Thieves Of Mercy

EIGHTEEN

HAMLET:… I have heard, That guilty creatures sitting at a play

Have by the very cunning of the scene

Been struck so to the soul that presently

They have proclaimed their malefactions.

SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET, ACT II, SCENE 2

Samuel Bowater felt like Noah’s less-enlightened neighbor. It came to him as he stood contemplating the ship ways on which the Arkansas had once stood. Arkansas … Ark… The Arkansas was long gone, towed away downriver, like Noah’s boat carried off on the flood. And here he was, with an ark of his own, half built. He was desperately trying to finish her up, but the water was rising fast. The River Defense Fleet’s victory at Plum Point Bend had electrified Memphis. The sailors of the fleet were lauded as heroes, eulogized to the heavens, lionized in the press, boozed up for free in the taverns. Some of the better-known brothels even offered attractive discounts to veterans of that fight. And there were a lot of veterans. It seemed to Bowater that suddenly every third man in town was a sailor in the River Defense Fleet. The ships themselves would have sunk under the weight of all the swaggering ersatz river men who claimed association with that special branch of the army. He just hoped that all these fellows with their newfound enthusiasm for the war would be there when it came time to confront the Yankees again-and that time would come-but he suspected they would not. He suspected that when the iron was flying again they would all go back to being blacksmiths and barbers and bottle washers.

Samuel Bowater always found the praise of civilians tiresome, and he found the adulation in Memphis more tiresome than most. He blamed his poor attitude on the frustration of having his new command still in frame, her iron on the Arkansas side of the river, her engines towed away to God knows where, and the still-powerful Yankee fleet just a few miles upriver.

The bluebellies were weaker by two ironclads, that was true, but it would not be true for long. The first ship that the River Defense Fleet had struck, which turned out to be the USS Cincinnati, was still in the mud. Reconnaissance north of Plum Point Bend revealed that she had not moved from the place where she sank in water up to her casemate roof. But the Yankees were making prodigious efforts to raise her, and there was little doubt they would succeed, and then the Cincinnati would be towed away to Cairo, Illinois, for repair, and soon she would be fighting again.

The second ship that the Confederates had rammed, which the papers were saying was the Mound City, had been raised already and was already off to Cairo. And so the sinking of two ships, which, had they been Confederate, might have been the ruin of the fleet, was to the Yankees with all their extraordinary resources just a big inconvenience, no permanent setback.

The Yankees were weaker for the moment, but they were still there, and they still had powerful gunboats, and they would not be caught a second time with their pants around their ankles. And without surprise working for them, the River Defense Fleet would be murdered by those iron monsters. What was needed was a Confederate ironclad.

And that was the very thing that Bowater was driving himself to distraction trying to build.

He had allowed his men forty-eight hours to revel in the adulation of an adoring Memphis, and then back to work. On the morning the grace period was over, Bowater walked briskly the half mile from his hotel to the waterfront. The spring morning was warm, the walk invigorating, and he arrived at John Shirley’s yard at 7:50 with a glow of optimism, which was snuffed out as soon as he found that he was alone. He had ordered his men to report to the yard at eight o’clock, not a minute after. By 8:05 not one was there.

The former Yazoo Citys were quartered in various places around town. Bowater considered sending a boy to fetch them, but realized that would be pointless. They were not likely to be at their assigned quarters. More likely they were scattered like chaff through the bars, whorehouses, fetid back alleys, and jails of the town.

Bowater was just working up a good head of profanity when John Shirley stepped out of his office and over to the gate to greet him. “Captain, Captain, good to see you. Congratulations on your victory. You know I had not yet heard of it when we spoke the other day, and you didn’t say a thing about it, did you? Humility, it’s a damned important trait, I say, and I reckon you got it in spades. A man should take a power of pride in that kind of humility. Where are your men?”

“I was just asking myself the same.”

“Well, I should expect they’re a bit under the weather this morning. Whole town was celebrating last night. Good to have something to celebrate, ain’t been much good news of late.”

Ruffin Tanner appeared at ten minutes past, his tongue thick, his eyes bleary, one hand pressed tenderly to his temple, apologizing for his tardiness. His arm was in a sling and the sling was dirty and stained. The first of his men to show up, and he was hors de combat, useless in the shipyard. Bowater gave him a sharp order to see things laid along for setting the next plank in place, as best as he could with one arm. He was not in a charitable mood.

One by one the others straggled in, Bowater’s men and the dozen or so that Shirley had scraped up. They set to work under the constructor’s careful eye, shaping and steaming planks, fitting the square beams of the casemate, pounding drifts and trunnels, turning the pile of lumber on the ground into the ironclad Tennessee.

Bowater spent some time watching them, but there was little he could do, because he was no shipwright. So once he was satisfied that Shirley and his foremen knew their business and would keep the men at it, he commandeered a desk in Shirley’s office and began to write. Requisitions for ordnance and powder, requests that more sailors be transferred to his command, requests to recruit river men from the armies stationed nearby, payroll information, submissions for reimbursement for the men’s housing expenses, it was all terribly depressing.

After some time of that, Bowater was distracted by a sound like a footstep on the two wooden stairs leading up to the office door, a sound like a footstep but more sharp, wood knocking on wood. He looked up. The door swung open and Hieronymus Taylor made his way through, walking with a crutch, his leg bound up in a heavy wooden splint. Bowater watched the engineer hobble across the floor, struggling with the splint and the unfamiliar crutches. He did not offer to help. He knew Taylor better than that.

Taylor flopped down in a chair beside Bowater’s desk. “You could at least offer some goddamned help,” he said. The body was worse off, but the attitude was Hieronymus Taylor of old. They would not mention the violin. That was mutually understood.

“I am forgetting myself,” Bowater said. “And you the hero of Plum Point Bend. I’ve heard some mighty tall versions of your exploits.”

“Hell…” Taylor put a cigar in his mouth, then spit out a fleck of tobacco. His hands were trembling. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

“I cannot imagine that you are discharged from the hospital by your doctor’s orders,” Bowater said. “And from the looks of you, you would be best to be in bed.”

“Bed. If I stay abed they’ll find me agin.”

“Who?”

“All of them. The ol ladies with their proclamations and presentations, the damn schoolchil’n comin to cheer the wounded sailors up, the damn mayor and his claptrap. Like to make a body shoot himself rather than listen to all that horseshit.” He scraped a match on the desk, lit his cigar.

“I wonder if every attempted suicide gets that much attention.”

“Suicide?” Taylor took a big puff of his cigar. “That what you reckon I was doin?”

Bowater held up his hands in a gesture that said “I don’t know.”

“Suicide, hell. I’m a big hero, Cap’n.”