He had overstated his own qualifications as well. Mallory called him “Captain.” Naturally, the Secretary would assume an experienced river pilot would merit that title. Not a big problem-he could get around that one. Take a real pilot at gunpoint if he had to, so long as he was aboard when the CSS Yazoo River got underway.
He read the letter again. He had to get back to his office in the Yazoo River’s wheelhouse. He had to write follow-up letters, find out where his gunboat iron was.
Jonathan Paine pushed open the back door of Miss Sally Tompkins’s house, clomped down the back steps. He held a big basket crammed full of filthy sheets and bloody bandages. The wind plucked at the red-and-white strips, pulled them out, set them flapping like banners. Jonathan turned a shoulder into the wind, hurried across the yard, along the path worn down to dirt and fringed with brown grass.
Bobby stood at a cauldron hanging from a tripod over a blazing fire. He agitated the contents with a big stick, like one of Shakespeare’s witches.
Othello plays in Macbeth, Paine thought, and the thought made him smile. He stepped quickly across the yard. He was moving well with his prosthetic leg now, walking more like a man with a hurt leg than a man with no leg at all. The limp reminded him of his father. Of the three boys, he had always favored his father’s looks the most. Now the effect was even greater.
He moved within the radius of the fire, caught what warmth he could. He and Bobby dumped the bloody bandages into the water and Bobby began stirring again.
For some time they just stood, enjoyed the warmth of the fire and the fresh air outside the stuffiness of the hospital, and said nothing. They were perfectly comfortable in one another’s company, could enjoy silent companionship. Jonathan wondered if this could have happened anyplace outside a hospital, where his wound and Bobby’s nursing had put black man and white on something like even ground.
“Been two months now,” Bobby said at last, never taking his eyes from the boiling water. A few itinerant flakes of snow began to whip around the yard.
“Month and a half. Since the last one.”
They were talking about letters home. Jonathan had written three, had been waiting for a reply. When he was healed enough that he could no longer stay on at the hospital as a patient, he stayed on as a helper, assisting Bobby in changing dressings, washing bandages, wrapping the dead. Not so many wounded now, mostly dysentery, ague, camp fever. What wounds there were were more often from accidents than the enemy. He nursed and he waited. He heard no word from his father.
“That like you daddy?” Bobby asked, looking up at last. “He the kind would jest not write?”
Jonathan shook his head. “No. No, that is not like him at all.”
Bobby nodded and stirred.
“Could be the mail isn’t getting through,” Jonathan said. “I can’t imagine things are running too well, as far as mail.”
“Could be. ’Course, ya sent three letters.”
Jonathan nodded. He did not believe that all three letters had failed to arrive. He could not imagine why his father had not written back.
“I have to go back,” Jonathan said at last. “I can’t wait to hear. I just have to go.”
He had not said that out loud before, because it frightened him. His world was closed down to Miss Tompkins’s hospital. The one time he left it had nearly killed him-he had been another two weeks in bed. Now the very thought of crossing the line of the white picket fence was terrifying.
He had never said it out loud, because doing so was like an announcement, a commitment, and he had not been ready.
Bobby nodded his head, and they were silent for a moment. “Yassuh. You gots ta go. An if ya likes, well, I’ll go wid ya.”
Jonathan smiled. “That’s right kind of you, Bobby. But it ain’t like you can just up and leave.”
“Why can’t I?”
“Well…well, hell, Bobby, you belong to Miss Tompkins, for starters.”
“No I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“No suh. I’s a free man.”
“You are? How come you never told me?”
“How come you jest reckoned I’s a slave?”
Jonathan smiled, shook his head. He had just assumed. He did not know why.
John Scofield sat in his office, elbow on his desk, chin in hand. He stared out the big window that looked out over the outer office. The window made the office seem more a fishbowl than private work space.
Cold air blew in from the outside window, which was opened a crack. Late February in Atlanta, Georgia. Generally not so cold, but a norther was blowing through, and temperatures plummeted.
He could hear conversation drifting up from the yard below, heated conversation, the hottest thing going in Atlanta. Generally, when the Scofield and Markham’s Gate City rolling mill was in full production, when the iron was pouring and the rolling mills rolling it out, when plate and bar and railroad iron was being loaded onto flatbeds in the siding, he would never have been able to hear something so quiet as a conversation three stories down. Not even a shouted conversation, as this one was.
But he could hear it now, because nothing was happening, no work being done. Prices were going up all over the Confederacy. Skilled men such as ironworkers were in great demand, and they knew it. The fact that their jobs kept them out of the army did not seem to impress them any more. They wanted higher wages, and just as Scofield came to expect from their ilk, they were not subtle about it.
He shook his head. He sighed. He could not make out all of the words, but he caught a few, mostly damns and y’all gonna be surprised when we… and you sons of bitches… It did not sound as if it was going well.
The conversation below stopped abruptly. Scofield swiveled around, looked at the door beyond the empty outer office, wondered who would come through. He waited. Finally it opened. Frank Ouellette, haggard, defeated, came in, closed the door behind him with more force than necessary.
He walked into Scofield’s office without knocking. He flopped down in a chair. Scofield thought of the Yankees retreating after Manassas. They must have looked like old Frank.
“Well?” Scofield asked.
“They ain’t budging. Another ten cents a day, and they ain’t too happy with Confederate scrip no more.”
Scofield shook his head. The war was less than a year old. If the Confederacy lost, he wondered if it would be due to the Yankees’ fighting prowess or the greed of the Southern mechanics and laborers.
“I don’t know as we can do that…” Scofield said.
Ouellette shrugged. “I told ’em. They think you and Markham, and me, we live like damned kings, think we making money hand over fist here.”
The two men were silent for a moment, and then Scofield felt the first stirring of an idea. “I wonder if we might give them some little token, something that will inspire them to get back to work…”
“Such as?”
“Everyone’s worried about this here Confederate scrip. How’s about if we pay them-even give ’em a bonus-in specie. Gold. Ain’t a thing satisfies a greedy man like real gold.”
“Sure, but…” Ouellette began, paused, saw where Scofield was heading. “That fellow, wrote last month…”
“Exactly. Never did count what he sent, but I’m certain they’s enough to go around, a couple of times. That should get them all fired up for work.”
Ouellette nodded. It had been something of a shock, the day the package arrived. Gold in coins and an order for iron, preferably rolled out into gunboat iron, drilled for six bolts. Some rich lunatic building himself an ironclad.
They marveled, shook their heads, put the gold in the safe, set the order aside. The Confederate Army and Navy were desperate for milled iron. There was no time to fulfill an order for some civilian with big dreams in the naval line. Perhaps in a year or so, but not now.
“You never had any intention of filling that fella’s order,” Ouellette pointed out. “You just gonna hand out his gold and let him fl
ap in the wind?”
“No, no…I can’t do that. Wish I could, but I can’t.” Scofield rummaged through a pile of papers in a basket on his desk, pulled out a letter from near the bottom of the heap. “We’ll start handing out gold to our malcontent workers there, and if that induces them to get back to work, then I reckon this…Robley Paine…gets the gunboat iron he’s asking for.”
38
About 1,000 tons of iron plating is being manufactured by rolling mills in Atlanta, Ga., for an iron-plated frigate nearly completed at New Orleans.
– Stephen R. Mallory to President Jefferson Davis
They arrived back in Newport, weary, battered, wounded in mind and body. Bowater saw his men safe in barracks at the Gosport Naval Shipyard. Ten-thirty at night, he had finished his reports, oral and written, told his tale to Forrest and the others, been dismissed.
He wandered out of the shipyard, too torn up to sleep, or even to remain in one place. He walked the streets. He knew where he would end up.
He approached the old house quietly. No lights burning. Behind it, within the tended yard, he could see the carriage house. A light shone in the window. Late, but not that late, and Samuel did not care much for convention at that moment.
He hopped the picket fence, landed soft on the grass, crossed to the carriage house. He rapped on the door, realized as he did that he might scare her to death, that she might not answer. But he heard soft footsteps across the floor, and the door opened.
Wendy was there, the light from a candle diffused through her long, dark hair. She was wearing a loose night dress, holding a book. Bowater saw a sudden flash of fear in her face, which softened to recognition, concern.
“Samuel…I thought it was my aunt. Dear God, what has happened to you?”
She opened the door wider, stepped aside, and he stepped in, looked around without seeing anything. “I have been in a fight, Wendy…” he said.
She put the book down, stepped up to him, wrapped her arms around him. For a long moment they embraced, and then Samuel pushed her gently back. “Do you have a canvas?” he asked. “Might I borrow some paints?”
Wendy nodded, stepped away. She picked up a small canvas, set it on the easel that stood in the corner, offered him her paint set, the one he knew so well.
He shed his frock coat and hat, let them fall on the floor, rolled up his sleeves. He stared at the canvas, let the picture form on the white surface, let his mind create it so that his hands had only to fill in the places where paint had to go. He took up a pencil, slashed a few lines across the surface, general outlines. He dabbed paint on the palette, began to work with a wide brush.
Wendy pulled up a stool and sat beside him and a little back and watched silently as the picture emerged. Samuel was hardly aware of the time passing, minutes, then hours, as the foredeck of the Cape Fear grew out of the white field before him, the gray skies and brown water, the sharp points of muzzle flash. And on one edge, dimly seen, Lieutenant Harwell’s face in the instant of death.
Samuel felt himself a part of the scene on the canvas as much as he had been a part of the real fight, he felt like a participant in the picture, painting from within the scene. He felt the tears roll down his cheeks as he rendered not the horror of the thing, but the suggestion of that horror, which was more frightening by half.
Three hours, four hours he worked, letting it all come out through his brush. Wendy sat on a small fainting couch, fell asleep with her head on her arm, and Bowater painted on.
At last he stepped back, set the brush down. Wendy came awake, as if she sensed this was the moment. She stood, joined him.
“That’s it…” she whispered, as if she knew what it was he was trying to render. “That is it exactly.”
Bowater looked long and hard at the canvas, and for the first time he felt a mesh, a perfect fit, between what he saw in his head and what he saw created in paint.
He turned away from the painting, hoped he had managed to get what was in his head out and plant it permanently on canvas. He ran his hands around Wendy’s waist, pulled her near. He could feel her smooth skin through the thin material of her night dress. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulled his head down to hers, and kissed him, and he kissed her back, with a desperate urgency.
Wendy cocked her head aside and Samuel ran his lips down her long neck, buried his face in her hair, kissed the soft place behind her ear. She pushed him away, took the top button of his shirt in her fingers, unbuttoned that, and the next and the next, and then eased the shirt over his head. She ran her hands over his chest. They felt cool and small against his skin. He ran a finger down her cheek, down her neck, took up the end of the tie that held her night dress up, tugged it free.
The garment fell open and Wendy shrugged it off, let it fall to the floor. The light of the three candles by which Bowater had been painting played over her white skin, the curves of her thighs and back and hips, and Bowater traced them with his hands. He stepped out of his shoes, let his trousers fall to the floor, led her over to the small bed in the corner.
He lay down with her, half on top, let the feel of her skin against his overwhelm him. She was beautiful, loving, warm. She smelled of violet water and soap. She smelled alive and good and like everything that the fight at Elizabeth City was not, and Samuel tried to envelop himself with her, to become a part of her and let her drive away everything else.
They made love, desperate and slow, consuming one another, and when it was over Samuel was spent in every way he could be, and he slept in a way he had thought he would never sleep again.
The weeks wound past. The Cape Fears lived at the Gosport Naval Shipyard and they waited. Bowater waited with them by day, raced to be with Wendy Atkins when his few duties were done.
They waited for orders. They waited for news from the Western Rivers. They waited for the Yankees to come overland from Albemarle Sound and take the shipyard back. They waited to see if the CSS Virginia would roll over like a dead whale, jam in the dry dock, or sink.
February 13, 1862. Float test for the nearly complete ironclad. For no reason other than curiosity, Samuel Bowater and Hieronymus Taylor stood near the edge of the dry dock and watched the water creeping up, lapping over the twenty-two-foot-deep hull of the former United States steam frigate Merrimack, now the Confederate States ironclad Virginia.
Bowater stared down into the water swirling into the dry dock. He recalled the night he was down there, looking for the bitter end of a burning fuse, the cold water knocking him around. With the Cape Fear they had assisted in getting the old wreck up and into the dry dock, had witnessed nearly every inch of her transformation from burned-out hulk to modern war machine.
He ran his eyes over her ugly, boxy shape. Merrimack had been no sleek clipper ship, but still she had had some elegance to her. There was nothing lovely about the ironclad. She was all function. But that was all right with Bowater, because he saw no loveliness in war, and he no longer felt that aesthetics had a place aboard the engines of war.
The water came up and up and the shoring dropped away and finally the Virginia floated free. Around the dry dock there was a shared sense of tension, like the shared sense of fear prior to combat. No one cheered, no one spoke loud. There was an undercurrent of muttering as several hundred navy men expressed several hundred opinions.
“Well, damn…” Taylor said, soft. “She didn’t roll over after all. I’ll be damned…”
Three days after that, the dry dock was flooded again, the gates opened, and the Virginia was christened and floated out into the Elizabeth River.
It was the most solemn christening that Bowater had ever attended. No political speeches, no flags, banners, fireworks, music. It was a quiet, thoughtful christening by professional navy men, who understood the profundity of the moment, who understood the change in their world that the 275-foot iron-skinned monster represented.
They watched in silence as CSS Virginia moved slowly out into the stream, pulled by silent warps. It m
ade Bowater wish that no one other than professional navy men ever be allowed to any christening.
Fitting out, provisioning, began in earnest, and an air of anticipation blew through the shipyard, lifting the gloom of winter and past defeats. And so it was with mixed emotions that Samuel Bowater reported to Commander Forrest for orders he guessed would take them away before the iron monster could sally forth.
He was right.
They were on a train the next morning: Bowater, Taylor, Tanner, Seth Williams, Eustis Babcock, Dick Merrow, Harry McNelly, all of the surviving members of the Cape Fear’s crew, transferred bodily to a new vessel, rattling along over a thousand miles of mediocre, terrible, and sometimes nonexistent railroad, to a riverport town that only a few of them had ever heard of.
Some of the men had friends, wives, girlfriends on the platform to see them off. Wendy arrived. She had two baskets with bread, cheese, cold roast beef, wine. She gave one to Hieronymus Taylor, who was more than a little surprised to see her there, and to Samuel Bowater, who was surprised she had brought a basket for the chief.
“Hieronymus and I met once, before that night at the concert,” she said. “I will tell you the particulars someday. Oh, don’t look like that, it was nothing at all.”
They held one another. They kissed. Neither cried. Neither thought of the likelihood of that being their last embrace, on a windswept, sooty railroad platform in Norfolk, Virginia.
The former Cape Fears were five days in transition. They walked a total of forty-three miles between different rail lines, past torn-up track, washed-out track. They slept on train seats that shook as if the earth was opening up beneath them, and on the floors of train stations. They ate greasy food bought from vendors on platforms which Samuel Bowater paid for from his own pocket.
They arrived at last on the crowded docks of Memphis. It was February 24. From there they were two days on a stern-wheeler, running south, a considerably more comfortable means of travel.
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