
“Yes, sir.” Bowater stepped through the door. The room seemed to be bursting with joy, and Samuel wondered if his actions were regarded as grander heroics than even he had dared think.
“Well, you have not heard then!” Forrest said. “It just come in over the wire. Beauregard met the Yankees at Manassas, fought ’em all day, and absolutely routed them! Sent ’em on a grand skedaddle clear back to Washington, the dirty dogs! They are saying it is the greatest victory since Waterloo!”
Forrest looked around at the others, as if for confirmation, and the other officers nodded their delighted agreement. Then Fairfax looked Bowater up and down and said, “Dear Lord, sir, what has happened to you?”
21
Great Battle and Glorious Victory
The greatest battle since that of Waterloo was fought yesterday, in the neighborhood of Manassas, between 50 and 60,000 Southerners on one side and 95 to 100,000 Yankees and Hessians on the other. The loss is not known, except that it was great on both sides.
– Richmond Whig, July 22, 1861
The Great Battle was two days gone when word reached Paine Plantation, just south of Drumgould’s Bluff on the Yazoo River. Robley Paine read about the event with a strange back-and-forth pull of emotions. It was the birth of his nation, and like the birth of his sons a bloody, wrenching, frightening affair. Like the birth of his sons, it should have filled Robley with an irrepressible joy.
But that was not what he felt, sitting on the wide porch, under the blue-painted ceiling, reading the newspaper accounts, the bold type that heralded victory, last-minute arrivals that turned the tide of Yankee and Hessian attacks.
What Hessians? Robley wondered. All the papers were filled with allusions to the Hessians.
Despite these accounts of Southern heroism, brilliant leadership in the field, feats of courage, Robley’s eyes moved again and again to the single line: The loss…was great on both sides.
How will I know about my boys? he wondered. If they are hurt or killed, will the army write me? If not, I will have to wait until the boys themselves write, to find out what has become of them.
Paine thought of the boys’ mother. He glanced up at the front door, as if she might be standing there. His sons had not been overly vigilant about writing, as he had suspected they might not. That silence had only added to Katherine’s already great misery. News of the battle had sent her to her bed. He wondered if she could endure a long wait to hear from the boys.
What if they are hurt? Or…
The papers were reporting that nearly 160,000 men had participated in the fight, Union and Confederate. Even if twenty thousand were casualties, that was still only one man in eight. And of those, most would only be wounded. An even smaller number would actually be dead.
When his boys marched off, Robley Paine had been dreadfully worried that they might receive wounds, but now that was hardly a concern. It would not be so very bad if they were wounded, he caught himself thinking. Not so much as to cripple them or kill them, just enough that it took them out of the fighting, let them come home with honor.
He shook his head, tried to distract himself from those dark thoughts. There was a dispatch from Norfolk, the paper reporting some minor victory by an armed tug of the Confederate States Navy. Robley smiled at the thought of the Confederate States Navy, wondered at what a motley collection of tugs and paddle wheelers and barges old Mallory was calling a navy. Still, they had managed to effect something, this navy, so there must be some merit in the idea.
He could not concentrate. He put the paper down, stepped down off the porch and walked the familiar downward slope to the riverbank. His beloved Yazoo rolled on past, that wide, disinterested stream. Did she care if the Yankee vandals were coming, if Yankee steamers would part her with their sharp bows? No, she was just water.
Paine turned back to look at the big house, the open-armed oak, his favorite view in the world. He imagined his boys tramping weary home from the war, seeing that big tree, its limbs like open arms, welcoming then back to the one place of earth that would always be their sanctuary. How much more beautiful would that tree look after the terror of war? Robley ached for that day to come. He ached to get word of his boys.
Four days later he did.
The letter was from Richmond, a printed envelope with the name of the Department of War. The very look of the thing was ominous, loathsome. Robley carried it unopened into the library. He felt sick to the point of nausea just holding the horrible thing, still sealed, in his hand. Finally, with trembling fingers, he tore it open.
Dear Sir:
We regret to inform you of the death of Lt. Robley Paine, Jr., Company D, 18th Mississippi Regiment, 3rd Brigade, during the late Battle of Manassas. Lt. Paine fought bravely in defense of his country.
Regretfully,
E. R. Burt, Colonel, 18th Mississippi
Robley fell back in the winged chair, staring at the stark, cold, typed words. He thought of his beautiful boy, four years old, blond hair and smudged face, running across the lawn, whooping like a wild Indian. He thought of him in his lieutenant’s frock coat, lying splayed out on the battlefield, dead eyes open and staring skyward, flies buzzing around open wounds. Robley Paine had seen enough battlefield casualties to know what they looked like, to guess how his lovely, handsome boy had ended up. The tears rolled down his cheeks and the sobs rose from his chest.
He heard soft steps in the hall, approaching the study, and he panicked. He did not want his wife to see the letter, but he could not hide it, and he could not lie to her.
“Robley, whatever is it?” But he did not have the strength to reply, or even move. She crossed quickly, plucked the letter from his hand. She gasped, dropped the paper, fled from the room.
It was several hours before Robley could find it in himself to stand up, to drag himself upstairs to the bed on which his wife had flung herself in her grief. He tried to comfort her, but there was little comfort in him.
Three days dragged by in a purgatory of grief, and then another letter arrived and it was in an envelope like the first. Robley opened the envelope in a numb, mechanical way, thinking vaguely that the regiment had by acciden
t dispatched two letters announcing Robley Junior’s death. He unfolded the letter.
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. As their names have not appeared on any of the lists of prisoners taken by the enemy, we fear they must be presumed deserted or dead.
Regretfully,
E. R. Burt, Colonel, 18th Mississippi
Robley did not know what to think. Even if his mind had not been so muddled with grief for his eldest son, he would not have known what to make of it.
Not prisoners, so deserted or dead. For a hopeful second he thought that perhaps they had deserted, perhaps they had left the army, were coming home that very moment, coming back to the proper side of their moat, their Yazoo River, where he would keep them safe. Let a provost try to extract them from Paine Plantation. It would never happen. The Yankees would seem a trifle compared to the way Robley Paine would fight to protect his boys. They would be safe there, within the family kingdom.
No sooner did that happy thought occur to him than he banished it away, and in its place came a new level of grief. His boys would not desert. He knew them too well to find hope in that thought. They would willingly die, side by side, but they would never desert.
And that left death. Their perfect bodies shot down by Yankee killers, left to rot in the hot sun. Robley Paine had seen the bloated, bursting corpses, the black faces of the battle dead. He saw his boys in their toy-soldier outfits, shot dead in some thick tangle of brush, some impenetrable wood where they would never be found, where their flesh would become carrion.
Robley felt the sickness and the tears coming again. He stood up quick from his wing chair, paced vigorously for a few moments. The letter said nothing of the sort, just that the boys’ whereabouts were not known. No reason to give in to more grief. Certainly no reason to tell Katherine, who had just that morning emerged from their bedchamber, dressed in black, sallow and sunken-eyed, but nonetheless up.
He crumpled the ambiguous note, tossed it into the wastebasket. He would give no thought to the younger boys until he had some definite news, something irrefutable.
Two days later it arrived, in an envelope wrinkled, smudged, battered from hard use. The handwritten address said only “Robley and Katherine Paine, Yazoo, Mississippi,” but it had found them. The return address read “Headquarters, 1st Brigade, Army of the Shenandoah.”
Robley took the envelope, carried it into his library, staring at it the whole time, as if trying to divine something from the terse address. Army of the Shenandoah? He did not see how this could have anything to do with his boys. But any correspondence from any army was cause for dread.
At last he tore it open and extracted a piece of paper more wrinkled and dirty than the envelope, and splotched with the chocolate brown of dried blood. It was written in pencil on lined paper imperfectly torn from a notebook. It was in Jonathan’s hand.
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.
“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God…” Robley stammered the words as if gasping for breath. Dumbly he stared at the other paper enclosed in the envelope.
Dear Sir:
The enclosed note was found on the remains of a private soldier from Mississippi who had apparently joined with our brigade in the great battle at Manassas. I regret that the exigencies of our current military situation make it impossible for us to comply with the request herein. Please be assured that Private Paine fought nobly and was given a Christian burial.
Regretfully,
Colonel A. Cummings
33rd Virginia
Robley’s head fell back. The letters slipped from his fingers, fell fluttering to the floor. There it was. His boys had gone off with another regiment, thrown themselves into the hottest fighting, had died for their enthusiasm.
That was his Nathaniel, his Jonathan. Not deserters, quite the opposite. They had joined with another regiment, another army, had died unrecognized among strangers. If Jonathan had not lived long enough to scribble that note, then they would have simply disappeared, tumbled into unmarked graves.
A great deadness spread over Robley Paine, Sr., spread from his chest to his arms and legs and his head. A deadness that was more than death, because in death, he knew, his spirit would take flight, would join his beloved boys in Paradise. But now his soul was trapped on earth, trapped in this aching mortal coil, on this horrible, wretched earth, where Yankees could come down from their filthy cities and kill his beautiful boys.
He heard the swish of silk and his eyes shifted to the door of the library and he wanted to stand, to do something, to hide this from his wife, who could not take another of these hammer blows, but once again he could not move.
She stepped into the doorway, stood there in her black dress, stared at him with sunken eyes, and he stared back, silent. Robley wondered if this was how it had been for their Savior, Jesus, staring down from the cross into his mother’s eyes. Such unspoken grief passing between them, grief far beyond words.
Katherine Paine’s eyes shifted down to the letters on the floor, then back up to her husband’s. She stood there, unmoving, and Robley could see that she understood, even without reading the letters that lay on the rich carpet at his feet, she knew. She probably knew all along. Without a word she turned and glided away.
After a while, Robley stood and wandered out of the library. He had no notion of how long he had been sitting there, whether that time could be measured in minutes or days. His feet took him down the hallway and out the front door, onto the wide porch and its view of the Yazoo River.
He stepped down off the porch and walked the green lawn, down, down to the water. For a moment he thought he might throw himself in, let the water envelop him, sweep him away. He thought he might let himself sink down into the river’s warm embrace, but he was not certain. He seemed to have no power one way or another, as if it was not his decision to make. He would just have to wait and see what happened.
He stopped at the edge of the stream and stared into it and realized that he was not going to throw himself in, though he was not sure why not. Perhaps there was something else he was supposed to do.
Robley turned, as he always did, looked back at the house, the great oak tree with its spreading limbs. He squinted at the tree, cocked his head. There was something not right with it. He could see nothing different about the tree, but still there was something not right.
And then it occurred to him: the spreading branches, the welcoming arms. Who was it that the tree would welcome? The arms of the tree were open to the northward, which was why Robley had envisioned them welcoming back his boys, come home from the fight. But his boys would not come home. So who was the tree to welcome?
“Damn that thing…” Robley said. He was breathing hard. He could not endure the sight of it, the great billow of green leaves, the limbs like spread arms. There was nothing, and no one, whom he would welcome now. Just the opposite. His boys had left the sanctuary of Paine Plantation and now they were dead. It was up to him, Robley Paine, to keep the rest of the world at bay. The tree was no longer a reflection of Robley’s heart.
He walked quickly back up the lawn, calling for the overseer. “Mr. Holling! Mr. Holling! Holling!” He stamped up the lawn, stopped twenty feet in front of the hateful tree.
“Holling!”
Four minutes later, Holling came from around the house, walking fast. He was a stout, greasy man with dirty clothes and ugly habits, and Robley did not like him. But he was of that breed who became overseers on plantations and excelled at the work. Robley had never met a good overseer who was also a decent human being. The two traits did not naturally coexist in a man.
Holling approached fast, laboring for breath. “You called, Mr. Paine?” he asked, stopping short, and Robley could see t
he man’s visible reaction to his employer’s appearance. “Sir?”
“I’m going to do some cutting on this tree,” Paine said, nodding toward the oak. “I need ten of the field hands with axes and saws, boys who can climb. I need ladders and a team to drag the brush away.”
Holling’s eyes shifted from Paine to the oak and back again. “Cutting…on the tree…sir?”
“Yes, damn you.”
“Ah…the niggers is all out in the fields, Mr. Paine, gettin’ in the cotton.”
“Damn the…goddamned cotton, Holling, let it rot! I don’t give a tinker’s damn about cotton. Get the hands and get them now!”
“Yassuh!” said Holling, who knew when to shut up and act. He turned and ran off.
Why did he not go to war? Paine thought. Why did that mean bastard live while my boys did not?
Overseers were too valuable to send off to fight. The meanest, vilest, most violent of men, but they were needed in the South to keep the Negroes in line and could not be spared to march off and fight the Yankees. So the best of the South had to go in their place.
After some time, Holling returned leading a dozen field hands, who carried among them tall ladders and axes and saws, and the last man was leading a two-horse team in traces. Robley could see the black men looking around, could see the apprehension in their faces. Their daily routine did not vary much. Any change was cause for concern.
“Listen here, you all,” Robley addressed his slaves. “I mean to greatly alter the look of this tree. We’ll start at the top. Who here is the best climber?”
The men shuffled their feet, looked at the ground, shot questioning glances at one another. Paine felt the frustration boiling up and he tried to hold it back.
“Very well. Billy, I have seen you shoot up an apple tree like a squirrel. You go to the top branches. Someone give Billy a saw. Set that ladder against the tree, that’ll get you to the lower branches. We are starting at the top, taking the branches clean off.”
Glory In The Name Page 22