Jonathan stared at the young man. Tough son of a bitch? He felt weak as a baby. “How did I get here?”
“You was at Manassas. Somehow you gots in wid da 33rd Virginia, got shot up awful bad. Near left for dead, but someone seen you was still breathing, so they patched ya up, sent ya here. You been crazy wid da fever for a week or more. No one knowed who you was, on account of you not bein’ with you regiment. We jest called you ‘ Mississippi.’ ’Cause dat’s what it says on you buttons.”
Jonathan swallowed and nodded. He could recall the bullets plucking at his coat, the waves of blue Yankees coming on, up that hill. He felt points of pain all over his body, places where the ache was not general but rather concentrated, as if he was being stabbed repeatedly in the same spots. But of all the aches, one clearly pronounced itself the worst.
“My leg…it hurts like hell…”
“Which one?”
Jonathan closed his eyes and thought about where the pain was. “Right…” he said. He opened his eyes again. Bobby was looking at him, and his expression was part sympathy, part amusement.
“I hates to tell you dis, but you ain’t got no right leg.”
Jonathan frowned at him. I just told you it hurts like hell… He struggled to lift his head and look down at his body, lying on the bed. He was covered with a white sheet, clean and sweet-smelling. At the far end of the bed he saw the point of white cloth made by the toes of his left foot. To the right there was nothing.
He fell back on the pillow, stared up at the ceiling.
“You be surprised,” Bobby was saying, “how often dat happens. Fella feels pain in a arm or a leg that ain’t even there no more.” He was trying to sound cheerful. Jonathan would have strangled him if he had had the strength to lift his arms.
It was coming back now, not a trickle of memory, but a flood tide. He had led Nathaniel to the fight and Nathaniel was dead. He recalled the look in his brother’s dying eyes, the death rattle as the life ran out of him on the field. He recalled the note he had written, stuffed in Nathaniel’s uniform.
His brother’s body would be back home now. Robley would have written their parents, told how Jonathan had persuaded Nathaniel to march off, just like all those other times he had lured his brother into trouble.
He closed his eyes against the grief and the hurt. He was crippled, his leg cut off by some army butcher. His parents and Robley Junior would despise him for what he had done, as well they might, the loathsome creature, to lure a brother to his death.
He felt the bed shift as Bobby stood and walked softly away and left Jonathan to lie there and envy the men left dead on the fields south of the Bull Run.
The Union navy was massing for something. Samuel Bowater had not been wrong in thinking so.
As the shipwrights swarmed over the Cape Fear, rebuilding her wheelhouse and galley, replacing panels in the sides of the deckhouse, patching holes and strengthening the bulwarks where the gun breeches made off, reports continued to come downriver of more and more ships gathering at Newport News and Hampton Roads.
As the burned-out wreck of USS Merrimack was transformed slowly into the ironclad CSS Virginia, Merrimack ’s old consorts, the Minnesota, Wabash, Monticello, Pawnee, and Harriet Lane , gathered as if for a reunion off Fortress Monroe. Also in attendance were the chartered steamers Adelaide and George Peabody, and the tug Fanny, all ships of the United States Navy. There were others as well, transports and battered old schooners, whose purpose was not clear.
Little, in fact, was clear, save that the United States Army and Navy were preparing to fall on some part of the Confederate coast.
July turned to August. The Cape Fear was returned to service, her superstructure repaired, her master’s cabin made better than it had been, with oak paneling, hinged windows, and a compass mounted over the bed. It was even extended by two feet aft, adding significantly to the volume therein. The former cabin had, after all, been no more than a bunk for a tugboat skipper, but now it was the great cabin of an officer of the Confederate States Navy.
August crept by, with its sweltering heat and dripping humidity. During the soft Virginia evenings, when the sun began to incline toward the west, and the Cape Fear was tied to the seawall or swinging on her hook, Hieronymus Taylor made his way aft to the fantail, violin under his arm, and sitting on the after rail coaxed lovely soft melodies from his instrument.
Moses Jones would soon drift aft, as if by pure chance, and he would lend his voice to Taylor’s music. They reminded Samuel, who would sometimes listen from the roof of the deckhouse, of two dancers in perfect sympathy with one another.
An illiterate coal passer and a poor, barely educated Southern peckerwood, but somehow, to Bowater’s amazement, they made music as if they were one person, and even he, who had no tolerance for the dreary sentimentality or the shallow joviality of popular music, found some merit in their performances. As did the other Cape Fears, who gathered every night to listen.
Early in the month the Yankees sent hot-air balloons aloft from the deck of a small steamer, with men in baskets suspended beneath to take a look at the Confederate works at Sewall’s Point. It was a novelty that warranted a few days’ discussions. And still the Union ships assembled, until they were so much a part of the coastline that neither Bowater nor any others of the Confederates on the shore south of Hampton Roads paid them any mind.
Until the afternoon of August 26, when they left.
It was a Monday. The day before, Bowater had wandered over to the riverfront park with a new canvas and easel. There had been several weeks of inclement weather, which had kept him from his usual painting, and that had made him anxious, a reaction which surprised him. It would not have occurred to him that he was anxious to see Wendy Atkins again, though thoughts of her still haunted him. More curiosity than anything, he told himself, a self-flagellating tendency to stoke his own irritation.
The Cape Fear was at the dock at Sewall’s Point, just south of Hampton Roads, off-loading ordnance. Despite the big Parrott gun in the bow and the twin howitzers, the tug was once again transporting supplies around the Elizabeth River. Bowater hoped to get into action again, indeed he never thought otherwise, but it would not be shelling the Union fleet. No one thought the United States Navy would be caught napping twice.
“Fleet’s getting up steam,” a captain of artillery noted as he and Bowater and Taylor watched the Cape Fears swaying a smoothbore thirty-two-pounder off the fantail and onto its waiting carriage.
“Is that a fact?” Here was some interesting news. The sharp edge that Bowater had felt after his fight with the steamer was now growing dull again.
Bowater and Taylor followed the gunner up the wooden steps, past the dusty earthworks, the mounds of dirt piled up to augment the fortification already in place.
They climbed up to the top of the rampart, above the black barrels of the guns that leered out over the water. Before them, spread out like a lake, the blue water of Hampton Roads. A little over three miles to the north, Fortress Monroe. Five miles off and a little north of west was Newport News Point, and between them, like a series of black dashes on the blue water, the massed fleet of the United States.
Bowater pulled his telescope from his pocket, snapped it open, and focused it north. He could pick out the Wabash and the Minnesota. Plumes of black smoke were crawling up from their stacks. Steam frigates getting underway. The wind was light out of the south. When Samuel Bowater was a young boy, no man-of-war could have left the Chesapeake Bay in those conditions. But the steam engine had changed that, had changed the entire nature of war at sea. Now schedules, and not wind and tide, dictated fleet movements. Now engineers lorded it over captains.
“That’s a lot of damned ships.” The artilleryman’s observation yanked Bowater from his reverie.
“And that don’t count the ships still on blockade. Or comin’ in from foreign ports,” Taylor added.
The three men stood silent for several minutes and looked at the fleet. The
profile of one of the big steamers began to change, to foreshorten.
“Wabash is underway,” Bowater said.
“Where you think they’re goin’?” the artilleryman asked.
“Hard to say. Charleston? Cape Fear? New Orleans? They have more choices than ships, to be sure.”
“Wherever it is,” Taylor said, “some poor Southrons are in for a whole lot of hurt.”
Thirty hours later, as the Cape Fear picked up her mooring off the dockyard, with the sun just a few hours from setting, they discovered where the fleet was bound, and who was in for the hurt.
“Boat’s putting out, sir.”
Ruffin Tanner, who had remained with the Cape Fear, was lashing the helm, looking out the wheelhouse window, as Bowater wrote in the log, 4:43-Done with engine.
Samuel turned and stepped across the wheelhouse and looked where Tanner pointed. A longboat pulling for them. Odd. He picked up the field glasses that he kept near the wheel, fixed the boat in the lenses. Flag Officer Forrest in the stern sheets. Odder still.
“Mr. Harwell!” The luff looked up from the foredeck. “It appears that Flag Officer Forrest is coming aboard. Please arrange for some kind of side party,” he said, and Harwell, who absolutely lived for such pomp, saluted and hurried off.
Five minutes later, Forrest stepped aboard to a credible display involving rifles and cutlasses and Eustis Babcock’s bosun’s pipe. Forrest exchanged salutes with the officers and Bowater led him up to the wheelhouse.
“They did a good job here, damned good,” Forrest said, looking around the rebuilt bridge and cabin and nodding his head. “They do good work, when they do work. Now see here, Bowater. Just got word. That damned Union fleet’s anchored at Hatteras Inlet. Got a chart?”
“Yes, sir.” Bowater pulled the chart of the coast from Cape Lookout to Cape Henry, unrolled it, and placed weights on the corners.
“There.” Forrest put a meaty finger down on the narrow Hatteras Island. “All those ships, you saw them. They’re going to blow hell out of the forts. We have two forts there, Hatteras and Clark. Gibraltar they ain’t.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve been there. Delivered ordnance to them twice now.”
“Yes, yes. ’Course you have. Good. Because you’re going to do it again. We’ve got to try and reinforce them. They don’t have above four hundred men, against all those abolition kangaroos Welles sent down there. Commodore Barron will be going down with Winslow soon as he can get underway. You’ll report to him. Get your ship alongside and get all the ordnance you can take.”
“And we are to leave?”
“Immediately, Captain. Immediately. As I hear it the Yankees are already knocking the stuffing out of those forts.”
“Aye, sir.” Bowater stepped over to the engine-room bell, gave a single jingle. Stand by. He waited to hear Hieronymus Taylor cursing from two decks down.
Twenty minutes later, they were tied up alongside the dockyard. With the fires freshly banked it took no time to get head up steam again. It took longer for Bowater to explain to a fuming Chief Taylor why his engine, which he had put happily to bed, was being called on once more. At last, when he seemed sure that Bowater understood the great favor being rendered, Taylor stooped to spread the fires in the boiler.
Goddamned engineers…
The ordnance workers were ready for them: a wagonful of shells and fuses, powder and round shot, whatever could be spared for the beleaguered forts on Hatteras.
With the sun an hour from setting, they cast off and headed downriver, to where the wide Elizabeth grew more and more narrow and channeled at last into the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, a thirty-five-mile cut through the wild Great Dismal Swamp.
The canal was mostly straight, and not terribly wide, only one hundred feet or so in most places. The vegetation grew right up to the banks, tall stands of cyprus trees lining the canal so that, in the gathering dusk, one had the sense of steaming down a city street, with tall buildings to port and starboard.
Samuel Bowater stood just outside the door of the wheelhouse, peering into the deep shadows that fell over the water. They were steaming at half ahead, the fastest that he dared go down that dark river.
“Come left, just a bit there…” he called into the wheelhouse, and Tanner repeated, “Left, just a bit…”
“Good…steady as she goes.” Bowater did not know how long they could keep this up, how dark would be too dark to steam down the canal. The sun was gone, and just the last tenacious threads of light were hanging in the west.
“A little right now…” And then the Cape Fear eased to a stop. Not a jarring crash, like hitting a rock, just a gentle cessation of movement, hardly noticeable, really, the feel of a slow-moving steamer running up on the mud.
Bowater reached up and gave the engine-room bell two jingles, stop. He looked forward, as far as he could, down the waterway, which was not far. The cyprus trees and the swamp grass seemed to melt into the water, so that he could not tell where one began and the other left off.
He grabbed the bell again, rang three jingles: done with engine.
All hands were called at eight bells in the night watch, four o’clock in the morning. In the predawn dark they ate and went to quarters.
Down in the engine room a grousing Hieronymus Taylor, bleary-eyed and rumpled, ordered Moses Jones to spread the fire while he stripped down, stumbled behind the condenser, and washed away some of the sleep and the film of grime and sweat under the warm spray of the engine room’s now functioning shower bath. He toweled off, dressed, lit a cigar, and was feeling something near content when the wheelhouse rang down one jingle, stand by, followed two minutes later by three bells and a jingle, full astern.
Taylor nodded to himself as he shifted the reversing lever and twisted the throttle open. Patrician put her in the mud…thought so…
Samuel Bowater leaned over the rail of the deckhouse. The water of the Dismal Swamp Canal, dyed brown by the tannin from the ubiquitous trees, was churning into a white froth, boiling up from the turns of the Cape Fear’s big prop. He looked up at the tree line, slipping ahead, as if the trees were marching on without them, but in fact it was the Cape Fear moving, backing out of her mud berth. He let out a quiet sigh of relief. It would have delighted Hieronymus Taylor to no end if they had had to use a steam winch to pull her off. The chief would have made simply giving the order a nightmare of humiliation.
They backed into the canal, and Bowater rang half ahead, then twenty minutes later, full ahead. It was warm and still behind the bulwark of cyprus trees, and the Cape Fear plowed her furrow south, and with each mile Bowater felt more and more anxious to get his cargo of ordnance to the forts before they were overrun by the Yankees.
They broke out of the Great Dismal Swamp before noon, steamed past Elizabeth City and down the Pasquotank River and into the wide-open water of Albemarle Sound, like a great saltwater lake. They chugged across the sound and past Roanoke Island and turned south toward Hatteras. To the east, the low, sandy dunes of the barrier islands. From the wheelhouse Samuel could catch glimpses of the Atlantic, stretching away to the horizon, beyond the barren yellow strips of land.
“Sir?” Thadeous Harwell stood forward of the wheelhouse, peering south with the big telescope. “Sir, perhaps you should see this.”
Bowater took the glass, pointed it in the indicated direction, sweeping along the line of low sand dunes and swatches of stunted trees, only just visible from the wheelhouse. He saw the dark vertical line that was the Cape Hatteras light. And then, south of that, he stopped.
It looked like a fog bank, or a low-lying cloud, but Samuel knew it could not be those things. It was smoke from artillery, the cumulative output of the guns of the United States fleet, billowing up high in the air, a dull gray cloud rising as high as the lighthouse itself.
“Dear God…” Bowater muttered. It took a frightening number of big guns to make a cloud like that. He wondered if they were too late. It did not seem possible the Confederates could stand up
to such pounding.
For the rest of the morning and afternoon they plowed their way south. The Cape Fear was moving as fast as she could, a bit more than five knots. Samuel Bowater, graduate of the Navy School, understood displacement and theoretical hull speed, was familiar with William Froude’s latest Wave Line Theory, but that did not stop him from hating it all, and wishing a little more speed from the deep-draft tug.
They were still miles away when they heard the cannon fire, a deep rumble, very like thunder, but continuous, absolutely unrelenting. Soon they could see the spray of dirt and sand as the shells exploded on the low forts and the island, the infrequent jets of water as the Yankee ordnance overshot its targets and dropped into Pamlico Sound, on the landward side of Hatteras Island.
It was late in the afternoon when Bowater conned the Cape Fear into the shallow harbor, more an indentation in the beach, behind Hatteras Island. The screams of shells through the air, the constant explosions on the fort and the beach around, blotted out any other sound; the Cape Fear’s engines, the anchor chain running out, the wind, which was brisk, everything. It was as if the fort was under a rain cloud, an isolated cloud that poured its deluge down on that spot alone. Hardly a shot fell that did not kick up a spray of earth from the ramparts. The gunfire from the fleet was deadly accurate.
Bowater picked up the field glasses, focused them on Fort Hatteras. The dirt was flying in tall brown spouts with each explosion of the Yankee ordnance, flying skyward like surf hitting a rocky shore. He could see no movement from the fort, save for the flying earth and the Confederate flag, standing straight in the stiff wind.
He shifted his gaze to the north, three-quarters of a mile. Fort Clark seemed to be spared the Yankees’ attention. He could see no explosions there, no rain of shells.
“Oh, damn…” It was not clear at first. He had to take a longer look. But then he saw it was not the Confederate flag flying on the flagpole, it was the Stars and Stripes.
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