JAMES NELSON - Thieves Of Mercy

“Oooweee!”

Bowater and his men looked up. Mississippi Mike Sullivan was leaning on the hurricane deck rail, grinning down at them. “That was a hell of a jump, Cap’n! I surely did not think you would make that!”

Bowater felt his eyes go wide, his mouth fall open. He was incapable of speech.

Sullivan leaned farther over the rail. “Damn, Cap’n, you are completely covered in coal dust! You could do a minstrel show, right here!”

Bowater’s hands were trembling. He felt the words rise up from his throat. “You… son… of… a… bitch!” He charged forward, raced for the ladder to the hurricane deck.

Samuel Bowater knew about killing. As a young ensign he had killed Mexicans. He had killed hostile islanders in the Pacific, slavers in Africa. In a year of warfare, Bowater had killed Yankees. But each time, every time, he had killed because he had to, because it was his duty. He had never actually wanted to kill anyone. Until now.

SIR: We have some information today that the enemy is about moving, and his forces are said to be large and his transports very numerous at Old Point [Virginia]. I trust you will be able to penetrate and defeat his designs. Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

STEPHEN R. MALLORY TO FLAG OFFICER JOSIAH TATTNALL, COMMANDING NA V AL FORCES, JAMES RIVER

Wendy Atkins looked at the letter in her hand. Crumpled and stained, smudged, wrinkled as if it had been wet, subject to the hard use of the Confederate Postal Service. Postmarked Yazoo City. Written by Samuel Bowater.

In front of her, on the bed where she and Samuel had made love her first and only time, a carpetbag sat open. Its gaping mouth begged to be filled, but Wendy hesitated. What to put in it? Can I really do this thing?

She had met Bowater one year before. A mutual love of painting had led them both to the little waterside park in Norfolk, a lovely view of the river that begged to be rendered on canvas. He had been put off by her, which was no surprise. Her brashness was an organic part of her, like her long, dark brown hair, and it overpowered any natural charm she possessed. She had offered her criticism of his work, which he most certainly had not requested. She delighted in his discomfort.

She had always been like that. She had always shocked people with her outspoken manner, her boldness. She did it to keep people away, like a rattlesnake shaking its tail. She did it because she was so terrified of being ordinary that she had to make herself extraordinary, even if it meant making herself obnoxious.

But their lives, it seemed, were made to intersect. Wendy met an engineer named Hieronymus Taylor, who helped her to live out a dream she had long held, to sail aboard a man-of-war in combat. It was a thing she had wanted ever since, as a little girl, she had sat on the floor of her father’s library and read romantic stories of great naval heroes and their victories in glorious battle.

Taylor snuck her aboard his ship dressed as a common sailor. One thing that Taylor had failed to mention-the captain of the ship was Samuel Bowater. She had seen him, calm as if he was painting a picture, in the middle of the bloody combat. She had been revolted, terrified, intrigued. The emotional wounds of all she saw that day took months to heal. She fled Norfolk for her family’s home in Culpepper.

It was late fall when she returned to Norfolk, a very different person. Things did not seem as frivolous as they once had. Her experience in battle had focused her mind beautifully. She volunteered as a nurse at the naval hospital.

In that capacity she met Samuel Bowater again, when he was brought it on a stretcher, fresh from Hatteras Inlet, his leg and arm so torn up that he nearly lost them both. Wendy nursed him back to health. She fell in love with him. And he with her.

It was in February that Bowater came to her there, in the little carriage house in which she lived, behind the Portsmouth home of her aunt Molly Atkins. He came from the fight at Elizabeth City, a fleet battle between gunboats in which he had seen things that wrenched him down deep. He asked her for canvas and paint and for hours he poured his grief out with oils and brush. And when he was done, and that horror was exorcized, as much as it could be, they lay down on the bed on which her carpetbag now rested and consummated the tumultuous thing that had been brewing between them for eleven months.

Soon after, he was reassigned to an ironclad in Mississippi. He fought in the losing effort to stop the Yankees from coming up the Mississippi River from the Gulf, Farragut and that bunch.

For two weeks after the battle, Wendy had walked around numb, as if she were encased in glass, her mind dulled to the grief and anxiety of not knowing. And then, on the eighth of May, the letter arrived and she knew that Samuel Bowater was safe, as of eight days earlier. He was in Yazoo City.

She had to go to him.

She went to her wardrobe, pulled out a plain gray dress, folded it, stuck it in her carpetbag.

This is insane.

How could she travel to Yazoo City, a woman by herself? It would be madness at any time, but now, with the entire nation at war, it was beyond the pale.

But yet… War brought with it a certain insanity, as if the old rules did not apply, as if she could do things she would not otherwise have dreamed of doing. Hadn’t she dressed as an apprentice sailor and snuck aboard a man-of-war, actually taken the wheel in the middle of a sea fight? How, in a sane world, could that have happened?

She could go to Yazoo City. It was just a matter of courage. Did she have the courage.

“No,” she said out loud, “I do not have the courage.” But I’ll go anyway .

She packed the rest quickly: dresses, chemises, stockings, her painting smock and her paints, a tiny canvas she had primed the day before. She looked at the window, more as a matter of habit than in hopes of seeing anything. It was around nine o’clock at night, full dark, and all she could see was her own reflection in the glass.

Dear God, I look a misery. The days of anxiety had not been kind to her. She was twenty-seven, not a young girl anymore, and the years were starting to show.

“I guess I had better get Samuel to marry me,” she said out loud, “or I’ll be an old maid soon enough.” She smiled as she thought of the two of them, she and Aunt Molly, living out their dotage together, old maids with white hair. People would whisper about them. Children would start rumors that they were witches.

She could imagine the two of them growing old together. They had got on well in the two years that Wendy had been with her, staying in the carriage house. Molly was lively and fun, and they understood each other’s need for occasional solitude.

Indeed, they did not grow tired of one another because they did not see much of one another. Molly was always on the move, and there would sometimes be weeks in which Wendy was certain Molly had not come home, but she was never sure. Molly never announced when she was leaving and did not announce her return. One day she was around the house, one day she was not. But Wendy lived happily in the little carriage house and enjoyed Molly’s company when it was there, and she did not ask questions.

Wendy finished packing, then pulled a simple traveling dress over her chemise, no crinoline, which she avoided in any event. She took the money that she had hidden in her sock drawer and stuffed it down into the carpetbag. She sat at her familiar desk and wrote a short note to Aunt Molly, explaining things matter-offactly, and left it on her pillow. She took one look around the carriage house, a place she had come to love, then tied a simple bonnet on her head, turned down the lantern until the flame was extinguished, and stepped out into the night.