Glory In The Name

He looked around, at the dripping engine room, the dripping, burned men. Burned but still alive. “Damn,” he said. That was all he could think to say.

Ian O’Malley raced up the ladder, desperate to get out of the engine room before the boiler blew. He was frightened, to be sure, and angry and wounded in his pride. But most of all he was bitter about the treatment he received. He had spent the better part of his life being bitter about the way he was treated. The emotion fit him like a well-worn pair of trousers, enveloping and comfortable.

Bloody bastard… he thought, throwing open the fidley door and stepping aft, stomping through the sunshine and relatively cool air.

Bloody Southerner and he treats his niggers better than me…and me a fireman first class…

That was another sore spot. His mother’s second cousin, chief engineer of an oceangoing packet, no less, had given him recommendation enough that it should have garnered him first assistant engineer’s papers, at least, despite what little experience he actually had. It should have been him telling Taylor to check the feed water and clean the damned grates…

Suddenly he was aware of gunfire. Far off, but he could hear it, shells whistling past. He looked outboard. They had turned, and he could see the Yankee ships astern, and the big one was firing.

I made a bloody mistake, didn’t I? he thought. Should have joined with the bloody Yankees…

He heard a voice behind, a soft voice. “Mr. O’Malley?” He turned. The boy Taylor had brought with him was there, but O’Malley had his suspicions. In fact, if he was right, it would be enough to get Taylor cashiered from the navy, which would be justice done. “You…” O’Malley said, took a step toward the speaker, hand reached out, and then his whole world was consumed by the whistle of a shell that seemed to suck the air out of the day, and then it blew up.

Wendy felt an odd sort of calm as she walked around the decks, even with the iron flying. It was like being in a bell jar, looking out, able to see everything, protected. It was an illusion, a dangerous one, and she knew it and told herself as much, but she could not shake it, so instead she enjoyed it, experienced it.

After fleeing the wheelhouse she had hunkered down by the forward end of the deckhouse, watched Taylor lay the gun, disable the Yankee. She had cheered with the rest, spontaneously, until she realized her voice might give her away. But Taylor had been right. No one seemed to care who she was or what she was about.

She watched Taylor go back into the engine room, but she could not bear to go down there. She had remained on deck, inconspicuous, reveling in her genuine taste of battle. It was exhilarating, now that it was over, now that the gunboat had turned and was steaming away from the Yankees.

Wendy was buoyant as she walked down the side deck, unconcerned about the last desperate shots the Yankees were taking. She saw Ian O’Malley storm out of the engine-room door, and she even felt kindly disposed to him, though she had seen in him a sullen malingering villain. Still, she looked on him, and all the men aboard, as her shipmates now, her Band of Brothers.

“Mr. O’Malley?” she said. O’Malley turned and his face was not a kind one, and she could see the anger in his eyes, the suspicion as he squinted at her, took a step toward her. She took a step away, the fear suddenly back. O’Malley sneered, said, “You…,” hand reaching for her, and then the distant whine of a shell grew suddenly to an overpowering scream, a noise that cut right through both of them, and then the forward end of the deckhouse exploded in a burst of wood and glass.

Wendy saw the sides of the cabin blow out and O’Malley lunged at her and she screamed, thought he was going to kill her. His eyes were wide and he hit her, full-body, knocked her back, and he was on top of her, and she swung and punched at him, kicked as they went down, but it had no effect.

She hit the deck hard, flat on her back. Felt the impact through her whole body. It stunned her, but all she could think was to get O’Malley off her, to get away before he killed her. She pushed him off, and to her surprise he moved, did not resist, and she scrambled to her feet.

She jumped back, pressed herself against the deckhouse, ready to kick O’Malley if he came for her. She looked down, saw he would not.

A shard of wood, three feet long, part of the frame of the cabin, was jutting from his back, and now that she looked she could see the jagged forward tip sticking out from his chest where it had gone clean through. A trickle of blood ran from his mouth.

Wendy stared at the lifeless eyes, the dead man in a growing pool of blood, and she felt nothing. She felt like Bowater, tossing the dead helmsman aside. Oh God, is this all? Is this all it takes, for a person to lose humanity entirely?

Taylor came up the engine-room ladder, stepped out onto the side deck. Wendy was there, pressed up against the deckhouse. O’Malley was dead at her feet. For a fleeting instant he thought she had killed him, but then he realized that was absurd.

“What happened?”

“Shell hit, up front, there. That piece of wood went right through O’Malley.”

Taylor nodded. She did not seem as upset as he might have thought she would be. “You best go down to the engine room. We’ll be heading in now.”

They looked at one another. There was something strange in Wendy’s eyes, something that had not been there that morning, and Taylor was suddenly afraid that he had made a great mistake, allowing her to see this. She pulled her eyes from his and disappeared below.

Taylor stepped forward again. Through the gaping hole that had once been a wall, Taylor looked in at the space that had once been the galley. The place was unrecognizable; only a few bits of cookware and sundry pieces of twisted gear looked at all familiar. The destruction was incredible, as if someone had picked the Cape Fear up and shaken her, then dropped her again. And right in the middle of it, sitting on a twisted and cracked stewpot, sat Johnny St. Laurent, wide-eyed, shaking his head, seemingly oblivious to the battle still raging.

He looked up and met Taylor’s eyes, shook his head in disbelief. How he could still be alive Taylor could not imagine. Then St. Laurent said, with evident grief, “All morning…I have been making de homard a la creme with a Felbrigg sponge cake for dessert, and now…” He spread his arms to indicate the destruction of his fiefdom.

“We’ll set her to rights, Johnny, don’t you fret,” Taylor said, as soothing as he could be, then left the galley and went up the ladder to the wheelhouse. “Cap’n, we lost the feed-water line, we gonna have to shut her down, ten minutes or so.”

Bowater nodded. “Ten minutes will be all right. More than that I do not think will do. We are not in the best place to be drifting.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Very good. What was the damage from that last shell?”

“Galley’s a wreck. Lunch is ruined. O’Malley was killed. But nothing beyond that, I don’t reckon.”

“The homard a la creme, ruined?” Bowater met his eyes for the first time. “Devil take those shopkeeping, mudsill Yankees…”

The sun was an hour gone, and the last orange strips of sky fading in the west, when the Cape Fear came alongside the seawall at Gosport Naval Shipyard and Babcock saw to the dock fasts. The damage to the vessel was considerable, but they had inflicted worse than they received, had crippled one of the Union’s James River fleet, had put a few shells through one of the Federal navy’s most powerful men-of-war, had shown the Confederate flag on waters that the Union had considered inviolably theirs. Samuel Bowater was eager to report all of that to Flag Officer Forrest.

Even as the Cape Fear had steamed her way down the Elizabeth River, Bowater had thought of his uniform. He and Jacob rummaged through what was left of the master’s cabin, and it was not much. Nearly everything that Bowater owned was now in more parts than it had been that morning. His uniforms were charred and shredded. Only a quarter of his oil painting of Newport remained, but he was not sorry to see that