by John Jakes
Cooper positioned himself slightly behind and to the side of the skipper, bending and sliding his rear onto a small iron seat attached to the hull. The six crewmen occupied similar seats, three on either side of the fore-to-aft shaft that had been cast with sections offset in the shape of broad, shallow U’s. The crewmen grasped these to turn the shaft and propel the submersible at its maximum speed of four knots.
“Mr. Main,” said Dixon, “would you be so good as to explain the test procedures to our crew?” As he spoke, he tested two handles. One operated the rudder attached to the propeller housing; the other controlled the angle of port and starboard diving planes.
“Simple enough,” Cooper said. His back already ached from bending to the curve of the hull. “Tonight we will not use that candle as the sole determiner of how long this vessel can stay underwater. We shall use you gentlemen. We shall remain submerged an hour—an hour and a half—” some apprehensive murmuring at that “—perhaps more. We will not surface until the first man reaches his limit and announces that he can’t continue to function without fresh air. Each man must find that limit for himself, being neither too confident of his own powers of endurance nor too quick to surrender to discomfort.”
The final words bore a clear note of scorn, causing Dixon to react. But he was facing the instruments; Cooper didn’t see the frown.
“When the first man calls out one word—up—that will be our signal to empty the tanks and rise to the surface. Any questions?”
“I just hope we can come up,” one man declared with a nervous laugh. “Some of the sojers say this fish ought to be named Jonah ’stead of Hunley.”
“Belay that kind of talk,” Dixon said as he climbed the short ladder and poked his head out the forward hatch. From his cramped position, Cooper could glimpse a small section of the hatch opening: an oval of sky decorated with faint stars.
“Cast off the bow and stern lines.”
Dockhands ran noisily to obey Dixon’s order. Cooper could feel Hunley float free all at once. Dixon climbed down again and addressed the mate.
“Airbox shaft open, Mr. Fawkes?”
“Open, sir.”
“Stand by to reverse crank. Half speed.”’
“Half speed—crank,” the mate repeated. Grunting, the crewmen began to revolve the shaft.
It was awkward work, but Dixon had drilled the men well and developed smooth timing. The candle flickered. Water lapped the hull with a queer hollow sound.
Again Dixon went up the ladder, calling down commands to the mate, who had taken the rudder. As soon as they backed from the dock, they reversed direction and picked up speed. Sweat trickled on Cooper’s chin. He felt entombed, wished he were anywhere but here. He fought rising panic.
Still with his head in the open, Dixon looked all around, three hundred and sixty degrees, then came down, reached overhead and secured the hatch.
“Stand by to submerge.”
Cooper’s heart was tripping so fast his chest hurt. He felt a keen respect for these men who had volunteered for this duty and some sense of the agony of those who had perished in the earlier dives. Then he chided himself. He was indulging in sentimentalities again.
“Close airbox shaft.”
“Airbox shaft closed,” the mate sang out.
“Opening bow tank seacock.”
Cooper heard the gurgle and rush of water. The hull swayed and dipped. He grasped a stanchion mounted above him as Hunley’s bow tilted down. He thought of Judith, Marie-Louise. He couldn’t help it. They did call this the Peripatetic Coffin, after all.
She settled to the bottom with a shiver and a soft thump. The men relaxed against the hull or leaned on the drive shaft. One fellow said the hardest half of the voyage was over. No one laughed.
Dixon studied the mercury tube in the depth gauge. Cooper fought sudden, terrifying fantasies. Someone tightening a metal band around his head. Someone locking him in a lightless closet whose door had no inside knob—
Alexander patted his waistcoat. “Any of you gents have a timepiece? In the excitement, seems I forgot mine altogether.”
“I do.” Cooper fumbled for the slim gold watch he always carried. He snapped back the lid. “Ten past seven.” The flame of the candle stood straight. Wax ran down to form tiny mountain chains on the sides.
At half past the hour, the candle was visibly dimmer. A man muttered, “Air’s growing foul.”
“Someone let one go,” said another crewman. The snickers were halfhearted. Cooper’s eyes began to smart. Dixon kept stroking his side whiskers with index and middle fingers.
“How long?” Alexander asked abruptly. Cooper roused. Either his sight was failing or the candle, half gone, had dimmed still more. He had to lift his watch near his chin to see.
“We’ve been down thirty-three minutes.”
He kept the watch open in his hand. How loudly it ticked. As the light continued to dim, his mind played pranks. The intervals between ticks grew far apart; he seemed to wait a half hour for the next one. When it came, he heard the sound for a long time.
Alexander started to sing softly, some Cockney ditty about wheelbarrows and vegetable marrows. Crossly, Dixon asked him to stop. Cooper longed for Liverpool, Tradd Street, even the deck of Water Witch. Thoughts of the blockade-runner led to thoughts of poor Judah, his remains lying somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic. Cooper felt moisture on his cheeks, averted his head so no one would see—
The candle went out.
A man inhaled, a panicky hiss. Another cursed. Dixon scraped a match on the iron plating, but it produced no light, only a quick fizzing noise and then a smell.
Alexander’s voice: “How long, Mr. Main?”
“A few minutes before the candle went out, approximately forty-five minutes.”
“The air is still quite breathable,” Dixon said. Someone’s grumble disputed that.
Without sight, Cooper couldn’t judge the passage of time. Nothing remained but a mounting pressure on his temples and devils in the mind, persuading him that he was suffocating, persuading him that he heard the iron plates cracking, persuading him that one thing after another was going wrong. He passed rapidly through dizziness, sleepiness, extreme confidence, the certainty of the imminence of his own death.
He ripped off his cravat, tore loose his collar button. He was strangling—
“Up!”
Laughter then, a rush of conversation. For a moment, wiping his sweaty neck, Cooper nearly convinced himself he had been the one to cry out. Calm, Dixon said, “Mr. Alexander, man the stern pump, if you please. I’ll handle this one. Mr. Fawkes, Mr. Billings, unbolt the ballast bars.”
Cooper rested his head against the hull, anticipating the sweet night air waiting up above. He heard the squeak and hiss of the pumps, the ring of an iron nut falling to the deck. The sound was repeated several times.
“Ballast bars unfastened, sir.”
“The bow’s coming up,” Dixon grunted, working the pump handle. “We should be lifting momentarily.”
Everyone felt the bow rise. The men laughed and whistled, but that didn’t last long. One exclaimed, “What’s wrong, Alexander? Why ain’t the stern coming up, too?”
“Captain Dixon?” The little Englishman sounded frightened. “The tank is still full. It’s the pump.”
“We’ll die,” said the man immediately behind Cooper.
Dixon: “What’s wrong with it?”
“Fouled, I should suspect. Damn bloody seaweed, probably.”
“If we can’t fix it, we can’t return to the surface.” Dixon’s words, blurted like a command to Alexander, had a bad effect on the crewman who had spoken a moment before.
“We’re going to suffocate. Oh, God, oh, God—I don’t want to die that way.” His baritone voice ascended to a high register, the words punctuated by the hiccups of his crying. “We’re going to die. I know we’re going to—”
Cooper twisted and reached into the dark. The watch fell; he heard the crystal sma
sh as he seized the hysterical man’s arm. With his free hand he struck the man’s face twice.
“Stop that. It will do no one any good.”
“Damn you, let go—all of us—we’re—”
“I said stop.” He struck a third time, so hard the man’s head thudded on the hull. Cooper released his arm. The man kept crying, muffling it with his hands. At least he wasn’t screaming.
“Thank you, Mr. Main,” Dixon said.
Alexander spoke. “Sir? I am going to dismantle the pump a section at a time. I think I can do it in the dark—I know exactly how she’s put together. It may be that I can reach and remove whatever’s fouling her.”
“If you do, the water will rush in.”
“Give me another idea, then!”
More softly, Dixon said, “I’m sorry. I have none. Take whatever measures you think will help, Mr. Alexander.”
So the nightmare continued, more intense than before. Cooper imagined he couldn’t breathe. Not at all. Yet somehow he did: thin breaths, each costing him pain. Or was the pain imagined, too? A silence that was almost sharp settled in the submersible, every man listening for the squeak or chink of a metal part being unscrewed or removed and wondering, What does that noise mean? That one?
Cooper groped near his feet for his broken watch. Just as he touched it, he heard a bubbly roar. A man screamed, “God preserve us,” and water gushed from the pump, filling the vessel with spray, sloshing along the deck.
Alexander exclaimed, “One minute more—now—there. I have a big handful of seaweed, sir. I think that’s all of it. Now I must force the pump back together against the pressure—”
The water continued to rush in. Cooper lifted his left foot and tapped it down. Splash. The man he had struck was moaning again. Cooper reached behind and shoved the man’s head against the hull. That shut him up.
Almost at once, he felt bad about treating the fellow so brutally. The man was right; they would all die soon. He had a swift and sure sense of that. He fought to draw a little of the malodorous air into his lungs and, with doubt about the outcome removed, settled down to wait for the end.
He began to review his past life quickly, by-passing the shameful moments and dwelling on those of intense pleasure—as when he had first seen Miss Judith Stafford on the deck of the coastal steamer bringing them both to Charleston long ago. He composed a little farewell speech to tell her how grateful he was that she had married hi—
“Done,” Alexander shouted. Cooper automatically looked toward the stern, though he could see nothing. He heard the drawn-out squeal of the pump piston. Then Alexander again.
“She’s working!”
“Hurrah,” Dixon cried. The crew applauded. Tears spilled from Cooper’s eyes as he labored to breathe. He thought he felt the stern lift. Dixon confirmed it.
“There she comes!”
Minutes later, Hunley broke into the moonlight.
Dixon and Alexander attacked the fore and aft hatch bolts like madmen seeking escape from an asylum. Suddenly Cooper glimpsed stars, felt and inhaled sweet, cold air. In no time, the crewmen were briskly turning the crank as if nothing had happened.
Dixon climbed up to peer over the forward coaming. “Only one person left. Can’t see who it is.”
Slowly, the submersible nosed back to the pier, where Lucius Chickering jumped up and down and clapped and spun round and round with his arms at shoulder level, like some happy bird. Dixon ordered him to stop capering and help tie up the vessel.
“I’m not capering, I’m celebrating,” Lucius exclaimed as Dixon worked his way to the bow and flung a line. “The soldiers and townspeople went home after forty minutes. They all said you were dead, but I had this crazy idea that if I stayed—if I didn’t give up—that would prove everybody else was wrong and presently the boat would come up. But Lord Almighty, Lieutenant, you surely tested my faith. Do you realize what time it is?”
Climbing out after Cooper, Alexander asked, “How long were we down?”
Cooper raised his watch to his ear. Good heavens. Still ticking. He jumped to the pier, tilted the watch toward the moon, shook bits of shattered glass from the white face. He thought he had misread the hands, but he hadn’t.
“It’s fifteen minutes before ten. We were submerged two hours and thirty-five minutes.”
“I told you, I told you,” Lucius cried, grabbing Cooper’s shoulders and whirling him. “Isn’t it incredible? You were right. She works.” Alexander muttered something; Dixon shushed him. “She can sneak out and kill Yankees any time now—Oh.” Lucius stopped his gyrations. “I forgot, Mr. Main. One soldier said he was going to General Beauregard’s headquarters to report Hunley sunk again. With all hands lost. I’ll bet your wife’s heard it by now.”
“Oh, God. Lieutenant Dixon, well done. I take my leave.”
He had begun to do so before the end of the sentence. He rushed toward the rowboat, resembling some great gangly shore bird scurrying on the sand. Lucius jammed his plug hat on his head. “Wait for me, Mr. Main!”
When Cooper reached Tradd Street after his incredible adventure, Judith wept with relief, even though Lucius Chickering’s prediction had been incorrect; she had heard no news.
She hugged her husband long and hard. But she still chose to sleep alone that night.
93
“WARDEN,” VESEY SAID, “THAT Yank turned on me like a ravening animal. He did so with no provocation but the prompting of his evil disposition. It is your duty, if I may be so bold—your duty as a responsible commander and Christian gentleman to grant me the right to punish him.”
Dubious, young Turner thought a while. “I would, but I can’t allow that kind of thing inside Libby, for several reasons. One, we’ve too blasted many Philadelphia lawyers among the inmates. Two, we’re getting close scrutiny from that damn busybody who works for Seddon.”
“You referring to that one-armed colonel, Warden?”
“That’s right. Main. The self-appointed conscience of our prisons. You’ve seen him nosing around without so much as a by-your-leave from this office.” Vesey nodded. “Recently we’ve been spared his visits—I understand he contracted a bad flux and is confined to his bed. But sure as I say go ahead, he’ll recover and pop in here the very day you do.”
Vesey looked glum. Then he noticed the slow beginnings of a smile. “Of course, if you could find some way to conduct the, ah, disciplinary lesson away from this building, I could issue a temporary release order, which you could destroy afterward with no one the wiser.”
Vesey leaned forward, his smile twice as broad as Turner’s.
“Should you need helpers in this—I mean to say, if there are witnesses,” the warden continued, “they must be absolutely trustworthy.”
“No problem there, sir.”
“If you mark him, it must appear to have happened accidentally.”
“I guarantee it.”
“Then I’ll prepare the pass. Before I hand it to you, I’ll want to know your plan in detail.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir!” Vesey said, fairly clicking his heels as he saluted. “You’ll have the information practically right away, I promise. Thank you again, sir.”
“Pleasure to help out.” Turner was still smiling. “You’re an exemplary soldier, Vesey. Wish I had more like you.”
That conversation took place on the thirtieth of January. On the first, Vesey returned, glowing with excitement. Catching the corporal’s mood, Turner asked, “Well? How are you going to do it?”
“With a caisson borrowed through my cousin in the artillery of the Department of Henrico. A caisson and the roughest road we can find. My cousin’s the one who suggested the idea. He told me the Yanks use it on serious offenders all the time. Good enough for them, good enough for us, I say.”
He continued speaking for more than a minute. At the end, Turner laughed loudly. “First rate! You’ll have the release order in an hour. It will be best if you take him out late at night. Fewer people awake then.
We’ll say he’s being removed to General Winder’s office for an urgent interrogation.”
“That’s perfect, sir.” Vesey couldn’t suppress his glee. “I must tell you this in candor. We will have a small group at the event—my cousin, some of his pals. But I pledge, Warden, every man can be trusted.”
“I’m holding you responsible for that,” Turner said with a genial smile. “I wish I could go with you. Get in a few licks for me.”
“Yes, sir. We surely will.”
“This is General Winder’s office?” After the question, Billy spat, but it only dripped down on the spokes because of the awkward angle of his head.
“Shut your face, Yank,” said Clyde Vesey’s cousin. He pulled Billy’s head back, then pushed it forward against the wheel. The horses pranced and snorted. It was a bright, breezy morning, warm for February. Bare trees soughed along both sides of the deserted, heavily rutted road that ran over a succession of little hills.
Billy was spread-eagled against the spare wheel mounted on the rear of the artillery caisson at an angle of about forty-five degrees. His bare back stippled with goose bumps, he lay with the wheel hub jammed into his gut. Normally, six horses pulled the caisson, but taking so many for this kind of excursion might have caused suspicion, so only two had been harnessed. They could handle it; the caisson had been considerably lightened by removal of the ammunition chests.
While four soldiers watched, Vesey inspected the knots of the ropes holding Billy’s wrists and ankles to the fellies of the wheel. His body was vertical though tilted forward by the wheel’s angle. After brief scrutiny, Vesey said, “Quarter turn, lads. I hear the trip’s even better that way.”
Snickering, they put their shoulders to it and with effort turned the wheel on its tight hub mount. Vesey called for extra ropes to secure the wheel in that position. Billy’s head was now at three o’clock, his feet at nine.
“Crawford?” Vesey’s cousin stepped forward. “To you falls the honor of riding postilion.” The oafish fellow eagerly mounted the near horse. Cheeks pink in the winter sunshine, Vesey stepped to one side, where the prisoner could see him.
