The Pale Blue Eye

by Louis Bayard

  “Against what, Colonel Thayer?”

  “Oh.” He scanned the ceiling. “Elitism, that’s a common theme. Our critics say we favor the scions of rich families. If they only knew how many of our cadets came from farms, how many are the sons of mechanics, manufacturers. This is America writ small, Mr. Landor.”

  It rang nicely in that hallway. America writ small.

  “What else do your critics say, Colonel?”

  “That we spend too much time making engineers and not enough time making soldiers. That our cadets take up the Army commissions that should go to men in the ranks.”

  Lieutenant Meadows, I thought.

  Thayer kept advancing, matching his step to the drumbeat outside. “And I don’t need to tell you,” he said, “about our last group of critics. The ones who want no standing army of any kind in this country.”

  “What would they put in its place, I wonder?”

  “The militias of old, apparently. Ragtag boys on the village common. Make-believe soldiers,” he said, with no trace of bitterness.

  “It wasn’t militias won us our last war,” I said. “It was men like—General Jackson.”

  “How nice to know we’re in agreement, Mr. Landor. The fact remains there are still a goodly number of Americans who recoil at the sight of a man in uniform.”

  “That’s why we don’t wear any,” I said, softly.

  “ ‘We’?”

  “I’m sorry, constables. Look where you like, you won’t find a constable— come to think of it, any New York City law officer—wearing something to announce himself. Uniforms do put folks off, don’t they?”

  Funny, I hadn’t planned on volunteering that, but it did touch off a fraternal spark between us. Which is not to say I saw Sylvanus Thayer smile—I’ve never in my life seen him do that—but his edges could be honed down.

  “I’d be remiss, Mr. Landor, if I didn’t tell you that I myself have come in for the lion’s share of attacks. I’ve been called a tyrant. A despot. Barbarian, that’s a favored term.”

  With this, he stopped. Let the word settle over him.

  “Well, now, it’s a bad fix, isn’t it, Colonel?” I said. “Looking at it from your side, I mean. If word got out cadets were actually breaking down under this—this brutal regime of yours, going so far as to take their own lives. . . .”

  “The word about Leroy Fry has got out,” he said, icy as a star. (Gone was the fellow feeling.) “I can’t prevent that, nor can I prevent people from construing it how they may. My only concern at present is to keep this investigation out of the hands of certain parties.”

  I looked at him.

  “Certain parties in Washington,” I offered.

  “Just so,” he replied.

  “Parties who might be hostile to the Academy’s very existence. Looking for a reason to raze it to the ground.”

  “Just so.”

  “But if you could show them you had things in hand—somebody on the job—then maybe you could hold off the hounds awhile longer.”

  “ A little while, yes,” he said.

  “And what if I find nothing, Colonel?”

  “Then I shall make my report to the chief of engineers, who will in turn consult with General Eaton. We shall then await their collective judgment.”

  We had stopped now by the door to Ward B-3. From downstairs, we could hear the fretting sound of the matron and the slow sliding sound of the surgeon. From outside, the piercing lines of a fife. And from inside Ward B-3, nothing at all.

  “Who would have guessed?” I said. “One man’s death could leave so much in the balance. Your career, even.”

  “If I can persuade you of nothing else, Mr. Landor, let me persuade you of this. My career is nothing. If I could be sure the Academy would survive, I would leave here tomorrow and never look back.”

  Giving me his most genial nod, he added, “You have a gift for inspiring confidences, Mr. Landor. I don’t doubt it comes in handy.”

  “Well, that depends, Colonel. Tell me now. Do you honestly think I’m your man?”

  “ We wouldn’t be speaking if I didn’t.”

  “And you’re bound to follow this out? To the very end?”

  “And beyond,” said Sylvanus Thayer, “if need be.”

  I smiled and looked down the hall, to the oculus window, where the light was calling up a floating chain of dust.

  Thayer’s eyes narrowed. “May I interpret your silence as a yes or a no, Mr. Landor?”

  “Neither, Colonel.”

  “If it’s a question of money . . .”

  “I have enough money.”

  “Some other concern, perhaps.”

  “None you can help me with,” I said, as kindly as I could.

  Thayer cleared his throat—a small rasping, was all, but I had the clear impression of something stacked in him.

  “Mr. Landor, for a cadet to die so young, and by his own hand, that is a hard thing to bear. But that he should have such an offense committed against his defenseless body is beyond sufferance. It is a crime against nature, and I consider it also a strike at the heart—” He stopped himself, but the word was already out. “—at the heart of this institution. If it is the work of some passing fanatic, so be it, that is in God’s hands. If it is the work of one of our own, I will not rest until the offender has been bodily removed from the Point. In leg irons or walking free, it makes no difference, he must be sent away on the next steam packet. For the good of the Academy.”

  Having rid himself of this, he exhaled softly and bowed his head.

  “That is your charge, Mr. Landor, if you accept it. To discover the person who did this. And to help us ensure it never happens again.”

  I watched him a good while longer. Then I drew my watch from my pocket and tapped once on its glass casing. “Ten minutes to five,” I said. “What would you say to meeting back here at six? Would that inconvenience you too much?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Good. I promise you’ll have my answer then.”

  * * *

  I had some idea in mind of strolling off on my own—it was my usual way—but the Academy could not countenance such a plan. No, I would have an escort, if you please. And for this work, Lieutenant Meadows was once again detailed. If the prospect had made his face fall, someone must have rearranged it for him: he was brighter in spirits than during our last go-round. I took this to mean he had not been granted a sight of Leroy Fry.

  “Where do you wish to go, Mr. Landor?”

  I swept my hand in the direction of the river. “East,” I said. “East would do nicely.”

  To get there, of course, we had to cross round the Plain, which was no longer empty, no, not at all. The evening parade had come. The cadets of the United States Military Academy were fanned out in companies—four seething formations. The band, led by a man with a tasseled cane and a red pudding-bag hanging from his head, was playing the final strains, and the evening gun was firing, and the Stars and Stripes was fluttering to the ground like a pretty girl’s handkerchief.

  “Sent harms!” cried the adjutant. At once came the clash of two hundred guns, and in less than a second, each cadet was staring into his gun barrel. The officer in charge drew his blade and slammed his heels together and cried, “Cree hump! ” Followed by (or so it sounded to me) “Charge peanuts! ” At the conclusion of which, every cadet was turned half to the right, ready to stave off the enemy.

  Oh, it was quite a show: the divots kicking up from the pale green turf, the last rays of the sun snagged on the bayonets. And the young men in their tight collars and tapering uniforms, plumes sprouting mighty from their heads.

  “Cree hump! . . . Der hump!”

  The news about Leroy Fry—part fact, part rumor—had by now become common currency among these cadets. And it was a measure of Thayer’s system that it could bear such a blow with no sign of strain. The space normally occupied by Leroy Fry was now taken by another—the gap had been bridged—and anyone looking on would
never have known there was one fewer in the ranks. Oh, a more trained watcher might have picked out the lost step here, the half shuffle there. A stumble, even. But that could easily be put down to the twenty or so plebes who filled each company. Boy-men only a few months free of their ploughs, still finding their rhythm . . . and all the same, swept up in the larger music.

  “Front your section, mister!”

  Yes, a fascinating sight, Reader, in the last hours of an October day, with the sun dropping, and the hills somehow twinning the blue and gray of the uniforms, and somewhere a mockingbird grouching . . . a fellow could do worse. There were others, too, passing time in much the same way. A raftload of tourists, down by the quartermaster’s office. Ladies in leg-of-mutton sleeves and men in blue frock coats and beige waistcoats . . . a holiday lightness about them. They’d come up that morning from Manhattan, probably, on the day boat, or maybe they were Britishers working their way through the Northern Tour. As much a part of the spectacle as anything else.

  “Snied States Milita’ ’Cademy, ’S Point, ’en York, ’tober twe’six, ’and thirty! ’Shal ’lorders ’umber TWO!!!”

  And who should be in the midst of the onlookers but Sylvanus Thayer? Not about to let a dead body keep him from his rounds. Indeed, he looked as if he’d never been anywhere but here the whole day long. Marvelous balance. He talked when he had to, stayed silent when that suited, bent an ear to any gentleman’s question, pointed out the stray detail to the ladies, never once bore down. I could almost hear him, you know:

  “Mrs. Brevoort, I don’t know if you’ve noticed a certain esprit d’Europe to this particular maneuver. It was created by Frederick the Great, later elaborated upon by Napoleon during his Nile campaign. . . . Oh, and perhaps you spotted the young man at the head of Company B? That’s Henry Clay, Junior. Yes, yes, son of the great man himself. Lost the headship of his class to a Vermont farmer’s boy. America writ small, Mrs. Brevoort. . . .”

  And now the cadet companies were being marched off in double time by the orderly sergeants, and the band was disappearing over a hill, and the spectators were falling back, and Lieutenant Meadows was asking me if I wanted to stay or keep walking, and I said walk, and so we did, all the way to Love Rock.

  And there was the river, waiting a hundred feet below. Rolling with boats. Freight boats bound for the Erie Canal and packet boats bound for the great city. Skiffs and canoes and dugouts, all burning with geranium light. I could hear, not so far off, the ring of cannon on the proving grounds: a fat boom and then a trail of echoes, climbing the hillsides. To the west was river, to the east more river, and river to the south. I stood there at the crux of it, and if I’d been of a more historic cast, I might have communed with the Indians or with Benedict Arnold, who’d once stood on this very point, or with the men who dragged the great chain across the Hudson to stop the British navy from penetrating north. . . .

  Or if I’d been a deeper soul, I might have given some thought to Fate or God, for Sylvanus Thayer had just asked me to save the honor of the U.S. Military Academy by once more taking up the work I had sworn off for good, and surely there was a larger pattern at work—I won’t call it divine—but an intervention, yes.

  Well, my mind doesn’t sound that deep. Here’s what I was thinking about: Hagar the cow. To be honest with you, I was wondering where she’d gone now. Toward the river? The highlands? Was there some cavern out there, back of a waterfall? Some private place only she knew about?

  So yes, I thought about where she might have gone and if anything would bring her back.

  At precisely ten minutes to six, I turned away from the river and found Lieutenant Meadows exactly where I had left him. Hands clasped behind his back, eyes locked, all other cares blacked away.

  “I’m through, Lieutenant.”

  Five minutes later, I was back in Ward B-3. Leroy Fry’s body was still there, draped in that nubby linen sheet. Thayer and Hitchcock were standing at something like parade rest, and I was just inside the door, and I was about to say, “Gentlemen, I’m your man.”

  But I said something else. Before I even understood I was speaking.

  “Do you want me to find who took Leroy Fry’s heart?” I asked. “Or do you want me to find who hanged him in the first place?”

  Narrative of Gus Landor

  4

  October 27th

  It was a locust tree. A hundred yards up from the South Landing. A black locust, slender and monkish-looking, with deep furrows and long mahogany pods. No different from most of the locust trees that cluster in the Highlands. No different, that is, except for the vine straggling from its bough.

  Well , I thought it was a vine, more fool me. In my own defense, more than thirty-two hours had passed since the event in question, and the rope had already begun the slow work of bleeding into its surroundings. I suppose I expected someone to have taken it down by now. But they’d followed the swifter course: on finding the body, they’d severed the rope just above the dead man’s head and left the rest dangling, and there it remained, lean-muscled, morning-dappled. And there was Captain Hitchcock, wrapping his hands round it. A testing tug and then a pull, as though there were a church bell on the other end. His weight sank into it, and his knees sagged a fraction, and I realized then how very tired he was.

  No wonder. Up on his feet for a night and a day and then a six-thirty breakfast summons to Sylvanus Thayer’s quarters. Me, I was just a hair fresher, having spent the evening at Mr. Cozzens’ hotel.

  The hotel, like so many things at the Point, had been Thayer’s idea. If day-boat passengers were to see the Academy in all its glory, they would need somewhere to rest their heads at night. And so the United States government, in all its wisdom, decided to put up a fine hotel right on the Academy grounds. Every day in the high season, tourists from all ends of the world would lay themselves down on Mr. Cozzens’ newly plumped feather mattresses, hushed with wonder at Thayer’s mountain kingdom.

  Me, I was no tourist, but my own house was too far from the Academy for easy coming and going. So, for a term indefinite, I was given a room overlooking Constitution Island. The shutters kept out nearly all the starlight and moonlight—sleeping was a dive into a pit, and the sound of reveille seemed to come from a distant star. I lay there, watching the red light steal through the bottom of the shutters. The darkness felt delicious. I wondered if maybe I’d missed my true career.

  But then I did the unsoldierly thing of lying abed another ten minutes, and I dressed at my leisure, and instead of dashing out for the morning roll call, I wrapped a blanket round me and strolled down to the boat landing, and by the time I got to Thayer’s quarters, the superintendent had bathed and dressed and squeezed the tidings out of four newspapers and was poised over a plate of beefsteak, waiting for me and Hitchcock to do it the justice it demanded.

  We ate in silence, the three of us, and drank Molly’s excellent coffee, and when the plates had been pushed back and we had slouched back in their chairs—well, it was then I laid out my conditions.

  “First off,” I said, “if it’s all the same to you gentlemen, I’d like my own horse about me. Seeing as how I’ll be staying in your hotel for some time.”

  “Not too long, we hope,” put in Hitchcock.

  “No, not too long, but it’d be good to have Horse around in any event.”

  They promised to fetch him and make a place for him in the stables. And when I told them I’d like leave to go back to my cottage every Sunday, they said that as a private citizen, I could leave the post whenever I wanted, so long as I told them where I was going.

  “And finally this,” I said. “I’d like free rein while I’m here.”

  “How are we to take that term, Mr. Landor?”

  “No armed guard. No Lieutenant Meadows, God bless him. No one walking me to the backhouse every three hours, no one kissing me good night. It won’t do, gentlemen. I’m a solitary sort, I get chaffed by too many elbows.”

  Well, they told me this was im
possible. They said that West Point, like any other military reservation, had to be closely patrolled. They had a congressionally mandated Responsibility to ensure the safety of every visitor and avoid Compromising Operations and on and on. . . .

  We found a middle path. I would be permitted to walk the outer perimeter on my own—the Hudson was all mine—and they would give me the paroles and countersigns to satisfy the sentinels who’d be stopping me at intervals. But I was not to enter the core grounds without escort, nor was I to speak to any cadet unless there was a representative of the Academy present.

  All in all, I would have called it a first-rate chat . . . until they started sliding in conditions of their own. This I should have expected, but have I mentioned yet? That I was still a shade off my best?