“Light, light, light,” we say back, once the candle’s extinguished. We’re fond of the reversal.
There are moments of panic. Episodes of self-doubt that buffet our overall submarine elation. We’ve come to know our time underwater as a dampened and foggy silence punctuated by flashes of distress so immediately visceral it takes us days to stop shaking. During one dive, Lieutenant Dixon forgets to light the candle before setting the diving planes, and accidentally floods the ballast tanks before the rear hatch is fully sealed, taking on enough water that if he hadn’t immediately realized his mistake we would’ve certainly sunk. Another dive, we reverse into a pylon and break the flywheel that houses our propeller. While depth testing, Augustus succumbs to a brief hysteria, and in our rush to surface we almost roll to port. “Pardon that,” he says, shaking. He’d almost kicked a hole in the hull. “Pardoned,” Frank says.
At the dock we heave ourselves out of the hatch and stretch out flat on our backs, letting the unreality of what we’ve just done sink in. The men puttering around Battery Marshall shake their heads and keep a distance that signals discomfort. We give them hard looks in return. They’ve taken to calling us Pickett’s Charge, only without the charge. They place bets on the time it will take us to sink ourselves. The odds are on less than a week. We resent the implication. Frank reminds them that the odds haven’t changed for the last six weeks running. “So?” one of them says back.
“Whatever happened to patriotism?” Augustus says. “Don’t they know war heroes when they see them?”
“Apparently not,” Carleton, watching the latest bombardment of Charleston, replies.
One day, following up an idea we had the night before, Augustus rigs a dummy spar and we knock it into the hull of the Indian Chief. We’re pulled from the water for a week for having a detrimental effect on morale. “So it wasn’t the best way to illustrate our potential,” Frank says. “But morale? Half of me wishes it’d been a live load.”
“Half of you?” someone says back.
Frank and James disappear in a reverie of letter writing. Lieutenant Dixon takes a leave of absence to visit his fiancée. Carleton and I spend the week sitting near the water, throwing pebbles at floating sticks. When Augustus comes back, he tells us our comrades in arms have a new name for the Hunley: the peripatetic coffin.
I tell him I like the sound of it. Augustus shrugs. “Incapacitation is as incapacitation does,” he says.
“For our parade,” Carleton calls over his shoulder to Lieutenant Joosten, who’s running an inspection on the torpedo, “how about a full band and seven of South Carolina’s finest, untouched beauties?”
“We’ll see about a celebration,” Lieutenant Joosten, who has a beauty of his own, says, “when you guys actually do something.”
Our first chance actually to do something comes at the end of December when we receive an order to engage the U.S.S. Camden, a sloop of war that has just arrived in the harbor. As we make our preparations, the thump of artillery sounds in the distance. It has also come down from General Beauregard that, for our own safety, we are not to use the Hunley as a submersible, but to remain partially surfaced, using the night as camouflage. When this news reaches us, Augustus says nothing. Carleton says nothing. I say nothing.
“Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of this thing?” Frank says.
“You’re looking at me like I have a reassuring answer to that,” Lieutenant Dixon says.
We retrieve the torpedo from the armory and carry it the three hundred yards to the dock. My hands are sweating and twice Carleton asks us to stop so he can get a better grip. We fasten the boom to the bow, sit on the dock, and listen to the waves lap the iron sides of the hull. The night is moonless, and very dark.
Without a word, we lower ourselves into the Hunley. Infantrymen line the dock wearing expressions caught somewhere between skepticism and disbelief. As we cast off, one of them, a kid wearing a uniform three sizes too big, slowly waves. I close and secure the hatch without waving back.
Lieutenant Dixon sights the Camden and calls for a rotational speed of three quarters. He floods the front ballast tank and then gives the signal for Carleton to flood the rear. Beside me, Frank whispers a Hail Mary. Augustus triple checks the i-bolt at his feet. We dive incrementally until only the conning towers are surface-visible and then secure the tanks. Two minutes in, the Hunley’s a hothouse. Six minutes in, Lieutenant Dixon blows out the candle, and we’re moving in a darkness so complete I feel outside of myself.
It takes us an hour to get to the mouth of the harbor. It takes us another hour to get within half a mile of the Camden. Lieutenant Dixon calls for a lower speed, and we’re surprised at the sound of his voice. My body’s aching from sitting in the same position for so long. My shoulders are on fire. Sweat pools in my boots.
When we’re what must be a hundred yards from the ship, Lieutenant Dixon orders us to stop. We take our hands off the propeller, and everything goes silent. We can hear the water breaking in wavelets over the conning towers as we glide forward. We can hear voices, indistinct. Laughter. Shouting. Part of a song. It sounds infinitely far away. For a moment we wonder if we’re prepared to do what we came out here for—it seems, suddenly, ungraspable and remote—and then Lieutenant Dixon hisses, “Stop. Reverse.”
We do nothing at first. “Reverse,” he says again. “It’s not the Camden, it’s just a picket ship.”
“What’s the difference?” Frank says.
“The difference is that we only have orders to engage the Camden,” Lieutenant Dixon says. “Reverse.”
“Why don’t we just ram it?” I say. “We’re out here.”
“Reverse.”
Because the tide is against us, it takes us four hours to get back. By the time we reach the dock, morning has broken. We sit at our stations, cold with sweat, furious with humiliation. No one wants to get out. Finally Lieutenant Dixon unscrews the hatch. As he heaves himself out, he shakes like he has a palsy. “It wasn’t the Camden,” he says, to someone at the dock.
“Well, I’ll be,” the voice comes back.
Opportunities come, opportunities go. We set out to engage the Hoboken, but the weather turns us back. We try the next night, but a tiny seam opens in the hull for no apparent reason and we turn back. A week later we get caught in the tide at the mouth of Breach Inlet and are rolled side to side so violently that Frank doesn’t eat for two days.
The war drags—slogs—on. On New Year’s Day, two runners break the blockade and we’re all grins and whoops until their cargo’s revealed to be molasses and women’s clothing. The ships we try to send through, carrying cotton and rice, are caught by the blockade and send up smoke in dark columns that travel so high before dissipating, the horizon appears jailed. The shelling of Charleston continues unabated, the Federals launching shell after shell into the abandoned city from Morris Island and the harbor as if they have nothing better to do with the afternoon.
To the north of us, General Grant has begun what’s promised to be a march of attrition and scorched earth, aimed at Richmond, and we seem unable to muster any sort of resistance. But how could we? We build an iron ship, they build one of theirs. We mobilize for Washington, and they cut us in half in Virginia. We shoot our best general in the back, and even he isn’t that surprised about it. “You’d think, standing at a distance,” Frank says, “that we’re trying to lose.”
“You’d also think,” Carleton, who’s sitting next to him, says, “that your emotional response would clock in somewhere above where it apparently is.”
Reports place our dead in the tens of thousands. In January, Battery Marshall becomes a way station for casualties. Throughout the night we hear the screams of the newly wounded. Outside the makeshift hospital, amputated legs are stacked like wood until someone complains and they’re covered up. “At least now you’ll have some company in the hobble department,” Augustus says to me. I key my laughter to such a pitch that someone’s dog answers from across Battery
Marshall and Augustus rapidly excuses himself from the table.
A letter from my mother informs me they’ve left our property in the face of the advancing Union army, and plan to head east. What I pray for now, it reads, is a swift end to this conflict, so we can be together again.
I start a letter back and give up halfway through.
During a test dive in February, we spring a leak and the Hunley is pulled for repairs. A bolt had come loose, and seawater erupted through the hull in a tiny stream that came up between Carleton’s legs in such a way that even Lieutenant Dixon, once safely on the dock, found it amusing. We’re told we’ll be back in the harbor in four days.
“What’s the point?” Carleton says as we secure the torpedo in the armory.
“Of what?” Frank says back.
“Of practice dives? Of any of this?”
Frank secures the padlock and turns. He shrugs, palms out, as if checking for rain. “Are you looking for the ontological explanation or something more accessible?” he says, shutting down the conversation.
In the harbor, the picket ships list around their newest arrival: the U.S.S. Housatonic, a twelve-cannoned sloop of war that measures over two hundred feet. At twelve hundred tons, she’s a thing of fierce beauty. Her appearance is the cause of general concern around Battery Marshall. For us, alone, it’s encouraging.
Lieutenant Dixon, for the first time in weeks, visits us in our barracks. He’s smaller than I am, and is wearing what Augustus has taken to calling his Look of Officiousness. He stands in the entry, silent, until Frank makes it clear that he should either come out with it or bid us good night. He smiles nervously, fishes in his pocket, and emerges with a twenty-dollar gold piece, dented in the middle.
“My fiancée gave this to me,” he begins, and tells his story.
We listen as the thing unfolds. His inaugural morning of combat was at Shiloh, where he was a rifleman in a first-wave offensive blown back so quickly it was held up as a textbook don’t in subsequent battles. Bullets whizzed by and lodged in the bodies of the men behind him. The sound of it, he said, was like apples exploding on the side of a barn. Cannon fire shredded his line. As he marched, unsure of himself—standing, so he felt, alone—the gold piece in his pocket caught a musket ball and sent him to the ground. He spent three weeks in the hospital, but kept his leg. “It seems like luck,” he says. “But it’s not.”
He passes it around. It’s heavier than I imagined, and gleams in the lamplight. On one side, there’s an engraving: Shiloh April 6 1862 My life Preserver G. E. D. “Where was this at Vicksburg?” Carleton says, when it’s passed to him.
Lieutenant Dixon pockets the gold piece and tugs at his beard. “We engage the Housatonic,” he says. “As soon as we’re repaired.” He turns and leaves.
“As long as this is inspirational story hour,” Arnold says from his bunk and cuts wind. Coincidence, pluck, promises, talismans—what does any of that have to do with us? We know what we see and what we’ve always seen: a campaign of indiscriminate shelling, economic paralysis, and relentless destruction. The strategy of the more powerful and better equipped. The Union giant’s footsteps thundered down our hallway the instant we struck our flints on Fort Sumter, and their response has so far outstripped the ethereal bonds of brotherhood that we blanch at our capacity for self-regard. How will we explain that we brought this on ourselves? How do you meet, halfway, a hammer blow that’s larger than anything you can imagine? And how long can you do nothing before you begin to feel you deserve it?
Frank takes one of Arnold’s boots and pulls the laces clean off. Arnold puts up his fists and Frank apologizes. “It was my intention,” he says, “to unlace both.”
“Intentions, intentions,” Augustus says. “Never the follow-through.”
Frank shrugs. He leans over, finds Arnold’s other boot, yanks the laces, and ties the boot closed. We have our fish boat. We have our bomb. We possess what the less observant might call an indifference to plausibility, which is matched only by our private desire to transfer this thing back to a human scale. We have what Augustus calls our Stab at Enlargement. Everything else hovers in a constant state somewhere just beyond recognition.
Before going to sleep, Carleton convinces Augustus to tell his balloon corps story. It’s one of our favorites; we know it by heart. Before stepping on his bayonet, Augustus had fought in Virginia with General Beauregard. Things hadn’t been going well. They were being outmaneuvered: any flank operation they attempted was spotted far ahead of time by the Union Balloon Corps—lookout men in balloons, who surveyed the land from the air and reported on Confederate flanking formations. These balloons were something to see. They hung in the sky like inverted onion bulbs, tethered to the ground. You kept waiting for them to sprout. They’d been bad news for the last few months, spotting and shucking any surprises General Beauregard could dream up. One night, the night before a planned mobilization, Augustus’s commander recruited a small group of soldiers and tasked them with a covert, and potentially dangerous, operation: they were to leave their encampment, bushwhack across the Union lines, fire on the corps, and return. No one in the balloons would be armed, and, if they managed their surprise, there would be minimal protection on the ground. Augustus and four other soldiers were given three muskets each, grimly saluted, and sent on their way. They ran like Indians through the forest, ducking branches, kneeling in the brush. It took them two hours to get within range, and another hour of crawling on their stomachs to get a clear view of the balloons. Afraid of being seen, they were quick to load and arrange their extra muskets in a row on the grass in front of them. At one of their whispered commands, they shouldered for the first volley. As Augustus lined and steadied his shot, he caught a glimpse of the man in the basket. He was small and bespectacled. He looked completely at peace.
It took two volleys to puncture the balloon. Beset by a sudden bolt of conscience—what Augustus calls one of his finer moments of not connecting the dots—he’d been very careful to aim well above the bespectacled man on his second shot. The basket fell. The man plummeted in silence and hit a patch of rocks. The sound was like a melon breaking. The musket reports brought the Union soldiers out of their tents, but by the time they figured out what had happened, Augustus was streaking back to camp, musket-less and exhilarated by the sound of panicked Union guns firing at the copse of trees where they had just been.
Confident he’d dismantled the enemy’s ability to undercut his formations, General Beauregard drafted his plans and slept the sleep of the satisfied.
The next day thousands of men—including Augustus’s commander and all four of the men who’d accompanied him through the forest the night before—died.
“Turns out,” Augustus says, “balloons weren’t the problem.”
We are quiet for a few minutes. Then Frank breaks the silence by telling Augustus he never tires of that particular story.
“I do,” Augustus replies, and turns his back to the rest of us to sleep.
Two nights later, the repairs have been made. We make our way to the wharf and run a quick inspection, our fish boat patient and quiet as we check the outside of her hull, crouch to run our hands across her deck, dip our fingers in the water. We secure the torpedo with care, triple-checking the firing mechanism. Lieutenant Dixon is in full regalia, his pistols crossed below his bandolier. The tassels of his shoulder ensigns sweep with his movement like grass in the wind. A gibbous moon hangs suspended over Breach Inlet, mirror-reflected in the water. We lower ourselves into the Hunley barely aware of one another. No one sees us off. As we go hands on the propeller and prepare to flood the ballast tanks, Carleton remarks on the thorough pleasantness of this February evening. It hadn’t occurred to any of us that the shelling had stopped.
The Housatonic sits two and a half miles outside of Battery Marshall, sails reefed, becalmed. On Lieutenant Dixon’s orders, we crank slowly, a partially submerged monster of complete silence.
We leave the inlet and churn at our
stations for what could be one hour or five, lost in the rhythm of our cranking. We know we are closing the distance; we care about nothing else. Fifty yards from the ship, Lieutenant Dixon calls for maximum speed and we oblige. Thirty-five yards away we are spotted and some sort of bell aboard the Housatonic peals alarm. We are too close for their cannons, but musket balls fired from deck ricochet off our conning towers—the only part of the Hunley they can see—and the sharp pings of impact are amplified between us, marbles tossed against a heavy iron tub. There is shouting, and I’m not sure if it’s coming from us or somewhere else.
The hollow thunk of our spar as it embeds itself in the wooden hull of the Housatonic jolts us forward; we scramble to regain our positions. Lieutenant Dixon yells for reverse. It takes us a second to remember which direction to crank until Frank says “Away from you” and we put it together. I’m aware that we’re moving at an angle, our stern dipping low, leading the bow below the surface. We glide in reverse for just long enough to wonder whether we’ve attached the line to the firing mechanism correctly, and then there’s an explosion so deafening it’s like tasting sound.
We take our hands off the crank and stare at the iron wall two feet in front of us. I can feel an arm on my shoulder, applying pressure. I’m vaguely aware of a hand on my leg. My feet are cold.
Lieutenant Dixon lights his candle and swivels in his seat. His expression is unreadable. He asks Carleton to check the ballast tank. He tells Frank to re-secure the rear hatch. When they tell him all is as expected, three quarters full, secured, he closes his eyes and lets his chin fall to his chest. I look down. We’re sitting shin-deep in water.
Battery Marshall is two and a half miles away. No one says anything. The swell bobs us back and forth, gently sloshing the water we’ve taken on, now at our knees, as if in a basin. Lieutenant Dixon tells us that through the porthole he can see the Housatonic in flames, listing to port. Lifeboats are being lowered. Men are in the water. We remain at our stations as he unscrews the front hatch and fires a magnesium flare, signaling success. Then he secures the hatch and returns to his seat without a word.
The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories Page 2