And then it was over and Jonathan Paine’s bird lay in a crumpled heap of bloody feathers.
“What the hell you say the name of your bird is?” the victor taunted Jonathan. “Winfield Scott, ain’t that what you said? Or wasn’t it Bluebelly?”
Jonathan grinned. He did not get angry. He rarely did. He picked up the rooster’s limp body. “His name, suh, is Stew Meat.” Jonathan bowed, turned to leave the circle, saw Robley watching him.
“Ah, brothers, you had to witness my bird’s ignominious defeat. He left a great string of dead fighting cocks in his path, and the one time you see him fight is when he gets beat by that cheating South Carolina son of a bitch.”
“He left one rooster dead in his path, and I think that one was sick with consumption to start,” Nathaniel said.
“Come on, Private,” Robley said, “there’s been a reassignment and you have picket duty tonight.”
“Picket duty?” The three brothers stepped off across the dry, dusty parade ground. “If y’all are putting me on picket duty,” Jonathan said, “you must reckon them Yankees’ll be coming down the road tonight.”
“You don’t mind fighting them single-hand, do you?” asked Nathaniel.
“Who else is gonna do it?”
They marched back toward the 18th Mississippi’s camp, slower now, as the sun reached its zenith. “Tell me true, Lieutenant,” Jonathan said. When he used Robley’s title with sincerity, it meant he was looking for a real answer. “When you think we’re gonna be at them bluebellies?”
Robley stopped in the middle of the wide central street. His wool clothing itched intolerably and he wanted some relief.
“Can’t be too much longer,” he said, scratching with abandon, which got his brothers scratching as well. Robley heard enough talk around camp to know that speculating about future action was the quickest way to sound like an idiot. But with his brothers it was different. “Uncle Abe’s three-month enlistments are up soon. He’s got to do something, before his army goes home. Got to be a battle soon.”
Nathaniel and Jonathan nodded. For all the casual, hunting-trip quality of Camp Walker, there was always that, the impending battle, hanging there. The Sword of Damocles, it would have to fall eventually.
“You afraid?” Jonathan asked Robley, and again there was a sincerity that the youngest did not generally show. Standing there, his dead rooster in his hand, he looked like the little boy that Robley remembered, holding a broken toy, a bit bewildered in a world where his father imposed no strict rules. The boys had always turned to Robley for structure in their lives.
Now Robley just shrugged, spit on the ground. “You mean am I afraid there won’t be a fight?” he asked, though he knew that was not what Jonathan meant.
“No, I mean, you afraid of the fight?”
Robley looked away, collecting his words, making sure there was no one else to hear them. These were his brothers. He did not always have to be Lieutenant Paine in front of them.
“Yeah. I’m afraid of the monkey show. I’m afraid I’ll run. Won’t have the nerve to stand up to it.”
Jonathan smiled, chuckled, shook his head. “That it? Aren’t you afraid of being killed? I’m…seems to me a Yankee bullet’s a more frightening prospect than doing a skeedaddle.”
The words took Robley by surprise, and he realized that his thoughts had been so directed toward how he would perform when the bullets started to fly that the thought of being killed had never occurred to him.
“No, I’m not afraid of being killed, I don’t reckon. Rather die with honor than live with the shame of running,” he said, and that seemed true, but was it?
Here now was a whole new question with which he would have to wrestle.
13
I had purposed offering some remarks upon the vast importance to Virginia and to the entire South of the timely acquisition of this extensive naval depot, with its immense supplies of munitions of war, and to notice briefly the damaging effects of its loss to the Government at Washington; but I deem it unnecessary…
— William H. Peters, Commissioner, to John Letcher, Governor of Virginia
Hieronymus Taylor sat on the stool at his workbench and puffed his butt end of a cigar to life. The Cape Fear was riding at her anchor. The fires were banked in the boiler and the doors and vents of the deckhouse that enclosed the fidley, the section of the deckhouse directly above the engine room, were open to the afternoon breeze, and the engine room was almost comfortable.
Taylor shook the flame out on his lucifer and tossed the smoldering match onto the workbench. He never took his eye off of Fireman First Class James Burgess.
Burgess had spent the past half hour tapping threads into a hole he had drilled into the side of one of the shoes on the eccentric—a circular piece of metal mounted off-center on the crankshaft that worked the engine’s valve gear. When the threads were cut, he screwed a bolt into the hole. Then he screwed an eye-bolt into a deck beam a few feet above the eccentric.
All this Taylor watched without comment. He could not figure what Burgess was about. He thought about asking him, but the Scotsman was never very enlightening, even when questioned directly.
If it had been O’Malley fiddling with his engine without permission, he would have stomped him underfoot. O’Malley had no feel for engines. He suspected O’Malley’s engineer’s papers had been supplied by some fellow Mick working in some navy shithouse office.
Burgess was different. Burgess understood engines. With Burgess, Taylor just watched.
When the eyebolt was in place, Burgess pulled a length of quarter-inch manila line from his pocket. He tied a bowline in one end and looped it over the bolt on the eccentric, then threaded the bitter end through the eyebolt. That was as much as Hieronymus Taylor could endure. The chief slid off the stool, ambled over to where Burgess was working.
“Awright, Burgess, I give,” he said to the Scotsman’s back. “What in hell are you about?”
Burgess made a grunting noise that might have been a word. It sounded like “Wawarr.” Then, when Taylor did not respond, he elaborated, saying, “Feer kaws.”
“Forgive me, but I can’t understand a goddamned thing you are saying.”
Burgess turned around. He spoke slowly and deliberately, as if to a child. “Washer. Fer washin clothes.”
Taylor nodded. “And how does it do that, exactly?”
Burgess pointed to the deck below, where the end of the rope dangled. “Put a barrel there. Fill it full of water. Get ’er good an hot with steam. Cut the barrel head down, put a ruddy great weight on it, hang it from the line.”
Hieronymus nodded. That was all the explanation he would get. He knew that. But he understood. Dirty clothes go in the barrel of water, hot from the boiler. The round barrel head, cut down so there is clearance all around, goes on top. The line goes from an eyebolt in the barrel head, through the eyebolt overhead, to the bolt on the eccentric shoe. When the engine is turning the shoe goes up and down and the line from the shoe to the barrel head makes the barrel head go up and down, like the plunger in a butter churn. The clothes are agitated until they are clean.
“Well, damn. You are one clever son of a bitch. Fer a foreigner, I mean.”
“Do it on errey Scottish ship,” Burgess grunted and went back to his task.
Taylor smiled. This was a hell of an idea. “Moses!” he yelled.
“Yassuh?” Moses and a couple of the coal heavers were knocking clinker from the boiler grates.
“Git some of your boys topside, find us a barrel. Cut the head down, ’bout an inch around. Damn me, we gonna have the cleanest damned black gang in the navy.”
“Yassuh.” Moses left off what he was doing and took Billy and Joshua topside.
Taylor liked Moses. Moses did not argue and he did his work well without playing sullen, petty games, and he could sing like a son of a bitch, and that was about all Taylor could ask of a coal passer, or any man, for that matter.