Chapter 38

About 1,000 tons of iron plating is being manufactured by rolling mills in Atlanta, Ga., for an iron-plated frigate nearly completed at New Orleans.

– Stephen R. Mallory to President Jefferson Davis

They arrived back in Newport, weary, battered, wounded in mind and body. Bowater saw his men safe in barracks at the Gosport Naval Shipyard.

Ten-thirty at night, he had finished his reports, oral and written, told his tale to Forrest and the others, been dismissed.

He wandered out of the shipyard, too torn up to sleep, or even to remain in one place. He walked the streets. He knew where he would end up.

He approached the old house quietly. No lights burning. Behind it, within the tended yard, he could see the carriage house. A light shone in the window. Late, but not that late, and Samuel did not care much for convention at that moment.

He hopped the picket fence, landed soft on the grass, crossed to the carriage house. He rapped on the door, realized as he did that he might scare her to death, that she might not answer. But he heard soft footsteps across the floor, and the door opened.

Wendy was there, the light from a candle diffused through her long, dark hair. She was wearing a loose night dress, holding a book. Bowater saw a sudden flash of fear in her face, which softened to recognition, concern.

“Samuel…I thought it was my aunt. Dear God, what has happened to you?”

She opened the door wider, stepped aside, and he stepped in, looked around without seeing anything. “I have been in a fight, Wendy…” he said.

She put the book down, stepped up to him, wrapped her arms around him. For a long moment they embraced, and then Samuel pushed her gently back. “Do you have a canvas?” he asked. “Might I borrow some paints?”

Wendy nodded, stepped away. She picked up a small canvas, set it on the easel that stood in the corner, offered him her paint set, the one he knew so well.

He shed his frock coat and hat, let them fall on the floor, rolled up his sleeves. He stared at the canvas, let the picture form on the white surface, let his mind create it so that his hands had only to fill in the places where paint had to go. He took up a pencil, slashed a few lines across the surface, general outlines. He dabbed paint on the palette, began to work with a wide brush.

Wendy pulled up a stool and sat beside him and a little back and watched silently as the picture emerged. Samuel was hardly aware of the time passing, minutes, then hours, as the foredeck of the Cape Fear grew out of the white field before him, the gray skies and brown water, the sharp points of muzzle flash. And on one edge, dimly seen, Lieutenant Harwell’s face in the instant of death.

Samuel felt himself a part of the scene on the canvas as much as he had been a part of the real fight, he felt like a participant in the picture, painting from within the scene. He felt the tears roll down his cheeks as he rendered not the horror of the thing, but the suggestion of that horror, which was more frightening by half.

Three hours, four hours he worked, letting it all come out through his brush. Wendy sat on a small fainting couch, fell asleep with her head on her arm, and Bowater painted on.

At last he stepped back, set the brush down. Wendy came awake, as if she sensed this was the moment. She stood, joined him.

“That’s it…” she whispered, as if she knew what it was he was trying to render. “That is it exactly.”

Bowater looked long and hard at the canvas, and for the first time he felt a mesh, a perfect fit, between what he saw in his head and what he saw created in paint.

He turned away from the painting, hoped he had managed to get what was in his head out and plant it permanently on canvas. He ran his hands around Wendy’s waist, pulled her near. He could feel her smooth skin through the thin material of her night dress. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulled his head down to hers, and kissed him, and he kissed her back, with a desperate urgency.

Wendy cocked her head aside and Samuel ran his lips down her long neck, buried his face in her hair, kissed the soft place behind her ear. She pushed him away, took the top button of his shirt in her fingers, unbuttoned that, and the next and the next, and then eased the shirt over his head. She

ran her hands over his chest. They felt cool and small against his skin. He ran a finger down her cheek, down her neck, took up the end of the tie that held her night dress up, tugged it free.

The garment fell open and Wendy shrugged it off, let it fall to the floor.

The light of the three candles by which Bowater had been painting played over her white skin, the curves of her thighs and back and hips, and Bowater traced them with his hands. He stepped out of his shoes, let his trousers fall to the floor, led her over to the small bed in the corner.

He lay down with her, half on top, let the feel of her skin against his overwhelm him. She was beautiful, loving, warm. She smelled of violet water and soap. She smelled alive and good and like everything that the fight at Elizabeth City was not, and Samuel tried to envelop himself with her, to become a part of her and let her drive away everything else.

They made love, desperate and slow, consuming one another, and when it was over Samuel was spent in every way he could be, and he slept in a way he had thought he would never sleep again.

The weeks wound past. The Cape Fears lived at the Gosport Naval Shipyard and they waited. Bowater waited with them by day, raced to be with Wendy Atkins when his few duties were done.

They waited for orders. They waited for news from the Western Rivers.

They waited for the Yankees to come overland from Albemarle Sound and take the shipyard back. They waited to see if the CSS Virginia would roll over like a dead whale, jam in the dry dock, or sink.

February 13, 1862. Float test for the nearly complete ironclad. For no reason other than curiosity, Samuel Bowater and Hieronymus Taylor stood near the edge of the dry dock and watched the water creeping up, lapping over the twenty-two-foot-deep hull of the former United States steam frigate Merrimack, now the Confederate States ironclad Virginia.

Bowater stared down into the water swirling into the dry dock. He recalled the night he was down there, looking for the bitter end of a burning fuse, the cold water knocking him around. With the Cape Fear they had assisted in getting the old wreck up and into the dry dock, had witnessed nearly every inch of her transformation from burned-out hulk to modern war machine.

He ran his eyes over her ugly, boxy shape. Merrimack had been no sleek clipper ship, but still she had had some elegance to her. There was nothing

lovely about the ironclad. She was all function. But that was all right with Bowater, because he saw no loveliness in war, and he no longer felt that aesthetics had a place aboard the engines of war.

The water came up and up and the shoring dropped away and finally the Virginia floated free. Around the dry dock there was a shared sense of tension, like the shared sense of fear prior to combat. No one cheered, no one spoke loud. There was an undercurrent of muttering as several hundred navy men expressed several hundred opinions.

“Well, damn…” Taylor said, soft. “She didn’t roll over after all. I’ll be damned…”

Three days after that, the dry dock was flooded again, the gates opened, and the Virginia was christened and floated out into the Elizabeth River.

It was the most solemn christening that Bowater had ever attended. No political speeches, no flags, banners, fireworks, music. It was a quiet, thoughtful christening by professional navy men, who understood the profundity of the moment, who understood the change in their world that the 275-foot iron-skinned monster represented.

They watched in silence as CSS Virginia moved slowly out into the stream, pulled by silent warps. It made Bowater wish that no one other than professional navy men ever be allowed to any christening.

Fitting out, provisioning, began in earnest, and an air of anticipation blew through the shipyard, lifting the gloom of winter and past defeats. And so it was with mixed emotions that Samuel Bowater reported to Commander Forrest for orders he guessed would take them away before the iron monster could sally forth.

He was right.

They were on a train the next morning: Bowater, Taylor, Tanner, Seth Williams, Eustis Babcock, Dick Merrow, Harry McNelly, all of the surviving members of the Cape Fear’s crew, transferred bodily to a new vessel, rattling along over a thousand miles of mediocre, terrible, and sometimes nonexistent railroad, to a riverport town that only a few of them had ever heard of.

Some of the men had friends, wives, girlfriends on the platform to see them off. Wendy arrived. She had two baskets with bread, cheese, cold roast beef, wine. She gave one to Hieronymus Taylor, who was more than a little surprised to see her there, and to Samuel Bowater, who was surprised she had brought a basket for the chief.

“Hieronymus and I met once, before that night at the concert,” she said.

“I will tell you the particulars someday. Oh, don’t look like that, it was nothing at all.”

They held one another. They kissed. Neither cried. Neither thought of the likelihood of that being their last embrace, on a windswept, sooty railroad platform in Norfolk, Virginia.

The former Cape Fears were five days in transition. They walked a total of forty-three miles between different rail lines, past torn-up track, washed-out track. They slept on train seats that shook as if the earth was opening up beneath them, and on the floors of train stations. They ate greasy food bought from vendors on platforms which Samuel Bowater paid for from his own pocket.

They arrived at last on the crowded docks of Memphis. It was February 24. From there they were two days on a stern-wheeler, running south, a considerably more comfortable means of travel.

They docked at Vicksburg in the shadow of the high hills, the Gibraltar of the West. They boarded a smaller steamer, made their way northeast, up the Yazoo River. They steamed into Yazoo City. They looked for an ironclad. They did not see one.

The steamer nosed into the dock, the brow was lowered, the men disembarked. Samuel Bowater looked around. Yazoo City was a moderatesized town, neat roads, brick buildings that suggested that money flowed through the place.

The wind was out of the north and cold, colder than he would have expected for central Mississippi. He wondered if that was typical. He had no idea what he would do next.

He saw the captain of the steamer, busy in the wheelhouse. “Y’all wait here,” he said to the men, climbed back up to the wheelhouse. “Captain?”

he said through the open door.

The steamer captain looked up. “Yes, Lieutenant?” Bowater was wearing his best uniform frock coat, in anticipation of coming aboard his next command.

“My men and I have taken passage here to report aboard the ironclad Yazoo River. Do you know where she is tied up?”

“Ironclad?” The captain looked confused. And then he chuckled. “Oh, sure. The Yazoo River. That’s the boat old Robley Paine bought. You seen

her when we was steaming by the docks, downriver. Side-wheeler, painted black. That’s her.”

“You’re…sure?”

“Sure.”

“Ahh…but she is not an ironclad.”

“No,” the steamer captain agreed, “she surely ain’t.”

Bowater nodded. You will make contact with one Captain Robley Paine, a civilian, who has undertaken to build the ironclad Yazoo River at his own expense. You will engage Captain Paine as pilot of the Yazoo River. Orders, direct from Stephen Mallory, Secretary of the Navy.

“This Paine, he is a riverboat captain? A pilot?”

“He’s a planter, like all the gentlemen lives along the river here. He ain’t no pilot, don’t know a damned thing about boats, as far as I know.”

Bowater nodded. He felt sick.

Down from the wheelhouse, back over the brow to the hard-packed dirt landing where his men stood huddled, braced against the wind. “All right, men. Follow me,” Bowater said, led them south along the dirt road the captain had pointed out, the one that would lead to the work docks, the side-wheeler Yazoo River.

With each step Bowater’s heart sank deeper. The dilapidated machine shops, the boatyards whose buildings were in need of basic carpentry themselves, the tall grass shooting up around discarded engine parts, coils of rotten rope, rusted anchors, all made him depressed and angry.

They marched on, came at last to the dock to which the side-wheeler was tied, and now that he looked at it he saw that indeed she had a name board on her bow and the name board said Yazoo River. He had hoped, right up until that moment, that the captain had been mistaken, that the real, gleaming, powerful ironclad was somewhere upriver of them.

Bowater drew the men up at the bottom of the brow and no one said a thing. They hunched their shoulders against the wind and looked. They saw the peeling black paint. They saw the twisted rails and shot-up superstructure, battle damage unrepaired. They saw the bales of cotton piled up on the deck, forming a sort of barricade around the bow and stern where the vessel’s three antique guns were mounted.

After a minute of that, Bowater saw a face peer out of the wheelhouse window. The face disappeared, and then a tall, gaunt man in a long coat stepped out onto the hurricane deck, sized them up, disappeared again.

A moment later he stepped out of the deckhouse, having apparently come down an inside ladder. He stood at the top of the brow. He held a shotgun in his hands, a heavy revolver on his belt.

“Ain’t this fella heard of Southern hospitality?” Taylor wondered out loud.

“Who are you?” the gaunt man demanded.

“I am Lieutenant Samuel Bowater, Confederate States Navy. I have come to assume command of the ship Yazoo River.”

The man was silent for a moment, scrutinizing the cluster of sailors. He set the shotgun aside, stepped down the brow, stopped five feet away.

“I’m Robley Paine. Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, I do.”

Paine was a frightening sight, not at all what Bowater had envisioned.

Bowater had been thinking of a plump, jolly, well-dressed individual who was looking to play at sailors, a Southern version of a Henry Fielding squire. Paine was not that.

Thin in an unhealthy way, eyes sunk deep, peering out from dark circles, darting side to side. There was a nervous, agitated quality to him, and a deadness to his eyes that was unsettling. He had not shaved in some time.

Bowater had an instant dislike for the man, which made his anger at Paine’s deception that much greater.

“This is it?” Paine said at last. “This is all the men to crew the boat?”

“This is the boat?” Bowater asked, taking a step forward. “You represented to Secretary Mallory that she was an ironclad. What the hell is this?” It had been a long trip, and Bowater was tired. He was beginning to lose his reserve.

“She will be an ironclad. She is not yet. She is a cotton-clad.”

Taylor stepped up, which further irritated Bowater. “She is a what, sir?”

“Cotton-clad. She is not the only one on the river.”

“‘Cotton-clad’?” Taylor chuckled. “You mean to say that she is armored with the lightest, softest, most flammable material known to man? I’m not sure that would be my first choice. Iron, I would think…”

“The cotton is effective against small-arms fire.” Paine turned on Taylor like a snake striking. “We do not wait for everything to be perfection. We fight the Yankee with what we have. Men do. Cowards and weaklings hang back and complain.”

An ugly silence. Everyone waited for Taylor to respond, but Taylor just gave out a low whistle, made his eyes go wide, smiled, and wandered off, assessing the Yazoo River.

“Be that as it may,” Bowater said, “we were led to believe that we were manning an ironclad, and that you were a qualified pilot, and I am not pleased, sir, by what I see.” This was not going well at all.

“Nor am I, sir. I have sunk no small part of my fortune into this ship, I have driven her into combat already, and I intend to do so again. I gave her over to the navy because I wished to man her with men who would fight. I will not be happy to find officers and men of the Confederate States Navy who are backward in their willingness to do battle with the enemy.”

Bowater stiffened. Paine’s insinuations were coming very close to intolerable insult, and it was only the wild intensity with which Paine spoke-as if Paine was not responsible because he had no control over what came out of his mouth-that made Bowater hold his tongue.

Taylor came ambling back, and before Bowater could reply he said,

“This here’s the Star of the Delta, ain’t she?”

“Pardon?” Paine said, the word shot out like a bullet.

“This here riverboat, she’s the old Star of the Delta, ain’t she? Used to run N’Orleans to Natchez, regular.”

“I believe that is her former name,” Paine said.

Taylor shook his head, grinned, stuck an unlit cigar in his mouth. “This jest gets better an better.”

Bowater rounded on Paine, ready to give him the full broadside; Paine rounded on Bowater, ready for the same. From up the road came the clomping of hooves on the hard-packed dirt. The men on the landing, as one, turned, looked, happy for some diversion.

A young man on a sorrel mare rode up, reined to a stop. “Mornin, Mr.

Paine,” he said.

“Morning, Billy.”

Billy paused, as if he felt he should say more, but could think of nothing, and the moment became awkward. “Got a telegraph for ya.” Billy held out the note. Paine took it from him, unfolded it, read it in silence.

Billy rode off.

“‘To Robley Paine,’” Paine read aloud from the paper. “‘From Stationmaster, Jackson, Mississippi. Sir, have received shipment eight

hundred tons iron for you, stop. Please retrieve at earliest convenience, stop.’”

Paine looked up at Bowater, and there was a different look in his eye. In another man the look might have been triumph, but not in Paine. Paine seemed too far gone to appear triumphant over anything. “There is your ironclad, Lieutenant. It is on the siding in Jackson. Tomorrow we will go and fetch it.”

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