Thieves of Mercy Read online

  “Yes, Chief,” Stembel shouted over the noise, the unrelenting noise. “We’ll beach her!”

  The chief nodded, turned back to his work. Stembel climbed back to the gun deck, and suddenly he could not stand to be there, down below, blind. He could not go back to the pilothouse with its little view ports. He had to see, had to be able to look around and understand the way things lay. Like Nelson on his quarterdeck.

  He climbed another ladder onto the hurricane deck and stepped out into the morning, blinking and squinting. The smoke from the battle was swirling around the river, blinding and choking, but still it was considerably more bright and cool on the hurricane deck than it was below.

  The Cincinnati was sinking, his ship was going down. He could feel the list in her as he crossed the hurricane deck to the pilothouse. Time to get her on the mud. But here was another Rebel, coming up fast, her bow gun firing, steaming up on the port quarter where only one of the Cincinnati’s guns could reach her.

  Fifty yards away, and someone from the Rebel boat shouted, “Haul down your flag and we will save you!”

  The words were like a slap. Stembel did not know what to say. Haul down our flag? But then from somewhere aboard the Cincinnati, someone shouted back, “Our flag will go down when we do!”

  Yes, yes, Stembel thought. He turned and hurried forward. He would direct the ship from outside the pilothouse, to the extent that he could direct a sinking ship that had no steering gear. Minié balls thudded into the wooden deck below his feet.

  Then the Confederate ram struck, right on the port quarter. Stembel stumbled and fell forward as the Cincinnati’s bow was driven under by the force of the impact. The Rebel went full astern, drawing its ram from the hole it had punched, and none of the ironclad’s guns would bear.

  Stembel pulled himself to his feet and drew his side arm. He pulled the hammer back with his thumb, found a Rebel sharpshooter over the barrel, pulled the trigger. The gun jumped in his hand. He thumbed the trigger back again. He could feel his ship settling under him, wondered how much water they were in. He fired, thought of Nelson, so recklessly exposing himself. He wondered how different this moment was from Nelson’s. The smoke, the gunfire, the despair at the thought of defeat.

  He fired again. He wondered if perhaps Nelson also felt that the romance of war belonged to an earlier age.

  He felt a punch in his shoulder, a straight line of burning pain running right through his shoulder, right through his neck, right through his throat. He gasped, staggered, dropped the pistol, grabbed at his neck. It was hot and wet with blood. He could feel the ragged skin under his hand where the ball had exited, passed clean through him. The pistol clattered on the deck. Stembel fell to his knees. Everything seemed hazy, indistinct, but it might have been the smoke. He fell prone, laid out on the warm deck planks, and did not move.

  ELEVEN

  We started at the commodore’s signal at 6 A.M. and steamed round the point in front of Fort Pillow. The boat guarding the mortar boat immediately started into the current and ran for the shoal water on Plum Point. The General Bragg, Captain Leonard, which had the lead, ran rapidly at her, striking her a glancing blow on the starboard bow and receiving a broadside at 10 feet distance.

  BRIGADIER GENERAL M. JEFF THOMPSON

  TO GENERAL G. T. BEAUREGARD

  When your sanctuary becomes your hell, there’s no damned place left to run.…

  Hieronymus Taylor pushed the insidious thought aside. Too much to consider, when he wanted to consider nothing.

  He was sweating hard. Well over one hundred degrees in the engine room. The boiler doors were open and the lean bodies of the firemen and stokers stood out in silhouette against the glowing white and orange banks of coal. On the floor plates were piled steep hillocks of coal into which the firemen drove their shovels with a grating sound, flinging more and more coal into the insatiable fire, all to raise the beast steam from the waters, to keep it moving.

  The coal bunkers to starboard and larboard were no more than half full, which was bad, since they were the only real protection the boilers had from rifled shells that could pierce the riverboat’s side as if it was wet paper. Taylor thought about the bargeful of coal that Sullivan had stolen in Vicksburg. They had left it tied to the dock at Fort Pillow. There had been no time to load it into the bunkers. All that potential protection, left behind.

  Cottonclad… Taylor had laughed the first time he heard the term. Cottonclad…armor the ship with the softest, most flammable substance found in nature. Goddamned stupid peckerwoods. But he wasn’t laughing anymore. Iron in any form was not to be had in the Confederacy, for all practical purposes, while the Yankees spit out so much of it they might be paving the roads with gunboat plating, for all he knew.

  But we got cotton down here, oh boy, yes, do we have cotton….

  Taylor’s eyes moved to the top of the boilers. The lever arms of the safety valves were lashed down with white cotton rope that stood out in the dim light, and he wondered if Guthrie had done that on purpose, so it would be obvious to everyone that he had lashed the valves, and done so without permission from the wheelhouse. If he had, it was a wasted effort, because Sullivan would not mind if the valves were lashed now. He would probably insist on it. Safety was not much of an issue that morning.

  Taylor was at the throttle, one hand on the reversing lever. It was Guthrie’s station, of course, but Taylor had offered to take it, to free the engineer up so that he could run around like a windup toy, issuing unnecessary orders and generally annoying the engine room. Watching him as he flew from boilers to crankshaft to crossheads and back, Taylor realized that Guthrie was, at the heart of it, a smaller, shriller, quicker Mississippi Mike Sullivan. Mississippi Mike’s alabaster pard.

  The sweat was slick under Taylor’s hand. He let go of the throttle, wiped his hand on his shirt. His appetite had been good in the early morning. He’d eaten a big breakfast—eggs, grits with syrup, soft tack, bacon—but now it sat like a rock in his stomach. He was afraid he might puke.

  The wheelhouse bells rang again, full speed, the third time that horse’s ass peckerwood Sullivan had rung for full speed. Taylor might have cursed out loud, but Guthrie beat him to it, cursing enough for both of them, enough for every engineer in the River Defense Fleet, for every engineer who had ever suffered the unforgivable torment of an idiot with his hand on the bell rope.

  The General Page was going as fast as she was going to go upstream. Her steam pressure gauges were toying with fifteen pounds’ pressure. A lantern hung near the front of the boilers seemed to cast its light directly on the gauges, as if it was making a special point of letting Taylor know how close to the edge they were running things.

  His breath was coming shallow and his head was feeling light. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply and he seemed to pull the anger further into him with every breath.

  He heard the muffled bang of a heavy gun. Not the Page’s gun, a gun from another ship. The Yankees, no doubt. He wondered if they were up with the enemy, how many Yankees there were.

  In all his seagoing career he had never been much interested in what went on above the main deck. All the nonsensical blather of captains and pilots about snags and chutes and shifting bars was of no interest to him. His world was valves and crossheads and connecting rods, and that was how he preferred it.

  That had changed with his first fight. When they started shooting at Yankees, suddenly his interest in what took place topsides had taken an exponential leap. He had even found himself laying the bow gun in the fight at Hampton Roads. But for all that, it was always a relief to get back to the confines of his engine room, to stand amid the perfect organization and pure logic of the machine.

  Another gun went off, and immediately another, and a shell ripped through the superstructure above, blowing a hole through the fidley, missing the walking beam’s A-frame by a few feet, no more.

  “Shit!” Taylor shouted the word so loud that a few heads turned. “Son of a bitch…
” he said, lower. He could feel his heart in his chest, banging away at twenty times the speed of the engine behind him. His breath was coming shallowly again.

  Guthrie was hovering in front of him, grinning. “That there is what you call a Yankee forced air ventilator! Forced it right through the goddamn fidley! Sum bitch, them kangaroos nearly took out the walking beam! Reason a walking beam got no place on a fighting ship. You all right, Taylor?”

  Taylor gulped air. “Yeah, yeah, I’m all right.”

  “Really? You look like a pile of horseshit.”

  Another shell hit, farther forward, boiler deck level, Taylor guessed. Some low grunting noise escaped his lips. Guthrie turned back to him.

  “Think I ate something for breakfast didn’t agree with me.”

  “Didn’t agree with you? Hell, it looks like it hated your goddamned immortal soul!”

  “Look, Guthrie,” Taylor was talking without thinking, “I got to get topside, get some air, or I swear I’ll puke all over the fuckin floor plates.”

  “Yeah, yeah, go on,” Guthrie said, taking Taylor’s place at the throttles as Taylor stood awkwardly, bent partway over. There was a note in Guthrie’s voice that Taylor did not like, as if, in Guthrie’s opinion, going on deck was not much different from going over to the Yankees. Taylor knew Guthrie felt that way because he would have felt the same.

  He tucked that worry away, knew it would bother him later, but he did not care at the moment. Now that he had stood, had made his excuse, he could think of nothing but getting out of that engine room, away from the boilers and the gauges and the damned white rope on the safety valves.

  He climbed up the ladder, moving faster with every rung, threw open the door to the fidley, and stepped out onto the main deck, starboard side. He put two hands on the rail, looked out over the river. The Van Dorn was blowing holes in the side of a mortar boat tied to the bank, while the mortar boat was lobbing shells over the top of the Van Dorn to drop on the River Defense boats farther out. But Taylor did not really care.

  He had thought, going up the ladder, that his first act on deck would be to puke over the side, and he hoped someone would see him, since that would lend credence to the idea that he had got hold of a bad side of bacon. But once he stepped through the door, into the relative fresh and cool air, he felt suddenly renewed, newborn, strong and able. His stomach pains eased, he felt the light breeze cool the sweat on his forehead and his drenched shirt. He breathed deeply for the first time in an hour.

  He was angry now. His body and his mind were betraying him, his unmanageable fear stripping him of the very thing that he was. The engine room was where he should be, but his traitorous self had driven him out. There was nothing more unforgivable than betrayal. What did you do when you caught yourself betraying yourself?

  Great God almighty, I’m scared, he thought. There, the word was out at last, free floating in his mind, at least, and probably in Guthrie’s mind too, and that son of a bitch Bowater’s. Bowater, he was certain, would never comprehend such a thing as what Taylor was suffering. You had to be a human being with human feeling to get yourself in the position Taylor was in, and he doubted Bowater qualified on either count. Ice cold son of a bitch…

  Taylor was getting more angry, now that he was no longer standing in the presence of the beast, the beast that had seared the skin clean off of James Burgess and left him a horrible writing thing on the deck plates, screaming for death to take him, and Hieronymus Taylor appointed the angel of mercy with a double-barreled shotgun.

  In the engine room he did not feel anger, because the other thing was so powerful, but up on the main deck, in the sunshine, it was only anger. He made his way forward, stepped around the forward end of the deckhouse just as the Page’s bow gun was going off. He watched the gun slam back, the river and the shore and the Yankees lost behind the gray cloud of smoke from the muzzle.

  The General Page steamed straight into the cloud, the smoke whipped aft and engulfed Taylor, and then the ship broke out into the blue sky and Taylor could see the lay of things.

  The Yankees were coming downriver, casting off from the bank, steaming to the aid of the mortar boat. The closest of the ironclad gunboats was just a few hundred yards upriver, down-bound, stern first, and firing like mad, guns going off from her broadside and stern gun ports. She was directly ahead, and Sullivan seemed to be making to ram her. Taylor pressed his lips together. He wanted Sullivan to slam the ship into the bastard, really hit her good.

  He heard gunfire to larboard, and in the same instant the side of the deckhouse seemed to explode, a shower of splinters and shattered wood blown out over the water. Taylor shielded his face with his arm as sundry bits of debris bounced off of him. He raced forward, looked off the larboard side. There was a Yankee gunboat, one hundred feet off; he had not even known it. She was lashing out in her death throes. Taylor could see she was listing, limping for shallow water, the crew spilling out of the casement onto the hurricane deck as their vessel sank under them.

  “Die, you son of a whore!” Taylor shouted at the gunboat. He ran forward to the bow where the gun crew were running the big gun out again. Buford Tarbox was captain of the gun, the crew made up of the riverboat men, but also the former Yazoo Rivers, his shipmates, joining in with the General Pages. Ruffin Tanner was handling the swab, and he and Taylor nodded their greeting. Tanner’s face was smeared black with powder smoke and his shirt was torn, a bloody gash visible though the rent cloth, but not enough to slow him down, apparently.

  They were closing fast with the ironclad, but not as fast as the Van Dorn, which had turned its attention from the mortar boat to the new Yankee threat coming downriver. The Van Dorn was crossing over from the eastern shore, crossing the Page’s bow, making a ramming run at the iron gunboat.

  “Get clear, you bastard!” Taylor shouted. “Stand off!” He waved his arm frantically, trying to get the Van Dorn to clear the way for them. He felt a need like great hunger to have the Page drive her ram into the Yankee. He wanted to get right up with the blue-belly sons of bitches and start killing them, kill them as fast as he could.

  “Get clear, for the love of God!”

  There was no chance he could be heard aboard the Van Dorn, and no chance he would be obeyed if he were. He knew it. He could not keep from yelling. Some of the gun crew took up the shouting, yelling with him, waving their arms. Some shook their heads at the display.

  “Run out!” Tarbox yelled. In place of his slouch hat he now wore a gray kepi he had picked up somewhere.

  The men at the gun tackles leaned into the pull, the awkward gun carriage rolled forward. The ironclad was filling the air with shot, shells screaming past. Taylor could feel the concussion of her cannon in the air and in the Page’s deck. He saw a respectable section of the Van Dorn’s deckhouse torn clean away, but she did not pause in her headlong rush to be the first to impale the Yankee.

  “Stand clear!” Tarbox yanked the lanyard. The gun went off with a terrific blast, hurling inboard, blanketing everything in the cloud of smoke. Taylor felt the deck jerk under him, shudder as if they had hit a rock. It felt good, revitalizing. He relished the nearness of death, Yankee death, his death perhaps, a clean death from a bullet. He was not afraid.

  The Page plowed through her own gun smoke and the scene opened up again, though now the haze hung so thick it was like steaming in a light fog. Visibility was perhaps two hundred yards through the smoke.

  The Yankee was still under their bow, the distance closing fast, but now the Van Dorn was on her, churning up the last fifty feet. The Yankee gunboat turned hard, swinging her bow away from the ram, and an instant later the Van Dorn struck. Taylor could see the ironclad roll and twist with the impact, he saw the Van Dorn shudder and pause as her submerged iron ram pierced the wooden hull of the ironclad and kept on going. But the Confederates had struck at an angle, only a glancing blow, and not the bone-crunching right-angle impact they had hoped for.

  The Van Dorn continued on uprive
r, past the ironclad she had just struck, right into the withering fire from the Yankees farther upstream, but Taylor had no more interest in her. The way was open now for them to hit, a clear stretch of water between the General Page and the Yankee gunboat.

  Taylor stepped forward, the madness on him like he had never felt before. He looked up at the wheelhouse. Bowater was there, hand on the rail in his yachting holiday manner. Sullivan was bouncing back and forth.

  “Ram that bastard!” Taylor shouted, pointing at the ironclad. “Run that son of a bitch down!”

  Bowater looked down at him, an odd expression on his face—part surprise, perhaps, part concern. Odd. Sullivan shouted, “What do ya think I’m gonna do, you stupid bastard?”

  Taylor turned and faced forward again. He had no time for Sullivan and his idiocy.

  The ironclad was hammering them good, tearing apart the deckhouse above Taylor’s head. The gun crew were ducking now, behind the bulwark of pine boards and compressed cotton that made a shield on the otherwise unprotected bow. Taylor wanted to tell them to get up, stand like men, load the gun, but he kept his mouth shut, kept his own council.

  He glanced over at the Van Dorn. She appeared to be aground and was taking a beating from the ironclad and the others upriver and coming down. Taylor had a sudden sick fear that Sullivan would give up, turn and run, decide they were too outnumbered. He looked up at the wheelhouse again, but Sullivan was standing like a brick wall now, hands on the rail, ready for impact.

  The ironclad was fifty feet ahead, no more. Black smoke was rolling from the Page’s chimneys. Guthrie was really pouring it on. Taylor could see the steam gauges in his mind and the thought made him stop, like remembering something terrible that you had managed to momentarily forget.

  Twenty feet, ten feet, Taylor could see faces in the Yankee’s gun ports, bare-chested men huddled in the shadows around the barrels of the big guns. A jet of smoke, the roar of a gun, and instantly Taylor was knocked sideways. For an instant he was certain he was a dead man and he was not sure how he felt about it.