Chapter 46

A few moments after the attack commenced, and the enemy succeeded in passing with foreseen ships…the battle of New Orleans, as against ships of war, was over.

– Report of Major General Lovell, C.S. Army,

Commanding Defenses of New Orleans

Robley Paine opened his eyes to brilliant light and heat, and he thought for one confused moment that he had fallen asleep in the summer sun, on the bank of the Yazoo River, at Paine Plantation.

That thought passed quick, washed away by a wave of pain in his leg, an ache that seemed to encompass his entire left side. He pushed himself off the hard surface on which he was lying, moved by instinct, compelled to get out of the way.

It came into focus-the gun deck of the Yazoo River. His ship. It was on fire.

He grabbed on to the wheel of one of the broadside guns, pulled himself to his feet as if climbing a steep cliff. He turned, leaned against the gun. He could no longer ignore the pain in his left side. He made himself look.

He was burned, all along his side, his frock coat and shirt, his trousers charred and in some places burned away, revealing ugly, cooked flesh, black and red and raw, through the holes. He sucked in his breath as the pain came again, worse, somehow, now that he had witnessed the damage.

He had been serving as gun captain, he recalled, of the second gun aft on the port side, in the place of a man who had been decapitated by a flying bit of metal. He remembered reaching down for a cartridge, and nothing else.

Robley turned his attention from his wounds to his ship. The whole forward bulkhead, the two guns pointing forward, and the forwardmost starboard broadside gun were all engulfed in flames. The fire seemed to fill the gundeck, blazing and spreading, lighting up that dark place with a brilliance it had never seen. The white paint was curling, bubbling, dripping from the sides. He could see the dark shapes of bodies, motionless, resting

in their crematorium. The casement was filling with smoke and the smell of burning paint and the sweet sickish smell of cooking flesh.

Robley looked around for an officer, a petty officer, someone to take charge. He found Quillin on the starboard side-his head and his shoulders, one arm, and a part of his torso. Where the rest of him was he did not know.

Ruffin Tanner was bleeding from his forehead but keeping his gun crews at their work, seemingly oblivious to the fire. Babcock, the boatswain, came running aft, carrying a bucket, leading a line of men carrying buckets, and they flung the water and sand at the fire, a useless gesture, as far as Robley Paine could see.

Midshipman Worley came racing down the deck, stopped, began to back away.

“Mr. Worley! Mr. Worley!” Robley Paine pushed himself off the gun, limped across the deck, grabbed the young man’s arm. Worley flinched, looked up at Paine, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open.

“Worley, is the captain alive?” Paine shouted. The midshipman shook his head, but from the look of unreasoning panic in his eyes, Paine could not tell if the gesture meant the captain was dead or that Worley thought it incomprehensible that someone should ask such a thing at such a time.

“Is the captain alive, damn you?” Paine shouted again, shook the midshipman, who offered no resistance.

“We’re played out…we must strike…” Worley managed at last.

“Strike? We’ll not strike.”

Worley seemed to come to his senses, or whatever senses were available to his terrified mind. He jerked his arm from Paine’s grip. “We must strike!”

he shouted.

Paine grabbed his arm again, leaned close. “Listen to me, Mr. Worley,”

he said, and spoke as gently as he could and still be heard. “We will fight, and we will die if we must, but we will not strike!”

Worley shook his head again, and Paine could see the boy thought him mad. He twisted free again, turned, and raced aft. Paine could see him in the light that the fire was throwing clear down the length of the deck. He could see him race past the pilothouse deck, even as Captain Bowater was coming down, could see him continue aft, and he had no doubt as to where the boy was headed.

“Damn!” he shouted, limped after him, each step a searing agony.

Captain Bowater raced past him, heading forward, did not even notice him,

but Paine did not care. Bowater had his job, he had another. He hobbled past the gun crews that worked their big guns as if at drill, oblivious to the flames, the shells pounding against the armor, the nuts whizzing across the casement, the dead and wounded mounting on the deck.

He came to the after end of the casement, where the flames at the forward end were making weird shadows on the overhead and the sides and the deck. The door that led to the fantail gaped open, and Robley Paine stepped through.

If he could have stepped from one planet to another, Paine doubted the change could have been more drastic than stepping through that casement door. The temperature was fifty degrees cooler in the night air. Instead of the tight, crowded deck, the muffled sounds of battle, the brilliant illumination of the burning casement, here it was dark, black, save for the blooms of orange that shone through the heavy smoke.

Here the noise of battle was not muffled by two feet of oak and iron.

Here the sound of the gunfire was thunderous and sharp, the kind of sound that was once the exclusive purview of angry gods. This was not the tight, insular world of belowdecks. Here big ships loomed out of the smoke and the night, great broadsides blazing away. Here a dozen Confederate vessels flung themselves at the big ship, firing away, enduring the disproportionate battering.

Clear aft, his outline black against the distant gunfire of the forts and the Union fleet, Worley struggled with the flag halyard. Had he been less panicked, Paine knew, he would have had the flag down and overboard already, and then how could the Yazoo River honorably continue to fight, when to all appearances she had surrendered? This could not happen. Paine hobbled on, drew the Starr from his holster.

Worley managed to get the halyard off the cleat, began to pull the flag down, when Paine came up with him, raised the pistol to shoulder height.

“Mr. Worley! Mr. Worley!” The midshipman turned, startled, frightened.

“Mr. Worley, raise that flag again, or by God I will shoot you like a dog!”

They stood for a moment, facing one another, and then Worley shook his head and continued to haul the flag down. And Paine would have shot him, would have put a bullet through his head and felt not the least twinge, but in that instant when Worley turned and looked at him, with the terror in his eyes, Paine saw in that instant his youngest, Jonathan, four years old, terrified of the thunder in a summer storm, curled on his lap in the study,

looking up at him, wide-eyed, yet trusting in the safety of his father’s embrace.

Paine took his finger from the trigger, flipped the gun around, took a step toward Worley, and hit him with the butt of the gun, a solid blow, not a lethal blow. Worley went down fast. Paine holstered his gun, hauled the flag up the ensign staff again.

Ping, ping, ping, a sound like hail hitting the casement. Paine turned. He had been looking upriver and north at the Union ships steaming line ahead past them, but this new sound was from the south, and downriver. Paine crossed to the starboard side. Another column of ships was coming up, a line of ships, stately and impregnable. That was what Tanner’s gunners were shooting at.

Ping, ping-they were minie balls, striking the iron plate. Then made little sparks like a train’s wheels on the tracks as they ricocheted and Robley knew it was time to get back in the casement. He looked at the midshipman at his feet, wondered if the boy was safer inboard or out.

Thud, thud, thud, the bullets began to hit the deck, kicking up little furrows in the wood, and the question was answered. Paine bent over, grabbed Worley under the shoulders, screamed with agony as he tried to lift and drag the motionless young man.

Come on, come on, come on… Paine ran the words over and over in his head as he pulled, inch by inch. A bullet clipped Worley’s foot and Worley rolled his head, moaned, but did not come to.

Paine lifted and pulled. He felt a bullet pluck at his frock coat, felt another graze his arm. He wondered if this was how it had been for his boys, at the end, the bullets teasing them, like a cat toying with a mouse.

And then a bullet hit, hit him right in the arm, right above the left elbow, shattering bone. He dropped Worley, howled in pain and in outrage.

Another bullet seared across his belly, he could feel the line it tore in his flesh. He jerked the Starr out of his holster, leveled it at the ship ranging up alongside, two hundred feet away.

“You bastards!” he shouted, fired the Starr into the night. The minie balls pinged and thudded around him, tore at his clothing. The hammer of the Starr came down on an empty chamber.

What now?

A minie ball hit him in the shoulder, sent him reeling back.

Shove Worley against the bulwark and get inside!

He took a step forward, like walking into a hailstorm. Another bullet hit him in the leg. He crumpled to one knee. A bullet tore into his stomach and he fell over, rolled on his back, looked up at the dull blanket of smoke overhead.

This is it… He had seen men enough with belly wounds in the Mexican War, knew it was over for him. If the Starr had had one round left he would have blown his brains out, but it did not, and Robley knew that God would not allow him so quick an end, not after all the suffering he had inflicted on others over the past year.

That was all right. He would take it, endure it manfully. It was a gift, really, a chance to repent what he had done, to beg the Lord’s forgiveness, and in the end he would see his Katherine, his boys…

The world seemed to explode around him, and at first he thought it was his wounds, but then he knew it was not. The Yankee ship was firing on them, firing its great guns, paying the Yazoo River back at last for whatever hurt Tanner had managed to inflict.

There was something else as well, some other sound, some other excitement. He turned his head. Another boat was coming alongside. Not a big ship, just a boat, like a tug or some such. Paine watched with a vague interest as it ranged up beside them, hit the Yazoo River with a thud that made the ironclad tremble. Someone came up over the side with a rope in his hand, and then another man and another. Yankees attacking? No, the Yankees did not seem willing to bother. Friends, then.

He closed his eyes against a wave of pain, listened to the sounds of men rushing around. He could barely hear, for the pounding of the blood in his head. He felt hands on him, on his face. He opened his eyes. Someone was kneeling over him, a dark shape, familiar somehow.

The big Yankee ship fired again, the light of the muzzle flash illuminating the face of the man looking down at him. Robley gasped, did not know what to think. Twenty years older, hurt, come from the grave, it was his son, Jonathan Paine. His son.

In the engine room: smoke, noise, heat, steam, an edge-of-disaster feel.

Full ahead with both engines, fires carefully tended, maximum achievable steam pressure in both boilers. There was no chance the safety valves would blow. Hieronymus Taylor had tied them off, considered them a nuisance in such circumstances.

The boiler-room temperature was 132 degrees. One of the coal heavers had already passed out, had been dragged into the engine room, splashed with water, allowed to lie there. No time to manhandle him up onto the gundeck.

The glass water gauge on the starboard boiler shattered, spewing boiler water, water right on the edge of steam, all over another of the coal passers.

He howled, plunged his arm in a bucket full of tepid water, but then manfully picked up his shovel again.

Burgess raced to the gauge, pulled on the chain that shut off the valves above and below it, whipped a screwdriver from his pocket. He danced around the piles of coal on the deck plates, twirling screws, as the coal passers fed the beast, the firemen pulled ashes from below the grate.

Chief Taylor stood by the reversing levers and throttles, looked around.

Chaos, controlled insanity. The whole thing pushed as hard and as far as it could be pushed. Under the hiss of steam, the roar of the fires, the clank of pistons and rods and shafts, sounded the leitmotif of war, the hollow, jarring concussion of shells striking the casement above, guns going off, the uncertainty of what was happening beyond those superheated confines, the possibility of a shell coming through the side and through the boilers, scalding them all, killing them instantly, if they were lucky.

Taylor did not like the looks of the starboard feed-water pump, the

“doctor.” He did not like the way the mounting bolts were working in the starboard engine, did not like the color of the rapeseed oil he lifted off the crankshaft. He was not pleased with the sound emanating from the shaft bearings. Four stay bolts were leaking on the starboard boiler, six to port.

There was a lot he did not like, a hundred things within his fiefdom that he feared might let go at any moment. But so far the gauge glass was the worst disaster they had endured.

He glanced up at the telegraph. It was pegged full ahead, had been for the past hour. But full ahead now was not what it had been an hour before.

The stack was shot full of holes and not drawing well, the grates were clogging with clinker from the poor-quality coal-no time to clean them now.

The fires were not as hot as they could be, steam pressure falling.

Taylor pulled a rag, wiped his forehead and eyes. How much longer until a major catastrophe? How long could they push this hard?

The gundeck hatch opened, and Taylor looked up. “Holy mother…” He could see flames leaping around the casement, could see the brilliant light

of a full-on fire raging in the tween decks. How long has that been burning?

What the hell else is going on up there?

Dick Merrow came scampering down the ladder. His face was blackened, holes charred in his clothing. “Chief, Chief, captain says we can’t charge the fire hoses! Whole casement’s going up!”

Taylor clamped on his cigar, and while Merrow danced around as if the floor plates were red-hot, waiting for an answer, Taylor traced in his mind the entire firefighting system, from auxiliary steam to the water pump to the intake, to the piping to the casement, to the hoses. “All right,” he said at last, “tell the old man he’ll have water as soon as humanly possible.”

Merrow nodded, got some relief from the words, raced up the ladder.

Bang, bang, shells hit the casement above, made Taylor stagger.

Damn… Whatever ship was hitting them now, it was much closer, or throwing heavier metal. The sound of the impact was deep and dull, a visceral sound. The Yazoo River staggered as if it had been hit with a fist, pushed sideways through the water. Taylor wondered if a shot toward the waterline would blow its way into the engine room, into the boiler room.

Probably.

Fire pump… He pulled himself back to the immediate threat. Problem had to be with the fire pump, or the steam line going there. He cursed under his breath. The pump was in the most awkward of positions, aft, behind the port engine, right up against the after bulkhead. He thought of sending Burgess to crawl into that filthy, dark place and fix it, but he could not do it.

Too lousy a job to delegate.

“Burgess!” Taylor shouted. Burgess looked up, held up a hand to signal he heard. “I’m going to see to the fire pump!” Taylor pointed aft. “Take over here!” Burgess nodded.

Taylor grabbed up some tools and a lantern. He worked his way around the engine, ducking under the piping, skirting the condenser. Shells slammed into the boat; Taylor staggered, put his hand against the cool, damp metal of the condenser, steadied himself. He inched on, following the steam line that led to the pump. Found the steam gauge-pressure enough to drive the thing. Reckoned the pounding of the shells had knocked something on the pump galley west.

He pushed aft, moving fast. The shells came faster, slamming into the ship, the dull, ugly sound frightening in the sweltering shadows of the

engine room. He dropped to his knees, crawled along under the long shafts driving the paddle wheels, the creaking pillow blocks.

Got to damn well move… he thought, picturing the fire above, and then he was tossed aside as if he had taken a swift kick in the ribs, slammed into one of the pillow blocks.

The engine room filled with a flash of light; Taylor had a second’s image of lightning and deep shadows on the engine and the bulkheads and sides of the engine room. Filling the room: the sound of gushing water, flying metal, the deep sound of an explosion, but muffled, like a bomb going off in a pile of sand. The furious hiss of steam, then dark again, and a hot, fine mist enveloped him, fell on his hands and face, just on the edge of painful.

A shell had hit a boiler. The starboard engine stopped, the noise in the engine room cut in half. Taylor closed his eyes, prayed that everyone had been killed in that instant. And as he prayed, the first horrible, insane shriek of agony rose up from the shadowy place forward of the engine, followed by another, and a third. Taylor clenched his teeth. The sound did not seem human, could not come from a human throat, save for a person in unimaginable agony, the flesh seared from his body.

“Die, damn it, will you die!” he cried out. There were three men shrieking-there was no way to tell which three-the screams in no way resembled human voices, or indeed anything earthly at all.

Taylor hesitated. Go back? Fix the fire pump? He crawled on, dragging his tools and his lantern. He found the fire pump, his hands moving on their own, reaching for tools, twisting, banging, wrenching.

The pump leaped to life-it took its steam from the port boiler-and even as Taylor heard the water sucking up through, pushed up the pipe to the hose above, he could not have told anyone what he had done to fix it. The screams of the dying men filled the engine room, pushed every other thing out of Taylor’s head. He was sobbing loud, bawling like a baby, completely consumed by the sound of his men screaming their lives away. He was too aware of the twitching agony he felt in his head to know or care about the pump.

He left the tools, grabbed the lantern, crawled back the way he had come, banging his head, lacerating his hands and arms, oblivious.

Die, please, God, why don’t y’all die? He wanted them to stop, he wanted their pain to stop. He crawled on. He did not want to see them.

He skirted around the condenser, stepped into the open space between the engine room and boiler room, blinked away the tears, held the lantern up. The exploding boiler had blasted the other lanterns away-his was the only light below. Its feeble flame glinted on the wet deck, the jagged edges of the shattered boiler, the twisted fire tubes and flues, the insane web of mangled piping.

Screaming, screaming, it was like a physical thing. Taylor could see one of them, off to the side, writhing on the deck, and from the place where the dying man had fallen, right by the reversing levers, he knew it had to be Burgess.

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!!” Taylor sobbed, more frightened, more sick, more desperate than he thought a sane mind could endure. He ran over to his workbench, reached up to the shelf above, laid his hand on his sawed-off shotgun. It was wet with boiler water, the metal warm to the touch. He grabbed up a box of cartridges, a box of percussion caps, shoved them in his pocket.

The hatch overhead opened, a voice shouted, “What’s happened here?”-

the question hardly cutting through the screams of the scalded men. Taylor tried to put a percussion cap on the nipple of his shotgun. His hands shook and he dropped it, heard it ping on the deck plate, grabbed another. In six tries he managed to get two caps on, one for each barrel, and all the time the screaming, the horrible screaming, more awful than any pain Taylor had ever endured.

He picked up the lantern, crossed the engine room. The glow from the port boiler’s firebox threw an orange light on the deck plates and the pile of coal. Taylor moved quick, stopped. Took a step forward. Made himself look down at the man in the pool of light on the deck, who had to be Burgess.

Every bit of exposed flesh had been scalded from Burgess’s body, but he had been too far from the boiler to die instantly. Instead, the lantern revealed wet, bloody, pulped flesh, reds and pinks, the hideous form of a man with nothing recognizable as human save for his shape and the frantic, thrashing movements.

Taylor blinked hard, trying to see, and his sobs were nearly as loud now as the shrieking man at his feet. He lifted the shotgun, cocked the hammer.

“Please forgive me, oh, Lord God, please forgive me!” he wailed and pulled the trigger. The gun jolted his shoulder, filled the place with the

sharp crack of the gunshot, a good, honest sound. Burgess jerked once, lay still. The screaming was cut by one third.

Taylor grabbed up the lantern, turned toward the boiler. Two bodies, lying still, killed mercifully in the blast. Taylor could not tell who they had been.

He moved around the port boiler, still intact. Two men were tossed up there, one of them, or what was left of him, a coal heaver named Collins they had picked up in Yazoo City. Flayed alive, and still alive; Taylor could see white teeth through the horror that was his face, the dark hole of his mouth as he screamed. Taylor lifted the gun, aimed, closed his eyes, squeezing the tears out, fired the gun.

The blast of the shotgun, then quiet. He swung the lantern around, around to where the third screaming voice had been. One of the men sent by Mallory, Travis something. His pants were shredded, the skin nearly gone, nothing of his leg but half-boiled muscle and skin draping off. He looked at Taylor, his eyes wild, a trapped animal look.

“Don’t kill me, Chief! Please, God, don’t kill me!”

Taylor looked at the boy. He lowered his gun. “I won’t kill you, boy.

Gonna hurt like a son of a bitch, getting you outta here, but I won’t kill you.”

“Chief Taylor! Captain wants to know what’s goin on!” The voice from the hatch. Taylor turned, saw Ruffin Tanner drop from the ladder to the deck plates, saw his eyes move around the shattered engine room.

“Lost the starboard boiler, whole black gang’s dead, but me and him.”

Taylor jerked a thumb at Travis. “We need some hands to get that poor bastard out of here.”

Tanner nodded. “Fire hose is working, they’re getting the fire down some. You need more hands down here?”

Taylor looked around. One boiler, one engine. “How much longer you think we gonna keep up this fight?”

“Not long. We ain’t long for it now.”

Taylor nodded. “No. You don’t want to send any of them poor bastards down here.”

Tanner nodded, stuck out his hand. Taylor took it, shook. Tanner disappeared up the ladder.

Taylor looked around. The firebox on the one remaining boiler was gaping open, the fire glowing red. Red meant too cold; it should be white-

hot. He grabbed up a shovel, dug it into the pile of coal on the deck plate, heaved it into the boiler.

Coal passer. Twenty-five years ago he had begun his engineering career as a coal passer, the first lesson in years of education, formal and otherwise.

Runaway from affluence, lured by a passion for machinery that his parents could not understand. Changed his clothes, changed his accent, been playing the peckerwood so long he did not know how to play any other part.

He dug up another shovelful, tossed it in, spread it around, watched with satisfaction as the fire began to change color. Twenty-five years, coal passer to chief and back to coal passer, and now it would end like this. All right, then. He would die like a man, with a coal shovel in his hand. That would do. He did not want to live anyway, not with the things he had in his head now.

They were really getting pounded this time. One of the big Yankees alongside, Bowater did not know which. Brooklyn, perhaps. It did not matter. She was moving slow upriver, giving back double what the Yazoo River could deal out.

The fire was raging in the forward end of the casement, Babcock leading his pathetic bucket brigade against it, the fire hose lying limp and useless on the deck. The ironclad shuddered with the impact of shells against her sloped sides, shuddered with the recoil of her own guns as Tanner kept his men at it, despite the fire and the carnage around them.

And there was carnage. Like nothing Bowater had ever seen or imagined. He once thought, having fought in Mexico, that he knew what war was. That memory embarrassed him now. He had had no notion. At Elizabeth City he had had a taste. Now he was having the main course, more bitter than he could have imagined.

Black smoke and the stink of burning paint and burning men roiled out of the blaze, the light from the fire revealed it all; the half-bodies, the sprays of blood, the odd limbs. Men lying as if asleep, save for the fact that their heads were gone. Bowater could not count the dead, the bodies were not intact enough for that, nor could he tell how many were being consumed by the flames. His officers were gone. He had seen what was left of Quillin. He had not seen the second officer or Worley for some time.

He looked at the hose. If the water did not start running soon, they would have to abandon ship. He was not sure how they would do that. Run

her aground, he supposed.

Another shell struck, not the casement this time, but low, under his feet, somewhere aft. He turned, and as he did he felt the entire ship shudder, shudder in her guts, heard a muffled blast, and a whoosh and gasp, like the last breath of some giant beast. The hatch to the engine room lifted on its hinges, a great rush of gray steam blowing up in a hot wet blast from below.

Boiler… Bowater closed his eyes. A shell had hit a boiler. He could not imagine what horror it had done below. He could not imagine that anyone in the engine room had lived through that.

He heard the note of the engine change, the sound running through the casement drop off as one of the engines faltered and died. He had to get back to the pilothouse, could no longer remain below, directing the firefighting, but all his officers were gone.

“Babcock! Take over here! Do your best-I don’t think we’ll get fire hoses now. Tanner! Drop down to the engine room, see what’s happening, report to me in the pilothouse!”

He had turned to head for the pilothouse when he saw the fire hose jerk and twist, like some animal one had thought dead suddenly springing to life. Water spurted, hissed, then streamed from the end, and Babcock snatched it up, charged the fire like a knight with a lance.

Incredible… Bowater thought. But too late…

He climbed back to the pilothouse. “Starboard engine’s gone, Captain,”

Risley said. “Rudder’s hard over, just keeping her going straight.”

“Very well.” Bowater looked out the slot. The ship that had punished them so greatly was pulling ahead, steaming upriver, past them, and in her wake, another ship, of around the same size and class. USS Richmond, Bowater thought, wondered if they had changed her name.

One by one, leisurely, Richmond’s broadside opened up, with the precision of a salute, the shells screaming by, clanging on the armor. Smoke and steam from the fire down below rolled into the pilothouse, obscuring everything, setting Bowater and Risley and the helmsman to coughing, gagging. But still the Yazoo River fired back, one shot to the enemy’s three.

The smoke drifted away, Bowater had a clear view again. The night was on fire, the wild reflections of red and orange, the flames through the smoke, the noise. Noise such as he had never heard. He felt his head swim, felt an unreality come over him. If only it would stop, even for a minute, give him time to think, to organize. If only the noise would stop.

And then, from Richmond, amidships, another gun fired, bigger than the others, a deep roar, a giant waking up, angry.

Eighty-pound Dahlgren rifle… was all Bowater had a chance to think.

Richmond carried one, on slides. Eighty-pound Dahlgren rifle.

The shell hit aft, made the Yazoo River slew around, exploded with a noise that stunned Bowater. He was thrown forward with the impact, slammed against the side of the pilothouse, bounced back, flailing for a handhold but finding nothing. He fell, down, down, saw the stairs coming up, reached out a hand to stop himself, and then he was tumbling to the deck below, and then, at last, it was quiet.

OceanofPDF.com