Hunley’s Craft

by Tom Hunley

The first submarine to torpedo an enemy boat was the invention
of Horace Lawson Hunley. The South lost the fight, but his invention

was the secret weapon that defended Charleston, a port city shelled
by the Union day and night. Hunley’s eponymous contraption,

a converted steam boiler that must have looked like a whale
surfacing in the harbor under moonlight, spurning attention,

held eight Jonahs in its belly, one skipper and seven brave crewmen
propelling the sub with hand cranks. They all died, I should mention,

just after their valor blew the USS Housatonic out of the water.
Worse, Horace Lawson Hunley died before his invention

modernized naval warfare. During diving trials, Hunley sank
with the Hunley because the hatch wasn’t closed tight. His invention

was salvaged by Confederate divers, who found captain and crew
still frozen in their death poses, a grisly sight. There’d been tension,

of course, between old-school navy men and Captain Hunley.
They told him, “We don’t hide in fright in an invention

that lets cowards breathe beneath the ocean. We battle on the waves,
like men!” The age-old clash between the dim lights of convention

and the bright bulbs of innovation. Like him, I’m a Hunley, a rebel,
a maker. Words are my keys-on-kites. These poems are my inventions.

 

                                                                                                  (unpublished, uncollected)


Tom C. Hunley is the husband of Ralaina Ruvalcaba and the father of Evan Joel Ruvalcaba Hunley. He has degrees from Highline Community College (AA), University of Washington (BA), Eastern Washington University (MFA) and Florida State University (Ph.D.), where he was the recipient of a 2002-2003 Kingsbury Fellowship. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Western Kentucky University. Before settling on a career in academia, he worked as a public relations writer, a sportswriter, a technical writer, a warehouseman, a Salvation Army bellringer, an enumerator for the U.S. Census Bureau, a typist, a data entry clerk, a file clerk, a fry cook, a cashier, a dishwasher, night manager of a convenience store, and a canopy construction worker. He is the editor/publisher of Steel Toe Books.