Glory In The Name

“I wrote to my daddy. Reckon you never thought to hear me say this, but it looks like I’m going home.”

Bobby smiled and Jonathan smiled. Home. The word did not mock him now. It sounded in his ear the way the word was supposed to sound, evoked those things that home should mean. He felt something he had not felt since that first bullet slammed into Nathaniel, sent him spinning down to the ground. He did not know at first what it was. It was only later that he realized. It was hope.

Bobby took the letter, carried it to the post office, paid for the postage. For three weeks the letter made its tortured way south, by rail, by steamboat, by coach, until at last the postmaster at Yazoo City plucked it from a pile on a big oak table, read the address, and shook his head. He carried it over to the pigeonhole marked 26, which was Paine’s box, and with some difficulty made a space in the mail already accumulated there and stuffed the letter in.

And there it remained. Because Robley Paine was not around to retrieve his mail, and would not have retrieved it anyway, even if he had been there. Because Robley Paine did not believe that there was any person from whom he wished to hear. Robley Paine had given up on this world, abandoned everything except his fight against the Yankees and his hope of heaven, and there was nothing that could come through the mail that he might care about.

At the very moment that the postmaster was forcing Jonathan Paine’s letter in among the demands from creditors, the letters to Katherine Paine from sundry relations, the reports from agents in New Orleans and England, Robley Paine, Sr., was tapping his fingers with frustration on the top of the big wooden wheel of the Yazoo River.

After shelling Pope’s ships, they had returned to New Orleans, heroes all. Kinney, his hand bound in a bloody rag, conned the boat up to the wharf at the foot of Beinville Street. The deckhands made the vessel off to the pilings and bollards, Engineer Brown shut the engines down, and then they all deserted, en masse, the entire crew, marching off the battered stern-wheeler into the cheering crowd and were never heard from again.

Frenzy time. Robley was all over the docks, looking for more men, more guns, more munitions, another chance to drive the Yazoo River into combat.

He found nothing. Kinney and Brown were well known along the waterfront, knew everyone, knew everyone who knew everyone. They spread the word about Robley, and it wasn’t good. Madman. Lunatic.

Kinney might even have brought Paine up on charges for blowing his fingers off, had he not been guilty of what could be construed as mutiny. As it stood, he was lauded as a great and wounded veteran of what the New Orleans Daily True Delta was calling “a complete success, and perhaps the most brilliant and remarkable naval exploit on record.” So Kinney contented himself with modest acceptance of the praise due him, and silence regarding the particulars.

Robley Paine came in for his share of the praise, but he wanted none of it. He wanted nothing but a competent crew to man his vessel and help him drive it into harm’s way, and that was the one thing he could not find.

He appeared one morning at the offices of Daniel Lessard, was greeted with a certain deference there, a reception almost like fear.

When the clerk hurried off to alert Lessard, Robley glanced at himself in a decorative mirror. Not an encouraging sight. He had not shaved in a week, could not recall the last time he had eaten. His eyes stared out from dark hollows, the stubble on his cheeks was drawn in tight where his face was pinched. His clothes were dirty and stained and torn in places. Over it all he wore a cape. He no longer bothered to hide the Starr hanging from his belt.

I have got to clean myself up…got to do something… But for all of the wild energy he directed at manning and outfitting his ship, he could not manage even the slightest interest in himself.

“Robley, sir, come in, come in, it has been far too long!” Lessard’s voice was smooth as river stones but he could not hide the quick, appraising glance up and down, the uneasy smile he hoped would look genuine.

“Good day, Daniel.” Robley let Lessard lead him into his office, shut the door, which Robley did not recall him doing before. He gestured for Robley to sit and sat himself behind his desk.

“Your fame has spread, sir. Your bold action at the Head of the Passes, and your attack on the Union ships down below Pilot Town…they have made you quite famous.”

“Humph. It was a start, a weak effort. Damned Hollins did us no favors, claiming to have sunk one of the Yankees. Should have. Didn’t.” Hollins, on seeing the Yankees abandoning one of their ships, had assumed her sunk, and reported her so. It detracted from their accomplishment when it was ultimately discovered that the ship was not sunk at all.

“Still, it was a singular victory. The papers…”

“See here, Daniel…I’m not blind. Or deaf. I know what’s being said. ‘Paine’s mad…trying to kill himself…’”

Lessard raised his hands to protest, but Robley cut him off. “Don’t deny it…I know it’s true. You think I’m mad as well, I can see it in your damned eyes. And you know what? I don’t give a goddamn. Hell, maybe I am mad. Got reason enough. But I can’t get anyone to ship with me. Damn engine is broken down again, I can’t get an engineer on, I can’t engage a pilot. I’m stuck here. Got an armed ship and can’t get in the fight and all the while the damned snake, squeezing tighter, squeezing…”

“Well, Robley, it is not you. It’s the war. All the available men are off with the army or the navy. Everyone is scrambling to find…”

“Here’s what I need. I don’t want to get men to fight the ship. Never find ’em. Need navy men. I see that. What I want now is an engineer to get the engines working, a pilot and crew to get the ship up to Yazoo City.”

Robley’s voice took on a plaintive tone, and he tried to fight it but he could not. He felt so lost there in New Orleans, surrounded by cowards and thieves. Yazoo City was becoming his personal El Dorado, a fabled city, his quest-to reach it. If he could get to Yazoo City, free from the corruption of New Orleans, then he could regroup and fight in earnest.

“That’s all I want. To get to Yazoo City. No fighting. Just help me get to Yazoo City, where folks know me, and I’ll get my men and fit my ship out there. I’ll pay in specie. Gold.”

Lessard leaned back and pressed his fingers together and his expression was very different. “Robley…that, I think, I can arrange.”

The engineer showed up at nine-thirty the next morning, and he was no Chief Brown. Clean and groomed, well-spoken, he had an air of competence and professionalism that made Robley furious. The good men were available to take gold for keeping out of harm’s way, it seemed. But Robley said nothing, because the goal was Yazoo City, and he did not wish to compromise that.

Two weeks and fifteen hundred dollars later the Yazoo River’s engines sounded better than Robley had thought they could sound.

Lessard sent deckhands, good Southern boys, competent, hardworking, not the foreign trash swept up along the docks. Lessard sent a pilot who did not stink of stale whiskey, a pilot who was courteous and professional and did as he was ordered and explained patiently when he was ordered to do something he could not.

And so, a week before the end of the year 1861, the year in which Robley Paine had witnessed the end of his life, and begun suffering the horrible torment of continuing to live nonetheless, the stern-wheeler privateer Yazoo River cast off from the docks of New Orleans and headed up three hundred winding miles of river to Yazoo City.

Victory or death. Victory and death. He would begin that journey there.

Eight hundred miles away, buffeted by the gales that shrieked in off the Atlantic, the CSS Cape Fear butted her plumb bow into the steep chop, sent spray flying up over the wheelhouse, where Samuel Bowater stood, one hand on the rail that ran around the bulkhead just below the windows, as a succession of seamen struggled with the wheel and cursed.

They watched the enemy at Fort Hatteras, brought supplies to the troops on Roanoke Island. They towed wrecks into Croatan Sound, the passage between Roanoke Island and the mainland, entryway to Albemarle Sound, and sank them. They struggled to drive pilings into the muddy channel bottom to stop the enemy’s passing. They watched sickness cut the crew down by a third, working in the freezing rain and the cutting wind. They waited for the Yankees.

Christmas came, and the Cape Fear was tied up dockside at Elizabeth City. Samuel