Annapolis, page 46
“She’s going to strike us,” shouted Bankhead.
“If we start the engines,” answered Tom, “we’ll have to stop the pumps.”
“Then we’ll sink. We’ll hold our position and hope she misses.”
JASON STAFFORD RUSHED to the starboard side and looked down at the Monitor. With a tremendous screech, the Rhode Island’s wooden hull struck the side of the little iron plug and scraped along.
Jason tried to see his son among the officers atop the turret.
Someone was screaming, “No damage!” The ocean was roaring between the vessels. The Coston flares cast huge, flickering shadows in every direction.
And there he was, standing close by the captain and calling orders down into the turret. The old man cried his son’s name.
But Tom did not hear.
HE WAS DROPPING into the darkness again, to check the depth of the water: two feet and holding. The air belowdecks had turned clammy and cold, as cold as the ocean flooding in.
“Lieutenant,” cried Malloy, “we ain’t gettin’ ahead of it no more!”
Tom felt the seasickness rising again.
“Lieutenant!” A cabin boy came sloshing forward. “The water’s too high. Boiler fires just went out. No more steam. No more pumps.”
“Bejesus,” said Malloy.
“Stay at your posts, men,” said Tom. “Keep bailin’. I’ll tell the captain.”
Back on top of the turret, he saw that the Rhode Island had now drifted several hunded yards downwind.
But two Coston flares were coming toward them through the darkness.
Lifeboats from the Rhode Island. Thank the Lord.
And back in the fresh air, with the horizon around him, he could fight off his seasickness. Thank the Lord again.
“The fires have gone out, Captain,” he said to Bankhead, still maintaining an officer’s professional calm. “We’re fillin’ with water. We could go down any minute.”
“Take the men off.”
The next fifteen minutes were the most harrowing that Tom Stafford had ever lived through.
They had to move sixty men up through the turret, down the ladder on the outside, across the pitching deck, and into the little boats banging against the side of the hull. And all the while, a handful of men remained below, passing up five-gallon buckets, as if they could buy a few more minutes, even though bailing the Monitor was like spitting on a house fire.
One boat made it away with a dozen men. Then another.
“Send up twelve more!” shouted Tom through the open hatch.
And a bucket came up, with Malloy right behind it. “The water’s at me balls, sir, but the lads is still bailin’.”
“Tell them to—”
“Holy Jesus!” Malloy’s eyes almost burst from his head as a wave swept three sailors from the deck. One moment they were there, clutching a rope and waiting for the lifeboat; the next, they were gone.
“They’re lost, Malloy,” shouted Tom. “Get below, and get back to bailin’.”
Another boat bumped against the hull.
More perilous descents down the side of the turret, across the slick deck.
More men away.
“That’s it!” shouted Bankhead. “Abandon.”
“Abandon ship!” shouted Tom through the open hatch. “Pass the word.”
One man came up, two, then a cluster of four. After a final puking cabin boy appeared, there was no one else.
“Any more down there?” demanded Tom.
“I… I don’t know, sir. I don’t think so. But the water… it’s waist deep.”
“Hurry!” screamed Lieutenant Samuel Dana Greene, who was already in the lifeboat. “Before we’re battered to pieces against the side!”
“Lieutenant,” Bankhead said to Tom, “down the ladder after you.”
But the ladder was gone, carried away by a wave a few moments before.
So they had to rig lines and go down hand over hand, palms tearing on the rope, hips slamming against the iron turret, whitecapped waves exploding over them in the moonlight.
First Tom, then the captain, skittering across the deck, grabbing lines, smokestack stanchions, anything to keep from falling while the men in the lifeboat called to them and held out boat hooks for them to grab.
All Tom had to do was grab a boat hook and leap across the churning three feet of water opening and closing between the lifeboat and the Monitor. But a sudden lurch lifted the lifeboat, causing it to pitch, pulling Bankhead aboard, and pushing Tom Stafford backward so that he fell hard on the iron deck of the Monitor.
A boat hook was thrust at him again. “Come on, Lieutenant!” It was Cookie, standing up in the pitching boat. “Take it and jump.”
“Cookie!” shouted Tom. “Where’s Malloy?”
“He done stayed below… said he’d take his chances on a big boat with some water in it ’fore he’d try to cross the deck.”
“Come on, Tom!” shouted Lieutenant Greene over the roar of the wind.
“You’ve done your job, Lieutenant,” cried Bankhead.
Another flare was coming toward them. Another lifeboat.
Tom grabbed the boat hook, but instead of levering himself aboard, he used it to shove the lifeboat toward the stern, where the wind caught it and pulled it away from the Monitor.
“Tom!” cried Bankhead, leaping to his feet, as if to jump back aboard.
“Get that boat away, Captain!”
“She’s goin’ down, Tom!” cried Lieutenant Greene.
“Then tell that next boat to hurry! There’s still men to bring off!”
Just then one of the flares on the Monitor’s turret burned out.
BY NOW THE Rhode Island had drifted almost half a mile downwind of the Monitor. Jason Stafford was watching through Trenchard’s glass.
Flares. Black racing shadows. Whitecaps in the moonlight.
When the turret flare went out, he thought the Monitor had gone down.
“Goddamn,” he muttered, though he wanted to cry out to God.
• • •
IN THE PITCHING darkness at the base of the turret, Tom found a line and began to climb. He was in his mid-forties, in a woolen uniform soaked with seawater, and still seasick, but he had never let himself get fat or complacent. And he was intent on doing what an officer should—lead the men that God gave him to lead.
He climbed to the top of the turret, gave one look toward the flare showing on the next lifeboat, then dropped down into the turret, past the two black Dahlgrens and through the next hatch, clutching the ladder that led to the lower deck, clutching tight because the water was rising below him.
The lower-deck lanterns were still lit, throwing their yellow light into the oily, chest-deep murk.
He hung on the ladder and shouted. “Malloy! Malloy!”
And a full five-gallon bucket was thrust at him. “I’m right ’ere.”
“Abandon ship. Didn’t you get the order?”
“I’m bailin’. Me and some others. Take this up and throw it over the side.”
“But we’re sinkin’. Every man for himself!” shouted Tom.
In the half-light beyond Malloy were other frightened men, passing buckets toward the ladder, doing a duty no longer needed, because they were too frightened to do anything else.
“Come on, lads,” shouted Tom. “Up the ladder with you.”
And another bucket was thrust up to Tom. He kicked it away.
Malloy shouted, “I seen what happened to them boys out on the deck. They couldn’t swim. Us neither. The divil you know is better than the divil you don’t.”
All around them came a tremendous unearthly groaning as the iron plates were wrenched by the weight of water below and waves above.
“You hear that, men? Come on.” Tom reached out to the frightened Irishman. “There’s no need to die here, Malloy.”
The water had risen to the little man’s armpits.
“Come on, Malloy,” repeated Tom.
Suddenly the water inside the Monitor’s belly became too much.
Tom felt her bow drop. It was not the first time it had happened that night. But this time, the stern followed it. Then a torrent of water poured through the hatch. It was not the first time that had happened, either. But this time, it did not stop.
Tom knew that the sea had closed over them.
So he turned and tried to climb, pulling Malloy with him.
The water rose everywhere at once, and the lanterns went out.
Tom Stafford’s last breath was like ice filling his chest.
xii
Cartes de Visite
Eve Sutter Stafford still cried over Tom five months later. But it was the only tearful indulgence that she allowed herself.
She had never considered herself a woman of strength. She had always been prone to low moods and bad headaches. And she had always worried inordinately over little things, like the cross look of a stranger or the way she appeared when she dared to wear flowers in her hair. Before she met George, she had taken refuge in the airs she could play on the piano and, at the age of twenty-eight, had reconciled herself to spinsterhood.
Then she had come to Annapolis to visit her aunt Dilly, and one Sunday, at Saint Anne’s, she had met Tom and George Stafford. Tom politely tipped his hat. But George’s gaze started at her feet and worked its way up to her face with a kind of interest that bordered on audacity. Had she been younger, she would have reacted indignantly. But she sorely longed for someone to listen to her music. So she met his gaze with her own.
Her aunt Dilly, a dropsical old busybody who lived on Cornhill Street, described George as an “immature, peripatetic, self-centered navy boy with a taste for popskull and a level of patter just this side of the minstrel show.”
It was true that George drank too much, but he made Eve Sutter laugh, and they were married in May 1860.
Three years later, Eve still did not consider herself a woman of strength, although she was raising a son in a houseful of women, nursing wounded men three days a week, teaching reading to illiterate prisoners at Camp Parole, and in her spare time, trying to convince her future sister-in-law that it was time for her to come over to the hospital and do some serious nursing.
Alexandra still resisted, but she and Eve had become close friends. On a May day in 1863, Alexandra accompanied Eve and her little son to Henry Baumgartner’s photography studio on Tabernacle Street. They dressed Jacob in a sailor suit. Eve wore her favorite blue flowered dress, the one that belted at the waist and accentuated the womanly swell of her hips. She parted her hair severely in the middle and gathered it at the back, but she added a small wreath of flowers. If they were good enough for Mrs. Lincoln, they were good enough for her.
Alexandra wore a simple blouse pinned with a cameo and let the mischief in her eyes do her talking to the camera.
Little Jacob, perhaps frightened by the huge camera and the strange window that let sunlight straight through the roof, sat so quietly that the mother-and-son sitting took a mere fifteen minutes, Alexandra’s even less.
A week later Mr. Baumgartner delivered two dozen cartes de visite, pocket-sized cards on which the portraits had been printed. Cartes de visite had become very popular since the beginning of the war as a way for a soldier to carry his loved ones into battle or, in this case, through a long blockade.
Eve thought her little boy looked healthy and happy in the photograph. And she liked the way she looked, too. Her gaze was direct. Her mouth, held straight, still showed a touch of a smile, and her hand was placed firmly but lovingly on her son’s shoulder. It was an image to give her husband confidence.
Alexandra liked her portrait too. She liked her own look of mischief, even if the only mischief she had gotten into was the kind that could get her hanged. She sent one carte to her father at Parrish Manor. But Ethan had no address, so he would not see her until he saw her in the flesh. Then she thought of someone else who might like a portrait of her. She wrote a brief note and mailed the carte to the actor who lived at the National Hotel in Washington, D.C.
A month later, a letter arrived at the Fine Folly, from George.
Dear Evie,
Thank you a thousand times for the cartes de visite. Every day I can see how beautiful you are, how handsome my son is. At the same time, I am subdued by all the time that this war has taken from us.
How does father fare? Is he finally coming to accept Tom’s death?
And what of Stafford Hall, now that the slaves have been given their freedom?
The blockade continues in its misery. I recently heard a description I am compelled to repeat: To understand blockade duty, “Go up on the roof on a hot summer day, talk to a half dozen degenerates, descend to the basement, talk to a half dozen more, drink tepid water full of iron rust, climb to the roof again and repeat the process until fagged out, then go to bed with everything shut tight.”
Is it any wonder I chafe at the boredom? Any wonder that my thirst has begun to grow again? It is hard, Evie. But action will be just the thing. One of Tom’s old friends from the Mexican War, John Winslow, has agreed to take me aboard his Kearsage. Her only task is to run down the Alabama, commanded by his old bunkmate from the Mexican War, Raphael Semmes. Tell Lexie I will not let them hurt Ethan when we find him.
This letter disturbed Eve. But if her husband was being transferred because he drank too much, it would do no good to worry. Only weak women worried. Strong women acted. That was what Antonia had told her. And before long, there was no time to worry about anything.
In the first week of July, trains began bringing the wounded from a Pennsylvania railhead called Gettysburg, first filling the Academy buildings, then the buildings at Saint John’s College, and then the tents that were raised all across the Academy grounds.
Doctors and nurses worked day and night. Carpenters made crutches and measured men for wooden legs. Embalmers set up their tents, mixed their concoctions, and put up their signs.
And Eve worked harder than she ever had. She bathed infected stumps, washed the lousy hair of a man who had no arms, cleaned up men with chronic diarrhea, who looked at her with woeful embarrassment as she worked. And whenever she found herself faltering, she watched Antonia and Margaret and took her resolve from them.
And every night, she told Alexandra how much they needed her.
“I’ve told you before,” said Alexandra, “my sentiments are not with these men. I can help in the Sanitary, but I’m no nurse… and surely no nurse for men who fought the South.”
“Just think of Ethan, or your own brother,” said Eve, “and remember that these men will never fight again. Some will never walk. Some will not even live. This is the last I will speak of these matters with you, Lexie. But you know I am right.”
IN LATE JULY, Alexandra finally made her way through the back garden, across King George Street, to the hospital, and informed the directress of female nurses, Miss Maria M. C. Hall, that she would like to volunteer.
Miss Hall, who fulfilled the army’s maxim that nurses should be plain-looking women, sat at her desk and ran her finger down the checklist before her. “You will have to wear brown or black, no bows, no jewelry, no hoop skirts.”
Alexandra did not mention that there were women in hoop skirts working right that very minute in the wards. She had already guessed, from the clipped manner of speech and dyspeptic attitude, that Miss Hall enjoyed following her orders and reading her checklists, so she simply said, “Yes, ma’am.”
“You will also have to pull your hair back into a bun.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you cannot be doing this because you are hunting for a husband.”
“My fiancé is in the navy.” She did not mention which navy.
“Now, how old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Disqualified,” Miss Hall said almost triumphantly. “Unmarried must be over thirty.”
“But my future aunt, Antonia Stafford—”
“She is your aunt?” Miss Hall’s posture and attitude changed.
“Yes. She said you needed nurses, and there are so many wounded that I am surprised you would reject a woman of any age.”
Miss Hall looked out at the men sitting along the river. “No, I don’t suppose that we would… not these days.”
The next day, Alexandra appeared in the hospital, wearing a bright yellow dress—with hoops, naturally—and bright yellow ribbons in her hair.
The men smiled. Some of the nurses frowned, but the younger ones, who dared to wear hoops in their skirts, smiled too, and soon there were more ribbons to be seen, and more smiles among the soldiers.
Of course, Alexandra was less interested in the soldiers than in the officers, who might still be privy to plans that she could pass to Surratt. But she did as she was told, and twice a week, she tended the men who were set in chairs and cots, to sit by the Severn.
She found one young man particularly intriguing. He had the familiar sad gaze beneath a thatch of black hair, and his strange accent snapped words off as though he were biting them. His name was Gabriel Shank, of the Twentieth Maine, the regiment that held the Union left on the second day at Gettysburg. A minié ball had struck him in the lower leg, shattering the bone and creating another customer for the crutch makers.
Whenever she asked him if he wanted anything, he answered that he wanted nothing more than a quiet place to still the screaming inside his head. Then, on a day in his third week at the hospital, he asked her for a sketch pad and pencil.
A few days later, Alexandra visited him with Antonia, who was teaching her how to change dressings on amputated limbs.
Without a word, Gabriel showed them the picture of Lincoln he was sketching.
“I’ve seen Lincoln in the flesh,” said Alexandra, “at the theater.”
“So have I,” added Antonia, and she told Alexandra to lift Gabriel’s leg. Then she showed her how to unwrap the cotton bandage, carefully cut away the lint packing on the wound, and… here was where Antonia said that a pleasant line of conversation with the patient was helpful.
Antonia looked up at Private Shank, whose eyes were riveted to the sketch pad. “I was very impressed by Lincoln when I met him.”
