Glory In The Name

there no more.” He was trying to sound cheerful. Jonathan would have strangled him if he had had the strength to lift his arms.

It was coming back now, not a trickle of memory, but a flood tide. He had led Nathaniel to the fight and Nathaniel was dead. He recalled the look in his brother’s dying eyes, the death rattle as the life ran out of him on the field. He recalled the note he had written, stuffed in Nathaniel’s uniform.

His brother’s body would be back home now. Robley would have written their parents, told how Jonathan had persuaded Nathaniel to march off, just like all those other times he had lured his brother into trouble.

He closed his eyes against the grief and the hurt. He was crippled, his leg cut off by some army butcher. His parents and Robley Junior would despise him for what he had done, as well they might, the loathsome creature, to lure a brother to his death.

He felt the bed shift as Bobby stood and walked softly away and left Jonathan to lie there and envy the men left dead on the fields south of the Bull Run.

The Union navy was massing for something. Samuel Bowater had not been wrong in thinking so.

As the shipwrights swarmed over the Cape Fear, rebuilding her wheelhouse and galley, replacing panels in the sides of the deckhouse, patching holes and strengthening the bulwarks where the gun breeches made off, reports continued to come downriver of more and more ships gathering at Newport News and Hampton Roads.

As the burned-out wreck of USS Merrimack was transformed slowly into the ironclad CSS Virginia, Merrimack ’s old consorts, the Minnesota, Wabash, Monticello, Pawnee, and Harriet Lane , gathered as if for a reunion off Fortress Monroe. Also in attendance were the chartered steamers Adelaide and George Peabody, and the tug Fanny, all ships of the United States Navy. There were others as well, transports and battered old schooners, whose purpose was not clear.

Little, in fact, was clear, save that the United States Army and Navy were preparing to fall on some part of the Confederate coast.

July turned to August. The Cape Fear was returned to service, her superstructure repaired, her master’s cabin made better than it had been, with oak paneling, hinged windows, and a compass mounted over the bed. It was even extended by two feet aft, adding significantly to the volume therein. The former cabin had, after all, been no more than a bunk for a tugboat skipper, but now it was the great cabin of an officer of the Confederate States Navy.

August crept by, with its sweltering heat and dripping humidity. During the soft Virginia evenings, when the sun began to incline toward the west, and the Cape Fear was tied to the seawall or swinging on her hook, Hieronymus Taylor made his way aft to the fantail, violin under his arm, and sitting on the after rail coaxed lovely soft melodies from his instrument.

Moses Jones would soon drift aft, as if by pure chance, and he would lend his voice to Taylor’s music. They reminded Samuel, who would sometimes listen from the roof of the deckhouse, of two dancers in perfect sympathy with one another.

An illiterate coal passer and a poor, barely educated Southern peckerwood, but somehow, to Bowater’s amazement, they made music as if they were one person, and even he, who had no tolerance for the dreary sentimentality or the shallow joviality of popular music, found some merit in their performances. As did the other Cape Fears, who gathered every night to listen.

Early in the month the Yankees sent hot-air balloons aloft from the deck of a small steamer, with men in baskets suspended beneath to take a look at the Confederate works at Sewall’s Point. It was a novelty that warranted a few days’ discussions. And still the Union ships assembled, until they were so much a part of the coastline that neither Bowater nor any others of the Confederates on the shore south of Hampton Roads paid them any mind.

Until the afternoon of August 26, when they left.

It was a Monday. The day before, Bowater had wandered over to the riverfront park with a new canvas and easel. There had been several weeks of inclement weather, which had kept him from his usual painting, and that had made him anxious, a reaction which surprised him. It would not have occurred to him that he was anxious to see Wendy Atkins again, though thoughts of her still haunted him. More curiosity than anything, he told himself, a self-flagellating tendency to stoke his own irritation.

The Cape Fear was at the dock at Sewall’s Point, just south of Hampton Roads, off- loading ordnance. Despite the big Parrott gun in the bow and the twin howitzers, the tug was once again transporting supplies around the Elizabeth River. Bowater hoped to get into action again, indeed he never thought otherwise, but it would not be shelling the Union fleet. No one thought the United States Navy would be caught napping twice.

“Fleet’s getting up steam,” a captain of artillery noted as he and Bowater and Taylor watched the Cape Fears swaying a smoothbore thirty-two-pounder off the fantail and onto its waiting carriage.

“Is that a fact?” Here was some interesting news. The sharp edge that Bowater had felt after his fight with the steamer was now growing dull again.

Bowater and Taylor followed the gunner up the wooden steps, past the dusty earthworks, the mounds of dirt piled up to augment the fortification already in place.

They climbed up to the top of the rampart, above the black barrels of the guns that leered out over the water. Before them, spread out like a lake, the blue water of Hampton Roads. A little over three miles to the north, Fortress Monroe. Five miles off and a little north of west was Newport News Point, and between them, like a series of black dashes on the blue water, the massed fleet of the United States.

Bowater pulled his telescope from his pocket, snapped it open, and focused it north. He could pick out the Wabash and the Minnesota. Plumes of black smoke were crawling up from their stacks. Steam frigates getting underway. The wind was light out of the south. When Samuel Bowater was a young boy, no man-of-war could have left the Chesapeake Bay in those conditions. But the steam engine had changed that, had changed the entire nature of war at sea. Now schedules, and not wind and tide, dictated fleet movements. Now engineers lorded it over captains.

“That’s a lot of damned ships.” The artilleryman’s observation yanked Bowater from his reverie.

“And that don’t count the ships still on blockade. Or comin’ in from foreign ports,” Taylor added.

The three men stood silent for several minutes and looked at the fleet. The profile of one of the big steamers began to change, to foreshorten.

“Wabash is underway,” Bowater said.

“Where you think they’re goin’?” the artilleryman asked.

“Hard to say. Charleston? Cape Fear? New Orleans? They have more choices than ships, to be sure.”

“Wherever it is,” Taylor said, “some poor Southrons are in for a whole lot of hurt.”

Thirty hours later, as the Cape Fear picked up her mooring off the dockyard, with the sun just a few hours from setting, they discovered where the fleet was bound, and who was in for the hurt.

“Boat’s putting out, sir.”

Ruffin Tanner, who had remained with the Cape Fear, was lashing the helm, looking out the wheelhouse window, as Bowater wrote in the log, 4:43-Done with engine.

Samuel turned and stepped across the wheelhouse and looked where Tanner pointed. A longboat pulling for them. Odd. He picked up the field glasses that he kept near the wheel, fixed the boat in the lenses. Flag Officer Forrest in the stern sheets. Odder still.

“Mr. Harwell!” The luff looked up from the foredeck. “It appears that Flag Officer Forrest is coming aboard. Please arrange for some kind of side party,” he said, and Harwell, who absolutely lived for such pomp, saluted and hurried off.

Five minutes later, Forrest stepped aboard to a credible display involving rifles and cutlasses and Eustis Babcock’s bosun’s pipe. Forrest exchanged salutes with the officers and Bowater led him up to the wheelhouse.

“They did a good job here, damned good,” Forrest said, looking around the rebuilt bridge and cabin and nodding his head. “They do good work, when they do work. Now see here, Bowater. Just got word. That damned Union