For some time they just stood, enjoyed the warmth of the fire and the fresh air outside the stuffiness of the hospital, and said nothing. They were perfectly comfortable in one another’s company, could enjoy silent companionship. Jonathan wondered if this could have happened anyplace outside a hospital, where his wound and Bobby’s nursing had put black man and white on something like even ground.
“Been two months now,” Bobby said at last, never taking his eyes from the boiling water. A few itinerant flakes of snow began to whip around the yard.
“Month and a half. Since the last one.”
They were talking about letters home. Jonathan had written three, had been waiting for a reply. When he was healed enough that he could no longer stay on at the hospital as a patient, he stayed on as a helper, assisting Bobby in changing dressings, washing bandages, wrapping the dead. Not so many wounded now, mostly dysentery, ague, camp fever. What wounds there were were more often from accidents than the enemy. He nursed and he waited. He heard no word from his father.
“That like you daddy?” Bobby asked, looking up at last. “He the kind would jest not write?”
Jonathan shook his head. “No. No, that is not like him at all.”
Bobby nodded and stirred.
“Could be the mail isn’t getting through,” Jonathan said. “I can’t imagine things are running too well, as far as mail.”
“Could be. ’Course, ya sent three letters.”
Jonathan nodded. He did not believe that all three letters had failed to arrive. He could not imagine why his father had not written back.
“I have to go back,” Jonathan said at last. “I can’t wait to hear. I just have to go.”
He had not said that out loud before, because it frightened him. His world was closed down to Miss Tompkins’s hospital. The one time he left it had nearly killed him-he had been another two weeks in bed. Now the very thought of crossing the line of the white picket fence was terrifying.
He had never said it out loud, because doing so was like an announcement, a commitment, and he had not been ready.
Bobby nodded his head, and they were silent for a moment. “Yassuh. You gots ta go. An if ya likes, well, I’ll go wid ya.”
Jonathan smiled. “That’s right kind of you, Bobby. But it ain’t like you can just up and leave.”
“Why can’t I?”
“Well…well, hell, Bobby, you belong to Miss Tompkins, for starters.”
“No I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“No suh. I’s a free man.”
“You are? How come you never told me?”
“How come you jest reckoned I’s a slave?”
Jonathan smiled, shook his head. He had just assumed. He did not know why.
John Scofield sat in his office, elbow on his desk, chin in hand. He stared out the big window that looked out over the outer office. The window made the office seem more a fishbowl than private work space.
Cold air blew in from the outside window, which was opened a crack. Late February in Atlanta, Georgia. Generally not so cold, but a norther was blowing through, and temperatures plummeted.
He could hear conversation drifting up from the yard below, heated conversation, the hottest thing going in Atlanta. Generally, when the Scofield and Markham’s Gate City rolling mill was in full production, when the iron was pouring and the rolling mills rolling it out, when plate and bar and railroad iron was being loaded onto flatbeds in the siding, he would never have been able to hear something so quiet as a conversation three stories down. Not even a shouted conversation, as this one was.
But he could hear it now, because nothing was happening, no work being done. Prices were going up all over the Confederacy. Skilled men such as ironworkers were in great demand, and they knew it. The fact that their jobs kept them out of the army did not seem to impress them any more. They wanted higher wages, and just as Scofield came to expect from their ilk, they were not subtle about it.
He shook his head. He sighed. He could not make out all of the words, but he caught a few, mostly
The conversation below stopped abruptly. Scofield swiveled around, looked at the door beyond the empty outer office, wondered who would come through. He waited. Finally it opened. Frank Ouellette, haggard, defeated, came in, closed the door behind him with more force than necessary.
He walked into Scofield’s office without knocking. He flopped down in a chair. Scofield thought of the Yankees retreating after Manassas. They must have looked like old Frank.
“Well?” Scofield asked.
“They ain’t budging. Another ten cents a day, and they ain’t too happy with Confederate scrip no more.”
Scofield shook his head. The war was less than a year old. If the Confederacy lost, he wondered if it would be due to the Yankees’ fighting prowess or the greed of the Southern mechanics and laborers.
“I don’t know as we can do that…” Scofield said.
Ouellette shrugged. “I told ’em. They think you and Markham, and me, we live like damned kings, think we making money hand over fist here.”
The two men were silent for a moment, and then Scofield felt the first stirring of an idea. “I wonder if we might give them some little token, something that will inspire them to get back to work…”
“Such as?”
“Everyone’s worried about this here Confederate scrip. How’s about if we pay them-even give ’em a bonus-in specie. Gold. Ain’t a thing satisfies a greedy man like real gold.”
“Sure, but…” Ouellette began, paused, saw where Scofield was heading. “That fellow, wrote last month…”
“Exactly. Never did count what he sent, but I’m certain they’s enough to go around, a couple of times. That should get them all fired up for work.”
Ouellette nodded. It had been something of a shock, the day the package arrived. Gold in coins and an order for iron, preferably rolled out into gunboat iron, drilled for six bolts. Some rich lunatic building himself an ironclad.
They marveled, shook their heads, put the gold in the safe, set the order aside. The Confederate Army and Navy were desperate for milled iron. There was no time to fulfill an order for some civilian with big dreams in the naval line. Perhaps in a year or so, but not now.
“You never had any intention of filling that fella’s order,” Ouellette pointed out. “You just gonna hand out his gold and let him flap in the wind?”
“No, no…I can’t do that. Wish I could, but I can’t.” Scofield rummaged through a pile of papers in a basket on his desk, pulled out a letter from near the bottom of the heap. “We’ll start handing out gold to our malcontent workers there, and if that induces them to get back to work, then I reckon this…Robley Paine…gets the gunboat iron he’s asking for.”
38
– Stephen R. Mallory to President Jefferson Davis
They arrived back in Newport, weary, battered, wounded in mind and body. Bowater saw his men safe in barracks at the Gosport Naval Shipyard. Ten-thirty at night, he had finished his reports, oral and written, told his tale to Forrest and the others, been dismissed.
He wandered out of the shipyard, too torn up to sleep, or even to remain in one place. He walked the streets.
