Thieves Of Mercy

Gentlemen of honor, fighting in honorable fashion, Bowater thought. Perhaps that very idea is as dead as the knights themselves. This war seemed to bring with it a kind of savagery that he had never known, certainly not on the ordered quarterdecks of the old navy, showing the flag around the world.

Perhaps I have never really known war. Certainly the Mexican War had never been anything like this, not in the naval line.

Useless thought. He pushed his damned philosophizing aside and looked astern. The gunners aft were still firing away with the thirty-two pounder, but they were leaving the Yankees upstream, and the Yankees were making no effort to pursue. Astern of the Page, last in the Confederate line, came the Van Dorn, her superstructure badly torn up, her upper works showing a dozen great gaping holes fringed with shattered wood, but the black smoke pouring from her chimneys showed that her engines and boilers were unharmed. The sound of her stern gun, giving the Yankees one last farewell, was proof that the fight was not out of her.

They steamed around Plum Point Bend, steamed under the guns of Fort Pillow, came to an anchor. From the flagship Little Rebel, one hundred yards away, they heard, clear as a gunshot, the sound of cheering, and one after another, the crews on board all the River Defense Fleet ships took it up, shouting with abandon, letting the tension of the morning, the exhilaration, the fear, the excess of energy, pour out of their throats and up to the heavens.

Bowater did not cheer, of course. He had not abandoned so much of his dignity or sense of decorum that he would yell like, say, Mississippi Mike Sullivan, who was whooping like a Red Indian, throwing his hat in the air, pounding one and all on the back, firing his pistol at the sky, and generally behaving in an appalling manner.

Bowater stood with his back to the texas so that Sullivan would not have the clearance to give him another of his backslaps. He watched the celebration with the same mixture of horror and amusement with which he might view a minstrel show or some other crass entertainment. But it was all right. It was good. Good for the men to get that energy out. They deserved it. They had done damned good work that morning. Like the fight at Elizabeth City the previous February, it was one of the only battles so far in that war that could be called a fleet action. Unlike Elizabeth City, this time the Confederates won.

“Captain Bowater!” a breathless Mike Sullivan said as he staggered over, “I surely do hope you and your boys will join us river rats in a little celebration when we gets back to Memphis. Oh, we’re gonna tear it up good, you can depend on it!”

Bowater nodded. It was a scene he could happily miss, and one he would prefer his men to miss as well. But that, he realized, might be asking too much. His men had fought as hard as the riverboat men, and they would enjoy the bacchanal as much, and it would do morale no good for him to impose his sense of propriety on them.

“My men will join you, I’ve no doubt. But I have other business to attend to.”

“What-all you got to do that takes precedence over our celebrations?”

“I must get to Shirley’s yard,” Bowater said, and he allowed the irony in his voice free reign. “I must inspect my ironclad.”

The Tennessee was an ironclad in the same way that an assemblage of giant bones was an iguanodon. The basic structure was there, complete enough to suggest the final form of the awesome and powerful beast, but the chances of ever fleshing it out complete and bringing it to life were pretty slim.

Bowater stood at the gate, surveyed the shipyard. The General Page and the other ships of the River Defense Fleet that had suffered damage in the fight the day before had returned to Memphis for repairs. Bowater had walked to the yard from the hospital, after having personally seen to Hieronymus Taylor’s admission, and watching the doctor drip laudanum on his tongue, though by then the engineer was pretty well played out.

There had not been much activity in the shipyard the first time Bowater saw it, but that had changed in the three days he had been gone. There were a hundred men at least, swarming over the yard and over the Arkansas , the more complete ship. Men running hawsers from the ironclad to the shore, men greasing the ways, men pounding wedges under the launching cradle. It was like the preparations for a wedding, and the Arkansas was the bride, and poor Tennessee the bridesmaid, shoved to the background and ignored.

Bowater hefted his seabag up on his shoulder, lifted his carpetbag, stepped across the trampled earth of the shipyard.

He set his gear on a pile of fresh-cut oak beams and, ignoring the chaos surrounding the Arkansas , walked slowly around his own ship, running a professional eye over her, and mostly liking what he saw. She was framed in oak, her planking yellow pine, her scantlings a respectable thickness. With twin screws and her relatively small size she would be nimble, by ironclad standards. He envisioned the iron ram bolted to her bow, the great damage he could do with that weapon, the heavy nine-inch guns sending their shells through the Yankees’ wooden walls.

He walked around her bow, looked at the run of her hull, and liked the shape of her wetted surface. He liked the low profile of her hull, the elegant round fantail, reminiscent of a tugboat.

And then a voice, louder than the rest, broke through Bowater’s reverie, a strident order: “Hurry it along there, you lazy bastards, the goddamn Yankees’ll be here, time you get that hawser rigged!”

The goddamned Yankees’ll be here… Bowater looked up, right up through the unplanked frames of his ship, right up at the blue sky above. They were working like mad to save the one ship that could be saved, and that was not the Tennessee. They might have beaten the Yankees at Plum Point Bend, but they could not hold them back forever. Here he was getting all moony about a ship he might never command, like falling in love with a woman in the last stages of consumption.

A quiet seemed to settle over the yard, which Bowater took to presage some new turn of events. He took his eyes off his own ship, stepped around her stern, stood in the shade of her partially planked-up fantail. The Arkansas was ready to go.

Men were standing on the foredeck and fantail, preparing for the ride down. More men were clustered around the launch cradle, sledgehammers in hand. A small man with a long black beard and a stovepipe hat that added six inches to his otherwise unimpressive height was flying from one place to another, seeing that all was in readiness, like a little girl setting up her dolls for a tea party.

John Shirley, Bowater thought, the ironclads’ builder. He seemed to know it intuitively, though he had never seen the man.

When all hands were at their stations, the man in the stovepipe climbed aboard as well. From the foredeck he shouted, “All right, let her go!”

The sledgehammers fell on the wedges, the air was filled with their pounding. And then the ironclad gave a little jerk and the hammers stopped and the men stood clear, and silent as a winter morning, the one-hundred- and-sixty-five-foot ship slid down the ways. She moved slowly at first, no faster than a man might walk on a casual stroll, but her speed built, faster and faster, an exponential climb with each foot she slid, until she was moving at a frightening speed when she parted the river with her rudder and sternpost, and floated free.

The Arkansas entered her native element with never a sound, from the last ringing hammer blow to the first swoosh of water closing around her hull.

No one cheered. No band broke into patriotic airs. For several moments no one even spoke. A ship launching, like a wedding or a birth, was supposed to be a time of optimism, a moment when the vessel’s full potential lay before her, when she was all newness and perfection and had yet to be tried in combat or at sea, before there was an opportunity for her to be found wanting.

But this launching was not like that, because Arkansas was launched in desperation, launched before her time.

Despair thy charm, Bowater thought, and let the angel whom thou still hast served tell thee, Arkansas was from her mother’s womb untimely ripped. Her builders had slid her into the water not because she was nearly ready to go forth and fulfill her destiny, but because they had to get her the hell away in the face of an encroaching enemy. She would not steam proudly from the dock to fight the Yankees, she would be towed away to a place where she would be safe from them, followed by barges loaded with the rest of her, the parts they had not had time to assemble.