Thieves of Mercy

by James L. Nelson

  “Now, Sullivan,” Bowater explained, “you should understand, with Shakespeare, sometimes the language can be a little hard to follow.” Bowater’s chief hope was that Shakespeare’s language would be so foreign to Sullivan that he would not notice the striking similarities between Hamlet and the plot of Mississippi Mike, Melancholy Prince of the River, that Bowater had been feeding him.

  “Aw, hell, Cap’n, language ain’t no problem. You should hear how some a these dumb-asses along the river talks. If I can understand them ignorant cusses, reckon I’ll have no problem with this here burlesque.”

  Bowater was going to point out that Hamlet was not exactly burlesque, but he realized that any interpretation was possible with the Theatre Troupe of the South, so he kept his mouth shut.

  They were ten minutes in restless anticipation before the house lights dimmed and the footlights came up and the sentinels Bernardo and Francisco came from stage right and left. They were wearing costumes reminiscent of Roman soldiers, which Bowater guessed were left over from an Easter pageant. Horatio and Marcellus soon joined them onstage, and hard on their heels, and moving like a somnambulist, the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

  The white greasepaint on his face made him look like the inverse of a minstrel, and it occurred to Bowater that it would have been funny to cast a black man in the role, for just that reason. A black man in whiteface. But clearly the Theatre Troupe saw nothing amusing in their production of Hamlet.

  Mississippi Mike jabbed Bowater in the ribs. “You was right, about the ghost,” he said in a loud whisper.

  “What?”

  “About the ghost. You said folks loves to see ghosts in things, and I reckon you was right. See, they got a ghost too.”

  The ghost drifted around the stage, wide-eyed, looking more confused than vengeful, and then drifted off at the sound of a stagehand doing a rooster call, stage right.

  Claudius, Polonius, Laertes, Gertrude, and Hamlet came and went upon the stage. Mississippi Mike squinted up at them, shook his head every once in a while, trying to follow the story line. Hamlet, with great moans of dismay, sawing the air with his arms, expressed the wish that his too, too solid flesh would melt, and Bowater wished it would too, and soon. He decided that the Theatre Troupe of the South was creating as grand a parody of Hamlet as Mississippi Mike’s.

  From back in the darkened house came a low buzz from the audience, a general restlessness, the occasional loud voice or shout of derision. As Bowater had guessed, the entertainment was not what that crowd had expected. The mood was growing volatile as it dawned on the audience that the play contained no burlesque and that the next act would not be a minstrel show, just more of the same, men in stockings and big hats.

  Horatio entered, stage left, and said, “Hail to your lordship,” to which Hamlet, exhausted from his ennui, said, “I am glad to see you well, Horatio! or I do forget myself.”

  Mississippi Mike’s elbow struck again. “They gots a Horatio too, ’cept he ain’t a darky. I guess when you come up with some good ideas like we done, you ain’t gonna be the only one’s gonna think of it.”

  “No doubt. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were even more things in common with our book. It’s perfectly normal.”

  Mike listened for a minute more, then asked, “What in hell are they all talkin about?”

  “I’m not sure,” Bowater said. “Something about a king.”

  Mississippi Mike nodded and turned his big face back to the stage. He squinted and shook his head through the next few scenes, and Bowater was beginning to think the big man might just sit through the whole show and never have a notion of what was taking place on stage.

  It was around Act I, Scene 5 that things began to go sour. Bowater, finding the ghost no longer amusing, stole a glance at Sullivan as Sullivan stared and frowned at the stage. Sullivan turned and looked at Bowater, too fast for Bowater to avert his eyes, and Sullivan said, “If I ain’t mistaken, that there ghost was goin on about some murder and poison and some such, and I could just swear I heard somethin about incest and marryin a queen what was that Hamlet’s mother. You thinkin the same as I’m thinkin?”

  “I am thinking nothing,” Bowater assured him.

  “Hmm. All right, you just let me do the thinkin, then.”

  Sullivan turned back to the play, and Bowater could see he was judging it in a different light now, scrutinizing it for similarities to his own literary efforts. He heard Taylor whisper, “So how you likin her so far, Sullivan?” and Sullivan say, “I ain’t sure, Chief, I ain’t so sure.”

  Act I gave way to Act II and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern made their appearance. Sullivan shifted uncomfortably, frowned, opened his mouth to speak but closed it before he did. Act III rolled around and Bowater was not certain he could stomach much more of the Theatre Troupe of the South, but he was kept firm in his seat by Mississippi Mike Sullivan, who looked more and more as if he was about to explode. Hamlet ran his sword through a hidden Polonius and Mike turned to Bowater and said, “Goddamn! Do you see what’s goin on here?” He did not whisper.

  “There do seem to be some similarities, but you know, Sullivan, there are classic plots that are often resurrected—”

  “Classic, my Royal Bengal.” He turned back to the stage, just as Claudius was instructing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to escort Hamlet to England, and that was the last straw. Sullivan leaped to his feet, pointed an accusatory finger at the stage, shouted, “You dirty dogs! Where the hell you get your hands on that? You answer me!”

  The confusion on Hamlet’s face was well worth the price of admission. The generally loquacious Dane was at a loss for words. His mouth opened and closed like a dying fish.

  “You give me some answers, now!” Sullivan advanced on the stage. Bowater glanced over and met Taylor’s eyes and Taylor smiled as if this were the most amusing thing he had ever seen, which it might have been.

  Bowater leaped to his feet. “Sullivan, let’s forget this and—”

  “Forget it? Forget it, hell!” Sullivan roared. “It’s your damned ideas they’s stealin, Cap’n, and I won’t stand fer it!”

  Someone farther back in the house, lost in the dark, shouted, “Sit down, you dumb bastard, and shut your trap!”

  “I’ll shut your trap for you!” Sullivan shouted back.

  The shouter replied, “I’d truly like to see you try!” but Sullivan was not paying attention to him. In a surprisingly graceful leap he mounted the stage and advanced on Hamlet, grabbing him by the big round frilly collar around his neck and jerking him close. “You got yer hands on my book, you dirty lyin dog, and I want to know how!”

  “Sullivan, get the hell down here!” Bowater shouted, but his voice was lost in the chorus of boos and shouts from the already restless audience.

  “I swear,” Sullivan said, drawing back a fist, “I’m gonna beat your brains out if you don’t start talkin.”

  Hamlet held up his hands to ward off the blow, shook his head in silent pleading. Bowater wondered if the Theatre Troupe of the South had received such treatment at the hands of the crowned heads of Europe. Most likely, if the crowned heads were at all discriminating.

  “Get off the stage, you fat ox!” shouted a man just behind Bowater.

  Hieronymus Taylor turned on him. Taylor was on his feet, as were most of the audience now. “You want him off, you go get him off!” Taylor shouted. “If you got the grit!”

  “Grit? I’ll show you grit!” The man bounded over the seats and clambered up onstage. The friends he left behind urged him on as if he were a fighting cock in a ring.

  Bowater glared at Taylor. “Just tryin to be helpful,” the engineer said, grinning.

  “You’re going to see the result of your helpfulness here any second!” The mood was ugly, explosive, the audience filling the dark theater with taunts, curses, orders for Sullivan to get the hell offstage. The cast of the play had spilled out from behind the curtain, but now they were backing away as they gauged the atmosphere in th
e place.

  The man from behind Bowater gained the stage and charged at Sullivan and Sullivan punched him in the face with his right hand even as he maintained his grip on Hamlet’s frilly collar with the left. The man hit the stage and his friends howled and jeered. He bounded up and flung himself at Sullivan again.

  Bowater sensed a shifting in the crowd, the mob closing in, pulled by the action on the stage, which they were enjoying much more than they had the previous performance.

  Sullivan let go of Hamlet, who quickly retreated, stage right, and turned to the man flailing him with his fists. The attacker was sinewy and tough, but a fraction of Sullivan’s size. Sullivan grabbed him by the crotch with one hand, the shirt collar with the other, and with apparently little difficulty hoisted him aloft, charged for the edge of the stage, and flung him clean over Bowater’s head and into the outraged faces of his cronies.

  That was the moment when the whole place erupted. Like an army crazed for blood and ordered to charge, the audience swept forward, climbing over seats, charging down the aisles. Bowater raced to the stage with Taylor thumping after him. They turned, backs to the raised platform, ready to meet the onslaught.

  One of the men from the seats behind them charged and Taylor caught him in the midriff with his crutch and doubled him up, then dropped him with a roundhouse. Bowater ducked a wild swing, shoved the man back, thought, We’re dead men…two hundred against three….

  From behind and up onstage came a wild shout, a kind of prolonged crazy yelp, a hair-raising battle cry, and three hundred pounds of Mississippi Mike Sullivan sailed overhead as he flung himself bodily onto the massed and charging crowd. A dozen men went down with Sullivan on top of them, a heap of flailing arms and legs, flying slouch hats, and cracked boots kicking the air and one another.

  Bowater took a painful punch in the chest but managed to work an elbow to his assailant’s jaw before the follow-up landed.

  Taylor wielded his crutch like a quarterstaff and his expression was maniacal. “Come on, come on, you bastards!” he shouted to the crowd at large, jabbing and swinging, felling a teamster with a blow to the side of the head, taking a fist in the jaw. Grinning and cursing, he worked the crutch with surprising efficiency, deflecting arms and legs, striking with quick jabs and sweeping blows.

  Sullivan was roaring like a bull, knocking men right and left, but even as he shouted Bowater could see the smile working on his face.

  There were knots of fighting men all over the theater, and Bowater realized as he fended off a punch with his left, jabbed with his right, that it was not hundreds against three, it was a free-for-all, all hands in, a chance to settle old scores or beat up on someone new or just release some tension in a debauchery of violence.

  He saw someone balance on the back of a chair, above the mob, then launch himself into the air. He hit Sullivan square in the chest, and the two went down in a heap, taking half a dozen with them. To his right Bowater heard a strangled voice. “You…son…of…a…”

  He turned. Some scraggly-looking peckerwood had climbed up on the stage, got an arm around Taylor’s neck, was choking the life out of him, even as he tried to fend off all comers with his crutch.

  “Damn you!” Bowater vaulted up onstage, the tails of his gray frock coat swirling around his legs. The man choking Taylor was kneeling down, and Bowater gave him a brogan in the ribs that sent him sprawling. Upstage he could see Claudius and Laertes kicking the hell out of Hamlet, who lay curled on the boards with his arms over his head, while Gertrude screamed at them to stop.

  Bowater was wondering if he should interfere, for the sake of art, or let them go for the same reason, when he was hit with a flying tackle, waist high, and went down hard on the stage. He kicked his way free, taking several blows as he did, sent his unknown assailant flying with a well-placed foot to the chest.

  The shouting seemed to build, there was a new quality to it, and Bowater looked out toward the house but he could see nothing beyond the footlights. He could hear feet pounding, men running in or out or both. He heard the word “Cops!” shouted above the tumult, and then there was someone else trying to take a jab at him and he could think of nothing but self-defense.

  He was a dirty-looking fellow with only a few teeth, and they were not much to talk about, a slouch hat that had somehow remained on his head, filthy dungarees. He was small and scrappy, looked mean. He caught Bowater in the stomach and doubled him up. Bowater crossed his forearms in front of his face and they caught the uppercut that he knew was coming. The arms saved Bowater’s teeth, but still the force of the blow flung him to the stage.

  He rolled stage right. The man kicked at where he had been but his foot found only air. Bowater kicked out at the leg he stood on and dropped him like a bail of cotton.

  At his right hand, Bowater saw a sword—Claudius’s sword, by the looks of it, which must have been ripped from the actor’s belt. He wrapped his fingers around the grip, flicked his wrist, and the scabbard flew off, revealing a dull, tarnished, rust-splotched blade, but a blade nonetheless.

  Bowater scrambled to his feet, came on guard just as his attacker was ready to charge. The man stopped, eyes on the still-sharp point that hovered inches from his face. The man grinned and drew a bowie knife a foot and a half long, with a hand guard, like the men aboard the General Page carried.

  “Is there some reason you feel the need to fight me?” Bowater asked. “Isn’t this a bit absurd?”

  The man shrugged, as if the question were too weighty, and lunged with the knife. But there was no way he was getting past Bowater’s defense, because now they were fighting in the manner to which Bowater was born.

  He parried, knocked the big knife aside, brought the blade up so the assailant, wide-eyed, was staring at the point mere inches from his throat. Bowater need only straighten his arm and the man was dead.

  The man backed away, took a new grip on the bowie knife, tried to see how he could get past that snakelike blade. Shoes pounded across the stage but Bowater did not dare take his eyes from the man. And then a voice shouted, “Put up your weapons, put them up! That’s a police order!”

  Without even a beat the man with the bowie knife turned and fled backstage, a blue-clad officer chasing behind. Bowater tossed the sword to the stage and it clattered at the feet of another policeman, who was pointing a gun at him. The policeman looked him up and down and said, in a tone of pure contempt, “Look at you, an officer, brawling like a regular plug-ugly. You should be ashamed.”

  TWENTY

  I have also desired Captain Lee to abandon the navy yard…destroying, if practicable, what he can not save. I beg that the Virginia may cover these operations….

  GENERAL JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON

  TO FLAG OFFICER JOSIAH TATTNALL

  They stepped tentatively through the iron gates of the shipyard, Wendy leading, Molly following. They entered the way one might enter a stranger’s house where the front door was left open. Wendy’s first impulse was to call out “Hallo?” but she resisted, understanding that that was absurd.

  They walked farther in, over gray cobblestones flecked with black soot. Molly said nothing, but she followed now without being begged or pulled along, and Wendy hoped some of the shock of Newcomb’s assault was dissipating, that her aunt’s senses were returning.

  They could feel the heat of the flames, though the nearest burning building was several hundred yards away. The fires rose three and four stories high, brilliant even in the direct sun, and in the heart of the flames, black and half caved in, Wendy could just make out the huge A-frame ship houses, the buildings that housed ropewalks and storehouses and the various shops.

  One year and twenty days before, the retreating Yankees had set fire to the shipyard in what the Confederacy regarded as an unprecedented act of vandalism. Now the retreating Confederates had done the same.

  “Dear God…” Wendy said, looking wide-eyed at the destruction. Molly said nothing. They walked on, walked toward the only part of the shipya
rd where there were no burning buildings, the wide area where the dry dock opened onto the river, the only direction in which they did not meet a wall of flames.

  “Molly, they might have sailed,” Wendy said, hoping to dull the blow to Molly if the fleet had gone, if Tucker had abandoned them. But her voice did not carry over the low-pitched furnace-roar of the flames, a dull, constant, near-deafening growl, punctuated with cracks and snaps and the shudder of something big collapsing in the inferno. Wendy shouted, “They might have sailed without us!”

  Molly nodded but said nothing, and Wendy was not certain she heard, or if she understood.

  They plunged deeper into the dockyard. They were surrounded by burning buildings now, to the right and left, the closest less than fifty yards away. The heat was sharp on Wendy’s hands and face; the black smoke rolled around them, engulfing them and then lifting on the breeze to give them a moment’s fresh air before falling on them again. They coughed and staggered on.

  Wendy wondered if she had made a mistake, if she should not have tried to lead them across the burning yard. Surely the men who had fired the buildings were long gone. She felt the near approach of panic, wished above all things that there were someone to whom she could defer. She did not want to make these decisions. But there was only Molly, and Molly was like a sleepwalker now.

  Wendy turned and looked back, wondering if they should go back the way they had come, leave the yard through the main gate before the flames closed around them and blocked that route. But she could no longer see the gate or the low brick wall that surrounded the shipyard. It was lost in the smoke and clouds of ash, in the orange and red flames. She was no longer certain of what direction they would walk to find the gate. Press on, she thought. What more could they do?

  Then through the roar of the flames came an explosion, deafening even through the layers of noise, jarring like thunder right overhead. The ground trembled beneath their feet, and to their left one of the massive walls of flame lifted off, flame shooting sky-ward like a giant cannon pointed straight up.