“I do believe it to be the case,” I said, “and I swear myself confounded not a little by the fact that I, too, engage in this transaction. For there’s no profit in it.”
“Except the moral,” Sam said, staring at me, perhaps remembering the woman to whom I had referred, perhaps posing me a question in his statement.
But M nodded his approval, and I did not reply to Sam.
M, around his pipe stem, said, “What do you say, Billy?”
“Why, I think I have said what I know and what I think. Does it not suffice?”
“It does,” he said, and Sam smiled tentatively. Then he looked behind us, and then looked grim.
M, walking west and away from us, paused. He asked, “What?”
Sam shook his head. “No, you must depart, sir.”
“But, Sam, what?” he asked.
“I was remembering a day in the hospital at Washington, when I visited Billy. He was in much discomfort. He was very brave. And I told him—I had to tell him of a horse I was forced to kill. I was not forced by any orders to do it.”
“I was hardly brave,” I said. “I killed like other men. And killed off other men. And of course you were not required by an officer to kill the horse,” I said. “You felt you had to as a kind of revenge.” To M I said, “The horse had killed a beloved sergeant of ours. Trampled him to death, in a panic induced by an artillery barrage.”
“A horse conjures forth from memory a horse,” M said. “The streets of New York bring forth the War. We live in several moments, several places, at once.”
Sam made a noise not unlike a gasp. He wrenched his notebook out.
“You have told him something crucial,” I said.
M, leaving us now, said, “Shipmates, it would be rewarding to think so.”
What I saw, as he went, was the face of the woman who had cared for me, and who, while Sam had nervously chattered like a squirrel, unwrapped and then rewrapped my face, this time with spaces for my eyes. Hers was the first face I saw. Her nose was broad and her mouth was small and tight. Her hair, curly with humidity and the color of tree bark, clung to her square head.
Her eyes had slid away from mine when she smiled an angry smile and said, “You see? I told you I was plain.”
“If you would come into this bed with me, I would worship you,” I said.
She flushed to her neck, but on her unfortunate, oily skin, it seemed a kind of rash. She said, “You’re regaining your health, I see, and growing rude as you do.”
“I would kiss every inch of your flesh with these scabrous lips,” I said.
Sam, I remembered noticing, had also flushed.
And her thick, square body had gone quite still, and then she had peered at me, her face still angry. “Liar,” she said, as if I had betrayed her.
Sam’s head had risen, and he was motionless in his concentration.
“Not so,” I said.
“No,” she mocked.
“But no,” I said.
And she had stared and stared, taking the measure of me, whose body she knew and which she had served so generously.
I looked back into her eyes.
Then she noisily took in a breath, and she turned her face from mine and carried away the soiled bandages.
And M, embarked now for the intersection of Laight and Washington Streets, and the thump of steam whistles, the clash of metal gears and the grinding of sea-soaked wood, called back as he strode his long paces away, “You ride your horse, Sam.”
While Sam visited the telegraph office to demonstrate to his editors in Boston that his story—of a great national treasure gone into neglect—would repay the cost of his sleeping and eating and drinking very well, I made for my office. I had no check from Lapham Dumont, but I did have a set of papers that would have made a national treasure, or even a journeyman, proud if his profession was the composition of fiction. For, according to these papers, a shipper in Corpus Christi had received a cargo of rum from Haiti; he had sent it from his warehouse on a schooner bound for the Port of New York, which had paused for replacement of its gaff sail boom at Savannah. It was due in tomorrow, three dozen tun and half-tun barrels of bonded spirits. A carter, led by Adam, would receive the shipment in the high light of noon—according to the papers—although Adam knew, and M knew, and Jessie knew, and Dumont did not, I prayed, that the wagons would be loaded and would roll—up Washington or Greenwich Street, some perhaps up Broadway—ponderous and piled, and alive with small black children who had hours before been scampering on the decks of Captain Corbeil’s ship. These papers did not represent the sums forwarded, and received, for the captain’s fee, and for two adult Negro women to supervise the conduct, and see to the comfort, of the children on their voyage from slavery to freedom. The amounts expended for food and drink and bribes for the skeleton crew were not listed. Nor were there details of how they had been freed; it was a shadow freedman’s bureau, Jessie implied, not trusting even me with names or locations, for the South was still a dangerous place. There was a bill of lading and a receipt of shipment. There were carter’s fees, marked as paid in full. And there were the warehouse receipts.
Missing was the Special License required for landing goods from on board a cargo vessel, as required in the statutes governing the tax Surveyor of the Port of New York; that license had to be provided to the night inspector by the Collector’s Office. I had written one out for M, and he was going to sign it. There was also missing a certificate of duties paid, a Customs House form, and M would also sign that. He would become, instead of the teller of truths, a liar on federal forms: a felon and a forger. This, I thought, is how fiction is constructed—of felonies and forgeries, of lies about hogsheads swung ashore, against the laws, at night.
What I did not yet know was whether M would sustain his enthusiasm. For he had said to me at last, “If we can save these children, we must.” He had faltered and gone silent, and I’d looked away. I heard the gurgle of spirits and then his voice again: “Law must be required to kneel before the right. That is what happened at times in the War.”
“This I do know,” I had told him.
“And it did not occur in my home.”
I knew that he was thinking of Malcolm, and that something to do with his household laws had been obliquely touched upon. I could not see it. I could feel it, though.
“We must see to what is right. There is risk—an income, a pension, the frayed remnants of a reputation.”
“Life,” I had told him, “and limb.”
His breath met the level of the liquor in his glass. I heard his breathing fill up the glass. “They are as nothing, or at any rate little. A man falls from the yardarm and crushes his skull and dies. He is sewn into a shroud of sailcloth loaded with scraps of ballast or balls of shot, and he is slid from under a flag off the deck to lie on the floor of the sea forever and ever. That he broke, and how, are of small moment. They are life and limb. But was he, at a moment of his life, in the right? I will sign the forms, Billy. We will off-load in darkness. The children shall be free. And then may heaven protect them.”
It was all too much of principle for me, and overmuch protestation. I must see him sign before I might speculate on right, wrong, sailcloth shrouds, or freedom. What I engaged in were transactions. The rest of it, I thought, were words—some of them, I had to allow, said by Jessie.
There were other documents to read and sign, and a check to write, and one to bank, and a proposal from a speculator in real estate sold or leased for theatrical purposes; he had become one of the underwriters, and he urged me to purchase a share of his share, of appearances in New York by Mr. Charles Dickens, who, in January, would give what the notice said were readings. That is to say, the English writer would appear in the Steinway Hall, which was built to hold an audience of over two thousand, and he would dramatize scenes, as I understood it, from his many popular books. Sam had spoken of Dickens, and he was the sort of fellow who might buy several tickets. There might be many such, accor
ding to the esteem in which Dickens seemed to be held. It seemed to me an endeavor in which I might participate, and I knew that Sam would be charmed; perhaps he would return to New York for the readings, although, according to the proposal, Dickens would also appear in Boston. But it might be a jolly occasion, I heard myself saying to Sam, and it was, after all, the season that men alone, in large cities and, I speculated, on frozen prairies and ships at sea, might find most trying. Sam, I heard myself suggest, come down to New York for a holiday! I wrote a counterproposal and pinned to it a check, the transmission of which, with other innocent documents, I would see to later in the day.
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.”
The Night Inspector Page 22