Thieves of Mercy

by James L. Nelson

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Had the ship not been lifted, so as to render her unfit for action, a desperate contest must have ensued with a force against us too great to justify much hope of success; and as battle is not their occupation, they [the pilots] adopted this deceitful course to avoid it.

  FLAG OFFICER JOSIAH TATTNALL

  TO STEPHEN R. MALLORY

  Midshipman Hardin Littlepage brought the news: Lieutenant Jones’s boat was back.

  Flag Officer Tattnall’s health had not improved in the hours that Jones had been gone. The thought of the army summarily abandoning Norfolk did not help. The idea of the soldiers handing over to the Yankees the Gosport Naval Shipyard and everything it meant to the Confederate Navy, without so much as a shot fired, ground him down like a boot heel on his neck. He lay in his bunk. He felt sick to his stomach, and feverish.

  If Norfolk was gone, then the Virginia was floating around untethered, like one of those damned hot air balloons the Yankees were using to spy on Confederate lines, a balloon that had broken loose. And she couldn’t operate that way for long. We’ll take her up the James River, he thought, but that did little to mollify him. There was hardly room enough in Hampton Roads for the beastly ship to turn. What would she be able to do in the James River?

  With a sigh, then a groan, Tattnall stood. His cabin, such as it was, was on the berthing deck and all the way forward. He made his way up the ladder to the gun deck, and then to the hurricane deck. He stepped into the open air just as Jones’s boat was sliding alongside. A minute later the lieutenant was reporting.

  “Sir, I went ashore at the naval yard, which was in flames. Everything was going up, sir, beyond saving. No one was there. No officers, anyway. One yard worker told me the officers had left by train for Richmond. From there I went to Norfolk, to confer with General Huger, as you instructed. I was told Huger and the army had also left by train. The enemy was within half a mile of the city; the mayor was treating for surrender.”

  Tattnall nodded, felt more and more unwell. He wanted to sit but he made himself stand. He could see the concern in Jones’s face. The lieutenant paused in his narrative, unsure if he should continue.

  “Go on,” Tattnall said. He did not need the sympathy of a junior officer.

  “On the way back upriver, I discovered that all the batteries on the river have been abandoned, including Craney Island. I encountered a boat with two women aboard, fleeing the city, and later saw another boat, which might have been the same, I couldn’t tell. It put into Tanner’s Creek and I didn’t think it important enough to follow. Other than that, there was no traffic on the river.”

  Tattnall nodded again and leaned on the rail. It was what he had feared, but also what he had expected. Damn those army sons of bitches! The thought of them piling on the trains and rumbling out of town for Richmond made Old Tat furious. They’ve done for me, the bastards….

  “Very well, Mr. Jones. Good work. Please pass the word for Lieutenant Jones.”

  Two minutes later the executive officer, Lieutenant Catesby ap R. Jones, climbed up through a casemate hatch, saluted, nodded to Pembroke Jones. Tattnall had Lieutenant John Jones repeat his report to Lieutenant Catesby Jones.

  “Gentlemen,” Tattnall said when Jones had finished, “as you know, the pilots say we can get the ship up the James River, get her within forty miles of Richmond, if we lighten her by four feet. That will be a hell of a job, but it will be worth it, I think. We might be able to do some good in the James, take on the boats the Yankees have sent up there. Anyway, it is the course I would choose, but I would like your opinions as well.”

  Both officers were nodding assent before Tattnall had even finished speaking. “It is the most judicious course, sir,” Catesby Jones said.

  “I agree,” John Jones said.

  “Very well,” said Tattnall, “assemble the men.”

  Catesby Jones saluted and summoned the boatswain, who began piping the men topside. Soon they were all there, crowding on the casemate roof, over three hundred men: naval officers, blue-water sailors, landsmen, mechanics, dockworkers, laborers, soldiers, whoever they had been able to scrape up to haul a gun tackle or shovel coal into a furnace. But whatever they had been before, however disparate a group, they were now the crew of the Virginia, battle tested, and Flag Officer Tattnall loved them, just as he loved the ship under his feet.

  “Men,” he said, speaking as loudly as his weak lungs would permit, “here is the situation. I’ll give it to you straight. The army has abandoned Norfolk. The navy yard is in flames.”

  A murmur like a breeze through long grass swept through the men. When it subsided, Tattnall went on. “We must get Virginia up the James River, as close up to Richmond as she will go. We can aid in the defense of the capital, maybe take some of the enemy’s ships, or sink ’em. But that means we have to lighten her, toss over everything but the guns and powder. It will take a prodigious effort on your part, but it is the only way to save our ship. What say you?”

  They replied with cheers—three loud, genuine, enthusiastic cheers—and Tattnall could see that these men would do everything that they were capable of doing to see the Virginia safe, just as he would.

  “You make me proud,” he said over the dying cheers. “Go to it.”

  He watched the officers telling off the work parties, and he was grateful for their loyalty and their youth, their intelligence and energy, and he was jealous of it too. He wanted more than anything to be foremost in the effort to save the ship. He wanted to fling himself into the work with the kind of unfathomable energy he had known forty years ago. But he could not. He was old and sick. He made his way carefully back to his cabin, lay down on his bunk, and closed his eyes.

  Wendy watched Roger Newcomb pace and stare out over the water and pull his shattered watch from his vest pocket and stare at it and she thought, God alone will be able to save us from this madman.

  His grip on reality—apparently weak from the start—was getting weaker still. His muttering had increased in quantity while going down in volume, so that now what came out of his mouth was no more than an incoherent babble, like someone speaking in tongues. It was unnerving.

  Wendy’s wrists, like Molly’s, were still bound, the skin rubbed agonizingly raw by the rough cordage that now grated on the sores it had opened. She could feel the occasional trickle of blood running down her fingers. She could not see Molly’s hands, but she guessed they were just as bad.

  The gags, at least, had been removed. Once the Confederate boat had passed well clear of them, beyond shouting range, Newcomb had removed the strips of skirt from their mouths and interrogated them as to the identity of the men in the boat. Since Wendy had drawn his attention to the boat, she bore the brunt of his questioning.

  “Who are they? Who are they?!” He had kicked Wendy hard, sent her sprawling into the dirt. She spit out sand and blood.

  “You little cowardly bastard!” she shouted. “Strike a woman whose hands are tied?”

  Newcomb grabbed a handful of Molly’s hair, jerked it painfully so her head was back. He held the pistol to her temple. He did not speak and he did not have to.

  “Confederate Navy. We met them when they were going upriver. The officer said his name was Jones. Lieutenant John Jones.”

  “Lieutenant John Jones…What else did he say?”

  “Nothing. He asked if we needed help. He was a gentleman.”

  Newcomb ignored the implication, paced to the water, looked north and south. He came back again. “What else?”

  “Nothing.” Wendy could see the anger, driven by madness, and she thought she had better come up with something.

  “He called himself a ‘flag lieutenant,’” she offered. It had meant nothing to her, but apparently it meant something to Newcomb. He stood straighter, regarded her as if trying to divine the truth, paced back to the water. Jerked his watch from his vest and replaced it without even looking at it.

  It had been several hours since that question
ing, and they had not moved from their place in the high grass on Tanner’s Point. Once, Newcomb had said, “We’ll just wait here until the United States Navy comes upriver, and then we shall see.” The words had come out so lucid, so conversational that they took Wendy by surprise. But soon he was muttering again, and she could catch the words flag officer and Virginia and a few obscenities and other words that she thought she could understand, but she was not sure.

  Madness… There was no method in it.

  The sun went down, blazing red and orange right in their eyes as they faced west, and the moon rose in the deepening blue sky, until the land on the far side was no more than a dark shape in the moonlight and the ruffled surface of the water just visible.

  Wendy’s wrists were agony now, and she could hardly feel her hands. They seemed swollen and dull, dead things, and cool, like touching wet gutta-percha. She wondered how long her hands could remain tied like that before the damage was permanent. She wondered if she would live long enough for it to matter.

  With the fading light, the insects swarmed. They attacked her bleeding wrists with vigor, biting the torn flesh. She flailed her arms to the extent that she could, but she could not rid herself of them. She shook her hair over her face to drive the biting flies and mosquitoes away, but they would not be thwarted. She wanted to scream. She looked over at Molly. Their eyes met; the mutual fear and misery passed between them. But there was fire there, too, in Molly’s eyes, and Wendy was pleased to see it. Molly had not given up.

  Roger Newcomb paced the shoreline, looking out over the water, as if he were waiting for a ship that would arrive at any moment. But nothing came. Nothing moved on the water.

  The sharp edge of fear began to dull, misery began to overtake her, and despite the pain and the torment of the insects, Wendy felt her eyes begin to close. She lay down on her side, fell in the sandy dirt with a thump, unable to ease herself down with her hands. She closed her eyes. She thought of Newcomb putting a bullet through her head as she slept, and it no longer seemed the worst thing that could happen.

  Some time later she woke, startled awake by something, but she did not know what. She had no notion of how long she had been asleep, but she was stiff and groggy and she guessed it had been a few hours at least. She looked over at Molly, who apparently had also been asleep, and who was also now awake. Molly was looking toward the shore.

  The moon was higher now, casting more light on the land and the water. It fell on Roger Newcomb as he paced, waved his arms, stared up the shoreline, paced again. His movements were more frenetic than ever.

  “He saw something on the water,” Molly said, speaking in a barely audible whisper. It was the first thing she had said since Newcomb had taken their boat, and Wendy felt an irrational sense of relief at the sound of her voice.

  “What do you think?”

  Molly shook her head. “Yankee navy ship?”

  They were quiet again, listening. The frogs and the buzz of the insects made a blanket of sound through which little else could be heard. But there was something else. Wendy could hear it, just hear it, far off. The occasional clanking sound, the huff, the rippling water of a bow wave. It sounded like a steamer. A steamship coming down from Hampton Roads. The Yankee navy.

  The ten-foot path between where the women were lying in the grass and the open shoreline was pretty well trampled now, after hours of Newcomb’s obsessive shifting between his prisoners and his vigil on the beach, and Wendy could see a good section of the water from where she lay. She struggled to her knees, pushing up with hands she could not feel. She looked as far north as she could.

  At first there was nothing. Only the dark water, barely distinct from the land. But slowly, slowly, from the north, something came into view, something moving on the water. No masts that she could see, no paddle-wheel boxes, no high superstructure or sweeping sheer of gunnels. It did not seem to be a ship at all, just a dark menacing presence, some leviathan making its way toward Norfolk, something sent up from hell to punish them all, Yankee and Southerner alike.

  She stared at it, puzzled, cocked her head. And then like a flash of inspiration it came to her. She looked at Molly and Molly nodded. “Virginia,” she whispered. The mighty Confederate ironclad.

  It had been five hours before that when Josiah Tattnall returned to his cabin and stretched out in his bunk fully clothed—“all standing,” as the sailors said—save for his shoes and sword belt. He lay for a while in the dark, listening to the wild sounds of the men lightening the ship, the drag and bang of the dismantling: galley, cabins, mess tables, fresh water, spirits, food, boatswain’s stores, personal effects, all of it gathered up, wrenched free, carried up, tossed overboard. Gangs of men formed human chains to pass the tons of pig iron ballast up from the bilges.

  Tattnall could envision the great mass of jetsam floating around Virginia and piling up on the bottom. He wondered if they would go aground on all the material they were throwing over the side.

  He closed his eyes, enveloped by the din of the men struggling to save his ship. He had had command of her for less than two months, but he loved her as much as any ship he had ever sailed. She was the most powerful thing afloat in all the Americas. All the world, most likely. Proof of what the Confederate States of America could accomplish, even with so little.

  His thoughts drifted off to ships past, to when he was young and strong and never fell ill, when it seemed his life would go on forever and nothing would ever slow him down. He fell asleep and dreamed disquieting dreams of ships and stormy seas and threatening coasts.

  He awoke later with someone shaking his arm. He opened his eyes, came instantly awake, a thing bred into him from years of command, when a summons from dead sleep invariably meant he was needed to step in where disaster was imminent, when he had to rush topside and begin making decisions the instant his feet hit the quarterdeck.

  “Yes?” In the feeble light of a single lantern he could see the troubled face of Catesby Jones.

  “Sir, we have thrown over everything we can. We have raised the ship. She’s drawing eighteen feet now, sir.”

  “Very good.” Tattnall stood awkwardly. Jones made no effort to help, and Tattnall was glad of it. He felt feeble enough without receiving a patronizing hand. “Let’s get under way.”

  “Ah, sir…” Jones equivocated, and the tone in his voice made Tattnall look sharp at him. “There is a problem. The pilots now say they can’t take the ship above the Jamestown Flats, even with an eighteen-foot draft.”

  “They…” Tattnall did not know what to say. “They say…they can’t get the ship up the river?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well…goddamn them, they have said any number of times they could, if we raised her to eighteen feet. You have heard them. Damn it, I asked them again just this evening!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tattnall took a deep breath. He had to hear it from the pilots. Before he went into the rage he felt building, he had to hear what the pilots had to say.

  Without a word to Jones he stepped from his small cabin into the open space at the forward end of the berthing deck. The other cabins, he saw, had been disassembled, the bulkheads no doubt flung over the side, but his had been left untouched. In the light of the single lantern hanging from the overhead he found the ladder to the gun deck and climbed up, quicker than he had climbed a ladder in some years.

  The gun deck was more brightly lit, with lanterns down the centerline of the ship. Most of the ship’s company were there, within the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot casemate. Even with all those men the space looked empty now, with everything but guns gone by the board.

  Tattnall looked around quickly, then snapped to Jones, “Pass the word for the pilots.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jones hurried off. Two minutes later he returned with the pilots, Parrish and Wright, miserably in tow.

  “Sir,” Parrish said.

  “Sir,” Wright said.

  Tattnall glared at them. He meant to ask them
what this was all about, but he could not make the words come out. He was paralyzed by fury. The two pilots looked sheepish, miserable, and guilty.

  “Sir,” Parrish began again, “we represented to you that we could get the Virginia to within forty miles of Richmond. But you must understand, that was in the event that we had an easterly wind. You see, an easterly will raise the level in the river enough to carry eighteen feet that far up. But as you know, sir, we have had westerlies, two days of westerlies, and they have had quite the opposite effect. We simply do not have the depth of water now to get the ship upriver.”

  Tattnall was silent for a moment more. The pilots fidgeted like children. “Sir, if you could raise the ship to fourteen feet draft, I do believe we could get upriver,” Wright said, as if trying to be helpful.

  “She cannot be raised to fourteen feet,” Tattnall said.

  “Yes, sir. We are very sorry, sir, but we cannot raise the level of the water above what it is.”

  The whole thing seemed unreal, it was all too horrible. Tattnall had long seen the moment coming when Norfolk would fall to the Yankees. He had examined every option. There were only two that he would consider.

  The first was to save the ship. Lighten her, get her up to Richmond. The option he had chosen. But if that could not be done, then his second choice would have been an all-out assault on the Union Navy. Fling himself and his ship at the wooden walls, plow through them, tear them up the way Old Buck had done. Eventually the Virginia would have been rammed and sunk—the Yankees had brought ships to Hampton Roads for just that purpose—but not before the ironclad had struck the Federals another serious and devastating blow. Perhaps even sunk that damned Monitor once and for all.

  That second option had always held some appeal, suicidal though it was. Tattnall knew he would not live forever. Hell, he would be lucky to live through the war. To die with guns blazing, surrounded by the shattered fleet of an enemy, that was how an old man-of-war’s man should go. Like Nelson. And the men would have followed, would have stood to their guns with the water rising around their ankles, because they were the men of the Virginia, and they were Southerners. If the pilots had told him about the effect of the westerly wind, his decision that evening would have been very different.