“What can I do for you?” The clerk came to them at last, harried, but not unfriendly.
“I need…I would like to see a list of the men killed or wounded at the Battle of Manassas.”
The clerk nodded. “That’s the easiest request I got all day. You want it by state, by army, by battalion, how?”
“Regiment. Eighteenth Mississippi. Do you have that?”
“Surely do.”
The clerk left them, crossed to the back of the room, rummaged through a pile of papers, thumbing though various folders. Jonathan felt sick. He was breathing hard. Everything in the room seemed to have a sharp edge to it. He looked over at Bobby, and he could see the worry in the black man’s eyes. Jonathan was terribly afraid.
At last the clerk found what he was looking for, came back across the room. His movements seemed unreal, slowed down, like a dream. Jonathan imagined this was what it was like those final moments marching up to the gallows, the slow, dreamlike unreality of the thing.
The clerk laid the sheet of paper on the desk, slid it over to Jonathan. “Eighteenth Mississippi. There you are.”
Jonathan reached out with a sweating, trembling hand. He tried to lift the paper but could not seem to do it, so he slid it closer, ran his eyes down the list.
Paine, Jonathan, Private, Company D.
Paine, Nathaniel, Private, Company D.
He stopped when he came to the name Paine, Robley, Jr., Lieutenant, Company D. He stared at the name, forced his eyes to focus. What was he looking at? He could not recall what the list was supposed to be.
His eyes shifted right, to the next column, the words that lined up with the names of the Paine boys. Missing. Missing. Killed in Action.
His breath was raspy, loud in his own ears. His eyes would no longer hold their focus on the list.
“What is it?” Bobby asked.
Jonathan looked up at him, his worried eyes, his hands poised, ready to reach out and save him from hitting the floor. “Bobby…” he managed. “I got to go home…” and then he felt the strength run out of him like water through a sieve.
31
SIR: In answer to your letter of 9th instant, asking what is necessary to be supplied…twenty surf boats for landing troops, of a build, except being a little more flat-bottomed, to correspond with those used at Vera Cruz during the Mexican war.
— Flag Officer S. H. Stringham to Gustavus V. Fox
It was an odd sort of concert. Samuel Bowater did not find the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Quintet bad, at least not intolerably so. The first violin knew his business, working through the tragic melody of the Quintet in G Minor, the joyous notes of the Quintet in C Major. He played well for the most part, doing no worse than briefly mutilating the tempo in the second movement and making a hash of a particularly difficult few measures in the third. But overall, not too bad.
Arriving at the hall was worse. It was a terribly improper thing from the outset, inviting Wendy Atkins to accompany him for the evening, with no escort, no chaperon, a young woman all but living by herself. The Samuel Bowater of half a year before would not have considered it.
But now, after the fighting, after the hospital, with the well-established order of things crumbling around him, now, somehow, it did not seem so intolerable. And so he had written to her. And she had accepted. But he had had no intention of displaying his newfound want of morals in front of the men.
Wendy was waiting for him outside as he made his way along the walk, a trail of seamen behind like the tail of a comet. “Miss Atkins, may I present Hieronymus Taylor, my chief engineer,” Bowater said, and Wendy held out her hand to shake and Taylor shook and Bowater was certain he saw something pass between them.
“I think perhaps we have met,” Taylor said. “Didn’t you use to paint them pictures in the park, like the cap’n here?”
“Yes, yes I did…” Wendy said.
So that is it… Bowater thought, and made himself be satisfied with that explanation.
In the concert hall, Hieronymus Taylor sat on one side of him, grinning a wide grin, Wendy on the other. Every once in a while Samuel would meet Taylor ’s eyes and the chief would smile and nod approvingly. Taylor beat the time on his leg, doing so with greater and greater enthusiasm as the concert progressed, to Bowater’s greater and greater annoyance. But Taylor did not stop, save for the moment when the first violin went astray, tempo-wise, and then Taylor just chuckled, waited for the violinist to get back on track.
For the others, it was a mixed experience. Bowater was aware of the shift in mood among the sailors, from anticipation of something new to an uncomfortable realization that a quintet was just a gang of five stiffs like the old man, playing music with no words, and that was as good as it was going to get. There would be no minstrel show, no one in blackface imitating Negroes and singing “Camptown Races” or “Old Folks at Home,” no olio with its crude jests, no burlesque with scantily clad women capering around the stage. Just a bunch of stiffs, sawing away.
Some of the hands tried to remain respectfully alert. Some squirmed, shifted, glanced at the door. Some fell asleep, and Bowater was thankful for that, except for when Jimmy Ogden began to snore and Ruffin Tanner hit him a bit too hard, and he shouted as he jerked awake.
No, it was not the finest musical experience that Samuel Bowater had ever enjoyed, neither the best musicians nor the best audience. He was supremely annoyed to have to divide his attention between Wendy and his cretinous crew.
When it was over the Cape Fears walked en masse back to the docks, with coats wrapped tight around them against the buffeting November wind, as Bowater walked Wendy to the boardinghouse at which she was lodging to have their private farewell.
They stood on the porch, catching a bit of a lee from the house, stood for a long time, not moving or speaking. A part of Samuel’s mind raged against the impropriety of it all, a part wanted to sweep her away, to use the war as his excuse for throwing all of his well-worn propriety overboard. At last he reached out for her, took her in his arms, hugged her, and she hugged him. A real hug, and not a brotherly one. He looked in her eyes. “I have missed you.”
“I have missed you. You’ll send word?”
“I will.” He kissed her, and she kissed him back. They said nothing more, and she pulled herself from his arms.
Bowater caught up with his men at last on the dock, and Bayard Quayle, who was on sentry duty, did no more than peek out from where he was huddled in the engine-room door to see who it was boarding the vessel. The men each thanked Bowater for the experience and disappeared forward.
“Well, damn me, that was somethin,” Taylor said as he and Bowater walked forward.
“Did you enjoy it, Chief?”
“I surely did, Cap’n. I always figured that Mozart and such was too highfalutin for a simple country fiddler like me, but now I see there ain’t so much to it. And all together, with them…whatta ya call ’em, the bigger ones?”
“Violas? Cello?”
“Yeah. Why, it sounds like a choir of angels!”
“I’ll admit the first violin was not the best I have heard. But the music itself is very complicated. It sounds simple, well played, but that is deceptive.”
“Aw, I don’t know,” Taylor said. “Hmmm, hmm, hm, hm…” The chief began to hum the first violin’s part with surprising recall. “Reckon I could scratch that out.”
“You remember that part?”