He tramped down the side deck, opened the engine-room door. The blast of heat was welcome now. He looked down the fidley. Burgess was hunched over the workbench. At the sound of the door opening he looked up.
“Chief Taylor down there, Burgess?”
“Naw. ’E’s inna gaal-lay, Cap’n,” Burgess said.
Bowater nodded. What the hell did he say? It was not worth asking him to repeat it. “Thank you, Burgess.”
Down the side deck came the scrape of a violin, the first pass of the bow before tuning the instrument. The note had come from forward-they must be staging their evening concert in the warmth of the galley.
Samuel hurried along, stepped into the galley, the smell of baking bread and a simmering cheese sauce like a warm blanket. Most of the Cape Fears were seated around the place, Taylor and Moses on stools at the forward end. It was a very congenial affair, and it made Samuel sad, that such a thing could go on and he, as captain, could have no part of it.
Not that he wished to, with their crude folk ditties and dreary sentimentality.
“Cap’n, come to join us, sir?” Taylor lowered his violin from his chin and called out.
“No, Chief, I fear not. I…ah…I’m off, just now, and I wanted to tell you we’ll be underway at first light, so we’ll need steam up then.”
“Never fear, Cap’n, the engineering division stands ever ready. Got them boys to clean the grates and the fireboxes, blew the boiler down, topped off the feed-water tanks…they don’t get no music unless the engine room’s up to snuff.”
“Very good. Well, then…”
“Where you off to, Cap’n, if you don’t mind my askin? Y’all are dressed to the nines, I mean, and it ain’t often we poor navy men have a chance for such formality.”
“Oh, well…as it happens I am off to a concert. Mozart. What they might term ‘classical music.’”
“Mozart…his music kinda like that Bach fella’s?”
“Yes, sort of. In a broad sense. You should take in some classical music, Chief Taylor. With your interest in the violin you might find it instructive.”
“Well, that’s damned kind of you, Cap’n.” Taylor stood, set his violin back in the box. “Sorry, boys, no fiddlin tonight. I’m goin to hear ‘classic music’ with the Cap’n!”
“Oh, well…” Bowater began, over a chorus of disapproval from the men. “It’s just that I don’t know what to expect from this quintet. Sort of a local, amateur thing. I’d hate to subject you to something that turned out to be awful.”
“Ah, it’ll be all right,” Taylor said, closing and latching the violin case. “Reckon if I started with the best I wouldn’t have nowhere to go.” He straightened, looked around the galley. “Seems a shame, though. These boys were sure looking forward to their music tonight.”
“I should think so, Chief. I don’t think it would be fair for you to deprive them.”
“Not fair at all. All right, boys. Get your shore-goin rigs on. We all goin to listen to classical music.”
“Oh…”
“And Cap’n, what about the darkies?”
“Well, there is generally a place in the balcony for servants to sit.”
“Well, that’s fine. Servants, coal passers, it don’t make no difference. Go on, boys, git your shore-goin rigs on.”
The galley cleared out as the men went to make their preparations for a run ashore. Hieronymus Taylor began to pull his overcoat on, and stopped. “Cap’n, I’m sorry. It just occurred to me, might be you didn’t intend for all the men to come to this here shindy of yours.”
“No, no, Chief, that’s quite all right. I am always happy for the chance to introduce people to the beauty of fine music,” Samuel said, and he knew that if he was a better man he would have meant it.
30
Every day regiments march by. Richmond is crowded with soldiers. These new ones are running in, fairly. They fear the war will be over before they get a sight of the fun.
– Mary Boykin Chesnut
They fitted Jonathan Paine with a prosthetic leg. They made him stand while they did it, made him endure their happy banter about his being as good as new, about how the girls were all swooning for a young soldier with an empty pant leg in his uniform. Jonathan said nothing.
They fitted the thing, took measurements, discussed adjustments. They left and came back another day and made him stand again and strapped it on. Bobby stood beside him-he might have been a tree trunk-and Bobby did not make clever jokes.
They gave him crutches and made him hobble about on the thing and his stump hurt like hell. He could hardly bear to look down and see his own damaged body. The act of standing made the room swirl around him in brilliant lit windows and white sheets and rows of beds and he thought he might fall down, but Bobby was there.
Finally they declared the thing done, set it beside his bed, and went away, and Jonathan got back in his bed and did not look at it again. It was a hateful thing.
Bobby came by to clean and dress his stump. He unwrapped the bandages, looked over the truncated limb as if he was evaluating horse flesh. “Mmm, my. This don’t need no cleanin’. This here looks good and healed-up to me.”
“You let me know when they start giving medical degrees to darkies. Then I’ll be happy to let you treat me.” The November wind made the windows rattle, and the sound chilled Jonathan right through.
Bobby smiled, sat down, uninvited, on a stool beside Jonathan’s bed. “Don’t need no fancy school to tell some things.”
Jonathan rolled his head over, looked into Bobby’s dark eyes. The black man was the only regular thing in his life. “That a fact? So what can you tell me, Dr. Sambo?”
“I kin tell you you bin layin in dat bed for a long damned time. Lot longer den it take for one shot-off leg to mend up.”
“That a fact?”
“Yassuh. Seen plenty a boys come and go, in da time you been layin here. Boys hurt wus den you.”
Jonathan rolled his head back, looked up at the ceiling. He knew every crack, every fleck of chipped paint. It was the landscape of the last part of his life.
Bobby was telling him a true thing. He had seen them too, the young men so grievously injured, seen them come and go while he remained, staring at the ceiling.
“Those other boys, they must have someplace to go,” Jonathan said.
“I tell you true…” Bobby said. He leaned closer and his voice was nearly a whisper. “You best find someplace too. I done heard the doctor talkin to Cap’n Tompkins yesserday. He say dere ain’t no reason you should still be here. He say da provosts, dey makin everyone in town give a bed to a hurt man, ain’t no room for one ain’t hurt.”
Jonathan closed his eyes. Of course, this would happen. He had known all along that it would, someday. He could not stay in that bed for the rest of his life, unless somehow his life were to end that day. But that did not seem likely. The only two things he could hope for-to remain fixed in that bed, or to die there-and neither one a possibility.
He was terrified. More frightened than he had been leaving his home for the uncertainties of war. More frightened than he had been looking down that hill-he now knew it was called “Henry House Hill”-into the swirl of battle, or standing in front of the charging Yankees, bullets plucking at his clothing. None of it was half so frightening to him as the prospect of standing up, tucking the crutches under his arms, hobbling out that door.
“You got no idea what kind of hurt I’m going through,” Jonathan said, and Bobby said, soft, “You think a nigger don’t know nuttin ’bout hurt? You think a boy sold away from his mammy, five years old, don’t know nuttin ’bout feelin sorry fo hisself? Missuh Jon’tin, you gots to go home.”
He was quiet for a long moment. He could feel Bobby’s presence beside him. Finally he spoke. It was just a whisper. “I can’t.”
Bobby replied, and his voice seemed to come from some place beyond the room, “You gots to. An I’se goin to help.” Then he stood and walked away.
&n
bsp; With that exchange, everything, for Jonathan, changed. Where before there had been deadness, nothing, there was now terror. Where there had been no thought of the future, there was now obsession with it. And from that obsession, no clear idea emerged of where to go, what to do. Jonathan felt sick to his stomach. His missing leg ached.
Where will I go? He had no money, no home. Certainly the army will give me something? Don’t they owe me wages, at least?
He thought of Robley. Where was he? In camp, no doubt. Jonathan did not follow the military situation, could not bear to think on it. But it was not possible for anyone in possession of his hearing to know nothing of what was going on. It was discussed constantly, and in all quarters. So Jonathan knew that the combined armies of Beauregard and Johnston were still encamped in and around Manassas, that they had done little since the Great Battle.
In October, Jonathan heard there had been some fighting at a place called Ball’s Bluff and the Yankees had been licked again, but he did not know if the 18th Mississippi had been part of that. Beyond that, nothing.
I could go to Robley… His brother tried to be the strict disciplinarian. Sometimes Jonathan thought Robley tried to fill in where their father was deficient, in that regard. But he was not unkind. Far from it. He could go to Robley, beg his brother’s forgiveness, ask for money enough that he could set up somewhere. Get a job. Surely there were things a one-legged man could do? Clerk, bookkeeper. He wrote a good, fair hand, had a head for numbers.
The whole thing overwhelmed him, made him sick with fear.
He thought of Robley, the last time he had seen him. How very angry he was. And Jonathan knew it was not just his and Nathaniel’s defiance that angered him. It was that Jonathan and Nathaniel were going into the fight, and he was not, and he wanted to, as much as his brothers, but his sense of duty would not allow him to walk away from Hamer’s Rifles.
Jonathan heard, subsequently, somewhere, that those troops at McLean’s Ford had in fact got into the show, late in the day. So Robley got what he wanted in the end. And if I had stayed put, made Nathaniel stay put, we would have been together and got into the fight just the same…
And that led to another thought. How do I know that Robley’s all right?
Jonathan sat up on his elbows, waited for the spinning in his head to stop. “Hey, Bobby…”
Bobby, across the room, looked up. He set down the bandages he was rolling, ambled over. He moved fast even while looking as if he was not.
“Yassuh?”
“Is there a way that a fella can find out if someone was killed or wounded in the Battle of Manassas?”
Bobby rubbed his chin. “I do believe they gots lists of all the boys was killed or hurt, down ta da Mechanics’ Institute. It’s where dey gots da War Department, ’cross from de capitol.”
Jonathan lay back again, nodded his head. He had to do it. Stand up, walk out the door, go and see if Robley Junior was still alive, or dead or wounded all this time. He had just compounded the terror. “Will you help me get there?”
“Sure enough,” Bobby said with tempered enthusiasm. He went off to get permission to leave, then came back, helped Jonathan sit up, swung his remaining leg over the edge of the bed. Every movement caused his head to whirl, so long had he remained supine.
Bobby helped him strap on the hateful prosthetic, supported him and helped him on with his pants, a cast-off pair of uniform trousers.
Bobby sat him down again and while he fought for equilibrium the black man pulled his shirtsleeves over his arms, buttoned the shirt down the front. He pulled Jonathan’s shell jacket out from under the bed, shook it out.
“Let me see that,” Jonathan said. Bobby handed it to him.
Jonathan held the jacket in both of his hands. He examined the gray cloth, the brass buttons with “Mississippi” stamped on their faces. They had called him “Mississippi” before they knew his name, because of those buttons.
He stuck his finger through one of the bullet holes. The jacket was riddled with them, as if moths had been at it, and stained with dark patches of blood that had failed to come out, even with the washing Bobby had given the thing.
Jonathan shook his head. All those bullets. How had he lived through it? Why?
“Here, let me help you on wid dis,” Bobby said, gently taking the coat from Jonathan’s hands, as if he did not want Jonathan to further contemplate his melancholy.
“Miss Tompkins, she say we kin take da buckboard. It ain’t too far, but I don’t hardly credit you wid da strength to walk to da carriage house.”
Jonathan pulled on the jacket, buttoned the brass buttons. It was like stepping into a past life, experiencing something from another place and time. Something that seemed utterly alien to the conscious mind but still completely familiar.
Bobby held out a hand and Jonathan took it and allowed Bobby to pull him to a standing position. Bobby stepped beside him and Jonathan put an arm around his shoulder and they stood there while Jonathan’s head settled down.
“I’m all right, I’m all right,” he said at last. “Crutches…”
Bobby tentatively let him go, stepped away to grab Jonathan’s crutches. Jonathan tested his weight on the stump, tried to get a feel for his balance. Not too bad. His shell jacket, cut to fit snug, now hung like a sack coat.
“Here you are, Missuh Jon’tin,” Bobby said, handing Jonathan the crutches. Jonathan tucked the armrests under his arms, set the tips on the floor, eased his weight onto them. Took a step, then another. “Good, good…” he gasped. “Good…show me the way, Bobby.”
They walked, slowly, out of the big room, into a foyer of sorts. Miss Tompkins’s was an elegant house, at least as well appointed as the Paine plantation house, if not quite as big. Now it was entirely given over to the wounded.
Bobby led Jonathan across the carpeted floor-worn and dirty now with the traffic coming and going-and opened the big front door.
Jonathan hesitated. He was breathing hard, in part from the exertion, in part from the panic that seized him. He had not been outside in months, had never really intended to go outside again. It was not a conscious thought-if he had thought about it at all he would have realized that it was absurd-it was just a feeling, understood, never expressed.
But there was the outside, right through the door. A front porch, the roof of which was supported by columns, a Confederate flag flogging in the breeze. Stairs down to the walk, a white picket fence around a narrow yard, sidewalk, cobbled street, people walking by, carriages, the whole world carrying on, waging war, and it did not know or care about Jonathan Paine and what he suffered.
Jonathan breathed deep, hobbled on, out the door. Bobby closed it behind him, helped him down the stairs and around the back of the white clapboard house to where the carriage house stood. In the open area in front of the carriage house stood the buckboard and two black, restless horses in traces. Their breath made gray clouds around their muzzles on that cold day.
Jonathan stopped and leaned on his crutches while Bobby arranged a crate for him to step up on and onto the buckboard’s seat. He gulped breath, felt his limbs trembling from the effort of getting out to the carriage house. His stump throbbed and he was covered in sweat, despite the cold wind that whipped around the courtyard, tumbling leaves and torn papers.
Bobby helped him up onto the buckboard’s seat, and with great relief Jonathan sat.
“You don’t have ta do dis, Missuh Jon’tin,” Bobby said. “You let me know what you wants to find out, I kin go find it out.”
“No,” Jonathan said, gasping the word. “No. I have to do it.” He did not know why. Some kind of penance. Perhaps he would not be satisfied with an answer he did not see himself. Whatever the reason, he had to go.
Bobby flicked the reins, made a clicking noise with his tongue, and the horses stepped out. The buckboard seat bounced and swayed on its springs and Jonathan held on, tried not to think about throwing up.
Richmond was crowded, packed with people, the
roads crammed with vehicles. It reminded Jonathan of the docks in New Orleans, that kind of traffic, that kind of bustle. There was nothing else to which he could compare it, he had never seen anything like it.
There were soldiers everywhere, companies and regiments marching past, loitering around, waiting, just as Jonathan remembered, the eternal waiting of military life. Gray-clad privates and privates clad in whatever their home states provided, or whatever they wore off the farm, officers on horses with gold braid swirling around gray sleeves and running wild over the tops and sides of kepis, gold rope twined around slouch hats. Like schools of various species of fish, they moved through the streets.
There were wounded men as well. Men with legs missing, arms missing, men with bandannas tied over their faces to hide whatever horror was left behind when the iron had done its work. In his total self-absorption Jonathan had come to believe that he was somehow unique. Despite the wounded men around him in the hospital, men who had also lost legs, or arms, or their lives, Jonathan had come to believe that he was the worst off, that he had suffered in a way that no one else had.
He sat silent, hanging on as the buckboard jounced, looked around, realized that he had been very wrong in thinking that. He saw a soldier, legs gone, bandanna over one blinded eye, leaning against a building, begging with tin cup extended. I am not so hard off as that fellow, Jonathan thought. When I join him in begging, then I’ll feel sorry for myself. The sight of the man, the thought of himself there on that street corner, rattled him. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the tattered sleeve of his jacket.
Bobby drove the buckboard with aplomb and a hint of aggression, and soon the big capitol building, with its massive columns at the top of wide granite stairs, loomed up in front, and Jonathan was glad because just riding in that swaying seat was taxing his strength to its limits.
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