From the main topmast crosstrees, now the highest point aboard Hartford, the lookout called, “Boat approaching! Steaming from the south! Looks like one of our dispatch boats, sir!”
Wainwright turned and looked south, but Farragut did not. With his eyes, he had no hope of seeing the boat until it was almost up with them. Nor was he that curious. He had seen enough dispatch boats in the past month to satisfy him for life.
With creaks and groans and billowing black smoke and the occasional jerk, the Hartford drove over the mud. Forty minutes after the Calhoun took up the strain, the ship gave a little lurch as she broke free from the last desperate grasp of the river bottom and surged ahead into deep water. Forward, Farragut could see the Calhoun sheer off as the towline was dropped.
“All stop!” Wainwright said. “Stand by the anchor!” he shouted down the length of the deck.
The Hartford was just settling on her hook when the dispatch boat pulled up alongside.
“Admiral, sir!” the lieutenant in command called up.
“Yes, Lieutenant?” Farragut called down. What news it was that could not wait for the lieutenant to come aboard he did not know, but he could guess.
“Admiral, sir, Commander Porter’s compliments, sir, and he reports his arrival at Ship Island with his mortar fleet.”
“Excellent!” Farragut replied. He looked upriver. Brooklyn was lying to her anchor, head to stream, three hundred yards away. “Lieutenant, steam up to Brooklyn and tell Captain Craven, with my compliments, to give his people their dinner and then I will signal to get underway. We’ll anchor at Head of the Passes.”
The lieutenant repeated the orders, saluted, spoke to someone in his wheelhouse that Farragut could not see, and the little steamer chugged on its way.
The Head of the Passes… He would plant the Union flag on Louisiana soil, and pray God it would remain.
Let the festivities commence…
On May 10, the newspapers in Yazoo City ran banner headlines, and those headlines proclaimed the death of the wooden walls.
Theodore Wilson arrived on his black horse, reined to a stop in a shower of small stones and dirt, leaped off, paper in hand.
“Captain Bowater! Captain Bowater, sir, did you see this?”
He handed Bowater the paper, shifted from foot to foot as Samuel read the article. CSS Virginia had sailed two days before. She rammed and sank the USS Cumberland, burned the Congress, which had run aground. Sent the Yankees into a panic, gave new hope to an emotionally battered Confederacy. It had been a hell of a maiden voyage.
Bowater read the account with the kind of interest only a professional navy man could have. He read the breathless claims of the obsolescence of all wooden vessels and smiled. The Virginia was too unseaworthy for the open ocean and of too deep a draft to get up any of the big rivers that emptied into the Chesapeake.
CSS Virginia was not the future. She was only a glimpse of it.
But one would not know that looking at the gleam in Theodore Wilson’s eyes. “What do you say to that, Captain?”
“Very impressive.”
Hieronymus Taylor ambled over. He had returned from Vicksburg, bleary-eyed, with a tear in his frock coat he did not recall getting. Had behaved a bit cagy at first, as if he was feeling Bowater out, but that did not last long.
“What’s so impressive, Cap’n?” Taylor asked, took the paper, read the first few paragraphs. “Well, damn. Looks like your ironclad done some good, Cap’n.”
“‘Your’ ironclad?” Wilson asked.
“Hell, yes,” Taylor said, looking up at Wilson. “Whole damn thing was Cap’n Bowater’s idea. What the hell you think we was doin in Norfolk so long? Cap’n here suggested it to Mallory, drew up the first plans. Weren’t no one thought it would work, but then, sure enough, once them others smell success, hell, they all come around like dogs to a…somethin. Anyhow, that’s why they sent Cap’n Bowater out here, figured he could do the same to the ol Yazoo River.”
Taylor folded the paper, handed it to Bowater. “Congratulations, Cap’n,” he said, then ambled off.
Bowater turned to Wilson. There was a light in the man’s eyes he had not seen before. “None of that is true,” Bowater said, but he could see Wilson would not be disabused of his fantasy.
Nor was Wilson a man to fantasize alone. The enthusiasm which he had displayed in organizing the wagons seemed to double up on itself. More wagons arrived, and carpenters, blacksmiths, machinists, laborers, black and white, from plantations all over Yazoo County. They set up their makeshift foundries on the shore, in a semicircle around the now cut-down riverboat. Wilson brought his screw steamer Abigail Wilson down and tied her astern of the Yazoo River. Her hoisting engine was made to drive several steam drills on shore, and her cabins became housing for the officers of the Yazoo River.
Newspaper reports two days later of the battle between Virginia and the Yankee ironclad Monitor did nothing to cool the ardor. Southern papers shaded the story in such a way as to make it sound like a Confederate victory, but any experienced navy man, reading the bare facts of the thing, could see it was a stalemate.
It was also the first time in the history of naval warfare that two ironclad vessels had battled it out. The future seemed to be arriving at an alarming rate.
Not only did the plantations send help, but the men of the town began to arrive as well, to lend their brawn and in some cases valuable skills to the work. Women came at noon with lunch in baskets. Children gathered up scraps of wood, swept sawdust into piles, scurried for tools.
The train of wagons arrived every third or fourth day, and eager hands pulled the plates of iron off the beds, stacked them carefully on the landing, and soon the once sorry pile was transformed into an impressive mountain of iron. And still it came.
Ironclad fever swept like the plague through Yazoo City. The people had read of the future in the papers, and they wanted a part of it. Suddenly the vision of a madman had become the most effective means of keeping the Yankee at bay. They were like Noah’s neighbors, who began to see the wisdom of the thing as the water crept up around their ankles.
All of the Yazoo River’s superstructure was gone, and in its place rose a casement, a low deckhouse with angled sides, and a small wheelhouse, no more than a four-foot-high hump on the roof through which captain, pilot, and helmsmen could see. The side wheels, delicate spider structures, were encased in oak two feet thick, a housing with flat, angled sides intended to protect that most vulnerable part of the ship from enemy fire. Paddle wheels were ideal for riverboats. They were not ideal for men-of-war.
The sides and bulkheads of the casement, foot-thick live oak, were pierced for ten guns-two pointing forward, two aft, and three on each broadside. It was optimistic, since they still had only the guns that Robley Paine had purchased for the ship, but Bowater was firing off a continual barrage of letters and he hoped one of them might have an effect.
Hieronymus Taylor tore the engines apart. He checked the cylinder bores and replaced piston rings with new ones he had had turned in Vicksburg. He checked the piston-rod packing and rebuilt and realigned the engines so that they would not tear themselves apart driving the big side wheels.
With block and tackle and crowbars they lifted the paddle wheels off their bearings and checked for wear and pitting and cracks. They checked crosshead bearings and mapped them with lead wire to see where they were worn and scraped them to get the proper clearance. They ground the steam valves and scraped the flues in the boilers.
Two days before they began bolting iron to the casement, the crew arrived. Fifty men, twenty-three of whom were genuine able-bodied sailors, the rest ordinaries, culled from the army and from the coastal defenses and sent to man the newest ironclad. At their head was Lieutenant Asa Quillin, executive officer, quiet, efficient, a thoroughgoing navy man whom Bowater had known briefly on the South American station.
Six weeks after the former Cape Fears had arrived in Yazoo City, a month and a half after Samuel B
owater had been greeted with the possibility that the ironclad Yazoo River might be no more than a madman’s dream, there were over 150 men working on the ship, six forges set up on the riverbank, a crew of seventy-five experienced seamen, and any number of local men ready to sail aboard the ship in the unskilled berths.
Once, Samuel Bowater recalled, he had told Taylor the Yazoo River had to get up steam and leave in six weeks’ time. He had made that number up. He would never have guessed then that they would actually be underway just a week later than that.
Richmond was getting nervous, and so was Jonathan Paine. On the 1st of April, General George McClellan had begun loading his vast army on board steamers, bringing them down the Potomac, down the Chesapeake Bay to Fortress Monroe for a push up the Peninsula to Richmond. He would be only fifty miles from the Confederate capital before he encountered his first Southern soldier. Grant and Farragut were moving on the Mississippi, to Jonathan’s worried mind closing in on Yazoo City.
It was just a few weeks shy of one year since the moment his body, riddled with bullets, had been flung to the dirt on Henry House Hill. During that time, the long slow climb out of despondency and self-flagellation, the difficult work of regaining interest in his life, Paine Plantation had taken on a mythical quality, an El Dorado, a Canaan, promised but unattainable. It called to him. It frightened him.
The Army of the Confederate States would not give him leave to go there.
Then finally, as the spring flowers were beginning to dot the drab landscape with color, and green leaves filled in the spaces between spindly branches like a painter adding another layer of pigment on a canvas, just when Jonathan Paine was considering going once more to the Office of Orders and Detail, though it was clear from the last three visits that his badgering was not appreciated, a letter arrived.
Bobby brought it into the drawing-room ward, where Jonathan was writing a letter for a corporal of the 4th South Carolina who had broken his arm in a fall from a horse. “Jon’tin, you gots a letter…” Bobby said and for a moment Jonathan could only look at him, and down at the letter.
Confederate States Army, Office of Orders and Detail… The words were printed in neat block type on the envelope, and Jonathan’s name and address handwritten below. He tore it open, his stomach twisting. He knew what it should be, but he still feared it was something else.
He pulled out the paper within, unfolded it. A preprinted form, lifeless save for the intricate decorations featuring eagles and flags and cannons sprawling across the top. The blank spaces were filled in in a hurried, largely illegible hand, but Jonathan Paine could certainly read it well enough to puzzle out his own honorable discharge from the Confederate States Army. There was as well a bank draft for the amount of ten dollars.
Jonathan looked for a long time at the two documents. There was a time when ten dollars would have been meaningless to him; his family spent more than that on sundry amusements on any given month. But now it represented his entire net worth. It was not just money, it was the way out of the desert.
“You still want to come to Paine Plantation with me?” Jonathan looked up at Bobby. “Help me get home?”
“Yassuh.”
“Then let us go.”
It did not take them long to pack. Jonathan had only his knapsack, the tattered remnants of his uniform with someone else’s uniform pants, someone not so fortunate as he, he imagined, in regards to wounds. Everything that Bobby had fit easily into a haversack and a bedroll. They said their goodbyes to Miss Sally Tompkins, the volunteers and patients at her hospital, ambled out into the crowded streets. Jonathan was not afraid. It was springtime.
They purchased tickets to ride the Richmond amp; Petersburg Railroad out of town. Bobby helped Jonathan aboard the car, making a path with his finely honed ability to knock people aside in a subservient, humble way. He set Jonathan down on a seat, set his haversack beside him, said, “All right, then, Missuh Jon’tin, you gonna be jest fine here. I’s gonna go to da car where da colored folks ride.”
“Very well, Bobby. Remember, we get off at Petersburg, at the junction with the Weldon amp; Petersburg Railroad.”
“Oh, I remembers, Missuh Jon’tin,” Bobby said, and with a smile he disappeared into the crowd.
It was a scene they played out many times over the next ten days, as they made their way laboriously south, then west. The trip would have been a simple matter, except Tennessee was in large part in Union hands.
So they went south on the North Carolina Railroad, the Wilmington amp; Manchester Railroad, the South Carolina Railroad, rattling up over the Appalachian Mountains before falling back down to Atlanta, Georgia, where they changed to the Alabama amp; Georgia Railroad, which took them through the low, hot, humid country of Alabama, to the old Confederate capital of Montgomery, and from Montgomery, by steamboat and rail, to Jackson, Mississippi. Eleven hundred miles of choking, rattling railcars, of waiting at depots while soldiers, bound for the front, took precedent over wounded soldiers going home, of eating just enough to stave off hunger, and no more, because they had so little money and no idea of how long it needed to last.
During those long hours flopped on benches in deserted depots or standing off to one side while men jostled for the cars, Jonathan told Bobby about Paine Plantation, about the beautiful lawns rolling down to the water, about the welcoming oak tree, about the summer nights when the fireflies made their own living constellations in the tall grass by the Yazoo River. They talked about all that, but they did not discuss Jonathan’s parents, because he had not heard from them and he was afraid.
From Jackson they had just enough money to secure a ride on the coach to Yazoo City, with Jonathan riding inside and Bobby on the box with the Negro driver. They walked from Yazoo City south, following the river.
It was all so familiar, it all fitted into place like the pieces of a puzzle. The smell of the bougainvillea and the pine, warmed in the sun, the river smell, mudbanks and rotting weeds. From the woods that lined the dirt road came the raucous call of the blue jay, the chickadededede of the Carolina chickadee. Cardinals flashed red against the dark green. The cooling breeze carried on it woodsmoke and warm, turned earth. It was delightful to Jonathan. It made him afraid.
At last they came to a dirt drive that branched off the road and Jonathan stopped and Bobby stopped and Jonathan said, “Here we are.”
“This you home?”
“This is it.”
They were quiet for a moment, Bobby letting Jonathan do as he wished, in his time. No bullying now, there was no need. “Very well…” Jonathan said at last. “Let’s go.”
They walked down the drive and soon, from the distance, the edge of the white house peeked through the trees. They walked on, the trees yielding to open space, the house emerging from its hiding place.
The lawn was overgrown; little care had been given to it. He could hear no sound from the house, nothing to indicate it was occupied. He felt his stomach churn, wondered who he would encounter first, if he would encounter anyone at all.
They pushed through the knee-high grass, Jonathan leading the way, circled around the house, giving it a wide berth, as if it was something to be wary of. The edge of the wide porch and the distant river came into view. Jonathan stopped short.
“Dear God…”
The limbs of the oak tree had been hacked off, save for the two lowest, which stuck out like skeletal arms. The remaining trunk had been painted, the paint peeling off in big flakes but still visible.
Jonathan limped slowly around the front of the house, eyes on the tree, mouth fixed. From the front he could see that the tree had been cut to look like some sort of monster, a gargoyle or some such. It rose thirty feet off the ground, leered at the river with its hideous mouth, hacked from the living wood and painted. Above the mouth, the painted remnants of eyes glared north. There was no new growth on the truncated limbs. The tree was dead.
“Dear God…”
Jonathan looked at Bobby, and Bobby’s
eyes were wide, as if he had seen the thing that the tree had been painted to represent. “That ain’t right, Missuh Jon’tin…” Bobby managed to stammer.
Jonathan looked up at the front of the house. Paint was peeling there, too, and the path to the porch was all but overgrown. Just a narrow strip of flattened and trampled weeds indicated that anyone had gone in or out of the house recently. The front door gaped open. There was no one around.
“Come on,” Jonathan said. He began walking slowly toward the porch, and after a pause he heard Bobby following behind. He climbed the steps with the now-familiar sound, creak, clomp, creak, clomp, of leather shoe and wooden leg. He crossed the porch slowly, stepped through the door.
The smell hit him first, the familiar smell of the plantation house. It was wood polish and leather and cooking smells and dust. It was a living smell, and it made Jonathan think the house was not a dead place, that there was still life there.
Behind him, he heard Bobby stepping into the foyer. He turned. His friend was looking around, his eyes still wide.
“Welcome to Paine Plantation, Bobby,” Jonathan said. “I fear it is not everything I made it out to be.”
Bobby nodded. “You gots any notion where da folks is?”
Jonathan shook his head. “Hallo?” he shouted, and his voice bounced around the empty space. “Hallo? Is there anybody here?”
The two men waited. There was no answer. “Come along,” Jonathan said, led Bobby deeper into the house, every inch a perfect fit with his memory, every little bit of the place sparking one memory or another. Bobby was absolutely right to think the place haunted.
He led Bobby into his father’s study. There was dust on the surfaces, unlike in the foyer or the hall, as if it had not been entered in some time. That did not bode well, not for any hope of his father’s being alive. Jonathan could not recall a day going by that Robley Paine, Sr., had not sat in his study.
On the desk was a stack of mail, and Jonathan began sorting through the letters. Letters from agents, creditors, letters to his mother and father, a few to him or his brothers. He found the letters that he had written, unopened, halfway down in the stack. He went through them all. They told him nothing, save that his father had not read his mail in the better part of a year.
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