Glory In The Name

He knew where he would end up.

He approached the old house quietly. No lights burning. Behind it, within the tended yard, he could see the carriage house. A light shone in the window. Late, but not that late, and Samuel did not care much for convention at that moment.

He hopped the picket fence, landed soft on the grass, crossed to the carriage house. He rapped on the door, realized as he did that he might scare her to death, that she might not answer. But he heard soft footsteps across the floor, and the door opened.

Wendy was there, the light from a candle diffused through her long, dark hair. She was wearing a loose night dress, holding a book. Bowater saw a sudden flash of fear in her face, which softened to recognition, concern.

“Samuel…I thought it was my aunt. Dear God, what has happened to you?”

She opened the door wider, stepped aside, and he stepped in, looked around without seeing anything. “I have been in a fight, Wendy…” he said.

She put the book down, stepped up to him, wrapped her arms around him. For a long moment they embraced, and then Samuel pushed her gently back. “Do you have a canvas?” he asked. “Might I borrow some paints?”

Wendy nodded, stepped away. She picked up a small canvas, set it on the easel that stood in the corner, offered him her paint set, the one he knew so well.

He shed his frock coat and hat, let them fall on the floor, rolled up his sleeves. He stared at the canvas, let the picture form on the white surface, let his mind create it so that his hands had only to fill in the places where paint had to go. He took up a pencil, slashed a few lines across the surface, general outlines. He dabbed paint on the palette, began to work with a wide brush.

Wendy pulled up a stool and sat beside him and a little back and watched silently as the picture emerged. Samuel was hardly aware of the time passing, minutes, then hours, as the foredeck of the Cape Fear grew out of the white field before him, the gray skies and brown water, the sharp points of muzzle flash. And on one edge, dimly seen, Lieutenant Harwell’s face in the instant of death.

Samuel felt himself a part of the scene on the canvas as much as he had been a part of the real fight, he felt like a participant in the picture, painting from within the scene. He felt the tears roll down his cheeks as he rendered not the horror of the thing, but the suggestion of that horror, which was more frightening by half.

Three hours, four hours he worked, letting it all come out through his brush. Wendy sat on a small fainting couch, fell asleep with her head on her arm, and Bowater painted on.

At last he stepped back, set the brush down. Wendy came awake, as if she sensed this was the moment. She stood, joined him.

“That’s it…” she whispered, as if she knew what it was he was trying to render. “That is it exactly.”

Bowater looked long and hard at the canvas, and for the first time he felt a mesh, a perfect fit, between what he saw in his head and what he saw created in paint.

He turned away from the painting, hoped he had managed to get what was in his head out and plant it permanently on canvas. He ran his hands around Wendy’s waist, pulled her near. He could feel her smooth skin through the thin material of her night dress. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulled his head down to hers, and kissed him, and he kissed her back, with a desperate urgency.

Wendy cocked her head aside and Samuel ran his lips down her long neck, buried his face in her hair, kissed the soft place behind her ear. She pushed him away, took the top button of his shirt in her fingers, unbuttoned that, and the next and the next, and then eased the shirt over his head. She ran her hands over his chest. They felt cool and small against his skin. He ran a finger down her cheek, down her neck, took up the end of the tie that held her night dress up, tugged it free.

The garment fell open and Wendy shrugged it off, let it fall to the floor. The light of the three candles by which Bowater had been painting played over her white skin, the curves of her thighs and back and hips, and Bowater traced them with his hands. He stepped out of his shoes, let his trousers fall to the floor, led her over to the small bed in the corner.

He lay down with her, half on top, let the feel of her skin against his overwhelm him. She was beautiful, loving, warm. She smelled of violet water and soap. She smelled alive and good and like everything that the fight at Elizabeth City was not, and Samuel tried to envelop himself with her, to become a part of her and let her drive away everything else.

They made love, desperate and slow, consuming one another, and when it was over Samuel was spent in every way he could be, and he slept in a way he had thought he would never sleep again.

The weeks wound past. The Cape Fears lived at the Gosport Naval Shipyard and they waited. Bowater waited with them by day, raced to be with Wendy Atkins when his few duties were done.

They waited for orders. They waited for news from the Western Rivers. They waited for the Yankees to come overland from Albemarle Sound and take the shipyard back. They waited to see if the CSS Virginia would roll over like a dead whale, jam in the dry dock, or sink.

February 13, 1862. Float test for the nearly complete ironclad. For no reason other than curiosity, Samuel Bowater and Hieronymus Taylor stood near the edge of the dry dock and watched the water creeping up, lapping over the twenty-two-foot-deep hull of the former United States steam frigate Merrimack, now the Confederate States ironclad Virginia.

Bowater stared down into the water swirling into the dry dock. He recalled the night he was down there, looking for the bitter end of a burning fuse, the cold water knocking him around. With the Cape Fear they had assisted in getting the old wreck up and into the dry dock, had witnessed nearly every inch of her transformation from burned-out hulk to modern war machine.

He ran his eyes over her ugly, boxy shape. Merrimack had been no sleek clipper ship, but still she had had some elegance to her. There was nothing lovely about the ironclad. She was all function. But that was all right with Bowater, because he saw no loveliness in war, and he no longer felt that aesthetics had a place aboard the engines of war.

The water came up and up and the shoring dropped away and finally the Virginia floated free. Around the dry dock there was a shared sense of tension, like the shared sense of fear prior to combat. No one cheered, no one spoke loud. There was an undercurrent of muttering as several hundred navy men expressed several hundred opinions.

“Well, damn…” Taylor said, soft. “She didn’t roll over after all. I’ll be damned…”

Three days after that, the dry dock was flooded again, the gates opened, and the Virginia was christened and floated out into the Elizabeth River.

It was the most solemn christening that Bowater had ever attended. No political speeches, no flags, banners, fireworks, music. It was a quiet, thoughtful christening by professional navy men, who understood the profundity of the moment, who understood the change in their world that the 275-foot iron-skinned monster represented.

They watched in silence as CSS Virginia moved slowly out into the stream, pulled by silent warps. It made Bowater wish that no one other than professional navy men ever be allowed to any christening.

Fitting out, provisioning, began in earnest, and an air of anticipation blew through the shipyard, lifting the gloom of winter and past defeats. And so it was with mixed emotions that Samuel Bowater reported to Commander Forrest for orders he guessed would take them away before the iron monster could sally forth.

He was right.

They were on a train the next morning: Bowater, Taylor, Tanner, Seth Williams, Eustis Babcock, Dick Merrow, Harry McNelly, all of the surviving members of the Cape Fear’s crew, transferred bodily to a new vessel, rattling along over a thousand miles of mediocre, terrible, and sometimes nonexistent railroad, to a riverport town that only a few of them had ever heard of.

Some of the men had friends, wives, girlfriends on the platform to see them off. Wendy arrived. She had two baskets with bread, cheese, cold roast beef, wine. She gave one to Hieronymus Taylor, who was more than a little surprised to see her there, and to Samuel Bowater, who was surprised she had brought a basket for the chief.

“Hieronymus and I met once, before that night at the concert,” she said. “I will tell you the particulars someday. Oh, don’t look like that, it was nothing at all.”

They held one another. They kissed. Neither cried. Neither thought of the likelihood of that being their last embrace, on a windswept, sooty railroad platform in Norfolk, Virginia.