Glory In The Name

of light where the guns were firing at them, was now on the port side, now astern, as the gunboat turned to run with the stream.

Caldwell grabbed the telegraph, swallowed hard, rang full ahead.

The deck vibrated as the engineer stoked the fires up and the prop churned the water and the speed built. The gunboat was moving fast now, with the current, covering the distance that she had just steamed. Against the stars overhead Caldwell could see great quantities of smoke rolling out of the stack, and he wondered what the chief was throwing on down there.

Fort Jackson to starboard was firing madly, but Caldwell could see the schooners now, the chain between them, could see the point he intended to hit, the place where the chain hung lowest between two hulks.

“I’ll take this,” he said softly to the quartermaster, and the surprised man stepped aside, let the captain take the wheel. Caldwell gave a half turn, brought the helm amidships. He could not risk the possibility of the helmsman misunderstanding his command. They had one try, and one try only. No practice run, no drill.

They were coming on fast to the schooners, one, two, three, and between schooners three and four he pointed the bow of the gunboat. He could feel the engines throbbing below, could hear the sound of the hull pushed as fast as she could go through the water. And then they hit.

The bow of the Itasca hit the chain and kept going, up, up, as if she was leaping a wave, and the pounding engines drove the ship on, higher and higher. The gunboat seemed to be crawling out of the water as it lifted up, as it rode up on the chain.

And then it stopped and the throbbing engines could push her no more. She sat there, hung on the chain, and it dawned on Caldwell that they might remain in that position, hung up on the chain under the Confederate guns. The forts would blow them to pieces at first light, a failure on his part much worse than failing to break the raft.

The first tendrils of panic were creeping up his throat when the chain broke under them. The bow of the Itasca dropped down, sent the spray flying high over the rails, rocked the vessel with the waves created by her own impact.

The straining engines shoved the gunboat ahead. To port and starboard, the old schooners that had held the chain were now caught in the fast-flowing current. They swept downstream, swinging on the chain, making a gap in the obstruction like barn doors swinging open.

Caldwell smiled and would have shouted if he had not controlled himself. Forward, someone with less control whooped, and more followed suit.

Lieutenant Caldwell looked at the wide gap in the chain, big enough for the flagship, big enough even for the side-wheeler Mississippi. He had done his job. Now there was nothing but the forts and the Confederate mosquito fleet between Farragut’s big ships and the city of New Orleans.

44

I wish you to understand that the day is at hand when you will be called upon to meet the enemy in the worst form for our profession.

– Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, General Orders to Captains

They worked as hard and as fast as they could: Theodore Wilson, Jonathan Paine, Bobby Pointer, the crew and new volunteers of what “Captain” Wilson was calling the “CSS” Abigail Wilson. They removed the towing bitts, rigged up gun tackles, swayed the gun carriage and six-pounder aboard. They procured shot and powder, topped off potable water, brought aboard food and sundry other supplies.

The days ticked by: April 18, 19, 20…The Jonathan Paine of a year before would have been frantic, yelling at everyone to hurry, arguing with Wilson over every new thing he had to have aboard. The Jonathan of a year before would have made an insufferable pain of himself, would no doubt have been thrown off the boat.

The one-legged, sunken-cheeked Jonathan was no less frantic, though he kept it to himself now, and simply worked as hard as he was physically able.

He had picked up the story of his mother’s death, his father’s life, piece by piece, from dozens of sources, like reconstructing a mosaic from a disorganized heap of tiles. He did not like the picture forming.

The servants remaining at Paine Plantation told him how his father had cut the limbs off the tree, turned it into what it was, for what reason they did not know. He did it at the same time his mother took to her bed, never to rise again. It was at the same time, Jonathan surmised, that they had received word of the death of their sons.

He heard the rest-travel to New Orleans, spending money wildly, the boat, the fight with the Yankees at the Head of the Passes, the return to Yazoo City, the conversion of the ship into an ironclad. None of it, none of it, sounded like the methodical, stable, well-considered father he knew. When the mosaic was put together it revealed a picture of a man who had gone mad with grief, who was flinging himself at the enemy as a form of suicide.

And now, Jonathan knew, the enemy was coming in force at the river defenses below New Orleans. It was a good opportunity to die. Jonathan could not bear the thought of his father’s going to his grave without ever knowing the truth, without knowing that the Paine line would live on. So he worked until the stump of his leg throbbed in agony, and then he stuffed cotton between the stump and the wood and worked some more.

They took on coal on the 20th, ready to get underway that afternoon.

“Bobby,” Jonathan said. They stood on the landing as the coaling commenced. “If you wish, you are welcome to wait my return at Paine Plantation. You know how to get back there.”

“I was figuring on comin wit you, Missuh Jon’tin.”

“This is not going to be a fine thing, Bobby. As I understand it, there aren’t but a few Southern boats against all the Yankee fleet. I don’t know as any of us’ll come through this one.”

Bobby nodded. “But I do love a boat ride, and I ain’t never seen N’Awlins. I gets to do dem tings, I reckon I’m fit to die.”

Jonathan smiled, slapped Bobby on the shoulder. “Good,” he said. Bobby was part of the journey, part of the entire thing. Jonathan did not like the thought of undertaking the last part, playing the final act, without him.

An hour later they left the dock, steamed out into the stream. They were a day and a half getting to Vicksburg, with “Captain” Wilson putting the Abigail Wilson hard into the mud half a dozen times. They tied up at Vicksburg and the captain, in a tacit admission of incompetence, hired a river pilot to take them to New Orleans.

They were underway again just a few hours later, steaming downriver through the night. Wilson was anxious too, Jonathan could see, eager to get into the fight. Driving him, no doubt, was the thought that Robley Paine might die a hero in combat and Wilson himself would never see a shot fired. Whatever it was, Jonathan did not care, as long as they were steaming for New Orleans, and doing so with all dispatch.

The pounding of the forts by the mortar flotilla downriver had been frightening at first, in its lethal potential. The round thirteen-inch shells fell with uncanny accuracy, exploding as they hit, the Yankees having worked out the elevation, trajectory, charge, and fuses exactly. The shells exploded with a deep, angry-God sound, sent shards of iron screaming. One shell through the roof of the casement, which served as a hurricane deck for the Yazoo River, would be the end of them all.

For all the daylight hours and well into the night, the sky was slashed apart with the streak of burning fuses as the thirteen-inch mortars lobbed shell after shell into the forts. Twenty-one mortars all firing together; the sound of individual guns was lost until it was all one big rumble of mortar fire, whistle of shell, explosion of shell. The twilight hours, the night, were lit with the continuous flash of detonations, muted through the pall of smoke from expended power which hung permanently over the water.

The men of the Yazoo River could do no more than stand on the hurricane deck, watch the awesome fireworks, and shake their heads at the resources the Yankees were able to array against them. Twenty-one specially equipped ships just to blast two forts? Would they never run out of shells?

Finally, after a few days, when the wonder of it all had worn away, the shelling became simply monotonous, and soon they hardly heard it at all. None of the shells were being lobbed at the fleet, huddled upriver of Fort St. Philip. The Confederate Navy and the River Defense Fleet did not seem to be a great concern to the Yankees.

The storm was building, Hieronymus Taylor could feel it. Like so many times out on the Gulf, when the sky