Glory In The Name

From up the road came the clomping of hooves on the hard-packed dirt. The men on the landing, as one, turned, looked, happy for some diversion.

A young man on a sorrel mare rode up, reined to a stop. “Mornin, Mr. Paine,” he said.

“Morning, Billy.”

Billy paused, as if he felt he should say more, but could think of nothing, and the moment became awkward. “Got a telegraph for ya.” Billy held out the note. Paine took it from him, unfolded it, read it in silence. Billy rode off.

“‘To Robley Paine,’” Paine read aloud from the paper. “‘From Stationmaster, Jackson, Mississippi. Sir, have received shipment eight hundred tons iron for you, stop. Please retrieve at earliest convenience, stop.’”

Paine looked up at Bowater, and there was a different look in his eye. In another man the look might have been triumph, but not in Paine. Paine seemed too far gone to appear triumphant over anything. “There is your ironclad, Lieutenant. It is on the siding in Jackson. Tomorrow we will go and fetch it.”

39

In conversations with the Secretary, I always have been under the impression that, for purposes of coast defense, he conceived that ironclad rams were the best vessels.

– Commander John M. Brooke, CSN

Robley Paine hunted wagons. He mounted his horse, rode the countryside north of Yazoo City, visited plantations he had first visited before he was old enough to walk. He spoke with fellow planters he had known since he was a boy.

They were polite. They kept their distance, did not invite him in. They had no wagons to lend.

Robley explained the situation. He had eight hundred tons of railroad iron, rolled and drilled, and another half ton of nuts and bolts, sitting on a railroad siding in Jackson. He needed wagons to haul it to the Yazoo River, to build his ironclad gunboat, to protect them, all of them, from the filthy hordes of shopkeepers and mechanics sweeping down from the north, and up from the south, closing in. He spoke emphatically and sometimes he caught himself speaking too loud, sometimes shouting.

The planters never took offense, which was the worst of it, as if it was pointless to be offended by the ravings of a madman. They nodded, shook their heads. “Not like I don’t know about them damned Yankees, Robley,” they would say. “My boy’s with Beauregard right now.” But they had no wagons, and they thought he was mad. He could see it in their eyes.

He rode all day, plantation to plantation, talked with his oldest friends, who treated him with the wariness with which one treats an unfamiliar dog. He got no wagons.

The next day he dispatched five of Bowater’s men with a local boy to lead them back to Paine Plantation to retrieve the three serviceable wagons in the barn. He told them there had been horses once, and there might still be, or perhaps not, he did not know. Robley continued his search, covering the plantations south of town.

There were no wagons to be had.

He found himself rubbing the butt of his Starr as he talked with his reluctant neighbors, found himself imagining how it would be to jerk the gun from his holster, take horses and wagons at gunpoint, frighten some cooperation into his fellow planters.

Once, riding along the empty roads from one house to the next, he thought he had done so. He stopped, tried to recall if he had used his gun on someone.

No… he concluded. No… He had only dreamed of it. It worried him some, that he could not always differentiate.

On the third day, near desperation, Paine hired three teamsters in Yazoo City, all that were to be had. The sailors returned from Paine Plantation with two wagons, eight horses, the worst of what had once been there, but all that was left. Like some pathetic parade they rolled south toward Jackson. Five wagons to move eight hundred tons of gunboat iron over forty miles of mediocre road. It was not a job that would be quickly done.

And all the while, every minute, Robley Paine felt the snake, squeezing, squeezing.

Samuel Bowater was happy to see Paine ride off mornings, felt his stomach fall when Paine returned after sundown. The whole thing-Yazoo City, the Yazoo River, the ugly weather, the feeling that he had been shunted off to the end of the earth and left there-it all made his mood bleak and desperate.

But to have Robley Paine watching over him, those sunken, crazy eyes boring into him, to field the inquiries delivered with no inflection, no sense of curiosity or companionship, as if he was a different species from Robley Paine and not worth any empathy, made him edgy and depressed. Robley Paine struck him as a man who, for whatever dark reason, no longer cared in the least for his own life or for anyone else’s. And if he had no care for life, then he certainly had no care for more mundane things, such as courtesy or any of the niceties that allowed men to coexist.

Robley Paine was not an easy man to be around, and so, when he left, Bowater was, if not happy, then at least less miserable.

He stood on the hurricane deck, in huddled conversation. The weather had moderated quite a bit, the cold north wind backing and dropping. The sun fought its way through high haze, and the temperature climbed to near fifty degrees.

“Very well…” Samuel said. “Mr. Polkey, what do you have to report?”

Artemus Polkey was one of three shipwrights for hire at Yazoo City. Somewhere in his fifties, grizzled, fat, he did not inspire a great deal of confidence. The two missing fingers on his left hand inspired even less. But of the three ship’s carpenters, Bowater judged him most competent, based on the necessarily brief interviews he had conducted. And so Artemus Polkey was hired to oversee the refit of the cotton-clad Yazoo River into an ironclad.

“Wellll…” Polkey drew the word out, worked the plug in his mouth, spit artfully over the side. “Her bottom ain’t too bad, an that there’s the chief of your concern. Seen a couple o’ planks is a bit punky, but ain’t nothin I’d worry about. Deck beams, carlings, clamps, it all looks good to me.”

Bowater nodded. “Good. So how do we make her an ironclad?”

“Wellll…” Polkey spit again. “Reckon we take all the goddamn superstructure off her, jest strip her right down to the gunnels, jest leave the weather deck and a big damn hole where the fidley was. Build us a casement along the whole length where the deckhouse is now. ’Bout eight foot high. Build her out of live oak, say, foot thick on the sides, foot and a half fore and aft bulkheads. Bolt that ol’ iron right onto that.”

“Can you do that? Do you have the men?”

“Ah, shit…ain’t talkin but four flat sides, like a cabin. I don’t need no shipwrights to do that. Hire house carpenters. Even hire out some darkies, know how to swing a hammer.”

“The sides of the casement cannot be vertical. They must be sloped, say at a thirty-five-degree angle.”

Polkey chewed some, nodded. “Makes things a bit harder, now, but we can do that.” Bowater was beginning to like the man.

“Good. Chief Taylor?”

Taylor wore his battered cap back on his head, his uniform frock coat unbuttoned over a stained and coal- dust-smeared shirt, pants glazed with dirt. Since the sinking of the Cape Fear he had not enjoyed the silent insubordination of clean clothing.

“Me and the ol’ Star of the Delta go way back,” he said.

“Did you serve on board her?” Bowater asked.

“No. No. Towed her a bunch, when she was broke down, which was damn near a weekly occurrence.”

Bowater frowned. He thought he was over the stab of nausea that followed bad news, but he realized he was not. “What is the condition of her machinery now?”

“Seems someone gone over it recently. Someone who knows his business, I’m pleased to say. Overall it ain’t so bad. Burgess and me, we got steam up in both boilers, got turns on both her engines and they held together. Reckon they will for some time more. They’s a power of things I could do. You jest let me know how much time I