Thieves Of Mercy

saw. There was something not right about the deck. The deck did not seem to be where it was supposed to be, did not seem to be the solid thing he recalled.

And then he realized that the deck was underwater, and as he did he saw Chief Engineer McFarland come hurrying over-wading over-the water up to his knees. He moved with the exaggerated swing of the arms and push of the legs that people do when their movement is impeded in that way.

“Captain, the pumps can’t keep up, sir!” the chief yelled and Stembel nodded. “Water’ll be up to the boilers soon, just when we’re getting head up steam! Son of a bitch!”

“Yes, Chief,” Stembel shouted over the noise, the unrelenting noise. “We’ll beach her!”

The chief nodded, turned back to his work. Stembel climbed back to the gun deck, and suddenly he could not stand to be there, down below, blind. He could not go back to the pilothouse with its little view ports. He had to see, had to be able to look around and understand the way things lay. Like Nelson on his quarterdeck.

He climbed another ladder onto the hurricane deck and stepped out into the morning, blinking and squinting. The smoke from the battle was swirling around the river, blinding and choking, but still it was considerably more bright and cool on the hurricane deck than it was below.

The Cincinnati was sinking, his ship was going down. He could feel the list in her as he crossed the hurricane deck to the pilothouse. Time to get her on the mud. But here was another Rebel, coming up fast, her bow gun firing, steaming up on the port quarter where only one of the Cincinnati ’s guns could reach her.

Fifty yards away, and someone from the Rebel boat shouted, “Haul down your flag and we will save you!”

The words were like a slap. Stembel did not know what to say. Haul down our flag? But then from somewhere aboard the Cincinnati, someone shouted back, “Our flag will go down when we do!”

Yes, yes, Stembel thought. He turned and hurried forward. He would direct the ship from outside the pilothouse, to the extent that he could direct a sinking ship that had no steering gear. Minie balls thudded into the wooden deck below his feet.

Then the Confederate ram struck, right on the port quarter. Stembel stumbled and fell forward as the Cincinnati ’s bow was driven under by the force of the impact. The Rebel went full astern, drawing its ram from the hole it had punched, and none of the ironclad’s guns would bear.

Stembel pulled himself to his feet and drew his side arm. He pulled the hammer back with his thumb, found a Rebel sharpshooter over the barrel, pulled the trigger. The gun jumped in his hand. He thumbed the trigger back again. He could feel his ship settling under him, wondered how much water they were in. He fired, thought of Nelson, so recklessly exposing himself. He wondered how different this moment was from Nelson’s. The smoke, the gunfire, the despair at the thought of defeat.

He fired again. He wondered if perhaps Nelson also felt that the romance of war belonged to an earlier age.

He felt a punch in his shoulder, a straight line of burning pain running right through his shoulder, right through his neck, right through his throat. He gasped, staggered, dropped the pistol, grabbed at his neck. It was hot and wet with blood. He could feel the ragged skin under his hand where the ball had exited, passed clean through him. The pistol clattered on the deck. Stembel fell to his knees. Everything seemed hazy, indistinct, but it might have been the smoke. He fell prone, laid out on the warm deck planks, and did not move.

ELEVEN

We started at the commodore’s signal at 6 A.M. and steamed round the point in front of Fort Pillow. The boat guarding the mortar boat immediately started into the current and ran for the shoal water on Plum Point. The General Bragg, Captain Leonard, which had the lead, ran rapidly at her, striking her a glancing blow on the starboard bow and receiving a broadside at 10 feet distance.

BRIGADIER GENERAL M. JEFF THOMPSON TO GENERAL G.T.BEAUREGARD

When your sanctuary becomes your hell, there’s no damned place left to run. …

Hieronymus Taylor pushed the insidious thought aside. Too much to consider, when he wanted to consider nothing.

He was sweating hard. Well over one hundred degrees in the engine room. The boiler doors were open and the lean bodies of the firemen and stokers stood out in silhouette against the glowing white and orange banks of coal. On the floor plates were piled steep hillocks of coal into which the firemen drove their shovels with a grating sound, flinging more and more coal into the insatiable fire, all to raise the beast steam from the waters, to keep it moving.

The coal bunkers to starboard and larboard were no more than half full, which was bad, since they were the only real protection the boilers had from rifled shells that could pierce the riverboat’s side as if it was wet paper. Taylor thought about the bargeful of coal that Sullivan had stolen in Vicksburg. They had left it tied to the dock at Fort Pillow. There had been no time to load it into the bunkers. All that potential protection, left behind.

Cottonclad… Taylor had laughed the first time he heard the term. Cottonclad… armor the ship with the softest, most flammable substance found in nature. Goddamned stupid peckerwoods. But he wasn’t laughing anymore. Iron in any form was not to be had in the Confederacy, for all practical purposes, while the Yankees spit out so much of it they might be paving the roads with gunboat plating, for all he knew.

But we got cotton down here, oh boy, yes, do we have cotton…

Taylor ’s eyes moved to the top of the boilers. The lever arms of the safety valves were lashed down with white cotton rope that stood out in the dim light, and he wondered if Guthrie had done that on purpose, so it would be obvious to everyone that he had lashed the valves, and done so without permission from the wheelhouse. If he had, it was a wasted effort, because Sullivan would not mind if the valves were lashed now. He would probably insist on it. Safety was not much of an issue that morning.

Taylor was at the throttle, one hand on the reversing lever. It was Guthrie’s station, of course, but Taylor had offered to take it, to free the engineer up so that he could run around like a windup toy, issuing unnecessary orders and generally annoying the engine room. Watching him as he flew from boilers to crankshaft to crossheads and back, Taylor realized that Guthrie was, at the heart of it, a smaller, shriller, quicker Mississippi Mike Sullivan. Mississippi Mike’s alabaster pard.

The sweat was slick under Taylor ’s hand. He let go of the throttle, wiped his hand on his shirt. His appetite had been good in the early morning. He’d eaten a big breakfast-eggs, grits with syrup, soft tack, bacon-but now it sat like a rock in his stomach. He was afraid he might puke.

The wheelhouse bells rang again, full speed, the third time that horse’s ass peckerwood Sullivan had rung for full speed. Taylor might have cursed out loud, but Guthrie beat him to it, cursing enough for both of them, enough for every engineer in the River Defense Fleet, for every engineer who had ever suffered the unforgivable torment of an idiot with his hand on the bell rope.

The General Page was going as fast as she was going to go upstream. Her steam pressure gauges were toying with fifteen pounds’ pressure. A lantern hung near the front of the boilers seemed to cast its light directly on the gauges, as if it was making a special point of letting Taylor know how close to the edge they were running things.

His breath was coming shallow and his head was feeling light. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply and he seemed to pull the anger further into him with every breath.

He heard the muffled bang of a heavy gun. Not the Page’s gun, a gun from another ship. The Yankees, no doubt. He wondered if they were up with the enemy, how many Yankees there were.

In all his seagoing career he had never been much interested in what went on above the main deck. All the nonsensical blather of captains and pilots about snags and chutes and shifting bars was of no interest to him. His world was valves and crossheads and connecting rods, and that was how he preferred it.

That had changed with his first fight. When they started shooting at Yankees, suddenly his interest in what took place topsides had taken an exponential leap. He had even found himself laying the bow gun in the fight at Hampton Roads. But for all that, it was always a relief to get back to the confines of his engine room, to stand amid