The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  “Is one of them yours, Jessie?”

  “Would it make a difference to you?”

  “Jessie, are you a mother torn from her child? How can this be?”

  “Can you help me, Bill?”

  “Is there a profit in it?”

  “Moral or commercial?” Her voice was low and even.

  “Jessie, is there a commission in it for a man who trades?”

  She said, “Their lives here will be difficult. But they will eat as they need to, and be free, as they come of age, to go as they please. There will be capital behind them, yes. So, yes. A commission for a trader? Yes, Bill. And he—you—will be serving me. It is I who have begged you. It is I before you here.”

  So I said, “Yes.”

  Her head came up, her features curtained from me by her hair.

  “Lie back,” she said, moving toward me again. “Lie down, Billy.”

  “What do you know,” M asked me after an evening of brandy I had bought us, “about what one might think of as ‘high art’?”

  I thought at once of the crotch of a tree, a butternut, perhaps, and of shivering in the cold of dawn because the tree wasn’t thickly leafed. I came down from there and crawled back to the derision of my sergeant. But I was able to stand and piss a steaming arc onto the hardpan of our encampment, and I was alive to watch the steam and smell myself. The decision, made so promptly, to come safely down from the tree: high art, I thought.

  I cannot say I trembled more vigorously when stalking my first than I did any number of men later. I was bade begin my special service, and I did. Several men waved me good-bye and even clapped me for luck on the shoulder. One called, “Greetings to Johnny Reb from the 109th Volunteers!” This practice was to greatly diminish, and at the last I was avoided, as if the men were frightened of a contagious disease of which I was the carrier. It was not I, myself, their manner intimated; it was the disease.

  We were then in Culpeper, the weather warming smartly and the air a blur of flies drawn in by the horses and our own rank stench. In Paynes Corners, we had called them sweat bees, though the sergeant called them deer flies. They stayed with a man. They were not deterred. My head was wreathed with them as I crawled, then wriggled on my belly, through a long, stony meadow. Beyond it was a steep hill, and past the hill a depression of scree and weed and stunted firs. Beyond that lay an evergreen forest and, at its far edge, or so we’d been instructed, was a detachment of Rebel horse. They were described as starved lean, and wonderfully trained, and stupidly brave. Of course, you could have described so many of them in that manner. And would I kindly, encased with sweat bees that circled and circled and stung and stung again, make my way over rabbit droppings and the skulls of mice or voles, owl pellets, anthills, and murder some Confederate raiders?

  It took me all of the morning to approach the forest. Its floor was shaded and therefore a litter of needles and dead branches. Every step was a possible bone-crack alarm. In my soft deerhide moccasins, and as slowly as a dancer, feeling more prey than hunter, I took half of the afternoon, swollen with bites and running in sweat, to find the tree at the farther edge and begin my climb. The rifle weighed so heavily, the higher I rose, that I feared to drop it. The telescope and cartridges, fastened against me, had frayed my skin and bruised my ribs. My legs shook as I stood on the limb, facing back to the Union lines, and I took a final gulping breath before I stepped and shimmied and finally sat, halfway around on the side that faced the Confederates, hidden or partly disguised by branches, but surely a decent target if they sought one. They had hunted, most of them, in order not to starve. If they saw me, they would have me.

  I was blackened and disguised with brush. But the blue of the uniform made a spectacular target. The sergeant had insisted I go uniformed lest, apprehending me, they hang me as a spy. The uniform would help them shoot me from the trees, I told him. But he served a lieutenant who served a colonel who served a brigadier, and I was therefore an extension of tactics, and therefore a target, faded and filthy and blue.

  I could not hear them, for the wind came from behind me and carried sound in their direction. I heard only the flies, and the groaning of branch upon branch where one tree had fallen into another, and of course the wind as it blew around my ears. I slowly turned my head so that my right ear was straight-on to their camp. Perhaps I’d heard the noise of metal on metal, but it probably was my imagination, I thought—my bowel-deep fear. The scent of pitch mixed with gun oil was so powerful that I expected to see it, around me, as a cloud.

  Finally, then, I dared the motion required to remove and extend the telescope. The pressure at my chest meant I’d been holding my breath, and I forced myself to shallowly, silently, breathe. A gray and white bird flew into me, quite nearly, and then veered away, scolding. The man I watched looked up at the sound, and he gazed at me, I thought. I held my breath. He looked away. There were several of them, ragged and bony and hard. Walking into a country tavern and spying them, a man of sage counsel would turn at once and depart.

  One of them cleaned what I thought to be a muzzle-loader. I had heard of them using arrows and bows. The one who stood, who had stared at the woods, wore a blond beard and soft muslin clothing washed almost white, though not recently. They were exhausted, their horses were hollow-looking, and one had cocked his hind leg as if coming up lame. And this was what had defeated us again and again, I thought.

  The officer removed spectacles from a pouch and put them on. I knew he was the officer because of his bearing, and because he studied documents. I stowed the telescope. I slowly extended the rifle. I sighted through the scope.

  He moved his mouth as the wind shifted, and I heard the laughter of his men. I lost him then because of the shaking. The gray and white bird returned, shrieking, and, as my trembling eased, the officer’s face came up. I squeezed away, and he went down, thank God, before I could see into his eyes. I heard my shot strike.

  I reloaded, by the numbers, calmly, and I looked for my second target. The men had scattered, so I put two horses down. Horses were becoming more precious than men. The sound was of a board slapped hard against the side of a building, and then the animal collapsed. I killed the second one, and I was deafened by my own firing. You do not hunt when you cannot hear. I descended the tree. They fired a fusillade into the woods, but I was well on my way.

  He had looked so studious in his spectacles, I thought. Though I remembered best of all, I realized, as I gave the day’s parole and walked past the pickets into camp at nearly dusk, how, when his jaw dropped as the shot struck home, his face had looked so soft, and he had seemed about to speak his surprise. Instead of the sound of his voice, I heard in my deafness—I was alone in it for part of the night—the smack, once and then again, of the .52-caliber bullets as they tore the horses down.

  After the War, I had become, you might say, a careful man. I was reckless as well, I think, but somehow in something of a careful manner. For example, I lived in the Points, although I could well have lived elsewhere. And the Five Points remained, for all the recent fits of municipal zeal, and the declarations by Trinity Church, a great landlord in the district, that moral improvement and the wrath of the Lord were on their way, nothing less than dangerous. I knew it. I had sought it, after all. But I never went unarmed, and I was prepared to do a fatal injury in defense of myself, and I held myself as one such, and they knew me there for a dangerous man. It is not impossible that my neighbors considered me as willing to die as to live, and it is not impossible they found the confusion overwhelming in such a man as myself, and with a face they could not read past the same almost-smiling first page.

  As in the War, when I refused a transfer to Berdan’s Sharpshooters because I did not wish to wear their green coat and look like a bottle fly and lie on hilltops with great long rifles on tripods to be picked off, surely, by one of the Rebels with a telescope of his own: I wished to run the risk by myself, I told the sergeant, who told the lieutenant, not lie in a file as they did in Berdan
’s. If I had to be shot for a shooter, I would suffer in private. And I did.

  I had sought out M. I had met him. We had dined together and had spoken of philosophy, and he had become enchanted, I thought, by my mask. He would have to be. He had spent his squandered or cursed career as an author in writing men who struck through the mask or curtain or surface of things not to do harm by the striking per se, but to learn what lay on the other side. He was drawn by the desire to see it, to know it, as surely as the nation was drawn, on foot and on wheel and on the backs of starving, stumbling beasts, to see what lay beyond the Mississippi River, and the Rocky Mountains, the southwestern deserts, and the hills between the travelers and the sea.

  Boarding one of the new, experimental Broadway streetcars—and of course it occurs as well upon entering a restaurant downtown, an office anteroom, the Steinway Hall—I struck those already there into silence. I imagine that I understand their reaction: the bright white mask, its profound deadness, the living eyes beneath—within—the holes, the sketched brows and gashed mouth, airholes embellished, a painting of a nose. Nevertheless. Yet I cannot blame them. But. Nevertheless. I won this on your behalf, I am tempted to cry, or pretend to. The specie of the nation, the coin of the realm, our dyspeptic economy, the glister and gauge of American gold: I was hired to wear it! For you. And by you.

  On the Broadway car, breathing to the rhythm of the horses’ hooves as we slowly rolled uptown, and in the lingering silence of the passengers, I remembered the pond in which I swam as a boy in Paynes Corners. You drifted out, your feet left the silt and lifted, and it was cold beneath while hot on your head. But when you paddled over the feeding spring, you gasped in surprise at the relentless cold. It was like that, entering a room, encountering their eyes. I had learned, however, not to gasp. I wasn’t a boy.

  No dragonflies followed me over the surface, no clouds of midge above or tickle of bass below, and in the chill of the car I thought of M again. He had eaten precisely, systematically, perhaps seeking in his own pursuit of food a relief from the vision of my forksful as they disappeared under my veil into what he wished to see and not to see. With capable workingman’s broad and long-fingered hands, he cut wedges and rectangles of pale pork and then, like an Englishman, shoveled with his knife to maneuver red pickled cabbage and crumbs of boiled potato onto the morsel of meat, the whole then carried to the mouth like a loading boom to the hold of a ship. He studied his plate as he worked, but looked at my head a flickering instant as the food approached his face. I thought of him as eating in a trance.

  The thin lips and tight mouth, the narrow head and curried beard, the exhausted, half-blind eyes to which his spectacles gave little apparent relief, were matched by a soft baritone voice that was given to hoarseness. He seemed to me within a very short distance of depletion.

  When I spoke of his The Ambiguities, he seemed to nod agreement; it was as if I had alluded to a relative whose death had long been suspected. But when I spoke of his Whale, even the flesh of his face seemed more alert. This, I thought, was a matter to which I must return. I’d smite the sun if it insulted me, his Ahab raged.

  Imagine, I thought, jolting over the street stones: Imagine the engine that ran a man liable, or so he thought, to being insulted by the very sun itself. I swung out of the car and onto Union Square, beneath the morning’s very sun itself.

  I killed men in a crowded tent they had erected against the side of a low hill in the lee of a pasture near no place I knew. By then we were a specialized unit, and my sergeant, LeMay Grafton, knew that his war would consist of feeding, protecting, and conveying me. As he scorned my necessary expertise, his superiors, he knew, would scorn but utilize his skill in utilizing mine. He and two privates became my pander and my maids. They escorted me; they kept me alive. They brought me to an area and they found me work, then left me to it. And they then avoided me in whatever place of safety to which they’d extracted me. And then we went on to the next.

  The Brigadier’s Capon, Sergeant Grafton said our lieutenant said of me. The brigadier, he feared, would not promote him to captain because he surely must revile the lieutenant’s measure of cowardice in seeing to the shooting down of unprepared and unresisting men. I knew this. The lieutenant knew it. So did the colonel who passed along the commands. And so did Sergeant Grafton. We were one another’s prisoner during our service together.

  The tent, you might think, would protect a group of men from my vision and my fire. But what the Rebels had not considered was that I might eschew, this time, the safety of the trees and, in my camouflage, crawl—wriggle, really, never raising my arms from my sides—an inch and even less at a time through marshy grass and cow pies and wild thyme, pausing to breathe facedown, then crawl blindly ahead, dragging the Sharps and hoping I would not foul the mechanism with moist earth or excrement. When my head touched the pit mound of the great birch at which, hundreds of yards and many hours before, I had aimed myself, I stopped. A blackbird from the swamp whistled and screeched. He might as well have been a Rebel picket, I thought. I lay my head upon my arms and waited for the bird to become accustomed to me. I breathed in the scent of the grass I had crushed with my body, and the bitter, dark smell of birch roots, the bright saltiness of my own heated flesh.

  When I heard him call from bushes some dozens of yards from me, and then from the marsh, I began to bring my piece along my body, inspecting the muzzle and sights and chamber as it traveled my length. Mud daubers had made a nest in the rotted tree; two of them stung me, and I held my breath, waiting to see if the colony would surge at my eyes and ears and mouth. One went after my hand, and I watched him and did not move. It was a cold kind of pain that spread along the surface of the skin. I then watched shadows grow longer. I could not catch their motion, no matter how open-eyed my stare: First they were short, then, magically, long, and then they were much longer.

  It was time to remove my forage cap and look over the fallen birch tree. What they had not reckoned on, you see, was the orange-crimson glare of the setting sun that poured down and through the tent. Just before sundown as it was, the men inside were silhouetted, and I did not gamble on the sun’s low glow along the barrel of the Sharps. I hastened, taking one, and then another, and they were clean kills, I think. They dropped like dead men. The third target howled, and he might have survived, though it was thousands of pounds of impact he endured if he did.

  I was what my commanders used as distress, in other words; I was a disease. I was poison in their lean rations, alkali water in their horses’ guts. A man must grow fearful, I thought, if he thought I might be nigh. And how could he know that I might not be? The Brigadier’s Capon had balls and he had reach, I thought I might say to Sergeant Grafton and my lads. I never did. It would not do for them to even suspect the very possibility that I felt the briefest of exultations, like a voice stoppered in my chest and throat, when I aimed, just before I killed someone. I put on my forage cap and, like a swimmer in the ponds of my boyhood, lay on my back and pushed off from the birch, able to squint down my legs toward the enemy while writhing backward toward what would have to pass for home.

  They would watch me come in. They would force me to use the day’s parole despite having seen me through the glass. I could always have approached closer before allowing them to see me, but I did not wish to give them an excuse to shoot me down. Not one of them would tell the truth, and maybe one of them would sorrow. They would be reattached to the 109th, and with pleasure, and they would tell their comrades of the Brigadier’s Capon, and how he died for want of a word, by misadventure, not far from the enemy’s lines. I am pleased to report that I was mistaken, and that it is likely, I have come to think, that I disliked myself a good deal more bitterly than any of them.

  It was, I repeat, our very own Trinity Parish that owned the four- and five-story tenements in the Points. Go to Canal, west of Mulberry, and look for Park and Worth and Baxter Streets. You’d have found half the Asians in America. You’d have found, nearby, on part
of Thompson, in the place once known as Africa, the remainder of what was the equivalent of a Negro nation. And in the Points, west of Chatham Square, was one of the worst rookeries the city could boast or be shamed by. They lounged on the curbings and the stoops, they crowded to what few windows there were and on the iron fire escapes. It was air they were after, and a sight of something more than a dying opium eater or a whore who was bleeding from a customer’s excess. The children wailed when they were young and were soundless as they grew older. They carried water up the steps from the pump. They lounged, as older boys, on the wagons outside the alley doors of the merchants. They were like sharks in a squalid sea, suddenly finning toward a stranger in the neighborhood, surrounding him, and stripping from him everything but flesh. And who—if it was night, and a boy unsettled because of a parent’s agonies or angers—can say that they always left the flesh? I had my own room, and I had my own lock. A lock meant everything: It meant you were undisturbed coming in, greeted by no surprises; and it meant that you could leave behind a bit of your private life. And it was the right district for a man who had left his face in bloody fragments on the splintered stock of his murderer’s gun. I had my room at the back, above an alley and over the porch of a saloon; I could jump to safety if a fire took the Old Brewery, which would burn as they said the armory burned in Columbia, South Carolina—with a vast roaring, like the interior of a furnace witnessed through its open iron door.

  And, yes, it was the church itself that profited from the immigrants and thieves, and from the whores, some of whom worked up against shingled walls or prone atop the rubbish over the vaulted sewers; you could hear the giant rats in them come running, a feathery sort of stampede. The journalists (and, surely, the good men in black serge who, preying, prayed on behalf of their church for the fallen) laid the blame on Dutch landlords, or on Jews come from Liverpool. But it was the best of us, the cream at the top of the cream. The cream rose, the value of their investments rose, and the single stairwell, serving as a flue, in a six-story building hard by Canal, all but round the corner from us, made the fire rise. It went straight up as the dago, the hebe, the bohunk, the nigger came down and into it. An investigation was promised by the Parish and the police, but I can tell you now: It was money killed them, same as ever, same as it was money responsible for maiming us. In the Harper and Brothers Weekly, didn’t I read that the Virginia legislature voted thirty thousand dollars for the purchase of limbs for disabled Rebel soldiers, while nothing was allotted for limbless men who had fought on the side that supposedly won? Because nobody won. It was money that won. As the credit notice in the advertisement says, No Trust.