The Night Inspector (29 page)

I read in the
Times
of streets torn up for replacement of the surface with stone blocks instead of cobbles. Crack a cobble, I thought, and it’s one small, broken stone; crack a large stone block, and you’ve holes, soon enough, that you might lose a wagon in. And they called this progress. I thought of the laborers who would do the work, the Bohemians and Scandinavians, the sturdy Irishmen, the slender, powerful Chinese—if the Europeans permitted them to join the crews. And of course I thought of the woman who was married to a dead man. I thought of Jessie, tracing my fingers on the tattooed figures on her stomach and her breasts. I thought, in turn, of the dead horse in the road, and of the unnamed, squarish woman, so generous and weary, who had nursed me through considerable pain and shame and my wish to surrender, and who had goaded me to want to see again, and to dare being seen. The papers would be signed by the night inspector, and the unseen children would be taken uptown to an address that Jessie would provide. At the end of it, I would have served her, and Adam would have served his people and me, and M would have served Malcolm or, anyway, his memory of him, and Sam would not have served; he would have observed, which seemed to constitute his passion.

And where, then, I wondered, would each of us go? For this would have been a small event of such large moment in our lives, that a change
or shift or long pause for reflection would feel necessary, I thought. And I wished I knew what I hoped for from Jessie. My work toward the end she sought was, after all, a transaction. Would one between us then begin? Or would it have concluded? I had been in the company of Sam, with his speculations and his formulations, for too long, I thought. It had not occurred to me, during our time in the War, that he might exert such an influence upon my life.

Had I seen this madness of the notebook during our fighting days? I wondered. And I could not recall. In fact, I thought, I had hardly noticed him, except as an extension of Sergeant Grafton and Private Burton and their mission as a group in detachment: to care for me. Burton had curried my horse and seen to his hooves and his tack. Sam had fed me when they cooked and while Burton fed the horses; the sergeant had seen to my few wounds and occasional sprains of the knee or shoulder, had waited out with me my sometime deafness after shooting, had gone over with me maps and escape routes, had established paroles and set out Sam and Burton as pickets while I was off on the hunt. I recalled Sam’s curious, wide eyes, his wiry hair, his sallowness and attentiveness and, in general, his seriousness, often leavened with humor; I suspected that some of the seriousness could be laid to fear, and it was a condition general to the four of us. We were alone, in Rebel country, and always about to come under their fire.

No notebook, though, and no frantic, frowning scrawl of notes. It had come after, I thought. After Sergeant Grafton’s brains had spilled upon Sam’s trouser legs and boots. After the blood of his horse had sprayed Sam’s face.

I recalled how I had teased him, when I had wished only to fall on the ground near his feet and groan, when I returned, winded, from a mission. I had been in a vulnerable position, which is to say that although I was camouflaged with branches and leaf and grass I had tied upon myself and over even my forage cap, I was without cover, spraddle-legged on the rise above their camp. I could kill some, but then, if they
had some nerve and could remember what good marksmen most of them were, they would have a clean shot into me as I rolled—it was my plan—away and down until the hill protected me from their fire.

I could not still the racing of my heart, nor the sighing of my breaths, which I drank rather than inhaled. I was certain they would hear me, had perhaps already heard me and were lying in wait while a few—I counted seven—pretended to build the fire up for the heating of lead to pour into the shot molds I saw through my telescope. At one instant, I closed my eyes and braced my body on the ground, head sideways on the scrubby grass, all of me shivering as if a terrible fever were passing through my body. No shot came, of course, for they were unaware of me, and I forced myself to count to ten. On the final count, I required that I raise my head. I did. And then I ordered my eyes to open. They obeyed.

Before me, on the ground, inches from my slowly moving head, was a bright blue bird with a duller blue breast that was brighter, still, than any blue I had seen, including those of the bluebird in my own upstate countryside, and the blues of Union soldiers and the first Confederate uniforms, and the blues of poor countrywomen like my mother, dressed in dull and inexpensive hues. I did not know its name, nor do I know it now. But I can see him. For he stood before me, a slowly writhing dark red worm in his mouth, and he stared along his blunt beak as if to challenge me to contend for the meal. My life, in the War, had so many times been held, like a worm, and like the worms to which I consigned my targets, at the mercies of a small creature of large appetite. I must find the lesson in this, I instructed myself.

I extended my rifle, and I lined up the first shot, having, with the telescope, now stowed in my jacket, selected the second and the third. I sighted, first, on the small black kettle that was on, really in, the fire. A sergeant with leather gloves and a stained leather cloth held in one gauntleted hand was preparing to pour the lead. The bright blue bird flew up, and one of the ranks—a country boy like me, I supposed—stuck out a hand, no doubt out of reflex in response to the color and motion.
Another looked up, and I froze. But I was too convinced they had spotted me to do what was wisest: remain in position and let their eyes accept me as an aspect of the countryside. I breathed out, and I fired. I fired again. The kettle took the first shot, and the second struck the fire—wasted powder. The sergeant was caught in the face and chest as he kneeled above the lead, and he began to scream. I saw his flesh give off a dirty smoke that rose around him.

Several of them came to his assistance, while the veterans moved away, toward their picketed horses and the trees. I caught one of them first, for he would be a cleverer soldier than those who had gone toward the wounded target. I then swung back, and I took the first one to reach the screaming sergeant, and then the second, who had halted while I shot. Some of them were firing, and one of them was good. He was excellent. He burned the back of my neck where I lay, and I howled. Then I remembered to roll, and I went flailing down the hill, bruising myself on the ammunition case and on my pistol every time I went around. I held on to the rifle so that my elbows and upper arms might take the brunt of my striking the ground, for I would need the rifle far more than I would hate the soreness of my arms. Nevertheless, I struck my face twice with my own firing mechanism, and I could feel the blood from the back of my neck.

I was moving through the evergreen forest below the little rise and well into its shadows before they could mount a pursuit. I panted and groaned my way, stilling myself twice to listen for them, then running on, whimpering by now like a child. I stopped close to the farther edge of the woods, and I caught my breath; it seemed to take me half an hour, although it was moments only, and then I forced my head back, although it stung, and more than that, and then I walked with a feigned ease back toward our encampment.

“Jupiter,” Sam called out.

I replied with “Your anus.”

“It’s
Ur
-anus, Mr. Bartholomew.”

But I was already there, closer to him than he had thought, and I was enjoying a bit, I confess, his exclamations over the blood at my neck and the bruises and cuts upon my face and hands.

He said, “I’ll fetch the sergeant to see to your wounds. I heard the firing.”

I was about to nod to his wide eyes, and to affect a veteran’s silence, when my intestines crawled about and began to thrash within me as if some animal, the size, say, of a raccoon or mink, had burrowed into my belly to dig its home. I leaned my rifle at him, and he caught it with a kind of surprise. “Trench,” I confessed, and I ran to it, crossing our camp and frightening one of the horses. If he brought our pursuers with his nickering, I would probably be killed as I sat on the log at our trench, but I would be fortunate to get there, and not to be caught with my trousers on the ground or filled with my wastes.

It was the burning, watery discharge of pure fear, and I was grateful to Burton for having left behind a few sheets of an Athens newspaper he had found. I did not think about smearing myself, as the flies gathered and my own odor choked me as it rose, with the facts or lies the Rebels told themselves about the War. I was happy to have lived, and happy to be through some of my terror in a private moment, and happy enough to consider that I would soon have to do it, or something very like it, again.

Later, as we led our horses with their hooves wrapped in pieces of flannel that Burton carried in a sack for the purpose, Sam, beside me, whispered, “I have never known you to leave your weapon, Mr. Bartholomew.”

“Nature is the breaker of habits,” I replied.

“It was an honor to be trusted.”

“I was, shall we say, relieved, Sam.”

Sergeant Grafton hushed us angrily, and he was right. I patted Sam on his bony shoulder, and he turned his head in surprise, no doubt at the intimacy of my gesture. I saw him lay his wide, intelligent eyes upon me,
and I knew that he was—as I considered wind and drop and angle when I laid a shot—puzzling out a way in which to think about me.

While I, in the remainder of that morning’s march, as the sun came fully up and we stripped the horses’ hooves and rode, was remembering how, when spring came to Paynes Corners, I came home to build a new outhouse at my mother’s place. I made the seat narrow, but sturdy, and I built the inside platform a little lower to the ground. Although I did salvage some of the wood from the old one, I set most of it afire where it stood and, guarding against leaping sparks with a ready bucket of water, I watched the flames, and then the sinking wood, and then the dropping of the platform, the crashing of the walls, and the burning of what lay beneath the wood and in the soil. I expected to smell something, at some point, like the roasting of beef. But it all finally smelled the same—a kind of acrid, intimate odor rode on the darker smell of burning wood. We were all, finally, the same, waste and lumber and Uncle Sidney. That evening, I noticed that my mother was gaining weight, and we roasted early lamb and gnawed the small rib bones.

I did not, however, see him making notes that day or in the camp that night. Sergeant Grafton insisted on disinfecting my neck with horse liniment; while Burton saw to the horses, the sergeant saw to me. And Sam, at his chores, did keep his eyes upon me, until I became nervy and snapped at him once when he asked a question about the charge of powder in the cartridges I employed.

“What difference can it make, Sam, for Christ’s sake?”

“In how they die and how you live, Mr. Bartholomew.”

“Well said,” the sergeant said from his blankets, where he lounged and smoked, his men having been seen to and Burton set upon patrolling the perimeter.

“Truly,” I relented. “I might be a little … eccentric tonight.”

“It was close this morning,” the sergeant said.

“Always, I suppose. But this morning, I felt as though, from the start, they had me.”

“And?”

“They weren’t that close,” I said.

“A half an inch away,” the sergeant said.

“How frightened were you?” Sam was young enough to ask it.

I was either veteran enough, or very young, and silence, in either case, would seem the only reply. I told him nothing.

Sam looked at me with his wide eyes, and I felt the pressure of his speculations. And I feel them now.

And here we poised, on the eve of the day of the eve. It was the middle of September, and hot in New York, but on the evening winds off the river there had come a hint of more than soiled water, and more than the dusty cliffs of New Jersey, and more than the smoke, dust, and corruption of the manufacturing process that was as dark upon the air as it was clamorous around our heads. It was a touch, barely a dilution in the general heat and stench and turmoil, of something cool, something like the seasons hinging toward fall. So we might change again, I thought.

I had been walking through the night. A vast hog had confronted me at St. John Street, once verging upon Africa, and we had stood there across from St. John’s Park, perhaps his bower and patrol, as if we were fighters in a duel, he sniffing my odor and backing up a pace, then coming forward a pace, as if he could not decide which part of me to snap and then suck down into his very large belly. His face seemed mild, almost comical, for he had a wound or growth near the bottom of his great lips on the rightmost side, and it made him look as if I struck him humorously.

“I will not be imprisoned on this street for you,” I told the hog. I had drawn my pistol, and I knew that I would fire.

Two women, quite pale and old and drawn inside the vast, dark skirts of their costumes, looking, really, like seamed, gray children in the clothing of adults, were about to pass me and cross toward the park when they saw what I stood before.

“Gretchen,” one of them said, “that man has a gun.”

“He has a wild pig, Eleanor.”

“Is he going to kill it?”

“Shall we ask him? Sir,” she called.

“Madam.” I turned to respond and, finally seeing me through their myopia, they each took several steps back.

“Gretchen, that man has a mask. Is he an outlaw?”

I wondered if it had been my grotesque appearance that gave the pig pause. “I advise that you effect a detour, ladies. Return, perhaps, to the corner of the street behind us and cross over there to the park.”

They fled me, and when I turned to the pig, he as well decided that I was a formidable presence and made his way along Canal. If he continued, I thought, he would arrive at the wharf of the Collins Liverpool Steamship line; embarking, he might become some of the famous Liverpool sausages.

I continued toward my home district, quite nearby to the east, and I was caught at the corner of Broadway and Leonard by a feeling I had known in the War. I wondered, in fact, if I roamed the city in an effort to capture these vagaries of mine; when I was unawares, and afoot, and adrift—for all my conspicuousness somehow still in hiding within the mask and the wound behind it—I walked into emotions that drifted upon the atmosphere of the streets as if they were smoke, or odors; in midstep, I was transported into a place I had been that was not New York and was not now. I thought, of a sudden, on the night before the day of our rescue of the Negro children, of a time when Sergeant Grafton found me outside our encampment in the week or thereabouts before they hunted me down.