The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  “You see,” I said, “that is what The Whale was, I maintain: a critique of the philosophy of numbers.”

  “You’re a watchful man, Mr. Bartholomew.”

  “No—won’t you call me Billy?”

  “Call me Herman,” he said.

  “An honor.”

  “And likewise. But may I ask you, Billy, about your …”

  “Face.”

  “Exactly that. Yes. Was it the War?”

  “It was the War. The interests of money and the will of our Commander decreed it. Battle for the rights of the industrialists, battle for the rights of the agriculturists, battle on behalf of bullyrag Abe, who saw himself, I insist, as the issue: my will, my national entity, my idea of indivisibility. Crush the farmboys and the desperate Negroes into one another with a thunderclap. And see to it—be sure!—that one William Bartholomew receive the national hoofprint in his head. I’m a coin imprinted with Abe’s earnestness.”

  He shook his head and permitted me to pour him more of Cheerie’s sour wine. “I cannot reprove your bitterness,” he said. “I know its taste. Though I believe the righteousness of the President’s motives. You cannot start a nation and permit it to founder. The experiment is too holy, too vast. And the black slaves? What of them, Billy?”

  “Engines of economy. It was money was the prize.”

  “Poor man,” he said. Then: “I meant that of all men, not you, you understand.”

  “Poor man,” I replied.

  “You were struck with a minié ball? May I ask?”

  “I saw my fellowman countless times, with a devastating insight. Twice, and once with devastation equal to that which I dispensed, he saw me in return.”

  He gazed and gazed, but I gave him nothing more. He dropped his red-rimmed eyes.

  “Tell me,” I said, “of that extraordinary moment when your Ishmael feels the hands of the other men as they squeeze the sperm of the killed whale on board their ship. It was an instant of brotherhood surpassing the interests of money, was it not? And would your man not feel a great sorrow, given his great gloom? Would he not sense, having felt the hand of brotherhood, that they were soon to lose hold of one another?”

  “You have read the book,” he answered, nodding slowly, permitting himself a smile. “You have studied it. Yet I must wonder: Have I written as much of economic matters as you seem to suggest? Did I not speak of the beef-and-ale of those actual men? And about the fishiness of the fishes? The brine of their sea? I did intend to. And, surely, I was intent, I can tell you, upon capturing—well, suggesting, at any rate, rendering as well as I could, the superb high will of Ahab. His shuddering desire to be dignified under heaven—under heaven’s oppression.” His hands moved with precision upon the surface of the table, though in service of exactly what I could not tell, at first. He arranged, as he spoke, the angles of cutlery to glass, of nappery to butter dish. His body seemed to seek the exactness of purpose about which he spoke. I realized then that he wanted—he was yearning—to write on paper with a pen. “I have some poems,” he said.

  “Would I dare to venture a request?”

  “Perhaps we’d dine again,” he said.

  “And you might bring one?”

  “Several,” he said. “If you’re willing, why flee from a reader?”

  I wore the mask when I left, and, underneath its absurd slight smile, an arrangement of pasteboard and varnish and paint, what was left of my mouth stretched involuntarily to imitate his own uneasy smile.

  On certain days in Manhattan, say in the Five Points, when I am passing the open drains that fester not that far from the communal pump, when the weather lays itself upon us, sealing the island beneath it as a cork in the top of a glass bottle, and nothing rises very far from the cobbles or mud—not steam from the manufactories, nor the stench of leather in tanneries, nor bowels of cattle slaughtered while they scream, nor the muggy dews of unsoaped flesh packed dozens in every room at the Old Brewery building—then I think of the smoke that choked Charleston. Stink was everywhere. I carry, behind the ruins of my face, inside my brain, the smell of excrement and pounded, flayed flesh stirred deep into the mud of the streets, the composted stench of decaying scrip and bank drafts and certificates of mortgage in the civil registry, and in the merchants’ bank, and of course the bitter, corrosive wash against my bandages of shingle, lath, and floorboard as they burned. It was a time of odors. You could smell the putrefaction of wounds. You could smell the maggots in them, like the bitter, herbal smell of bats. The unbathed men, the starved, exhausted horses and mules, the shallow breathing of a vast despair—you could smell the staggered nation, now entire again as the President would have it, and the perfumed men of industry and capital and confidence, one of whom I vowed to become. Some of us with faces could be seen to smile. And on certain days in Manhattan, say in the Five Points, I, with my little carved mouth hole set below the excellent painting of a face—lashes drawn above the eyeholes, breathing holes under the handsome, Saxon nose, all of it on the pinkish-white face paint that shines with its protective lacquer—I smiled, too, because I so wished that I might mean to. I was always grateful for a falling barometer, and the fog from off the Battery, because I was not, I knew, a gladsome sight.

  I had come, unseeing, through Charleston on my way back up to Washington. That was where they nursed me in spite of my cowardly begging, my tearing at the bandages with which they wound my head and covered my face. I ought to have bled to death, and I hoped to, and I failed.

  “Have the goodness,” I told the woman who volunteered to bathe the remains of my face in glycerine water, “have the cordial generosity, the sisterly affection, I beg you, Madame, to leave me be.”

  “Have the decency,” she replied, with her memorable inability to say the letters r and l as anything other than w, “to reward my efforts and the surgeons’ with your silence and your courage.”

  “It is my choice to live or die,” I said. I should not say said. I whimpered, I believe. I hoped that someone might end me, although I could not say so outright. My head burned from within, like one of the ruined manorial houses, all roasted black shell and sullen embers, which I had seen before the hunters took me down.

  “There is no more choice, sir,” she said as if in tears. I could not see her. She had a husky voice and a cultured manner. “Choice is irrelevant. Henceforth, we may live with much, though with less than before. And not, I believe, with choice. If I may say.”

  I did not see her face for weeks. I thought, often, of strangling her, and, equally, of wedding her, the better to serve her unto death. I did not know her name. She refused to give it. I became tumescent, on her account, for the first time in months. I thought to see to myself, glowing like a stove inside my bandages and beneath the coarse hospital blanket.

  “It’s daylight,” a man on a nearby cot said hoarsely. His voice was equal parts pity, contempt, and embarrassment.

  “In here,” I told him, “it’s night.”

  “To the bald-headed hermit,” he replied, “the time is always night. But I thought you’d want to know it’s late afternoon, and your blanket gives an appearance of being crowded and violent.”

  “My thanks for the tip.”

  “No, sir,” he said. “The tip, the shaft, the bollocks and all are wholly your affair. My sole concern is to convince myself that no wrist aches beneath the arm they cut away. I thought it right to warn you for dignity’s sake.”

  “Who among us has dignity?” I asked him.

  “Neither you nor I, I’d say offhand,” he said. “Did you hear that? Offhand? I’ve a lot to learn.”

  “All of us, my friend.”

  “All of us,” he said. “I’ll tell you when it’s gone dark.”

  Mrs. Hess was as usual reserved, perhaps this evening even distant. I wondered if she sensed an embarrassment in me. I always valued her decorum. Her house, in Yorkville, was frequented by a various clientele, among them the boy called Mal, on whom a few of the older women doted
. He was muscular and loud and, they said, at the moment of disrobing, shy. He had enlisted in the Guard and was sorrowful, they said he claimed again and again, not to have served, by dint of his youth, in the War.

  “Then serve in this,” one of them repeated to a few of us, lounging in the parlor near dawn. “Do some active service here.” The tired, drunken women nodded, and the men laughed aloud. The peacekeeper and factotum, Delgado, dark of mien and dark of complexion, a sure, fierce fighter, circulated in silence. It was a noteworthy moment in that tasteful room of gentian-colored, textured wallpaper, and colored prints of parrots and doves, and it did not pass me by.

  If Mrs. Hess was withdrawn, she was impossible to overlook, on account of her bulk, the jeweled tiaras with which she held her yellow-white hair in place, and the pallor of her marble flesh, not unassisted in this wise, I thought, by the quantities of laudanum she took in. Jessie, too, listened more than she spoke. Her skin was the color of lumber, say pine or spruce, washed with a tincture of creosote and slightly aged out of doors: browner than white and lighter than, say, beans of coffee in their burlap sacks. She was slender, tall, powerfully made, a mix perhaps of a female South Sea islander and African, and a man, she thought, who had been some Seminole, some white, and some Negro slave. Her limbs were long, the muscles of her calves looked always clenched, and when she moved her arms, the long muscles writhed.

  Watching them once, I told her, “You have a separate life inside you.”

  Beneath her breasts, such tender flesh, she was tattooed in small designs that she claimed were of significance to her and to her family. I could not decipher the figures, although I often pressed myself close enough to the place to trace the dark inscriptions on her darkness.

  It is pathetically and laughably illogical that a man such as I would care, as I did, for such a woman. There were sufficient numbers of limbless, even faceless, men like me in Manhattan. Passersby regarded us with curiosity, with disquiet, with sorrow and pity and disgust. Men with pinned or flapping sleeves and men on crutches jerked and wobbled on Broadway. Men with specially fitted masks, with artificial jaws and gleaming ivory temple plates or metal cheekbones, swelled the crowds at Madison Square. I envied those who had visited the prosthetic specialists at Baltimore and had come away with more than a pasteboard mask. My wound, though it was closed, was always raw. The medicos claimed that the pain was mentally stimulated and the wound had healed. It was more than a wound, I’d replied. It was a topography, a climate and a landscape, a sculpture of furrows and hillocks, of gullies and caves and open field. I smelled it, some days—it made me think of pink roasted beef left for weeks in the cupboard and still, somehow, damp. When the air was cold, the mask bit. In humid weather, fluids dropped and collected, I thought, in a heavy, oil-like liquor. The doctors instructed me otherwise, and Jessie was emphatic in her own assessment contrary to mine. But they had never been able, at Baltimore, to fit me with an artificial face. I howled at them about my pain, complained that it grated on the bone. “He desires his anguish,” one of them said in disgust. I made a child’s rebellious face at him. But, looking at me, how could he have known?

  In her fine room, on her broad bed, in the darkness I so appreciated, she moved me with her powerful thighs and bony shoulders, and she pinned me beneath her and held me still. She worked her lips and slow tongue on me, and I envisioned at such times—I always did, each time—her sad, light, greenish-brown Creole eyes. She climbed upon me, and then she reached above my head to the oval deal table beside the bed. Her breasts brushed my hair, and then she declined again, so that her chest and arms and belly and legs matched mine.

  That stretching motion was always to turn up the lamp. It preceded by a moment the pulsing of her little pump against my loins, and then her low, soft voice: “Now take off the mask.”

  I always did. And then we worked against each other, and then I worked within her, though never for terribly long, and then I arrived and so, I thought, or so she gave me to think, did Jessie. Each time, surprising myself, I realized, as if it were the first time, I wept and wept, and she held me as if I were her child.

  Upon an evening soon again, I paid for the night, and I lay wrapped in bed linen as if it were a winding sheet, listening to Jessie as she read. The Methodists had taught her brilliantly; rather, I thought, she was brilliant, and she had been taught by someone literate. She wore a silk robe, figured, in white on a blue background, to represent the wings of moths, or mythical birds. Her radiantly black long hair she had put up in a kind of knotted ring at the back, and tendrils hung down beside her face, so that her head was naked and sheltered at once. A spike of tattooed figure peeked from her bosom at the margin of the robe, and Jessie peered at me, upon occasion, from within herself. And she read to me from a novel named St. Elmo, which breathlessly announced Miss Augusta Jane Evans’s discovery of human qualities in the poor and inhuman depravities in the wealthy.

  “Jessie,” I said, “I beg your pardon for interrupting, for I love to hear you read. But am I wrong or is Miss Evans discovering that sunshine is hot and ice is cold?”

  “Ice?” she said.

  “I mean that this Evans discovers for us that those with wealth have got it through dint of effort, though it is perhaps cruelly applied, while the poor are … poor, Jessie.”

  “Yes, they are. Then I’ll leave off, or read you something from the newspapers. I have procured The New York Times and The Evening Post. There’s a good deal about money in the headlines. The Union Pacific Railroad has paused in the building of track for want of something or other.”

  “Funds,” I said. “Everything is funds.”

  “And a credit something or other will be formed to do something else.”

  “Build the road in return for railroad stocks.”

  “And the losing of whichever is someone else’s profit, I assume.”

  “You see, Jessie? I told you that anyone could understand the economy. You most of all, good heavens. You simply never cared.”

  “And isn’t it peculiar,” she said, “that I, who am a commodity, have chosen to remain ignorant of what you call the marketplace?”

  “The invisible marketplace. Yes.”

  “Perhaps if I could see it,” she said, stretching. The tattoo moved because her bosom did, and I could look nowhere else. She did not turn toward me, but sat at the low green wicker table in a matching wicker chair, the lamp beside her, the book on her lap, and the window before her, its curtains adjusted so that she could watch the streets as she wished. Yet, not seeing me, she said, “But you can see it, can’t you, Bill?”

  “You know that is not what I study at the moment.”

  “You study me?”

  “You know.”

  She sat forward as if to look more closely at Eighty-sixth Street, hard by Third Avenue. And, as if in a bath, she slowly shrugged the robe from her shoulders. Gaslight fell upon her golden skin and she seemed to me the color of cherrywood boards, gleaming in the twilight of the room. She pulled at the belt of her robe, and with a motion of either arm arranged herself so that the robe was gathered at her rounded belly, and the hair of her sex just barely visible. She sat straight yet relaxed, as one who posed for a painter.

  And then she brought up her right hand, which she’d leaned on the arm of her chair that was closer to me. She touched the side of her right breast, and my fingers moved in response. She let her fingers trail to the jutting dark nipple, and she touched it as if in discovery. Then she pulled up her robe, though she did not fasten it closed, but let it drape her nakedness so that a man on the bed, attending her every breath and gesture, might see much but hardly all of what he just had seen.

  She leaned back. “Economics,” she said. “Are they not the considerations by men who do not care for babies about the burdens imposed when women, large with children fathered by men, give birth in great pain?”

  I knew so little of her, and I thought to learn more.

  “What do you know about babies,
Jessie?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll read to you.”

  “No,” I said.

  Then she turned in the chair to face me, the gown opening so that I might once more see her breasts, and so that she could fasten her dismaying light eyes upon me. I wondered who had passed down eyes of such coloration if her mother was African or Polynesian, and her father a slave. There was a white man in the woodpile, I thought. I thought, too, of the loveliness of her face, the strength of her long throat, the savagery in her tattoos. She was a letter I had read with my fingers, like a man long blind who at last has a message he was years before intended to receive.

  She said, as tranquilly as if she offered to pour wine or turn up the lamp, “Then I’ll swallow you down. Would you like that?”

  She came toward the bed in slow, leonine paces.

  “What, though, do you mean about babies?” I lay back, but on an arm, so that I might watch her face.

  “There are children at the school still.”

  “In Florida?”

  “Yes. In Florence. At … that place. They are, I suppose you would say, the last crop of slavery. They were intended as slaves, and now there is no legitimate market. There’s your word again, Bill.” She stood at the foot of the bed and reached back to unfasten her hair. All the while, she was expressionless; all the while, she regarded me unblinking. “They will be kept there and used.”

  “The trade goes on?”

  “Everyplace. Dark skin is the color of money. It is everyplace still negotiated.”

  “Unless someone—the Freedman’s Bureau?”

  “They are saving adults in the Carolinas. We have enquired.”

  “We.”

  Suddenly she let her head hang. “I am—I am a member of a group. We are most of us colored. We are determined to rescue these children. These babies of slaves.”