Glory In The Name

A gunboat! For all the Yankees’ sea power, the only vessel that could get underway fast enough, the only one with a rifled gun that could reach out that far, was one not much larger than the Confederates’.

Harwell, beside him, was dancing with excitement. “Mr. Harwell, please have your gun crew redirect their fire to the gunboat.”

“Aye, sir!” Harwell practically shouted, and relayed the order.

They were closing fast, both vessels charging like knights-errant. The Cape Fear fired, missed, but not by more than a dozen yards. The Yankee fired again and charged on.

He must have more shells than we do… Bowater was counting the valuable projectiles as his gun crew blasted away. He wondered if the Yankee captain had to do the same. He wondered if he knew the Yankee captain, if they had been shipmates once.

The Cape Fear’s gun went off, the deck shuddered under Bowater’s feet, and in the deafening blast, the Yankee’s gun seemed to fire in absolute silence, less than half a mile away. The last of the reverberations from the Cape Fear’s rifle were dying, and from that noise rose the scream of the Yankee’s shell, fast and loud. Bowater could see the black streak in the sky, right in line with his vessel, and then the shriek was like sharp pegs in his ears and the shell crashed through the cabin behind him, exploding in a great shower of shrapnel and wood and glass.

Before Bowater’s shocked face, an image of painted wood and dark paneling and Littlefield the helmsman, all exploding as if from some internal force. And then he was down, and the darkness washed over him, like the cold water in the dry dock, and once again he could not crawl free.

Hieronymus Taylor did not care for this, did not care for it at all. He paced back and forth, worried the cigar in his mouth, glared at the wheelhouse bell.

Generally, he preferred to be below. He would rather be in his engine room, surrounded by his beloved machinery, than up there in the light with the idiots and prima donnas of the master’s division. He preferred the precision of machinery to the vagaries of wind and tide and politics and chains of command.

It was a preference, and a passion, which he tried to convey to Wendy. He gave her a tour of the engine room, spoke passionately about Scotch boilers and fire tubes and blowdowns. He was absolutely poetic on the subject of winging fires with slice bars, on hot wells and feed water, on Stephenson links and trunks and rods and shafts and pillow blocks.

There was so much he wished to convey to her. He wanted to tell her about the monster that he and his men were able to conjure up, like wizards in storybooks. How they made this monster rise in the boiler, how they drove it under pressure through the pipes, made it work for them, contained it, dangerous beast that it was.

He wanted to tell her how the monster-invisible, deadly hot-was forced into the trunk, made to push the piston, and there it died. He wanted to tell her how the watery remains of the beast were pumped back into the boiler and the thing was raised again from the dead, how they performed this miracle in a continual circuit, again and again, drove this gunboat along in that manner.

It was just like the fellow said, “What immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry…” Except it wasn’t an immortal hand at all, just a man, an engineer. That was the miracle of the thing.

He wanted to tell her because he thought she would understand. He had never shared that vision with anyone, never tried. The beats that haunted engine rooms would have looked at him as if he had two heads. The general run of mechanics and engineers could never see the poetry in the machine. They saw pipes and valves and condensers and such, but they could not see the magic, the absolute beauty, in such mechanical perfection. There were times when Hieronymus Taylor would look on his engine, with all its parts running with interlocking grace, knowing that inside those pipes and trunks and hot wells and condensers the beast was living and dying, and he would tear up-actually cry-for the sheer beauty of the thing.

That was not something you shared with the black gang.

But Wendy, she was a different matter. Women by their very nature were more attuned to such things, more able to recognize beauty where men could see only function. And a girl with the imagination to paint as well as she did, and the grit to dress as a sailor and sneak aboard a man-of-war going into battle, she, of all people, should have the ability to see in the engine the elegance of mathematical grace. If anyone could get it, Wendy should.

But Wendy did not get it. She nodded as Taylor pointed out the steam dome and traced the main steam line aft, said “Indeed?” as the chief showed her the throttle and Stevenson links, looked politely at the things Taylor pointed out. But there was no passion there, only politeness. She asked intelligent questions until somewhere around the hot well pump her eyes began to look as if they were encased in thin glass. For all her imagination, she could not see in the machine what Hieronymus Taylor saw. She was not interested.

Taylor stopped his tour of the engine before coming to the part where the water returns to the boiler, and Wendy did not even notice. “Reckon if you want to see somethin, you best get topside,” Taylor said, a muttered, taciturn admission of defeat.

“Topside? On deck?” Wendy looked by parts elated and afraid. “But sure I’ll be discovered there.”

Taylor shook his head. “More’n half the hands we got aboard are shippin the first time today. Doubled our crew for this here excursion. Ain’t no one knows everyone aboard. Jest keep out of the way, act busy if you can. Won’t be no problem.”

Wendy smiled, and the look nearly compensated Taylor for his disappointment. “Thanks, Chief!” she said and scrambled up the ladder, left him alone, as he usually was, with his passions.

Now things were heating up, and he was not sure about it. He had been below before during times of great excitement-steamboat races, violent storms, collisions with other vessels-and still he preferred his engine room above all things.

But this was different. This was fighting, killing Yankees. Arrogant damn Yankees, like used to swagger around the docks at New Orleans, off their Boston-built ships, loading cotton for England, treating them all like they were field hands, white men and black.

Bowater. He was not much better. Just the fancy Dan that Taylor had expected, prim as Queen fucking Victoria, but now he was driving this little boat into combat, going to kill Yankees with unprecedented boldness, and Taylor wanted to be part of it. Not down below, not this time, but up on deck. This time he wanted to see the fun, because there had never been this much fun before.

It was crowded now in the engine room. Normally, there would only have been one fireman, Burgess or O’Malley, and one of the coal heavers, along with Chief Taylor. But now, at quarters, both firemen and all three coal heavers were down there, standing by for an emergency.

Navy fashion… Taylor thought. Six men to do the work of two. “What the hell you starin at, Moses?”

“Well, Massa Taylor, I ain’t ever seen you in sich a state. You ain’t afraid of dem Yankees, is you?”

“Afraid? Shut up, ya damned darkie.”

Moses smiled at that, which just further infuriated Taylor. “Clean the ash out of that damned boiler, you lazy son of a bitch,” he said and stamped off.

Taylor stood by the wheelhouse bell, peered up through the fidley. The sky beyond the skylight in the deckhouse roof was clear blue, as if the glass was painted that color. Behind him, he heard Moses’s shovel scraping up the ashes, heard the black man singing, just loud enough so that Taylor could hear, a song to the tune of “Dixie.”

O, I wish I was clear of ol’ Chief Taylor

Lock you down like a mean ol’ jailer

And the other stokers joined in, soft,

Heave away, heave away, heave away, Taylor-man.

Well the engine room, it’s his frustration,

Thinks he’s on a fine plantation

Heave away, heave away, heave away…

Taylor turned, ready to put a stop to their nonsense. He was in no mood for it. Then, overhead and forward, the ten-pound Parrott fired with a roar that sounded through the vessel like the end of the earth. The deck below their feet shuddered and the blast of the gun echoed and died and suddenly it seemed very quiet below, despite the roar of the fire and the hissing and clanking of engine and pumps. Everyone stopped and stared up at the roof overhead,