Glory In The Name

forehead and back, felt the running perspiration trace cool lines on his skin and sting his eyes. He blinked it away, wiped a shirtsleeve over his face.

The place was filled with smoke and noise, men shouting, guns running out, the wounded screaming. Minie balls pinged like hail against the armored sides, thudded in the deck when they managed to find an open gunport, twanged off the muzzles of the guns. Quillin appeared out of the gloom. “Sir, we have five down, three of them are dead.”

“Did shot pierce our armor?”

One of the Yazoo River’s guns went off, then another, then the Pensacola’s broadside hit again. The casement shuddered and rang, the ironclad staggered under one hammer blow after another. The air was filled with the scream of metal, the sound of shrapnel slamming into the wooden sides.

Bowater could do nothing but stand, arms out, trying not to fall as the deck shuddered under him. There was Harper Rawson in front of him, pulling a swab from the muzzle of his gun, stepping back to give the loader room. He saw Bowater, gave him a half-smile, and then another shell hit the casement outside and Rawson’s chest seemed to explode as if a grenade had gone off inside him. He lunged at Bowater, a surprised expression frozen on his face, as something hit Bowater’s shoulder and sent him spinning to the deck.

“Sir! Sir!” Quillin was kneeling beside him.

“What the hell…?”

“It’s the bolts, sir! The bolts holding the iron plate! The impact of the enemy’s shells sends the nuts flying!”

Dear God… The nut would have killed him if Rawson’s body had not slowed it down. He struggled to sit up, with Quillin’s help, put his hand down in a pool of Rawson’s warm, slick blood. He struggled to his feet. The men were working like madmen in the gloom, apparently oblivious to the threat from their own vessel. They had their fighting blood up-Bowater recognized it-they would not be frightened by the proximity of death.

“Get some hands to clean this up! Try to keep the blood off the decks! Get the wounded out of the way!”

“Aye, sir!” The hammer blows fell against the Yazoo River’s side; the ship staggered under the impact. Iron screamed across the casement, slammed into the wooden framework, but Bowater’s fighting blood was up too, and he took no notice as he climbed back up to the pilothouse.

Pensacola was nearly past them now, pushing upriver, working her way across the stream as if she had lost her bearings. “She’s too fast, sir, I couldn’t keep on her!” Risley shouted, and Bowater nodded. His shoulder hurt like hell but he did not think it was broken. He stared out the slot at the night and the smoke and fires.

Behind Pensacola came another of the big ships. A side-wheeler. Mississippi, Bowater had no doubt. Not too many like her in the navy anymore, her big paddle wheels so exposed and vulnerable. She was twenty years old, Commodore Perry’s flagship when he opened Japan; now she was an anachronism in the age of the screw propeller and the ironclad.

“Here is Mississippi!” Bowater shouted, pointing to the bull of a ship charging upstream. “Right for her! We’ll ram her if we can!”

“Aye, sir!” shouted Risley, with the first hint of hesitation. But ramming was their only hope. Their pathetic battery could do little against the frigate’s thick sides.

Bowater looked at the telegraph. Risley had ordered slow astern to keep the Yazoo River where she was. He grabbed the handles, rang the engine room, shoved the indicator to full ahead. Ramming, like the ancient galleys, but with two condensing horizontal side-lever engines to take the place of the poor bastards chained to the benches, working the oars.

Bowater felt the speed build, felt the deck tremble, the Mississippi looming ahead. Her paddle wheels dug into the river and her broadside lashed out at the night, but her shot went high. Bowater fixed his eyes on the place abaft her paddle wheels where he would hit.

“Captain!” Risley shouted. “Look at that sumbitch!”

Bowater looked though the slot on the port side. A low hump in the water, the wake washing over her bow, the flash of gunfire glinting off her round, wet sides. The ironclad Manassas was steaming for the Mississippi, her throttles wide, smoke rolling from her stack.

“Come right! Come right!” Bowater shouted to the helmsman. They were on a collision course, Yazoo River and Manassas, would hit one another before either hit the Yankee.

The Yazoo River sheered off, her bow turning from her intended target, her chance to ram the side-wheeler gone. Bowater watched with some irritation as Manassas raced forward. The Mississippi was firing wildly, blasting away, like a man frantically slapping at bees, but her guns could not be depressed enough to hit either ironclad.

Hit them, hit them, hit them… Bowater thought as he watched the whale-shaped former tug charging the big side-wheeler. He could see it all, in shades of orange and black, the man-of-war pushing hard upstream, the half-submerged ram racing for her side.

And then the Manassas struck. The Mississippi rolled hard to starboard with the impact, her paddle wheel thrashing as it lifted out of the water. The current swept Manassas past; Bowater could see the gaping hole the ironclad had ripped in the big ship’s side. The Mississippi rolled back on an even keel, a great bear baited by dogs, and as she did she fired her broadside, the flash of her eight-inch guns dancing off Manassas’s wet sides.

Bowater felt the deck jerk underfoot as a shell entered one of the Yazoo River’s gunports and exploded. The dark gundeck below the pilothouse was filled with brilliant light for just a fraction of a second, the already noisy place filled with the blast of exploding powder, the shriek of flying metal.

Jonathan Paine watched Theodore Wilson as Theodore Wilson watched the battle through the wheelhouse window. The Abigail Wilson was making turns for slow astern, holding her place in the river, half a mile upstream from Fort St. Philip.

Wilson said he wanted to think about his strategy. Wilson was afraid, Jonathan Paine knew it.

Wilson did not know that he had less than sixty seconds to either steam ahead or die. Less than sixty seconds to grab on to the bell rope for the engine room and ring up full speed ahead before Jonathan would pull his pistol- a.44 Adams and Deane he had retrieved from Paine Plantation-and shoot him in the head.

Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five…

Wilson had been all bluff talk steaming downriver, but his bravado had begun to waver when the sounds of the gunfire mounted, the flash of the ordnance became visible over the low-lying marsh. Now he toyed with the bell rope, twisted it in his fingers, stared downstream.

Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty…

It was a mesmerizing sight, the big ships moving through the clouds of smoke, half hidden, lit up orange with the flash of guns, the smaller Confederate vessels thrashing around in a disorganized attack. Jonathan understood the effect that such a scene could have. He recalled looking down the slope of Henry House Hill, watching the chaos of battle, wondering how he could ever plunge into it himself.

But he had done so, and the fear of it was gone, and though he understood Wilson’s trepidation, he had little time for it. He did not doubt that his father was there, somewhere in that maelstrom. Nothing would prevent Jonathan’s finding him. There was no time to waste. Less than thirty seconds, in fact.

Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three…

“The thing of it is, I’m not quite sure what we should do…” Wilson broke the uncomfortable silence. “I had hoped to get here in time to meet with the commanding officer, get orders from him. Now…?”

“Time for orders is gone, I reckon,” Jonathan said. He did not much care what Wilson decided to do. He figured he would have to shoot him at some point, and hold the pilot and helmsman at gunpoint, in order to use the Abigail Wilson to locate Robley Paine. “Looks to me like it’s every man for himself, those boats getting in where they can hit the hardest.”

Wilson nodded, considered the strategic situation.