The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

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The sound of iron walls adjusting to the underwater pressure around you was like the sound of improbability announcing itself: a broad, deep, awake-you-from-your-stupor kind of salvo. The first time we heard it, we thought we were dead; the second time we heard it, we realized we were. The third time wiped clean away any concern we had regarding our well-being and we whooped like madmen in our sealed iron tub, hands at the crank, hunched at our stations like crippled industrial workers. Frank yelled like a siren without taking a breath. Augustus hooted like a screech owl. The walls pinged and groaned, but held their seams. We screamed for more.

My name is Ward Lumpkin, and I man the second crank station aboard the “fish boat” H. L. Hunley, the first underwater vessel commissioned for combat by the Confederate States of America. There are seven of us aboard, not including our captain, Lieutenant Dixon, and in navigating the submarine murk of Charleston Harbor we make up the third volunteer crew in as many months. Mechanical failure; flooding ballast tanks; human error; bad luck: conventional wisdom around Battery Marshall has the survival rate aboard the Hunley hovering near zero, and that’s without ever having engaged an enemy ship. Cannon probability, Augustus calls it, as in, stuff yourself inside a cannon and see what happens. But there’s probability, and there’s certainty. Antietam was a washout. Gettysburg was worse. Crescent City folded like the house of cards it was and we lost the Mississippi.

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