by Nan Ryan
Mary Ellen’s raised glasses never left Clay.
As soon as he stepped on the decks, a boatswain came forward to meet him. Clay shrugged out of his heavy greatcoat and turned over the coat, his grip, and the stallion to the seaman. The sailor led the black out of focus, and only Clay was in sight.
The riverboat’s engines started up, shooting plumes of steam high into the rain-heavy air. The twin paddle wheels immediately began to churn up water, and the bell clanged loudly as the steamer backed slowly away from the levee.
Clay lithely climbed the companionway to the hurricane deck as the Andrew Jackson headed for the middle of the wide river. He nodded to the keen-eyed pilot in the glassed wheelhouse, then continued to climb up to the texas deck.
While the last gray light of the cold, rainy November evening began to fade fast, the southbound steamer—running lights now ablaze—reached the point in the river directly below Longwood.
Framed perfectly in her raised field glasses, Captain Clay Knight, in full blue dress uniform, was alone on the tall texas deck. A solitary figure in the gloom, he stood as unmoving as a statue at the white gingerbread railing. His rain-wet face was turned up to the bluffs, the cold November winds tossing locks of his blue-back hair about his head.
A lump starting to form in her throat, Mary Ellen thought as she watched her husband being carried slowly downriver that the old Mississippi had brought him back to her on a hot June night and now the river was taking him away from her on a cold November evening.
Clay. Her lips formed his name silently. Oh, Clay, please come back to me.
To Mary Ellen’s delight and astonishment, the tall dark man to whom she soundlessly spoke raised his hand and waved. He could see her! He knew she was here, and he was waving to her.
Laughing and crying at once, Mary Ellen shot her arm up into the air and waved madly to him. Through the powerful glasses trained on him, she saw his handsome face break into a wide, boyish grin. She puckered her lips, touched them to her fingers, and tossed him a kiss. He followed suit, raising both hands to his lips, kissing them, and then flinging his long arms out wide and high.
Then he was gone.
Swallowed up in the fog and the mist and the night. In seconds the Andrew Jackson itself was no longer visible on the dark, murky river.
Mary Ellen lowered the heavy glasses. She shivered with the cold and with fear.
He was gone.
Clay was gone.
And he might never come back.
There had been no war for Mary Ellen as long as Clay was at Longwood with her. But now that he was gone, the war was paramount on her mind. She read the Memphis Appeal voraciously and any other newspaper she could get her hands on. She checked daily with Ensign Johnny Briggs to see what he had learned of the battles being waged across the South, both on land and on water.
Her heart froze with fear when, shortly before Christmas, word reached Memphis that the Cairo, the Federal ironclad Clay was on, had been sunk by a mine December 12 in the Yazoo River. There were casualties, but it was not yet known who and how many had perished.
Mary Ellen spent the worst week of her life awaiting further word. When at last the dispatch arrived at Memphis’s Union headquarters, young Ensign Briggs quickly brought Mary Ellen the good news. The Captain’s name was not among the Cairo’s dead or wounded.
Some days later Mary Ellen received a brief letter from Clay assuring her he was unhurt and would stay that way. He was on his way to Arkansas, where he would join Rear Admiral David Porter’s fleet.
She was not to worry.
Mary Ellen lowered the letter, shaking her head.
She was not to worry? Worry was all she did. Like thousands of other wives, mothers, sisters, and sweethearts, she worried constantly about the safety of the man she loved.
With Clay in the war, Mary Ellen’s duties at the hospital took on new meaning. Anytime she bent to comfort some poor suffering soul, she imagined Clay lying there, wounded and helpless, and compassion swelled in her breast. Worrying that she might not have always been as tender and caring as she could have been, Mary Ellen redoubled her efforts to give the injured, dying men as much attention and kindness as any brave war hero deserved.
To those she tended, it mattered not that she was the wife of a Union naval officer. The infirm men she patiently watched over with grace and sympathy cared only that her pretty face above their own offered a ray of sunshine in a world of darkness. And that her gentle hands on their pain-racked bodies brought a blessed degree of comfort.
Mary Ellen worked extra hard and extra long hours, knowing soon she wouldn’t be able to help out at all. The waistbands of her winter dresses were already growing uncomfortably tight, and Dr. Cain had warned her that the stress and strain of working at the hospital was too hard on an expectant mother.
New Year’s was Mary Ellen’s last day at the clinic. Four months pregnant, she knew it was time to retire to the privacy of Longwood to await the birth of her baby.
Without her duties at Shelby County Hospital to keep her occupied, time hung heavily on her hands. It was the longest, loneliest winter of her life. Each day she prayed a letter would come from Clay, but he wrote infrequently. She’d received only a half dozen letters since he’d been gone, and those she read over and over again.
The winter weather matched Mary Ellen’s gloomy mood. Day in, day out, it was cold and gray, and one ice storm after another blanketed the river city during the months of January and February. Great patches of ice formed on the cold, dark Mississippi, and the banks were frozen solid. Mary Ellen felt as if she were in prison, and if it hadn’t been for Leah coming often to check on her and cheer her up, she was sure she would have lost her sanity.
Mary Ellen shivered alone in the big mahogany bed each night, wishing Clay were there with her, wondering where he was and if he was cold and hungry and tired and dirty and…hurt? She forced the possibility from her mind. Clay wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t going to be hurt.
Dear God, don’t let him be hurt!
Spring finally came to Tennessee, and nobody was happier to see it than the pregnant, lonely Mary Ellen Preble Knight. Even with the warmer weather, she couldn’t go anywhere, because as Titus none-too-gently pointed out, fine ladies did not go out in public in her condition.
“Yo momma’d roll over her grave if n she thought you was gonna be a-parading down the streets of Memphis lookin’ like you do now.”
“Titus, I’ve no intention of ‘parading down the streets of Memphis,’” she told him, a hand pressed to her aching back. “But would it shock the gentry if I sit on my own front gallery?”
“Might want to wait till the sun goes down,” he said thoughtfully. “Not many folks passing by then.”
“I am not waiting for sunset,” she said, then stormed out the front fan-lighted doors and eased herself down onto a rocking chair.
She sighed and looked wistfully down the pebbled drive. One day she’d see Clay come riding up the drive, and she’d run out to meet him with their child in her arms. Mary Ellen smiled, envisioning it, and placed a protective hand atop her rounded belly.
On that sunny May afternoon Mary Ellen rocked alone on the wide gallery while out on the lawn brilliant butterflies darted from flower to flower and a balmy breeze stirred wisps of hair at her temples and the sweet scent of honeysuckle wafted up from trellises on the north side of the mansion.
She fell to daydreaming of the happy years stretching before her here at Longwood with Clay and their children. Lulled by the quiet and the dream, Mary Ellen dozed.
She’d slept but a few minutes before she was awakened by the drum of horses’ hooves on the pebbled drive. Mary Ellen blinked and focused. Ensign Briggs dismounted and let himself in the front gate.
Mary Ellen held her breath. She remained seated as the red-haired young sailor hurried up the front walk. When he got closer, she could tell by his expression that he wasn’t bringing bad news. So she relaxed a little and smiled at him.
He had come to tell her that a dispatch had just arrived at Memphis’s Union headquarters. On the eighteenth of May, Admiral Porter had sent six gunboats upriver to support Grant’s army in the operations east of Vicksburg.
The gunboats were under the command of Captain Clayton Terrell Knight.
41
Morning, May 21, 1863
CAPTAIN CLAY KNIGHT SHIVERED as he stood in the bright sunshine on the bow of the squadron’s lead gunboat, Cincinnati. Despite the warmth of the May Mississippi sun, he felt a chill and his hands shook slightly as he nervously took a cigar from his uniform pocket, stuck it between his lips, and lighted it.
Drawing the smoke deep into his lungs, Clay wondered at himself. He had never known fear before. Never. Not when he was a brand-new striper and he’d been sent down to Buenos Aires to protect endangered Americans. Not when he’d helped drive the Chinese bandits out of Shanghai. Not even when he’d been called on to fight a thousand hostile Indians in Seattle, Washington.
Fear had always been a stranger to him.
Until now.
His gray eyes narrowed against the glare of the sunlight reflecting off the river, Clay was forced to admit to himself that he was afraid.
In an hour this gunboat on which he stood would reach Vicksburg and the Confederates’ well-equipped navy yard. And then it would begin. In sixty minutes he would be going into battle. A battle that for him could end only in one of two ways. Either the river city of Vicksburg would fall to the Union.
Or he would be killed in the line of duty.
There were no other alternatives.
His orders were quite clear: to meet and bombard the enemy from the Mississippi River at Vicksburg while Grant’s army engaged the Confederates on land. Both navy and army were to remain until the vital city fell, no matter how long that might take.
Clay knew Southerners.
Vicksburg wouldn’t give up without a long, bloody fight.
The citizens as well as the soldiers protecting their city knew that if Vicksburg fell to the Union, the Confederacy would be cut in half. And for them the war might well be lost.
Smoke from the cigar clamped between his teeth drifting up into his eyes, Clay patted the left breast pocket of his blue uniform blouse. A neatly folded letter inside a sealed envelope rested there, next to his heart. A letter to Mary. He’d felt compelled to write the letter in the long, sleepless hours of the previous night.
Unable to shake off a nagging premonition that something was going to happen to him, he’d gotten out of bed and written the brief message to his wife. The letter sealed, the envelope addressed, he had put it inside his uniform pocket and would carry it on his person throughout the upcoming battle.
If he was struck by enemy fire, the letter would be found on him and, he trusted, sent directly on to Mary.
Clay flicked away his smoked-down cigar, thinking with bitter irony that the reason he’d never been afraid before was that he hadn’t cared all that much whether he lived or died. It was indifference that had made him courageous.
Now he cared.
Now he had Mary, and he wanted to live so badly that he knew he was probably much more likely to die.
Soon there was no more time for contemplation.
The Confederate naval yard was swiftly coming up on the starboard side of the gunboat Cincinnati, and Captain Clay Knight ordered the crew to immediately man their battle stations.
His body tensed, his alert gray eyes riveted to the riverbanks, Captain Knight issued the order to hold all fire until he gave the signal. The gunboat slid around the curving, timbered bank. The Captain brought down his right arm, and the shelling began.
And never stopped.
Attempts to take Vicksburg by storm failed, just as Clay had suspected. Grant’s army settled down for a long siege, and Porter’s naval squadron was active throughout the operation. The well-armed Union gunboats poured more than two thousand shells into the river city in the first six days. They drew sporadic fire from the Rebel batteries on the bluffs but suffered little damage.
“Surely they can’t take much more of this, Captain,” said one of sweating gunners as the sun began to set on the sixth day and the river was quiet for brief, welcome interlude.
“You don’t know these stubborn Southerners,” said Clay. “We may be here for weeks. They’ll hold out until—”
The sentence was never finished.
All at once the batteries on the bluff blazed to life, and the Cincinnati’s starboard cannons immediately answered the assault. The ensuing battle was fierce. The river was aglow with gunfire, and the thunderous boom of cannon and shell was deafening. Thick black smoke billowed into the air, blinding the gunners and filling the lungs of the sailors at their battle stations. The eerie shouts and screams of the shrapnel wounded and dying rose from unseen men enveloped in the thick, blinding smoke.
Standing his ground firmly, Captain Knight shouted clear, precise orders, ignoring his watering eyes and burning throat. All traces of his former fear now vanished in the heat of battle, the cool-headed Annapolis-trained naval officer calmly displayed his ability to perform—and to lead—under pressure.
Captain Knight was shouting an order when a single Rebel shell pierced the gunboat’s forward ammunition magazine. The Cincinnati’s explosion lit up the night sky as bright as day.
“Mary,” Clay murmured as the dark waters of the Mississippi closed over his head and filled his shrapnel-lacerated lungs.
“Clay!” Mary Ellen screamed, and bolted upright in her bed. “No! No! Clay!”
Heart beating so fast and so forcefully she clutched her breast in pain, Mary Ellen trembled violently in the midnight darkness of that warm May night. Her palms clammy, her face covered with a sheen of perspiration, she was gripped with terror from the too real nightmare that had awakened her.
Tears streamed down her cheeks as she struggled in vain to get up. Almost nine full months pregnant, she was clumsy and all but immobile. Her jerky, awkward movements awakened the child sleeping inside her. The baby began to kick viciously, and Mary Ellen held her swollen stomach and cried uncontrollably, unable to move to the mattress’s edge to swing her legs over.
She heard the knock on the door but was crying too hard to answer. The door opened slowly. A lamp wavered and moved, and through her tears Mary Ellen saw old Titus limping toward her.
“Child, what is it?” he asked anxiously, his eyes round with fear. “The baby? Is the baby—”
“No, no,” she sobbed. “It’s Clay. Clay’s been killed, I know he has! Titus, Clay is dead! Clay is dead!”
“No sech of a thing,” said Titus. He set the lamp on the night table and came to the bed.
“What is it?” Mattie called as she hurried into the room, tying the sash of her robe.
“Oh, Mattie,” Mary Ellen wailed, “Clay’s been killed, I know he has. I saw it all in a dream, and it was so real I know—”
“Shhhh,” said Titus, absently patting her hand where it rested atop her domelike belly. “You’re gwine hurt yo’self and that child you’re carryin’ if you’re not careful.”
“I must get up! Help me get out of bed,” Mary Ellen pleaded.
Now at the bed, Mattie elbowed Titus out of the way, leaned over, and took the sobbing Mary Ellen in her fleshy arms. Resting her cheek atop Mary Ellen’s blond head, she murmured, “Ain’t nothin’ but a bad dream, child, that’s all it was. You just lay back down and relax. Soon you’ll go back to sleep.”
“No, I can’t! Something terrible has happened,” whimpered Mary Ellen. “I saw, I tell you. I saw the whole thing. Oh, God, I saw Clay—”
“No, you didn’t,” Mattie interrupted, motioning to Titus to help her ease Mary Ellen back down on the pillows. “What you saw was a nasty ol’ nightmare. Don’t mean nothin’. Not a thing.”
Unconvinced, Mary Ellen continued to weep as the two old servants fussed over her and assured her repeatedly that everything was fine. If anything had hap
pened to the Captain, they would have heard about it. Hadn’t that young Ensign Briggs told her just this afternoon that there hadn’t been a single one of those Yankee gunboats sunk down in Vicksburg? Not a one.
“I’ll sit here with you till you fall back to sleep,” promised Mattie.
“I was gonna do that,” the protective Titus promptly informed the cook.
“Ain’t a bit of need of us both stayin’,” Mattie told him. Then she pointed. “Go get me a washcloth. This poor child’s burning up.”
Muttering, Titus limped into the white marble bath and came back with a washcloth and china basin of cool water. Mattie took it from him immediately and, standing beside the bed, blotted Mary Ellen’s shiny forehead and bathed her tear-streaked cheeks. She pressed the cool cloth to Mary Ellen’s throat, reached inside the open-throated nightgown, and bathed her shoulders and the tops of her swollen breasts. She hummed as she worked, and then in a low, soothing voice she began to sing an old spiritual that had been a favorite of Mary Ellen’s when she a child.
Mary Ellen finally stopped jerking. Her sobs became quieter, then died away.
Mattie smiled and said, “Now jes’ close your eyes, my sweet baby, and forget that mean ol’ nightmare.” And she repeated, “I’ll stay right here with you till you fall back to sleep.”
Not to be outdone, Titus took one of Mary Ellen’s hands in his gnarled fingers and, leaning close, said, “I’ll be stayin’, too, Miz Mary Ellen. Yes, I will. Sit right here beside the bed till you goes back to sleep.”
Seated side by side on two chairs they had laboriously pulled up close to the bed, Mattie and Titus were soon sound asleep.
But Mary Ellen wasn’t.
She didn’t close her eyes for the rest of the night.
42
I READ ONLY SUNSHINE…
The words etched on the face of the old marble sundial on Longwood’s lower terrace.
For thirty-four years the sundial had worked perfectly. Since the beautiful spring day in 1829 when John Thomas Preble had supervised as it was anchored carefully on the estate’s northern lawn, the shadow of the sundial’s brass hand had moved slowly, surely, around the flat marble face.
