Thieves of Mercy Page 25

  “Oh, those bastards,” he said. The secesh must have torched the place before abandoning it. “Oh, those vandalous bastards.”

  He wondered if there was anything he might do to save the yard. Judging from the smoke, the fire was pretty well established and covered a lot of ground. But perhaps there was something he might do, something of importance he might save. If they found him there, when they came, heroically fighting the flames to save something vital for the Union, then perhaps there would not be so many awkward questions, even if he did not have the secesh spy in his custody.

  He started to walk and then he started to run. Soon he could see the low brick wall that surrounded the shipyard, a place he knew well from its time as a United States Navy facility. He was nearly to the gate when it occurred to him that perhaps it was not yet abandoned, that he might be running right into a trap.

  He slowed to a walk, approached the gate carefully. He stopped at the edge of the wall, peered around it. The gate was hanging open, no guards. He stepped around the corner of the wall. No one inside the yard that he could see. It looked entirely abandoned, the only movement the waving and leaping of the fires that were still consuming the buildings scattered around the yard.

  Newcomb stepped through the gate, moving cautiously, looking around for secesh, and for some opportunity, something he might do.

  He was too late, as far as he could see. Half the buildings had collapsed into charred rubble, and those that had not were too far gone to be saved. Not that he alone could have done anything in any event.

  He walked on. Through the smoke he could catch glimpses of the river, and that made him think of the dry dock. When the navy had abandoned the shipyard the year before they had mined the dock and tried to blow it to kingdom come. If they had succeeded, then the Rebs would never have been able to bring that Frankenstein’s monster Merrimack back to life. Newcomb wondered if perhaps the Rebs had also mined the dry dock, to deny it to the Union.

  He began to run, despite the agony in his head from each jarring footfall. If he could prevent the dry dock from being destroyed he would be a hero for certain. As he raced through the smoke he decided that even if the dock was not mined, he would try to round up barrels of powder and mine it himself, just so he could be discovered in the act of saving it.

  He broke through the curtain of black smoke, out into the open place where the cobbled dockyard ran down to the river, with the dry dock just ahead. He hurried on, hoping against hope that the secesh had filled the thing with gunpowder.

  He was near the edge of the dry dock when he saw a red bag of some sort lying on the ground. A reticule. He knelt beside it, reached out a hand and lifted it. It was heavy. He looked inside. Half covered by a handkerchief he could see the pepperbox pistol.

  Newcomb looked up, looked around. He was the only human being in the dockyard, that he could see. On a bollard nearby he could see dock fasts for a ship’s boat trailing over the edge of the sea-wall. He squinted upriver. He forgot entirely about the dry dock.

  TWENTY-ONE

  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

  Samuel Bowater walked stiffly uphill to the hospital. He was sore in several places from the beating he had taken at the Tilton Theater, the most violent theatergoing experience of his life.

  In performances past, when the final curtain fell on The Tragedy of Hamlet, it had been the stage that was littered with bodies, while the audience remained largely intact. But that wasn’t how it played out in Memphis.

  After the police managed to bring the brawling to a stop, and the only ones left in the theater were those who had not tried to run, or could not, Bowater had looked out over a scene much like the aftermath of battle. Men were sprawled on the floor or draped over seats or leaning against walls nursing wounds.

  Mississippi Mike Sullivan had a cut lip and a laceration over his eye that had smeared his face with blood and made his grin look even more maniacal. Bowater found Taylor propped up against the stage. He was sweating, barely conscious. His frock coat was torn and his hands were bloody, but the splint on his leg seemed to have held. His crutch was broken in two, and he still clutched the short end in his hand.

  The police had tried to arrest Bowater and Sullivan and Taylor, but Bowater would have none of it. Instead, he ordered the police officers to fetch a litter and take Taylor to a hospital. And because Bowater was a Confederate officer, and because he was so well practiced at issuing orders in a voice that did not admit of argument, and because he approached the situation with an entirely unfeigned attitude of moral, social, and military superiority, the police officers obeyed. They called him “sir.” They did not mention arresting him a second time.

  Once Bowater had Taylor secured in the hospital with another healthy dose of laudanum in his stomach, he staggered back to his hotel, stumbled into his room. He picked up the bottle of merlot that his father had sent, pulled the cork, and slugged it right out of the bottle. He drained it, and did not even care that he had degenerated to the point where he could do such a thing. To complete his descent into barbarism, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, then shuffled out of his frock coat and let it fall to the floor.

  The next morning, aching, sore, he crawled out of bed. He did not bother going to the shipyard. He could not endure it. Instead he went to check on Taylor. It was not at all unheard of that someone should die from a broken bone, especially someone who had behaved as stupidly as Taylor. He wondered, as he humped his weary body uphill, what he would find.

  He found the chief engineer asleep and looking bad, damned bad. His face had a grayish pallor, his eyes had dark circles around them. There was a sheen of perspiration on his skin. Bowater did not wake him, but sought out his doctor to get the prognosis.

  The doctor frowned and shrugged his shoulders. “Fifty-fifty chance that the fever will break, and there’s no mortification. That’s if he stays put. He wanders off again and starts brawling, he’s a dead man for certain.”

  Bowater returned to the engineer’s bed, and now Taylor was stirring. He looked up at Bowater through half-closed lids and managed a weak smile. “Cap’n…you gettin to be quite a hand at brawlin…make a river rat outta you….”

  “My highest ambition.”

  They remained silent for a moment. Taylor closed his eyes and Bowater thought he was asleep again, but a moment later Taylor said, “I know that performance weren’t worth horseshit, but why’d Sullivan git s’all-fired mad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Another long silence, and then Taylor said, “Well, it made fer a pleasant evenin, anyhow.”

  Bowater did not respond, and soon Taylor was breathing deeply and rhythmically, so Bowater walked silently away. He paused just inside the front door, stared out through the heavy glass, tried to make up his mind what to do.

  Duty called him to the shipyard, but only because that was where his men and ship were. There was no work for him to do, not while the men were laboring under Shirley’s frantic oversight. And for all their hard work, neither he nor Shirley nor any of the men really believed they would get the ship finished. But of course they could not say that, and they could not give up trying. He found the whole thing so futile and depressing, he did not think he could drag himself down to the yard.

  Coming up the walkway he saw Mississippi Mike Sullivan, stepping quickly, his lips pursed so Bowater guessed he was whistling, though he could not hear. Sullivan held something shaped very much like a whiskey jug in a crocker sack, a weak attempt at discretion. As usual, Sullivan did not look much worse for the beating he’d taken the night before. His lip was swollen with a nasty cut, and the gash over his eye was now a jagged line of dried blood, but beyond that he seemed quite robust.

  That clay-eating peckerwood, Bowater thought.
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br />   Sullivan did not see Bowater there as he burst through the door and strode across the tiled floor, and Bowater considered letting him go. He was never enthusiastic for Sullivan’s company, even less so at that moment, with the blue devils tormenting him. But neither did he care to allow Sullivan to continue his recruitment efforts.

  “Sullivan!” he called out, and Mississippi Mike whirled, paused, stammered, a guilty stammer.

  “Damn, Brother Bowater! How the hell are you?”

  “Fine, fine. What have you there?”

  “Oh, this?” Sullivan looked at the burlap-wrapped jug as if he were surprised to see it. “Medicine, Cap’n, medicine for our beat-up engineer.”

  “My engineer, Sullivan. Not ‘our’ engineer.”

  “Did I say ‘our’? Well, of course, the man’s like a brother to me, always was. Known each other better’n ten years now.”

  “In any event, Chief Taylor is sound asleep and he needs to stay that way. The doctor said something about having to keep him from drinking himself to death.”

  “Doctor, hell…This here’s the finest Tennessee corn red-eye, aged in tin buckets fer the time it takes to get her from the still to the jug. Ain’t nothin sets a man up better.”

  “An absolute panacea, I’m sure. Now let’s get out of here before the contents of that jug explodes and kills us all.” Bowater half led, half pushed Mississippi Mike out the door and down the path.

  “It’s a fortunate thing, Cap’n, I ran into you,” Sullivan said. “I was gonna hunt you down, after I gave old Taylor the cure. I’m headin upriver on a little scoutin expedition, reckoned you might want to come along.”

  “I think not.”

  “Aw, hell, Cap’n, what better thing you got to do? Sit on your ass an watch yer men work? You ain’t no shipwright. Ol’ Shirley’s got them at it, and he’ll keep ’em at it.”

  “Still, I cannot leave my command.”

  “Look here, Cap’n. Whole reason you’re workin so damn hard is to get your ship ready to fight them Yankees. Am I right? You know you’re gonna have to fight ’em. So what’s a better way to spend yer time betwixt now and then, watchin a bunch of peckerwoods plank a boat up, or steamin upriver and seein what the enemy’s fixin to do?”

  Bowater frowned. Damn Sullivan and his damned backwood, white-trash logic. There was an ulterior motive here, Bowater was certain of it. Sullivan had all but finished his draft of Mississippi Mike, Melancholy Prince of the River. Bowater suspected that Sullivan wanted to trap him on board the General Page for the hundred miles between Memphis and Fort Pillow so that they could put the finishing touches on the book.

  “Very well,” Bowater said, sighing as he spoke. Sullivan was not wrong, it would be a great help to get a sense of the enemy’s force and disposition, and it was true that there was little he could do in Memphis. He had already come to that conclusion.

  He could put up with Sullivan, he could put up with the damned penny dreadful, if it would get him closer to the enemy and allow him to feel, just a bit, that he was actually doing something of worth.

  Wendy and Molly Atkins sat on the boat’s thwarts and pulled oar for as long as they were physically able. They worked the long looms fore and aft until their muscles burned with the effort, until their palms were slick with blood from hands rubbed raw, until their throats were parched. It was a big boat and would have been a handful for two experienced seamen to row. For the women, unused to such labor and unfamiliar with the art of rowing, it was torment.

  It took ten minutes just to establish a rhythm, so that they were able to pull together and make the boat move forward, and not jerk side to side as first one, then the other, pulled her oar. They had managed to leave the Gosport Naval Shipyard astern, but just barely. They could still see it.

  An hour of rowing, and then for the eighth time Wendy crabbed her oar—failed to raise it high enough on the forward sweep, so the blade caught the water and was pinned back against the boat—and she could do no more. She slumped forward on the handle of the oar, buried her head in her arms, let her aching hands dangle. “Forgive me, Aunt, but I must rest,” she muttered, eyes closed, face toward the bottom of the boat.

  Molly said nothing. After a moment Wendy looked up. Molly was staring south, toward the navy yard, but now her face showed something more than just apathy and despondence. There was something else there. A spark. And if she was still not the Molly Atkins of yesterday, neither was she the nearly dead thing that Wendy had pulled from the house.

  Molly shifted her eyes from the shipyard and met Wendy’s. “I think I saw an anchor,” she said. She pulled her oar in, laid it on the thwarts, and climbed forward. The tide was carrying them upriver again, sweeping them back over the distance they had so laboriously covered.

  Wendy half turned to see what Molly was doing. Her aunt had found an anchor, like a small grappling hook, up in the bow. She threw it over, let the thin anchor line run through her hands. She took a turn around a cleat, the line came taut, and the boat snubbed to a stop.

  “There,” Molly said. “Now we can pause to think, without having all our labor undone by the tide.” The punishing work at the oars seemed to have done much to restore her.

  The wind was steady from the west. Wendy turned her face into it, let the cool breeze sweep over her flushed skin. “The tide has to turn sometime,” she suggested.

  “Humph,” Molly said. “Yes, well, it had better hurry the hell up. The Yankees’ll add murder to our list of crimes, if they catch us.”

  “They cannot catch us. We must get clear of here.”

  They were quiet for a moment, then Molly said, “Goddamn that John Tucker and his goddamned promises! Where the hell was he? How could he leave us?”

  Wendy let the question pass. She was looking at a wooden bucket stuck under the stern sheets, a thing she had not noticed before. It had a checked cloth over it that looked very much like a napkin. With some effort she pulled her oar in and laid it on the thwarts, then stood awkwardly, her legs protesting after being cramped in a sitting position and subjected to the effort of rowing.

  The heavy boat was stable enough for her to stand with confidence. She made her way aft, picked up the bucket, and looked inside. She saw four fresh ship’s biscuits, a chunk of ham, two apples, a knife, and a folded paper. She unfolded the paper, read the note.

  “Molly, listen to this!” she said, then read out loud.

  Dear Molly,

  I write this note in haste. We have been ordered to sail immediately. The yard is already burning, and the fires spreading fast. Lt. Batchelor has not returned and I have made every effort to await your return, but I can delay no longer. I will leave you this boat with food and water aboard. You will not be able to row it, I do not think, but the sailing rig is complete and you are a resourceful woman. We are ordered up the James River, look for us there.

  Godspeed,

  Cpt. Jn. Tucker

  Molly looked down at the poles and folded canvas that lay across the thwarts. “Sailing rig,” she muttered. “Of course, that is what it is….”

  Wendy was too busy tearing off a chunk of bread and attacking the ham with the knife to look at the mast and sail. She stuffed her mouth full, struggling to chew. She recalled her manners, cut a more sensible piece for Molly, and handed it over.

  The two women, famished, sat on the thwarts and ate in silence, bobbing on the Elizabeth River. Upstream of them, the black columns of smoke from the burning yard rolled away to the east, partially obscuring the town of Norfolk off their starboard side. But overhead the skies were blue, the day warm, and the water just slightly ruffled by the wind. The weather seemed too pleasant for their world to be collapsing around them.

  They ate all there was to eat and found the water butt and drank and then Wendy stood. “Very well, let us get the mast stepped and the sail set.”

  Molly looked up at her as if she were speaking nonsense. “Stepped?”

  “That is what you call putting a mast in place.
”

  “Did you learn all this from your sailor boy?”

  Wendy flushed, waiting for some ribald comment to follow, but Molly said no more. “I have read stories of the sea since I was a girl,” Wendy said, “and have picked up a thing or two.”

  Her tone was more confident than she was. She had never actually sailed a boat herself, and had only been aboard small boats under sail three or four times. As she unfolded the canvas and looked with dismay at the tangle of ropes and the various varnished spars, she chastised herself for having reveled in the beauty and romance of the thing without paying strict attention to how it was done.

  “Well, the longest one must be the mast,” she said. She looked around. There was a hole through one of the thwarts and a block of wood with a matching hole in the bottom of the boat. “And this must be where it goes,” she added. “Here, Aunt, bear a hand.”

  The mast had been laid down in the proper orientation for stepping, which Wendy thought was fortunate until it occurred to her that it was probably put like that on purpose. They maneuvered the heel of the mast in place, and then hauling, straining, cursing, they lifted the pole, eighteen feet long, and worked the heel into the hole. At last the mast came straight up and then dropped in place with a thump that made the boat quiver underfoot.

  Wendy looked up with satisfaction. They had “stepped the mast,” a thing she had often read about and now had accomplished. But that was only part of the job. There were half a dozen or so lines coming down from the masthead and pooling at her feet. She pulled them apart, followed them up the pole with her eyes, trying to divine their purpose.

  “This one”—she gave it a little tug—“raises the sail. I forget what it is called. Here, hold this.” She handed the line to Molly. “These”—she untwisted the lines; they ran from the top of the mast, with a small block and tackle at the lower end—“are…” She was not certain.