LII.

When he had sobered up, Linus Poteat intended to skedaddle the first chance given, but none was forthcoming. It wasn't cowardice, he told himself. This war stuff just wasn't his jam. He could find his way.  Way where?  Where the hell am I?  His eyes were red and sunken.  His normally cheerful smile was downturned, a thread of drool hung down into the grass.  Stumbling, blinking, he rose and found his shoe and turned it upside down thinking something might fall out. He could not be sure what to find, but did so habitually on account of some dim and mystifying experience from beyond the verge. For drunkards like Linus Poteat have their waking rituals where clues may be found as to their comings and goings from nights previous.  He need not have looked far.  Down through the brush to the big river was the smoking hulk of a Yankee ironclad.  My God!  I remember that!  We blew her up!   

As he stood watching the spinning whisps of smoke rising from the river, he was approached by a rebel patrol.  He was rounded up and marched north. He recognized Skid Johnson and Stew Harlow who were both from the Nickajack and were in his conscription class.  Skid Johnson was from the Warrior Mountains. He said his family grew little more than a vegetable patch and hunted for the rest of their food like so many redskins. He was a red-headed freckled kid, and he said he was rounded up like a fugitive slave by the Home Guard.  They clasped him in chains and carted him into Moulton with a few other forlorn souls and told them all they could hang or they could join. Stew Harlow was of the prominent clan of Rats who inhabited the coves and inlets around Rodgersville.  He simply couldn't run fast enough, or he couldn't row fast enough, or he was too drunk to escape the clutches of the Home Guard.  He couldn't be too sure himself.  It could have been all three.  

And so they were marched into the town of Grand Gulf, or what was left of it anyway.  It used to be a thriving little cotton landing about twenty miles south of Vicksburg as the crow flies.  Now it was a burnt out gathering of gutted frames and scorched chimneys. The Yankees had put the town to the torch the year before. Now the Confederate Army was building gun batteries along the bluffs. The boys were hauled before an officer, who disgustedly sent them to dig earthworks. This they did for weeks, and in their penal state, they were watched constantly.  There was simply no way to skedaddle.  Worse yet, alcohol was difficult to come by.  It was around, but not near enough to numb the anguish of monotonous labor.  A sutler's wagon would ride down from Vicksburg three times a week, and he would peddle the most awful rotgut that would blind Linus for hours.  So he started picking through the wreckage of town looking for anything from which he could fashion a still, a unusual aptitude but none too far removed from the workings of a steamboat boiler. In this endeavor he was unsuccessful.

In late April there was a most tremendous cannonade that echoed down the river where the Yankee ironclads were trying to make the run past Vicksburg, that Gibraltar of the South. The rumbling of this distant fire continued ominously for hours.  If the Yankees were not destroyed by Vicksburg batteries, then it meant the next boats to come churning around the upriver bend would be their dreaded ironclads.  And in time they did come.  Seven of them, their armored wheel boxes slapping the water and their stacks belching round nimbi of grey smoke. As soon as they rounded the bend, they coughed thick black shot into the bluffs of Grand Gulf.  The rebel batteries responded in kind. A most furious cannonade ensued.  The guns along the bluffs barked and jerked, and the men would swarm across the gun with their plungers and shot and powder bags. Linus Poteat had never heard such a racket!  And then the Yankee shots came roaring in like freight trains. They fell into the earthworks digging up huge clogs of dirt, or sometimes burst overhead sending shrapnel everywhere that sounded like sleet.  This was a terrifying experience sober.  No wonder why so many officers drank too.

Things got worse as the big Yankee ironclads, which resembled old flat boats or even great metallic moccasins, churned their way closer and closer until they were just under the bluffs.  Linus found himself kicked by a sergeant whom he couldn't hear.  It was then he realized he was crouched with his knees under his chin and that he had urinated himself. 

Get up you bastard and bring water to the gunners with that bucket, the sergeant barked!

Linus watched as Stew Harlow seemed to skitter like a crab bearing a box of ammunition, his head always peering up then ducking with each shell that passed over.  Linus worked up just the bare modicum of courage to crawl after his hat and then crouch-run to a cistern.  

Jesus Christ!  This is madness, he thought to himself!  

The air rocked with successive shockwaves.  Every time the big pop bottle guns fired, they blew a wave of heat and rent air that rattled his clothes. He found a pale and filled it with water, then dashed from cover to cover until he had reached one of the guns.  So frantic had been his scramble that he arrived with almost no water at all.  

Shit!

So he ran back again and returned and found he had lost all the water again. The Yankee ironclads had swung to within a hundred yards of the bluffs, so close you could hear their officers barking orders. Linus saw a Confederate colonel who was brazenly standing atop an earthwork with his binoculars.  In the next moment, his head had simply vanished, knocked to bits by a cannon ball.  This was bad business, Linus thought. It was the most horrible thing he had ever seen when he realized what must have happened to the man's head that had splashed into a pink mist.  Linus Poteat had never been so frightened in all his life. All he could think of was running as far away as possible from this hellish juncture of madness, but there was nowhere to go!  

He heard Skid Johnson call his name through the cacophony of exploding guns. He beckoned him over from one of the rifle pits. So Linus crawled on all fours to where Skid Johnson was and slid down face first into the rifle pit.  He saw Stew Harlow huddled in a corner.  He looked frightened. There was someone else too, but he wasn't moving. No one had the courage to check on him, and assumed correctly he was dead.  

Boys, we gotta get out of this place, Linus said. This is bad business! Real bad business!

Skid and Stew agreed. He'd never had the chance to desert, and it didn't seem any more possible now. Getting blasted to bits, however, made him carve his own chance now out of a primal desire to live, and he intended to take it for better or worse.  So they all bound out from the rifle pits and in the din and chaos of the bombardment, they dashed from cover to cover to the magazines, which were set a good way back.  There they made a pretense of gathering munitions for the gun batteries before leaping into a wooded defile and skedaddling into the forest.  They had no rifles, no food and no camping kit.  They had no idea what to do next but run as far away as they could from that place of hell, and this did into evening to avoid the army patrols.

They wandered through wild ridged country to a river called the Big Black where to their amazement and divine gratitude they came across an abandoned still. It was a lean-to shack built against a gnarled old cedar, and within it they found a trove of moonshine. It was too good to be true, but it was.  There was no better way to settle the nerves than a drip of that fine Mississippi dew, and this they did while they ate tinned bully beef they had rummaged from a crate. It may have been a good time to plan about what to do next. They were all a long way from home.  Instead, they decanted moonshine down their gullets for the next few days and tried to forget the dreadful experience they endured.  

It would not be long, however, before the war itself would chase them down, for General Grant had crossed the Mississippi and had landed on the rebel shore with over 15,000 Yankees and were marching towards the Big Black River.  

XLIX.

A Confederate lieutenant was inspecting the new allotment of soldiers he had just received  These were the dunces he'd been shipped from Alabama. They were drunkards, shirkers, bogtrotters, low-downers and other assorted white trash from the Nickajack, about twenty of them rounded up in the last conscription class.  They'd been barged down from Vicksburg to Fort DeRussy on the Red River where the lieutenant was told these would the last reinforcements he would ever see.  The Yankee gunboats were marauding below Vicksburg now and were capturing transports and ferries all down the Mississippi River.  That may have been so now, but the South had a real surprise up their sleeve.  

The night before the Yankee gunboat USS Queen of the West had slipped into range of the gun batteries of Fort DeRussy and was disabled and abandoned.  She had careened into the brushy banks of the Red River where she was claimed by a band of whooping rebel soldiers. They swarmed across the hulk like so many Lilliputians and put her back into action as the CSS Queen of the West.  She was armed with a large 30-pound cannon on her bow, and three small 12-pound guns poking out three sides of her forward cabin. Her deck was crowded with wet bales of cotton to help absorb shot. And so the plan was to take the fight back to the Yankees and retake the Mississippi River with this contraption.  

So, the lieutenant said, we will be attached to this gunboat as sharpshooters. When we come across another a boat, you boys will sweep the enemy decks of Yankees.  

Some of these people were crack shots, but they were also ill-disciplined and he was certain half of them were drunkards. But this was all he had to work with. An old saying went that when it comes to recruits, Virginia gets the cream, Tennessee gets the corn, and the Trans-Mississippi gets the slops. 

Have any of you worked in the steamboat business?  

One man raised his hand.  

Step forward, private. State your name and your qualifications.  

A short and fat cherubic-like man stepped forward.  He smiled bigly, which flared his gin blossoms and exposed a missing eye-tooth.  It wasn't an unpleasant smile, but it gave the impression of some mental vacancy. He wore a greasy slouch hat and suspenders.  

Linus Poteat, he saluted. Sir, he added. I helped build an ironclad once, he said proudly. There were a few chuckles.  The lieutenant nodded slowly with astonishment, but not in the affirmative. They seemed to expect more, so Linus continued.  

Sir, I know how to work a boiler and I can work a grasshopper steam engine.  I owned a scow on the Tennessee River.  That was my ironclad.  We called it the Gar!  

More chuckles.  The lieutenant decided to test the recruit.  He dismissed the rest of the recruits with his sergeant and brought Linus Poteat down to the river bank where the CSS Queen of the West was being outfitted for her mission.  Linus never ceased smiling, and looking about at the trees and birds and soldiers, and he wiggled his nose towards the scent of coffee.  The lieutenant looked over his shoulder at Linus suspiciously as he followed him down to the gunboat.  Aboard was a Confederate officer, Major Joseph Bent, who would lead the operation.  Linus Poteat was led below decks where he stepped between the pipes and hoses and the boilers and piles of coal to examine the engines they called 'grasshoppers' on account of the motion of their stroke resembling the legs of a grasshopper.  Linus immediately impressed them against all better judgement. The man seemed to know his way around an engine.  So he was assigned to the chief engineer as a mechanic's mate and he immediately set to work getting the engines ready for their sortie against the Yankee invader.

Specifically, they intended to sortie against the Yankee ironclad USS Indianola, which had run the rebel batteries at Vicksburg to harass rebel shipping along the Mississippi and Red Rivers.  Here was a real river beast.  Squat like a river beetle with her rear paddle wheels protected by skirts of tin, she was armed with four enormous Dahlgren guns. These things were shaped like pop bottles and capable of firing enormous cannonballs the size of ten-pin balls.  She had already captured several rebel steamers and was now tied up near Davis Bend, just miles south of Vicksburg.  Lashed to her sides were several coal barges and she was undergoing replenishment while waiting for new orders from General Grant.  And so by the light of the half moon, the CSS Queen of the West was accompanied by another "cotton-clad" named the CSS William Webb as they shimmied among the muddy river's tortuous bends until they passed the rebel batteries at Grand Gulf, which were about 20 miles as the crow flies south of that Gibraltar of the South, Vicksburg. The rebels announced by horn that the USS Indianola was just up the next bend, which was David Bend where Jefferson Davis's family kept their great plantation estate.  The rebel gunners lined up along the earthworks overlooking the river and gave three cheers for the little rebel squadron as it chugged upriver.   

Major Bent called down by the sound tube - enemy in sight, increase to full speed.  The crew cheered. Linus was below decks and monitored the pressure gauges while maintaining his hands on the vital switches and valves that controlled one of the grasshoppers. The chief engineer barked near indecipherable Irish, but it was the sort of industrial pidgin language of the burgeoning caste of mechanics that they all seemed to understand.  It may have been February, but the colliers kept the coal hatches open as they shoveled filthy Arkansas coal into the boilers and the temperature spiked below decks to near 120 degrees.  Everyone was soaked in sweat. Suddenly they heard the boom of cannon fire as first the Confederate gunboats opened fire and then the Yankee ironclad responded. The grasshopper was kicking and the entire boat seemed to bound with each stroke of the pistons.  

He couldn't help himself.  Linus had to see what was going on, so he peeked above decks to see rebel rifleman popping shots off into the night and the enormous thunderclap and burst of sparks that resulted from the 30-pounder gun firing.  About a hundred yards ahead he saw the stooping, turtle shape of the Yankee ironclad abeam off their bow. When its Dahlgren guns fired, they created a tremendous roar and even a passing shot could knock a man to his feet from the passing shockwave. With this looming shape growing larger on the horizon, Major Bent called down the sound tube again - increase to ramming speed! With this the chief engineer lambasted the colliers in Gaelic curses and Linus released more pressure into the pistons.  The grasshoppers seemed to jump off their base plates. They jerked uncertainly in an arhythmic motion before finally grasping their rhythm, and the Queen of the West lurched forward with a few extra knots of speed.  

The crew of the CSS Queen of the West roared with awe and spectacle and exhilaration. The Yankees aboard the USS Indianola were horrified to see two rebel gunboats steering directly for her. They braced for impact as both rebel gunboats cleaved into the wooden coal barges that were lashed to the ironclad's side.  They were sliced in half and the USS Indianola shuddered under the impact. A sickening sound of crumpling iron and snapping beams was heard. The Confederate gunboats were crowded with whooping and excited rebel riflemen. They fired at the Yankee ironclad. They fired into the air. They fired into the moon.  They were like pirates of the damned.  

And that was not all.  Linus Poteat was thrilled. He threw the grasshopper into reverse with a clunking and a hissing, which backed the boat up, then Major Bent would order the boat forward again. Both gunboats rammed the Yankee ironclad again, and stove in her amidships and wrecked her rudder.  The rebels roared with excitement.  Yankees were already jumping over the sides.  Her humongous guns were too slow to load and never got more than a half dozen shots off. 

Reverse the engines, Major Bent called down the tube!  Ahead ramming speed, he called down again!

The rebel gunboats continued this business of reversing, then ramming again the mighty Yankee river beast again, then again.  Lastly, the CSS Queen of the West headed above stream, then swung back downriver to ram the USS Indianola with the full force of the Mississippi backing their run.  This final blow finished the river beast.  It took seven rams, but the river beast was vanquished. The Yankees hauled down their flag and were taken prisoner, their stricken ironclad towed to the rebel shore where the Confederates planned to place this Union warship in their service.  The victory was announced upriver to Vicksburg by the tolling of bells. The city fired salutary shots from its gun batteries in honor of the brave crew of the rebel gunboats.  Meanwhile, Linus Poteat and the other engineering crew of the rebel gunboats leaped aboard the captured Yankee ironclad. They were amazed the quality of construction, the size of the guns, and above all by the bottles of rum that was kept in the captain's locker.  This they immediately partook in celebration of their victory.  

The next morning, Major Bent left a crew of mechanics and engineers to help salvage and repair the Yankee ironclad. This they put to the attempt, and Linus Poteat set to work on assessing damage to the Indianola's grasshoppers.  As they all did so, Linus Poteat and the other colliers would sneak off behind the boilers to swill the rum and smoke the cigars they had found.  Meanwhile the Yankees were in great distress at this development.  They devised a most improbable plan to send a "fake" ironclad down the river crafted from wood painted dark like iron, bristling with wooden Quaker guns, and stoked by a false engine which was little more than bonfire.  Even its smoke stacks were made of pork barrels. They jokingly called it the "Black Terror," and they sent this bizarre raft downriver thinking it would no good at all.  In fact, it did. 

So drunk was Linus Poteat and the rest of the salvage crew that when the Black Terror was spotted drifting downriver towards them, they panicked and scuttled the Indianola.  This they did with such great alacrity that it was downright vandalism.  Linus and the others set the stricken ironclad afire. Then they took two of the giant Dahlgren guns, pointed them at each other, and with a long and spliced primer cord, they fire both guns into one another.  It blew the bow of the Indianola off in a great shower of splinters and the boat burned down to her waterline in a great bonfire of popping sparks and great coils of smoke.  Linus Poteat and the rest of the drunken salvage crew leaped to shore where they cheered the great display they had made.  

And when the Black Terror passed by the shore where they gawked, they were embarrassed to see that this new Yankee ironclad was nothing but an utter hoax. But they didn't seem embarrassed for long.  Linus Poteat snorted, then fell on his back drunk and laughing.  The rest did the same.  To them, it didn't feel like war. It felt buccaneering. And so at times, this war was fought strangely on the rivers and certainly seemed that way.  

XXXIX

Drake Shoney treated all his friends with airish disdain, even ones he was indebted to. So it was that one of his creditors was Linus Poteat, to whom he owed a gambling debt on account of a busted flush. These two kept low when the Yankees occupied Athens, for they had both been sponsors to the would-be ironclad, The Gar. They frequented Kingpin Cotter's turf where they played cards and gazed askance at Blanche Cotter's cleavage. This distraction had cost Drake Shoney a good sum, to which he pledged a note of $500 to Linus Poteat.

Goddamit why you gotta bother me about that money again, Linus? I said I'm good for it. I just gotta rake in this corn. Interest? Did you read the note? It says interest free. You signed it. I read it to you, you indolent cretin. Learn to read.

Linus looked sad, except he wasn't sober, and was somnambulate. He put the promissory note he couldn't read back into his pocket.

And so the Yankee occupation lifted in late '62, and Drake sold his late corn on a contract of $1,500 in Confederate bonds to General Bragg's agents in order to feed the Army of Tennessee, which was soon to occupy the Nickajack around Shelbyville. No sooner had he received this perceived windfall when he was also handed his conscription notice. He accepted it with confusion, his mouth open. Drafted? Me? But, but...

He went home and after a spell of drinking began to scheme a way out. He had not the specie to buy a substitute. He had $1,500 in Confederate bonds, which was merely an annuity. He couldn't afford to sell a slave. Elzey, his creole overseer, wouldn't have it. He'd never hear the end of it from her. She was already upset he had sold the early corn.

And so at another bender at Kingpin Cotter's flatboat, Drake Shoney threw his arms around his friend Linus Poteat, who was catfishing next to a demijohn.

Linus, before you get drafted, what do you say I pay you $1,000 to go as a substitute for me? That's a lot of money! The going rate for a substitute is half that. I'm telling you, this is the way to go. If you're going to have to fight, you might as well get paid a bounty for it. Am I right? Look here. Drake held out a slip of paper. He didn't even have the bonds in hand, just a scrip signed by General Bragg's agent transferring ownership of the bonds. For something worthless to begin with, this looked altogether suspect. But it would relieve $500 in gambling debt and buy Drake out of the war.

Linus Poteat, who was a doleful drunkard and a dullard, was convinced at length to take the deal. And before Linus could sober up, Drake rode into town in his chaise with his arm around his friend, sharing a flask and waving cigars singing Buffalo Gals. They rode straight to the Limestone County Board of Enrollment where, up until Linus Poteat affixed his signature of an "X” on his army papers, Drake never removed his arm from around Linus. This done, Drake signed over the scrip to Linus Poteat, who was now richer than he ever had been in his life. Or so he thought.

Its an annuity, Linus! They pay you every month, so you don't spend it all at once, you fool! Lord knows you'd lose it all at the table anyway!

In fact, it paid nothing. At length, General Bragg had been turned out of the Nickajack by the brilliant machinations of General Rosencrans and was falling back into Georgia. The Yankees reoccupied the Nickajack. In theory the payments and interest for Linus Poteat's bonds were accruing on a ledger book in Richmond, Virginia, but that was about the extent of it. Meanwhile, his soldiering potential was judged so abysmal that he was sent with an allotment of dunces to the Trans-Mississippi, which was to say Louisiana. His skills as a boiler mechanic, however, were at least passable, and he was thus assigned to the CSS Queen of the West, which had just been captured from the Yankees on the Red River. It was the third year of the war.

XVIII

For someone who had been such a vocal proponent of secession, Drake Shoney went to extraordinary lengths to avoid actually fighting for it. When the first conscription act was passed, he placed an entreaty in the paper to hire a substitute. He could scarcely afford one. Thankfully, Linus Poteat was broke after the debacle of the Gar and Drake hired him at a discount in forbearance of his gambling debts. Later, when the hiring of substitutes was abolished, the Confederate government left an exemption from conscription for any white male who owned twenty or more slaves. So Drake went even further into debt and purchased two slaves bringing his total to twenty.

Esmerelda had her hands full as the overseer of Gloaming Birch. Drake seemed to have very little interest in the running of his plantation. He left almost all day-to-day management to her. She did well enough. She learned her trade at Davis Bend under the legendary Ben Montgomery, the slave who managed the Hurricane plantation and its five-thousand acres. Each year she sold the cotton harvest, she brought in tidy profits for her master. So she was frustrated that Gloaming Birch still did not prosper, but it was only a point of personal pride. Drake was actually a generous if flippant master. He was munificent everywhere with his finances. Whatever she needed to improve the living conditions of the estate's slaves, he showed a dismissive largesse. It was not out of benignity, for Esmerelda had long come to the realization that Drake Shoney was just an a**hole.

Fine! Fine! Elzey. You're just about getting on my goddam nerves now. Go and get you and your darky friends instruments then. I don't give a damn. Besides, I'm tired of hearing y'all beating those gourds and s**t in my backyard. You sound like a bunch of mooks out there. And when you get back from town bring me some tobacco. Oh, and if they got some orange juice I need some for my cocktails. And you can use the change to buy you and your darky pals some gum. Just get yer s**t done before you go. Now go on. Get out of here. And don't let me forget to sign your negro papers before you go! 

So she bought instruments and the slaves of Gloaming Birch learned to pick tunes and sing ditties and put their slave spirituals on the strings. With so many slaves working so few acres they had plenty of time on their hands. On cool autumn evenings, they'd play music around the fire like Jimmy Get Your Hoe Cake Done and Rose of Alabama.  Drake was often surrounded by a milieu of bogtrotters, mudsills and low downers he held in his social thrall. They'd sit on Drake's porch and listen to the music and get roaring drunk into the night playing cards and talking about hunting.

Meanwhile Gloaming Birch was in dire financial straits. Drake searched the papers for a Southern victory that would remove the yolk of his Northern creditors. When the Yankees occupied Athens in the Spring of '62, he never went into town.  He grew reclusive and spent more time hunting and fishing and neglecting the estate.  When the Greeks started selling cotton up North during the occupation, he told Esmerelda to change the crop over to corn. He understood he could make more in Confederate dollars selling corn, but did not understand that inflation rendered higher revenues in that currency meaningless.  

None of this concerned Esmerelda. With the war she knew slavery was on its way out.  She could have fled Drake long ago, but she stayed with him.  Besides, the corn he now grew made it even easier to smuggle fugitive slaves through his fields.  She had been running them under Drake's nose for years.  

I

I'm reminded of some old stories in chatting with my friend Charles Williams, whose daddy was longtime mayor of Athens and an old fox of politicking.

 
If you grew up in Limestone County like I did, then you might have heard the story of the old rebel ironclad called The Gar that protected these parts of the Tennessee River from Grant's army. She was sheltered from the Yankee gunboats by the Muscle Shoals and she was to prowl as she pleased up and down the river these parts. She was financed by Drake Shoney, a sesech cotton planter from Athens and the county's deadliest duck hunter, who said to hell with the Union and bought a steam scow from the pilot Linus Poteat, who said to hell with the Union too.

 
Rumors of the ironclad's construction spread and were greatly exaggerated by the Yankee press. It was said Grant couldn't cross the River here because as long as The Gar was afloat, it could chop his ferryboats to matchsticks with its guns. So he had to swing his army west and cross the Tennessee above the Shoals at a place now called Shiloh, where The Gar could not molest his crossing.

Folks from all over county came down in their buggies to Buelah Bay where she was cheerfully christened beside the tall grasses. For long days work was done by volunteers while the ladies picnicked. She wasn't but thirty foot long. They lashed her with sheets of tin, and all bits of ploughshares and gin work, cast iron cookery and lumber ties. When the folks of Limestone County had finished with her, The Gar looked like some shaggy metallic duck blind, or perhaps a floating doodlebug.

 
At any rate, she carried a single gun cast crooked from the bell of Buelah Land Apostolic Church, which was donated by the fire eating preacher Hieronymus Rhett, who believe in predestiny and thought all his congregation was going to hell anyhow. He had done the math on 144,000 and shuttered his church doors to fight Yankees. The Gar's single boiler doubled as a still with which Linus Poteat, who was a notorious lush, mixed powerful and melodious elixirs. Such were the proclivities of vice that were natural to both Shoney and Poteat that they took The Gar out one night to fish off Lucy's Branch, shooting birds and taking to their cups. What was supposed to be one night out catfishing turned into a three day drunken bender during which the great Battle of Shiloh was fought up the way while The Gar mysteriously burned down to the waterline in the Elk River.

 
Drake Shoney and Linus Poteat swam to shore exclaiming it was a boiler explosion that had sunk The Gar. They blamed it on a Yankee gun battery that had set up on the opposite bank, and with which they tussled with their single crooked gun. Most folks in town, though, knew about those two boys when the moon goes full and whiskey gets poured. And so goes the story of the Tennessee River's only ironclad gunboat, built in Limestone County, Ala.