“Fight? I don’t know what the hell kind of fighting you envision, Lieutenant, a tugboat against all the fleet there at Fortress Monroe. I think he had more in mind a reconnaissance, and a few shots if you can take them.” Fairfax’s anger had moderated considerably, Bowater noted. He wondered if the commander had been genuinely angry at all, or if he had simply felt obligated to berate an inferior for trying to pull the wool over his eyes.
“This might be an opportunity for a little more action in the offensive line,” Fairfax continued. “Forrest is talking about arming the Harmony the same as you have done the Cape Fear. Let me take her upriver and get my blows in as well.”
Ahhh! Bowater thought. His insubordination had put a new thought in the head of Captain French Forrest, flag officer in command of the dockyard. And that thought might lead to Fairfax’s getting the opportunity to take a vessel in harm’s way, a thing denied to most Confederate naval officers.
No wonder you’re not so mad as you make out…
“In any event, Bowater, it looks as if you get to keep the guns you so cleverly acquired. I wish you joy with them. Do you have steam up?”
“The fires are banked, sir.”
Fairfax handed Bowater a sealed envelope. “Here are orders from the flag. I don’t know what is in them, but I suspect you will want to get a head up steam.” He lifted a canvas bag from the floor, dropped it on his desk. “And here is your crew’s mail. You are dismissed, sir.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“And Bowater?”
“Sir?”
“I reckon you know better than to ever try and pull such shit as this again? At least with me?”
“Yes, sir,” said Bowater, far more contrite this time, and far more sincere. He snatched up the mail bag, saluted, turned, and left quick, before Fairfax could say anything that might ruin his newfound happiness.
Now he looked at the orders in his hand and the gun on the bow and he felt quite differently about the once despised ordnance. The gun had led to the order he had dreamed of, a chance to show some initiative and dash. No more hauling guns, now he would be a fighting captain. Fourteen years in the United States Navy had nearly worn his initiative away to nothing. The Confederate States Navy was threatening to do the same. But now this. It was the chance he had hoped a fledgling service would provide.
But the Cape Fear could not move until the boilers had head up steam, and the speed at which water turned to steam was ordered by the laws of physics, not Samuel Bowater.
He had to move, to expend some of his restless energy. He climbed down the ladder, around the side deck. Find out how long until steam was up? No, he couldn’t ask Taylor that. Couldn’t show his eagerness. Think of something that would lead to the answer.
He opened the engine-room door, looked down the fidley. Chief Taylor was not there, not that he could see. He closed the door, walked farther along to the door of Taylor’s cabin. He wrapped on the door, which swung open under the tap of his knuckles.
“Chief Taylor?” Bowater leaned into the room. It occurred to him that he had never seen the inside of Taylor’s cabin. “Chief?” No response.
The yellow sunlight spilled in from the cabin’s only window. On the desk beside the door, a big, leather-bound book lay open, with papers and pencils scattered about.
“Hmm…” Taylor did not strike Samuel as a reading man. He took a step closer, lifted the cover. The Principles and Practice and Explanation of the Machinery Used in Steam Navigation; Examples of British and American Steam Vessels and Papers on the Properties of Steam and on the Steam Engine in its General Application, Originally compiled by Thomas Tredgold, CE. MDCCCLI.
Bowater laid the book down again, read part of the page to which it was open. Let t1 be the temperature of the water at a dangerous pressure; t the temperature at the working pressure; Q the quantity of heat, in British units, transferred to the water per minute-then the equation T=W(t1-t) is approximately correct.
He shook his head. Hieronymus Taylor was the kind of engineer who started as a coal passer and picked up bits and pieces along the way-learned how to clean a grate, wield an oil can, rebuild an air pump, until at last he was running the black gang. Perhaps he had an aptitude for such things, which would help. But Samuel did not think him the kind of engineer to delve into such theoreticals. He would not have credited Taylor with the education to read even the title of that book.
And yet there were the notes and equations and comments on the text, written in the cramped scrawl that Samuel recognized from countless engineering division reports.
Curious as he was, Bowater recalled that he was doing something utterly improper. He stepped out of the cabin, eased the door shut. Walking forward, he met Chief Taylor coming aft.
“Ah, Chief. I was looking for you. I just wanted to double-check that we had clean fires for our work today.”
Taylor was in shirtsleeves, and with the sun full on him it was difficult for Bowater to look directly at his white shirt. He had noticed, just in the past week or so, that the formerly unkempt black gang were now wearing uniforms and work clothing of pristine cleanliness. Not just Taylor and the firemen, but even the Negro coal passers seemed to have crisp, clean outfits when they gathered on the fantail for their evening sing-alongs.
Bowater’s clothes were washed on the foredeck by Jacob, who also washed Mr. Harwell’s clothes as a courtesy. The deck crew were given buckets and soap and allowed to do their wash once a week, dipping fresh water straight from the river. But Samuel never saw any of the engineering department wash their clothes, and yet, here they were, the cleanest on board, even though they worked in the filthiest environment.
Samuel did not begrudge them their superior cleanliness, but he was damned curious as to how they did it. He would not, of course, ask, because he was certain Taylor wanted him to. He would rather not know.
“Grates are all clean, bunkers full, black gang scrubbed and dried. Head up steam in one hour. I have some of my boys ashore, gettin’ some piping I need. Boat should be back, twenty minutes or so.”
“Very well. See that they are. I want to be underway the minute steam is at service gauge.”
“The very minute, Cap’n,” Taylor smiled.
Bowater climbed up to the wheelhouse, sat at the small desk in his cabin. Mail had come that morning. He picked up the letter on top, smiled as he looked at the printed stationery. NAVY DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C. He had received enough of those over the course of his career. He had not reckoned on receiving any more.
He snatched up his scrimshaw whalebone letter opener, cut the letter open. He could well guess at its contents.
NAVY DEPARTMENT, May 7, 1861
SIR: Your letter of the 22d ultimo, tendering your resignation as a lieutenant in the U. S. Navy, has been received.
By direction of the President your name has been stricken from the rolls of the Navy from that date.
I am, respectfully, your obedient servant,
GIDEON WELLES
Secretary of the Navy
Bowater read the terse words, read them again and again, and an unexpected sadness came over him, a touch of shame, that all the arguments about the legitimacy of his actions could not entirely erase.
An officer had always held the right to resign his commission. There was nothing dishonorable about it. If the officer’s conduct was under question, however, there were several options available to the navy by which they might censure that officer, even at the very moment he moved beyond their grasp.
One such punishment was dismissal from the service, throwing him out before he had the chance to honorably resign. Worse, dismissal with striking the officer’s name from the record, as if he had never been.
But the ultimate censure was the one that Bowater held in his hands: dismissal and striking of the officer’s name by order of the President. There was no equivocation, no appeal. The officer was cashiered.
In the early days of secession, officers had been allow
ed to resign without dismissal of any sort. When Gideon Welles took over, that changed. His was a scorched-earth policy, no quarter given.
Bowater stared at the note. He had never really expected anything else, had never thought to preserve his place in the old navy in case seccession didn’t pan out. Still, an Academy education and fourteen years of service were not so easily dismissed.
To hell with you, Gideon Welles, my “obedient servant,” he thought, and crumpled the letter up and tossed it in the wastebasket. That was the past, a life that was gone, and he was blessed to have a second life now, a thing denied most men. I do believe I will go punch a few holes in your ships, Mr. Secretary.
He looked at the next letter, from his father, and opened it up. It was written in the neat, tight hand that Samuel knew so well. He read it through. It was a very businesslike report: effects of the blockade, the state of Charleston’s defenses, who was off in military service, price increases. Samuel smiled despite himself. William Bowater, Esq. He wondered sometimes if his father had not been some dour Boston Puritan in an earlier life, as those dabblers in mysticism were wont to believe.
He went through his father’s letter again. There was something comforting in the stolid and unexcitable prose. With everything falling apart, with the entire order of his universe in flux, it was nice to see that one thing at least remained unchanged.
Lord, he is a stoic, and I am some kind of damned poet… He hated the thought as he thought it. The idea of himself as an artist felt facile and shallow.
From the top of the ladder, Hieronymus Taylor could look down the fidley on his engine room and his beloved engine, with the great maze of pipes: steam and return water, eduction pipes and intake pipes and discharge pipes, running to cylinder, air pumps, hot well, condensers, boiler, feed water, so amazingly complex, such a tangled web, unfathomable to the uninitiated, and yet not an inch of it that he did not fully comprehend, and hardly a bit of it that he had not laid hands on at one time or another.
A thing of beauty, like a symphony wonderfully written and wonderfully played, all the disparate parts, iron and steam, working together to create that final whole, pssst, clunk, pssst, clunk, pssst, clunk, thirty rotations per minute.
He ran his eyes over the entire space, the engine room, the boiler room on the other side of the open bulkhead, the bridge from one side to the other, the deckhouse with its windows and skylight and vent above, enclosing the fidley. Gloomy, hot, bad-smelling, and loud, it was his fiefdom and he was well pleased with it.
At the workbench below, fireman Ian O’Malley was seated on Taylor’s stool, his face hidden behind a newspaper, and the sight of the man deflated the good cheer the chief felt at looking upon his engine and its domain. He clattered down the ladder and across the engine-room deck.
“Y’all hold her dere, now…” Moses’s voice came from behind the engine, a place deep in the recess of the engine room, inconspicuous and hard to see from the engine-room door above. “Good, now gimme dat wrench…”
Taylor ducked under the piping for the condenser and straightened. Coal heavers Joshua Beauchamps and Nat St. Clair were holding a three-foot-square metal box, the hot well from a small steam engine, against the overhead, while Moses bolted it to the deck beams. The hot well had been Moses’s idea-he had noticed it in the yard one morning while they were taking on coal, and Taylor agreed that it was an improvement over his initial idea of a barrel as a water tank.
He watched for a moment while Moses tightened the bolts, then said, “Secure that tank, then belay the thing, Moses. We got to get underway.”
“Damn!” said Moses, never taking his eyes off the bolt head. “Can’t we ever finish one damned thing ’round here?”
“Not as long as we got a master’s division.”
“Massa’s division?” Moses tightened the bolt until it was snug, then lowered his arms and stepped back. “You de only massa we gots, Massa He-ronmus. You de massa of dis whole fine plantation here.” With a sweep of his arm he gestured toward the engine and boiler rooms.
“And don’t you forget it, neither. Now hurry it up.”
He left them at it, ducked back under the piping, ambled over to where O’Malley was lounging. “Morning, O’Malley,” he said cheerfully.
O’Malley looked over the top of his paper. “Morning, Chief,” he said and raised the paper again.
“Say, O’Malley…the captain has a notion to get underway. Think you might stoke up them fires?”
O’Malley lowered the paper once more. “I reckon one of them niggers can do it,” he said and raised the paper again.
Taylor smiled, nodded, waited until the urge to pull the paper from O’Malley’s hands and stuff it down his throat had passed. “I can see you wouldn’t care to get them new dungarees all covered with coal dust. Where’d y’all get ’em?”
O’Malley lowered the paper. “I got ’em up to Norfolk last Saturday, and a right bargain they were. Are they not the handsomest you’ve seen?”
Taylor nodded. The cloth was dark blue, and the light from the skylight overhead danced on the new steel buttons. “Very nice. It grieves me to ask you to get them all soiled, but Moses and the others are still working on the shower bath.” Which, he added silently, I told you to do, you lazy Mick.
“Ah, very well,” O’Malley put his paper down with a sigh. “I’ll do it me self. Easier than trying to get a bloody darkie to do a job of work…”
He slid off the stool, ambled over to the boiler, on the other side of the open bulkhead. “’Tis no great hardship, soiling me clothes, now that me and Burgess have that famous clothes washer set up.”
The Irishman whipped a rag around his hand, opened the door to the furnace. He picked up a shovel and spread out the coals banked in the firebox, then began to scoop more coal from the hopper and feed it to the glowing orange bed.
Taylor picked a match up off the workbench, scratched it, and lit his cigar. He leaned back to watch the fun.
O’Malley continued to feed coal into the firebox, and Taylor heard the first hiss of steam beginning to form.
“Easy with the coal, O’Malley. Don’t smother it. Want to get her nice and hot.”
“I’m not goin ta bloody smother it,” O’Malley growled. He paused in his shoveling because in fact he was.
The fire was getting hot, Taylor could feel it from the engine room. O’Malley was starting to do a weird little dance, squirming a bit, as if something might be in his pants.
“We’ll need some speed today, O’Malley. Get her good and hot!”
“Aye!” O’Malley called, his back to Taylor. Taylor hurried to where the coal heavers were working on the shower bath. “Moses, you all, come see this!” He got back to his stool in time to catch O’Malley give a little jiggle, as if he was trying to shake something out of his new dungarees.
“Good and hot, O’Malley!” Taylor prompted, grinning around his cigar.
“Aye!” the Irishman shouted, more irritated this time. He scooped another shovelful, then another, leaned forward to spread the coals out. He paused for a second, then dropped his shovel and whirled around.
“Ahh! Ahh! Ahhh, bloody shit, bloody hell!” He leaped up and down, plunged his hands in his pants, screamed again, pulled his hands out. “Ahhh!” He jerked his belt loose, tore the buttons of his pants open, and dropped his dungarees around his ankles. He stood there, mindless of who might be watching, and clasped his private parts, sighing with relief.
It was a minute at least before Hieronymus Taylor could open his eyes and wipe the tears from them enough that he could see. What he saw, not surprisingly, was Ian O’Malley, staring hatred at him.
“Do ya think it’s bloody funny? A man burns himself, acting on your rutting orders?”
“O’Malley, you stupid bastard. Every coal heaver been on the job a week knows you don’t wear pants with goddamned steel buttons. Burn your pecker clean off, if you got one. Where the hell did you get your papers?”
“Shut yer bl
oody gob, you bastard, I’ll do for you.”
Taylor stood, spread his arms in a sign of welcome. “I’m waiting…” he said, but O’Malley just stared and said nothing.
“That’s what I reckoned,” said Taylor. “Now go and put some engineering pants on and get your ass back here. We got a war to fight, in case you ain’t been informed.”
“Chief?” Johnny St. Laurent called down the fidley. “Boat’s puttin off, Chief!”
“Thank you, Johnny.” O’Malley forgotten, Taylor climbed up the ladder and onto the side deck, walked quickly around to the fantail. He could see the boat pulling for them, brilliant white on the blue water. In it, the hands he had sent ashore. And one he had not.
He waited impatiently, glanced up at the wheelhouse, but neither Bowater nor Harwell was to be seen. He drummed his fingers on the cap rail. At last the boat pulled alongside and the sailor in the stern sheets called, “Toss oars!” and the boat came to a gentle stop at the Cape Fear’s starboard quarter.
One by one the men hopped out. Taylor met Wendy’s eyes, gave her a quick wink, then paid her no more attention. He resisted helping her out of the boat, and she managed well enough without his help, despite an obvious unfamiliarity with watercraft.
The bowman pushed the boat off, and Taylor was able to get a better look at her. She was dressed in sailor garb, the wide-bottomed trousers, loose-fitting frock, and wide-brimmed straw hat; the uniform of men-of-war men the world over. She looked like a kid playing dress-up.
“Come on,” Taylor said, led her forward and then down the fidley ladder to the engine room. It was only there, in his fiefdom, that he finally felt safe to turn and look at her directly, and address more than two words to her.
“Everything go all right?” he asked.
“Perfect!” she said low. He could see she was thrilled by the adventure of the thing. They had been planning it for weeks, had put all the elements in place. Taylor had needed only to hear that they were going into battle. He was beginning to think it would never happen. And then, that morning, Bowater had informed him of their orders. Johnny St. Laurent was dispatched to town with a confidential message, on the pretext of buying fresh galley stores, a mission that Bowater the gourmand, who adored all that hoity-toity slop, would never refuse or question.
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