Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

There were no speeches, no explanations. But who needed one? Just by looking at the thing you knew what it was built for. “You getting emotional?” Frank said.

“I believe I might be,” Augustus said. “I believe it may be so.”

How unfamiliar are we with what we are capable of? As a child I was Gimpy the Lump Foot, One-Legged Ward, Vomit the Hobbler. The one-room schoolhouse I attended in Columbia was an exercise in controlled explosions. Before school, groups of kids would taunt me until I chased them, then laugh at the shit-show. During school, balled pieces of paper were bounced off the back of my head with Swiss-clock regularity. After school came the fights. My sisters were no help. My father shrugged at my bloody noses and torn shirts and said I had to learn how to stand up for myself sometime. I pointed to my leg. “You know what I mean,” he said.

My mother was more sympathetic, taking me, on occasion, in her arms to muffle my sobs. “You have to know your strengths,” she said.

As far as I could tell my only strength consisted of taking heroic portions of abuse and folding them into broods so unyielding that no one in my family would approach me for days. I was accused of being inconsolable. I was chastised for my inability to see beyond myself. Sunday sermons exhorted us to forgive and forget, but even then I knew forgiveness was the province of the healthy, of the unbeaten, and that no help was coming. My parents were treated with sympathy for their blessing in disguise. “Pretty good disguise,” my father was fond of saying in response.

The Hunley ’s first crew was gathered from an elite corps of older seamen none of us, until the moment they filed down the dock, had seen before. They threaded through the assembled crowd, accepting slaps on the back from enlisted men. There was a speech at the water by her captain, Lieutenant Payne, of which only fragments of intoned heroism drifted to my ears. Once everyone was below, Lieutenant Payne waved, then saluted and turned to board. After the hatches were sealed we watched the boat for movement and saw no movement. No one cast off. We waited twenty minutes. Finally, the forward hatch opened, and Lieutenant Payne said that while he appreciated our audience, we should return to our duties: the crew was only becoming familiar with instrument placement, and there would be no dive. Eventually they did dive, but the triumph was short-lived. On August 29, as the Hunley was out on the water running short surface maneuvers, Lieutenant Payne inadvertently stepped on the lever controlling the diving plane and our fish boat, with her hatches still open, dove, filled with water, and sank. The rescue skiff found Lieutenant Payne treading water amidst a soup of roiling air bubbles, wearing a look so far beyond stricken it resembled paralysis. He was relieved of his command and the Hunley was fished from the bottom of the harbor. Five men drowned. She hadn’t traveled more than fifty feet from the wharf.

A second crew volunteered, and the boat’s inventor, Horace Hunley himself, was brought in from Mobile to assume command. We lined the shore as dive after successful dive was completed. Mud and silt, occasionally churned to the surface by her propeller, marked the vessel’s underwater progress. It was like watching a monster patrol a pond. Fifteen minutes; twenty-three minutes; an hour. We bet rations on how long she’d stay down. One day, she ventured only into the shoals, and remained submerged for eighteen minutes. The next, she explored the deepest part of the harbor, stayed under for fifty-seven minutes, and surfaced to applause.

After three weeks of successful practice dives, we waited one afternoon as an excruciating ninety-two submerged minutes ticked by. Augustus paced the gangway. Carleton tied line in and out of Turk’s head knots. I scanned the harbor for churn and saw none. We upped our times and doubled our bets in a show of solidarity until finally even we had to concede it was a lost cause. Lieutenant Joosten let us know that word would be sent to General Beauregard: the crew had drowned and a salvage operation would begin in the morning.

Half an hour later, a yell from the harbor sent us topside. “What’s the time on that one?” Hunley shouted. He stood half out of the hatch, his clothing soaked, his voice quavering.

It had been two hours and fifteen minutes. The Hunley bobbed fifteen feet from the dock like a fishing buoy. We cheered as though we’d won the war.

Augustus had had the highest guess when we stopped betting. “What am I going to do with all this hardtack?” he said, looking at the pile in front of him.

“Rebuild Fort Sumter?” Frank, fanning the heat off his face, said. “Shove it up your ass? Be grateful?”

On October 15, two days before she was scheduled to engage the picket ships, the Hunley failed to surface. Three days later, she was found nine fathoms down, her bow augered into the mud, her ballast tanks open and her cabin flooded. The salvage operation confirmed what we already knew: that all eight men, including Horace Hunley, had been trapped aboard, and drowned. The service was brief. We stood at attention, approximated composure, and returned to our ship.

The blockade, as if relieved to have dodged this particular assault, sank two of our runners and shelled a cathedral in celebration.

What kind of person signs up for duty aboard a self-sabotaging vessel that has failed—spectacularly—almost every meaningful test it’s been given? Who willingly mans the underwater equivalent of a bicycle strapped to a bomb with the intention of pedaling it four miles through hostile waters to engage an infinitely better equipped enemy? After a two-week hiatus, the Hunley was returned to active duty, and her new skipper, Lieutenant Dixon, asked for volunteers. We stepped forward. He was visibly touched. We were touched ourselves. He wondered why, out of over four hundred people, only seven had signed up. We shrugged. He asked if we knew how unlikely a successful mission would be. We nodded. And might he ask why we volunteered.

“You could, ” Frank said, and offered nothing else.

The Hunley is thirty-nine feet long with a beam of three feet, ten inches. The entry hatches that cap the conning towers are fourteen by fifteen and a half inches; we swivel our hips diagonally, and even then it’s like threading a cannonball through a needle. Below boasts a cabin height of four feet; there is no standing, only sitting. Discomfort, muscle cramps, an iron-smelling darkness; it gets so hot we make jokes about various sins catching up to us in this lifetime. Augustus, generally the first below, has taken to greeting us as we crawl past. “The C.S.S. Steam Boiler welcomes you aboard,” he says.

The seven of us sit on the starboard side, shoulders chafing, hands on the propeller crank. Our legs, if extended, span the beam and come up short on the hull. Lieutenant Dixon perches in the bow, head in the conning tower, levers at the ready. On his signal we turn the propeller. He lights a candle, checks the manometer mounted above his head, and floods the ballast tanks. As we dive, the iron hull sweats and groans like old wood. The air goes from stale to rank. “Yo-ho-ho,” someone says.

In August she arrived; in August she sank. In August she rose; in October she sank, only to be salvaged and mobilized again. Every day we board a contraption that has killed thirteen men, including its inventor, on test runs alone. Every night we site the picket ships, set a course, and practice maneuvers. Our purpose is comically straightforward: steer undetected to the mouth of the harbor, sink the largest Union frigate we can ram, hope we are not destroyed in the explosion, and crank ourselves back to shore. To call us brave would imply that we’ve thought this through. To call us a suicide outfit would be missing the point. How many men have been underwater for hours at a time? How many men have sat crumpled, candlelit, and submerged and been sure of themselves? Frank hums a marching song softly in time with the propeller. Carleton taps the crank handle with his ring finger.