Thieves Of Mercy sb-2

by James L. Nelson

  FIFTEEN

  The great craft building in Memphis has been taken up the Yazoo to be finished, and a mechanic from there says it will be fifteen days before she will be ready. We must catch her there before she can be fitted out.

  LIEUTENANT SAMUEL L.PHELPS TO FLAG OFFICER A.H.FOOTE

  The next morning, Samuel Bowater went to Shirley’s yard and saw that things were moving apace. With the Arkansas already towed off downriver, Shirley could dedicate what men he had to work on Tennessee. A dozen shipwrights, house carpenters, and day laborers were climbing over her hull, planking up, port and starboard.

  After he had satisfied himself with the work taking place, and moved by his father’s newfound spirit, Bowater went shopping. It was near noon when, cardboard box in hand, he stepped through the big front door of the military hospital and let an orderly guide him to the ward in which Hieronymus Taylor lay.

  He stood beside the bed for a moment, looking at Taylor, whose eyes were closed and who was apparently asleep. The engineer was propped up with pillows to a near sitting position. He looked bad, with a week’s growth of salt-and-pepper beard, face paler than usual, with a waxy look to it and a sheen of sweat. He had lost quite a bit of weight, Bowater realized. Taylor seemed to be suffering in his own personal hell, and Bowater did not know what it was.

  At last Taylor opened his eyes, slowly, and let his head loll over until he was looking at Bowater. “Cap’n.” He spoke slowly and his voice was weak. “I heard all the celebratin goin on last night, on account of our great victory. You lookin pretty smart for a fella been drinkin, whorin, and brawlin all night.”

  “Just drinking and brawling, actually. And it’s the whoring that really takes it out of one.”

  Taylor managed a thin smile. After a pause he said, “Ain’t this where you tell me how good I look?”

  “It would be, if you didn’t look like absolute hell. Chief, you got to try and get some rest, do you understand?”

  “Yeah, yeah… been hearin that from the damn doctors all mornin. Well, if it’s any comfort, reckon I’d drop like a rock was I to try standin up, so it looks like I ain’t goin anywhere for a while.”

  “Good. Good.”

  They were quiet for a moment and Taylor closed his eyes. He opened them again. “ ‘Mississippi Mike’ don’t look too good this mornin.”

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “He was by, hour or so past. Brought me a nice little flask, some cigars.”

  “Just what the doctor ordered.”

  Taylor smiled again. “Sullivan’s lookin to get rid of Guthrie, I reckon. He’s tryin to scout himself up a new engineer.”

  Son of a bitch, Bowater thought. “He’s made a few veiled references to having my men sail aboard his boat. Laying the groundwork for stealing my crew, I suspect. Now he’s after my engineer?”

  “He and Guthrie never did see eye to eye, and from the sounds of it, it ain’t gettin better. Never thought much of ol Sullivan, but I gots to say, Guthrie is one royal pain in the ass.”

  “Certainly. But so are you, Chief.”

  “Course I am.” Taylor closed his eyes for a moment, rallied his strength. “But I’m a damned good engineer, which fact compensates for me bein a pain in the ass. Guthrie ain’t even a good engineer. They like to go to fisticuffs here any day, Guthrie and Sullivan. Sullivan’ll cut him loose, soon as he finds a new man.”

  Bowater was suddenly afraid that Taylor would take Sullivan up on the offer. They were river rats of a feather, after all. As a warrant officer, Taylor could resign anytime he wished and join the army, which had authority over the River Defense Fleet. And while Bowater certainly would have been pleased to swap Taylor for a more agreeable man, or at least one who kept to himself, he did not care to find himself without any engineer at all.

  “So what did you tell him?”

  Taylor closed his eyes again and chuckled. “As if I’d sail with a damn peckerwood calls hisself ‘Mississippi Mike.’ Hell, I’d rather be engineer on board the Tennessee, with the damn engine a hundred miles downriver, than sail on that ol General Page.”

  Bowater nodded, oddly relieved. For a long moment they were silent. “Chief,” Bowater said, and felt himself flush with embarrassment even as he approached his prepared speech. Taylor opened his eyes and looked up. “I happen to see this on sale for an absurd price, so I picked it up for you.”

  Bowater held up the box, two feet long and a foot wide. Taylor shuffled himself to a sitting position, frowned at the box as if he had never seen the like. At last Bowater had to thrust it at him just to get the engineer to take it.

  Taylor set the box on his lap and opened the cover. Inside lay a violin and bow and a little bag of rosin and spare strings. In the daylight streaming in through the big windows the varnish on the dark wood gleamed as if it were wet.

  Taylor said nothing. He just stared at the instrument.

  “I don’t know a thing about violins, and the price was so good I fear it may be a very inferior instrument,” Bowater lied. He actually knew a fair amount about violins, though he did not play himself, and at two hundred and forty dollars he expected this one to be reasonably good. “In any event, I know you lost your old one with the Yazoo River and I imagined it would help pass the time if you could play. And I suppose…”

  Bowater was rambling but Taylor was not listening. He reached slowly into the box and with his left hand lifted the instrument by the neck, gently, as if he was lifting something of unknown fragility. Bowater stopped talking.

  Taylor tucked the violin under his chin and plucked at the G string. Bowater had insisted that the shopkeeper tune the instrument before he took it, but Taylor was not satisfied. He gave the tuning peg the slightest twist and there was a barely perceptible rise in the note coming from the vibrating string. He did the same to the D, A, and E strings, tweaking them ever so slightly. He listened with eyes closed to the last dying note, then his right hand reached for the bow.

  Bowater smiled. Whatever torment Taylor was suffering, it was made worse by not having the release that music gave him. He understood that, because he found the same release in painting, an emotional blowdown, pouring his unconscious self out onto the canvas.

  If William Bowater had found in his heart a new degree of empathy and concern for his brethren, then Samuel guessed he could as well. And what better use to put his father’s money to?

  Samuel waited for Taylor to say something, but he did not. Instead he lifted the bow and brought it down on the strings and drew a long note. Bowater looked around, embarrassed, considered suggesting that perhaps Taylor should not play in the hospital ward. Several of the patients were looking over, their expressions ranging from curiosity to annoyance.

  Hieronymus Taylor, eyes closed, was utterly unaware of the stares of his fellow sufferers. He seemed unaware of anything. Bowater had seen men in such a state before, sailors in port after long months at sea, looking at the taverns or whores on shore, completely mesmerized by desire. He had never seen such a reaction to a classical instrument.

  Taylor tried the bow on each of the strings, listening to their notes, and then he set in. Bowater had expected “Camptown Races” or “Roll the Old Chariot Along” or “Shenandoah’’-the best he could hope for-or any of the various crude, barbaric popular ditties with which Taylor had once amused the men and driven Bowater nearly to distraction.

  But he did not play any of those. Instead it was Mozart, Mozart’s Quintet in G Minor, one of Bowater’s personal favorites. He looked at Taylor to see if this was for his benefit, or if the engineer was mocking him, but Taylor ’s eyes were closed and his lips moved a bit and he was oblivious to everything but the instrument.

  He played as if the music had been dammed up inside of him and now, finally, the dam had burst and the notes were flooding out. The music filled the ward, which Bowater noticed had surprisingly good acoustics. Those who could sat up in bed. Nurses and doctors filtered in, stood off to the sides, watching and listeni
ng. Bowater, caught up in the beauty of the sound, did not even register the fact that he was as much the center of their collective gaze as was Taylor, not until the last few measures played out and Bowater looked around and flushed with embarrassment.

  Taylor let the bow bounce off the strings and the patients and the hospital staff applauded, but the engineer did not seem to notice any more than he had noticed anything since he had lifted the instrument from the box. He leaned back on his pillow and smiled, a sort of tired yet sated smile. He ran his eyes over the violin, shook his head. At last he looked up at Bowater.

  “I thank you, Cap’n. I surely do. I can’t recall a greater kindness done me.”

  Bowater shrugged, even more embarrassed. “It’s not much of an instrument, I fear.”

  “It’s fine, fine. Just lovely.”

  “Yet I perceive it does not have quite the depth and timbre of your old one.” And that was true; Bowater had noticed as much midway through the piece.

  Now Taylor shrugged, a dismissive gesture. “The old one was a Guarneri, been around since the 1650s. We ain’t gonna see its like on the Mississippi agin.”

  Bowater’s eyes went wide, despite himself. “A Guarneri?” Some people held the Guarneri family to be superior even to the Stradivari in violin-making. “Dear God, and you took it to sea? Into battle?”

  “Only fiddle I had.”

  Bowater was speechless. His head was filled with images of that exquisite instrument being blown to splinters by a Yankee shell. “How did you happen to come by a Guarneri?”

  Taylor smiled. “Gift from my pa.”

  “This would be the pa you told me spent his whole life loading freight on the docks of New Orleans?”

  Taylor smiled, a smile of shared and unspoken understanding. “It was somethin like that,” Taylor said.

  “What a terrible waste,” Bowater said.

  “Lost a lot worse’n a fiddle that night, Cap’n,” Taylor said, and there was a catch in his voice, as if a word had caught momentarily, blocking the rest in his throat, just for an instant. He choked it out, looked down at the violin, coughed as if trying to clear the source of his discomfort.

  So that is it, Bowater thought. “In any event, I had best be running along,” he said, trying to breeze through the awkwardness of the moment.

  “Yeah, yeah… and thanks, Cap’n, again, for the fiddle.” Taylor met his eyes. There was sincerity there. It was an unusual look for Hieronymus Taylor.

  “You’re welcome. I’ll come again.” The men shook hands and Bowater took his leave.

  In the lobby of the hospital he paused, stared out one of the windows. Was it the nightmare of death on board the Yazoo City, in that last desperate hour below New Orleans, that had so affected Taylor ’s mind as to set him on this path of self-destruction? It was certainly possible.

  And what, Bowater wondered, does that say about me? Taylor ’s reaction was perfectly understandable, but what kind of a person became more upset over the destruction of a rare violin than over the deaths of ordinary men?

  Bowater shook his head. He had seen death before, of course, more than Taylor, he imagined. He had seen the casualties of the Mexican War, the men blown apart by naval gunnery at the bombardment of Veracruz. Men died all the time at sea, from falls or disease or any of a countless number of shipboard accidents, circumstances unknown on riverboats.

  Death was a constant, as much as foul weather or rocks and shoals. Bowater had seen more men go over the standing part of the foresheet than he could remember. He had been aboard the captured slavers during cruises off the African coast, had seen the horrors of the lower decks. Was he beyond feeling now?

  He thought of Thadeous Harwell, first officer aboard his first command, shot down at the Battle of Elizabeth City. Young, enthusiastic Harwell, and the memory gave him a sharp knife thrust of sadness, and with it came genuine relief that he could still feel such an emotion.

  SIXTEEN

  On the next day, at 10 o’clock A.M., we observed from the Virginia that the flag was not flying on the Sewell’s Point battery and that it appeared to have been abandoned.

  FLAG OFFICER JOSIAH TATTNALL TO STEPHEN R.MALLORY

  The Norwegians were kindness itself to the pair of exhausted-looking, disheveled, French-speaking American women who had appeared on their deck, transported there by a United States dispatch boat and requesting they be returned to the Confederacy.

  The crew of the Norvier acted with such dispatch, in fact, that Wendy had the clear impression that the Norwegians were eager to be rid of them. Molly began with her usual sort of explanation-believable, detailed, but not overly so, spoken in a fluent French that oozed sincerity and vulnerability. She explained how the Federals refused to take them to a Confederate port, despite their being citizens of the Confederate States, after the ship they were on was captured by Yankees off Cape Hatteras.

  She had got no further than that when the officer to whom they were speaking, who Wendy assumed to be the captain, cut her off with an apology, hands held up to ward off further explanation. He turned to another man, who had approached them in midconversation, a man in finely made civilian clothing who, though having just completed a trans-Atlantic voyage, looked as if he was ready for an evening at the opera. This Wendy took to be the Norwegian minister. If he had a wife, she was not in evidence.

  The two men spoke in rapid Norwegian and the women could do no more than listen and try to deduce, from the tone and the hand motions, what was being said. Wendy worked out her best-guess translation:

  CAPTAIN: Your Honor, I don’t know what these lunatic women are talking about. Something about the Federals not allowing them to go home.

  MINISTER: What do they want from us?

  CAPTAIN: Apparently they want us to take them over there.

  (The captain at that point gestured toward the south.)

  MINISTER: Very well, let us get them the hell off this ship and have no more to do with this. Lord, we don’t want to start an incident an hour after the anchor has dropped!

  That was just Wendy’s guess, but she would have wagered all the money pressed against her breasts that she was within a biscuit toss of being right. Before Molly could begin again, the captain informed her that they would be taken ashore, and he turned and shouted for a boat to be cleared away, shouting orders over the two women’s attempts to thank him.

  An hour later, with the sun just lost in the west, they fetched the beach at the foot of the battery at Sewell’s Point, the very spot from which they had left that morning in the first light of day. Lincoln ’s boat and the other Federal vessels that had been shelling the fort were long gone, the Virginia , hulking and dark, riding on her mooring half a mile away.

  The Norvier’s launch was crewed by twenty young Norwegian sailors, tricked out in blue-and-white-striped shirts and flat-topped hats that they wore at a jaunty angle, bound around with a strip of black ribbon embroidered with the name of their ship. They were handsome, blond, smiling men who seemed to appreciate the women in the stern sheets. They took every opportunity to meet their passengers’ eyes and smile, while Molly smiled coquettishly back and Wendy blushed and the officer sitting beside them scowled at his men in disapproval.

  The boat ground up on the gravel shore and the oarsmen hopped out one by one and dragged the boat up on the beach, until at last they were able to assist Wendy and Molly out onto the dry ground. Molly thanked them all in French, and though it was clear they did not understand the words, her meaning was obvious, and they smiled and gave their welcomes in Norwegian. The humorless officer ordered the boat to be pushed back into the water and hustled the sailors back aboard, and soon they were pulling for the Norvier, a gray and indistinct object, half lost in the gloom.

  “Lord, I would sign aboard that ship in a minute if they would promise to put me in the fo’c’sle!” Molly said. Wendy was too exhausted to be scandalized.

  “Now what, Aunt?” Wendy said. She sat with a thump on a knee-high rock. The
gentle surf pulsed against the shore and the saltwater washed over Wendy’s shoes but she did not have the energy to move them. Whatever spirit had been driving her along through the chaotic day was now entirely drained from her. Her body seemed to know it was safe to collapse now, with her feet back on Southern soil, her neck apparently free from the hangman’s noose, and the question of whether or not she should blow out the brains of the President of the United States decided for her. She felt like a chicken, beheaded, hung by its feet, all the life juices drained from her.

  “That’s quite an image,” Molly said.

  “What?”

  “A beheaded chicken. You don’t look as bad as all that.”

  Did I say that out loud? Wendy thought. She must have, or else Molly was reading her mind. The soldiers that were moving down the beach were marching with an astounding symmetry, thousands and thousands of them, and the orange light streaming from the rifles they held over their shoulders lit the sky like sunset.

  “Come on, dear,” Molly said, and Wendy woke to find herself still sitting on the rock, Molly’s protective arm around her shoulders to keep her from falling onto the beach. “Do you think you can stand? Lieutenant Batchelor is here to help us find some transportation back to Norfolk.”

  Wendy looked around. In the fading light of sunset she could see Lieutenant Batchelor standing a few feet away, pristine in his frock coat. “Lieutenant… how good to see you! How…?”

  “The Yankees let me go, just as they said they would. Spent a fair amount of time questioning me, but they got nothing that I didn’t tell them when we first pulled alongside. To hear me, you would have thought I was the most ignorant man in the Confederacy.”