“Yes, Lieutenant, yes. Here, have a look. Is it my tired old eyes, or is there no flag flying at Sewell’s Point battery?”
Jones took the field glasses and studied the fortifications, which just the day before had been pounded by Union ships, including the Monitor. “I do not believe there is a flag flying, sir,” he said at last. “I can’t see a soul stirring there.”
Tattnall frowned. Damn Huger was supposed to notify me if he was abandoning his position… The Virginia had been kept at Sewell’s Point to protect Norfolk from the Union Navy, and she had been damned effective in that job. Every time she showed up, the Yankees skedaddled. She had fired only one shot since the great battle with Monitor, and that had been a parting shot in disgust at the Union fleet that would not close and fight. She was the undisputed queen of Hampton Roads.
But if the Yankees took Norfolk and Portsmouth, and once again had possession of the naval yard, then Virginia ’s position there was untenable. She ate coal at a prodigious rate, and her engines were too unreliable for her to be without a dockyard nearby.
But where would he go? There was no ship afloat with guns heavy enough to penetrate Virginia ’s ironclad hide, but Tattnall was not so certain about the big guns at Fortress Monroe. He was not enthusiastic about steaming past that place during the daylight hours, through tricky shallows and the crossfire of Monroe and the Rip Raps, and the pilots would not take her through at night.
Richmond was where the Virginia belonged, up the James River to the capital, fight the Yankees as they tried to use their gunboats to cover McClellan’s flanks. But the James River was tricky, and shallow, and Virginia was clumsy and deep.
Tattnall took the field glasses back from Jones, trained them to the south, toward Craney Island. The island was four miles away, but he thought he could make out the Stars and Bars still flying in the breeze. Jones’s considerably younger eyes confirmed it.
“Lieutenant, take a boat down to Craney Island and see what’s happening there. We have to know if the Yankees have landed, and what Huger is doing with his damned army.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” Jones saluted.
“And send up Parrish and Wright.”
“Parrish and Wright, aye, sir.” The lieutenant disappeared down the hatch, and Tattnall was able to enjoy the agreeable quiet once again. From inside the casemate he could hear a dull pounding, someone fixing something, it never stopped. At the far end of the hurricane deck a gang of sailors were overhauling boat falls. But where he stood, it was quiet. Hard to believe they were surrounded on all sides by warring parties, great armies struggling over the fate of two nations.
Tattnall frowned and paced.
“Sir?” It was the pilot, Mr. Parrish, and his chief assistant, Wright. Tattnall did not care for them, did not think them bold enough in assuming risk. Virginia was a man-of-war, she could not be safe all the time. But that was the nature of the breed, with pilots.
“Mr. Wright. It appears the battery at Sewell’s Point has been abandoned. If the Yankees take Norfolk we will have to sail up the James River to Richmond. I wish to confirm with you that we can do so.” They had been over this before. But Tattnall had to know that it could be done.
“Well, sir,” Parrish said patiently, “we can get her to within forty miles of Richmond. If the ship can be lightened to a draft of eighteen feet.”
Tattnall nodded. Virginia drew twenty-two feet. To raise her by four feet would require throwing nearly everything overboard, save guns and powder. It would raise the iron shield out of the water and expose her vulnerable wooden hull. It would render her indefensible. But it would be worth it, to get her upriver. If he could not do that, then he would blast his way into the Union fleet, rip them apart until he was run down by Yankee rams, until the ironclad sank under him with guns blazing and flags flying. That was how a ship like Virginia, and an old sailor like Josiah Tattnall, should die.
“Very well,” Tattnall said. His eyes were following Jones’s boat, which was just leaving Virginia ’s side, heading southwest toward Craney Island. Four men were pulling oars, two were stepping the mast amidships. Jones sat in the stern sheets, a hand on the tiller.
Suddenly, Tattnall felt very unwell. His stomach churned. A headache was building like storm clouds. “Thank you, pilot,” he said and Parrish and Wright disappeared. Tattnall leaned heavily on the rail that ran around the hurricane deck. I am old, he thought, old, old, old.
Roger Newcomb tried to see upriver through the drifting smoke of the navy yard. He stood near the end of the great granite dry dock, coughing, wiping his eyes, trying to focus his telescope on the northern reaches of the Elizabeth River.
There was no telling how far ahead those two bitches were. They might have left two hours before him, or twenty minutes. They might be alone in a skiff, or they might be in a longboat with twenty secesh sailors. He just did not know.
He snapped the telescope shut-useless thing-and cursed out loud. There was only one thing he knew with certainty, and that was that he had to follow them, and run them to ground before they could reach the protective arms of the Confederacy. He needed a boat.
That realization spurred him. He put the telescope back in the haversack and began to work his way north across the navy yard, but he was met with fire that made the way impassable, or with the charred remains of buildings, a few blackened brick walls standing here and there, empty window casements like eye sockets in skulls. It was pointless. Anything worth having there had been taken by the secesh or burned in their wake. He would not find a boat.
Cursing, he ran back across the navy yard, through the smoke and the heat, out the iron gate in the low brick wall. The streets were deserted, the people either hiding or fled. He raced for the north end of the shipyard and the docks he knew lined the waterfront.
His head was a riot of pain, made worse with each footfall, and that only fueled his fury. He had been shot with his own gun, he knew it, but he would not let the words form in his head because the humiliation was too great. Instead he focused on the treachery, the lies, the unfathomable viciousness of that bitch. Both of them. Because the dark-haired one was a part of this too, as guilty as the Luce whore.
He came to the north end of the wall, the northern boundary of the shipyard. Beyond that, the town of Portsmouth consisted of wood frame houses and various businesses tucked into red brick buildings. Trolley tracks cut parallel lines down the hard-packed dirt streets.
He crossed the road at an angle, heading for the water. With the breeze blowing the smoke from the burning yard off toward Norfolk, he could smell the fish and coal dust and brackish mud flats of the waterfront.
A Negro in a big slouch hat stepped from an alley to Newcomb’s left. Newcomb rested a wary hand on the butt of his gun, but the man stopped short twenty feet away. Their eyes met, and the black man took a step back, his face registering fear and revulsion. He turned and fled back the way he had come.
Stupid nigger, what got into him? Newcomb thought as he hurried on. Then he recalled his own reflection in the mirror, the crusted blood, the hair wild and matted. He was a frightening thing to look at.
The waterfront consisted of wharf after wooden wharf, stretching north along the Elizabeth River and piled with barrels and bales of sundry goods, cotton and hay and straw. Rising above them was a tangle of masts and smokestacks like a forest in winter-seagoing ships and brigs and schooners, fishing smacks, tugs, packet boats. They were all tied up and seemingly abandoned in the panicked town.
Newcomb paused, let his breath settle, looked around. There was nothing moving on the river. He waited for a minute, then another, to be certain he was not being watched. He took a step toward the docks, then stopped.
The river was not entirely deserted. He could see a boat now, about two hundred yards away, and coming up from somewhere downriver. The boat was driven by a dipping lug sail, a crew of seamen leaning on the weather rail to steady it. It had to be a manof-war’s boat, it could be nothing else.
Newcomb sucked in his breath. He felt the sweat stand out on his forehead, though he was not certain why. Is it them? If so, why would they be coming upriver? They should be heading to Richmond, or to hell, or wherever secesh trash went.
He pulled his telescope and focused it on the boat. Six men that he could see. They seemed to be wearing the bibbed frocks of navy men, but there was no uniformity, and that, to Newcomb, meant Rebel. He swept the glass aft to the officer in the stern sheets. His coat might have been faded blue, but Newcomb did not think so. More likely the gray of the Confederate Navy.
Newcomb felt a tremor in his stomach, felt an impulse to run inland and hide. He lowered the glass, took a step back.
Wait, wait, wait, he thought. I’m a civilian, aren’t I? Nothing about him indicated that he was a Union naval officer. That fact might get him hung as a spy if the secesh caught him, but it also meant that the men in the boat, even if they did pay any attention to him, would not see him for what he was.
He lifted the glass again, pretended that he was entirely calm, and watched the boat approach. All right, if they land anywhere near here I’ll hide, he decided at last, but the boat made no move to approach, and soon Newcomb realized they must be heading for the navy yard.
All right, all right, what does this tell me? The Federal forces have not yet taken Norfolk, or those bastards would not dare come sailing upriver like it was a holiday. Whoever those Rebs are, they do not know the yard is abandoned. Damned secesh, just what you’d expect… left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing…
He continued to watch as the boat swept by, making good time with the sail set and the tide flooding. None of the boat crew even looked in his direction. Finally it was lost from sight behind a warehouse upriver of where Newcomb stood.
I need a boat…
He needed to find a boat that he could handle by himself. A fast boat, one that could outsail the Rebel boat that had just passed him, in case it came to that.
Through the maze of rigging and spars he saw a single thin mast, no more than twenty feet high. It looked like a possibility. He walked out along the wooden wharf to which it was tied.
The boat floated four feet below the level of the wharf, a long, lean thing, ketch rigged. It was what the people of the Chesapeake called a log canoe, with a hull that looked for all the world as if it were planked up, but was in fact burned and carved from a few big logs fastened together. They were generally used in the oyster fishery, as apparently this one was, judging from the dried mud, broken shells, and dark pool of fetid bilgewater in the bottom.
But that did not matter. The boat was simple to sail and fast and that made it ideal. Newcomb looked around to see if the owners were near, but the only people he could see were a hundred yards away and paying no attention to him. He climbed down into the boat, lowered the centerboard, cast off the dock fasts, and pushed away from the wharf.
He raised the jib and then the mainsail, which was an odd-looking thing. It had no gaff, but rather a triangular head and a loose foot, rather like the jib. The clew was cut off and a short spar was laced there and the sheet attached to that.
The sails flogged as they went up and the boat began to drift downwind. Newcomb took his place at the tiller, leading the sheets aft. He hauled both sheets taut, the sails hardened up, and the boat began to gather way, heeling over and moving so nimbly that Newcomb sucked in his breath in surprise. He rounded up a bit to slow her down, then fell off the wind, letting the lean boat gather way. In less than a minute he was cleaving the small chop at four knots, the tiller firm and responsive in his hand.
Soon the town of Portsmouth dropped away and the river opened up before him. He turned the bow more northerly. The quick and weatherly log canoe pointed so high he thought he might well fetch Hampton Roads on that one tack. Newcomb was well versed in small boat handling, had sailed nearly every kind of rig imaginable, but he could not recall any boat so nimble and fast.
He kept to the center of the river, well away from the tricky mud banks, equidistant from Portsmouth to the west and Norfolk to the east, since he did not know who was in control of either town. He scanned them with his telescope as best he could, but the glass revealed nothing beyond the fact that they both seemed deserted, that virtually no one and no vessels were moving along the waterfront.
The town of Norfolk yielded to the brown fields and clumps of trees to the north, and Newcomb had to tack once to stand more into the center of the river, then again to return to his northerly course. The low western shoreline dropped away where the southern and western branches of the river met, and four miles down-river the great expanse of Hampton Roads and the mouth of the James River opened up before him.
He picked up his telescope, twisted around, and looked astern. Nothing. Just empty river and a shoreline crowded with idle shipping. He looked forward, his pulse quickening. He made himself be calm, be methodical. Swept the glass west to east.
There was a boat. It was under sail, about a mile or so ahead. It was on a starboard tack, sailing roughly southwest, but as New-comb watched, it turned up into the wind, tacking around. It seemed to stall, sail flogging, caught in irons for a moment. It was too far to see what was happening, but whoever was sailing the boat was apparently no expert.
Newcomb’s hands were trembling. He was grinding his teeth together and he made himself stop.
You bitch…
TWENTY-THREE
HAMLET: O it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise.
SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET, ACT III, SCENE 2
Mississippi Mike steadfastly refused to allow his literary doppelganger to die at the end of the book. “I admire the knife fight, an the poison an all that,” he said to Bowater, sitting on the edge of a frail-looking chair in his cabin aboard the General Joseph Page. “I surely do. But it don’t make no sense to have Mike kilt off, an this the first book we done.” He stood, made an expansive gesture. “Hell, Cap’n, when this here book goes like hotcakes, I reckon me an you’ll be writin two, three of ’em a year, minny-mum! Can’t kill the damned golden goose right off.”
“Very well.” It was pointless to argue. On artistic grounds, Bowater could generally sway Sullivan to his way of thinking, but this was a commercial consideration, and Mike was intransigent. “Let’s see what we have.”
Sullivan sat again. Bowater picked up the manuscript and read. The fight scene, the very end of their opus.
Mike’s ol pard Larry took a lucky stab at Mike with his big ol bowie nife and he cut him a good one, right acrost the arm, and Mike bled jest like a pigll do when his throtes cut.
“Tere warnt no call to do that,” Mike sed an he dropt his nife an put his hand over where he was cut. “Warnt no call at all,” he sed an now he was getin some angry an he hit Larry right square in the jaw an hit him so hard ol Larry fell right down flat an dropped his nife to.
“Yer my meat now, Mississippi Mike,” Larry sed and gabbed up a nife but he grabed Mississippi Mike’s nife by accident and Mike picked up Larrys nife. They went at her like a couple of ol bucks in ruttin season and next thing Mike cuts Larry a good one.
Jest then Mike’s ma fell right out of her chair. “Oh, Mike, they done poisoned me, I knows it!” she called and then she died, right then and there.
“Poisoned? What all’s goin on here?” Mike demanded.
“Reckon Im done fer now, Mike,” Larry said, “Same as you. On account of that nifes got poison on her. Same poison done fer yer ma.”
Mississippi Mike jest nodded his worried hed but he didnt say nothin on account of he knew there warnt no poison could kill him.
Bowater nodded his approval as he read. “This is excellent, Sullivan,” he said and looked up at Mike’s beaming face. “You just wrote this?” “Wrote her up last night. I’m awful careful now about who I
lets see that. Keep her under lock and key when I ain’t actually in my cabin. I don’t know how them actor sons of bitches got their hands on her, but I got my ideas.” He leaned closer, said in a stage whisper, “I reckon it’s that little weasel Guthrie, down ta the engine room. He’s got it in fer me, has fer a long damn time. I jest got plumb full up of his lazy damned careless ways and I started tellin him what’s what and he don’t care fer it. Damn engineers. Damn the whole breed of cat.”
Bowater raised the glass of brandy that Sullivan had provided. “I’ll second that.” Finally, he and Mississippi Mike had found common ground.
If there was one good thing about Spence Guthrie, the nervous, rodentlike malcontent in the Page’s engine room, it was that he made Hieronymus Taylor seem like a reasonable and cooperative individual.
No sooner had Bowater and Sullivan come aboard than Guthrie had started in: the coal’s no good, the new firemen didn’t know their business, the condenser’s shot and no spare parts to be had. “Whole damn walking beam’s shifting around, the bearings’s so worn. I been with whores didn’t move as much as that fucking walking beam.” All in that shrill voice, on and on, until even Bowater wanted to strangle him.
Not even Mississippi Mike Sullivan deserved Spence Guthrie.
They had got under way around noon, after listening to Guthrie explain why the boilers would probably blow up and kill them all, jest because some goddamn people think a damned army riverboat’s their own private yacht, jest run her up and down the damn river hows’ever they please, an never mind about the engine room, they’ll do jest fine on their own, thank you please, jest there to serve the lords and masters in the ruttin pilothouse anyhow…
Later, after their literary salon, during which they finalized the climactic end of Mississippi Mike, Melancholy Prince of the River, Sullivan relieved Tarbox in the wheelhouse for the evening watch and Bowater found a dark place on the fantail and sat. He watched the moonlit banks and the scattered lights on shore slip past, listened to the slap of the paddle-wheel buckets, the creak of the walking beam overhead, let his mind go away, far and away.
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