“We have to get off the boat,” Josephine said. She eyed her mother’s dress, which had layers and layers of petticoats, most of which she would remove as she danced, until she was practically down to her stockings. Rhinestones and sequins weighed down the outer layer. “Get undressed. Hurry.”
The Colonel came out as the women started working each other’s clasps and loops. He glanced at the stacks, then turned a skeptical eye to Josephine. “Seems a lot of fuss for nothing. I really don’t think a stack fire is going to make the entire—”
He never finished his sentence.
A tremendous flash of light lit up the night sky. A boom and a concussion of air threw Josephine off her feet. She landed on her back, ears ringing, head cloudy. Barely conscious. A column of fire and debris shot skyward from the center of the boat. As she lay stunned, the debris began to rain down. The heavier pieces landed first: twisted pieces of steaming metal, giant, flaming beams of wood. This was followed by burning furniture, spears of broken wood, barrels, chunks of wood, and people. Many, many people. They fell broken and torn in pieces all around, on the boat and in the water. A bloody leg slapped wetly onto the deck near Josephine’s head, followed by the entire torso of a man. Then something—dear God!—that looked like a bloody doll but that she knew was not.
Josephine struggled to rise. She couldn’t stand and fell again. Her head was swimming. Her limbs were lead and wouldn’t do what she told them to do. The eerie silence in the wake of the explosion was replaced by the roar of fire and the screaming of those still living.
At last, she began to recover her wits and regained her feet. All around lay the dead and dying. They were burned, broken, scalded by boiling water, mangled and twisted. Dozens and dozens. The deck was on fire all around, and the entire center of the boat had turned into a mass of flames.
She found the Colonel, rising slowly to his feet with a stunned expression on his gaping face and blood streaming from both nostrils. And she found her mother, groaning, clutching her head. Her hair lay spread across a flaming piece of the paddle-wheel guard and was burning up on the end. Josephine struggled to pull her mother clear of the fire.
Cairo Red was an inferno, with flames already shooting skyward even as the smaller bits of debris continued to rain down. The boat was listing. Water would be gushing into the hull. It would soon go down.
The Colonel grabbed Josephine and spun her around. His eyes were wide, his shirt wet from his bloody nose. “Where is the box?”
“Box?”
“The lacquer box? Where the devil did you put it?”
“We’re going down. Help me get Mama out of her dress.”
“Where is it?”
“Damn the box. We’re going down.”
He shook her like a terrier with a rat. “Tell me!”
“Behind my cot.”
He turned and ran off toward the stairs that led up to the promenade. The fire was spreading rapidly along the upper levels, and as she looked after him in dumbfounded amazement, she figured she had seen the last of him. The fool had survived the explosion only to be burned to death.
She turned and struggled to get her mother out of the dress. The clasps, hooks, and loops that had been so easy to unfasten moments earlier were now wet from the water sloshing over the deck as the boat listed onto its side. Josephine’s fingers were numb, as if they’d been struck by a hammer. All around, people screamed and struggled. Many were dead, others horrifically wounded and suffering. Some threw themselves into the water, or were flailing and drowning in the river, their stricken faces illuminated by the burning barrels, furniture, and chunks of decking that floated downstream with the general conflagration.
Josephine got the outer dress off her mother. After that, the rest of the layers came off quickly until the woman was down to her undergarments. Josephine started on her own clothes. Her mother was still woozy but seemed to be recovering. She looked up.
“Josie. What—”
“Mama, we have to swim for shore.” Josephine couldn’t get the clasp off at her neck. The dress was torn and the metal hook twisted. She kept struggling.
The deck heaved beneath them. The water was swirling all around now, and as she looked up and into the raging fire of the upper decks, she saw with horror that the remnants of the side-wheel, the heavy walking beam, and the saloon were already submerged. The remaining stack tilted toward them, still leaking smoke. It crashed onto the aft deck with a shudder. And then Cairo Red sank beneath them.
Josephine grabbed her mother by the hair as the rail snagged them and threatened to drag them to the bottom. Water sucked at her, tugging downward. She fought against it, got her mother to the surface, sputtering. Josephine hooked a hand under her mother’s chin and kicked her way toward shore.
Josephine had grown up a river rat, with no fear of the water. She’d learned to swim so young that she couldn’t ever remember not knowing. She’d long since stopped diving overboard in her underclothes as she’d done as a child, but she hadn’t forgotten how to swim.
But her confidence quickly faded. Her mother was thrashing in terror; Josephine’s own clothes were waterlogged and tugging her down. She struggled to keep both of their heads above water. There was no way she’d make it all the way to shore. A big chunk of decking floated by, and she grabbed for it. But there was a man fighting for it, too, one of his arms twisted and mangled. He couldn’t reach the planking, but he did get his free arm hooked around Josephine’s neck. He tried to climb on her back.
She went under, struggling and kicking to get away from his desperate lunges. When she’d come up and fought herself free, she’d lost her mother. Crying out, still fending off the wounded man, she looked about. A large chunk of the burning upper deck of Cairo Red was still floating to one side, and it cast the river in light, illuminating the dead and dying. Josephine spotted her mother, bobbing along, still flailing.
“Mama!”
Josephine swam after her. She fought clear of another bit of flaming debris, two more injured, screaming people who tried to grab her, and then was logjammed behind several floating barrels. By the time she got around them, her mother had disappeared.
“Mama!” Panic was spreading in Josephine’s breast. “Mama!”
Her voice drowned in the screams of other survivors. She swam around, calling, begging for help from any who seemed to be swimming uninjured toward the shore. Twice more she fought off screaming, frightened survivors. She was too exhausted from her own struggles to help and still desperate to find her mother. When she could swim no more, she clawed her way to shore and hauled herself through the mud to throw herself feebly onto the bank. The last burning wreckage drifted downriver and out of sight. From up and down the riverbank came the cries of the wounded, people hollering for help or shouting out for loved ones.
Josephine fought off her exhaustion and climbed to her feet. She waded into the shallow water near the bank and splashed downriver, calling for her mother. There were dozens of survivors all along the bank. None of them were her mother. Josephine continued, ignoring pleas for help in her desperation. About an hour later, the Colonel must have heard her voice, because he was calling to her from a dry, grassy bank. She pushed through the darkness until she found him. He did not have Claire. He hadn’t seen her.
But of course he had rescued his precious Oriental box. He’d even managed to haul it to shore in a rapidly emptied cask of tobacco, so it wasn’t even wet. He tried to take Josephine in his arms and comfort her, but she beat on his chest, uttering every riverboat oath she’d ever heard, until he relented and let her go.
“Maybe she . . . ,” he began. “She might have . . . somewhere on the riverbank. We’ll keep looking.”
“She didn’t make it! You let her die!”
“It was an accident. Nobody could have known it.” He sounded shaken. “Claire!” he shouted into the darkness, as if that would help. Then, to Josephine. “We can keep looking.”
“I’ll keep looking. You stay
here. I want nothing to do with you. Do you understand? I never want to see you again.”
“I’m so sorry.” He reached out for her.
“Leave me alone.”
“Here, take this at least. Please.” He had reached for her to shove the Oriental box into her hands.
“I don’t want your confounded box, I want my Mama back.”
“Please, keep it. Take it with you. It’s very valuable.”
He turned and started shouting for Claire again. This only made her more upset, so she set off again downstream and left him alone in the dark. Somehow, she kept the lacquer box, instead of hurling it into the river, as was her first inclination. She kept searching throughout the night.
When daylight came, Josephine was exhausted, hungry, and broken in spirit. In her heart, she knew that her mother had drowned in the river, but she couldn’t stop looking. She came across a man who had taken in two children who’d lost their parents, and when a woman came staggering out of the brush, Josephine and the other two adults decided to round up survivors instead of waiting helplessly. They trudged through the swamps and muddy flats along the riverbank, fighting clouds of mosquitoes as they gradually worked their way upriver.
By the time the first boats began taking in survivors, Josephine and her companions had gathered over ninety souls. Reading later about Cairo Red, she would learn that only 147 people had been rescued after the disaster. The number of dead and missing was unknown, but estimated at four hundred. Among those taken that day were the captain, the owner of the boat, and nearly all of the musicians and dancers.
Also among the missing was Claire de Layerre. Her body was never found.
A few weeks later, Josephine was in New Orleans and desperate. She’d spent most of the eight dollars she’d kept in the Oriental box and had nothing to sell but the box itself. She took it to a curio shop in Exchange Alley in search of a good price. The owner was out, but his wife offered seventy-five cents and stood firm at that price.
“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll wait until your husband is back,” Josephine said stubbornly. “The box is worth far more than that. Feel it. It’s heavy, it has good workmanship.”
The woman snorted. “Believe me, it’s not. It’s the sort of thing sailors pick up in Hong Kong to give to their sweethearts back home. Seventy-five cents is generous. But if you want to wait, suit yourself.”
Josephine did, only to get a similar answer from the woman’s husband. She tried two more stores, but neither offered her more than four bits. Discouraged, she returned to her dingy hotel, which was barely a step up from a brothel. She was down to her last thirty-two cents. Either she figured something out in a hurry or she’d be spreading her legs to keep herself fed and scrape together enough for a passage to St. Paul. God willing, the newspaper position would still be open. If not, the leg spreading may become her permanent occupation.
Upon the realization that she was actually contemplating whoring herself out, she dug her fingernails into her palm and stifled a scream. She looked at the box, wanting to smash it to pieces. Of all of her possessions—books, journals, clothing—it was the blasted box that had been saved. She hated the damn thing. It only reminded her of her mother, of the Colonel. She determined to go back to the curio shop and sell it for seventy-five cents.
Why did the Colonel think it was so valuable? That made no sense. The man had won and lost all manner of treasures over the years. Yet he had taken the biggest gamble of all to run into the middle of the burning heart of Cairo Red to rescue this box. And then given it to her in what seemed like a fit of guilt and despondency. Even a rat could suffer a guilty conscience, she supposed, but the box? Why would he risk his life for it?
Josephine opened the box and searched for a catch or false compartment. The most likely place seemed to be the lid, which was about an inch thick, and fairly heavy. But though she held it up to the oil lamp and ran her finger along the underside, there didn’t seem to be any place to open it. She thought about smashing it open to be sure, but she couldn’t afford to. She needed that seventy-five cents.
So she shut the lid and set it on her lap, where she ran her fingertips across the red-and-green-painted harbor scene. One of the carved Chinese junks moved beneath her thumb. Josephine caught her breath. Working carefully at the boat, she got it slid open and then eased her little finger into the tiny space revealed below. There was a click, and the lid popped open.
The lid of the box held its own separate compartment, a box within a box. With an invisible seam and an ingenious hooking mechanism of fine metal wire and hinge, the space was large enough to hold a few folded-over bills or a handful of gold coins. The perfect hiding space for a gambler needing to transport wealth. During a flush period, this particular gambler had given the box to his mistress’s daughter for safekeeping. Like a bank, for if he ever needed emergency funds.
It was stuffed with wads of cotton, to keep whatever was inside from rattling around. She removed this carefully, then tipped the lid and gave a gentle shake to ease the items within first to the corner, and then into her hand. Several cool, hard objects dropped into her palm, like tiny stones. They glittered green and red when she lifted them to her eye.
There were ten rubies, each the color and size of a pomegranate seed, and two large, glittering emeralds, the size of wine grapes. For a long time she admired them in the palm of her hand, where they glittered with reflected lamplight. So beautiful. And obviously so valuable.
She would have to be clever and very, very careful. Men would see a girl in possession of such a treasure and immediately set about stealing it by fraud or violence. But if she could change the gemstones for money, it would provide the answer to all of her problems.
Josephine carefully put each of the stones back into the secret compartment, shut the box, and hid it. Then she began to scheme.
Josephine made it known at the newspaper that she was looking for the turtle-like Manassas, and Solomon Fein, with his instincts for sniffing out a good story, soon gave her a critical hint. He’d heard that Stanley Ludd from the Picayune was in the river off New Orleans on Commodore Hollins’s flagship, CSS Calhoun. Three other ships from the mosquito fleet, Jackson, Pickens, and Tuscarora, had pulled in to join Calhoun.
“Something is brewing if Stinky is on board,” Fein said. “Might be this business with Manassas.”
Four Union vessels had crossed the sandbars and come up the river as far as Head of Passes in late September, where the river broke into the numerous swampy channels of the delta. A few days ago, on October 5, the lightly armed Confederate steamer Ivy floated down to reconnoiter Head of Passes, where she briefly engaged the powerful lead ship, the twenty-two-gun Richmond, before fleeing for her life. Josephine knew there was talk of an attempt to drive the Union out of the river, but that was an expedition that could easily result in disaster. With the two big ironclads still under construction in the yards, having the ram would be critical to success.
Ludd looked irritated when Josephine came aboard Calhoun later that afternoon. “What are you doing here? Don’t you have society gossip to cover or some such rubbish?”
She smiled and set her carpetbag significantly at her feet. He had been dismissive every time they’d met, but with each story she filed, his attitude became less amused and more defensive. In this case, she could hardly blame him for being annoyed. Had the situation been reversed, she’d have been equally irritated. Smaller boats were bustling back and forth from the four small warships to shore, and the general activity of the crew made it obvious that they were about to draw anchor and set off downstream. Yet there were no other newspaper writers aboard; Ludd had been expecting to scoop whatever story was developing.
Ludd had a notebook out and had been interviewing Commodore Hollins, a sharp-eyed old sea dog with a black-and-gray-streaked beard; a round, bald head; and a penetrating gaze. She had met him briefly at one of Mrs. Dubreuil’s fetes, and he had been polite, but reticent.
Now
it seemed that the government had ordered him to cooperate with the local press, so he endured a joint interview from the two reporters from the Picayune and the Crescent. When they asked difficult questions, he gave vague answers, his expression not unlike that of a man having a tooth extracted.
“He wasn’t very forthcoming,” Josephine observed, watching Hollins’s proud, erect carriage as he made his escape.
“He was before you showed up,” Ludd said. “Thank you for that,” he added sarcastically.
The mosquito fleet steamed downriver with the five-knot current, and they arrived at the forts on the evening of October 11. There they found the turtle-like Manassas sitting at anchor off Fort St. Philip, a few of its civilian crew lounging in the cool air on its ironclad back, smoking, playing cards, and swatting at mosquitoes. Nearby lurked McRae and Ivy from the mosquito fleet, keeping an eye on the privately held commerce raider as if to ensure it wouldn’t try to escape.
Shortly after their arrival, Hollins sent across a boarding party to seize Manassas. The longshoremen on the deck of the raider watched passively until Hollins’s men drew near, when panic set in. They dove down the hatch like rats scurrying into holes, which made the men watching from Calhoun laugh and slap their knees, and the boarding party shout and cuss. When Hollins’s men reached the boat, there was a brief scuffle, then the rats started jumping into the river and swimming for shore. Those who remained surrendered.
“Damn fools,” Ludd muttered. “Bet half of them are Yankees. They’d just as soon turn her over to the enemy.”
Doubtful. They weren’t Yankees or Confederates, Josephine thought. They were vermin drawn from all points on the river, and from no point in particular, on the commerce raider to make a fortune engaging in legal piracy. When it looked like they might be pressed into the actual Confederate navy, forced to do some real fighting, they wanted nothing to do with it.
“Hope they string them up,” Ludd said. “Make a good example of them.”
The Crescent Spy Page 14