John Scofield sat in his office, elbow on his desk, chin in hand. He stared out the big window that looked out over the outer office. The window made the office seem more a fishbowl than private work space.
Cold air blew in from the outside window, which was opened a crack. Late February in Atlanta, Georgia. Generally not so cold, but a norther was blowing through, and temperatures plummeted.
He could hear conversation drifting up from the yard below, heated conversation, the hottest thing going in Atlanta. Generally, when the Scofield and Markham’s Gate City rolling mill was in full production, when the iron was pouring and the rolling mills rolling it out, when plate and bar and railroad iron was being loaded onto flatbeds in the siding, he would never have been able to hear something so quiet as a conversation three stories down. Not even a shouted conversation, as this one was.
But he could hear it now, because nothing was happening, no work being done. Prices were going up all over the Confederacy. Skilled men such as ironworkers were in great demand, and they knew it. The fact that their jobs kept them out of the army did not seem to impress them any more. They wanted higher wages, and just as Scofield came to expect from their ilk, they were not subtle about it.
He shook his head. He sighed. He could not make out all of the words, but he caught a few, mostly damns and y’all gonna be surprised when we… and you sons of bitches… It did not sound as if it was going well.
The conversation below stopped abruptly. Scofield swiveled around, looked at the door beyond the empty outer office, wondered who would come through. He waited. Finally it opened. Frank Ouellette, haggard, defeated, came in, closed the door behind him with more force than necessary.
He walked into Scofield’s office without knocking. He flopped down in a chair. Scofield thought of the Yankees retreating after Manassas. They must have looked like old Frank.
“Well?” Scofield asked.
“They ain’t budging. Another ten cents a day, and they ain’t too happy with Confederate scrip no more.”
Scofield shook his head. The war was less than a year old. If the Confederacy lost, he wondered if it would be due to the Yankees’ fighting prowess or the greed of the Southern mechanics and laborers.
“I don’t know as we can do that…” Scofield said.
Ouellette shrugged. “I told ’em. They think you and Markham, and me, we live like damned kings, think we making money hand over fist here.”
The two men were silent for a moment, and then Scofield felt the first stirring of an idea. “I wonder if we might give them some little token, something that will inspire them to get back to work…”
“Such as?”
“Everyone’s worried about this here Confederate scrip. How’s about if we pay them—even give ’em a bonus—in specie. Gold. Ain’t a thing satisfies a greedy man like real gold.”
“Sure, but…” Ouellette began, paused, saw where Scofield was heading. “That fellow, wrote last month…”
“Exactly. Never did count what he sent, but I’m certain they’s enough to go around, a couple of times. That should get them all fired up for work.”
Ouellette nodded. It had been something of a shock, the day the package arrived. Gold in coins and an order for iron, preferably rolled out into gunboat iron, drilled for six bolts. Some rich lunatic building himself an ironclad.
They marveled, shook their heads, put the gold in the safe, set the order aside. The Confederate Army and Navy were desperate for milled iron. There was no time to fulfill an order for some civilian with big dreams in the naval line. Perhaps in a year or so, but not now.
“You never had any intention of filling that fella’s order,” Ouellette pointed out. “You just gonna hand out his gold and let him flap in the wind?”
“No, no…I can’t do that. Wish I could, but I can’t.” Scofield rummaged through a pile of papers in a basket on his desk, pulled out a letter from near the bottom of the heap. “We’ll start handing out gold to our malcontent workers there, and if that induces them to get back to work, then I reckon this…Robley Paine…gets the gunboat iron he’s asking for.”
38
About 1,000 tons of iron plating is being manufactured by rolling mills in Atlanta, Ga., for an iron-plated frigate nearly completed at New Orleans.
— Stephen R. Mallory to President Jefferson Davis
They arrived back in Newport, weary, battered, wounded in mind and body. Bowater saw his men safe in barracks at the Gosport Naval Shipyard. Ten-thirty at night, he had finished his reports, oral and written, told his tale to Forrest and the others, been dismissed.
He wandered out of the shipyard, too torn up to sleep, or even to remain in one place. He walked the streets. He knew where he would end up.
He approached the old house quietly. No lights burning. Behind it, within the tended yard, he could see the carriage house. A light shone in the window. Late, but not that late, and Samuel did not care much for convention at that moment.
He hopped the picket fence, landed soft on the grass, crossed to the carriage house. He rapped on the door, realized as he did that he might scare her to death, that she might not answer. But he heard soft footsteps across the floor, and the door opened.
Wendy was there, the light from a candle diffused through her long, dark hair. She was wearing a loose night dress, holding a book. Bowater saw a sudden flash of fear in her face, which softened to recognition, concern.
“Samuel…I thought it was my aunt. Dear God, what has happened to you?”
She opened the door wider, stepped aside, and he stepped in, looked around without seeing anything. “I have been in a fight, Wendy…” he said.
She put the book down, stepped up to him, wrapped her arms around him. For a long moment they embraced, and then Samuel pushed her gently back. “Do you have a canvas?” he asked. “Might I borrow some paints?”
Wendy nodded, stepped away. She picked up a small canvas, set it on the easel that stood in the corner, offered him her paint set, the one he knew so well.
He shed his frock coat and hat, let them fall on the floor, rolled up his sleeves. He stared at the canvas, let the picture form on the white surface, let his mind create it so that his hands had only to fill in the places where paint had to go. He took up a pencil, slashed a few lines across the surface, general outlines. He dabbed paint on the palette, began to work with a wide brush.
Wendy pulled up a stool and sat beside him and a little back and watched silently as the picture emerged. Samuel was hardly aware of the time passing, minutes, then hours, as the foredeck of the Cape Fear grew out of the white field before him, the gray skies and brown water, the sharp points of muzzle flash. And on one edge, dimly seen, Lieutenant Harwell’s face in the instant of death.
Samuel felt himself a part of the scene on the canvas as much as he had been a part of the real fight, he felt like a participant in the picture, painting from within the scene. He felt the tears roll down his cheeks as he rendered not the horror of the thing, but the suggestion of that horror, which was more frightening by half.
Three hours, four hours he worked, letting it all come out through his brush. Wendy sat on a small fainting couch, fell asleep with her head on her arm, and Bowater painted on.
At last he stepped back, set the brush down. Wendy came awake, as if she sensed this was the moment. She stood, joined him.
“That’s it…” she whispered, as if she knew what it was he was trying to render. “That is it exactly.”
Bowater looked long and hard at the canvas, and for the first time he felt a mesh, a perfect fit, between what he saw in his head and what he saw created in paint.
He turned away from the painting, hoped he had managed to get what was in his head out and plant it permanently on canvas. He ran his hands around Wendy’s waist, pulled her near. He could feel her smooth skin through the thin material of her night dress. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulled his head down to hers, and kissed him, and he kissed her back, with a desperate urgency.