The Pale Blue Eye

by Louis Bayard

  Mr. Landor, you may not breathe a word of this investigation to anyone inside or outside the Academy.

  So far . . .

  Mr. Landor, you must report to Captain Hitchcock on a daily basis.

  . . . so good. . . .

  Mr. Landor, you must prepare a detailed weekly report that outlines all your findings and conclusions, and you must be ready to recount your investigations to any Army official whenever so called upon.

  Delighted, I said.

  And then Ethan Allen Hitchcock gave his mouth a brutal swipe and cleared his throat and nodded sternly at the table.

  “There is one final condition, Mr. Landor.”

  He looked distinctly uncomfortable. I felt sorry for him until I heard what it was, and then I never felt sorry for him again.

  “We’d like to ask that there be no drinking—”

  “No untoward drinking,” said Thayer, working in a quieter key.

  “—during the course of your investigations.”

  And with that, the whole affair expanded before my eyes—it took on a dimension of time. For if they knew about that, it meant they’d been making inquiries—buttonholing neighbors and colleagues, the boys at Benny Havens’—and that was more than a morning’s work, that was days of husbanding. The only conclusion was this: Sylvanus Thayer had long ago cast his eye on me. Before he knew he had a use for me, he’d sent his scouts out to learn everything that could be learned about me. And here I sat now, eating his food, swallowing his terms. At his mercy.

  If I’d been in a fighting mood, I might have denied it. I might have told them no drop of liquor had touched my lips in three days—it was the Lord’s truth—but then I remembered that was the very thing I used to hear from the micks who slept out by the Garnet Saloon. “Three days,” they always said, “three days since I touched a drop.” As fast a turnabout as dead Jesus, to hear them tell it. How I used to smile.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, “you’ll find me, in all our dealings, as dry as a Methodist.”

  They didn’t press the point too hard. Thinking back on it, I wonder if they weren’t more alarmed by the example I might set for the cadets, who were, of course, denied the pleasures of the bottle. The pleasures of the bed, the card table. Chess, tobacco. Music, novels. It hurt my head sometimes, thinking of all the things they couldn’t do.

  “But we haven’t yet spoken of your fee,” said Captain Hitchcock.

  “We needn’t.”

  “Surely . . . some compensation . . .”

  “Only to be expected,” said Thayer. “I’m sure in your previous capacity . . .”

  Yes, yes, as a constable, you work on commission. Either you get paid by someone—the city, the family—or you stay out of it. But now and then you forget the rule. It’s happened to me once or twice, to my sometime regret.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, drawing the napkin from my shirt, “I hope you won’t take it wrong, you seem like grand fellows, but once this business is done, I’d be most grateful if you’d leave me alone. Except for a note now and again to let me know how you are.”

  I smiled to show I bore them no ill will, and they smiled, too, to show they’d saved a sum of money, and they called me a fine American and I forget what else, though I know the word principle got used. Paragon, too. And then Thayer went about his business, and Hitchcock and I went to our locust tree, and here now was the weary captain, leaning into that severed length of rope.

  One of Hitchcock’s own cadets was standing not ten feet off. Epaphras Huntoon. Third-year man, a tailor’s apprentice from Georgia. Tall and ox-shouldered and still in awe of his own bulk, I thought, for he seemed all the time to be appeasing it, with a dreamy brow and a wheedling tenor. It was this cadet’s fate to have found Leroy Fry’s body.

  “Mr. Huntoon,” I said, “please accept my sympathies. It must have been an awful shock.”

  He jerked his head in a nettled way, as though I were calling him away from a private talk. And then he smiled and started to speak and found he couldn’t.

  “Please,” I said. “If you’d take me through what happened. You were on guard duty Wednesday night?”

  That turned the trick: coming at it in pieces. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I went on post at nine-thirty. Got relieved at midnight by Mr. Ury.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I made my way back to the guardroom.”

  “And where is that?”

  “North Barracks.”

  “And . . . where was your post?”

  “Number four, sir. Over by Fort Clinton.”

  “So . . .” I smiled, looked around. “I’ll admit I’m not very familiar with the grounds, Mr. Huntoon, but it seems to me this patch we’re standing on right now isn’t on the way from Fort Clinton to North Barracks.”

  “No, sir.”

  “What took you off course, then?”

  He stole a look then at Captain Hitchcock, who gazed back a moment before saying, in a dull tone, “You needn’t fear, Mr. Huntoon. You won’t be reported.”

  Relieved of this care, the young man gave his big shoulders a shake and looked at me with a half grin.

  “Well, sir. Thing is sometimes . . . when I’m on guard duty . . . I like to get me a feel of the river.”

  “A feel?”

  “Put in a hand or a toe. Helps me sleep, sir, I can’t explain it.”

  “No need to explain, Mr. Huntoon. Tell me, though, how you got yourself down to the river.”

  “I just took the path to the South Landing, sir. Five minutes down, ten minutes up.”

  “And what happened when you reached the river?”

  “Oh, I didn’t get there, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “I heard me something.”

  Here Captain Hitchcock shook himself and, in a voice that belied his weariness, asked: “What did you hear?”

  It was a sound, that was all he could say. Might have been a branch creaking or a flaw of wind; might have been nothing at all. Whenever he was moved to say what it was, it showed itself as other.

  “Young sir,” I said, laying my hand on his shoulder. “I beg of you, don’t start kicking in the spurs. It’s no surprise you can’t get at it . . . all the excitement, all the running about, it tends to rattle a fellow’s brain. Maybe I should ask what made you follow this sound?”

  That seemed to calm him. He got very still for a stretch.

  “I reckoned it might be an animal, sir.”

  “What sort?”

  “I don’t rightly know, I . . . maybe it got itself caught in a trap . . . I’m terrible partial to animals, sir. Hounds, ’specially.”

  “So you did what any Christian man should do, Mr. Huntoon. You went to the aid of one of God’s creatures.”

  “I reckon that’s what I done. I was just fixing to go up the hill a piece, it being pretty steep and all, and I was all ready to turn back—”

  He stopped.

  “But then you saw . . . ?”

  “No, sir.” Back he came with a rush of air. “I didn’t see anything.”

  “And not seeing anything, you . . .”

  “Well, I just had me this feeling somebody was by. Something. So I said, ‘Who goes there?’ As I’m charged to do, you see. And there weren’t any answer, so what I did, I brought my musket to ‘charge,’ and I said, ‘Advance and give the countersign.’”

  “Still no answer.”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  “And what did you do then?”

  “Well, I kept going a few paces. But I never once seen him, sir.”

  “Who?”

  “Cadet Fry, sir.”

  “Well, then, how did you find him?”

  He waited a few seconds to steady his voice.

  “I brushed him.”

  “Ah.” I cleared my throat, gently. “That must have been a surprise, Mr. Huntoon.”

  “Not at first, sir, ’cause I didn’t know. But once I knew, why, yes—yes, it was.”

  I�
�ve often thought since that if Epaphras Huntoon had passed a yard to the north or a yard to the south, he might never have found Leroy Fry. For it had been almighty dark that night, cloudy with a bitty thumbnail of a moon and just the lantern in Huntoon’s hand to show the way. Yes, a yard in either direction, and he might have passed right by Leroy Fry and been none the wiser.

  “What then, Mr. Huntoon?”

  “Well, I jumped back, is what I did.”

  “Perfectly natural.”

  “And the lantern fell. Out of my hand.”

  “It fell? Or maybe you dropped it?”

  “Um . . . dropped it, that may be. Can’t say, sir.”

  “And what next?”

  He fell silent again. At least his voice box did. The rest of him was talking at a mad pace. Teeth dancing, toes sliding. One hand playing with his tunic, the other with the buttons that ran down the side of his trousers.

  “Mr. Huntoon?”

  “I didn’t rightly know what to do, sir. See, I weren’t at my post, so I weren’t sure anyone’d hear me if I called. So I run, I expect.”

  His eyes were cast down now, and that was all it took to press the picture into my mind’s eye: Epaphras Huntoon dashing half blind through the forest, clawing the branches out of his face, brass and steel rattling under his cloak, cartridge boxes shivering. . . .

  “I run straight back to North Barracks,” he said, quietly.

  “And who did you report this to?”

  “Cadet officer of the guard, sir, and he went and got Lieutenant Kinsley, sir, who was army officer of the day. And they had me go and fetch Captain Hitchcock, and we all of us run back and . . .”

  He looked at Hitchcock now with an unmistakable plea. Tell him, captain.

  “Mr. Huntoon,” I said. “I think we might take a step back, if you don’t object. Back to when you first found the body. Do you think you could face that again?”

  Fierce-browed, vise-jawed, he nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “There’s a good man. Now, let me ask you, did you hear anything else at the time?”

  “Nothin’ you wouldn’t hear in the normal way. An owl or two, sir. And . . . a bullfrog, maybe. . . .”

  “And was there anyone else about?”

  “No, sir. But then I wasn’t looking for no one.”

  “And I would guess—after that first contact, you didn’t touch the body again?”

  He twitched his head back to the tree. “I couldn’t,” he said. “Once I seen what it was.”

  “Very sensible, Mr. Huntoon. Now maybe you could tell me—” I paused to scan his face. “Maybe you could tell me just how Leroy Fry looked.”

  “Not well, sir.”

  And that was the first time I heard Captain Hitchcock laugh. A squoosh of merriment, gouged out of his middle. Surprised even him, I think. And it had this other virtue: it saved me from doing the same.

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said, as softly as I could. “Which of us would have looked our best in such a setting? I was thinking . . . more the position of the body, if you recall that.”

  He turned now and faced the tree head on—for the first time, maybe? Letting the memory work through him.

  “His head,” he said, slowly. “The head was twisted to one side.”

  “Yes?”

  “And the rest of him was . . . he looked knocked back, sir.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Well.” He fluttered his lids, chewed his lip. “He wasn’t hanging straight.

  His backside, sir, it was . . . like maybe he was getting ready to set. In a chair or hammock or some such.”

  “Did he look that way because you’d knocked into him?”

  “No, sir.” He was quite definite on that point, I remember. “No, sir, I only grazed him, word of honor. He never budged.”

  “Go on, then. What else do you remember?”

  “The legs.” He extended one of his own. “They were split wide, I think. And they were—they were ahead.”

  “Not following you, Mr. Huntoon. You say his legs were ahead of him?”

  “On account of they were on the ground, sir.”

  I walked to the tree then. I stood under that dangling length of rope, feeling its tickle against my collarbone.

  “Captain Hitchcock,” I said. “Do you have any notion of how tall Leroy Fry was?”

  “Oh, average or above—maybe an inch or two shorter than yourself, Mr. Landor.”

  Epaphras Huntoon’s eyes were still closed when I came back to him. “Well, sir,” I told him, “this is very interesting. You mean to say his feet . . . his heels, maybe—”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “—were resting on the ground, do I have that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I can verify that,” said Hitchcock. “He was in the same position when I saw him.”

  “And how much time passed, Mr. Huntoon, between your first sighting of the body and your second?”

  “No more ’n twenty minutes, I reckon. Half an hour.”

  “And did the body’s position change at all during that time?”

  “No, sir. Not so’s I noticed. It was terrible dark.”

  “I’ve got just one more question, Mr. Huntoon, and then I’ll trouble you no longer. Did you know it was Leroy Fry when you saw him?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How?”

  A flush of red sprang to his cheeks. His mouth skewed right.

  “Well, sir, when I first run into him, I swung the lantern out. Like this. And there he was.”

  “And you recognized him right off ?”

  “Yes, sir.” That pickled grin again. “When I was a plebe once, Cadet Fry shaved off half my scalp. Right before dinner formation. Lord, did I catch it.”

  Narrative of Gus Landor

  5

  Lazarus began stinking after a few days—why should Leroy Fry have been any different? And as no one was planning to raise him from the dead anytime soon, and as his parents weren’t expected for another three weeks, the Academy administrators had a problem on their hands. They could bury the boy right away and brave the ire of the Fry family, or they could keep him above ground and risk the decay of his hard-used body. After some talk, they chose the latter course, but ice was still in demand, and Dr. Marquis was forced to fall back on a practice he’d witnessed many years back as a medical student at Edinburgh University. Which is to say, he submerged Leroy Fry in an alcohol bath.

  And that was how we found him, Captain Hitchcock and I. Naked, in an oak box filled with ethyl alcohol. To close his mouth, a stick had been wedged between his breastbone and jaw, and to keep him from rising, a load of charcoal had been dumped inside his chest cavity, but his nose kept breaking the surface, and his eyelids still refused to close. And there he floated, looking more alive than ever, as though he were being carried back to us on the next wave.

  The box had been caulked but not tightly enough, for we could hear a dripping on the trestle. All round us rose cool snarly fumes of alcohol, and I figured this was as close to drunk as I would get for some time.

  “Captain,” I said. “Maybe you’ve been to the ocean?”

  Hitchcock answered that he had, on several occasions.

  “Me, I’ve only been once,” I said. “I remember seeing a young girl there—eight, maybe—making a cathedral in the sand. Remarkable thing, abbeys and bell towers . . . I couldn’t even tell you all the details she piled on. She’d planned for everything—except the tide. The faster she worked, the faster it came on. Before another hour was out, that beautiful thing of hers was just a set of humps in the sand.”

  I made a leveling motion with my hand.

  “Wise girl,” I said. “Never shed a tear. I think about her sometimes when I try to pile things on top of these simple facts. You can make something beautiful, and then a wave comes along, and all that’s left is the humps. Your foundations. Shame on anyone who forgets them.”

  “So what are our foundations?” asked Hitchco
ck.

  “Well,” I said, “let’s look and see. We have this idea that Leroy Fry wanted to die, which seems like a damned good foundation, Captain. Why else would a young man hang himself from a tree? He was beaten down, it’s an old story. So what would a beaten man do? Why, he’d leave a note, that’s what. Tell his friends and family why he was doing such a thing. Get the hearing he never got when he was alive. So . . .” I held out my palms. “Where’s his note, Captain?”