The Night Inspector (11 page)

The houses were set fifty and more yards apart, and I left off circling our temporary house on my watch, walking into the warm night, in order to assure myself that we were alone and therefore safe. They had fled the fighting, of course, but I wondered why they hadn’t returned. It is likely that no one else among us would have found the remains of the
doll because they were not gifted with my eyesight; there was little even barely visible that I did not see. At the third house from ours, the farthest down the row, attached to the field, I found the face of a rag doll—only the small face, no bigger than my thumb, with inked dots for eyes and a vertical line for a nose, a curved line for its smiling mouth—abandoned at the ledge of the window at the front dooryard, hard by the porch. My lantern caught its white, coarse cloth. The wind shifted back against me, and it carried with it something of cellars, something like the small upstate caves outside which I had paused as a boy, smelling the cold, earthen odor of snakes. I regarded the staring fragment of doll, caught on the coarse wood of the sill, beneath the shattered glass.

But why would a child leave her doll? And why leave but a piece of it?

I assessed the glass, and the scars of bullets in the window’s frame and above the sill. I slowly went to my knees and, seating the lantern on the porch beside the window, I lowered myself to the ground, fully prone, but propped on my hands, so that I could sniff the hard-packed soil of the dooryard. This was something I knew. Then, on my feet again, leaning my rifle against the porch, I walked the wall with the lantern high and close to it, from the doll face along to my right toward the sliding door of a small storage shed. The clapboard was well chewed by gunfire. Most of it seemed to have been concentrated at the same height.

Yes, I thought, slipping the doll’s head into my belt and retrieving my rifle. I thought: No!

I knew to walk out behind the house and to hold my lantern low, to prod the earth with the toe of my boot, looking to pry loose clods. I found nothing for twenty yards in either direction right or left, and nothing fifteen or twenty yards back from the house.

“Well, of course,” I instructed the overgrown field, the high, bright half of moon, the distant trees, the houseful of snoring men. Beyond the light my lantern threw, a creature moved off, and I wished I had gone with it. “Why,” I asked, “would you dig when you hadn’t to? When you
were moving at a rapid march?” I should have known, I thought, expert as I was at hiding in sight.

I returned to the house and I pulled a loose finishing nail all the way out of the clapboard with my knife. Using the handle of the knife as a hammer, I affixed the nail above the door of the shed and hung my lantern there. I took up my rifle, though I knew that what I’d face could not be fought, and I slid the shed door open on its rough runner, crying out something in no words, employing the sound as something of a shield.

There was my memory of coiled, sleeping snakes. There was the blood I had smelled on the beaten clay of the dooryard. There was the hamlet, and there— Her arm was bent behind her; she was devoid of expression, although her gray-green blankness was punctuated by the movement of a rat across her mouth (for the flesh is tenderest there, and at the cheeks). I had pulled up and fired before I knew that I would, and of course I missed the rat and caved in the face of the six- or seven-year-old girl, bloated as it was with gases from the corrupted internal organs. Drawn by the sound of my shot, they came up in good time, armed and shouting.

Sam began to convulse in vomiting and tears, and it was contagious, and we all of us were ill. The smell was as nothing compared to what poured upon us from the heaped corpses in their clothing rent by bullet after bullet, and in their blood. Men and women were piled upon each other with no respect for the intimacy of their posture.

I could not help but be offended by this disregard for their modesty, I told Sergeant Grafton.

He looked at me as if he might speak, but then he returned, as did I, to pulling the corpses away from one another and laying them in rows.

Sam whimpered, and then cleared his throat, and made as if to adjust one of the lanterns one of them had hung from a post. “I wish we could know which family was which,” he said. “It seems wrong to separate them like this.”

“A small, a miniature wrong,” the sergeant said.

“Yes. But they require rescuing,” Sam said.

The sergeant only continued to drag the bodies and to line them up.

I was astonished at the number of children they had executed. I wondered if one of the men had shown resistance, or had even killed a Union soldier, to call down such a large and brutal vengeance. All that was ever required, of course, for such a massacre was for a soldier to shoot his piece at the wrong moment, when everyone was tense or fearful or fresh from a battle gone wrong. Of course, it also required an officer, I thought, to permit himself to be swept by the moment’s emotional flood, and to organize the operation. So many men to herd the families, so many men to guard the perimeter as they were marched into place, and so many men to be willing to stand and pour the volley into the mothers huddled round their children or grasping their infants—we’d found three babies—while husbands raged or trembled or called to those they loved about courage or heaven, or threatened the soldiers, or begged. There were young boys and girls, and the babies, and probably the parents had been young, although they now looked very old—as old, I thought, as people get.

The shirts of some were burned at the entrance hole of the bullet. The women, I saw, were clothed, and perhaps they hadn’t been raped. You could not tell, of course, for it’s simple to lift the skirts of her dress up over her head and hold her thus for a comrade before he offers you a similar courtesy so that you may take your turn. I would not look beneath their clothing to see if any had been violated; there were young girls, and I could not bear to know.

Their flesh oozed liquids you would not know the body contained, and the skin was loose on them, as if a form of greenish clothing that might tear away when we moved them. The stench, now fully upon us, was like the fields after any battle, and it merely sickened us, and we were accustomed to such effluvia, so sweet and rich and full of bowel and the cuprousness of blood.

It was their faces I wished not to look upon. I had seen men killed, and I had killed them. I had smelled their corpses and the corpses other men had made. But I’d seen only the faces of men, condemned to die or dying gladly, though I think few do gladly die, and the expressions had, for the most part, been of little more than violence that had shaken the features, which, after days, in fact, begin to relax, go bland and loose and full. Here, however, I saw fury and despair, deep fright, and I sensed in them a diminution—that they had understood, ultimately, that to someone in the world with the power to enforce his conviction, they had not mattered at all.

“You are making something of this,” Sergeant Grafton said. “You are constructing an insight.”

I stood. I regarded him. I thought of striking him, and he knew it.

“Don’t,” he said. “There’s no profit in it.”

I thought of what he deemed an insight, my no doubt erroneous belief that these dead mattered more than any bodies I had produced as I descended upon them like Jehovah down upon the Egyptians. I thought, as well, of the profit and loss in striking the man who could see me summoned at a courts-martial, and who could see me abandoned on a hunt, and who could also, and probably with justification, shoot me down if I made to assault him.

“I haven’t any idea what you mean,” I said, and I commenced the search of dead hands for the fragments of missing, stuffed bits of chest, or arm, or leg, that had been clutched when the volleying had torn away the head and left it perched upon the house. I had vowed that I would investigate each hand of every child, but I could not. I pried open the small fists of one whose eyes were open, and could not force myself beyond the hands of one other, a girl, whose hair had caught fire from the heat of the shots as they entered her face and neck. I took the head of the doll from my belt and carried it to the end of a row and set it upon the straw: man with much of his arm and chest shot away; man with no apparent wound; man with all of one side of his rib cage showing;
woman with one shoe on; woman whose wound was in her shoulder, probably dead from the bleeding and shock; small girl; larger girl of seven or so; girl; a boy whose hands remained in fists I dared not open; boy without trousers; girl; the finger of cloth with its painted face.

We slept hard, afterward, each of us claiming not to have wakened to smell his hands or see them as they lay in the shed. I actually went, when I waked, to see if Sam had covered the mirror in the hallway of the house we used. He had.

We departed without burying them, although Sergeant Grafton drove a fence post into the earth outside the shed and hung upon it the tarnished silver crucifix that had encircled the neck of one of the women. We hurried along, agreeing that our orders called us away, agreeing without speech that what hurried us was what we left behind. After much of a day’s hard riding, we entered swampy ground that sucked at the hooves of our horses and that worried the sergeant. He sent me up a tree to survey the landscape, and I saw solider ground to our west. We rode toward it, suffering much from insects not much larger than fleas that anguished our horses and flew in at our nose and mouth and eyes. As we climbed, they diminished, although the pitch grew steep and we led rather than rode the horses.

“What does this go to?” the sergeant asked me.

“Nothing pleasant,” I said.

“In specific?”

“I haven’t any idea,” I said.

“Then please find out,” he said, stopping us and sending me to a slender poplar that swayed as I went up. “Stop,” the sergeant called, and I did. “Why burden yourself with the rifle?”

“It is what accompanies me up trees, Sergeant.”

“See that it doesn’t go off.”

Despite the low crotch of the tree, because we had climbed a good distance, I was able to make out, instantly, motion in a copse a little more than three or four hundred yards from us. I used my telescope, and the
sergeant hushed them, knowing that I used it only for a stalk. I enjoyed working with him; he was professional, and he offered me deference when the matter at hand concerned my work.

He looked up, waiting. I looked down to him and nodded. I presented the four fingers of my right hand, and he nodded. They led the horses back from the tree, and they readied their weapons. They would shelter behind a stone outcropping we had passed, calming the tethered horses and preparing to rescue or reinforce me.

I looked back, through the telescope, at the four men in their encampment. They seemed to have no horses, or to have left them somewhere. I could not find their mounts after sweeping the landscape, so I looked once more with the telescope and then replaced it in my kit. Now I looked upon them with my telescopic sight. I checked the arming of the Sharps. I selected the first of them, a man in an Indian squat some small distance from the others. I would take him and then quickly find a second target where the three of them waited.

Waited for what? was forming in my mind as I found the first one again and sighted him in. I looked down at a man in a blue shirt rimmed at the armpits by the salt of his sweat. His trousers were of buckskin, and his boots, I saw as I swept the glass down his body, were cracked and one was caked with dung. I wondered where their horses were.

Waited for what? I swept up to his head for the placement of my shot, and I looked into his telescopic sight.

Waited for him to take me.

They did not know I was me. But they knew me. You’re your actions, and those they surely knew. They had been hunting me, perhaps in more than one party.

His companions waited for him to take me. He did. We fired at once. His ball must have struck the trigger guard or the metal at the breech. The rifle, at my shoulder and just below my right eye and right temple and right cheek, exploded into my face. I might have hit him, I realized much later, for they fled rather than come after me to see if they needed
to finish. I did not fall from the tree, I realized later. I hung in the crotch, screaming. I heard myself. The metal of the mechanism, the splintered wood of the stock, were driven back into my face, as was, of course, the powder of the percussion pellet set upon the nipple. My face was the site of an explosion, yet my hearing was unaffected. I heard myself as I screamed and screamed, wiping at the teeth and gums and slices of face that fell upon my tongue as I made my undignified noises.

“Here we come,” said Grafton, soothing even from a distance. “Here we come,” he called, like a father to his frightened child. “We’re coming,” he called from the base of the tree. I went by wagon the rest of the way, rolling home inside a dream I dreamed was dreamt by someone else. After coming to consciousness, and begging for death, which I was not granted, I tried to imagine whose dream it had been.

I was wrapped in bandages and blind, because they did not know at first if my eyes were affected; but they had left an aperture at the mouth for breathing and speech. I used it when someone came into what I thought of as the dream to press my shoulder and ask how I fared.

“You could kill me,” I said.

There was a pause, and then the hand was removed from my shoulder.

I said, “You could easily—”

“Yes,” a stranger’s voice replied.