Behind him, another gun discharged, a huge sound echoing around the interior, deafening even over the roar of the flames. The vessel shook as if it had been struck.
Newcomb wheeled around in surprise, twisted on the ladder to see aft.
With a flurry of skirts, a shriek like a banshee, Molly launched herself off the side of the ship and flew across the deck at New-comb, so suddenly Wendy shouted in surprise.
Newcomb swung around, fired the gun, and Molly hit him square in the chest. The two of them flew down the ladder in a wild, chaotic tumble to the deck below.
Wendy leaped to her feet, raced for the ladder, all but jumped down to the gun deck. Newcomb was pulling himself away, trying to disengage himself from Molly, who was slashing at him with clawed hands, cursing and screaming, out of her mind with rage. Five feet from his right hand, the pistol lay on the deck.
“Oh!” Wendy shouted, ran for the gun. Newcomb cocked a leg, kicked Molly hard, knocked her free, lunged for the pistol. The smoke was coming thicker now, a dark cloud filling the forward end of the casement, obscuring objects even close up.
Wendy fell to her knees, grabbed at the gun, but Newcomb got there first. His hand wrapped around the butt, he swung the weapon around at Wendy’s face. Wendy grabbed the barrel and shoved it away as he pulled the trigger.
The pistol fired six inches from her head. The barrel jerked from her fingers, the sound of the shot like a hammer blow, the bullet loud in her ear as it flew past. Newcomb’s crazy eyes were a foot from hers. She screamed, raked his face, slashed at his eyes with her nails, slashed him again. He shrieked, rolled away, the gun still in his hand.
Wendy pushed herself up. Molly was standing, heaving for breath. Her left arm was hanging limp, blood running down her fingers, soaking the torn sleeve of her dress. She kicked Newcomb hard in the head, kicked him again.
Wendy grabbed her good arm, pulled her back, even as she was lashing out with her foot again, shouted, “Go!” She pointed toward the gun port through which they had come. They had to get out. The ship was a death trap. Fire or bullet, they would die by one. “Go! I’m right behind!”
Molly nodded, raced for the gun port. Newcomb was sitting up, blinking sight back into his eyes, looking around, pushing himself to his feet. Wendy raced after her aunt. The smoke roiled around them. Molly put a leg out the gun port, grabbed the sill with her uninjured arm, swung herself out of the casement.
“No, no, you bitch!” Newcomb roared. He was twenty feet aft, barely visible through the smoke, on his feet, stumbling forward. Wendy backed away, ducked under the pilothouse platform. Too late, she could not get out of the gun port without him seeing her. He would shoot her dead as she tried.
Newcomb limped, cursed, staggered forward, the gun in his hand. Wendy pressed back into the shadows. Dear God, did he see me? She was cornered now, she was dead if Newcomb had seen her crawl into that narrow space.
He staggered past, heading for the gun port, following Molly, thinking perhaps that Wendy had gone first. He fired the pistol, put a bullet right through the open gun port, shouted a stream of profanities.
He reached the open port, swung a leg through, straddling the opening, peering out. He reached up and grabbed the sill and began to hoist himself through. Halfway in, halfway out, and that was when Wendy saw the shutter’s lever.
Oh God, oh God… She flew out of her hiding place, her eyes locked on the lever, her teeth clenched, waiting for the bullet. Five feet, four feet, three feet, her hands stretched out in front of her, she saw in the corner of her eye Newcomb turn, Newcomb scream, Newcomb raise the gun and fire. Felt the bullet pluck her skirt, and then her hands were on the lever and pulling.
For a second it would not budge and she heard Newcomb scream “No!” and heard the click of the hammer and saw him try to claw his way back in, and then the lever was free in her hands, no resistance. The chain flew through the hole with a wild rattling sound and the heavy shutters swung down and caught Roger New-comb half in, half out, hundreds of pounds of iron jaws swinging on a single pivot; it caught him there and held him as surely as the hand of God.
The pistol fired, the bullet thumping into the deck. Wendy twisted sideways, waiting for the next shot that would kill her, praying that Newcomb was dead.
He was not. Newcomb’s head, shoulder, and gun hand were inside the casement, his left hand and leg outside, the shutter pinning him vertically by the chest. The gun was on the deck where he had dropped it and he was flailing wildly around, his hand slamming against the shutter and grabbing at the edge and trying to pry it away. But the iron shield was built to resist the impact of solid shot at point-blank range, and there was no chance at all that he would move it.
Wendy backed away, eyes on the struggling man, just as New-comb seemed to notice her. He looked up with bulging eyes, gaping mouth. Wendy wondered if he was being slowly crushed to death, like some barbaric death sentence from another age.
His eyes met hers, and she could see they were wild with pain and fear and fury. He reached out a hand to her, fingers spread, but whether he was looking for help or hoping to get hold of her, to take her to hell with him, she could not tell.
She pressed her hands over her face, overwhelmed by the horror of the scene. She thought of picking up the gun, finishing him off, more for mercy than vengeance, but she knew she could not do that. Without rage or fear to drive her, she could not shoot a human being.
She stepped sideways, past Newcomb, five feet away, but she could not take her eyes from his, she was transfixed by those mad eyes. They were staring at her but they were seeing the face of certain death. He stretched his hand farther toward her. She sobbed, made a choking sound.
When Newcomb’s voice came, it was strangled and cracked. “Help me,” he said. A trickle of blood came out of the corner of his mouth.
“Oh, God!” Wendy cried, turned her back on the man, and fled. She ran across the deck, past the pilothouse ladder. She fell, felt the pain shoot through her arms as her damaged hands hit the deck, pushed herself right to her feet with hardly a break in her momentum. The smoke was thick and black and choking, she could hardly breathe, her eyes were streaming with tears from the acrid smoke and the horror of what she had just witnessed.
She was becoming disoriented. She stopped. Left or right? She had to get out of the casemate before the smoke overwhelmed her. She could feel her head growing light. She was getting dizzy. Her throat ached from coughing and she had no idea, left or right.
She turned right for no reason at all, other than that she had to turn in one direction. She stumbled forward, through the blackness. Her legs were shaking. She wanted to fall down. But she could see something in front of her, something moving, ghostlike in the smoke.
“Wendy! Wendy!” It was Molly, her voice like a dream. “Wendy, here!” She could see her aunt’s arms waving, her face just visible in the smoke-filled place. Wendy stumbled on, felt Molly’s hands on her, pulling her. The smoke seemed even thicker there, and she realized Molly was outside, standing on the bulwark, half in the gun port, and the smoke was getting sucked out around her.
“Come, dear, right out here!” Molly shouted, and Wendy put a leg through the gun port, grabbed the sill overhead, swung the other out. Molly leaped out of the way and Wendy slid down the side of the casement, slid just a few feet until her feet hit the top of the V-shaped bulwark. She felt herself stagger, thought she would fall, tried to recall what was below her. Then Molly’s strong hands were on her arm, pulling her, and she fell inboard, onto the foredeck inside the bulwark.
She landed in a heap and lay there, breathing the air, blessed fresh air, as the smoke rolled away overhead.
She heard Molly’s voice in her ear. “Newcomb?”
Wendy shook her head. It was a few seconds before she could speak. “Done for,” she said.
Molly let her lie still for a minute more, then said, “We have to go. It’s not safe here.” She helped Wendy to her feet, but Wendy was feeling str
onger, the fresh air revitalizing her. Together they climbed over the bulwark and down into the boat, which thankfully Newcomb had tied alongside. They cast off. Wendy set the sail.
Toward the after end of the ship, another cannon discharged, blasting a column of flame over the water.
“We should land where the ship’s crew landed, over there.” Wendy pointed toward the dark shoreline.
“Wait,” Molly said. “I have to know about Newcomb.”
“He’s dead. He was caught by the shutters on the gun port.” Wendy did not describe that final, hellish scene. She tried to exorcize it from her mind, but it would not go.
“We thought he was dead before, and he lived,” Molly said with a finality in her voice that Wendy had not heard in some time. “So this time we wait, until we are certain.”
Wendy sailed the boat around the burning ironclad. Port and starboard, guns went off, the shells screaming by overhead.
At last they could see Newcomb’s arm and leg hanging out the gun port. They were not moving, and Wendy hoped that he was dead, hoped he had died quickly. For their sake she hoped he was dead. And for his, because she did not want to think of what he would be suffering if the fire were reaching him now. She did not need that on her soul.
They stood toward the shore, getting some distance from the ship, then Wendy hove the boat to, the way she had seen it done. They stayed more or less in place, watching the ship burn. Three more guns fired, and then no more. Flames were reaching out of the gun ports, licking up the side of the casement, making the outline of the ship quite visible in the dark.
Then Wendy realized that it was not so dark. The sun was coming up in the east, a thin line of gray sky on the far horizon. A new day, and they were still alive.
“Very well,” Molly said, breaking the long silence. “I am satisfied that Newcomb is dead.”
Wendy put the tiller over and the boat began to move. She headed toward shore, and in the gathering gray light could see the landing where the crew of the Virginia had set foot on shore, a weary old wooden dock leading up to the bitter end of sandy road.
Wendy brought the boat alongside and Molly tied the painter to a piling. They climbed up a slick wooden ladder to the dock. Silent, they turned and looked across the water at the burning ironclad. Acting Master Roger Newcomb’s funeral pyre.
“Bastard,” Molly muttered. “I wish I had killed him myself.”
And then the CSS Virginia exploded. The top of the casemate seemed to lift right up, as if a massive creature made of red and orange and yellow flame were standing up inside, tearing it apart as it stood. Black shards of iron and the long guns like exclamation points lifted up, up into the dawn sky. The entire explosion-the light, the noise, the concussion-was so massive that it melded all into one overwhelming sensation, hurling itself at the women standing dumbfounded on the dock.
They looked with wide eyes and open mouths, and then the shock wave rolled over them and knocked them clean off their feet, tossing them to the ground like children’s dolls. They clutched the dirt for protection and felt the earth tremble, and that was the most frightening thing, feeling the only thing in life that is absolutely immovable quivering as if it had no substance at all.
They did not move. The explosion at the shipyard had been a nightmare, but it was a minor affair compared to this Armageddon. Wendy could feel the impact of ironclad parts falling around them. She pictured the huge sections of iron plate, the guns and carriages and shot and massive wooden beams hurling through the air and she wondered if any would drop on them, if Roger New-comb had killed them after all.
When it was quiet they looked up. The sky was lighter overhead. Massive sections of casemate lay smoldering all around them. A falling cannon had shattered a small oak near the side of the road.
They got to their knees and then to their feet. The Virginia was a low dark spot on the water, still burning, like a barge on fire. The casemate was gone, the decks were gone, everything that had made her the invincible ship she was had been blown to the heavens, and now the parts that had once been the USS Merrimack, the hull and machinery that had lived already through one sinking and burning, were dying their final death.
The Virginia no longer existed.
Molly nodded. “Now I am very satisfied that Newcomb is dead.”
The women turned and headed up the road. Behind them, the sun broke the horizon, sent its orange light down the road at their feet, threw long shadows ahead of them. A new day. They headed for Richmond.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Our only hope is to make ourselves useful “upstream,” and we will keep the enemy at this point in check until they are largely reinforced. The enemy’s boats above Fort Pillow are now moored in narrow channels behind sand bars, where we can not attack them again, but we will wait and watch for another opportunity.
BRIGADIER GENERAL M.JEFF THOMPSON TO GENERAL G.T.BEAUREGARD
I was some time after the death of CSS Virginia when Samuel Bowater read the news. It saddened him, the way he would have been saddened by the death of someone he had known briefly in person, knew well by reputation, and had come to deeply respect.
Bowater had been there on the night the USS Merrimack had gone down, scuttled and burned by the men who had been sent to save her. He had helped raise the hulk of the ship and maneuver it into the dry dock at the Gosport Naval Shipyard. While he had been ferrying supplies around the Norfolk area, chafing at the tedium and flailing around for a way to get into the fight in a meaningful way, he had watched the ship’s slow transformation. He had stood by the dry dock on that solemn day in February, just four months before, when she had without fanfare floated free of the blocks.
Four months… Bowater wondered if any ship in the history of naval warfare had done so much, had so influenced strategic thinking, had changed the very nature of shipbuilding as profoundly in a career that had lasted just four months. He did not think so.
Four months… It seemed more like four years, four times four years, since he had stood beside that granite dry dock in Virginia. Since he had been able to spend evenings with Wendy Atkins, enjoy the trappings of civilization, far from the barbaric shores of the Mississippi.
But no, it had only been four months since then, and less than a month since the Battle of New Orleans. Now the army under Ben Butler, whom they were calling “Beast,” was in charge in the Crescent City, and Farragut was coming north.
And Bowater, by order of Secretary Mallory, was not concerned with what was happening downstream. It was the enemy upstream, pushing south, that he was there to help stop. Squeezed from both sides, and the pressure was becoming terrific.
He did not know how much fighting he would be doing with the Tennessee. They were planking her like mad, but the army would not send any shipwrights, and even house carpenters were getting scarce. The men Bowater had brought with him were good for heavy lifting but not much else.
Construction dragged its tedious way along. Two lots of lumber for deck plank sat at the Memphis and Charleston Railroad depot, but the manpower was not there to transport it to the shipyard. The iron plate still sat on the Arkansas side of the river, finished but unpaid for, and despite all Bowater’s prodding, Shirley could not be induced to take possession of it.
The shipbuilder had any number of excuses: he did not want to waste time before the iron was needed, he did not want to clutter up the yard, the boats were not available to bring it over. But Bowater had a good idea of the real and unstated reason for his reticence. Shirley did not want to pay for iron plate for a ship that he believed would never be launched.
And then there were the engine and shafting, sent downriver with the Arkansas. At some point soon it would be time to put them in, and all work would stop until that was done. They couldn’t seal up the casemate without first installing the shaft, at least. And if it was not there, then what?
It was all very depressing, so Bowater made a point of not thinking about it.
Noah, he reflected, h
ad built the whole damned ark by himself in less time than it was taking them to finish this gunboat. And just as Noah had his neighbors to taunt him, so Bowater had Mississippi Mike Sullivan.
The ships of the River Defense Fleet moved up and down the river, staying mostly under the guns of Fort Pillow but sometimes dropping down to Memphis. Sullivan did not miss a chance to come by the yard to inspect the half-built Tennessee, a look of barely suppressed amusement spread across his bearded face.
The River Defense Fleet was quite literally on the front lines of this fight. The fleet and Fort Pillow formed the levee holding back the Yankee flood. That was it. Remove even one of them and the Yankees would be swarming over Memphis in a few days, and the Mississippi River would be in Federal hands from Cairo, Illinois, clear down to Vicksburg. The very fate of the Confederacy, perhaps, was being decided one hundred miles upriver, and Bowater could do nothing but struggle to finish a ship that no one, himself included, believed could be finished. It was intolerable.
Bowater understood-and he hated the fact-that if he hoped to get into the fast-approaching battle, it would have to be at Mississippi Mike’s side.
And that was why, on that perfect morning on the third of June, Lieutenant Samuel Bowater, CSN, found himself just outside the now familiar wheelhouse of the General Page, half a mile upriver from Fort Pillow and a good hundred miles from where he was supposed to be.
He watched the sunlight play over the surface of the river and the scrubby vegetation on the bank, and his thoughts drifted off to how he might paint that scene, how desperately he missed painting, how the intense focus of rendering a scene on canvas gave him, for the time it took, a reprieve from the myriad other thoughts that plagued him. He had given Hieronymus Taylor his music back, and it had made a world of difference to the engineer’s recovery. He could use a similar diversion.
He shook his head. The guilt over his jaunts upriver with Mississippi Mike was bad enough. He could never bring himself to open a paint set, not then. Such self-indulgence was not in his nature.
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