Glory In The Name

by James L. Nelson

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 surpr
ising.

  “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.