Thieves Of Mercy

the perfect organization and pure logic of the machine.

Another gun went off, and immediately another, and a shell ripped through the superstructure above, blowing a hole through the fidley, missing the walking beam’s A-frame by a few feet, no more.

“Shit!” Taylor shouted the word so loud that a few heads turned. “Son of a bitch…” he said, lower. He could feel his heart in his chest, banging away at twenty times the speed of the engine behind him. His breath was coming shallowly again.

Guthrie was hovering in front of him, grinning. “That there is what you call a Yankee forced air ventilator! Forced it right through the goddamn fidley! Sum bitch, them kangaroos nearly took out the walking beam! Reason a walking beam got no place on a fighting ship. You all right, Taylor?”

Taylor gulped air. “Yeah, yeah, I’m all right.”

“Really? You look like a pile of horseshit.”

Another shell hit, farther forward, boiler deck level, Taylor guessed. Some low grunting noise escaped his lips. Guthrie turned back to him.

“Think I ate something for breakfast didn’t agree with me.”

“Didn’t agree with you? Hell, it looks like it hated your god-damned immortal soul!”

“Look, Guthrie,” Taylor was talking without thinking, “I got to get topside, get some air, or I swear I’ll puke all over the fuckin floor plates.”

“Yeah, yeah, go on,” Guthrie said, taking Taylor ’s place at the throttles as Taylor stood awkwardly, bent partway over. There was a note in Guthrie’s voice that Taylor did not like, as if, in Guthrie’s opinion, going on deck was not much different from going over to the Yankees. Taylor knew Guthrie felt that way because he would have felt the same.

He tucked that worry away, knew it would bother him later, but he did not care at the moment. Now that he had stood, had made his excuse, he could think of nothing but getting out of that engine room, away from the boilers and the gauges and the damned white rope on the safety valves.

He climbed up the ladder, moving faster with every rung, threw open the door to the fidley, and stepped out onto the main deck, starboard side. He put two hands on the rail, looked out over the river. The Van Dorn was blowing holes in the side of a mortar boat tied to the bank, while the mortar boat was lobbing shells over the top of the Van Dorn to drop on the River Defense boats farther out. But Taylor did not really care.

He had thought, going up the ladder, that his first act on deck would be to puke over the side, and he hoped someone would see him, since that would lend credence to the idea that he had got hold of a bad side of bacon. But once he stepped through the door, into the relative fresh and cool air, he felt suddenly renewed, newborn, strong and able. His stomach pains eased, he felt the light breeze cool the sweat on his forehead and his drenched shirt. He breathed deeply for the first time in an hour.

He was angry now. His body and his mind were betraying him, his unmanageable fear stripping him of the very thing that he was. The engine room was where he should be, but his traitorous self had driven him out. There was nothing more unforgivable than betrayal. What did you do when you caught yourself betraying yourself?

Great God almighty, I’m scared, he thought. There, the word was out at last, free floating in his mind, at least, and probably in Guthrie’s mind too, and that son of a bitch Bowater’s. Bowater, he was certain, would never comprehend such a thing as what Taylor was suffering. You had to be a human being with human feeling to get yourself in the position Taylor was in, and he doubted Bowater qualified on either count. Ice cold son of a bitch…

Taylor was getting more angry, now that he was no longer standing in the presence of the beast, the beast that had seared the skin clean off of James Burgess and left him a horrible writing thing on the deck plates, screaming for death to take him, and Hieronymus Taylor appointed the angel of mercy with a double-barreled shotgun.

In the engine room he did not feel anger, because the other thing was so powerful, but up on the main deck, in the sunshine, it was only anger. He made his way forward, stepped around the forward end of the deckhouse just as the Page’s bow gun was going off. He watched the gun slam back, the river and the shore and the Yankees lost behind the gray cloud of smoke from the muzzle.

The General Page steamed straight into the cloud, the smoke whipped aft and engulfed Taylor, and then the ship broke out into the blue sky and Taylor could see the lay of things.

The Yankees were coming downriver, casting off from the bank, steaming to the aid of the mortar boat. The closest of the ironclad gunboats was just a few hundred yards upriver, down-bound, stern first, and firing like mad, guns going off from her broadside and stern gun ports. She was directly ahead, and Sullivan seemed to be making to ram her. Taylor pressed his lips together. He wanted Sullivan to slam the ship into the bastard, really hit her good.

He heard gunfire to larboard, and in the same instant the side of the deckhouse seemed to explode, a shower of splinters and shattered wood blown out over the water. Taylor shielded his face with his arm as sundry bits of debris bounced off of him. He raced forward, looked off the larboard side. There was a Yankee gunboat, one hundred feet off; he had not even known it. She was lashing out in her death throes. Taylor could see she was listing, limping for shallow water, the crew spilling out of the casement onto the hurricane deck as their vessel sank under them.

“Die, you son of a whore!” Taylor shouted at the gunboat. He ran forward to the bow where the gun crew were running the big gun out again. Buford Tarbox was captain of the gun, the crew made up of the riverboat men, but also the former Yazoo Rivers, his shipmates, joining in with the General Pages. Ruffin Tanner was handling the swab, and he and Taylor nodded their greeting. Tanner’s face was smeared black with powder smoke and his shirt was torn, a bloody gash visible though the rent cloth, but not enough to slow him down, apparently.

They were closing fast with the ironclad, but not as fast as the Van Dorn, which had turned its attention from the mortar boat to the new Yankee threat coming downriver. The Van Dorn was crossing over from the eastern shore, crossing the Page’s bow, making a ramming run at the iron gunboat.

“Get clear, you bastard!” Taylor shouted. “Stand off!” He waved his arm frantically, trying to get the Van Dorn to clear the way for them. He felt a need like great hunger to have the Page drive her ram into the Yankee. He wanted to get right up with the blue-belly sons of bitches and start killing them, kill them as fast as he could.

“Get clear, for the love of God!”

There was no chance he could be heard aboard the Van Dorn, and no chance he would be obeyed if he were. He knew it. He could not keep from yelling. Some of the gun crew took up the shouting, yelling with him, waving their arms. Some shook their heads at the display.

“Run out!” Tarbox yelled. In place of his slouch hat he now wore a gray kepi he had picked up somewhere.

The men at the gun tackles leaned into the pull, the awkward gun carriage rolled forward. The ironclad was filling the air with shot, shells screaming past. Taylor could feel the concussion of her cannon in the air and in the Page’s deck. He saw a respectable section of the Van Dorn’s deckhouse torn clean away, but she did not pause in her headlong rush to be the first to impale the Yankee.

“Stand clear!” Tarbox yanked the lanyard. The gun went off with a terrific blast, hurling inboard, blanketing everything in the cloud of smoke. Taylor felt the deck jerk under him, shudder as if they had hit a rock. It felt good, revitalizing. He relished the nearness of death, Yankee death, his death perhaps, a clean death from a bullet. He was not afraid.

The Page plowed through her own gun smoke and the scene opened up again, though now the haze hung so thick it was like steaming in a light fog. Visibility was perhaps two hundred yards through the smoke.

The Yankee was still under their bow, the distance closing fast, but now the Van Dorn was on her, churning up the last fifty feet. The Yankee gunboat turned hard, swinging her bow away from the ram, and an instant later the Van Dorn struck. Taylor could see the ironclad roll and twist with the impact, he saw the Van Dorn shudder and pause as her submerged iron ram pierced the wooden hull of the ironclad and kept on going. But the Confederates had struck at an angle, only a glancing blow, and not the bone-crunching right-angle impact they had hoped for.