Thieves Of Mercy

their approach to the Norvier. Molly removed the percussion caps from Newcomb’s pistol and handed it back to him. She kept the pepperbox in her hand, with her shawl draped over it. The three of them made their way to the wheelhouse.

Newcomb hailed the Norwegian man-of-war and asked permission to come alongside. After some confusion, which involved finding an English speaker aboard the Norwegian vessel, permission was granted.

Ten minutes later, Wendy and Molly stood on the Norvier’s white and perfectly ordered deck, in front of her gracious and flustered captain, while the dispatch boat, with smoke rolling from her stack, plowed a straight wake back toward Sewell’s Point. Wendy was surprised to see that the small former tug could move so fast.

“Forgive me, sir,” Molly said, speaking French again, but this time with a French accent. “We have had a terrible time, and wish to beg the assistance of a gentleman.”

FOURTEEN

Where all acted so handsomely it would be invidious to discriminate, and I will simply state that the captains and crews of this [River Defense] fleet deserve the confidence which has been reposed in them, and my officers and men acted, as they always have, bravely and obediently.

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

By the time they dragged Hieronymus Taylor back on board the General Page, the Battle of

Plum Point was over. Thirty minutes after the River Defense Fleet had steamed around the bend and into the startled faces of the Yankees, Captain James Montgomery, aboard the screw ram Little Rebel, ordered the recall flag run aloft, and reiterated the order with a series of blasts from his steam whistle.

Some of the Defense Fleet did not need recalling. The General Bragg, first of the fleet into the brawl, had had her tiller ropes cut by a lucky Yankee shell, and thus disabled she had drifted downstream and out of the fight. The General Price was thoroughly torn up, and though most of the damage had been to her superstructure, one shot to the supply pipes in the engine room had knocked her out as well.

The other vessels of the fleet, the Sumter, Van Dorn, General Page, Jeff Thompson, General Lovell, Beauregard, and Little Rebel, all

suffered damage to greater or lesser degrees, mostly lesser. For all the extraordinary amount of metal flying around, the casualties were light: the steward on the Van Dorn, W. W. Andrews, killed; third cook on the Bragg mortally wounded, and eight or ten more slightly wounded.

They left behind them a Yankee fleet that was much worse off than they were.

As Bowater helped lay Taylor easy on the side deck, someone up in the wheelhouse was spinning the General Page around, heading her downstream. Taylor cursed anyone who came into his line of sight, and Bowater guessed that cradling the engineer in his arms and cooing soothing words in his ear would be pointless, so he ignored the wounded man and looked out over the rail.

The river swept past like a panorama painting. The Union ironclads were still coming down, firing like mad, like some kind of prehistoric herd, wreathed in their own smoke as they steamed downriver. Bowater recalled reading how Blackbeard the Pirate used to do that-burn a slow match in his beard to make himself look like some demon from hell. Well, here they were, Satan’s war machines, the genuine article, but they were too late.

You’d think Satan would know to keep his steam up, Bowater thought.

The ironclad they had struck, the one from which they had rescued Taylor, was nearly sunk. She sat at an odd angle, her bow near the shore, the water lapping over the bottom edge of her casement, and Bowater was certain she was sitting in the mud. A perfectly designed machine for river combat, but the River Defense Fleet had found her Achilles’ heel, her unarmored wooden hull, four feet below the waterline.

The Page continued her left wheel, and the western side of Plum Point Bend came into view. From aft, the thirty-two-pound stern gun fired. Bowater felt the deck shudder underfoot. The paddle wheeler had never been intended to absorb that kind of shock.

“Ahhh!” Taylor shouted. He was writhing a bit now, and his hand was gripping his thigh, as close as he could get, or dared get, to grabbing at his wounded calf. The bone was broken, Bowater was sure. The leg was not quite straight.

“All right, stand aside, you sons of whores! Shove!” The cook, Doc, pushed his way through. A short man, with a thick yellow beard and blond hair tied back, he looked like an ill-tempered elf. He was carrying lengths of wood and bandages. He was still wearing his apron.

He knelt beside Taylor, chewed his plug, looked over the leg while Taylor glared up at him.

“Leave me alone, you filthy son of a bitch!” Taylor shouted, but Doc did not acknowledge him.

“I said leave me alone!” Taylor reached up, grabbed a handful of Doc’s apron, but the former cook, now surgeon, plucked his hand off as if it were a child’s. “Aw, shut up,” he said. He nodded to some of the riverboat men standing over them. The river rats knelt down, grabbed hold of Taylor ’s arms, and held them through a storm of obscenity, while Doc went to work setting and splinting the leg.

Ruffin Tanner was sitting on a crate a ways aft, leaning against the deckhouse side. Bowater went over to him. “Is the arm bad?”

Tanner looked up. “Naw. Torn up the meat some, but I don’t reckon it hit bone. Bullet went clean on through.”

“That’s lucky. Comparatively speaking.” Bowater helped him off with his coat, fetched some bandages from Doc, who gave them grudgingly, and bound Tanner’s arm. He left him there, went forward to check on Taylor.

He stepped up to the group of men watching Doc do his work, and Mississippi Mike’s big arm swung around and gave Bowater the breathtaking bonhomie smack. “Come on, Captain, let’s get back to the wheelhouse!”

Bowater did not care to follow Sullivan to the wheelhouse, but neither did he care to listen to Taylor curse and shout in pain, and he certainly did not care to have anyone think that the job they were doing on Taylor set his teeth on edge-which it did-so he followed Sullivan up the ladder to the hurricane deck.

Buford Tarbox was in the wheelhouse, and he nodded and spit in the direction of the spittoon when Sullivan and Bowater came in. “Lookee here,” he said, nodding toward the starboard bow.

They were just passing the first of the ironclads, the one that had been so savagely mauled by the Bragg and the Price. She had crawled away from the fight and found a mudbank on which to die, sinking into the brown river.

She was motionless, dead, no smoke coming from her chimneys, her boilers ten feet underwater. The water was well up over her casement and lapping over her hurricane deck. The chimneys seemed to rise straight up out of the river, along with her three tall flagstaffs, forward, amidships, and aft. The wheelhouse and the centerline paddle-wheel box, rising above the hurricane deck, formed two small iron islands onto which the shipwrecked sailors had scrambled-dozens of blue-clad river sailors perched on those two dry places above the river. It was a ridiculous sight, and Bowater smiled.

Mississippi Mike roared. “Look at them stupid Yankees! Damn me if they don’t look like a bunch of damned turkeys on a damn corncrib!” He laughed until he doubled over, a laugh that Bowater was certain carried across the water to the miserable men on the sunken ironclad, and it must have been salt in their wounds.

Rub it in, Sullivan, rub it in, Bowater thought with delight, and he wondered when he had become so uncharitable. Was it the river, the war? Age? There had been a decency about him once, a magnanimous spirit that extended to friend and enemy alike. An officer and a gentleman. It was the spirit embodied in that phrase, a phrase he had once held as close and dear as his belief in a benevolent God.

But he was changing, he felt it. This was a different kind of war they were fighting, an all-out war. Just a month before, at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, the Confederates had attacked and overwhelmed the Yankees, only to be pushed back again, at a staggering cost to both sides. The bloodshed that day- such unprecedented bloodshed-changed everything. This was not knights of old on proud steeds. This was slaughter.