Glory In The Name

Suddenly he was moving. The gun-carriage wheel disappeared and the world seemed to whirl around. He looked up. Gray sky, smoke. He did not know what was happening.

A face blotted out the sky. Captain Samuel Bowater. The captain had lifted him up, was cradling him. Harwell tried to smile, was not sure if he had managed it.

“We fought them off, Lieutenant!” Bowater said, loud. “Thanks to you, we fought them off!”

Then Harwell remembered. The words! The final words! And here, of all men on earth he would wish to say them to, here was Captain Samuel Bowater, whom he loved so dearly.

Harwell made to speak, and then a panic rushed over him. He could not recall! All that practice, and now the moment, and he could not recall. He wanted to weep.

The edges of his vision were growing dull, and he felt a lightness to his body, and then suddenly in a great rush they were there, the words he had labored over. Joy spread over him like the heat in front of a blazing fire, and he spoke and he could hear his voice was clear and loud and strong.

“Happy am I to lay down my life for this, my beloved Confederacy, and only regret that I shall not live to fight on…”

Bowater was nodding. He had heard the words, understood the sentiment. Of course, such a noble spirit would understand. The world seemed to be growing brighter. Brilliant light seemed to be streaming from around the captain, and soon the captain was lost in the light and then it was all light and then nothing.

Samuel Bowater held the dead lieutenant in his arms and he felt tears roll down his cheeks, surprising and bitter. The poor bastard had been shot right in the back, spine severed, lungs torn up, artery blown apart.

He had lied to Harwell, but he did not feel bad about that. They had not beaten the Yankees back. They had fought to a standstill, fought until the Cape Fear lurched hard, began a death roll, and the Yankees fled from the sinking tug, climbed back aboard their gunboat. Some of the Cape Fears had followed them, preferring prison to death in the river. The rest remained, grabbed on to things that would float.

He had told Harwell they had won because that was what the lieutenant, with his wild, romantic notion of war-a notion that was not dimmed by real and bloody combat-would have wanted in his dying ears.

Harwell had smiled. He had tried to say something, it was unintelligible, a mumble of half-formed words, and then he died. He died with the smile on his lips. Bowater could not take his eyes from the smile.

The Cape Fear rolled again, and Bowater nearly fell over. He looked back. The after end, right up to the middle of the deckhouse, was underwater; debris and dead men were swirling around in the stream.

A hand fell on his shoulder. He looked up. Taylor was there, bleeding from three places, cigar in his teeth, violin case under his arm. “We got to go, Cap’n,” he said.

“Go where?”

“Dunno. Find some damned thing will float.”

“I’m taking Harwell.”

“All right. I’ll help.”

Taylor grabbed Harwell’s feet, Bowater grabbed his shoulders, and they lifted and Taylor grunted and cursed and Bowater guessed that the wounds hurt more than he would let on.

Tanner was there, helping with the weight. They half-walked, half-slid down the deck to the water. No one spoke, no one had any idea of what they would do when the boat sank under them.

Then around the shattered deckhouse, moving fast, churning the water, came the CSS Appomattox. Lieutenant Simms in the wheelhouse pointed, reached up, and rang the engine-room bell. The Appomattox slowed, settled into her wake, stopped beside the sinking Cape Fear. Men on her fantail, anxious faces, grabbed hold of the Cape Fears, pulled them over the tug’s low bulwark. Men on the Cape Fear handed wounded over, scrambled over after them.

The Yankee gunboat fired, too high, the shell screamed past. Taylor and Bowater handed the body of Lieutenant Harwell over. “Go on, Chief,” Bowater said, and Taylor scrambled onto the tug.

Bowater turned to Tanner. “Go…” he said and stopped. This had played out before-him, Tanner, enemy guns, the last men to leave. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“You remember.”

Bowater shook his head. It was too much. Think on it later. “Go on, Tanner, I won’t argue this time.”

Tanner nodded, climbed over the bulwark. Bowater took one last look around. The breeching on the Parrott gave way and the big gun slid down the deck, slammed into the front of the deckhouse. Bowater wanted to weep. He turned, climbed on board the Appomattox, felt the deck shake as Simms ordered up all the steam they had.

Bowater stood on the fantail, watched the Cape Fear, his first command, slip away. She went down fast, the river lapping over her, her deckhouse, her foredeck, her boat deck. Last of all he saw the wheelhouse, his wheelhouse, a place that he had come to love as much as any place he had known, go under with a roil of bubbles, and then she was gone.

He stared at the spot, but it was soon far astern, with the Appomattox running upriver to the Dismal Swamp Canal. Bowater surveyed the scene of the battle. Steamers everywhere, Union ships weaving in and out, but the fight was over. Sea Bird was all but sunk. Ellis was in Yankee hands, Black Warrior on fire, Fanny run aground and blown up, the Forrest set on fire on the ways.

Bowater forced himself to climb up to the wheelhouse, where Lieutenant Simms was looking upriver, giving helm commands.

“Lieutenant,” Bowater said, “on behalf of myself and my men I thank you for your brave and timely arrival.”

Simms smiled, nodded. “Wish I could have been there before you took that damned Yankee shell. My bow gun got knocked out, only had the howitzer, which was of little value.”

Bowater looked back. The steamers were receding in the distance, the fight left astern. “Nothing you could have done…” he said at last. “Nothing to be done.”

They continued on upriver in silence, and soon the locks of the Great Dismal Swamp Canal were ahead, gaping open like welcoming arms. Bowater glanced down at the deck of the Appomattox.

“You’ve taken this boat though the locks before?” he asked.

“No. Reckoned this was as good a time as any to give it a try.”

Bowater nodded. “You think she’ll fit in the lock?”

Simms frowned, shrugged. “I don’t know.”

The river narrowed, the lock gates lay open. Simms rang the engine room. Half ahead. He rang again. Slow ahead. They approached the locks going two knots at most. Simms scanned the opening, looked at the Appomattox. Bowater did the same. Twenty feet away. Bowater had opened his mouth to say he did not think they would make it when Simms said, “It’ll be tight, but I think we’ll fit.”

The helmsman gave the wheel a subtle turn. The bow eased into the lock gates, the granite sides of the lock slid past. The Appomattox lurched to a stop, the men in the wheelhouse stumbled to keep their footing. Bowater looked down the side. The tug was jammed halfway into the lock, stuck fast.

Book Four

THE FIGHT ON WESTERN WATER

36