Glory In The Name

was. He looked a bit drunk, and he probably was that as well.

“Ah, Isherwood, yes. Got Welles’s note just today, said you were coming…” The old man-he was sixty-eight- searched his desk as if he was looking for something, then sat back, looked at Isherwood, said, “Ah…”

“Sir, as the Secretary related to you, it is his desire to see the Merrimackis brought to Philadelphia. He has asked that I personally oversee the refit of her engines.”

“Ah, yes, Merrimack. She is in dreadful shape, Mr. Isherwood, you will find. Her engines were nothing to crow about in her best days.”

“So I understand, sir.” Isherwood was not overly interested in McCauley’s opinion. McCauley had told the yard’s chief engineer, Robert Danby, that it would take a month to get Merrimack underway, which was absurd. But most of the officers at the yard were Southerners, and they were influencing McCauley, and the old man was neither strong-willed enough nor sober enough to make up his own mind.

“Very well, Mr. Isherwood, do what you will…”

And so he had. He and Danby, working around the clock, twelve-hour shifts, supervising whatever men they could scrape up to swing a hammer or turn a wrench.

The machinery was in a bad way. The braces had been pulled out of the boilers, the engines torn apart, air pumps disabled, their components scattered around the machine shops and blacksmith shops that crowded the huge shipyard.

Night and day for four days they labored, and now he heard the giant’s heartbeat, the steady thump of the pistons. The ship was stirring. In order to get to sea now, they needed only permission.

Isherwood stood with a groan and tried to shake the kinks out of his legs.

“What do you say to that, Chief?”

Isherwood turned. Danby was there, his face smeared with grease, his hands black, a filthy bandage with a dark spot of dried blood tied around one finger. “Don’t she sound fine?”

“She sounds like hell, Mr. Danby, but she’ll do. Let me go talk to the old man.”

They had gone to visit McCauley the day before, he and Danby, and reported the machinery ready in all respects. They had hoped for the order to fire her up and go. But McCauley had hesitated, told them they would be in season the next morning to get up steam.

Now it was next morning. The fires had been lit around midnight, and sometime around daybreak the water in the huge boilers began to produce steam. Now the engines turned slowly, and the only things keeping Merrimack in Norfolk were the chain and rope fasts holding her to the dock, and McCauley’s orders.

Wearily, like soldiers in the aftermath of battle, Isherwood and Danby climbed the ladder from the engine room, emerging into the blessed coolness of the tween decks, then climbed up the scuttle and onto the main deck.

It was nine o’clock and the sun was brilliant in the spring sky, and Isherwood was a little disoriented. It had been full night when he had gone down into the bowels of the Merrimack.

He paused and took a moment to look around and realign himself. Merrimack was an awesome vessel, 275 feet long and thirty-eight feet on the beam. She normally carried forty guns: fourteen eight- inch guns, two ten-inch, and twenty-four nine-inch, a powerful battery. The guns were off her now, making her deck seem even more expansive.

She was too much ship to let her fall into the hands of the Rebels rumored to be massing outside the walls and setting up batteries across the river. With Merrimack alone, the Confederates could cause real trouble for the Union navy. Time to get her out of there.

Isherwood and Danby walked down the brow from the Merrimack’s deck to the shore and across the big shipyard, their shoes loud on the cobblestones in the quiet morning. It should not have been quiet-the yard should have been in full production at that hour, with hammers falling and forges and heavy machinery and capstans and draft animals all filling the air with noise-but it was not. Most of the civilian workers were gone, either unwilling to work for the old government or unwilling to let their neighbors see them doing so. Those still reporting to work spent the day lolling around their work stations or doing desultory chores. They all seemed to be waiting. Waiting for orders, waiting to see who it was who would be giving orders come the end of the day.

The engineers walked past the looming twin ship houses with their odd A-frame shape, a third one under construction, past the foundries, machine shops, boiler shops, sail lofts, timber sheds, burnetizing house, riggers’ lofts, and ropewalk.

It was no wonder that the Rebels were starting to gather like vultures, ready to fall on that place. Gosport was the most extensive and valuable shipyard in the country.

Isherwood and Danby walked past the huge granite dry dock, and Isherwood thought, The secessionists would dearly love to have hold of that… There were only two in the country, and no real navy could be without one.

They arrived at last at McCauley’s office. There was no one in the outer office. McCauley’s door was open. Isherwood stepped across the room, rapped lightly on the doorframe.

“Commodore?”

“Ah, Isherwood, come in come in…damned secretary is gone, a damnable Democrat, took off with the secesh trash…ever since Lincoln called up them men, every damned one reckons it’s war…like rats, sir, rats from a sinking ship, if you’ll pardon the old saw…

Isherwood and Danby exchanged glances. The commodore was not doing so well. His frock coat was tossed over the back of his chair, his hair was wild. There were stains on his shirt, from what, Isherwood could not tell. From the doorjamb he could smell the booze.

“Commodore, I am here to report that the machinery aboard Merrimack is ready. We have steam up and the engines are turning now.”

“‘Turning now,’ eh? Good, good. Good show. Haven’t quite made up my mind about sending her away…”

Isherwood and Danby exchanged glances. “Pardon, sir?” Isherwood asked.

“Haven’t quite decided whether or not I’ll send her away. It is a damned complicated situation, Mr. Isherwood, far more than just a matter of working engines.”

Isherwood straightened and made an effort to contain his surprise and mounting dismay.

He has been talking to some of these Southern gentlemen, I suspect. Or they have been talking to him.

“Sir, might I remind you that the orders which I delivered to you were peremptory, that Secretary Welles was quite unequivocal about wanting Merrimack moved to Philadelphia. He does not generally dispatch the engineer in chief of the navy to fix a broken engine if it is not important.”

“Yes, sir, I am aware of that.” McCauley was annoyed and he did not try to hide it, but he also looked uncertain and even fearful. “But it ain’t that simple. The Rebels have put obstructions in the river.”

“The Merrimack can easily pass through them, Murray determined that, but if we wait another day they may sink more, and then the ship will be stuck.”

McCauley shook his head. “We send the Merrimack out of here and the Rebels say it’s war and attack! And then we don’t have her battery for defense. We leave her and put her ordnance aboard and they say we are turning the naval yard into an armed camp, and that is an act of war! One damned officer tells me one thing, another something else. Damn it, man, it is not that damned simple!”

McCauley slumped back exhausted, and he had a hungry look in his eyes, hungry for a drink. Isherwood felt pity for the old man. He had been fifty-two years in the navy. He may have been something as a young man, but now he was played out.

“It is complicated, sir,” Isherwood said. “But the orders from Secretary Welles are clear.”

“Clear, clear, yes, yes…” McCauley straightened himself out somewhat. “I shall make my decision later in the day, sir. Right now we will leave things as they are…not so pressing now…”

Isherwood tried to think of a reply, but he could see that any would be pointless. He was a stranger there, whereas the officers whispering in the commodore’s ear, those with South-leaning sympathies, were old and trusted colleagues.

“Very well, sir,” said Isherwood crisply. “I shall wait your orders.” He turned and stamped out of the office, feeling like a petulant child, but he could not help it. Behind him, wordless, Danby followed.

They stepped out of the granite building in which the commodore had his office and right into the path of