The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  “Nature is the breaker of habits,” I replied.

  “It was an honor to be trusted.”

  “I was, shall we say, relieved, Sam.”

  Sergeant Grafton hushed us angrily, and he was right. I patted Sam on his bony shoulder, and he turned his head in surprise, no doubt at the intimacy of my gesture. I saw him lay his wide, intelligent eyes upon me, and I knew that he was—as I considered wind and drop and angle when I laid a shot—puzzling out a way in which to think about me.

  While I, in the remainder of that morning’s march, as the sun came fully up and we stripped the horses’ hooves and rode, was remembering how, when spring came to Paynes Corners, I came home to build a new outhouse at my mother’s place. I made the seat narrow, but sturdy, and I built the inside platform a little lower to the ground. Although I did salvage some of the wood from the old one, I set most of it afire where it stood and, guarding against leaping sparks with a ready bucket of water, I watched the flames, and then the sinking wood, and then the dropping of the platform, the crashing of the walls, and the burning of what lay beneath the wood and in the soil. I expected to smell something, at some point, like the roasting of beef. But it all finally smelled the same—a kind of acrid, intimate odor rode on the darker smell of burning wood. We were all, finally, the same, waste and lumber and Uncle Sidney. That evening, I noticed that my mother was gaining weight, and we roasted early lamb and gnawed the small rib bones.

  I did not, however, see him making notes that day or in the camp that night. Sergeant Grafton insisted on disinfecting my neck with horse liniment; while Burton saw to the horses, the sergeant saw to me. And Sam, at his chores, did keep his eyes upon me, until I became nervy and snapped at him once when he asked a question about the charge of powder in the cartridges I employed.

  “What difference can it make, Sam, for Christ’s sake?”

  “In how they die and how you live, Mr. Bartholomew.”

  “Well said,” the sergeant said from his blankets, where he lounged and smoked, his men having been seen to and Burton set upon patrolling the perimeter.

  “Truly,” I relented. “I might be a little … eccentric tonight.”

  “It was close this morning,” the sergeant said.

  “Always, I suppose. But this morning, I felt as though, from the start, they had me.”

  “And?”

  “They weren’t that close,” I said.

  “A half an inch away,” the sergeant said.

  “How frightened were you?” Sam was young enough to ask it.

  I was either veteran enough, or very young, and silence, in either case, would seem the only reply. I told him nothing.

  Sam looked at me with his wide eyes, and I felt the pressure of his speculations. And I feel them now.

  And here we poised, on the eve of the day of the eve. It was the middle of September, and hot in New York, but on the evening winds off the river there had come a hint of more than soiled water, and more than the dusty cliffs of New Jersey, and more than the smoke, dust, and corruption of the manufacturing process that was as dark upon the air as it was clamorous around our heads. It was a touch, barely a dilution in the general heat and stench and turmoil, of something cool, something like the seasons hinging toward fall. So we might change again, I thought.

  I had been walking through the night. A vast hog had confronted me at St. John Street, once verging upon Africa, and we had stood there across from St. John’s Park, perhaps his bower and patrol, as if we were fighters in a duel, he sniffing my odor and backing up a pace, then coming forward a pace, as if he could not decide which part of me to snap and then suck down into his very large belly. His face seemed mild, almost comical, for he had a wound or growth near the bottom of his great lips on the rightmost side, and it made him look as if I struck him humorously.

  “I will not be imprisoned on this street for you,” I told the hog. I had drawn my pistol, and I knew that I would fire.

  Two women, quite pale and old and drawn inside the vast, dark skirts of their costumes, looking, really, like seamed, gray children in the clothing of adults, were about to pass me and cross toward the park when they saw what I stood before.

  “Gretchen,” one of them said, “that man has a gun.”

  “He has a wild pig, Eleanor.”

  “Is he going to kill it?”

  “Shall we ask him? Sir,” she called.

  “Madam.” I turned to respond and, finally seeing me through their myopia, they each took several steps back.

  “Gretchen, that man has a mask. Is he an outlaw?”

  I wondered if it had been my grotesque appearance that gave the pig pause. “I advise that you effect a detour, ladies. Return, perhaps, to the corner of the street behind us and cross over there to the park.”

  They fled me, and when I turned to the pig, he as well decided that I was a formidable presence and made his way along Canal. If he continued, I thought, he would arrive at the wharf of the Collins Liverpool Steamship line; embarking, he might become some of the famous Liverpool sausages.

  I continued toward my home district, quite nearby to the east, and I was caught at the corner of Broadway and Leonard by a feeling I had known in the War. I wondered, in fact, if I roamed the city in an effort to capture these vagaries of mine; when I was unawares, and afoot, and adrift—for all my conspicuousness somehow still in hiding within the mask and the wound behind it—I walked into emotions that drifted upon the atmosphere of the streets as if they were smoke, or odors; in midstep, I was transported into a place I had been that was not New York and was not now. I thought, of a sudden, on the night before the day of our rescue of the Negro children, of a time when Sergeant Grafton found me outside our encampment in the week or thereabouts before they hunted me down.

  “Mr. Bartholomew,” he said, coming up behind me and pausing. I had read the sounds of his approach and, from the size of the stride and sound of his breathing, I had known who approached.

  “Sergeant,” I said.

  “I have a sense that you are troubled,” he said, “and I wondered if I might be of some assistance.”

  I turned to face him under a moonless sky and, in the darkness of those dense woods, I watched him swat at nighttime insects, a shape more than a particular man. “If you could see my face,” I said, “you would see me smile. I am grateful, but you cannot protect me from ghosts as if I were a child from whose dream I required rescuing. The ghosts, of course, are actual. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “But you enjoy your work, Mr. Bartholomew. Or am I mistaken?”

  “I cannot know what you mean by ‘enjoy,’ Sergeant. But I likewise cannot imagine that whatever pleasures a marksman might take in the execution of his duties have any effect upon the spirits of the dead.”

  “You are haunted,” he said.

  “Why are you not?”

  “I do not kill them in that manner.”

  “You believe,” I said, “that the manner of killing is a matter of any moment to the dead? Or, for that matter, to those who effect the death?”

  “It is why there are rules.”

  “There no longer are. Wars are fought between nations? Not the present one. Wars are a contest in the moral theater? Not this economic contest. Wars are for our right? Has Abe not abridged what once was promised by our Constitution? I do not know your rules, Sergeant. I am killing these people as best I can, and I am enduring the consequences. Cause and effect. If that is my lot, or being shot out of a tree by a Secessionist marksman intended to be my target, then cause will have been served by effect.”

  I heard myself panting, and I required of my breathing that it grow quiet.

  “You are attempting, then, to come to terms with your own conclusion,” Sergeant Grafton said. “You are an old man in some ways, are you not?”

  “It is likely that I may not become one in the matter of years spent in breathing upon the earth. It’s therefore just as well that I age while I can, Sergeant.”

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nbsp; “Come in as soon as you can, then. Sam Mordecai is worried that you are unescorted in the forest.”

  “Strange fellow,” I said. I ratcheted back the hammer of the Sharps. “I am never unarmed. You might tell him that.”

  The sergeant paused, turned, then paused again and said, “When we have done with all this, when it is through, Mr. Bartholomew, and we are demobilized, as I pray will occur to you and me and our fellows back in the camp, I would like you to come as a guest to my home, my father’s home, in Saugerties. Do you know it?”

  “On the Hudson,” I said, “far north of New York City. It is below where I live.”

  “Which is?”

  “Paynes Corners. A small settlement in the center of the state of New York. A hundred and more miles, I believe, north of you. Little is there, although the Payne after whom it is named is said to be a relative of the patriot who changed the spelling of his name because he was a loyalist during the War of Revolution. There weren’t rules in that one either, by the by. Which is how the Americans won.”

  “You study war, then.”

  “For the time being, Sergeant, war is what I am.”

  The dampness of the dark forest, the distant smell of horse manure and horses, unwashed men, the smell of roasted rabbit which Burton had trapped, and something almost rotten, perhaps my own terrified sweat that rose about me as I moved in the forest, seeking someplace solitary where I might huddle with my arms about my own knees and thus take hold of myself for what comfort I might provide while I shook—that was all of what seized me at Leonard Street. I was near a notorious alleyway in the Points, running as it did behind a terrible crib above a vicious saloon, and situated as it was above a tunnel that came from the central sewers. It was here that we had seen enormous rats, and where more than one infant, left alone in its blankets and sucking on a flavored bit of ice, had been attacked while the mother was seeing to her business within. The minders they hired were cripples and drunks who were of little use but who, for a penny or two, claimed to keep an eye upon the babes, and to comfort them if they required attention. The flavored ice was offered in place of food, and they soon enough dropped it because of the cold or because their little fingers could not manage the grip.

  I wondered if the worst element I smelled was something dead. The alley was lighted only from the windows above, and few of them were illuminated at that moment. I saw motion in the alley’s mouth, not far from where I had paused, and I took hold of my pistol and cocked it. I wanted any observer to hear that I was armed. And no one in those streets at night could mistake the cocking of a gun. It is a cold and very clear and ultimate sort of sound, tending to carry much farther than you might imagine, even in the clamor of those streets. And then, because I was alert to menace, as was often the case, I found myself drawn to it—sooner the ugly stench and almost liquid darkness of the alley, I chided myself, than a street I must share with a pig of the streets.

  I walked slowly into the alley, and light from the thoroughfare disappeared as if the lamps had been blown out. I waited then in the dark, for my eyes to grow accustomed to it. And soon enough, I could see motion farther in, and then see figures. A piece of the street seemed to rise, and I understood that someone had opened a cellarway or a cover for one of the new drains meant to accommodate the rising tides of sewage and the floods of fresh water from storms. I closed my eyes, and I smelled what I had smelled during the War, when I went off into the woods to shake and weep. Some of that was the concentration of cooking odors and the general stink of stained bedclothes and unhealthy whores. Some was cheap or debased spirits. Some was the corruption of household and commercial garbage in mounds that had been heaped against the bricks and clapboard of the structures that formed the alley. There was probably a dead dog or cat or even horse that rotted under one of the mounds—it might have been a person; so many went missing in these places and never were found—but I could, for all my efforts, not identify the deep and rank and familiar olfactory note that probably, of all the smells, had brought me into this other world abutting the more familiar one.

  As I walked farther in, toward the part of the walkway that had risen, I listened, through the mechanical piano playing and the shrieks of false gaiety, the grumbling deep noises of men at rut or next door to stupor, for a sound betokening threat. I heard it—a mechanical grating at once thin and loud: the cocking of a weapon—as I recollected the nature of the smell. It was fear, which had driven me before it into the forest during the War. I sniffed at my own odor and wondered whether it was derived from my being here, or whether my fear of the morrow, and our rescue, and its consequences, had sent me down the alleyway.

  I stood in my place, the pistol in my hand, which hung at my side. “Good evening,” I said into the darkness.

  “You’re here for a reason?”

  “The reason is that I didn’t go somewhere else.”

  Someone laughed. Light came up then from the stones of the street itself, and I saw that they—I made out two of them in the light—had been in the sewers and were emerging, or were about to descend.

  From up the alley a woman’s voice called, “They opened hell again, girls!”

  “I will not do a swallow-cock on Satan,” another woman replied. “My throat’s off duty for the night.”

  The first one replied, “Yes, dearie, but the mouth in your ass does double duty, doesn’t it?”

  “Is your business with me?” the man called softly.

  “What’s your business, then?”

  “You would know, if you were supposed to be here.”

  “You’re one of the Swamp Angels,” I said. “Did you escape from the Tombs? Or are you some other municipality’s prisoners? Former prisoners,” I amended.

  “You’re police?”

  I went closer. I cannot say why I was thus drawn. Perhaps I was driven by my fear to prove—to me, perhaps somehow to it—that I would not be controlled; surely, I seemed to need to assert it to the man with the weapon. In the light that came up, a poor and wavering light, so perhaps from a lantern or candles, I saw that he wore a dark, dirty kerchief around his mouth and nose below his eyes. The smell of raw sewage rose with the light, and it was possible that he wore the mask against the stench, although, seeing my veil, he seemed actually to become less apprehensive and to make something of a show of uncocking his pistol, a large, nickel-plated weapon with a snubbed barrel. I uncocked the .31 and replaced it in my belt, at the back, beneath my coat. His clothes looked shabby and long unwashed. His shoes were surprisingly delicate in appearance and workmanship, and I suspected that he wore them beneath fisherman’s boots that he had discarded on his way up.

  “You aren’t police,” he said. “We don’t invite visitors. We turn them away. Some of us were about to come up for, well, recreation.”

  “One of them said her jaws were tired.”

  “All of them have more than jaws.”

  A stovepipe head slowly rose in the light and the terrible smell, and then a small man wearing a white muslin mask about his mouth and nose came up beneath it. He had one eye and a puckered hole where the other had come out. He was missing most of his ear on that same side, and his stovepipe listed in the same direction. He noted my veil, I saw, and was assured.

  “Evening,” I said. “Or is it morning now?”

  “Soon,” the little fellow said.

  I noted the approach of the second man I had initially observed. He wore a long coat that nearly touched the stones of the alley, and a sailor’s wool cap. I had thought, at first, that I saw M in his oilskins, but this was a man with no beard I could see who also wore a mask he had fashioned from a large, figured red bandana. He stood beside the first man and then walked around him to stand closer to me. Even his eyes, little and fatigued, slightly closer together than in most faces, reminded me of M. We had stood at the wharfs one late afternoon, when after my own day’s work I had come to meet him at the conclusion of his. We were to take a meal, and drink some strong ale, and t
ell stories. He had, always, to tell stories—they were his only form of intimacy, Sam had said, upon meeting him. It was a point with which I could neither agree nor disagree, for I did not wholly understand its meaning.

  But there we stood, he in his long oilskin coat and watch cap, I unprotected from the rain except by my hat. I had stowed the mask beneath my coat, to protect it, and was holding the veil in place as the winds came in with some force. M had scrupulously observed me as I held the mask and sited it beneath the jacket of my suit, which I fastened with some care. He looked at my face as I covered it and replaced my hat.

  “You have penetrating eyes, Billy,” he had commented, looking away, at the roiled and pockmarked surface of the river. “You see things, don’t you? Short, quick probings at the axis of reality, and then back undercover, if you don’t mind my saying it. Back beneath the mask.”

  “I am flattered to have been so studied, and to have been so considered.”

  “It’s the mask that reinforces the study, I think. And it’s the mask that lets you say the wise, brooding words I enjoy in our exchanges. You have read Shakespeare, I know.”

  “I was a boy, at Yale.”

  “An oceangoing vessel underneath a cloud of canvas was my Yale. But I have read the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, through whose mouths he so craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true.” He leaned closer and, although we were of a similar height, he reached around me as if to loom at my ear from a height. He succeeded in dripping water from his sleeve down the back of my coat. I shivered with the cold of it as he said, almost into my ear, “Those things he says, shipmate. Those true, terrible things, he tells through the mouths of his characters. Do you see? For it would be all but madness for any good man—Shakespeare or Bartholomew—in his own, proper character, to utter or even hint of the truth. Remember Lear! I feel so close to him, Billy! That frantic king tears off his mask and speaks the sane madness of vital truth. But, Billy, it is Shakespeare behind him. It is Shakespeare who wears his face, his soul. Lear is, you understand me, Shakespeare’s mask! How else might we tell the world our terrible thoughts except through these masks?”