Glory In The Name

front of First Assistant Engineer Taylor. “Very well, Mr. Taylor, you may report.”

“Well, suh, this here’s the engineering division. The firemen first class are Mr. Ian O’Malley from Belfast. He is of Hibernian descent,” Taylor added in a loud whisper. “Mr. James Burgess of Aberdeen, who ain’t been known to speak three words consecutive. The Negroes is the coal heavers. They have the singular advantage of not appearing dirty, though devil take me if I can find ’em when they’re hiding in the coal bunkers.”

Bowater held Taylor’s eyes, did not acknowledge his attempt at humor. He shifted his gaze, looked over the engineering division. They were the same men he had seen in every engine room aboard every ship he had sailed. “Very well. Carry on.”

Fifty hours…

Hieronymus Taylor slumped on his stool and leaned against the forward bulkhead of the engine room, disassembling a recalcitrant gauge with a small screwdriver. He pictured in his mind the chart, Cape Fear to Cape Charles. They had been steaming fifty hours now. That should put them into the Chesapeake Bay.

Now, from his place on the stool, Taylor could feel the motion of the ship change, the slow roll of the ocean swells give way to a shorter, faster pitch, and he guessed that they were finally inside the Capes.

“Missa Taylor?”

Hieronymus looked up. Moses was leaning on his coal shovel. “What?”

“We gots the fire going nice an hot. You wants us to clean up here, or sommin’?”

“Clean up what?”

Moses shrugged. “I dunno. Clean de deck plates, mop her up. Make her look good, fo’ de new cap’n an all.”

Taylor scowled, looked around. “Where the hell is O’Malley? Ain’t it his watch?”

“Reckon it too hot down here for dat Irishman. I thinks he’s havin a smoke, topside.”

Taylor pulled his shirt away from his chest. It was intolerably hot, by most normal standards. But with the sun set and the engine running at cruising speed, the engine room was not much above one hundred degrees, and for any veteran of an engineering division, that hardly constituted hot.

“Well?” Moses asked.

“‘Well, sir.’”

“Well, suh?”

“Well what?”

“You want us to mop de deck?”

“Why?”

“Case de cap’n come down here agin.”

“Devil take the captain.” Bowater had made his inspection of the ship soon after muster. He had looked around the engine room, found not one thing wrong, because Hieronymus M. Taylor made sure there was nothing wrong to be found. That perfection had earned only a nod, and a “Very good. Carry on, Chief” from the Academy stiff.

“You think I need to mop the deck to impress his lordship? Ain’t a goddamned thing wrong with the deck. Lookee here…” Taylor fished a chunk of bread from the pocket of his coat, hung beside him on a hook. “Lookee here.” He dropped the bread on the deck, got down on his hands and knees, and grabbed the bread in his teeth.

“See here?” he said through the chunk of bread. “I can eat off the damned deck!”

Nat St. Clair, coal heaver, began to bray like a hound dog, and the call was taken up by the other two coal heavers on watch. Moses grinned down at Taylor. “Now you got the boys all worked up!”

“Shut yer damned gobs, dumb coons.” Taylor got back to his feet. “I’ll make y’all eat yer damned dinners off’n the deck.”

Overhead the bell from the wheelhouse sounded, riing, riing. Three bells, full ahead. Taylor scowled at the polished brass irritant.

“Dat you massa calling!” Moses said.

“Shut up. Didn’t I tell you to wing that fire over?”

“No, suh.”

“Well, wing the rutting fire over.” Taylor glared at the bell. “St. Clair, go find O’Malley, tell him to tell them stiffs in the wheelhouse that’s all the steam we’re going to get out of this ain’t-for-shit coal.”

Just spoil ’em, if I give ’em everything they ring for. Next you know they’ll come to expect it… He picked up his gauge and gently turned the brass screw that held the backplate in place. Give ’em a little more steam in twenty minutes or so. That should do for them wheelhouse beats.

The Cape Fear steamed on, the thrum and hiss and bang of her engine so regular and perfect that Taylor did not even hear it, not on any conscious level. Any tiny change in the sound, he knew, would have sat him bolt upright, even if he had been asleep, every sense straining to determine the cause. But there was no change.

O’Malley stumbled back into the engine room, mumbled some excuse for his absence, spoke too low to be heard over the working of the engine, the roar of the boilers, the hiss of the air pumps. Taylor considered turning in.

A draft of cool air blew over him, and he looked up to see landsman Bayard Quayle come through the door and make his way warily down the ladder to the engine room. He stopped at the bottom, turned, and looked around with the wonder and uncertainty of one not used to the heat and the noise. Then he spotted Taylor and made his careful way over.

“Chief? Capt-” The tug took a harder pitch and Quayle grabbed frantically for a workbench, as if he was afraid of being sucked into the machinery. “Captain’s compliments, Chief, and…” He paused, trying to recall the exact wording. “…and things is getting a bit tight, and he would be obliged if you was to…ah…make the coal perform to satisfaction…is what he said.”

“That a fact?”

“Yes, suh… Oh, and he asks would you please report to the wheelhouse?”

“What for?”

“Dunno, suh. Don’t see nothing out of the ordinary. But the boatswain, he says it looks to him like all damned hell is breaking loose out there.”

9

The most abominable vandalism at the yard. The two lower ship houses burned, with the New York , line of battle ship, on the stocks. Also the rigging loft, sail loft, and gun- carriage depot, with all the pivot gun carriages and many others.

– George T. Sinclair to Stephen R. Mallory

Captain Bowater stood in the wheelhouse, just to the left of the helmsman. He stared out of the window at the shorelines, set off from the water by a sprinkling of lights, and at the traffic on the water, and he knew that something was wrong.

There was too much going on for so late an hour, too many vessels on the move, too many lights onshore. There was an energy in the air that should not have been there twenty minutes after midnight.

“Come left to a heading of east northeast,” he said, and Pauley McKeown, able-bodied seaman, eased the wheel to port and said, in the remnants of an Irish burr, “Coming left to east northeast…east northeast.”

At the far side of the wheelhouse, the luff’s pencil scratched the course change in the ship’s log.

Bowater frowned to prevent himself from smiling, because smiling for no apparent reason was the sure sign of a weak-minded idiot. Still, the smile wanted to come, despite his apprehensions about the night and the traffic on the water. He was overcome with the pure joy of the thing; the vibration of the engines coming through the deck, the motion of the vessel through the water. The quiet formality of the quarterdeck.

Not a quarterdeck, of course, not the wide, open quarterdeck of the Pensacola, but a