You Belong to My Heart (34 page)

Mary Ellen didn’t laugh, although the vision of poor old crippled Titus out in the rain, cutting a long willow switch, was more than a little comical. Even more comical was the idea of him “stinging her legs right good” with that switch. The gentle old man had never laid a hand on anybody in his entire life.

Mary Ellen said, “I’ll be a good girl, I promise. Just let me stay until I can get a glimpse of Clay when he reaches the levee.”

Acting exasperated, Titus nodded his white head and informed her, “That boy be a-boardin’ the
Andrew Jackson
for the trip downriver. The Yankees commandeered that old sidewheeler to transport their troops.”

“Why, Titus Preble!” Mary Ellen was honestly surprised. “Clay didn’t mention which vessel he’d be taking down to Mississippi. You’re a wealth of knowledge.”

“I know lots o’ things,” he said, pulling his coat’s collar higher around his cold ears. “Always have.” He turned and limped away, leaning on his cane, muttering to himself, “Not that anybody ebber listens to me, no, suh, don’t pay no attention when I talk, but they sho’ ought to, and besides…”

Smiling fondly after the dear old man, Mary Ellen turned back to the river, lifted the field glasses, and, looking northward, anxiously searched the crowded levee below.

She swept over the long rows of other craft moored at the landing: trading scows, timber rafts, barges, fishing boats, steam-driven tugs, and other steamers.

At last she found and focused on the
Andrew Jackson.

Unwavering, her chilled hands held the powerful field glasses to her eyes and she stared almost unblinkingly until she caught sight of Clay. Her hands shook involuntarily then, and the heavy glasses bobbled and blurred her vision.

“Thunderation!” she said aloud, annoyed with herself.

She quickly regained control and leveled the glasses on the tall, dark officer leading a spirited black stallion up the steamer’s long gangplank.

Mary Ellen’s raised glasses never left Clay.

As soon as he stepped on the decks, a boatswain came forward to meet him. Clay shrugged out of his heavy greatcoat and turned over the coat, his grip, and the stallion to the seaman. The sailor led the black out of focus, and only Clay was in sight.

The riverboat’s engines started up, shooting plumes of steam high into the rain-heavy air. The twin paddle wheels immediately began to churn up water, and the bell clanged loudly as the steamer backed slowly away from the levee.

Clay lithely climbed the companionway to the hurricane deck as the
Andrew Jackson
headed for the middle of the wide river. He nodded to the keen-eyed pilot in the glassed wheelhouse, then continued to climb up to the texas deck.

While the last gray light of the cold, rainy November evening began to fade fast, the southbound steamer—running lights now ablaze—reached the point in the river directly below Longwood.

Framed perfectly in her raised field glasses, Captain Clay Knight, in full blue dress uniform, was alone on the tall texas deck. A solitary figure in the gloom, he stood as unmoving as a statue at the white gingerbread railing. His rain-wet face was turned up to the bluffs, the cold November winds tossing locks of his blue-back hair about his head.

A lump starting to form in her throat, Mary Ellen thought as she watched her husband being carried slowly downriver that the old Mississippi had brought him back to her on a hot June night and now the river was taking him away from her on a cold November evening.

Clay.
Her lips formed his name silently.
Oh, Clay, please come back to me.

To Mary Ellen’s delight and astonishment, the tall dark man to whom she soundlessly spoke raised his hand and waved. He could see her! He knew she was here, and he was waving to her.

Laughing and crying at once, Mary Ellen shot her arm up into the air and waved madly to him. Through the powerful glasses trained on him, she saw his handsome face break into a wide, boyish grin. She puckered her lips, touched them to her fingers, and tossed him a kiss. He followed suit, raising both hands to his lips, kissing them, and then flinging his long arms out wide and high.

Then he was gone.

Swallowed up in the fog and the mist and the night. In seconds the
Andrew Jackson
itself was no longer visible on the dark, murky river.

Mary Ellen lowered the heavy glasses. She shivered with the cold and with fear.

He was gone.

Clay was gone.

And he might never come back.

There had been no war for Mary Ellen as long as Clay was at Longwood with her. But now that he was gone, the war was paramount on her mind. She read the
Memphis Appeal
voraciously and any other newspaper she could get her hands on. She checked daily with Ensign Johnny Briggs to see what he had learned of the battles being waged across the South, both on land and on water.

Her heart froze with fear when, shortly before Christmas, word reached Memphis that the
Cairo,
the Federal ironclad Clay was on, had been sunk by a mine December 12 in the Yazoo River. There were casualties, but it was not yet known who and how many had perished.

Mary Ellen spent the worst week of her life awaiting further word. When at last the dispatch arrived at Memphis’s Union headquarters, young Ensign Briggs quickly brought Mary Ellen the good news. The Captain’s name was not among the
Cairo’s
dead or wounded.

Some days later Mary Ellen received a brief letter from Clay assuring her he was unhurt and would stay that way. He was on his way to Arkansas, where he would join Rear Admiral David Porter’s fleet.

She was not to worry.

Mary Ellen lowered the letter, shaking her head.

She was not to worry? Worry was all she did. Like thousands of other wives, mothers, sisters, and sweethearts, she worried constantly about the safety of the man she loved.

With Clay in the war, Mary Ellen’s duties at the hospital took on new meaning. Anytime she bent to comfort some poor suffering soul, she imagined Clay lying there, wounded and helpless, and compassion swelled in her breast. Worrying that she might not have always been as tender and caring as she could have been, Mary Ellen redoubled her efforts to give the injured, dying men as much attention and kindness as any brave war hero deserved.

To those she tended, it mattered not that she was the wife of a Union naval officer. The infirm men she patiently watched over with grace and sympathy cared only that her pretty face above their own offered a ray of sunshine in a world of darkness. And that her gentle hands on their pain-racked bodies brought a blessed degree of comfort.

Mary Ellen worked extra hard and extra long hours, knowing soon she wouldn’t be able to help out at all. The waistbands of her winter dresses were already growing uncomfortably tight, and Dr. Cain had warned her that the stress and strain of working at the hospital was too hard on an expectant mother.

New Year’s was Mary Ellen’s last day at the clinic. Four months pregnant, she knew it was time to retire to the privacy of Longwood to await the birth of her baby.

Without her duties at Shelby County Hospital to keep her occupied, time hung heavily on her hands. It was the longest, loneliest winter of her life. Each day she prayed a letter would come from Clay, but he wrote infrequently. She’d received only a half dozen letters since he’d been gone, and those she read over and over again.

The winter weather matched Mary Ellen’s gloomy mood. Day in, day out, it was cold and gray, and one ice storm after another blanketed the river city during the months of January and February. Great patches of ice formed on the cold, dark Mississippi, and the banks were frozen solid. Mary Ellen felt as if she were in prison, and if it hadn’t been for Leah coming often to check on her and cheer her up, she was sure she would have lost her sanity.

Mary Ellen shivered alone in the big mahogany bed each night, wishing Clay were there with her, wondering where he was and if he was cold and hungry and tired and dirty and…hurt? She forced the possibility from her mind. Clay wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t going to be hurt.

Dear God, don’t let him be hurt!

Spring finally came to Tennessee, and nobody was happier to see it than the pregnant, lonely Mary Ellen Preble Knight. Even with the warmer weather, she couldn’t go anywhere, because as Titus none-too-gently pointed out, fine ladies did not go out in public in her condition.

“Yo momma’d roll over her grave if n she thought you was gonna be a-parading down the streets of Memphis lookin’ like you do now.”

“Titus, I’ve no intention of ‘parading down the streets of Memphis,’” she told him, a hand pressed to her aching back. “But would it shock the gentry if I sit on my own front gallery?”

“Might want to wait till the sun goes down,” he said thoughtfully. “Not many folks passing by then.”

“I am
not
waiting for sunset,” she said, then stormed out the front fan-lighted doors and eased herself down onto a rocking chair.

She sighed and looked wistfully down the pebbled drive. One day she’d see Clay come riding up the drive, and she’d run out to meet him with their child in her arms. Mary Ellen smiled, envisioning it, and placed a protective hand atop her rounded belly.

On that sunny May afternoon Mary Ellen rocked alone on the wide gallery while out on the lawn brilliant butterflies darted from flower to flower and a balmy breeze stirred wisps of hair at her temples and the sweet scent of honeysuckle wafted up from trellises on the north side of the mansion.

She fell to daydreaming of the happy years stretching before her here at Longwood with Clay and their children. Lulled by the quiet and the dream, Mary Ellen dozed.

She’d slept but a few minutes before she was awakened by the drum of horses’ hooves on the pebbled drive. Mary Ellen blinked and focused. Ensign Briggs dismounted and let himself in the front gate.

Mary Ellen held her breath. She remained seated as the red-haired young sailor hurried up the front walk. When he got closer, she could tell by his expression that he wasn’t bringing bad news. So she relaxed a little and smiled at him.

He had come to tell her that a dispatch had just arrived at Memphis’s Union headquarters. On the eighteenth of May, Admiral Porter had sent six gunboats upriver to support Grant’s army in the operations east of Vicksburg.

The gunboats were under the command of Captain Clayton Terrell Knight.

Morning, May 21, 1863

C
APTAIN CLAY KNIGHT SHIVERED
as he stood in the bright sunshine on the bow of the squadron’s lead gunboat,
Cincinnati.
Despite the warmth of the May Mississippi sun, he felt a chill and his hands shook slightly as he nervously took a cigar from his uniform pocket, stuck it between his lips, and lighted it.

Drawing the smoke deep into his lungs, Clay wondered at himself. He had never known fear before. Never. Not when he was a brand-new striper and he’d been sent down to Buenos Aires to protect endangered Americans. Not when he’d helped drive the Chinese bandits out of Shanghai. Not even when he’d been called on to fight a thousand hostile Indians in Seattle, Washington.

Fear had always been a stranger to him.

Until now.

His gray eyes narrowed against the glare of the sunlight reflecting off the river, Clay was forced to admit to himself that he was afraid.

In an hour this gunboat on which he stood would reach Vicksburg and the Confederates’ well-equipped navy yard. And then it would begin. In sixty minutes he would be going into battle. A battle that for him could end only in one of two ways. Either the river city of Vicksburg would fall to the Union.

Or he would be killed in the line of duty.

There were no other alternatives.

His orders were quite clear: to meet and bombard the enemy from the Mississippi River at Vicksburg while Grant’s army engaged the Confederates on land. Both navy and army were to remain until the vital city fell, no matter how long that might take.

Clay knew Southerners.

Vicksburg wouldn’t give up without a long, bloody fight.

The citizens as well as the soldiers protecting their city knew that if Vicksburg fell to the Union, the Confederacy would be cut in half. And for them the war might well be lost.

Smoke from the cigar clamped between his teeth drifting up into his eyes, Clay patted the left breast pocket of his blue uniform blouse. A neatly folded letter inside a sealed envelope rested there, next to his heart. A letter to Mary. He’d felt compelled to write the letter in the long, sleepless hours of the previous night.

Unable to shake off a nagging premonition that something was going to happen to him, he’d gotten out of bed and written the brief message to his wife. The letter sealed, the envelope addressed, he had put it inside his uniform pocket and would carry it on his person throughout the upcoming battle.

If he was struck by enemy fire, the letter would be found on him and, he trusted, sent directly on to Mary.

Clay flicked away his smoked-down cigar, thinking with bitter irony that the reason he’d never been afraid before was that he hadn’t cared all that much whether he lived or died. It was indifference that had made him courageous.

Now he cared.

Now he had Mary, and he wanted to live so badly that he knew he was probably much more likely to die.

Soon there was no more time for contemplation.

The Confederate naval yard was swiftly coming up on the starboard side of the gunboat
Cincinnati,
and Captain Clay Knight ordered the crew to immediately man their battle stations.

His body tensed, his alert gray eyes riveted to the riverbanks, Captain Knight issued the order to hold all fire until he gave the signal. The gunboat slid around the curving, timbered bank. The Captain brought down his right arm, and the shelling began.

And never stopped.

Attempts to take Vicksburg by storm failed, just as Clay had suspected. Grant’s army settled down for a long siege, and Porter’s naval squadron was active throughout the operation. The well-armed Union gunboats poured more than two thousand shells into the river city in the first six days. They drew sporadic fire from the Rebel batteries on the bluffs but suffered little damage.