“See here?” he said through the chunk of bread. “I can eat off the damned deck!”
Nat St. Clair, coal heaver, began to bray like a hound dog, and the call was taken up by the other two coal heavers on watch. Moses grinned down at Taylor. “Now you got the boys all worked up!”
“Shut yer damned gobs, dumb coons.” Taylor got back to his feet. “I’ll make y’all eat yer damned dinners off’n the deck.”
Overhead the bell from the wheelhouse sounded, riing, riing. Three bells, full ahead. Taylor scowled at the polished brass irritant.
“Dat you massa calling!” Moses said.
“Shut up. Didn’t I tell you to wing that fire over?”
“No, suh.”
“Well, wing the rutting fire over.” Taylor glared at the bell. “St. Clair, go find O’Malley, tell him to tell them stiffs in the wheelhouse that’s all the steam we’re going to get out of this ain’t-for-shit coal.”
Just spoil ’em, if I give ’em everything they ring for. Next you know they’ll come to expect it… He picked up his gauge and gently turned the brass screw that held the backplate in place. Give ’em a little more steam in twenty minutes or so. That should do for them wheelhouse beats.
The Cape Fear steamed on, the thrum and hiss and bang of her engine so regular and perfect that Taylor did not even hear it, not on any conscious level. Any tiny change in the sound, he knew, would have sat him bolt upright, even if he had been asleep, every sense straining to determine the cause. But there was no change.
O’Malley stumbled back into the engine room, mumbled some excuse for his absence, spoke too low to be heard over the working of the engine, the roar of the boilers, the hiss of the air pumps. Taylor considered turning in.
A draft of cool air blew over him, and he looked up to see landsman Bayard Quayle come through the door and make his way warily down the ladder to the engine room. He stopped at the bottom, turned, and looked around with the wonder and uncertainty of one not used to the heat and the noise. Then he spotted Taylor and made his careful way over.
“Chief? Capt-” The tug took a harder pitch and Quayle grabbed frantically for a workbench, as if he was afraid of being sucked into the machinery. “Captain’s compliments, Chief, and…” He paused, trying to recall the exact wording. “…and things is getting a bit tight, and he would be obliged if you was to…ah…make the coal perform to satisfaction …is what he said.”
“That a fact?”
“Yes, suh… Oh, and he asks would you please report to the wheelhouse?”
“What for?”
“Dunno, suh. Don’t see nothing out of the ordinary. But the boatswain, he says it looks to him like all damned hell is breaking loose out there.”
9
The most abominable vandalism at the yard. The two lower ship houses burned, with the New York, line of battle ship, on the stocks. Also the rigging loft, sail loft, and gun-carriage depot, with all the pivot gun carriages and many others.
— George T. Sinclair to Stephen R. Mallory
Captain Bowater stood in the wheelhouse, just to the left of the helmsman. He stared out of the window at the shorelines, set off from the water by a sprinkling of lights, and at the traffic on the water, and he knew that something was wrong.
There was too much going on for so late an hour, too many vessels on the move, too many lights onshore. There was an energy in the air that should not have been there twenty minutes after midnight.
“Come left to a heading of east northeast,” he said, and Pauley McKeown, able-bodied seaman, eased the wheel to port and said, in the remnants of an Irish burr, “Coming left to east northeast…east northeast.”
At the far side of the wheelhouse, the luff’s pencil scratched the course change in the ship’s log.
Bowater frowned to prevent himself from smiling, because smiling for no apparent reason was the sure sign of a weak-minded idiot. Still, the smile wanted to come, despite his apprehensions about the night and the traffic on the water. He was overcome with the pure joy of the thing; the vibration of the engines coming through the deck, the motion of the vessel through the water. The quiet formality of the quarterdeck.
Not a quarterdeck, of course, not the wide, open quarterdeck of the Pensacola, but a wheelhouse. His wheelhouse. There was no one to whom he must report the course change, no one to whom he must try to explain the odd feeling he was having. No one to whom he need speak at all.
He looked down at the rounded bows of the Cape Fear as they butted their way through the small chop and he knew that they were his bows and he loved them.
But he allowed no inkling of this newfound passion to creep into his voice, or his demeanor. His attitude was perfect disinterest.
“Helmsman, steady as she goes,” he said and stepped behind the helmsman, behind Lieutenant Harwell, and peered out the side window on the starboard side. Just forward of the starboard beam he could make out Fortress Monroe. It was about two miles off—he had been giving it a wide berth—but even from that distance he could see that it was a busy place.
He frowned again, in earnest this time, and put his field glasses to his eyes. The magnification made the activity more obvious. He could see lights moving on the water, where small boats were pulling here and there, and more lights moving onshore. He could see lights along the top of the fort’s walls. Something was happening.
Bowater stepped back across the wheelhouse and out the side door, peering out into the night. It was cool. He was wearing his old U.S. Navy uniform, with the insignia removed, and the breeze made the tail of his blue frock coat flap and beat his legs. He grabbed the patent-leather visor of his cap and tugged it lower. Up in the wheelhouse, the roll and pitch of the little man-of-war was much more pronounced.
Samuel Bowater had not realized, during his long self-imposed exile in Charleston, how very much he missed this.
He felt the platform on which he stood shake and turned to see Hieronymus Taylor mounting the ladder. The chief reached the top, paused, gave something that could be construed as a salute, which Bowater returned.
Then, before the captain could speak, Taylor turned his back on him and stared out over the water, then peered through the wheelhouse windows north toward Fortress Monroe. He made Bowater wait for an audience, as if it had been Taylor who summoned the captain, and not the other way around.
When the chief was done looking around he fished a lucifer from the pocket of his frock coat, which was unbuttoned to reveal the sweat-stained cotton shirt beneath, scratched the match on the rail, and stoked his cigar to life. He coughed, spit over the side of the ship, and returned the cigar to his mouth.
All the while Samuel Bowater quietly regarded him, the unshaved face, the squinting eyes, the hands black with coal dust and oil. An occasional unfortunate turn of the breeze brought the smell of the engineer to Bowater’s nose. Samuel Bowater had never cared for engineering officers generally, as a class of men—dirty, artless mechanics—but so far Hieronymus M. Taylor was in the lead for most objectionable of the lot.
At last Taylor pulled the cigar from his mouth, looked out toward Sewall’s Point, just off the port bow. “They’s somethin happenin out there…” he said at last. “Somethin ain’t right…bad ju-ju…don’t know what it is, but I can feel it.” He turned, looked Bowater right in the eye for the first time. “You feel it?”
Bowater nodded and Taylor nodded, and for a moment they said nothing.
“Chief, we’ve been steaming for fifty hours now, so I imagine you have a good idea of the state of our engine and boilers. How are they?”