But the ultimate censure was the one that Bowater held in his hands: dismissal and striking of the officer’s name by order of the President. There was no equivocation, no appeal. The officer was cashiered.
In the early days of secession, officers had been allowed to resign without dismissal of any sort. When Gideon Welles took over, that changed. His was a scorched-earth policy, no quarter given.
Bowater stared at the note. He had never really expected anything else, had never thought to preserve his place in the old navy in case seccession didn’t pan out. Still, an Academy education and fourteen years of service were not so easily dismissed.
To hell with you, Gideon Welles, my “obedient servant,” he thought, and crumpled the letter up and tossed it in the wastebasket. That was the past, a life that was gone, and he was blessed to have a second life now, a thing denied most men. I do believe I will go punch a few holes in your ships, Mr. Secretary.
He looked at the next letter, from his father, and opened it up. It was written in the neat, tight hand that Samuel knew so well. He read it through. It was a very businesslike report: effects of the blockade, the state of Charleston’s defenses, who was off in military service, price increases. Samuel smiled despite himself. William Bowater, Esq. He wondered sometimes if his father had not been some dour Boston Puritan in an earlier life, as those dabblers in mysticism were wont to believe.
He went through his father’s letter again. There was something comforting in the stolid and unexcitable prose. With everything falling apart, with the entire order of his universe in flux, it was nice to see that one thing at least remained unchanged.
Lord, he is a stoic, and I am some kind of damned poet… He hated the thought as he thought it. The idea of himself as an artist felt facile and shallow.
From the top of the ladder, Hieronymus Taylor could look down the fidley on his engine room and his beloved engine, with the great maze of pipes: steam and return water, eduction pipes and intake pipes and discharge pipes, running to cylinder, air pumps, hot well, condensers, boiler, feed water, so amazingly complex, such a tangled web, unfathomable to the uninitiated, and yet not an inch of it that he did not fully comprehend, and hardly a bit of it that he had not laid hands on at one time or another.
A thing of beauty, like a symphony wonderfully written and wonderfully played, all the disparate parts, iron and steam, working together to create that final whole, pssst, clunk, pssst, clunk, pssst, clunk, thirty rotations per minute.
He ran his eyes over the entire space, the engine room, the boiler room on the other side of the open bulkhead, the bridge from one side to the other, the deckhouse with its windows and skylight and vent above, enclosing the fidley. Gloomy, hot, bad-smelling, and loud, it was his fiefdom and he was well pleased with it.
At the workbench below, fireman Ian O’Malley was seated on Taylor’s stool, his face hidden behind a newspaper, and the sight of the man deflated the good cheer the chief felt at looking upon his engine and its domain. He clattered down the ladder and across the engine-room deck.
“Y’all hold her dere, now…” Moses’s voice came from behind the engine, a place deep in the recess of the engine room, inconspicuous and hard to see from the engine-room door above. “Good, now gimme dat wrench…”
Taylor ducked under the piping for the condenser and straightened. Coal heavers Joshua Beauchamps and Nat St. Clair were holding a three-foot-square metal box, the hot well from a small steam engine, against the overhead, while Moses bolted it to the deck beams. The hot well had been Moses’s idea—he had noticed it in the yard one morning while they were taking on coal, and Taylor agreed that it was an improvement over his initial idea of a barrel as a water tank.
He watched for a moment while Moses tightened the bolts, then said, “Secure that tank, then belay the thing, Moses. We got to get underway.”
“Damn!” said Moses, never taking his eyes off the bolt head. “Can’t we ever finish one damned thing ’round here?”
“Not as long as we got a master’s division.”
“Massa’s division?” Moses tightened the bolt until it was snug, then lowered his arms and stepped back. “You de only massa we gots, Massa Heronmus. You de massa of dis whole fine plantation here.” With a sweep of his arm he gestured toward the engine and boiler rooms.
“And don’t you forget it, neither. Now hurry it up.”
He left them at it, ducked back under the piping, ambled over to where O’Malley was lounging. “Morning, O’Malley,” he said cheerfully.
O’Malley looked over the top of his paper. “Morning, Chief,” he said and raised the paper again.
“Say, O’Malley…the captain has a notion to get underway. Think you might stoke up them fires?”
O’Malley lowered the paper once more. “I reckon one of them niggers can do it,” he said and raised the paper again.
Taylor smiled, nodded, waited until the urge to pull the paper from O’Malley’s hands and stuff it down his throat had passed. “I can see you wouldn’t care to get them new dungarees all covered with coal dust. Where’d y’all get ’em?”
O’Malley lowered the paper. “I got ’em up to Norfolk last Saturday, and a right bargain they were. Are they not the handsomest you’ve seen?”
Taylor nodded. The cloth was dark blue, and the light from the skylight overhead danced on the new steel buttons. “Very nice. It grieves me to ask you to get them all soiled, but Moses and the others are still working on the shower bath.” Which, he added silently, I told you to do, you lazy Mick.
“Ah, very well,” O’Malley put his paper down with a sigh. “I’ll do it me self. Easier than trying to get a bloody darkie to do a job of work…”
He slid off the stool, ambled over to the boiler, on the other side of the open bulkhead. “’Tis no great hardship, soiling me clothes, now that me and Burgess have that famous clothes washer set up.”
The Irishman whipped a rag around his hand, opened the door to the furnace. He picked up a shovel and spread out the coals banked in the firebox, then began to scoop more coal from the hopper and feed it to the glowing orange bed.
Taylor picked a match up off the workbench, scratched it, and lit his cigar. He leaned back to watch the fun.
O’Malley continued to feed coal into the firebox, and Taylor heard the first hiss of steam beginning to form.
“Easy with the coal, O’Malley. Don’t smother it. Want to get her nice and hot.”
“I’m not goin ta bloody smother it,” O’Malley growled. He paused in his shoveling because in fact he was.
The fire was getting hot, Taylor could feel it from the engine room. O’Malley was starting to do a weird little dance, squirming a bit, as if something might be in his pants.
“We’ll need some speed today, O’Malley. Get her good and hot!”
“Aye!” O’Malley called, his back to Taylor. Taylor hurried to where the coal heavers were working on the shower bath. “Moses, you all, come see this!” He got back to his stool in time to catch O’Malley give a little jiggle, as if he was trying to shake something out of his new dungarees.
“Good and hot, O’Malley!” Taylor prompted, grinning around his cigar.
“Aye!” the Irishman shouted, more irritated this time. He scooped another shovelful, then another, leaned forward to spread the coals out. He paused for a second, then dropped his shovel and whirled around.
“Ahh! Ahh! Ahhh, bloody shit, bloody hell!” He leaped up and down, plunged his hands in his pants, screamed again, pulled his hands out. “Ahhh!” He jerked his belt loose, tore the buttons of his pants open, and dropped his dungarees around his ankles. He stood there, mindless of who might be watching, and clasped his private parts, sighing with relief.