The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  “ ‘Poetry,’ Button tells them. ‘Sweet music, hard truth, and wisdom. And a bit of sorrow, like spice in a Polynesian stew. Madness, even, though of the sane variety. And not for burning.’

  “With that, he bolts, for he knows they’re soon to act. He hies himself to his hammock and his seaman’s trunk, a lovely structure of polished maple from his native New Hampshire and leather from a deer he shot when home. He opens the lid for an instant, looks in at the titles and the authors’ names, and, bidding farewell to the likes of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare and Laurence Sterne, he shuts the trunk and locks it, and he swallows the small metal key. ‘They can cut it out of me when they’ve done their worst,’ Button says. He opens his clasp knife and sits, awaiting them, perched atop his seaman’s trunk in the middle of a frozen waste like an Anchorite in the sweltering sands of the Holy Land.”

  He had leaned, again, to refill our glasses, spilling a little after having drunk much.

  “And there he sat.”

  “But what happened? I must beg you: finish,” I said.

  “No, shipmate. In the case of the tale of Button and his books, what happened matters less than Button’s decision.”

  “To die for his books.”

  “Exactly. Perfectly spoken. Die for his books. That, shipmate, is a reader for whom a man might decide to write something and see it through the printers and reviewers. Die for his books.”

  “And that,” I remember saying, disappointed and bemused, “is all?”

  “It is everything,” he said.

  “You startle me with your unorthodoxy,” I ventured to say, “but you do so surely tell a tale. I dare not complain.”

  “So they once said,” he told me, and turned his attention to the blue, oily gin.

  His son, I thought, stepping back from the wheels of a yellow-and-white ice wagon from which trailed some of the sawdust used to insulate the great, cloudy blocks, had none of the highly flavored language, none of the easy command of one’s attention, nor any of the certainty—for all the uncertainty of M’s latter days—that made him a present public official and, once, an author to be reckoned with. His son was, in fact, a bully and a lout. He would enjoy the murder of Indians, I wagered.

  I knew men, I reminded myself, who had engaged in a war’s worth of murder.

  It was battle, I demurred. I was a soldier.

  But the bully boy will also be a soldier, I told myself.

  I could not have been more mistaken.

  Outside the Five Points House of Industry that same night, I paused beside its smeared, unlighted window and its rugged wooden door. This was a refuge, I knew, for Chinese boys who wished to learn a trade other than their father’s. Women, of course, did not attend, nor were they taught how to dress like Americans and speak the language of the United States. They were drowned at birth in China, I had heard men say at the coffeehouse beneath the Equitable Building. Surely, reading of gold miners in California and Oregon—it was where Chun Ho and her people had come from: “Oh-gin.” “Where?” “Oh-gin!” “Oregon?” “Sure”—I had seen stories of the binding of women’s feet at birth, of the uselessness, to their family, of girls, who would finally be of service as breeders for the groom’s family. Chinese women rarely appeared on the streets, and I saw very few, and all of them were bulky in their silk pajamas and oval shoes, and none seemed to walk with the abrupt energy of Chun Ho or, for that matter, to sit with the profound contemplation I sensed in her. I had seen her lift filled laundry baskets, two of them, each balanced on the end of a stick, that were almost as tall as she. Somehow her mother had felt obliged to serve Chun Ho’s wish for independence. Somehow Chun Ho had felt obliged to serve her own. I knew that she had a daughter and a son, and I knew that she would feel obliged to raise the daughter as an American person—a girl strong enough to live alone.

  The Points, of course, were echoing as of wild creatures nailed inside barrels—calls, laughter, sexual cries, every variety of uneasiness and dismay, and the working sounds of the lower levels of industry composed of loom shuttles slapping, stable doors slamming, donkey carts rattling, honey wagons gurgling with the refuse of a tenement’s month. But what I thought of, as I walked, immersed in the life I had chosen as if it were the sea and I a kind of misshapen fish, was obligation: Jessie’s to her people, and Chun Ho to hers, and mine to gelt. To be sure, I felt loyalties of several sorts, emotional and otherwise; I was no monster, though I might be said to resemble one now and to have resembled one then. But I did not belong to a species or a people or a family or, say, fang, the group that gave general assistance, or, say, a shantan, which, as she explained it, was concerned with keeping a Chinese cemetery, and eventually transporting their dead back to China, as was, it seemed, their way. There was no group, from traders’ organization to cemetery society, to which I cared to belong. So no one would bury me; I was for potter’s field unless I gave instructions and left money in someplace safe for someone who cared to recover it and pay to cover me up.

  Yet Sergeant Grafton had felt a loyalty to me. He had not wanted to, but I remembered, finally, his coming up the tree so swiftly, with such ferocity, and the gentleness of his voice: Here we come. We’re coming. Here we come. The remembering him, and my thoughts of gentle Sam: Were those not loyalties?

  I felt like someone with bonds and coin to deposit in a vault, and no bank in sight, and the need to save things powerful along my fingers and arms and in my head, and Irish Rabbits or Swamp Angels, those escaped convicts who lived in the sewers, coming toward me in the street. I smelled whatever it was they burned in a doss-house, and then I smelled stables, then the effluvium of a ditch engraved over time by the wastes that poured from a little hotel for whores and their customers who wished to rise from the streets in order to fall in rankness and disease.

  I was thinking, of course—I must have been seeking not to think—of the warm, still evening in perhaps July, though it might have been August, when I walked on the toes of my moccasins to the edge of a Carolina wagon relay: raised wooden water tower, stable and farrier’s, the little carpentry shop, and, radiating out from that cluster, a wooden fence in which horses might graze. There were to have been a hundred horses or more exchanged for looted Yankee silver, so the colonel had told the lieutenant who’d instructed Grafton and me. I counted nineteen horses, a few of them hale and well fed. The others were spindle-shanked and blown. But they were horses, and they could be hitched to cannon, ridden by men, and, if need be, served up for supper. I was sitting in my firing position on the top of the water tower, waiting for a good five seconds in the sights of either the chief drover who had brought the poor animals in, or his master, a man called Wickery or Hickory, or one of the Rebel officers who had come to take possession. I counted four horses with saddles on, their reins trailing on the yellowing grass.

  I was to try to bring down the architect of the robbery—he’d robbed the Union, and now he would rob the Confederacy—and then to harvest whom I could in what time I had left. I assumed now that the fellow in the suit whose hands were not on the lantern as it was lit would be the man behind the deal. He had a thick, short beard of reddish-brown, and one of his nostrils seemed to be far wider than the other. I decided to place the shot up his nose. The lamp was set down, then adjusted; it flared, it subsided, an orange light slanted across the neck and then nose of the dealer as he bent to light his cigar at the chimney of the lamp. All right, I thought: I’ll go down your nose instead of up. I should have apologized to him for taking him in an awkward stooping position while thinking derisively of his nose.

  I did not apologize. I fired.

  His forehead and nose blossomed, he leaned backward and I saw his devastated face, and then he went over. I loaded and aimed at the officer who crouched to the right of the table. I had him. But the charge failed. They began to fire wildly from the window, but upward; either they had sensed the origin of the original shot or they had been warned that I might be about. If so, what could have br
ought them to a lighted lamp in the frame of the window—a picture they posed for the transporter of their deaths?

  I went down the ladder on the far side of the tower, and I propped the Sharps to recover when I was finished. I walked, as far as I can reconstruct it now, into their fire. A ball took off my hat, and something tugged my shirtsleeve. I drew the Navy Colt and, aiming it as best I could while I strode toward them, I fired deliberately, sighting this time with both eyes so that I could perceive their relationship toward my changing position.

  When I was out of cartridges, I took them singly from the pouch I carried in my pocket (to distinguish them from the rifle ammunition in my leather pannier), and I reloaded three or four cylinders. I had no more time. I had been struck above the belt, on my left-hand side, though I could not tell then how deeply I had been explored by the shot. I held the Colt at arm’s length and I fired and fired and fired as I walked to the window. I did not stop, I was surprised to learn. I stepped up and through the window, kicking aside the table and the lighted lamp. I stepped upon the first man I’d shot and went around the drover and the Rebel corporal who had come along to assist the officer, who stood propped against the far wall. He was slight and young, but unafraid. He was angry at me. He was raging, but he was also respectful. He stood and bled and shook.

  “You murdered me,” he said.

  “I murdered them so far,” I said, moving closer while he shot with his pistol and missed me. I said, “I haven’t even aimed at you.”

  “You’re the one put this in me,” he said. His thigh was bloody, and the leg seemed ready to buckle.

  “I didn’t know it,” I said. “I was just firing.”

  “For just firing, you mule-jism bastard, you did plenty of harm.”

  He brought his weapon up and fired and the hammer clattered down. “I’m out,” he said. “I knew so. Oh, bastard, my leg hurts. I just wanted you to think, one time, you might die.”

  “That,” I said, “I do think, every time out. If it’s any consolation.” I brought my Colt up and the hammer landed on an empty cylinder.

  “Both of us,” he said. “Maybe we should leave each other to go our ways, then?”

  He wasn’t begging. He preferred not to die, but he was brave enough. His leg collapsed, and after he’d hit the floor, he slid his sound leg out from under him and sat against the wall as if he’d chosen to.

  I took the knife from my belt and I stooped as I stepped forward, thinking to do it quickly for him, and I stabbed him in the throat. The worst part was pulling it out as he gurgled and squealed with the pain of the blade coming back at a slightly different angle from its entrance. Blood geysered, for I had struck an artery, and I hated for him to have to watch it pulse out and up. He made a face of defiance, of disgust for me, and then he grew paler and more fatigued and closed his eyes. He would die in a minute or more.

  I called down, as if he might take the words with him, “You were good. You were a stubborn soldier, do you hear? You were good.”

  He shook, as if with an ague, as if in the cold of an arctic night and not this moonless, windless summer dusk. His face was the dreamy, lost face of a boy deep asleep. The metallic smell of his blood was on my arms and hands and trouser legs. Then his bowel gave out the last that we leave in the world when we go: our embarrassment, our shame, the least of all of our aspects. He shook and his unwounded leg bounced upon the floor and then was still, and so was he.

  “Plenty damned good,” I said. I collected what papers I could find on the table and the floor. Outside, I grabbed for the horses’ reins, but the stink of blood on me must have spooked them. They danced a dozen yards away and then, because they were trained and their reins were trailing, they stopped to wait. The only way I could keep them still so I might search the saddlebags for the silver I’d been told to retrieve was to reload my pistol and kill each one of the four. I searched with my hand for the cartridge pouch, and I found it; I had enough to load five cylinders with two more left.

  But, you must think, I surely had to have been exhausted. I was. Might not I have been shaken by the battle? Absolutely. And, within it, the slaughter? Of course. And the death of the brave young man? And that without doubt. So that I rebelled at the killing of the mild, obedient horses?

  I shot them down by holding the pistol in both hands and squeezing off as I saw those gentle, obedient eyes find me and look head-on; the sound was crunchy and slamming at once. I killed two with my first two shots; one ran off, then turned, as if in disbelief, and I shot him, too. The other I missed. He ran on, past the farrier’s, and I found I hadn’t the kidney any longer for a crippling shot and then the one with which to dispatch him. Only one seemed alive as I came up. He shuddered and looked to me as if—it was his training, after all—I brought reason and procedure and relief. I reloaded, standing above him while he watched, and I put the coup de grâce into the bony head of the sweet, betrayed creature. I went to the next one, and then to the farthest, and did all, at that moment, that I could: squeezed a shot away. The first one I’d taken had the bag I sought, a small canvas valise such as an artisan carries his tools in. I wondered what I would have done if the horse had pinned the bag beneath him. I thought of my knife. I thought of me in the geysering blood as I butchered the horse, hacked at him with axes from the woodworker’s shop, sawed at his ribs, fell to above and within him with a mallet and chisel, until I had torn him apart and had fetched the bloody bag on which he’d lain. Instead, I cut the pigging string away from the handle of the valise, put away my revolver, stopped at a watering trough to rinse off the blade of my knife, and carried the valise toward the Sharps I’d left at the water tower.

  Grafton was on watch as I came in. He didn’t waste time with paroles. He came running clumsily through the high timothy weed and he got himself alongside, as if we both were ships on a rough channel, and he slipped his arm around me, grasping my belt, and tugged me along. He was soaked in blood, mine and the brave young soldier’s, by the time we reached our bivouac. And I thought, near home in the Points, thinking still of the smell from the joss house, the odor of a people’s obligation to an ancient ordering of life, I could feel obliged in my own way. I could feel a kind of loyalty to men like Grafton, and the men and horses and the single dog I had dispatched: my fang. And to the currency of the United States of America, to the growth of whose fortunes I had given straight lips, sound cheeks, most of a nose, much of a chin, and, no doubt, a goodly portion of my mind.

  Sam Mordecai came to see me in Washington. He told the terse, wise, merciful woman at my bedside that we had served together in the fray. He said that: “Comrades in the fray.”

  “Poor fellow,” she said.

  “Oh, Samuel, you rabbi from consternation,” I hissed up at him through the bandages, which seemed, on that particular moist, hot Washington afternoon, to be made of clay or rock and to have just come from the furnace in which they had baked all day. My words, I knew, were difficult to decipher, not nearly so clear, say, as Chun Ho’s or Adam’s to me.

  “Billy,” he said, “your eyes. Why are they covered?”

  “He does not wish to see,” she told him, “until he can be seen.”

  “Will that occur?”

  She said, “I have told him probably not.”

  “It was their idea to bandage me, on the way here. Their thought was that my eyes were affected.”

  She said, “It was yours to keep them bandaged.”

  “She lies,” I whispered, “this demimondaine of the casualty ward.”

  Young Sam said, “Surely, you do not wish to address her so. You always had the best of manners. Burton and I sought to emulate you.”

  “He wishes to drive me to fizz and sizzle,” she said with, I thought, some pleasure. “But he cannot. This forenoon I assisted, in the absence of nurses, who were elsewhere at work, when the surgeons had off a poor fellow’s leg. Knee and below,” she said. “I was not driven away by that ghastly brutality, and I surely will not be offended b
y his attempts to woo my worst attentions.”

  “Sam, she’s right. I am trying to get her into my narrow iron bed.”

  “You would not, if you could see my face,” she said, “because I am the plainest of women. Let us cut holes in the bandage. Have a look.”

  “Billy,” Sam said, “let’s do it.”

  I said, “What brings you here, Sam?” I heard her release her breath, and then I heard the sound of her skirts against a neighboring bed as she moved away.

  “You should let her, Billy. What a fine woman that is!”

  “Sam. What?”

  “Oh, Billy,” he said, and I could hear him start to weep, then stop.

  “Who?”

  “Sergeant Grafton.”

  “How?”

  “A cannonade. His poor horse went mad with the suddenness of it. His fright—”

  “He threw him off?”

  “He crushed his head. He danced on him in his fear. It was a jelly, his skull—white jelly and red jelly, bits of bone all through it.…”

  I found no words. I breathed out against the hot, heavy bandages and then I breathed in. We’re coming, I heard him say, as gently as if to a boy.

  “Billy, I shot the horse.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You think I was right?”

  “It’s as good a deed as any other I can think of. Punishment for disobedience by an animal we’ve raised to serve us. Mercy, if horses are capable of pronouncing guilt upon themselves. Corrective, if another horse observed and could fathom it as retribution. Sam, my skin hurts, Jesus, it feels like they’re boiling it and poor Grafton. He was a decent man. He should have been an officer. Though maybe he was decent because he was one of us. Oh, Sam: Take up your pistol, pretend I’m a horse.”

  He started in weeping again, and I put my hand up and he took it. He stopped, and so did I.

  “You know what I intend to do, Billy? With this War? All of this?” I could feel the tension in his hand, the strength of his resistance to the strength in him of what he wanted to do—run mad, go screaming in the corridors and streets.