The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (2 page)

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.

On the hull, rivets have been countersunk to minimize drag. If the tide is with us, if the sea is calm, if we are cranking to absolute capacity, our top speed is four knots. If the water’s against us, we have a cruising speed of one knot and are in danger of capsizing. On the rear conning tower Frank’s painted “1863” and below it, “Speed Matters Little.” Someone else (not one of us) has painted, in smaller letters, “Also: Reason.” It shows a basic lack of understanding. As far as we can tell, our Confederacy is on the verge of collapse. What’s so unreasonable about wanting to give some of it back?

November and December pass without improvement around Battery Marshall, the focused attention of our war effort shifting from one losing front to another, and enthusiasm regarding our new weapon seems to have tapered from the top down. In the absence of any clear directive, our dives become endurance tests. How deep can we go? How fast can we pump air back into the ballast tanks? We turn tight circles underwater. We set the
Hunley
down on the harbor floor and practice shallow breathing. We dive and surface, acquainting ourselves with immersion. We memorize instrument placement. Attached to the outer hull is extra ballast, iron platelets i-bolted through the floor, which, in case of an emergency, can be unscrewed and dropped. We practice locating them in the dark.

Lieutenant Dixon studies tidal charts. Given that we are hand-powered, whenever we are scheduled to engage the blockade we will need to leave on the ebb tide and return with the flood. We will need the cover of darkness.

“Darkness, darkness, darkness,” Frank has taken to saying before Lieutenant Dixon blows out the candle.

“Light, light, light,” we say back, once the candle’s extinguished. We’re fond of the reversal.

There are moments of panic. Episodes of self-doubt that buffet our overall sub-marine elation. We’ve come to know our time underwater as a dampened and foggy silence punctuated by flashes of distress so immediately visceral it takes us days to stop shaking. During one dive, Lieutenant Dixon forgets to light the candle before setting the diving planes, and accidentally floods the ballast tanks before the rear hatch is fully sealed, taking on enough water that if he hadn’t immediately realized his mistake we would’ve certainly sunk. Another dive, we reverse into a pylon and break the flywheel that houses our propeller. While depth testing, Augustus succumbs to a brief hysteria, and in our rush to surface we almost roll to port. “Pardon that,” he says, shaking. He’d almost kicked a hole in the hull. “Pardoned,” Frank says.

At the dock we heave ourselves out of the hatch and stretch out flat on our backs, letting the unreality of what we’ve just done sink in. The men puttering around Battery Marshall shake their heads and keep a distance that signals discomfort. We give them hard looks in return. They’ve taken to calling us Pickett’s Charge, only without the charge. They place bets on the time it will take us to sink ourselves. The odds are on less than a week. We resent the implication. Frank reminds them that the odds haven’t changed for the last six weeks running. “So?” one of them says back.

“Whatever happened to patriotism?” Augustus says. “Don’t they know war heroes when they see them?”

“Apparently not,” Carleton, watching the latest bombardment of Charleston, replies.

One day, following up an idea we had the night before, Augustus rigs a dummy spar and we knock it into the hull of the
Indian Chief
. We’re pulled from the water for a week for having a detrimental effect on morale. “So it wasn’t the best way to illustrate our potential,” Frank says. “But morale? Half of me wishes it’d been a live load.”

“Half of you?” someone says back.

Frank and James disappear in a reverie of letter writing. Lieutenant Dixon takes a leave of absence to visit his fiancée. Carleton and I spend the week sitting near the water, throwing pebbles at floating sticks. When Augustus comes back, he tells us our comrades in arms have a new name for the
Hunley:
the peripatetic coffin.

I tell him I like the sound of it. Augustus shrugs. “Incapacitation is as incapacitation does,” he says.

“For our parade,” Carleton calls over his shoulder to Lieutenant Joosten, who’s running an inspection on the torpedo, “how about a full band and seven of South Carolina’s finest, untouched beauties?”

“We’ll see about a celebration,” Lieutenant Joosten, who has a beauty of his own, says, “when you guys actually
do
something.”

O
ur first chance actually to do something comes at the end of December when we receive an order to engage the U.S.S.
Camden,
a sloop of war that has just arrived in the harbor. As we make our preparations, the thump of artillery sounds in the distance. It has also come down from General Beauregard that, for our own safety, we are not to use the
Hunley
as a submersible, but to remain partially surfaced, using the night as camouflage. When this news reaches us, Augustus says nothing. Carleton says nothing. I say nothing.

“Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of this thing?” Frank says.

“You’re looking at me like I have a reassuring answer to that,” Lieutenant Dixon says.

We retrieve the torpedo from the armory and carry it the three hundred yards to the dock. My hands are sweating and twice Carleton asks us to stop so he can get a better grip. We fasten the boom to the bow, sit on the dock, and listen to the waves lap the iron sides of the hull. The night is moonless, and very dark.

Without a word, we lower ourselves into the
Hunley
. Infantrymen line the dock wearing expressions caught somewhere between skepticism and disbelief. As we cast off, one of them, a kid wearing a uniform three sizes too big, slowly waves. I close and secure the hatch without waving back.

Lieutenant Dixon sights the
Camden
and calls for a rotational speed of three quarters. He floods the front ballast tank and then gives the signal for Carleton to flood the rear. Beside me, Frank whispers a Hail Mary. Augustus triple checks the i-bolt at his feet. We dive incrementally until only the conning towers are surface-visible and then secure the tanks. Two minutes in, the
Hunley
’s a hothouse. Six minutes in, Lieutenant Dixon blows out the candle, and we’re moving in a darkness so complete I feel outside of myself.

It takes us an hour to get to the mouth of the harbor. It takes us another hour to get within half a mile of the
Camden
. Lieutenant Dixon calls for a lower speed, and we’re surprised at the sound of his voice. My body’s aching from sitting in the same position for so long. My shoulders are on fire. Sweat pools in my boots.

When we’re what must be a hundred yards from the ship, Lieutenant Dixon orders us to stop. We take our hands off the propeller, and everything goes silent. We can hear the water breaking in wavelets over the conning towers as we glide forward. We can hear voices, indistinct. Laughter. Shouting. Part of a song. It sounds infinitely far away. For a moment we wonder if we’re prepared to do what we came out here for—it seems, suddenly, ungraspable and remote—and then Lieutenant Dixon hisses, “Stop. Reverse.”

We do nothing at first. “Reverse,” he says again. “It’s not the
Camden,
it’s just a picket ship.”

“What’s the difference?” Frank says.

“The difference is that we only have orders to engage the
Camden,
” Lieutenant Dixon says. “Reverse.”

“Why don’t we just ram it?” I say. “We’re out here.”

“Reverse.”

Because the tide is against us, it takes us four hours to get back. By the time we reach the dock, morning has broken. We sit at our stations, cold with sweat, furious with humiliation. No one wants to get out. Finally Lieutenant Dixon unscrews the hatch. As he heaves himself out, he shakes like he has a palsy. “It wasn’t the
Camden,
” he says, to someone at the dock.

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

O
pportunities 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.

D
uring 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?