Thieves of Mercy Read online

  “Sir, do you speak French?” Wendy asked.

  “No.”

  “It’s just as well. My aunt is…upset. These few bags are all we have left.”

  “Why doesn’t your aunt speak Norwegian?”

  “She does, of course. French is the only language we have in common.”

  The Union officer nodded. “So what do you want?” He addressed the question to Lieutenant Batchelor.

  “Best as I can understand it, this lady’s husband is bound to Washington. I don’t know nothing about this Norvier. Lady keeps sayin the ship’s due here any day. Any event, she’s got no business in the Confederate States. My commanding officer, he told me to get her to the Yankee flagship. Reckoned an admiral would know where she belongs.”

  “You want me to take her?”

  “No, sir. I just need passage under flag of truce to get her to the Minnesota. Lieutenant, I swear I will give the keys to Richmond to the Yankee admiral who’ll take her off my hands.”

  The Union officer paused and stared at the women, clearly unsure of what to do. This entire act was supposed to be played out alongside the flagship, where there would be officers who could make decisions, where two little women would seem rather harmless against the great mass of men and ship.

  “Lieutenant, that cockleshell boat can’t be too comfortable. I reckon the gentlemanly thing to do is to take these ladies on board.”

  Wendy looked up. The man who had spoken was on the roof of the deckhouse, leaning on the rail. He had been watching the whole proceeding from up there. Wendy had not even noticed him.

  “Yes, Mr. President,” the lieutenant replied, crisp and quick.

  Wendy stared at the man, stared in shock at the lanky form, the long, horselike features, the part sad, part amused expression on the face of President Abraham Lincoln.

  EIGHT

  Hope ere long you will be able to test with success the efficiency of your boats, which are now the last hope of closing the river to the enemy’s gunboats.

  GENERAL G. T. BEAUREGARD TO GENERAL M. JEFF THOMPSON,

  RIVER DEFENSE FLEET

  Hieronymus Taylor found himself wandering about the decks of the General Page. He had some tender spots from the previous night’s brawl and he tried not to let them show in the way he moved. He was not bouncing back from the damage done the way he had in earlier years. The fight had not chased away the blue devils.

  He climbed up to the hurricane deck, watched the great walking beam go through its teeter-totter motion, driving the side wheels that pushed the ship north against the current.

  He climbed up on the platform built on the starboard wheel box, felt the paddle wheel vibrating below him. He leaned on the rail and looked out across the water. The town of Greenville was just going out of sight around a point of land. Taylor knew a girl once from Greenville. Ended up as a whore in New Orleans. He tried to picture her face but couldn’t.

  After a while he sighed and stood up straight. The town was lost from sight and the banks were a wild tangle of marsh and forest and swamp. They steamed past wide rafts floating downstream, barely controlled by the long sweeps rigged out astern. In the middle of the rafts, makeshift shelters where men squatted around fires, cooked breakfast, and made coffee. They waved and Taylor waved back.

  Tugs with barges pulling astern passed them as well, and paddle wheelers carrying Lord knows what. Two years before it would have been cotton, down-bound, and sundry merchandise coming up—foodstuffs and manufactures that could not be grown or produced on the plantations. But now? There were hardly any manufactured goods coming into the Confederacy through the coils of the Yankee anaconda, and King Cotton for export made it as far as New Orleans, and there it sat on the dock.

  No, Taylor corrected himself, not New Orleans. New Orleans was a Yankee-held town now.

  Taylor’s despair became, in his mind, a boiler, steam building inside. The idea of the Yankees at New Orleans made the steam gauge jump, the needle quiver up in the regions of trouble. A good fight was supposed to be a safety valve, blow the excess steam right out. It had failed. It seemed the valve was lashed tight.

  He climbed down from the wheel box, down to the main deck, drifted along the side of the deckhouse. From the outside, the deckhouse of a steamship looked to be a spacious affair, running almost the full length of the ship itself, but that was deceptive. The center third of the deckhouse was not a house at all, but a great open space above the engine room, called the “fidley.” The fidley extended from the floor plates of the engine room, which were just below the lowest, or main deck, up through the boiler deck, which was next deck above the main deck, and up to the hurricane deck, two decks above, where skylights provided light to the black gang and air to the engines and boilers.

  Taylor paused at the fidley door. The engine room was his domain, but now he felt some invisible force pushing him away, like trying to make opposite poles of a magnet touch.

  Ain’t my engine room, he thought. Engineers looked on their engine rooms the way women looked on their kitchens, or dogs on their yards, with a disdain for intruders who might interfere. The message was, “I’ll thank you to stay the hell out of here,” stated verbally or otherwise.

  Taylor opened the fidley door, stepped inside. Intruder, perhaps, but Spence would wonder why he was not hanging around, because that was the other thing engineers did on some other engineer’s ship, though they might hate it on their own.

  The fidley door opened onto a catwalk above the engine room and a ladder down. Directly in front of him, taking up most of the fidley, was the massive wooden A-frame that supported the walking beam. It rose from its mounting blocks in the bilges below right up through the hurricane deck overhead.

  For a moment Taylor stood still as the heat and the sounds washed over him—the dull roar of the fire in the boiler, the pssst, pssst of steam in the cylinder, the knocking of pipes, the creaking of the A-frame, the loud and profane voices of Mike Sullivan and Spence Guthrie as they screamed in each other’s faces.

  Oh, hell, Taylor thought. He turned for the door, but Sullivan’s voice caught him before he could escape.

  “Taylor! Taylor, you son of a bitch, come down here, talk some sense into this damn mule-headed…”

  There was no escape now. Taylor turned back, climbed down the ladder to the floor plates. Sullivan and Guthrie were near the workbench, standing close to one another. Sullivan had his hands on his hips, Guthrie had his arms folded. Sullivan was sweating profusely, sweat running down his face and staining his river driver shirt. He was a big, angry man, unused to engine room heat.

  “How can I help you gentlemen?” Taylor drawled. His eyes darted to the steam gauge on the boiler. Eleven pounds, well within specs. The safety valves were untied.

  “You can help me stuff this fat bastard back up the fidley,” Guthrie said.

  “Hieronymus, talk some sense into the man,” Sullivan said. “He’s got the damned safety valves tied down, which is fine when we really need it, but there ain’t no call all the time!”

  “Look at this!” Guthrie held up a fistful of old twine. “This son of a bitch comes down here on my watch below, cuts them away! Like he got a right to make decisions here!”

  Taylor had to agree with Sullivan. He was not as enthusiastic as he once had been about tying safety valves shut. On the other hand, it was an offense against nature for the captain to come down to the engine room and interfere, particularly when the chief was not there.

  He held his hands up, a gesture of surrender. “I ain’t got a dog in this here fight,” he said.

  “What would you do, was you engineer?” Guthrie asked. The question was part challenge, part accusation.

  “I would do as my heart commanded me,” Taylor said.

  “Well, Guthrie here gonna do as I command him,” Sullivan said with finality. “You keep them safety valves free unless I say otherwise, or by God you’ll be on the beach in Memphis.” For emphasis he poked Guthrie in the chest with a
sausage finger, then stormed off, leaving the engineer to hurl obscenities in his wake.

  “Son of a bitch, big fat bastard, coming down here telling me what to do. To hell with him, the lazy…No, sir, he can go to the devil…”

  Taylor was surprised. He would not have expected such good sense from anyone who called himself Mississippi Mike.

  As Guthrie ranted and cursed—his verbal storm was his own personal safety valve, fully functional—Taylor’s ears sorted out the various sounds of the engine and boiler rooms. He could not help it. He was not really even aware that he was doing it.

  “…ain’t nothin but a chicken, thinks his whole damn boat’s gonna blow up…”

  “You got a fire tube broken,” Taylor said.

  “Huh?”

  “I think you got a broken fire tube on the starboard boiler.” The fire tubes ran through the interior of the boilers, from one end to the other. The searing hot vapors of the coal fire in the firebox passed through the tubes and brought the water to a boil. Taylor could hear the irregular hissing and popping of spurting water on hot iron. When a tube was broken, water leaked from the boiler into the tube and into the firebox at one end, the smoke box at the other.

  “Oh, horseshit, broken…” Guthrie said, with momentum still on his tirade, but he paused, cocked an ear, shut his mouth for a moment. “Well…”

  With a scowl and a spit into the bilges he stepped over to the starboard boiler and threw open the door to the firebox. The coal was laid out in an even bed, glowing white hot, the heat shimmering and rising and hitting Guthrie and Taylor like a solid thing. No smoke. The shirtless, black-smudged fireman knew his business.

  Taylor peered over Guthrie’s shoulder at the black circles that were the ends of the fire tubes. Third row down, second tube inboard, he could see the water dancing and sizzling and the gray vapor rising off it as the steam condensed. He opened his mouth, shut it, waited. A second later, Guthrie said, “There’s the son of a bitch…three rows down, second in from the starboard side…”

  “Oh, yeah, sure enough.”

  Guthrie straightened. “Well, I guess we’ll have to plug the bas-tard. Not like we got any spare tubes. Maybe when we’re tryin to get up steam with one tube left, someone’ll think to get us some more.”

  Taylor nodded his understanding. He could see that four other tubes were already plugged. “I’ll get the other end,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “The plug at the forward end. I’ll get it.”

  “Why? You don’t even work on this bucket, and you better thank Jesus you don’t, son of a bitch rotten…”

  “I know. But I reckon I best earn my keep.”

  Guthrie shrugged. “Have it your way, pard.” They went over to the workbench. Taylor shed his frock coat, pulled on heavy leather gloves. They assembled wrenches, plugs, nuts. Taylor took a lantern, knowing the feeble light of the engine room would not extend to the far end of the boilers. “Let’s do it,” Taylor said.

  Guthrie stepped over to the after end of the boiler. “Daniels, English,” he called to two of the firemen, “git some fire hoses rigged an charged. English, you go an help Taylor, there.”

  Taylor went forward, skirting around the long, low iron tank, tons of iron of unknown integrity containing within it enough scalding water and steam to kill every man in the engine room—boiler explosions, the great terror of the steamship, to be feared like the wrath of God and defended against with a similar religious zeal. Taylor once had looked on the possibility of a boiler explosion the way most men looked upon sin—as something to worry about unless it was inconvenient. But no more.

  His feet crunched on bits of coal spilled from the bunkers up against the starboard side of the ship. He walked sideways, through the narrow space between boiler and bunker, leaning away from the hot iron. He could feel the sweat on his brow and hands and recognized that it was not the sweat made by engine room heat, even though it was one hundred degrees at least in that space. His hands would be trembling if he had not been gripping his tools hard.

  He skirted around a stanchion and the wrench slipped from his hand, clattered on the iron floor plate. Hell…He bent over, awkward in that narrow space, the burning metal of the boiler right beside him, picked the wrench up with slick fingers. He continued on, came out around the forward end of the boiler. In front of him there was only the black void of the coal bunker.

  He found a hook in an overhead beam and hung the lantern, then applied the wrench to the nuts that secured the access plate to the smoke box. He was aware of the quiver in his fingers. He could smell the sweat from under his shirt.

  He paused for a moment while English dragged the charged fire hose forward and opened it, letting the water gush into the bilge. While Taylor was actually plugging the tube, English would play the water over his hands. Otherwise the heat would be unbearable.

  Most…goddamn routine…fucking simple job… Plugging fire tubes. It was a common enough task. He could not begin to recall how often he had done it in the course of his career. But that was before he had seen the power of the beast steam let loose.

  He took the nuts off, dropped two, had to fumble around to find them, cursing.

  “You done, there?” Guthrie called from the other end of the boiler.

  “Hang on, hang on, got a froze nut,” Taylor shouted back. He was surprised by the anger in his voice. He pulled the plate free, opening up the smoke box and the end of the boiler, with its rows of tubes.

  Water hissed and spit, jetting from the broken tube, steam condensing into swirling gray clouds. Ah, shit… The boilers were tipped forward, ever so slightly. It might have been the way they were mounted, or the trim of the vessel, or any number of factors. But the majority of the water leaking into the broken tube was running down toward Taylor, dancing and flying in the heat and with the motion of the ship.

  Taylor felt the sharp insect bites of boiling water droplets lashing his face. The heat from the fire tubes was overwhelming. He took a step back, turned his head away. His breathing was becoming fast and shallow. He did not have to do this. It was not his engine room.

  But he knew he had to do it. Especially now, after his great show of casually volunteering for the job. And it was not a hard job, not a dangerous job. Routine. But here he was, standing in the jaws of the beast, approaching it, laying hands on it, and the hardest part was to resist conjuring up the image of what was left of the scalded James Burgess right before he shot him.

  “What the hell you doin up there?”

  “Hold your goddamned horses…I got it now!” Taylor shouted back. “All right, English, go on.”

  The fireman raised the stream of water until it was rushing over Taylor’s hands and hissing and popping against the boiler. Taylor tried to breathe deeply but the breath wouldn’t come. He stepped into the grip of the heat, blinking water from his eyes, trembling, flinching from the steam and the spattering boiler water.

  He heard something clang, as if someone had hit the boiler, and it made him jump. English jerked, and the stream of water from the fire hose went wide. Water jetted from the fire tube, gushing out the end, falling on hot metal plates, sizzling, steaming. Boiling water splashed over Taylor’s arms and chest, burned him right through his shirt. Steam whistled by his face. He felt his stomach convulse, he thought he might piss his pants.

  “Oh! Oh, son of a bitch! Git that goddamned water on here! Git it on here, you stupid bastard!” He was shrieking at English, shouting like a madman. The fire tube had cracked more, perhaps cracked clean through. Guthrie had the plug in on the other side—the added pressure might have done it, or the jostling by Guthrie’s wrench. Whatever. The smoke box was filled with jetting water, steam, vapor, and heat.

  “What’s wrong?” Guthrie shouted.

  “Tube’s…son of a bitch tube…is ruptured!” Taylor went in, blinking, squinting, face turned away, hands shaking, tears running down his cheeks. There was water gushing everywhere, coming from the fire tube,
from the stream English was directing at him. The heat and the smoke filled his eyes. He went in with the cone-shaped plug held out like a sword, lunging at the spurting tube. He heard himself make a low, whimpering sound but it seemed like it was someone else making the sound. He jammed the plug in the end of the tube. The water and the steam stopped.

  The heat from the fire tubes was overwhelming, a searing, clawing agony, even with the stream from the fire hose. Taylor knew he had only seconds to get the nut on before he would have to step back. And then the plug would fall out and the water and steam would come and he would have to do it all again.

  Don’t drop the nut, don’t drop the nut, don’t drop the nut…. Taylor held the plug with his left hand, the nut in his right. The water from the fire hose tried to jerk it from his grip. Squinting in the terrible heat, like being pressed against a griddle, he worked the nut on the threads, worked it around, waited for the threads to catch.

  Come on, come on, come on…. And then he felt the threads take, felt the satisfying action of nut and bolt working together. He cranked it down, hand tight, stepped back with a gasp of relief.

  For a minute, two minutes, he just stood there, hands on hips, gasping air, hot air, but not the burning air of the smoke box. At last he stepped forward, put the wrench on the nut, tightened it down. “All right,” he said to English, trying to sound as reasonable as he could, to compensate for his earlier hysteria. English directed the stream back into the bilge. Taylor put the access plate back on the smoke box, replaced the nuts. The heat fell off perceptibly.

  “There you are! Hell, I thought you’d fainted from the heat!” Guthrie started around the boiler toward Taylor.

  Taylor nodded, could not talk for a second. “That…was a son of a bitch,” he said. “Real spouter.”

  “All right. Well, it’s done. Thanks for the help.” There was a grudging sound to Guthrie’s thanks.

  “You’re welcome.” Taylor had a sudden and overwhelming need to get out of the engine room, to stand on the deck, let the cool breeze run over him. To get away from the beast. “I got to get some fresh air,” he said, following Guthrie back around the boiler.