The Crescent Spy (30 page)

Josephine stuffed more cotton in her ears and put her hands over them as she looked out through the slits at the action on the river. The fort shuddered with another barrage of mortars, sending dust sifting from the rafters. Moments later, the Union fired another broadside from its sloops. Shells slammed into the wall and threw Josephine and the gunners to the ground. A young soldier lay crying next to her, his wrist badly twisted, probably broken. She volunteered to take him down to the infirmary. The gunnery sergeant nodded, pale-faced, before turning back to order return fire.

The injured boy was still crying when she got him to the yard, tears cutting streaks in the powder that blackened his face. “Don’t let them do it.”

“Do what, cut off your hand? Surely it’s not as bad as all that?”

He bent his wrist. “It’s not broken at all, only sprained. That’s what I mean. They’ll send me back.”

A shell fell whistling into the yard. It struck the ground a few yards away and sent mud flying. The boy staggered and they grabbed each other for mutual support.

“Please, help me get out of here,” he said. “I can’t take it anymore.”

She stared at him. “You mean desert?”

“No, I would never . . .
yes.
”

The boy had seen the elephant. She could see it in the wide-eyed, stunned expression, as if a shell had exploded too near his head and addled his brains. He was shaking so hard that she thought his knees would buckle and he would collapse.

“If you want to leave,” she said, “there’s a crew outside repairing the telegraph lines. If anyone asks, that’s where you’re going. Then slip into the swamp beyond the water battery. Union pickets lie two miles to the south. Give them information, and they’ll guarantee your safety.”

S
hells fell all day and into the night. The bombardment never ceased. Sometime after midnight, men came pounding on her door and she emerged into the hallway to find it filled with smoke. A shell had penetrated the bombproof and set the wooden support beams on fire.

She stumbled outside to find half the fort aflame and the night lit up with orange, smoky firelight. Shells came screaming into the yard, where they buried themselves in the wet ground and detonated. Mud spumes spouted into the air. The ground shook so hard it felt as though the fort would soon collapse into rubble.

In spite of all of this, the fort was still standing. Several men had been killed, and another dozen injured, but casualties were still light. The biggest injury seemed to be morale, and Dunbar reported with disgust that several dozen men had failed to report for duty, presumably deserting. Josephine thought guiltily about the boy she’d encouraged to flee toward Union pickets.

“I’ve set guards,” he told Josephine and Fein. Ludd had fled upriver the previous night with a signal boat, leaving the two reporters from the
Crescent
alone to report the battle.
“We’ve caught a few deserters, but too many have slipped through. An example must be set. From this point, anyone caught deserting will be shot.”

“Isn’t that a little harsh?” Fein asked.

“Every man who leaves his post makes it that much more likely that his fellow soldiers will be killed.”

When he left, the two reporters stood in the doorway of one of the few bombproofs not on fire, staring up at the sky. The mortars were targeting the water battery outside the walls at the moment, but soon enough the barrage would return, and they wanted to be ready to flee inside.

Josephine had been thinking about the reporter from the
Picayune
. “Can you believe that Ludd left already? Did he expect to find a picnic and a fireworks display?”

Fein cleared his throat nervously. “We should go, too. They say
Louisiana
left the levee under tow. We could meet them midway up and get a good story there.”

“You can go, I’m staying.”

“Then let’s cross to Fort St. Philip at least,” Fein said. “We’ll still see the battle, but away from this confounded bombardment.”

More bombs came into the yard. One buried itself in the ground some twenty feet away, and soldiers in the fire brigade threw aside their water buckets and leaped to the side. The two reporters ducked inside and cringed, waiting for it to go off. This one failed to detonate.

“Josephine, for God’s sake,” Fein said. Another shell shook the roof. “We can’t stay here.”

She hesitated. In spite of her bold words, that last bombardment had left her rattled. But she couldn’t leave. It wasn’t simply a question of watching the battle; she was collecting information for the Union fleet downstream. They must have used hundreds of tons of powder and launched thousands of bombs, shells, and shot, yet so far had not diminished the ability of Fort Jackson to keep fighting back. Few men inside had been killed. If federal troops marched on Jackson, they would be slaughtered. Would she be able to collect this information from the safer side of the river? And could she get this information downriver from either location?

“All right,” she said. “We’ll move to Fort St. Philip.”

But this proved easier to plan than to execute. They found Dunbar only to learn that even military traffic across the river had been cut. The Yankees had fired up the docks, he said bitterly, and what’s more, the Confederate fleet was too afraid to venture beyond the barrier except to push down fire rafts when darkness fell.

The guns from the fort had won at least one hard-earned concession from the enemy. Some of the most accurate mortar boats on the east bank had taken damage, and Farragut had moved them to the opposite side of the river. Here, they were more protected, but more of their shells began to fall astray.

Even so, Dunbar shared the grim result of two days of full-scale bombardment. The casemates, parapets, and the parade plain had been pounded. Shells had knocked out two thirty-two-pounders in the water battery, and several heavy guns in the fort were either destroyed or disabled.

“What about
Louisiana
?” Josephine asked.

“They brought her in tow. She’s anchored above Fort St. Philip.”

Fein made encouraging noises at this.

“But she can’t move under her own power,” Dunbar continued, “and the mechanics are still trying to get her guns properly mounted. I want her towed below the barricade. It would be something at least.”

“Like a floating battery,” Josephine said. “That makes sense.”

“Yes, and damn near impregnable.” The major shook his head. “The navy won’t do it. They say they need three days to get her ready for combat.”

“Three days!” Fein said.

“Yes, I know,” Dunbar said glumly. “In three days we’ll all be dead.”

T
he next night, someone came to shake Josephine from her sleep. She lay wrapped in a blanket, still dressed in the filthy clothes she’d been wearing for days. Soldiers slumbered all around her. They tossed and turned on the hard ground, some moaning in their sleep, others muttering to themselves.

At first she thought the person trying to wake her was only the ground shaking, the endless rumble and buckle of the bombardment that seemed never to end.

“Josephine, wake up!”

She blinked at a lamp held in front of her face. “What is it? Are they here?” There was a dream still lingering on the edge of her memory, something about soldiers storming the gates of the fortress.

“The boat is ready. We have to go now.” It was Fein peering down at her. One of the lenses in his glasses had cracked.

Josephine threw off her blanket and grabbed the satchel she’d kept held between her knees while she slept. She stuffed the rest of her few belongings into her carpetbag.

Outside, there was enough light to see by the remnants of the citadel still burning in the center of the yard. Fein ducked his head and raced across, with Josephine following. Another bomb hit, followed by the roar of two cannons from the casemates. The two reporters left the fort through the open gates, ignored by the soldiers on watch.

They found a rowboat waiting at a newly reconstructed dock on the upriver side of the fort. Four sailors sat at the oars, and the passengers included a gray-bearded engineer who said he’d come across from St. Philip to check the magazines, as well as two of General Lovell’s staff officers. The final passenger was a young soldier with his hands tied in front of him and wearing a blindfold. Some miscreant, she supposed, being hauled across to the other side to face a whipping, or worse. He was trembling so violently that she couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.

The river was a glossy black, reflecting the flashes of light from the Union warships downstream. Behind them, the fort answered fire with fire, while atop the ramparts, the Confederate flag still flapped in the breeze, defiant in the face of all the might the Yankees could throw at them. In spite of the crippled morale inside the forts, it seemed as though the Union was no closer to their objective than when they’d begun.

“Please,” the young soldier said, flinching at the sound of cannon fire as the rowboat entered the current. “Could you please let me see? I don’t want to die blindfolded.”

This only brought jeers from the sailors rowing the boat and further disgusted comments from the officers.

Josephine’s pity only grew. “I don’t see the harm. His hands are tied.”

“He’s a damned coward,” one of the sailors said. “He don’t deserve nothing from us.”

“Save your tender feelings,” one of the officers added, a lieutenant. “This man is going to hang for desertion.”

“All the more reason to show compassion.”

Josephine made her way to the bench holding the prisoner and pulled off his blindfold. It was the young soldier with the sprained wrist that she’d encouraged to desert. He fixed her with a haunted, desperate look. She stared back in shock and horror.

“It is true,” he whispered. “There’s no saving me now.”

“I’ll talk to them. I’ll tell them—”

“No,” he interrupted. “Please, don’t.” The young man lifted his bound hands and took a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket, which he handed to Josephine. “For my mama. I wrote down her name. She lives in the Third Ward.”

“This man is a coward and a traitor,” the officer said. His voice was as unforgiving as the shells screaming over their heads to slam into the casemates of the fort. “That’s all his mother needs to know. That he was running to enemy lines, prepared to kiss those Yankees’ boots and thank them kindly for their savagery.”

Fein had been watching with a concerned expression, and now he spoke up. “This man is going to die tonight. So might we all. What harm is there in showing a little mercy?”

Josephine took the young man’s note, cast a defiant stare at anyone who seemed likely to offer further contradiction, and tucked it into her satchel with her own writing.

The rowboat was roughly a third the way across the Mississippi when fire caught Josephine’s eye from upstream. What was at first a flickering light became a billowing bonfire drifting toward them. The navy had set loose one of their fire rafts to float down at the federal fleet.

This put down any further talk about the prisoner. The rowing sailors cried out at the unexpected inferno roaring toward them and redoubled their efforts. The officers snarled profanities, both at the sailors for not rowing fast enough and at the navy itself for not bothering to find out whether anyone was attempting to cross before sending down a raft. Viewed from the parapets, the fire rafts had seemed so slow and lazy as they drifted downstream, that it was never a surprise to Josephine that the Union invariably snared them and dragged them harmlessly away from the big ships. But viewed from a rowboat in the river, the raft seemed to be barreling down at them. It was still a hundred yards away when Josephine could feel the heat.

It looked as though they would just squeak past before it hit them. But then one of the sailors leaped overboard and swam toward the near shore. One of his fellows cursed him. A lieutenant pulled out a revolver and calmly plugged shots into the water, but none hit the coward, who escaped into the darkness. The man had jettisoned the oar as he went, and it now slipped out of the oarlock and fell into the river. A second sailor leaped overboard while the others were grabbing at it.

Josephine had been holding it together until the second man hit the water. Then suddenly she was back on
Cairo Red
the night the boiler exploded. Firemen and engineers had leaped overboard and left the passengers to die. Burned, scalded, blown to pieces. And drowned, like her mother.

The fire raft now towered above them. Heat roiled over the water. Both raft and rowboat were now drifting downstream toward the barrier.

She ignored her carpetbag but clutched her satchel. If she went over, she would lose all of her writing of the past few days, now amounting to at least forty pages.

Another splash. It was the engineer, who bobbed up and began paddling to safety. He was followed moments later by the two remaining sailors and one of the lieutenants. One remained, plus the young prisoner, who stared at the fire with a wide, slack-jawed expression, as if stunned. Plus the two reporters from the
Crescent
.

Josephine moved to untie the young prisoner.

“What are you doing?” the remaining officer demanded. He wasn’t the one who’d been speaking so angrily moments earlier about the prisoner’s cowardice—that one had fled in terror—but this officer still looked uncertain, and made as if to draw his firearm.

Her hands struggled with the knot. “He’s a man, not an animal. Will you see him burned alive?”

The lieutenant dropped his hand from his weapon and came over. “Move.”

While he untied the young man, Josephine wedged her satchel under the seat where it would be safest from the flames. Even if she died, the Union might find the rowboat only partly scorched and rescue her papers. Meanwhile, she had to save herself. They were approaching the barricade, which had been partially separated so the fire raft could pass. Men stood on the deck of one of the hulks, shouting and waving their arms in warning, as if the people on the rowboat had somehow missed the inferno bearing down on them.