by John Brunner
Although he had noticed, with burgeoning anger, that it was always he who had the most menial task. Here he was chopping wood. The rest of the men were about the business of making a bivouac. Two were lighting a fire with the first batch of wood he had delivered; others were searching for anything that might serve as fishing line, in the hope of supplementing their rations with a catfish. Some had suggested going after wild turkey, but Captain Folbert had forbidden it. That would cost powder and shot, and both were reserved for killing people.
His decision proved unpopular, though there was no gainsaying it. They were all at the limit of their resources. They had hastened south along the river bank under orders to act as a kind of tripwire; they had started out as a sketch for a full battery—having the minimum complement of four twelve-pounders—and lost one when a wheel broke which they could not repair, so they had to spike the gun and abandon it, retaining the limber because it held precious ammunition. Tomorrow they would carry on to their designated station at Coles Creek Point. But now darkness was falling, and mist was closing in, so Folbert had made camp and posted sentries.
Free for a little from their traces, the horses moved fitfully within the radius of their tethers, grazing off what grass contrived to find lodging on this impermanent ground. Even they, Caesar told himself silently, are given more chance to rest than I am!
But the word that had disturbed him still hung in the air like the smoke from a gun glanced at when its noise arrives over long distance.
With a start he gathered himself. Extended toward him was a rich-scented plug of tobacco. The hand holding it was white. Long ago and far away white hands had offered him a brown bribe; that had been molasses taffy and the price of acceptance an order to take down his breeches. Nor was that the sole recollection from his childhood which often made him wish he had been assigned to a regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards—officered though they were for the most part by free persons of color who had not scrupled to own slaves themselves. These his companions were, as he had been assured he was also, American citizens. But they could as well have been inhabitants of the moon. They were more alien to the world he had grown up in than the folks at the Great House to the slave families of Pré du Lac Plantation…
But that was then and this was now and the person making the offer was Sergeant Tennice, who was rebelling against some strict religious sect Caesar had never heard of that banned liquor and tobacco and even coffee, yet took seriously other principles of the kind about which this war was being fought—to the extent of being courteous to a black recruit.
Muttering reflex thanks, he trimmed a small chaw from the plug with his left-side teeth. Those on the right were in poor shape. Last time the battery was in a settled camp the regimental surgeon had drawn one of them, but now another was starting to ache.
Having given back the tobacco, he waited to savor the first juice, then made to raise the axe again.
Tennice checked him with a gesture.
“Rest a while longer,” he advised. “So far they didn’t burn the wood you gave them already… Say, tell me something, soldier!”
Compared to some of the names he had been called, that title was such an honorific Caesar almost sprang to attention.
“Surely, Sergeant, if I can.”
“More than any people of color I so far met, you talk like an educated person. I bet you must have been a house nigger—right?”
“No sir.”
“But you can read and cipher!”
“Yes sir.”
“Then how come?”
There was a taint of smoke in the air. It had arrived this moment. Caesar had snuffed it, drawn a conclusion, decided the conclusion was mistaken and dismissed it: that, in the space of a dozen heartbeats.
“I was set to work in the sugar mill,” he muttered. “They had all kinds of machinery. The overseer was mostly drunk, but someone was ‘bliged to keep it going… There was books sent with the machines. I figured ‘em out. ‘Fore that, of course I did have schoolin’. Mist’ess liked to give us Bible lessons, bein’ min’ful of the souls of nigger chil’en.”
Especially those who shared blood with her own!
That almost slipped under Caesar’s guard. Nervous, before he could stop himself he found he was offering Tennice the ingratiating smile which in plantation days would have been necessary to escape a whipping, even though he had privately sworn that when he donned blue army garb he was exchanging it for the last of all such cringing grins.
The sergeant, however, having lost his bet with himself, was paying half a mind to something else.
“Ah, smells like they got the fire to burn at last. On with your axe-work, soldier! Tonight we shall enjoy hot victuals, praise the Lord!”
He was moving away when Caesar caught his arm.
“That smoke—it’s not from our cookfire! And listen!”
Tennice cocked his head. His mouth grew round. A second later he was striding toward the captain’s tent, shouting, while men who had lain down in the hope of a few hours’ rest sat up, uttering groans.
Shortly he was back with Captain Folbert, bringing a telescope which the latter seized as he rushed up the one tiny hillock to be found at this spot and swung in the direction of what was by now incontestably the chuffing-popping of a steamboat under load. The wind, such as it was, blew from the south; across the intervening neck of land it carried not only the sound but also the smoky scent which Caesar had been first to recognize.
It wafted the mist this way, too, and in patches that was so dense as to deserve the name of fog.
The telescope still on his eye, Folbert said, “Sergeant, did we not post a sentry on the downriver side?”
“We did, sir,” Tennice answered.
“And he hasn’t given warning?”
“Not so far, Captain.”
“In that case”—lowering the telescope—“next time we pitch camp we’d better hand him an axe and put the colored boy on sentry-go. Advance the guns! Wait on my order, for there’s a chance that boat may be one of ours, but if not she’ll be a sitting target as she breasts the point!”
His eyes red-rimmed for lack of sleep, his gray coat open to reveal a dirty flannel undershirt, and his cheeks dark with grime and the need of a shave, Colonel Carradine said, “Shall we be able to run through the night, or shall we be obliged to tie up? It would be a pity now we’re so close to Vicksburg.”
Captain Parbury started. It had been long and long since, in the pilothouse of a steamer, he had found himself subservient to the orders of another—indeed, not since he ceased to be a cub and proudly accepted responsibility for a thirty-thousand-dollar boat. Almost defensively he kept overlooking that on this voyage he was compelled to share command. Ordinarily the pilot on watch was a supreme authority; even the boat’s owners were not entitled to dispute his judgment. Here once again was the sensation that war, like the river, could wash away what one had taken to be fixed.
Resentful of the obligation to put into words what he understood perfectly without them, angry because his stammer—which confidence in his captain’s status had almost erased—was apt to come back any moment without warning, he said, “All depends on what the fog does, Colonel.”
“It doesn’t look too serious right now.”
“It surely don’t,” Parbury agreed with forced patience. “But we have torch-baskets that will lead us through simple darkness. When it comes to fog, though, all you can trust is your wits and your leadsmen.”
He glanced at a stanchion beside him. There hung a present from his wife last Christmas: a combined thermometer and barometer on a polished wooden frame. He had thought it frippery at first, having run so many boats up and down the river without such help, but experience had shown it to be useful. He had made a point of saying so. Adèle had been overjoyed. It was the first contribution she had been able to make to that half of his life where she might never enter, only observe.
Carradine mopped his forehead—and small wonder, P
arbury thought, for the thermometer was showing eighty-one degrees. The very wheel in his hands seemed to be sweating.
“Is no season on this river free of fog?”
For the moment Parbury had used up his command of words; his last speech had been uncharacteristically long. He contented himself with a headshake, and need not even have made that gesture, for Carradine had leapt to his feet, snatching up field glasses.
“Look there!” he barked, pointing to the headland they were approaching.
For a moment Parbury saw nothing remarkable; then he detected movement, and with an oath reached for his own—seldom-used—binoculars. Through them he made out the silhouette of a field gun being wheeled about, then its horses being backed to slack the traces. Men in crouched attitudes hurried to chock the carriage against recoil.
Automatically his hand sought the rope for the backing bell.
“Not astern!” Carradine snapped, thereby betraying the close attention he had paid to the operation of the boat. “Full ahead! Our best chance is to round the point before those guns are rammed and laid!”
“Guns? I saw one gun, but—”
“Guns! That was a twelve-pounder, and they run in batteries of four at least!” Carradine tensed as a breeze cut a clear line through the mist. “There’s number two, but by a miracle she’s bogged a wheel. The way her muzzle’s canted she’ll be there some time. But here comes at least one other, and her limber too— Sergeant! Sergeant!”
Rushing to the pilothouse door, he bellowed in a voice to overcome the roar of the chimney-draught and the heave-and-sigh of the engines and the swish of the wheels and the thumping of the pitmans which made life aboard any steamer like the Nonpareil a small eternity of throbbing and rocking.
“Sergeant, all sharpshooters to the foredeck except Mears and Locket, and I want them on the pilothouse roof. Jump to it—jump!”
Within, as it seemed, the blink of an eye, the rows of cotton bales were infested by men leveling rifles. The two whom Carradine had singled out by name, stripped to shirts and breeches and not even taking time to don the boots they had put off when they lay down to rest, scrambled up as directed over Parbury’s head. Alarming creaks answered the imposition of their weight.
The mist came and went. Now the boat was in a clear spot, but the shore was veiled; now everything was wiped from view by a gray-bright cloud; now, without warning, there was a gap that showed the guns being readied for attack. Parbury concentrated mechanically on ensuring that the steamer followed the most distant safe line around the point. But the deep-scoured channel was, of course, close to the inside of the bend. There would be a cutoff here soon…
All that, though, belonged on a plane which did not call for words. He devoted his chief attention to framing what he planned to say the moment Carradine returned.
The pilothouse door swung wide. Promptly: “Colonel!”
“Yes?”
“You mean to run this point right now?” His stammer was threatening; any second, a crucial word might hit a snag. So he rushed on without waiting for a reply. “We have supplies aboard destined for Vicksburg—not the bottom mud!”
To his astonishment he even scraped over the shoal of that last phrase. But mere seconds later he felt his jaw lock into the trembling static mode which would ensure he could say nothing for the next minute, and he was totally unable to interrupt Carradine’s retort: quietly-spoken, yet as blistering as an escape of high-pressure steam.
“What’s your alternative? Think you can outdo the Carondelet and Pittsburgh in a tinclad?” He was referring to the Union gunboats which, a year ago, had run past Island Number 10 by night defying its Confederate garrison, and earned the admiration of both friends and foes. “Hah! If you go astray in the fog, you’ll wind up sitting on a sandbank, a fixed target and the easiest thing to range on. And before you claim you’re too good a pilot to drive us aground—which I believe, sir, for I’ve watched you closely and with respect!—think how little cover darkness offers to a steamer, fog or no fog. Did you never notice what a fountain of sparks your chimneys vomit, a hundred feet above the water? Did you never hear the rumble of your engines, that would show a blind man where to aim his guns? Why, the very ripples making a drowned log bob about would be enough to suit some gunlayers I know!”
Parbury, still tongue-tied, felt his cheeks grow as hot as a callow boy’s. That was not uncommon. All the accomplishments lying to his credit, all the skills he had acquired as an adult, his marriage, his status as a father, had not sufficed to alter the personality of the gangling youth who had gone home to find his home had gone.
“Now me!” Carradine, a man who breathed confidence at every word, was scanning the shore again. “Me, I have experience of a battery like that one. While it’s true they could lay their guns by sound alone, I doubt they will. Ammunition has grown precious in this war and they won’t risk wasting it until they must. This implies that so long as the fog is less than solid they will wait until they have a clear view. But when they can see us, we can see them. And under my command, Captain, I have marksmen who will take the eye out of a squirrel so as not to spoil the skin. Given that, would you prefer to face three cannon… or three-score rifles?”
Parbury wanted desperately to say that something was amiss with Carradine’s reasoning. He sensed the fact much as he could detect the changing current of the river. But for him words had always been treacherous, apt to collapse under the weight of his intended meaning.
The tightness in his jaw spread; he felt tension in his bowels now, which he was used to because it occurred whenever he had to steer a steamer across a bend new-made since last fall. The familiarity of the sensation entrained resignation. He was acquainted with the river. War, like the river, altered things. He was ignorant of war but there were men who had trained for it. One was here.
Dry-mouthed he said, “Aye, Colonel. At your orders.”
With that he surrendered all judgment, all control. Passive, he awaited the outcome of events. The mist grew denser here, and thinner there; random gusts—some due to the steamer’s furnaces—opened and shut the view like a picturebook’s leaves turning under casual fingers. The engines’ thumping mingled with the hull’s complaints. The sky leaned down and darkened. He could feel its intolerable load.
The manner in which the bone-weary artillerymen reharnessed their horses was not drill to satisfy a parade-sergeant. Nonetheless, it resulted in the rapid arrival of guns one and three at a spot where they could be brought to bear on the approaching steamer.
Number two failed to make it. A tree trunk, partly rotted, lay sunk in the dirt, invisible under moss and lichens. One of the gun carriage’s wheels chanced to run lengthwise over its weakest part. It cracked open. The wheel fell into its hollow center and jammed at the point where punk wood changed to sound.
Fuming, Folbert shouted for Caesar to bring his axe and chop the wheel loose, while he himself took command of number one gun with Tennice in charge of number three, and ordered the spare limber belonging to the missing fourth gun to stand by under the direction of a fat and nervous private named Hall, who clung to his horse’s halter like a lifeline.
Feeling mutinous, Caesar reluctantly complied. Why should he be, again, the man who undertook the dullest hardest job, when what he wanted most was to let fly at the enemy? There might not be a chance for long; the mist was thickening by the minute…
Still, if all else failed one could aim at the noise. He was well acquainted with small steamboats, for the Pré du Lac Plantation had a navigable connection with Bayou Lafourche, but this was the first time he had been in earshot of a two-hundred-foot Mississippi sidewheeler under full power, and he was amazed at how deafening she was.
So, if he did break this gun free, he might at least claim the right to fire a shot with it. Who deserved to do so better than a former slave?
Anger lent muscle to his blows. He had served in the Union Army four months; he had seen action during two attacks on Vicksburg. But he
had been confined to commissariat duties. This was the first time he had been in confrontation with his former masters. He thought of all the rebels as detestable because some of them bought and sold other human beings. Never, since he learned to talk, had Caesar believed he was a mere object to be traded back and forth like an ox or a bedstead. This conviction had sustained him when he dodged the patterollers who policed the plantation’s boundary, mounted on horseback and accompanied by hounds. Evading pursuit by swimming the bayou, he made his way north despite hunger and thirst and not infrequently despair, until he met soldiers wearing blue and begged to be enlisted on their side.
And found he was one of hundreds, and felt proud of his own people for the first time ever.
Of course it should not have been—chunk went the axe and chips and splinters flew—not have been a war that made it happen!
And likewise, since it had turned out that way, instead of swinging this axe—thunk!—he ought to be behind a gun loaded and laid to sink the steamer! Obviously it took practice to handle a field gun. But Sergeant Tennice, last time he put his black recruit through a drill, had told him he was doing well. Thunk! So—
“Fire!”
Folbert’s command rang out, and twin explosions followed prompt. Caesar could no more resist the temptation to see what effect the guns had had than anybody else.
The captain had chosen a moment at which the mist was lifting. Down a gray-walled alley in the air loomed the bulk of the steamboat in her ugly wartime garb, her paint dull and peeling, her sides hung with boiler plate.
Of which one sheet was uttering a boom like a giant gong. The better shot had landed fair and square.
But the other, as a drift of spray revealed, had fallen short. Folbert had been overeager.