“Fine, fine. Ain’t a damned thing wrong with either.”
“And the coal? O’Malley seemed to think there was something wrong with it.”
Taylor grinned at the crude verbal trap. “We got that all straightened out, Captain.”
“So if we get into action tonight, I can rely on the engine?”
Taylor pulled the cigar from his mouth. “Action? What the hell we gonna do, throw biscuits at the Yankees?”
“Perhaps.”
Taylor replaced the cigar, nodded, and grinned. He had an eager, hungry look that Samuel did not find altogether disagreeable, not in the given circumstances. “Well, don’t you worry about the engine, Captain. Get you in and out of any damned thing you can dream up.”
“Good.”
The two men were quiet for a moment, looking out at the dark humps of land, the lights like fireflies on the water, wrapped in the weirdness of the night.
“Chief, if you do not mind a personal question…what does the ‘M’ in your name stand for?”
“Michael.”
“You were not, perchance, named for the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch?” The question sounded idiotic, even as it left his lips.
Taylor took his cigar from his mouth so he could grin wider. “I don’t reckon, Cap’n. I don’t reckon my pappy’d know a Flemish painter if one come up, kicked him in the balls. He spent his whole life humpin freight in New Orleans. Don’t know where he come up with ‘Hieronymus.’”
He put his cigar back in his mouth, turned his head into the breeze. “That’s the damned thing about a name, ain’t it? The very thing that God and man knows ya by, and you ain’t got a thing to say in choosin it.”
“I suppose that’s so. You were not in the old navy?” Bowater asked next.
“Navy? No, that ain’t for me, all that ‘yassa no suh’ horseshit.”
“Until now.”
“Well, suh, now’s different, ain’t it? Now we gots a chance to kill us some Yankees. Besides, if I didn’t join up with the navy, some dumb ass like to put me in the army, now ain’t they? Don’t reckon you’d care to suffer that fate anymore’n me.”
Samuel ignored the comment, which hewed pretty close to insubordination, and decided instead to wring more of Taylor’s past from him. He had no personal interest in the man’s history, but knowing the chief’s background would help Bowater size up his reliability. The fact that he was not a navy man had already lowered him considerably in Bowater’s estimation. “So you learned your trade in the merchant service?”
“Might say that. Bangin around riverboats and such. Thing of it is, Captain, I got me a natural inclination toward anything mechanical. Something a man’s born with, like music or painting or such. If it’s driven by steam, I know how to make it work. In my gut. Ain’t no other way to explain it.”
“I see.” Taylor apparently equated his proficiency with a wrench and screwdriver with Beethoven’s genius for music or Rembrandt’s mastery of the brush and palette. It was amusing, and charming, in a rough sort of way.
“Very well, Chief,” Bowater said, by way of dismissal. “Why don’t you lay below and conduct your orchestra of crankshafts and valves. And I promise I will let you know if we are going to get into any action tonight.”
Lieutenant Henry Wise of the United States Ship Pawnee sat in the stern sheets of the launch and held the boat’s tiller as the twenty bluejackets pulled slow and steady at the oars. Off the starboard side, across the river, some in shadows, some not, he could make out crowds of men, restless, ready for violence. He could feel their eyes on him. He could see the gleam of rifle barrels. Virginians, now secesh. They were waiting.
Thirty-five yards away to port, the granite seawall of the Norfolk naval shipyard made a sharp black line in the starlight. Beyond that, the yard receded into darkness, a darkness which swallowed up the brick wall on the perimeter and left what might be lurking beyond it to Wise’s imagination.
He pictured a growing army of militia, armed, drilled, waiting for the moment to attack. All night long they had been hearing trains pulling into the station in town, carrying, it was said, thousands of troops. Rumors were swirling around the yard, and they all pointed to an overwhelming attack, ready to break at any second. The lieutenant could practically smell the panic in the air.
Wise looked to his right again, over the dark stretch of the Elizabeth River to the lights of Norfolk. There were boats all over the water, lights moving onshore, a general noise of activity, like the growing buzz of a restless crowd waiting on some grand event.
It was all over for the naval yard; there was nothing more they could do. The Pawnee, under the command of Commodore Paulding, had steamed to Portsmouth to save what ships they could from the massing Rebels. They were too late. McCauley had ordered them all scuttled two hours before.
Wise had hit the dock, raced to Merrimack, his particular charge, and found the water already over the orlop deck. It was over.
Someone shouted, out in the night, something made a clattering noise, then the report of a rifle and the water spit up, ten feet astern of the boat.
“Son of a bitch!” Wise shouted. “Lean into it, you men,” he called, but the bluejackets needed no command, and like the experienced sailors they were they picked up the speed of their stroke without missing a beat.
Another rifle went off, and another, little shoots of water coming up around the boat. A ball thudded into the bows and then the boat moved into the shadow of the sloop-of-war Plymouth and was lost from sight of the mob.
The USS Plymouth, which had been perfectly serviceable that morning, was down by the stern and sinking slowly into the mud.
“Hold your oars,” Wise ordered, and the men stopped rowing, let the blades drag in the water, and the boat slowed until it was nearly stopped. From out of the night he could hear the clank of Pawnee’s anchor chain coming on board, the chugging of the steam tug Yankee, come to take the Cumberland in tow. She was all that they could save.
“Not long now, boys…” Wise said.
“Till what, sir? Till the secesh come over the wall?” one of the men asked, and got a chuckle from the others.
“No, till we blow this place to hell and the secesh with it,” Wise said. “Give way, all.”
Once again the sailors leaned into the oars and the boat gathered way. They glided down the long black side of the Plymouth and came out under her bows. He could see the mob again, in the shadows and the pools of light. They moved and swayed like a wheat field, and their shouts punctuated the night.
“Pick up the stroke,” Wise said, and the bluejackets leaned into it again and the boat shot forward just as the first rifle fired at them. Here and there muzzle flashes pricked the darkness and the balls whizzed around them, but they would be no more than a dark shadow on the water and it would be a lucky shot indeed that did any damage.
Now the once mighty Merrimack loomed up over them, and with one pull they were behind her protective wooden walls. She reeked of the turpentine with which Wise and his men had doused her decks hours before.
“Hold your oars.”
Over the noise of the Pawnee’s anchor chain he heard a voice, clear and loud, call, “Up and down!” Pawnee was nearly underway.
Wise shifted in his seat, turned to look in Pawnee’s direction, and as he did a rocket lifted off from her deck and streaked up into the sky. The yellow tail made a slash of light against the backdrop of the stars, and then the rocket exploded in a burst, its fragments trailing fire down to the water and hissing out.
“That’s the signal, boys. Toss oars. Bowman, ease us along to the powder train.”