Thieves Of Mercy

himself to open a paint set, not then. Such self-indulgence was not in his nature.

To the north, hidden by the humps of land and the wild turns of the Mississippi River, the first Union mortar of the day fired with a faint, dull thud. Bowater watched the black streak of the shell against robin’s-egg blue, watched it arc neatly into Fort Pillow just to the south and go off with a flash and a sharp crack. Just as they had done to the forts below New Orleans, the Union mortars were pounding away at Fort Pillow, and with equally indifferent results.

Fort Pillow was in grave danger, to be sure, but not from the Union mortars.

Nine days before, on the twenty-fifth of May, General P. G. T. Beauregard’s seventy-thousand-man army, crippled by dysentery and typhoid and still recovering from their wounds at Shiloh, had abandoned Corinth, Mississippi, in the face of the Union forces creeping toward them. The Confederate line moved fifty miles south, to Tupelo. Fort Pillow, eighty miles west of Corinth, was left flapping in the breeze. The Union gunboats might not dare to face the fort’s artillery, but the Union Army would have little difficulty in sweeping over their defenses in a land assault.

The Federals did not know it yet, but Fort Pillow would soon be theirs. And then it was only the River Defense Fleet between them and Memphis.

And Bowater and Sullivan continued their strange dance.

“Now, Cap’n,” Sullivan said, leaning on the rail, trying to meet Bowater’s eyes as Bowater drank his coffee, stared out over the water, and tried to ignore him. “Comes a time a fella gots to face the truth. Even if ya do git yer boat built, git her planked up and ironclad an all, you ain’t got no engines. If ya ain’t got engines, ya don’t need no engineer.”

This was the one point on which Mississippi Mike was persistent. He had given up his hope of snatching Bowater’s men, but he was still agitating for Hieronymus Taylor, as if Taylor were a chattel slave for Bowater to dispose of as he pleased.

“Ask him yourself,” Bowater said. “I have no authority over his warrant.” Taylor, much improved over the past weeks, had actually accompanied them on this trip. If Bowater took a few steps forward and leaned over the rail he would be able to see the engineer up at the bow, sitting on one of the bollards, his leg, bound in a lighter splint now, thrust out before him.

“Ah, come on now, Cap’n,” Sullivan said. “I can’t go poachin in another man’s engine room, it ain’t right. It’d be like me askin yer sister to marry, without I asked yer pa first.”

Bowater found that analogy particularly revolting. “Oh, I see. That’s why you don’t ask him yourself. And here I thought it was because you know Taylor wouldn’t sail with you even if the fate of the Confederacy depended on it.”

“Taylor’s pleased to make like he don’t care fer me. It’s his way. Not like the kind of worshipfulness he shows you…”

Bowater ignored the irony. “You have an engineer.”

“Call that little skunk an engineer? Know what he done this mornin? I ring down three bells, he tells me he ain’t got the steam. Ain’t got the steam, my Royal Bengal. So I jest goes right down to the engine room, jest to have a look-see. He got so much god-damned steam he’s blowin it through. Load of horseshit. And you’d think I walked in on his weddin night, the way he’s screamin about me goin down ta the engine room, like I ain’t got no right to be down there. Come at me with a wrench and I laid him out good.”

Sullivan grew madder and madder as he told the story, his normal flip attitude deserting him, and Bowater felt a genuine spark of empathy. He had had run-ins enough with engineers over the course of his career. But always the strict discipline and order of the United States Navy had prevented the black gang from running amuck. The River Defense Fleet enjoyed no such discipline or order.

Taylor was a pain in the Royal Bengal, to be sure, but he was also an extraordinary engineer. Nothing in his engine room was ever in disrepair. And while Bowater suspected that Taylor had, in the past, flanked him with that “ain’t got enough steam” bit, the instances were few, and never at a critical time. None of that could be said of Spence Guthrie.

Bowater sympathized with Sullivan. But he would not give him Taylor.

“Cap’n, would you jest talk to Taylor, then? See if he don’t want to sail with us? I’ll put that peckerwood Guthrie on the beach in a second.”

From below them, as if it were rising from the deck, came a sound-part shriek, part triumphant shout, part cry of wounded pride-a noise that could only come from the throat of Spence Guthrie.

“Sullivan, you bastard, I knew you was tryin to git me off this boat!”

They still could not see him-he was on the side deck right under their feet. Bowater wondered how long he had been standing there listening, if he had crept up there for just that purpose.

Now they could hear his feet clapping on the deck boards as he ran forward, raced up the stairs, made a fast walking charge across the hurricane deck to where they stood, his arm held out straight, an accusatory finger like a lance pointing at Sullivan.

“I knew you was plottin agin me, you fat son of a bitch, and now I gots my proof!” Guthrie’s skin was very white and the black smudges of coal dust stood out vividly. His hair made his head look like a porcupine that had suffered some internal explosion, his scraggly beard like an afterthought. It was hard to imagine what color his shirt and pants had originally been.

“Git the hell off this deck, you little bastard, or I’ll kick you clean down to the boiler room,” Sullivan growled. It was the first time Bowater could recall seeing Sullivan, genuinely angry-redfaced, eye-bulging, fist-balled angry. He had seen Mississippi Mike get punched, kicked, threatened with knives, shot at, jumped by a mob, arrested, seen chairs broken over his head, but he had never, in all that, actually seen him get seriously angry. Until now. And it was not pretty.

But Guthrie was angry too, angry enough to be oblivious to the clear and present danger that a furious Mike Sullivan represented. “You the one gonna leave this here boat, Sullivan. Gonna leave her in a pine box, you hear? Hit me when I ain’t lookin, like you done this mornin, I’ll teach you, you son of a bitch.”

“You will, huh?” Sullivan stepped away from the rail, made fighting room around himself, pushed up his sleeves. He towered over Spence Guthrie, weighed as much as two of him, but Guthrie was undeterred. He stepped back as well. A few more men appeared on the hurricane deck. Bowater saw Hieronymus Taylor clomping awkwardly up the ladder at the forward end. Buford Tarbox stepped out of the pilothouse, leaned on the side, cheroot in mouth.

Bowater did not think this would provide much entertainment. How long did they think Guthrie could stand up to the ursine Mississippi Mike, going slug for slug?

And then the knives came out.

Charles Ellet Jr., steaming down the Mississippi River in the ram Queen of the West, felt like Agamemnon of old. Agamemnon, playing the utter fool at Troy. Ellet, in his former life, was a civil engineer, and had been for many years. He was not a young man. Early in the war he had come up with an idea for fitting out fast steam vessels as rams that could dash at an enemy vessel and sink it faster than it could be sunk with gunfire. He had been pushing the idea for almost as long as the war had been going on. He went first to the navy, but the navy showed no interest in his ideas, so he took them to the War Department. The War Department was not very enthusiastic either. But then, on the eighth of March, 1862, the Confederate steamer Virginia demonstrated to a skeptical world just how effective a steam ram could be. Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, was ready to listen to Charles Ellet Jr. So now he was Colonel Charles Ellet, United States Army, in command of an odd assortment of nine army ram vessels, with little in common save for their strengthened bows, the wooden bulwarks protecting their boilers, and the built-up iron rams bolted to their stems. Urged on by Stanton, he had rushed his rams to Plum Point in the wake of the Confederate attack that had sunk two ironclads and, to Ellet’s morbid satisfaction, proved the worth of the ram as a weapon of river warfare. He personally had arrived on board the Switzerland, the last of

the fleet, ten days earlier. He was brimming with plans for attacks, runs by Fort Pillow, fights with the Rebels. But Flag Officer Charles Davis showed no interest in his ideas. He would not join Ellet, would not offer one gunboat for the protection of the rams, or any naval officers to man them. He did not return Ellet’s correspondence. He did not seem overeager to do much of anything.

Colonel Ellet could stand it no more. He was, after all, army, and not under Davis’s command. He could do as he wished, by order of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, as long as it did not interfere with Davis’s plans. And Davis did not seem to have any plans.