Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

It took two volleys to puncture the balloon. Beset by a sudden bolt of conscience—what Augustus calls one of his finer moments of not connecting the dots—he’d been very careful to aim well above the bespectacled man on his second shot. The basket fell. The man plummeted in silence and hit a patch of rocks. The sound was like a melon breaking. The musket reports brought the Union soldiers out of their tents, but by the time they figured out what had happened, Augustus was streaking back to camp, musket-less and exhilarated by the sound of panicked Union guns firing at the copse of trees where they had just been.

Confident he’d dismantled the enemy’s ability to undercut his formations, General Beauregard drafted his plans and slept the sleep of the satisfied.

The next day thousands of men—including Augustus’s commander and all four of the men who’d accompanied him through the forest the night before—died.

“Turns out,” Augustus says, “balloons weren’t the problem.”

We are quiet for a few minutes. Then Frank breaks the silence by telling Augustus he never tires of that particular story.

“I do,” Augustus replies, and turns his back to the rest of us to sleep.

Two nights later, the repairs have been made. We make our way to the wharf and run a quick inspection, our fish boat patient and quiet as we check the outside of her hull, crouch to run our hands across her deck, dip our fingers in the water. We secure the torpedo with care, triple-checking the firing mechanism. Lieutenant Dixon is in full regalia, his pistols crossed below his bandolier. The tassels of his shoulder ensigns sweep with his movement like grass in the wind. A gibbous moon hangs suspended over Breach Inlet, mirror-reflected in the water. We lower ourselves into the Hunley barely aware of one another. No one sees us off. As we go hands on the propeller and prepare to flood the ballast tanks, Carleton remarks on the thorough pleasantness of this February evening. It hadn’t occurred to any of us that the shelling had stopped.

The Housatonic sits two and a half miles outside of Battery Marshall, sails reefed, becalmed. On Lieutenant Dixon’s orders, we crank slowly, a partially submerged monster of complete silence.

We leave the inlet and churn at our stations for what could be one hour or five, lost in the rhythm of our cranking. We know we are closing the distance; we care about nothing else. Fifty yards from the ship, Lieutenant Dixon calls for maximum speed and we oblige. Thirty-five yards away we are spotted and some sort of bell aboard the Housatonic peals alarm. We are too close for their cannons, but musket balls fired from deck ricochet off our conning towers—the only part of the Hunley they can see—and the sharp pings of impact are amplified between us, marbles tossed against a heavy iron tub. There is shouting, and I’m not sure if it’s coming from us or somewhere else.

The hollow thunk of our spar as it embeds itself in the wooden hull of the Housatonic jolts us forward; we scramble to regain our positions. Lieutenant Dixon yells for reverse. It takes us a second to remember which direction to crank until Frank says “Away from you” and we put it together. I’m aware that we’re moving at an angle, our stern dipping low, leading the bow below the surface. We glide in reverse for just long enough to wonder whether we’ve attached the line to the firing mechanism correctly, and then there’s an explosion so deafening it’s like tasting sound.

We take our hands off the crank and stare at the iron wall two feet in front of us. I can feel an arm on my shoulder, applying pressure. I’m vaguely aware of a hand on my leg. My feet are cold.

Lieutenant Dixon lights his candle and swivels in his seat. His expression is unreadable. He asks Carleton to check the ballast tank. He tells Frank to re-secure the rear hatch. When they tell him all is as expected, three quarters full, secured, he closes his eyes and lets his chin fall to his chest. I look down. We’re sitting shin-deep in water.

Battery Marshall is two and a half miles away. No one says anything. The swell bobs us back and forth, gently sloshing the water we’ve taken on, now at our knees, as if in a basin. Lieutenant Dixon tells us that through the porthole he can see the Housatonic in flames, listing to port. Lifeboats are being lowered. Men are in the water. We remain at our stations as he unscrews the front hatch and fires a magnesium flare, signaling success. Then he secures the hatch and returns to his seat without a word.

The Hunley fills fast. We stop moving in the swell, and I have the sensation of diving without diving. When the water’s at my waist, I wonder if we’ll make it to the bottom of the harbor before we drown. I imagine a gentle cessation, silt and mud pillowing out and up, then settling. I imagine rust and barnacles, inquisitive fish. When the water’s at chest level, Frank mumbles something and puts his head under. No one restrains him.

When the water’s at my neck, my father appears. He asks me if I know that, one hundred years from now, the Hunley will be found and fished out of the harbor by an expedition costing millions of dollars, and, once salvaged, will be paraded through the streets of Charleston by young men dressed in gray uniforms. He asks me if I know that they’ll find a boot and a button, and verify that Arnold had been one of the men aboard. That, eventually, they will find Lieutenant Dixon’s gold coin, dented in the middle, and a great effort will go into finding out what happened to his fiancée—whose name, it turns out, was Queenie—but that her story will prove mysterious, no beginning, just an ending, as it is with us. He asks me if I know that, despite sustaining over seven million pounds of artillery, Charleston will never succumb to Union occupation.

“Did you,” he says, “ever wonder at this?”

I tell him that at every turn our understanding of what was happening around us had been mitigated by such a clanging abashment that we’d become rock-like as far as expectations go. It was pick-up sticks in the middle of a hurricane. It had never occurred to us to wonder about much of anything.

He tells me that we will be remembered mostly for our optimism. I tell him it isn’t optimism that gets you aboard something like this. He says, Still.

I ask him what we’ve done beyond proving our own uselessness? What are we but a spectacle of self-defeat? He answers that we are an expression of an intangible truth that has plagued victors for thousands of years. That immolation as a form of confrontation holds irreducible power.

I tell him he has it backward, and if it had been approval we were looking for, we would’ve kept diaries.

There is another explosion above us, the keel of the Housatonic seizing in on itself, collapsing, and my father disappears. Through the darkness I feel the iron hull on my back. I feel for the crank handle and grasp it. Carleton is frantic. Augustus is standing so his head is in the small hollow of the conning tower, which will be the last place to fill. Someone is screaming at a pitch both familiar and thoroughly distant, a keening that only stops, and briefly, in surprise when our stern hits the floor of the harbor and our bow follows, scrapes a rock of some kind, and rests.

Friends, two boys, stare at each other and themselves in the slightly warped mirror in the second-floor bathroom of a small house in Laurelhurst, shorts on, shirts off. It’s the summer after fifth grade, and school, for them, is already beginning to seem like a dream that belongs to someone else. It’s in their slipstream. Gone. The days are beginning to get hot hot, there’s a Popsicle man somewhere, but right now? They don’t care. They’re almost exactly the same age—their birthdays are four days apart, a cosmic near-miss that in their calculations brings them just short of being brothers, twins, the way things were supposed to be. One of them, the older-by-four-days friend has a younger sister; the other only parents, and, standing next to his friend, in his friend’s house, he feels a deformity calmed. Their chests are concave; their feet are growing. Their arms are marbled with the musculature of tiny woodland creatures. One has an innie, the other an outie. No one is home.