Glory In The Name

wheelhouse. His wheelhouse. There was no one to whom he must report the course change, no one to whom he must try to explain the odd feeling he was having. No one to whom he need speak at all.

He looked down at the rounded bows of the Cape Fear as they butted their way through the small chop and he knew that they were his bows and he loved them.

But he allowed no inkling of this newfound passion to creep into his voice, or his demeanor. His attitude was perfect disinterest.

“Helmsman, steady as she goes,” he said and stepped behind the helmsman, behind Lieutenant Harwell, and peered out the side window on the starboard side. Just forward of the starboard beam he could make out Fortress Monroe. It was about two miles off-he had been giving it a wide berth-but even from that distance he could see that it was a busy place.

He frowned again, in earnest this time, and put his field glasses to his eyes. The magnification made the activity more obvious. He could see lights moving on the water, where small boats were pulling here and there, and more lights moving onshore. He could see lights along the top of the fort’s walls. Something was happening.

Bowater stepped back across the wheelhouse and out the side door, peering out into the night. It was cool. He was wearing his old U.S. Navy uniform, with the insignia removed, and the breeze made the tail of his blue frock coat flap and beat his legs. He grabbed the patent-leather visor of his cap and tugged it lower. Up in the wheelhouse, the roll and pitch of the little man-of-war was much more pronounced.

Samuel Bowater had not realized, during his long self-imposed exile in Charleston, how very much he missed this.

He felt the platform on which he stood shake and turned to see Hieronymus Taylor mounting the ladder. The chief reached the top, paused, gave something that could be construed as a salute, which Bowater returned.

Then, before the captain could speak, Taylor turned his back on him and stared out over the water, then peered through the wheelhouse windows north toward Fortress Monroe. He made Bowater wait for an audience, as if it had been Taylor who summoned the captain, and not the other way around.

When the chief was done looking around he fished a lucifer from the pocket of his frock coat, which was unbuttoned to reveal the sweat-stained cotton shirt beneath, scratched the match on the rail, and stoked his cigar to life. He coughed, spit over the side of the ship, and returned the cigar to his mouth.

All the while Samuel Bowater quietly regarded him, the unshaved face, the squinting eyes, the hands black with coal dust and oil. An occasional unfortunate turn of the breeze brought the smell of the engineer to Bowater’s nose. Samuel Bowater had never cared for engineering officers generally, as a class of men-dirty, artless mechanics-but so far Hieronymus M. Taylor was in the lead for most objectionable of the lot.

At last Taylor pulled the cigar from his mouth, looked out toward Sewall’s Point, just off the port bow. “They’s somethin happenin out there…” he said at last. “Somethin ain’t right…bad ju-ju…don’t know what it is, but I can feel it.” He turned, looked Bowater right in the eye for the first time. “You feel it?”

Bowater nodded and Taylor nodded, and for a moment they said nothing.

“Chief, we’ve been steaming for fifty hours now, so I imagine you have a good idea of the state of our engine and boilers. How are they?”

“Fine, fine. Ain’t a damned thing wrong with either.”

“And the coal? O’Malley seemed to think there was something wrong with it.”

Taylor grinned at the crude verbal trap. “We got that all straightened out, Captain.”

“So if we get into action tonight, I can rely on the engine?”

Taylor pulled the cigar from his mouth. “Action? What the hell we gonna do, throw biscuits at the Yankees?”

“Perhaps.”

Taylor replaced the cigar, nodded, and grinned. He had an eager, hungry look that Samuel did not find altogether disagreeable, not in the given circumstances. “Well, don’t you worry about the engine, Captain. Get you in and out of any damned thing you can dream up.”

“Good.”

The two men were quiet for a moment, looking out at the dark humps of land, the lights like fireflies on the water, wrapped in the weirdness of the night.

“Chief, if you do not mind a personal question…what does the ‘M’ in your name stand for?”

“Michael.”

“You were not, perchance, named for the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch?” The question sounded idiotic, even as it left his lips.

Taylor took his cigar from his mouth so he could grin wider. “I don’t reckon, Cap’n. I don’t reckon my pappy’d know a Flemish painter if one come up, kicked him in the balls. He spent his whole life humpin freight in New Orleans. Don’t know where he come up with ‘Hieronymus.’”

He put his cigar back in his mouth, turned his head into the breeze. “That’s the damned thing about a name, ain’t it? The very thing that God and man knows ya by, and you ain’t got a thing to say in choosin it.”

“I suppose that’s so. You were not in the old navy?” Bowater asked next.

“Navy? No, that ain’t for me, all that ‘yassa no suh’ horseshit.”

“Until now.”

“Well, suh, now’s different, ain’t it? Now we gots a chance to kill us some Yankees. Besides, if I didn’t join up with the navy, some dumb ass like to put me in the army, now ain’t they? Don’t reckon you’d care to suffer that fate anymore’n me.”

Samuel ignored the comment, which hewed pretty close to insubordination, and decided instead to wring more of Taylor’s past from him. He had no personal interest in the man’s history, but knowing the chief’s background would help Bowater size up his reliability. The fact that he was not a navy man had already lowered him considerably in Bowater’s estimation. “So you learned your trade in the merchant service?”

“Might say that. Bangin around riverboats and such. Thing of it is, Captain, I got me a natural inclination toward anything mechanical. Something a man’s born with, like music or painting or such. If it’s driven by steam, I know how to make it work. In my gut. Ain’t no other way to explain it.”

“I see.” Taylor apparently equated his proficiency with a wrench and screwdriver with Beethoven’s genius for music or Rembrandt’s mastery of the brush and palette. It was amusing, and charming, in a rough sort of way.

“Very well, Chief,” Bowater said, by way of dismissal. “Why don’t you lay below and conduct your orchestra of crankshafts and valves. And I promise I will let you know if we are going to get into any action tonight.”

Lieutenant Henry Wise of the United States Ship Pawnee sat in the stern sheets of the launch and held the boat’s tiller as the twenty bluejackets pulled slow and steady at the oars. Off the starboard side, across the river, some in shadows, some not, he could make out crowds of men, restless, ready for violence. He could feel their eyes on him. He could see the gleam of rifle barrels. Virginians, now secesh. They were waiting.

Thirty-five yards away to port, the granite seawall of the Norfolk naval shipyard made a sharp black line in the starlight. Beyond that, the yard receded into darkness, a darkness which swallowed up the brick wall on the perimeter and left what might be lurking beyond it to Wise’s imagination.

He pictured a growing army of militia, armed, drilled, waiting for the moment to attack. All night long they had been hearing trains pulling into the station in town, carrying, it was said, thousands of troops. Rumors were swirling around the yard, and they all pointed to an overwhelming attack, ready to break at any second. The lieutenant could practically smell the panic in the air.

Wise looked to his right again, over the dark stretch of the Elizabeth River to the lights of Norfolk. There were boats all over the water, lights moving onshore, a general noise of activity, like the growing buzz of a restless crowd waiting on some grand event.

It was all over for the naval yard; there was nothing more they could do. The Pawnee, under the command of Commodore Paulding, had steamed to Portsmouth to save what ships they could from the massing Rebels. They were too late. McCauley had ordered them all scuttled two hours before.

Wise had hit the dock, raced to Merrimack, his particular charge, and found the water