Glory In The Name

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