The Night Inspector (35 page)

He waved his hand in the air. “Lose them forever, then, if you will, shipmate. Then I must merely contend with my anger and my shame.”

I set the pistol on the deck and tore at any proof of malfeasance—any, that is, except the dark children in the imprisoning tuns. The fragments, like a tiny snow, blew past Sam and fell upon the Hudson River and soon would sink, and M, at least, was now free to be only an official who had happened upon a crime and had done his utmost to bring some villains to brook.

I withdrew the pouch of cartridges from the croker sack and felt only four. I saw that the chambers were empty, and I prayed that I might recover my former skills, for the .31 would serve us only at proximity; our long gun, and the salvation of the children, must be what sent M’s Malcolm into the earth.

As if I soon might have a shot, I lay my gun hand on the deck and, supporting it with my left, I sighted on the smokestack and its sparks, and I thought to squeeze off. But the ship was so far ahead of us that I could not imagine our capturing her. Which her: the question I posed for myself. And why? Because she had gulled me—there is no embarrassment greater, for a New York man such as I, than to be fooled, like the country cousin, by a striking woman of Manhattan—or because she had committed a crime? The nature of the crime was very terrible, for a woman who was (probably) the product of slaves was now, herself, a slaver; like the Africans who sold the slaves to Dutchmen or the Portuguese, she was enslaving her own for the profit. She was no better, I
thought, than a white. Yet it was she, naked beside me or upon me, who had whispered my name on my flesh; somehow, I became more authentically myself when she had done that. Just so with her farewell kiss, when she had intimately planted her lips upon the scarf that masked the mask beneath which I sheltered. It was as if she reminded me that I was a man in hiding—as, indeed, I had been throughout the War—and then, with her chewing and sucking at my throat, as if she reminded me that the twice-masked man was this flesh, and this blood, and he was actual.

I came forward, saying, “Adam, I insist now.”

“Your hands, Mist Bartelmy, aren’t even literary like
this
man’s,” he said.

But he and Sam shipped their oars, and I exchanged places with Adam, and I was pleased, in spite of the burning of my palms and fingers, to be rowing again.

Sam said, “Will we catch them? I can feel the wind rising at us, can I not?”

“Ask the captain,” I said.

“ ‘Ask the captain,’ eh?” M roared, of a sudden, as if I had inspired him. He swung the little jib, then gave up as the wind blew hard from New Jersey, and he let the sail slacken, then tied it loosely to the jib.

He took up the spearlike gaff and shifted it upon the flooring. He adjusted his legs in their stance. Lifting his chin, he said, “Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. Babies unsafe, men unsound, danger everywhere to the frailest. Billy,” he called.

I had the breath to utter, “Sir,” but little more.

“Did you fight your War for the world to come to this?”

“I did not think,” I gasped in a kind of hoarse whisper, “that it might come to too much more.”

“We should have known each other years ago,” he said.

It occurred to me that no one knew him. And I wondered if that was also true of me. It seemed to me, in that dark and soaking night of so many disappointments, that I wished for anyone to say that I was not unknown to them.

The wind beat at us in such a way as to drive us landward, and M required that Sam ship his oar while I row so as to bring us away. The rowing was even more difficult, and the water came over the prow upon us with considerable weight. The power of the tide propelled us, but endangered us as well, for, always, we seemed in danger of losing control. Still, Sam and I pressed on against the waves.

“Drive!” M called.
“Bend
, men!”

Adam, squatting in the stern beside him, said, “Is that the literary part or the workingman part?”

“Great heavens,” Sam said. “I could tell him.”

“Tell what? Tell who?” I asked. “What
are,”
I panted, “all these words you are slinging about?”

“Their fire has gone out,” M said. “Or, anyway, it has diminished. They cannot progress unless they make sail. To do so—well, let us hope that they do not do so. It is the price of empiricism, shipmates. The motors in the world, each and every one, are subject to the laws of motors: They must be started, and they
will
, willy-nilly, come to rest. Each and every one. As here, tonight. Now
bend
, lads! With a will! Will you break your backs, my fellows? Will you crack your spines?”

And instead of repudiating his hyperbole, Sam and I did bend to the oars and press and pull and then press again, stroking with our shoulders and arms, pushing with our knees down into our legs, leaning forward, pulling back, and driving us on, even faster, despite the higher waves and harder wind, than we had previously gone.

“Will you
bend,”
he begged us, as if more, even than the lives of the children, even more than our outrage and pride, were at stake. And we bent. And, scrutinizing us, he leaned back his large, shaggy head, and his eyes rolled up as he bent at the knees and laughed his soundless laughter, mouth open to the nighttime skies.

And then, of a sudden, he ceased to be that person who all but lashed us to row, and he appeared to be more like the night inspector who used to write books. He peered beyond us, and Sam and I rowed, and Adam, clambering past us to the prow, said, “I see ’em better. We’re closer now.”

“With a will,” M growled at us, and I waited for him to shift his being once again, and to become whomever he was when he drove a boat’s crew onward. But he said nothing more, and I rowed as if my life were at stake.

It was M, then, the sailor, and the officer upon the Hudson, who said, “Did you hear about the coal barge?”

“It is like a blessing, Sam,” I whispered. “I swear it. Like a sign.”

“Broke her moorings,” M said, “and filled and sank. Well, partly sank. Where they were dredging, do you know?”

Sam gasped, “Good thing, Billy?”

“Yes. The best. Shallow.” And then I had to stop because I couldn’t breathe.

M said, “Drafts in the thirties of feet there, when dredging’s complete. But the barge sank because it
wasn’t
complete. The vessel turned over on top of the dredger’s barge, and they’re both down there, like a reef. It’s not the engine that defeats them so much as the life of the river itself. They’re fast on the topmost barge, and they’ve driven themselves snug!”

Adam called back, “They are working, all of them. Everybody’s dancing. No! But everybody’s moving around.”

“I must get up front,” I told M. “I have a marksman’s eyes, and excellent night vision.”

“How much you have missed with them,” he said sadly, but then he suggested that we ship our oars, that Adam return to rowing, and that I, in the prow, report on what approached.

He asked of Adam, “Are you sound? Hands and arms are fit? Your back, poor fellow?”

“That’s free,” Adam said, to none of us in particular. “When they ax.”

He and Sam began the stroke, and I lay on my belly, legs splayed under the thwart that shifted beneath their weight as they rowed. I could feel the power of the river beneath my legs as I put my sore, puffy hands above my eyes, as if the visor of a cap, and attempted to concentrate my vision upon the thick, dark ship. Adam had been correct, I thought, for
there did appear to be a kind of orchestrated movement about the cargo and back and forth; I thought I saw Jessie, her exposed head floating above the darkness of her cloak. It was she who led the dance. We drew closer. Every shape but hers that was the size of an adult was now my target, and I sighted on the silhouettes.

I heard a large-bore pistol shot. M was encouraging Sam and Adam to press a little harder at the oars, for we did make progress. When I looked over my shoulder at him, I saw that his expression was sorrowful. I returned my study to the boat we pursued, and foaming splashes became evident, I surmised, from the far side of their ship. Jessie was no longer visible in her dance, and Porter and North seemed not to be in sight, although the splashes came more quickly.

One of them lost his stroke, and we began to spin in the tide. I looked back. M said nothing. He pointed at Sam, plunging his hands down, and Sam understood, placing his oar unmoving in the river so that the other side of our craft came around again, and then Adam and he knew to take up their rhythm of rowing once more, and we began again to progress toward the lighter, ferrying our own cargo—the dull, fat cartridges we carried in the chambers of my gun. I saw no sparks at the stack, and I grew optimistic. That was just before I sighted the first.

I called to M, and he soon enough made it out as well. They had, it eventuated, not unsealed all of the great casks, for one came down to us—or, rather, we came to it while it whirled very slowly in a stately manner, dipping in the drive of the current that pitched it against the drive of the tide. It made its progress sideways more than down the river, and as golden light broke through the serried ranks of cloud, I could see the heat, trailing vapors, drift up. In the ribbons and then curtains of what seemed to be steam, as dawn came upon us, I saw the tun.

I said, “Not so.”

M, in the stern, used his gaff and leaned to bring it closer. Adam ceased his rowing and took hold of M’s waist lest he be pulled over. I scrambled past Sam, who sat, his mouth open, his chest heaving, slowly
shaking his head. The great cask was open, and in it was Jessie, with a foolish expression at her mouth because of the blood that had filled it and then leaked out along her ruined lips. She glared at us from her death. I saw at last where the bullet had entered, in the back of her neck, where the hair was damp and heated, as if she were a sweaty child at play outside the school in Florence, Florida, free for a time of the minister and his instruction—if all or any of that was true. The bullet had emerged from her mouth, shattering teeth and lips. I thought: Cruel joke upon us, Jessie, for you, had you lived, would also have needed a mask. I held her head while M held the tun fast to us, and I at last patted her cheek once and let her go. Below her were dead children, their limbs jammed into place, the stench of their vomitus and excrement a kind of terrible sweet sourness: Lydia Pinkham’s in the juices of fruit. They probably had never wakened, and now Jessie, whose waking I had more than once watched—a taut peacefulness going watchful and engaged—also would not waken. Neither would Delgado, who had sought at the end to protect her, I wagered; for we could see his black hair and pale forehead underneath a small, dark child.

Adam said, “Isn’t that justice, Lord?”

“Is that what it is, Adam?”

He looked at me and said no more.

M said, “The children beneath her.”

I nodded.

“They never wakened,” he said.

“Sir, I was thinking that. She had thought to see to them, and she had protested their lightening the load. Surely that is what they’re about now. Throwing overboard their investment.”

“They’re bad businessmen, then,” he said, “for they invested a great deal of money in these lives.”

“They’re entangled in the business of avoiding imprisonment. They’re scrabbling for
their
lives now. At the end, Adam, I think she must have thought of the children.”

He looked away. He did not reply.

M said to me, “Were you thinking of Mal? He went to sleep and they went to sleep, and none of them did wake.” He said then, with only a small pause, “Will you, Adam, first of men, take hold of the mouth of this great barrel? It will be for only a moment, I promise.”

Adam moved around him to the gunwale, and he seized the lip of the tun with both hands.

“That is right. You understand. For only a moment, now.” Adam pulled against the current and M, standing back and then lunging, dashed the pole of the gaff against the side of the tun. He reared back and did it again, then again. Staves parted, and one split. He struck hard, he was breathing hard, and the color was up in his pale face. Soon enough, the staves parted wide, and we could see her drawn-up thighs between them. I would have pulled her skirts down to cover them if M had let me, but, seeing me about to move, he ceased his battering and held his hand aloft. “We are engaged now, Billy, in a burial.”

Sam said, low, “She must be hid, then?”

M replied, “They all must be hid. Hence, to the awful floor, cinnamon-colored child.”

I said, “She is no child.”

“She was somebody’s child,” M said.

Adam, staring at the tun he held against the current, said, “Maybe she’s my child.”

I said, “Truly, Adam?”

“Truly enough,” Sam said, as if he knew.

Adam said, “Truly enough.”

“Enough,” M said. He said, “Adam, let them go. And may there be a Lord, and may He await them.”

Adam stepped back and sat, and the tun fell away, then began to bob and revolve and then speed up, dipping, catching the river as it poured upon them within, dipping lower now, bobbing less, spinning and then, of a sudden, out of sight beneath the river’s surface as if they never had
been born. Some others now drifted near us, bobbing, sealed, lives put by as if canned for use a season hence.

M said, “And what meaning lurks in this? What cause? How dare we witness this and
live?
And yet we do, and then we do.”

“Can we rescue them?” Sam asked.

“You must row, Sam,” I said.

“He is right,” M said. “Row, good fellows, will you? Can we not catch them up?”

“They might be alive inside,” Sam said. “One of them might breathe.”

“Contraband,” Adam said. “Slaves. They didn’t know you need to keep them alive.”

M said, “I suspect they will roll them all overboard. Some will drift to an embankment, or over to New Jersey, where they will snag on the reeds and marsh grass, or come to rest, poor children, in gravel or mud. Or they may sail, when the tide goes out, all the way from the North River and out past the Battery, past Dimond Reef, into the East River’s mouth. They’ll grow waterlogged, no matter how earnestly the cooper worked to seal the tuns. They’ll sink at sea, or they’ll sink in harbor, or they’ll sink before they drift past Christopher Street.”