The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories Read Free Page B

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