Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

“Well, I’ll be,” the voice comes back.

Opportunities come, opportunities go. We set out to engage the Hoboken, but the weather turns us back. We try the next night, but a tiny seam opens in the hull for no apparent reason and we turn back. A week later we get caught in the tide at the mouth of Breach Inlet and are rolled side to side so violently that Frank doesn’t eat for two days.

The war drags—slogs—on. On New Year’s Day, two runners break the blockade and we’re all grins and whoops until their cargo’s revealed to be molasses and women’s clothing. The ships we try to send through, carrying cotton and rice, are caught by the blockade and send up smoke in dark columns that travel so high before dissipating, the horizon appears jailed. The shelling of Charleston continues unabated, the Federals launching shell after shell into the abandoned city from Morris Island and the harbor as if they have nothing better to do with the afternoon.

To the north of us, General Grant has begun what’s promised to be a march of attrition and scorched earth, aimed at Richmond, and we seem unable to muster any sort of resistance. But how could we? We build an iron ship, they build one of theirs. We mobilize for Washington, and they cut us in half in Virginia. We shoot our best general in the back, and even he isn’t that surprised about it. “You’d think, standing at a distance,” Frank says, “that we’re trying to lose.”

“You’d also think,” Carleton, who’s sitting next to him, says, “that your emotional response would clock in somewhere above where it apparently is.”

Reports place our dead in the tens of thousands. In January, Battery Marshall becomes a way station for casualties. Throughout the night we hear the screams of the newly wounded. Outside the makeshift hospital, amputated legs are stacked like wood until someone complains and they’re covered up. “At least now you’ll have some company in the hobble department,” Augustus says to me. I key my laughter to such a pitch that someone’s dog answers from across Battery Marshall and Augustus rapidly excuses himself from the table.

A letter from my mother informs me they’ve left our property in the face of the advancing Union army, and plan to head east. What I pray for now, it reads, is a swift end to this conflict, so we can be together again.

I start a letter back and give up halfway through.

During a test dive in February, we spring a leak and the Hunley is pulled for repairs. A bolt had come loose, and seawater erupted through the hull in a tiny stream that came up between Carleton’s legs in such a way that even Lieutenant Dixon, once safely on the dock, found it amusing. We’re told we’ll be back in the harbor in four days.

“What’s the point?” Carleton says as we secure the torpedo in the armory.

“Of what?” Frank says back.

“Of practice dives? Of any of this?”

Frank secures the padlock and turns. He shrugs, palms out, as if checking for rain. “Are you looking for the ontological explanation or something more accessible?” he says, shutting down the conversation.

In the harbor, the picket ships list around their newest arrival: the U.S.S. Housatonic, a twelve-cannoned sloop of war that measures over two hundred feet. At twelve hundred tons, she’s a thing of fierce beauty. Her appearance is the cause of general concern around Battery Marshall. For us, alone, it’s encouraging.

Lieutenant Dixon, for the first time in weeks, visits us in our barracks. He’s smaller than I am, and is wearing what Augustus has taken to calling his Look of Officiousness. He stands in the entry, silent, until Frank makes it clear that he should either come out with it or bid us good night. He smiles nervously, fishes in his pocket, and emerges with a twenty-dollar gold piece, dented in the middle.

“My fiancée gave this to me,” he begins, and tells his story.

We listen as the thing unfolds. His inaugural morning of combat was at Shiloh, where he was a rifleman in a first-wave offensive blown back so quickly it was held up as a textbook don’t in subsequent battles. Bullets whizzed by and lodged in the bodies of the men behind him. The sound of it, he said, was like apples exploding on the side of a barn. Cannon fire shredded his line. As he marched, unsure of himself—standing, so he felt, alone—the gold piece in his pocket caught a musket ball and sent him to the ground. He spent three weeks in the hospital, but kept his leg. “It seems like luck,” he says. “But it’s not.”

He passes it around. It’s heavier than I imagined, and gleams in the lamplight. On one side, there’s an engraving: Shiloh April 6 1862 My life Preserver G. E. D . “Where was this at Vicksburg?” Carleton says, when it’s passed to him.

Lieutenant Dixon pockets the gold piece and tugs at his beard. “We engage the Housatonic, ” he says. “As soon as we’re repaired.” He turns and leaves.

“As long as this is inspirational story hour,” Arnold says from his bunk and cuts wind. Coincidence, pluck, promises, talismans—what does any of that have to do with us? We know what we see and what we’ve always seen: a campaign of indiscriminate shelling, economic paralysis, and relentless destruction. The strategy of the more powerful and better equipped. The Union giant’s footsteps thundered down our hallway the instant we struck our flints on Fort Sumter, and their response has so far outstripped the ethereal bonds of brotherhood that we blanch at our capacity for self-regard. How will we explain that we brought this on ourselves? How do you meet, halfway, a hammer blow that’s larger than anything you can imagine? And how long can you do nothing before you begin to feel you deserve it?

Frank takes one of Arnold’s boots and pulls the laces clean off. Arnold puts up his fists and Frank apologizes. “It was my intention,” he says, “to unlace both.”

“Intentions, intentions,” Augustus says. “Never the follow-through.”

Frank shrugs. He leans over, finds Arnold’s other boot, yanks the laces, and ties the boot closed. We have our fish boat. We have our bomb. We possess what the less observant might call an indifference to plausibility, which is matched only by our private desire to transfer this thing back to a human scale. We have what Augustus calls our Stab at Enlargement. Everything else hovers in a constant state somewhere just beyond recognition.

Before going to sleep, Carleton convinces Augustus to tell his balloon corps story. It’s one of our favorites; we know it by heart. Before stepping on his bayonet, Augustus had fought in Virginia with General Beauregard. Things hadn’t been going well. They were being outmaneuvered: any flank operation they attempted was spotted far ahead of time by the Union Balloon Corps—lookout men in balloons, who surveyed the land from the air and reported on Confederate flanking formations. These balloons were something to see. They hung in the sky like inverted onion bulbs, tethered to the ground. You kept waiting for them to sprout. They’d been bad news for the last few months, spotting and shucking any surprises General Beauregard could dream up. One night, the night before a planned mobilization, Augustus’s commander recruited a small group of soldiers and tasked them with a covert, and potentially dangerous, operation: they were to leave their encampment, bushwhack across the Union lines, fire on the corps, and return. No one in the balloons would be armed, and, if they managed their surprise, there would be minimal protection on the ground. Augustus and four other soldiers were given three muskets each, grimly saluted, and sent on their way. They ran like Indians through the forest, ducking branches, kneeling in the brush. It took them two hours to get within range, and another hour of crawling on their stomachs to get a clear view of the balloons. Afraid of being seen, they were quick to load and arrange their extra muskets in a row on the grass in front of them. At one of their whispered commands, they shouldered for the first volley. As Augustus lined and steadied his shot, he caught a glimpse of the man in the basket. He was small and bespectacled. He looked completely at peace.