The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  We sat in the silence that his words made among us.

  Then I pointed ahead of us. “They,” I said, “are cutting their losses, as it is called. So that when they have discarded these small lives in great barrels, they may reverse their engines and back away from the wreck—the reef, as you call it—and may live to invest another day.”

  “The black folks are the losses,” Adam said. “I don’t see but one white corpse come down on us. Plenty of black ones, though, in the water, under it, everyplace—dead black babies in the water. Why’d they bother and be born?”

  “There is Mr. North still left, Adam,” I said.

  “No,” Adam said, “he’s pretty much white, sir.”

  “Get us closer, can you? I beg you. Get me a little closer to them?” I said it to the men behind me, but I stared ahead, at a third spinning cask, and at the investors on board their boat.

  “Will you?” M cried. There were tears in his eyes and on his seamed cheeks. “Will you haul us to them? Will you bend?”

  We made more speed as the light brightened further, and I lay at the prow once more, my legs behind me in a marksman’s delta, my scarf, so sodden as to retain the shape of whatever pressed upon it, folded now before me. I extended my arms, and I rested my left upon the scarf and gripped the bottom of my right, which held the heavy Colt, to steady my weapon and give me true aim. My hands felt slick, as if the new blisters already ran their pus and blood. They felt clumsy and thick. But I had no doubt of their ability to grasp the weapon and to shoot it true.

  “Is it rescue of the remaining tuns, Billy, or is it revenge?” M’s voice was high and hoarse, and I knew that he mourned not only the Negroes discarded, in their barrels, as if they were spoilt goods, but again—and for all of his life—his child, who had gone to sleep and had not wakened.

  I called back, “It is nothing that feels right, sir. It is action in the face of the event.”

  “What a pragmatical man you are, Billy! In your flinty heart, you are a sailor.”

  I cocked the Colt, and I sighted over the hammer block along the front sight. As the dawn lay out along the nearby shore and on the green, fast water, the river seemed broader, their vessel seemed smaller, and they, upon its deck, in frantic motion, appeared ludicrous to me, like puppets in a children’s show who danced to a jig. Yet the cruelty of the morning was in the children themselves, lost at their young age, like Jessie in hers: suffocated, drowned, and thrown away.

  By now the vessel was close enough, and the light upon us full enough, for me to read the craft’s unobstructed name: She was the Sweetheart, out of Cape Sable. Her captain was using his gun. I heard the dry crack of the pistol and I said, “We are under fire.”

  And Sam, in a tight, familiar voice, said, “It is like old times, Mr. Bartholomew.”

  I heard the groan as they shipped their oars. We drifted in, and I waited.

  Adam said, “All it is, I tell myself, is dying. But I am not calmed down.”

  “A minute more,” I said.

  I was staring ahead, then I turned to report to them and saw that M had not sat down. “Sir,” I said, “you are most vulnerable as a standing target. Will you take cover?”

  He opened his mouth wide and seemed about to silently laugh. And then his mouth dropped shut and he, in turn, dropped down to his knees in the stern. “I have mouths to feed,” he said in a thin, bitter voice.

  I returned my attention to the lighter. I called to Sam and Adam to lie low. Two more shots sounded, and nothing seemed to have hit. As I counted, he had at most three chambers full, though no quantity of cartridges would keep me from him. I saw him kneel beside a half-tun barrel, and I sighted, tried to allow for wind across us from the west, and for the dip of the prow as the current struck us, as the tide surged under us, and I fired two rounds. One or both took him down, and he did not move. I saw a head at the forward hatch, and I put two rounds there. A man began to howl his pain, and I could only think that I had struck him in the jaw or neck, for, surely, if he was not dead, he was very seriously wounded.

  I said to them, “Kindly bring us in, gentlemen. Their gun will be silent.”

  Sam began at once, Adam an instant later, so that we wobbled in our course and then straightened, then made good speed. M stood again in the stern, his gaff hook like a spear in his hand, his shoulders squared, his chin upthrust. No one spoke.

  “In the mercy of the Lamb, in the mildness of the Father who is Child,” the voice came chanting from the hatch. “Mr. Porter is sorely wounded. I think the bones of his shoulder are shattered.” I shook my head in regret for my poor marksmanship. Pistols are unreliable. “Our captain is dead. I alone am left to tell the tale. I throw myself upon your mercy in assurance that it will be as the mercy of the Lamb.”

  “Come up,” I called.

  “In the assurance—”

  “Up, Mr. North. And you forgot to report on Miss Jessie. Is she safe?”

  “Below decks and safe and well, sir.”

  “Come up, Mr. North.”

  He appeared as a hat, and then a sweating, round face, and then a good gabardine suit with stains upon its sleeves and matching waistcoat. In his hand was what appeared to be a small, folded handkerchief, stained but once white.

  “A flag of surrender, sir. The rules of war. The principles of engagement—I beg all parties to attend. A flag of surrender!”

  I put a single .31 round into his belly, at the line of his belt, and I saved the other against emergencies. I wanted the shot in his lower stomach because he would die the more painfully, poisoned by his own bowel. I estimated Porter to be almost bled to death. I lay my head against the warm revolver and the cold, damp scarf. Sam and Adam rowed again, I heard, and we came abutting the lighter, onto which M made us fast. I lay where I was, uncertain for an instant whether we were in a tree in Rebel country or the river off New York. M clambered past me, and I saw the men I had killed and wounded, and I smelled their blood as if it were spilling, all of it, at once, as I lay there, and as if—the scene came through my mind and left, but I remember it—my companions on board the lighter were filling tuns with the blood I had caused to flow. I saw Jessie’s face, and I felt her neck and hair, and then I was up, upon my knees, and then standing, and I watched as M and Adam forced the tun and searched inside for someone’s missing child.

  Soon, for I joined them in the labor, we had opened them all. It was a perversion of Christmas, I thought, unfastening these great casks that were to provide to their inhabitants a gift and to those who shipped them the even greater gift of having given liberty to someone enslaved. Everything was slimy with a mixture of salt and fresh water, the blood from the rowers’ hands, and the terrible fluids of the bodies within the tuns. We found only death, and its stink of decomposing bodies in their embarrassing disarray was potent. It made for a liquor I thereafter drank in my dreams. For they were children. They were made of the tender eyelids, the short, thin fingers and soft limbs that we, who were grown in the world, were required by what is proper and right in life to cradle against us, and protect.

  M retrieved his gaff, which he had carried aboard the lighter like a spear for great fishes, and he turned from us, by the small cabin among the lengths of rope with which the tuns had been lashed down. They lay beneath his feet like snakes. He stared into the glare above Manhattan that prefigured a lurid dawn. And he only shook his head.

  Then, as if possessed of a sudden, he drew himself tall, stepped backward among the serpents, then strode at the side of the lighter and hurled his wooden gaff pole with its iron hook, high and into a darkness that accepted it, as if the morning skies, or what lay behind them, had absorbed his assault.

  He stared after his vanished weapon, and then he turned, with a terrible, tortured face, to confront us.

  “These babes,” he said, “these darksome pips of humanity, abandoned by man and woman and God. How can we? How can He?”

  Adam sat with his back pressed into the deckhouse, and he stared
at the tun. For myself, I committed impracticality, seizing my Navy Colt by its barrel and tossing it, as if with barely a consideration, over the side.

  M sought, I saw, to muster a smile for me, but he clearly could not.

  And, barely a quarter of an hour later, we fought our way downstream, M at the tiller, steadying our path and correcting, upon occasion, but permitting us to slowly float with a kind of rocking that sickened us as, aided by the sail, we retreated. The day came up, dispersing the golden shimmer under which we had labored at dawn, replacing it with a sullen red light that spoke of dampness and heat.

  We were alone on the water for a while in our silence. He swung us out, at Warren Street, and we continued to drift as shipping came up, as a cutter of the river police swung past us—he stood, pulling at his oilskin coat, so that his badge caught the sun—and we began to hear the carts and wagons in the streets, the clash of crates and pallets as they were swung up and set down, the huffing of the switching engines in the yards. Gulls cackled, and the pigeons wheeled above the warehouses, into and out of the soft light.

  Adam had begun, on seeing the children, to lament in a deep, hoarse voice that he could not still; I watched him try, for the sake of his dignity, or because he had no wish to share with pale-skinned men the profundity of his feelings. But he had wept, and so had M, who had assaulted the sky. I was emptied, and I sat upon my haunches in the Customs boat and waited. Sam had watched us all. And now we drifted, M steering us, into the Customs wharf, a half an hour before he might go off duty.

  “I must make for my office. I cannot speak of what we witnessed and endured. I will not. Adam: You are a man, and a companion, and I offer my salute, my handshake, sir—will you?”

  Adam took his hand and promptly released it. His hands, like mine and Sam’s, were bloody. His face looked washed clean of energy and will, but I knew better. He would direct his life, and he would never forgive us. He looked at me, then more briefly at Sam, and he climbed from the boat to the dock, and he quickly walked away.

  M said, “Billy, you were used, I take it. So was I, by you. But I like you, while I confess to a near womanly love for your Sam. You enlivened me; he will make me live a good while longer, on the pages he will write.” Sam’s face lit, like the globe of a gas lamp, and his smile stretched wide. “You will write them, Sam.

  “As to your fishing for the shabby author fish, I know too well the world’s waters not to recognize bait, Billy, or lure, or line. But I cannot see it all as insult, and you’re a good fellow, and a hero of the republic. I’m a restless man, and I shan’t lie down for long. Something further may come of this.”

  He gathered the skirts of his great, long coat, and he climbed slowly out of the moored boat and turned to us. “The Hudson is a thoroughfare, and crowded with traffic often enough. There are pleasure-seekers, believe it or not, who paddle canoes upon her, and vessels of commerce coming down to us from Albany and Troy, and returning north with passengers and goods. That stubby, terrible craft with her cargo of the dead will be discovered in hours. In a moment, perhaps. What will we need to say to the authorities, if ever asked?”

  He took a step, and seemed about to stumble, but he caught himself as, I knew, he had been dragging himself upright for so many years. He shook his head, and of course no one might descry whether it was the elements in the air or the tears from within him that so made his dull eyes, this only time, appear to shine.

  “And the black-skinned babies,” he said, moving his arms as if to indicate them, “and the girl with the cinnamon skin, murdered by her murderous plotting. No one vouchsafes that she won’t soon be found. Nor that those dreadful wooden envelopes containing their shrunk and deathbound seeds will not be opened on the morrow, shipmates and friends. How to account to the world for all this death strewn in and under and through its waters? How to answer to the dreadful shipment that’s landed all too soon along our shore? Nothing I know of in a long, dreary life will do. It will not do. It never will do.”

  He seemed about to speak once more, but his arms lifted and dropped, the heavy skirts of his oilskins flapped and lay still, and his chin was down, an instant, upon his breast as it rose and fell with a futility. He raised his right arm, as if to wave us farewell or to bless us, and he turned toward the steps and moved off in the direction of his office. He would make as if to have been there all the night, and, as he did, he would retrieve a cached bottle of gin, and he would put it to work.

  And Sam would soon pack his bag at the Astor and entrain for New England, while I would find myself, days hence, in the office of Lapham Dumont, badgering him for copies of the documents I had required he create—evidence, of course, which I must destroy against the discovery of the lighter, or Jessie’s corpse, or those of the other children, buried alive in great casks by the merchants on whose behalf Jessie had duped me, and I had duped M, the merchants for whose calculations she had perished. As Dumont watched me from his straight-backed oaken chair, I swept through his disheveled files and through the drawers and cubbies of his desk.

  “You have hidden nothing?”

  “I wish nothing to connect me to your … business,” he replied, “whatever it might be.”

  “And I to you. I have withheld my participation in the matter and know nothing of its consummation. Do you understand?”

  “No, sir. I do not wish to. May I go so far, without prejudicing your goodwill, as to pretend to never having heard of you?”

  “If you would. And I, for my part, hereby forgive your debt.”

  “Forgive?”

  “Wholly. I will devise an instrument, I will sign it, and I will cause it to be delivered to these offices. You have wagered and lost on bearskins at my expense. As far as you are concerned, I am as good as dead. If you renege in any manner on our understanding, it is you who will be so good.”

  He laved his red face with his hands as I have seen a raccoon, at the side of a stream, wash his muzzle. Sighing, he raised his head from the protection of his fingers. “May I say,” he ventured, “that I would believe it only from you—the equation of death with the good. Still: forgiven!” His face reflected his disbelief, as if, instead of the William Bartholomew with whom he had conducted business in the past, he thought me somebody else.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE SECOND DAY, THEN, OF 1868, AND MY PARTIAL investment, the English author, Mr. Charles Dickens, having come to New York to read from his works in December, and having read at the plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn to great acclaim several times, now was about to mount the stage in the Steinway Hall on East Fourteenth Street to offer a program that seemed to me far too long. I sat in a box with Sam, who had come down from Boston; we were far to the rear, and while Sam whispered about the prominent men and women he recognized, I employed my telescope, untouched since the War.

  It was, as the newspapers would declare the next day, a gala, and celebrated personages abounded. Mr. and Mrs. Fields, who were book publishing people, Sam said, were in attendance. “Mrs. Fields will remain in her seat, while her husband will shortly walk around backstage to offer his support. I have seen this in Boston. He is Dickens’s publisher, Billy, although it is the wife, I have heard, at whom Mr. Dickens enjoys directing his attentions.”

  I pointed out Mr. and Mrs. John Bigelow, he the diplomat and partial owner of the New York Post. Nearby, far down front, were Horace Greeley and William Cullen Bryant. A fellow with a broad, ferocious mustache sat near Mr. Bryant; he was with a woman of remarkable beauty. “Twain!” Sam said. “He is called Mark Twain, he wrote of the life in the gold fields, and he is on the rapid rise.” Sam’s voice expressed no little envy.

  The women wore opulent gowns, and there was much décolletage and jewelry in evidence. The men were dressed, for the most part, in evening suits and boiled shirts, many with diamond studs down the front. I could smell the oily smoke of expensive cigars on their clothing, and the perfume on the warmed skin of the women made a sharp, sweet contrast to the odor of t
obacco and—it is inevitable on a cold evening in the city—to the slightly sour smell of the damp wool fabric of their overcoats. They stood, many of them, for as long as they could, so as to see who was present that night and, of course, to also be seen. I sat back in the shadows and looked out with my glass into the rosy light of the hundreds of gas lamps that glowed upon the gold leaf and paint of the ceiling, the molded plaster and carved mahogany of the walls.

  It was a happy sound, the hubbub of those voices, and the clothes and jewelry made for a gladsome sight. It had nothing to do with how we lived in the Points, and it was the beginning—I could feel its pulse in the Steinway Hall, and I had sensed it in my accountings of profit and loss: The nation, that New Year’s Eve, was commencing to gather itself, and great wealth was in the offing. The result would be named the Gilded Age, and the fellow with the bristling mustache and the angry expression would be said to have chronicled its rise.

  The lighting was adjusted, and the audience took their place. Two thousand and five hundred seats were full—he would carry away from New York several hundreds of thousands of dollars—and Mr. Charles Dickens came striding onto the stage. He was smaller than I thought a world-famous writer might be, and I could see the lines of pain about his mouth, as well as the subtle drag of his right foot, as if he bore a wound. His suit was a light gray, with a muted pattern in the weave, and his waistcoat was a bright red silk. As the applause rolled up and the lights came further down, he lifted his head as if to listen to the language in a song. He smiled, and they clapped harder, and several cheered.