The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  “Five dollars,” I said. “No, four, let’s say.”

  “A week’s pay,” he said.

  “I’m in no hurry for the money.”

  “A debt’s a debt. It’s a creature I know by heart.”

  We sat in silence, but surrounded by noise—the small splash of his oars, wielded with power and efficiency, against the black waters; the roaring of a furnace on the shore; the seething of the wind against the surface and the perforations of my mask; the little grunt he made as he held an oar, like a rudder, in the water while digging in with the other to turn us. The man of oceans, of three-masted ships, of naked brown girls and sailors who stalked their boys with hard hands and filleting knives: He rowed me, I thought, in a little boat. How could he bear this disintegration?

  “Land ho,” I said, with what I hoped was jest in my voice. I regretted at once my having reminded him of real voyages, and of landings made after considerable danger.

  “You sound like a sea dog” is all he said, letting us drift to the barge, lifting his face to silently laugh in the flare of the lantern, a smudge on the fog.

  I had a furrow up my inner arm, tender and debilitating, because I fell from a tree like a boy in mid-climb who goes frightened, stiff, and incapable. In fact, they had begun to stalk me. I was not as frightened of dying, though I did not wish to, as I was unnerved by considering they thought of me as a creature one might shoot. I had been, for a while, invulnerable; I had been, for a while, an eye at the end of a telescopic sight, a finger on the trigger of the Sharps, but no one they might know. I was, when I hunted them, a force and not a man. And before my little detachment was sent to the western theater, while we still were hunting in Virginia, I was up a tree in a blind I had built—lashed boughs for a shooting platform, a breastworks of bushes and limbs for camouflage—and I was daily awaiting the passage below me of reinforcements for Spotsylvania. Hearing my fire, artillery hidden in a copse hard by would begin to bombard the road. I would make my escape because I was a creature of the woods, Sergeant Grafton had been informed by the lieutenant relaying orders.

  “They think you virtually a ghost,” the sergeant told me.

  “From dying of fright,” I said.

  “Not you, Mr. Bartholomew. You’re a cold one.”

  “That’s shivering—from fright.”

  “That’s trembling from eagerness to kill someone,” he said, clapping me gently on the shoulder. “You aren’t human, though you’re decent enough for all that.”

  On the third day, kneeling to micturate over the edge of the blind, I heard the clatter of wheels; then a horse, perhaps because he caught my scent, whinnied. With my flies undone, I lay back to check my cap, and then I lay the blackened barrel over the breastworks and sighted on the road. The clatter, and now a creaking, approached the track below me, coming from the east, to my right, and moving toward the north and west. First I saw the two horses, nervously stepping because reined and harnessed to what frightened them, a platform on wagon wheels, swaying and making odd sounds because it was jerry-rigged and poorly balanced on the axle. In the platform, four men were kneeling, two at each side. Their rifles pointed south and north, one of each couple aiming at the tree line, one of each aiming at the thickets on the side of the road.

  They were looking out for me, I thought. They didn’t know my name or face, but they knew what I did. And you are, in this world, what you do. And they therefore did know me. They expected me. They wished to kill me, and I shook with the authority of my fright: They were after me.

  I could take each man on my side of the cart, I thought, and surely one on the other side, and probably each and every one of the four. Someone behind them—for two ragged columns followed of lean, dark men, many of them with shaved heads because of the lice that infested them, all of them hard-looking, bitter, nourished only by rage or despair—one of them would harvest me.

  Breathing was difficult, for I forced myself to breathe shallowly for silence’s sake; yet I wished to gulp at the sky, to chew the air, to relieve my stoppered chest. I went over the side and dove off the limb like a squirrel. My foot caught, my rifle was nearly pulled from my grasp, and I hit, balls and belly and all, the limb beneath my blind. I held my weapon. I held the limb. They heard me and poured a dozen rounds, at least, into the tree. A ball went up the limb, possibly a ricochet from a complete miss, and it gathered bark and brought it through my shirt and up my arm, just above the armpit, and along the underside, leaving a furrow that ended at the forearm, loaded with sap and bark and bits of cloth.

  I was away by then, running a line of retreat I had marked out days before. The barrage began and some of them were killed. We found the rolling platform from which they had cut the horses as they fled. I lay in the blood of the Rebels on the platform, tilted up on its two wheels, bracing myself at the bottom with my feet while Sergeant Grafton cut away my shirt and poured liniment into the wound.

  I refused to cry out.

  He swabbed with the fragments of my shirt to clean away the bits of cloth and tree, and then he poured more liniment on.

  “Survive my tender attentions, Mr. Bartholomew, and you’ll surely survive the wound.”

  “Agreed,” I forced through my teeth.

  “We’ll get you a shirt from a corpse, if you like.” He nodded at Sam, who stood reluctantly.

  “No,” I said to Sam, “don’t bother with a shirt. Their skin will do me.”

  Sam looked at Sergeant Grafton, who said, “He’s joking, Sam.”

  “You’re sure?” Sam asked.

  “No,” Sergeant Grafton said.

  I was still tender and sore when we made our way to harry the Army of Tennessee, which the Rebels wanted to bring from Tuscumbia toward Central Georgia to block Sherman’s move out of Atlanta. We came down through North Charleston and were a long way from Milledgeville in Georgia, where couriers were to find us, when we stopped in a shabby hamlet the name of which none of us knew. I counted seven bullet-pocked houses, but Sergeant Grafton said there were only six, because one I had counted was only an estimable outhouse. Its seat was wide enough for two, and it was elevated with interior steps, a palace that reminded me of nothing so much as the privy at our place in Paynes Corners, home to my aging mother and, in a sense, to my unmourned uncle. All the structures were in need of paint, inside and out, as we found, moving warily from building to building by twosomes. We sheltered, once we had found ourselves alone, in a low house with a small porch and a back door; it was situated closest to the scrubby brush that ran toward the woods and farthest of them all from the long, uncultivated field that would be a killing ground if we were jumped.

  We drew water from the well behind the house, and we cooked in the iron stove, plundering the fled householders’ flour to make pan bread. We took four-hour turns walking watch around the house. The sergeant was willing to excuse me from patrolling, but I was too dependent on him and the lads for my life; I wanted their goodwill—it meant my safety—and I didn’t mind losing sleep, and feeling the chafe of my wound against my side, in order to secure it. So it was true, as I later stated, that in spite of Mr. Homer having posed me in a tree for his picture of a marksman on picket duty, I was never compelled to patrol.

  The houses were set fifty and more yards apart, and I left off circling our temporary house on my watch, walking into the warm night, in order to assure myself that we were alone and therefore safe. They had fled the fighting, of course, but I wondered why they hadn’t returned. It is likely that no one else among us would have found the remains of the doll because they were not gifted with my eyesight; there was little even barely visible that I did not see. At the third house from ours, the farthest down the row, attached to the field, I found the face of a rag doll—only the small face, no bigger than my thumb, with inked dots for eyes and a vertical line for a nose, a curved line for its smiling mouth—abandoned at the ledge of the window at the front dooryard, hard by the porch. My lantern caught its white, coarse cloth. The wind sh
ifted back against me, and it carried with it something of cellars, something like the small upstate caves outside which I had paused as a boy, smelling the cold, earthen odor of snakes. I regarded the staring fragment of doll, caught on the coarse wood of the sill, beneath the shattered glass.

  But why would a child leave her doll? And why leave but a piece of it?

  I assessed the glass, and the scars of bullets in the window’s frame and above the sill. I slowly went to my knees and, seating the lantern on the porch beside the window, I lowered myself to the ground, fully prone, but propped on my hands, so that I could sniff the hard-packed soil of the dooryard. This was something I knew. Then, on my feet again, leaning my rifle against the porch, I walked the wall with the lantern high and close to it, from the doll face along to my right toward the sliding door of a small storage shed. The clapboard was well chewed by gunfire. Most of it seemed to have been concentrated at the same height.

  Yes, I thought, slipping the doll’s head into my belt and retrieving my rifle. I thought: No!

  I knew to walk out behind the house and to hold my lantern low, to prod the earth with the toe of my boot, looking to pry loose clods. I found nothing for twenty yards in either direction right or left, and nothing fifteen or twenty yards back from the house.

  “Well, of course,” I instructed the overgrown field, the high, bright half of moon, the distant trees, the houseful of snoring men. Beyond the light my lantern threw, a creature moved off, and I wished I had gone with it. “Why,” I asked, “would you dig when you hadn’t to? When you were moving at a rapid march?” I should have known, I thought, expert as I was at hiding in sight.

  I returned to the house and I pulled a loose finishing nail all the way out of the clapboard with my knife. Using the handle of the knife as a hammer, I affixed the nail above the door of the shed and hung my lantern there. I took up my rifle, though I knew that what I’d face could not be fought, and I slid the shed door open on its rough runner, crying out something in no words, employing the sound as something of a shield.

  There was my memory of coiled, sleeping snakes. There was the blood I had smelled on the beaten clay of the dooryard. There was the hamlet, and there— Her arm was bent behind her; she was devoid of expression, although her gray-green blankness was punctuated by the movement of a rat across her mouth (for the flesh is tenderest there, and at the cheeks). I had pulled up and fired before I knew that I would, and of course I missed the rat and caved in the face of the six- or seven-year-old girl, bloated as it was with gases from the corrupted internal organs. Drawn by the sound of my shot, they came up in good time, armed and shouting.

  Sam began to convulse in vomiting and tears, and it was contagious, and we all of us were ill. The smell was as nothing compared to what poured upon us from the heaped corpses in their clothing rent by bullet after bullet, and in their blood. Men and women were piled upon each other with no respect for the intimacy of their posture.

  I could not help but be offended by this disregard for their modesty, I told Sergeant Grafton.

  He looked at me as if he might speak, but then he returned, as did I, to pulling the corpses away from one another and laying them in rows.

  Sam whimpered, and then cleared his throat, and made as if to adjust one of the lanterns one of them had hung from a post. “I wish we could know which family was which,” he said. “It seems wrong to separate them like this.”

  “A small, a miniature wrong,” the sergeant said.

  “Yes. But they require rescuing,” Sam said.

  The sergeant only continued to drag the bodies and to line them up.

  I was astonished at the number of children they had executed. I wondered if one of the men had shown resistance, or had even killed a Union soldier, to call down such a large and brutal vengeance. All that was ever required, of course, for such a massacre was for a soldier to shoot his piece at the wrong moment, when everyone was tense or fearful or fresh from a battle gone wrong. Of course, it also required an officer, I thought, to permit himself to be swept by the moment’s emotional flood, and to organize the operation. So many men to herd the families, so many men to guard the perimeter as they were marched into place, and so many men to be willing to stand and pour the volley into the mothers huddled round their children or grasping their infants—we’d found three babies—while husbands raged or trembled or called to those they loved about courage or heaven, or threatened the soldiers, or begged. There were young boys and girls, and the babies, and probably the parents had been young, although they now looked very old—as old, I thought, as people get.

  The shirts of some were burned at the entrance hole of the bullet. The women, I saw, were clothed, and perhaps they hadn’t been raped. You could not tell, of course, for it’s simple to lift the skirts of her dress up over her head and hold her thus for a comrade before he offers you a similar courtesy so that you may take your turn. I would not look beneath their clothing to see if any had been violated; there were young girls, and I could not bear to know.

  Their flesh oozed liquids you would not know the body contained, and the skin was loose on them, as if a form of greenish clothing that might tear away when we moved them. The stench, now fully upon us, was like the fields after any battle, and it merely sickened us, and we were accustomed to such effluvia, so sweet and rich and full of bowel and the cuprousness of blood.

  It was their faces I wished not to look upon. I had seen men killed, and I had killed them. I had smelled their corpses and the corpses other men had made. But I’d seen only the faces of men, condemned to die or dying gladly, though I think few do gladly die, and the expressions had, for the most part, been of little more than violence that had shaken the features, which, after days, in fact, begin to relax, go bland and loose and full. Here, however, I saw fury and despair, deep fright, and I sensed in them a diminution—that they had understood, ultimately, that to someone in the world with the power to enforce his conviction, they had not mattered at all.

  “You are making something of this,” Sergeant Grafton said. “You are constructing an insight.”

  I stood. I regarded him. I thought of striking him, and he knew it.

  “Don’t,” he said. “There’s no profit in it.”

  I thought of what he deemed an insight, my no doubt erroneous belief that these dead mattered more than any bodies I had produced as I descended upon them like Jehovah down upon the Egyptians. I thought, as well, of the profit and loss in striking the man who could see me summoned at a courts-martial, and who could see me abandoned on a hunt, and who could also, and probably with justification, shoot me down if I made to assault him.

  “I haven’t any idea what you mean,” I said, and I commenced the search of dead hands for the fragments of missing, stuffed bits of chest, or arm, or leg, that had been clutched when the volleying had torn away the head and left it perched upon the house. I had vowed that I would investigate each hand of every child, but I could not. I pried open the small fists of one whose eyes were open, and could not force myself beyond the hands of one other, a girl, whose hair had caught fire from the heat of the shots as they entered her face and neck. I took the head of the doll from my belt and carried it to the end of a row and set it upon the straw: man with much of his arm and chest shot away; man with no apparent wound; man with all of one side of his rib cage showing; woman with one shoe on; woman whose wound was in her shoulder, probably dead from the bleeding and shock; small girl; larger girl of seven or so; girl; a boy whose hands remained in fists I dared not open; boy without trousers; girl; the finger of cloth with its painted face.

  We slept hard, afterward, each of us claiming not to have wakened to smell his hands or see them as they lay in the shed. I actually went, when I waked, to see if Sam had covered the mirror in the hallway of the house we used. He had.

  We departed without burying them, although Sergeant Grafton drove a fence post into the earth outside the shed and hung upon it the tarnished silver crucifix that had enci
rcled the neck of one of the women. We hurried along, agreeing that our orders called us away, agreeing without speech that what hurried us was what we left behind. After much of a day’s hard riding, we entered swampy ground that sucked at the hooves of our horses and that worried the sergeant. He sent me up a tree to survey the landscape, and I saw solider ground to our west. We rode toward it, suffering much from insects not much larger than fleas that anguished our horses and flew in at our nose and mouth and eyes. As we climbed, they diminished, although the pitch grew steep and we led rather than rode the horses.

  “What does this go to?” the sergeant asked me.

  “Nothing pleasant,” I said.

  “In specific?”

  “I haven’t any idea,” I said.

  “Then please find out,” he said, stopping us and sending me to a slender poplar that swayed as I went up. “Stop,” the sergeant called, and I did. “Why burden yourself with the rifle?”

  “It is what accompanies me up trees, Sergeant.”

  “See that it doesn’t go off.”

  Despite the low crotch of the tree, because we had climbed a good distance, I was able to make out, instantly, motion in a copse a little more than three or four hundred yards from us. I used my telescope, and the sergeant hushed them, knowing that I used it only for a stalk. I enjoyed working with him; he was professional, and he offered me deference when the matter at hand concerned my work.

  He looked up, waiting. I looked down to him and nodded. I presented the four fingers of my right hand, and he nodded. They led the horses back from the tree, and they readied their weapons. They would shelter behind a stone outcropping we had passed, calming the tethered horses and preparing to rescue or reinforce me.

  I looked back, through the telescope, at the four men in their encampment. They seemed to have no horses, or to have left them somewhere. I could not find their mounts after sweeping the landscape, so I looked once more with the telescope and then replaced it in my kit. Now I looked upon them with my telescopic sight. I checked the arming of the Sharps. I selected the first of them, a man in an Indian squat some small distance from the others. I would take him and then quickly find a second target where the three of them waited.