The man lifted Jonathan’s head, pressed a glass to his lips. The water was tepid but clean, and Jonathan sipped it, felt the liquid wash over the dry, raw patches in his mouth and throat, cool them and wet them. He drank some more, and then drained the glass.
“More…”
They repeated the procedure and then Jonathan let his head fall back, exhausted. He closed his eyes for a moment, but this solidness, this new reality, was too intriguing for him to ignore. He could recall coming to a vague and unconscious understanding that he was dead and in hell. He opened his eyes again. The young man was still there, and that was a relief.
“Where am I…?”
“ Richmond. You inna hospital.” The young man seemed to find delight in the questions, as if he had been waiting for Jonathan to ask.
Jonathan turned his head, just a bit. He was in some kind of sitting room, a big one, like the sitting room at the Paine plantation, but beyond the molding and the light fixtures and the fireplace, there was nothing else that suggested a private home. All of the chairs, the tables, the bookcases that one might expect were gone, and in their place were beds, perhaps twenty beds in that one room.
There were men in the beds and others bustling around them, and women, too. Men in tattered uniforms, walking on crutches or sitting on the edges of beds. Sunlight streamed in from big windows, filling the place with brilliant light. Far from hell, this place with its white sheets and brilliant sunlight looked more like heaven. But it was not that. In heaven, Jonathan was sure, he would not be in such agony as he was.
“My name’s Bobby,” the young man offered. “Bobby Pointer. I work for da missus, runs the hospital. I take care a da stables, most times, but now I’s helping out here. Nurse, you might say. We gots more wounded boys den we gots horses, now.”
Then a woman appeared, beside Bobby, seemed to just float into place. A young woman, not thirty. She had dark hair and wore a white apron, spotted here and there with dark brown stains.
“Is our young man awake, at last?” the woman asked. Her voice was musical. Jonathan could not recall the last time he had heard such a voice.
“Yes, ma’am. Jest opened his eyes.”
“Hello, Private. My name is Miss Tompkins. How are you feeling?”
Jonathan tried to nod but could not. He opened his mouth to speak, but there were too many things he wanted to ask, and so he just shook his head.
Miss Tompkins watched his struggle and said nothing. She did not seem impatient or surprised at his inability to speak. After a moment she just smiled again, a lovely smile, patted his arm, and said, “I must go attend to the others, but I’ll be back. You are in good hands here, with Bobby.” And with that she seemed to float away.
Bobby leaned close, and said in a conspiratorial tone, “She call herself ‘Miss,’ but da truth is, she ‘Captain’ Tompkins. Jeff Davis hisself done give her a commission as captain in da army. Imagine dat!”
Jonathan nodded again, still could think of nothing to say.
“You was at da battle at Manassas, you recall?” the young man asked. “You done took a hell of a knock on da head.”
Jonathan tried to think. Battle at Manassas… Yes, he could recall that, but just images. Not like the fleeting nightmare images, but close. He recalled thirst. He recalled noise. He recalled the horror of bullets whizzing past, men screaming and dying.
“Nathaniel…”
“Nathaniel? That your name?”
“No…” He paused for a long moment, felt consciousness slipping away, thought he might pass out, but the lightness faded. “He was my brother…I’m…Jonathan.”
“Well, howdy, Jon’tin. We been waiting to see if you gonna live or not. You be one tough sumbitch…”
Jonathan stared at the young man. Tough son of a bitch? He felt weak as a baby. “How did I get here?”
“You was at Manassas. Somehow you gots in wid da 33rd Virginia, got shot up awful bad. Near left for dead, but someone seen you was still breathing, so they patched ya up, sent ya here. You been crazy wid da fever for a week or more. No one knowed who you was, on account of you not bein’ with you regiment. We jest called you ‘ Mississippi.’ ’Cause dat’s what it says on you buttons.”
Jonathan swallowed and nodded. He could recall the bullets plucking at his coat, the waves of blue Yankees coming on, up that hill. He felt points of pain all over his body, places where the ache was not general but rather concentrated, as if he was being stabbed repeatedly in the same spots. But of all the aches, one clearly pronounced itself the worst.
“My leg…it hurts like hell…”
“Which one?”
Jonathan closed his eyes and thought about where the pain was. “Right…” he said. He opened his eyes again. Bobby was looking at him, and his expression was part sympathy, part amusement.
“I hates to tell you dis, but you ain’t got no right leg.”
Jonathan frowned at him. I just told you it hurts like hell… He struggled to lift his head and look down at his body, lying on the bed. He was covered with a white sheet, clean and sweet-smelling. At the far end of the bed he saw the point of white cloth made by the toes of his left foot. To the right there was nothing.
He fell back on the pillow, stared up at the ceiling.
“You be surprised,” Bobby was saying, “how often dat happens. Fella feels pain in a arm or a leg that ain’t even there no more.” He was trying to sound cheerful. Jonathan would have strangled him if he had had the strength to lift his arms.
It was coming back now, not a trickle of memory, but a flood tide. He had led Nathaniel to the fight and Nathaniel was dead. He recalled the look in his brother’s dying eyes, the death rattle as the life ran out of him on the field. He recalled the note he had written, stuffed in Nathaniel’s uniform.
His brother’s body would be back home now. Robley would have written their parents, told how Jonathan had persuaded Nathaniel to march off, just like all those other times he had lured his brother into trouble.
He closed his eyes against the grief and the hurt. He was crippled, his leg cut off by some army butcher. His parents and Robley Junior would despise him for what he had done, as well they might, the loathsome creature, to lure a brother to his death.
He felt the bed shift as Bobby stood and walked softly away and left Jonathan to lie there and envy the men left dead on the fields south of the Bull Run.
The Union navy was massing for something. Samuel Bowater had not been wrong in thinking so.
As the shipwrights swarmed over the Cape Fear, rebuilding her wheelhouse and galley, replacing panels in the sides of the deckhouse, patching holes and strengthening the bulwarks where the gun breeches made off, reports continued to come downriver of more and more ships gathering at Newport News and Hampton Roads.
As the burned-out wreck of USS Merrimack was transformed slowly into the ironclad CSS Virginia, Merrimack ’s old consorts, the Minnesota, Wabash, Monticello, Pawnee, and Harriet Lane , gathered as if for a reunion off Fortress Monroe. Also in attendance were the chartered steamers Adelaide and George Peabody, and the tug Fanny, all ships of the United States Navy. There were others as well, transports and battered old schooners, whose purpose was not clear.
Little, in fact, was clear, save that the United States Army and Navy were preparing to fall on some part of the Confederate coast.
July turned to August. The Cape Fear was returned to service, her superstructure repaired, her master’s cabin made better than it had been, with oak paneling, hinged windows, and a compass mounted over the bed. It was even extended by two feet aft, adding significantly to the volume therein. The former cabin had, after all, been no more than a bunk for a tugboat skipper, but now it was the great cabin of an officer of the Confederate States Navy.