Robley put his kepi back on, trudged to the end of the 18th Mississippi’s encampment. Coming from the other direction was Nathaniel Paine, alone.
“Couldn’t find him?” Robley said.
“No, sir.” Nathaniel pulled his kepi off, just as Robley had done, wiped his forehead. As soon as Robley had been promoted, Nathaniel had begun to address him as “sir,” with not the least hint of irony.
Robley frowned, looked around again. Miles of identical tents, thousands upon thousands of men. The Confederate Stars and Bars hung limp from a flagpole near the center of the camp. The two-story brick home of Wilmer McLean, headquarters of Brigadier General David Jones, stood brooding over the rows of Lilliputian tents.
Far off in the distance they heard the flat boom of cannon fire, the artillery units around Washington, D.C., exercising at their pieces. It had caused a stir in camp the first time they had heard it, but now it was hardly noticed.
“Fella told me he saw him with his bird, heading for the South Carolina boys,” Nathaniel added.
“All right. We’ll try there.” Robley headed off, with Nathaniel behind, and soon they crossed the largely invisible divide between the 18th Mississippi camp and the 5th South Carolina, with whom they were brigaded.
Near the center of the 5th South Carolina’s camp the tents were arranged in such a way as to form a parade ground, and at the far end of the parade there was a cluster of men in a circle, and Robley had a good idea that Jonathan might be among them. He was not a fellow to miss a frolic of any kind.
The brothers crossed the parade, peered through the group of men standing and kneeling, and Robley was not surprised to see Jonathan at the center of the circle, holding the fighting cock he had been training up for a week now. Money was passing around the circle of men.
Jonathan was in his shirtsleeves and his kepi was tilted back and his face was red with exertion and excitement. His light brown hair was plastered to the sweat on his forehead and he was grinning, and even Robley could appreciate how handsome and vital his brother looked.
“What y’all say your chicken’s name is?” Jonathan called to his opponent at the far end of the circle, a big Irish-looking fellow who also clutched a straining rooster. “Y’all said his name is Abe Lincoln, didn’t ya?”
“Abe Lincoln, my ass. Yankee Killer. Gonna git himself some practice now.”
“Yankee Killer? Well, hell, just put a uniform on him. He’s as much a man as any of you South Carolina boys.”
Robley could not help but smile. Jonathan had a quick wit about him. It got him in trouble more often then not.
Then, on some unseen signal, the birds were released. In a great welter of feathers and flying dust the fighting cocks fell on each other, flailing and lashing with dagger spurs. The roosters screamed and the men screamed and shouted and urged the animals on to greater violence.
A stream of blood made a red slash across the tan earth, and Robley winced and felt a rush of shame that he should have such a reaction. They were birds. How would he fare when men were being shot down around him?
The shouting of the men and birds built and Robley pushed his concerns aside, watched the battle of brilliant red and yellow and black feathers. Some of the watchers let out a wild, unearthly whoop, a pagan battle cry that came from some place deep inside, and it sent shivers down Robley’s spine.
And then it was over and Jonathan Paine’s bird lay in a crumpled heap of bloody feathers.
“What the hell you say the name of your bird is?” the victor taunted Jonathan. “Winfield Scott, ain’t that what you said? Or wasn’t it Bluebelly?”
Jonathan grinned. He did not get angry. He rarely did. He picked up the rooster’s limp body. “His name, suh, is Stew Meat.” Jonathan bowed, turned to leave the circle, saw Robley watching him.
“Ah, brothers, you had to witness my bird’s ignominious defeat. He left a great string of dead fighting cocks in his path, and the one time you see him fight is when he gets beat by that cheating South Carolina son of a bitch.”
“He left one rooster dead in his path, and I think that one was sick with consumption to start,” Nathaniel said.
“Come on, Private,” Robley said, “there’s been a reassignment and you have picket duty tonight.”
“Picket duty?” The three brothers stepped off across the dry, dusty parade ground. “If y’all are putting me on picket duty,” Jonathan said, “you must reckon them Yankees’ll be coming down the road tonight.”
“You don’t mind fighting them single-hand, do you?” asked Nathaniel.
“Who else is gonna do it?”
They marched back toward the 18th Mississippi’s camp, slower now, as the sun reached its zenith. “Tell me true, Lieutenant,” Jonathan said. When he used Robley’s title with sincerity, it meant he was looking for a real answer. “When you think we’re gonna be at them bluebellies?”
Robley stopped in the middle of the wide central street. His wool clothing itched intolerably and he wanted some relief.
“Can’t be too much longer,” he said, scratching with abandon, which got his brothers scratching as well. Robley heard enough talk around camp to know that speculating about future action was the quickest way to sound like an idiot. But with his brothers it was different. “Uncle Abe’s three-month enlistments are up soon. He’s got to do something, before his army goes home. Got to be a battle soon.”
Nathaniel and Jonathan nodded. For all the casual, hunting-trip quality of Camp Walker, there was always that, the impending battle, hanging there. The Sword of Damocles, it would have to fall eventually.
“You afraid?” Jonathan asked Robley, and again there was a sincerity that the youngest did not generally show. Standing there, his dead rooster in his hand, he looked like the little boy that Robley remembered, holding a broken toy, a bit bewildered in a world where his father imposed no strict rules. The boys had always turned to Robley for structure in their lives.
Now Robley just shrugged, spit on the ground. “You mean am I afraid there won’t be a fight?” he asked, though he knew that was not what Jonathan meant.
“No, I mean, you afraid of the fight?”
Robley looked away, collecting his words, making sure there was no one else to hear them. These were his brothers. He did not always have to be Lieutenant Paine in front of them.
“Yeah. I’m afraid of the monkey show. I’m afraid I’ll run. Won’t have the nerve to stand up to it.”
Jonathan smiled, chuckled, shook his head. “That it? Aren’t you afraid of being killed? I’m…seems to me a Yankee bullet’s a more frightening prospect than doing a skeedaddle.”
The words took Robley by surprise, and he realized that his thoughts had been so directed toward how he would perform when the bullets started to fly that the thought of being killed had never occurred to him.
“No, I’m not afraid of being killed, I don’t reckon. Rather die with honor than live with the shame of running,” he said, and that seemed true, but was it?
Here now was a whole new question with which he would have to wrestle.
13
I had purposed offering some remarks upon the vast importance to Virginia and to the entire South of the timely acquisition of this extensive naval depot, with its immense supplies of munitions of war, and to notice briefly the damaging effects of its loss to the Government at Washington; but I deem it unnecessary…
– William H. Peters, Commissioner, to John Letcher, Governor of Virginia
Hieronymus Taylor sat on the stool at his workbench and puffed his butt end of a cigar to life. The Cape Fear was riding at her anchor. The fires were banked in the boiler and the doors and vents of the deckhouse that enclosed the fidley, the section of the deckhouse directly above the engine room, were open to the afternoon breeze, and the engine room was almost comfortable.
Taylor shook the flame out on his lucifer and tossed the smoldering match onto the workbench. He never took his eye off of Fireman First Class James Burgess.<
br />
Burgess had spent the past half hour tapping threads into a hole he had drilled into the side of one of the shoes on the eccentric-a circular piece of metal mounted off-center on the crankshaft that worked the engine’s valve gear. When the threads were cut, he screwed a bolt into the hole. Then he screwed an eyebolt into a deck beam a few feet above the eccentric.
All this Taylor watched without comment. He could not figure what Burgess was about. He thought about asking him, but the Scotsman was never very enlightening, even when questioned directly.
If it had been O’Malley fiddling with his engine without permission, he would have stomped him underfoot. O’Malley had no feel for engines. He suspected O’Malley’s engineer’s papers had been supplied by some fellow Mick working in some navy shithouse office.
Burgess was different. Burgess understood engines. With Burgess, Taylor just watched.
When the eyebolt was in place, Burgess pulled a length of quarter-inch manila line from his pocket. He tied a bowline in one end and looped it over the bolt on the eccentric, then threaded the bitter end through the eyebolt. That was as much as Hieronymus Taylor could endure. The chief slid off the stool, ambled over to where Burgess was working.
“Awright, Burgess, I give,” he said to the Scotsman’s back. “What in hell are you about?”
Burgess made a grunting noise that might have been a word. It sounded like “Wawarr.” Then, when Taylor did not respond, he elaborated, saying, “Feer kaws.”
“Forgive me, but I can’t understand a goddamned thing you are saying.”
Burgess turned around. He spoke slowly and deliberately, as if to a child. “Washer. Fer washin clothes.”
Taylor nodded. “And how does it do that, exactly?”
Burgess pointed to the deck below, where the end of the rope dangled. “Put a barrel there. Fill it full of water. Get ’er good an hot with steam. Cut the barrel head down, put a ruddy great weight on it, hang it from the line.”
Hieronymus nodded. That was all the explanation he would get. He knew that. But he understood. Dirty clothes go in the barrel of water, hot from the boiler. The round barrel head, cut down so there is clearance all around, goes on top. The line goes from an eyebolt in the barrel head, through the eyebolt overhead, to the bolt on the eccentric shoe. When the engine is turning the shoe goes up and down and the line from the shoe to the barrel head makes the barrel head go up and down, like the plunger in a butter churn. The clothes are agitated until they are clean.
“Well, damn. You are one clever son of a bitch. Fer a foreigner, I mean.”
“Do it on errey Scottish ship,” Burgess grunted and went back to his task.
Taylor smiled. This was a hell of an idea. “Moses!” he yelled.
“Yassuh?” Moses and a couple of the coal heavers were knocking clinker from the boiler grates.
“Git some of your boys topside, find us a barrel. Cut the head down, ’bout an inch around. Damn me, we gonna have the cleanest damned black gang in the navy.”
“Yassuh.” Moses left off what he was doing and took Billy and Joshua topside.
Taylor liked Moses. Moses did not argue and he did his work well without playing sullen, petty games, and he could sing like a son of a bitch, and that was about all Taylor could ask of a coal passer, or any man, for that matter.
“Chief?”
Taylor looked up. Jacob, Bowater’s servant, was leaning into the deckhouse door, one deck up. “Captain’s compliments, Chief. Dinner in twenty minutes.”
“Aye.” Damn. Taylor usually ate by himself, or with his engine-room gang. But once a week Bowater invited him to dinner, and much as he would have liked to, he did not think he could refuse. Bowater might be a blueblood, slaveholding navy martinet, a man incapable of action, a yachtsman who would rather lounge about on the deckhouse roof and dabble with his paints and have his darkie bring him mint juleps than fight a war, but he was still the captain.
Hieronymus tossed what was left of his cigar into the furnace, climbed grudgingly up the ladder and aft to his cabin. He wished Burgess had finished the clothes washer the day before. Taylor could not help but feel like slovenly white trash in Bowater’s patrician presence. It annoyed him, and it annoyed him more that he let Bowater get to him in that manner. He wished they had a bath down in the engine room. Or a shower bath, that would be even better. Rig a barrel to the overhead, run a steam line into it, tap in a valve…
Taylor stopped in midstride, saw the whole thing form in his head. Yes. He wondered if Burgess or any of his damned Scots had ever come up with that one.
“Massa Samuel?”
Samuel Bowater looked up from the reports from department heads, Hieronymus Taylor’s insufferably dreary description of the state of the engine.
“Yes, Jacob?”
“Dinner in twenty minute, suh. Chief Taylor and Missuh Harwell joinin’ you, suh.”
“Right. Very well. Thank you, Jacob. Please get my painting gear together. I’ll be going ashore after lunch.”
“Yes, suh,” Jacob said, then, good servant that he was, disappeared.
Bowater sighed and set the reports aside. They had been puttering around the same ten-mile stretch of river, from Gosport to Sewall’s Point, for two months now. Two months, while somewhere beyond that waterfront, somewhere up the river and in the country beyond, the pressure of war built like steam in a boiler. Bowater knew it would blow soon, and he did not want to be at a safe distance when it did.
They had been busy enough; they had not been idle. At the end of May they joined in the effort to raise the remains of the Merrimack from the river bottom. They had sealed her up as best they could, pumped her out until her own buoyancy lifted her out of the mud.
With the Cape Fear alongside, she was eased into the flooded dry dock and her keel was allowed to settle down on angle blocks and her blackened sides were supported with shores wedged between her timbers and the side of the dry dock. The water was pumped out of the dock. The Merrimack, charred on the topside and unscathed below, rested safe and dry in Confederate hands, while Confederate minds wrestled with the question of what to do with her.
Captain, now Flag Officer, French Forrest, whom Samuel knew from the old navy, had been given charge of the navy yard. Under his able command the yard was made whole and defensible. The buildings that the retreating Yankees had burned were rebuilt. Batteries were erected along the outer walls.
The Cape Fear and the smaller tug Harmony were set to work as ordnance transports, hauling guns to the newly erected batteries on Craney Island and Fort Powhatan and Aquia Creek, distributing the largess that the Federals had left in their wake.
Twice they made the 120-mile trip down the canal through the aptly named Great Dismal Swamp to Albemarle Sound, past Roanoke Island and into Pamlico Sound. There, on the sandy, windswept Hatteras Island, south of the massive and blind Cape Hatteras light, the Confederate Army was erecting two sand-and-mud forts to keep the Yankees out of the protected sounds and the rivers that ran deep into Confederate country. The tugs from Norfolk brought guns, ammunition, supplies, all former property of the United States.
The work was hot, dull, uninspiring. The Cape Fear had hauled tons of ordnance, but she herself remained unarmed. There was no chance that she could be anything but a tug. And as long as that was true, then Bowater knew he could be nothing more than a spectator to the greatest military undertaking he was likely to see in his lifetime. The thought made him desperate.
Samuel Bowater stood and stretched. He was certain that the others, Harwell and Taylor, blamed him for their inaction, thought that perhaps he was backward in his effort to join the fighting. They did not know about his constant requests of Forrest that the vessel be mounted with a gun for offensive action, his letters to the navy office at the new capital in Richmond for new orders, the repeated instructions to remain at Norfolk under Forrest’s command until instructed otherwise. They did not know and he would not tell them, because it was not their business.
Landsman Dick Merrow walked around the front of the wheelhouse and rang the bell, two sets of two. Four bells in the afternoon watch, two o’clock in the afternoon. Dinnertime. Bowater stepped out of his cabin, stepped through the door to the boat deck, which formed the roof of the deckhouse. Lieutenant Harwell was already there, trying to look casual but not too casual as he waited for his captain. Taylor was not yet there.
“Please, Mr. Harwell, sit,” Bowater said, and the lieutenant nodded his eager head and sat to the right of the captain’s place. The boat, hanging in its davits, cast a shade over the table, and that and the soft breeze made the setting most idyllic. The table was set with the silver and bone china service and crystal glasses that Samuel had brought with him for his captain’s table.
Jacob stepped forward and poured wine for the two officers. “So…” Bowater began, but he was interrupted by the sound of Taylor’s shoes pounding the ladder and he climbed up to the deckhouse roof.
“Forgive me, Captain, for my tardiness,” he said, his tone just shy of insubordinate. He was dressed in his uniform coat and hat, though the coat was unbuttoned and hanging open, and the visor of his hat was creased and pulled low over his eyes. But he had made an obvious effort to clean up, and that was something, though he had stopped short of shaving.
“Damn.” Taylor looked around, breathed deep. “It is a fine day indeed for dining al fresco,” pronounced as if referring to a man named Alan Fresco. “I have got to get out of that damned engine room and up here on the boat deck more often.”
“Please, Chief, be seated,” Bowater said. “Have you decided to grow a beard?” He recalled the promise he had made to himself to be more tolerant of Hieronymus Taylor. He was a fine engineer, for what that was worth.
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