And Moses, fireman, unofficial chief of the coal heavers, caught on to the game, sang more boldly each day. He was a freeman, unlike most of the coal heavers, who were slaves and hired on to the navy by a master somewhere—somewhere safe, Taylor imagined. Moses had, for some reason, volunteered for the navy. Like any Southern black man, he knew how to move through the white man’s world without giving offense.
And so, each afternoon, the crew of the CSS Cape Fear began to drift aft, and soon they were all coming around and sitting on the deck and listening to the music and Moses’s lovely bass voice and joining in on the chorus.
The “luff,” the first lieutenant, was a moon-faced young man of twenty-eight perhaps, an unassuming officer with what Hieronymus Taylor considered the command presence of a greased pig at a county fair. But he was agreeable, and Taylor liked him well enough. His name was Thadeous Harwell and he had graduated from the Naval Academy eight years before, but Taylor still liked him.
It had been a busy three weeks. Harwell had been issued orders to get the tug in shape for combat, and for the arrival of the new captain. And Harwell, an Academy graduate and an eager young officer indoctrinated into the ancient traditions of the navy, had very definite ideas of what a man-of-war was, and the Atlas was not it.
The deckhouse, for one, had been laid out and maintained to the standards of the tugboat’s small and none too demanding crew. The cabins were filthy and stuffed to the overhead with all manner of junk: old coils of rope, fenders, rusting machinery, lumber of all sizes, stacks of newspapers. It did not appear to have ever been cleaned.
Harwell turned to the work with a will, and did an admirable job of driving the others. They cleared out each of the cabins, scraped the decks, painted the bulkheads. They tore out the berthing for four crew in the forecastle and installed berthing for ten, plus additional berthing for the Negroes aft and storage amidships. They gutted the master’s cabin and turned it into a place fit for a naval officer, and the same with the luff’s and the chief’s cabins.
They scraped, scrubbed, and painted the galley until it no longer made a man nauseous to look at the walls or the deck.
Hieronymus had his own problems. Despite the title of first assistant engineer he was in fact the officer in charge of the Cape Fear’s machinery, the former tug being too small to warrant an officer with the rank of chief engineer. With the fires drawn and no coal to heave, he set the black gang to scraping and painting the engine room, draining and cleaning out boilers, taking on and shifting stores of coal.
He and his firemen first class, the Scot Burgess and the Irishman O’Malley, had their own work to do. They had mapped and scraped the bearings, balanced out the high—and low—pressure cylinders, rebuilt the boiler stops, reconditioned the air pumps, replaced fire tubes. The engine had not been in bad shape to begin with, and by the end of three weeks’ constant work it was as perfect as it was going to get.
The Cape Fears spent their days toiling to turn their little floating world into something that could be a part of the coming fight, while the newspapers told them of all of the extraordinary events spooling out across the nation, history of which they longed to be a part. And then in the evenings, their sing-along.
Burgess was sitting on the deck, leaning against the bulwark, smoking his pipe in silence. O’Malley was leaning on the ladder that led from the afterdeck to the roof of the deckhouse. He began every evening by ostentatiously refusing to sing, because he would not sing with Negroes, and certainly not if Moses Jones was left to sing the lead parts. That generally lasted about twenty minutes, and then he was adding his clear tenor to the mix—an Irishman could not remain silent at a sing-along forever.
The luff was sitting on an overturned bucket now, singing the chorus of “Shenandoah” in his alto voice, having finally abandoned any hope of putting a stop to the music. It was clear that Lieutenant Harwell thought perhaps he should not allow the crew to congregate as they did, officers, men, slaves, all together. He spent a week of afternoons floating about and fidgeting and looking as if he wanted to say something. But Taylor just chewed on the stub of his cigar, looked the luff hard in the eyes, and any objections died a quick death and the men had their little time.
Hieronymus Taylor came to the part of “Shenandoah” where he improvised on the reprise. He had been working on it, changing it around in subtle ways, for the past week, and he was coming to love what he had. He felt the music lift out of the violin, and then, just as he was coming to the high point, the part that near moved him to tears, just as his bow drew out that quivering note, a voice shouted from the dock, saying, “Ahoy, da boat!”
Taylor clamped his teeth down on the unlit stub of his cigar, drew the note out, but the mood was shattered.
“Ahoy da boat!” There was always some idiot coming by. It was the disadvantage of being dockside and not at an anchor.
This darkie son of a whore better have a damned good reason…
“Who goes there?” Lieutenant Harwell called out, and a voice, someone who was definitely not a darkie, and probably not a son of a whore, answered, “Cape Fear.”
Cape Fear? Ah, shit… Their captain, come at last. Just when Hieronymus Taylor had Harwell trained up right, now there would be another damned officer for him to teach. He lowered his bow and violin, opened his eyes to a scene of confusion. Half the peckerwoods on board clearly did not know that only the captain referred to himself by the name of the ship, and they were staring wide-eyed at the others, who were scrambling to get up and stand at some kind of military readiness.
“Fall in there, men, fall in, fall in. Dress it up,” Harwell was saying in a stage whisper as he inched backward toward the brow.
Taylor smiled, set his violin and bow down. He considered pulling on his frock coat, which was draped over the rail, and decided against it. “Moses, get them darkies in some kinda order. Captain’s comin aboard.”
Moses began to maneuver the coal heavers into line, and then Lieutenant Harwell was back, practically genuflecting to the man who followed behind.
“If we had had any idea, sir, that you were arriving today…” the luff stammered.
“You did not get my telegram?”
“Telegram? No, sir…telegram?” Harwell looked around as if hoping for more intelligence regarding a telegram, but none was forthcoming.
Taylor grinned around his cigar. No telegram. This meeting would not have been half as much fun if he had given the lieutenant the telegram announcing the old man’s arrival.
The chief ran his eyes over the new captain. Thirties, nice uniform frock coat. Mustache and goatee trimmed and groomed to an absurd perfection. The accent was Charleston, and it wasn’t peckerwood. Charleston elite. Naval Academy. Regal bearing.
This one got a ramrod right up his ass, he thought. Taylor stepped across the deck, brushed past Lieutenant Harwell, thrust out his hand. “Captain…?”
“Samuel Bowater.” He took Taylor’s hand, matched the strength of his grip, looked him in the eyes with no hint of expression. If he was angry or afraid or disgusted or pleased, Hieronymus Taylor could not tell. “And you are?”
“First Assistant Engineer Hieronymus M. Taylor, sir. This here’s my engineering division. Them there’s the black gang. Coal heavers is black as coal, as you can see.”
“Hmm, indeed.” Captain Bowater released his grip. His eyes flicked up and down Taylor’s clothing. His patrician expression did not change any more than that of a statue would change, but still Taylor felt the disdain radiate from the man. It was a particular trick that these gentlemen had.