The planters never took offense, which was the worst of it, as if it was pointless to be offended by the ravings of a madman. They nodded, shook their heads. “Not like I don’t know about them damned Yankees, Robley,” they would say. “My boy’s with Beauregard right now.” But they had no wagons, and they thought he was mad. He could see it in their eyes.
He rode all day, plantation to plantation, talked with his oldest friends, who treated him with the wariness with which one treats an unfamiliar dog. He got no wagons.
The next day he dispatched five of Bowater’s men with a local boy to lead them back to Paine Plantation to retrieve the three serviceable wagons in the barn. He told them there had been horses once, and there might still be, or perhaps not, he did not know. Robley continued his search, covering the plantations south of town.
There were no wagons to be had.
He found himself rubbing the butt of his Starr as he talked with his reluctant neighbors, found himself imagining how it would be to jerk the gun from his holster, take horses and wagons at gunpoint, frighten some cooperation into his fellow planters.
Once, riding along the empty roads from one house to the next, he thought he had done so. He stopped, tried to recall if he had used his gun on someone.
No… he concluded. No… He had only dreamed of it. It worried him some, that he could not always differentiate.
On the third day, near desperation, Paine hired three teamsters in Yazoo City, all that were to be had. The sailors returned from Paine Plantation with two wagons, eight horses, the worst of what had once been there, but all that was left. Like some pathetic parade they rolled south toward Jackson. Five wagons to move eight hundred tons of gunboat iron over forty miles of mediocre road. It was not a job that would be quickly done.
And all the while, every minute, Robley Paine felt the snake, squeezing, squeezing.
Samuel Bowater was happy to see Paine ride off mornings, felt his stomach fall when Paine returned after sundown. The whole thing—Yazoo City, the Yazoo River, the ugly weather, the feeling that he had been shunted off to the end of the earth and left there—it all made his mood bleak and desperate.
But to have Robley Paine watching over him, those sunken, crazy eyes boring into him, to field the inquiries delivered with no inflection, no sense of curiosity or companionship, as if he was a different species from Robley Paine and not worth any empathy, made him edgy and depressed. Robley Paine struck him as a man who, for whatever dark reason, no longer cared in the least for his own life or for anyone else’s. And if he had no care for life, then he certainly had no care for more mundane things, such as courtesy or any of the niceties that allowed men to coexist.
Robley Paine was not an easy man to be around, and so, when he left, Bowater was, if not happy, then at least less miserable.
He stood on the hurricane deck, in huddled conversation. The weather had moderated quite a bit, the cold north wind backing and dropping. The sun fought its way through high haze, and the temperature climbed to near fifty degrees.
“Very well…” Samuel said. “Mr. Polkey, what do you have to report?”
Artemus Polkey was one of three shipwrights for hire at Yazoo City. Somewhere in his fifties, grizzled, fat, he did not inspire a great deal of confidence. The two missing fingers on his left hand inspired even less. But of the three ship’s carpenters, Bowater judged him most competent, based on the necessarily brief interviews he had conducted. And so Artemus Polkey was hired to oversee the refit of the cotton-clad Yazoo River into an ironclad.
“Wellll…” Polkey drew the word out, worked the plug in his mouth, spit artfully over the side. “Her bottom ain’t too bad, an that there’s the chief of your concern. Seen a couple o’ planks is a bit punky, but ain’t nothin I’d worry about. Deck beams, carlings, clamps, it all looks good to me.”
Bowater nodded. “Good. So how do we make her an ironclad?”
“Wellll…” Polkey spit again. “Reckon we take all the goddamn superstructure off her, jest strip her right down to the gunnels, jest leave the weather deck and a big damn hole where the fidley was. Build us a casement along the whole length where the deckhouse is now. ’Bout eight foot high. Build her out of live oak, say, foot thick on the sides, foot and a half fore and aft bulkheads. Bolt that ol’ iron right onto that.”
“Can you do that? Do you have the men?”
“Ah, shit…ain’t talkin but four flat sides, like a cabin. I don’t need no shipwrights to do that. Hire house carpenters. Even hire out some darkies, know how to swing a hammer.”
“The sides of the casement cannot be vertical. They must be sloped, say at a thirty-five-degree angle.”
Polkey chewed some, nodded. “Makes things a bit harder, now, but we can do that.” Bowater was beginning to like the man.
“Good. Chief Taylor?”
Taylor wore his battered cap back on his head, his uniform frock coat unbuttoned over a stained and coal-dust-smeared shirt, pants glazed with dirt. Since the sinking of the Cape Fear he had not enjoyed the silent insubordination of clean clothing.
“Me and the ol’ Star of the Delta go way back,” he said.
“Did you serve on board her?” Bowater asked.
“No. No. Towed her a bunch, when she was broke down, which was damn near a weekly occurrence.”
Bowater frowned. He thought he was over the stab of nausea that followed bad news, but he realized he was not. “What is the condition of her machinery now?”
“Seems someone gone over it recently. Someone who knows his business, I’m pleased to say. Overall it ain’t so bad. Burgess and me, we got steam up in both boilers, got turns on both her engines and they held together. Reckon they will for some time more. They’s a power of things I could do. You jest let me know how much time I gots to play down there.”
That was the question. How much time? If they never found more wagons for hauling iron from Jackson, the ironclad Yazoo River would not be underway for the next two years. But how might they haul it faster? How many men would they get to work on rebuilding the ship? Could he recruit from the nearby army units? Would Mallory send more men?
So many variables. Absolutely no way to know how long it would take to do anything. He did not know what move of the Yankees he needed to be ready to counter.
“Six weeks. We must be underway in six weeks,” Bowater said decisively. They needed a goal, a definite date, even if it was only one that he made up, right off the top of his head.
Incredible…
The word echoed around David Glasgow Farragut’s mind.
Incredible…
He was not sure to what specifically he might apply the word—there were so many things.
Incredible how swiftly a man’s fortunes could change.
Number 38 on the captains’ list of the United States Navy after fifty years’ service. A Tennessee man who had never blinked in his support of the Union, but who, he assumed, was still considered questionable thanks to his place of birth. Just two and a half months before, he had been festering away on the Navy Retirement Board, dying an interminable death. His nation was consumed by war—the one thing for which he had trained his entire life, boy to man—and he was behind a desk, shuffling papers.
But no more. He looked around the day cabin on his flagship, the USS Hartford, 225 feet long, forty-four feet on the beam, 2,900 tons. Solid. Indefatigable. His.