Glory In The Name

which Robley did not provide.

South West Pass was all but straight, a boulevard of water through the delta, and soon the Yankees were in sight, clustered around the bar, one ship on the Gulf side and two still inland of the muddy shallows. The largest of them, the steamer, was pouring smoke, which made a sharp angle as it roiled from her stack and blew away to the south. The ships were motionless, as far as Robley could tell, the steamer broadside to the river, the smaller one with her stern pointed right at the Confederate fleet.

Robley picked up his field glasses, swept the ships on the bar. “They are aground,” he said. “I do believe they are aground.” It was too much to hope for. The enemy stranded in the mud, right under his bow gun.

He stepped from the wheelhouse and forward, to the edge of the hurricane deck. Below him, the gun crew sat on the deck, leaning against the cotton wall, or stood gazing forward at the distant Yankee ships.

“Gun crew!” Paine called, and the men looked up. “The Yankees are aground! Load and run out!”

The men went through the drill, silent and fast, just as they had done so many times dockside in New Orleans.

“Fire!” Paine shouted out, much louder than necessary. The gunner pulled the lanyard and the ten-inch Dahlgren fired with its great throaty roar, flung itself back against the breeching. Paine could see the shell make a black streak in the light blue sky as it sailed toward the Yankees, shrieked through the rigging, and plunged into the water beyond the bar.

“Lower! Lower! You’re firing right over their damned heads!”

On either side of the Yazoo River the other gunboats were opening up, firing their heterogeneous collection of artillery, an eighteen-pounder Dahlgren, an eight-inch rifle, an eight-inch Columbiad; they all fired as fast as they could, pouring shot and shells into the stranded Yankees, hitting back in a way that the Confederate Navy had yet to do, after seven months of war.

The Yazoo River’s bow gun fired again, but Robley could not see where the shot fell.

And then the Yankees replied, the big steamer, firing her broadside guns at the mosquito fleet. The muzzle flashes looked dull and insignificant in the sunlight. A series of water spouts shot up from the river, two hundred yards short.

“Kinney,” Paine called, stamping back into the wheelhouse. “Slow ahead. We’ll creep up to point-blank range.”

“Son of a bitch! We ain’t in range of them Yankees here. We should stay here.”

“If we ‘ain’t’ in range, then we should get closer. But see here, I don’t need you just to ring a bell. I can ring the bell myself, and that will save me the cost of paying you your wages.” Robley reached for the bell cord, but Kinney was there, moving across the wheelhouse with two quick steps, snatching the cord practically from Robley’s hand.

“All right, all right, goddamn it…slow ahead!”

Robley nodded, left the wheelhouse, took his place on the front edge of the hurricane deck, where his view of the enemy and his own gun crew was unimpeded.

He looked right and left. The line of pugnacious gunboats blasting away, from the 830-ton, bark-rigged side- wheel steamer McRae to the fast river tug Jackson, made his heart sing. Fighting back, that was the thing. Was there anything more terrifying then sitting idly by, while the serpent wrapped itself around his new nation?

The turn of the Yazoo River’s stern wheels began to slow, the creaking note lowering in pitch, and the boat’s forward motion was checked. Paine whirled around, caught Kinney’s eye, and Kinney looked quickly away.

Paine crashed the wheelhouse door open as he burst in. “I give the goddamned orders! I say when to go, and when to stop, is that clear, Mr. Kinney?”

“I reckoned it was time to stop. We getting damned close to being in range of them Yankees.” The shot from the steamer’s smoothbores was beginning to fall just a hundred yards or so beyond the bow, and some even falling around the boat.

“Slow ahead, Mr. Kinney,” he said, soft, and once again Kinney reached for the bell cord and tugged.

I will have to shoot that coward before we are through here… Robley thought. He held Kinney fixed with his eyes until he felt the stern wheels begin to turn again, felt the Yazoo River’s momentum build. She was out ahead of the others now, but that was where Robley wished to be.

Then, from deep below them, from somewhere near the bottom of the ship, a terrible wrenching sound of metal. Something snapped with a sharp report. The starboard paddle wheel stopped instantly, as if the hand of God had been laid on it, and the boat began to slew.

“Meet her, meet her!” Robley said to the helmsman. They had gone through this drill before. The helmsman spun the wheel, compensating for the off-center thrust of the single paddle wheel.

“Well, shit, reckon that’s it,” Kinney said with a hopeful tone.

“We have two engines, Mr. Kinney, and we have lost only one.”

“You don’t mean to keep on here?”

“Slow ahead, Mr. Kinney. I shall signal you when to stop.”

Paine walked out onto the hurricane deck. Am I mad? he wondered. He knew it was a terrible risk he was taking, driving the Yazoo River forward until she was within range of the Yankee’s guns. He could not muster even the slightest concern for his own welfare, or for that of his ship and men, which he considered no more than an extension of his own will.

Madness!

But can I be mad, if I understand that what I am doing is madness?

The bow gun fired again, and he traced the trajectory right to the big steamer’s hull. They were not above five hundred yards away, easy for their big rifle, and well within range of the Yankee’s broadsides.

The round shot was falling all around them now, kicking up spray that fell on the Yazoo River’s deck, but the gun crew was performing well, loading and firing, seemingly as oblivious to the shot as was Robley. He was proud of his crew. Were it not for Kinney, all would be perfect.

From the Yankee ship, a muzzle flash, a foreshortened black streak, and Robley watched as it slashed toward them, screaming by his ear, leaving a jagged hole in the wheelhouse astern. He was standing in the hail of iron, leaning into it, as if it was a cool rain at the end of a hot, humid summer day. He was revived by the gunfire, refreshed by the proximity of death.

You sulfurous and mind-tempting flames, vault couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, singe my white head!

A Yankee ball came in on a flat trajectory, plowed down the hurricane-deck rail on the port side, snapping off the stanchions like a scythe through wheat.

Now what are the chances of that? Robley wondered as he looked at the unusual site, the twisted metal posts and rails, hanging at odd angles.

He turned to the wheelhouse, held up his hand for Kinney to ring slow astern, which would hold them on that spot in the river.

From the Yankees came a new note, a sharper crack, not like the flat, dull boom of the smoothbores. Robley brought his field glasses up to his eyes. The smaller ship, the one run bow first on the mud, had moved two guns aft and run them out of the after gunports. These were not smoothbores but rifles, Robley could tell by the higher pitch of their report.

As he watched through the binoculars, the port gun fired, the crack of the gun and the scream of the shell whirling past coming one on top of another. Exploding shells. This was dangerous stuff, much more so than the round shot. Robley felt exhilarated.

The air was filled with the sound of battle, a continuous rolling fire from the Rebels and the Yankees, the buzz of round shot passing close, the scream of the rifle shells, the occasional crash of shot hitting the Yazoo River, taking off bits of the superstructure, chipping away at the wheelhouse. And under it all, the hiss and puff and clank of the single engine, driving the single paddle wheel slow astern. And then it stopped.

Paine was aware first of the change in sound, some part of the tapestry of battle noise gone. And then the