The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  I covered the house. One of them scuttled back, but the other paused, and I shot him on the spot. There were only a Rebel and a whore left to contend with, and I decided to risk open movement. I walked at a good marching pace up the low hill the way I had come. Every now and again, I stopped and turned to face the sheds and scrutinized the land with my telescope. If they were lucky, they’d be fucking each other, I thought, because there was nothing left to do in the face of so much slaughter except, of course, wail at the skies—where the vulture, I remembered, was poised.

  “I love when you do that,” Jessie said.

  “You must tell no one.”

  “We are our secret,” she said, wiping the tears at my eyes. “We are our good secret. No one knows about us except that you prefer me and will pay most dearly, and that I am pleased to be preferred.” She lay against me now, her head on my chest. I could feel her breath against my breast as she spoke. “And within that secret,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “The other one. About the poor children,” she said.

  “Of course. I have our man, and I am laying the ground.”

  “While doing a lay. A double lay, then, and one of them not for profit.”

  “But he has latterly had a death in the family, and I must be tentative. But I have not forgotten the children. And I wonder if the recent death will not be powerful motive for him to lend us a hand.”

  She moved her own hand and cradled me in it, cock and balls at rest. It was as if she held the whole of me.

  Uncle Sidney Cowper, I came to realize, had admirably demonstrated the kind of discipline and restraint about which he had preached. This came to me of a wet, cold afternoon in my fourteenth year when I was out and at my chores—weather was no obstacle to the performance of duty, Uncle Sidney preached, and besides, we did need the wood to warm the house. I was splitting some limbs of birch to use as kindling in our kitchen stove and was concentrating on the blade of the axe in the greasy, chilly rain. I brought in an armful and was about to go out for another, pausing to filch a carrot from the simmering kettle of soup on the stove, when I heard a kind of snuffling from the pantry. It occurred to me that something large, say a raccoon, had got into our stores. At the door, just slightly ajar, I paused, for the snuffling had been joined by a lighter sound, as of panting, and it sounded more like a person, and less like a raccoon. I went to one knee at the door and listened, pressing my ear to the space between the door and the jamb.

  The lighter sound became “He … will … hear,” whispered in my mother’s voice.

  The deeper snuffling was, of course, the energetic gasping for breath as he grasped for my mother of Uncle Sidney Cowper.

  I do not know what caused me to stand and kick the door shut, but I did, still dripping in my soaked canvas coat, before I went outside and set to splitting thick, heavy sections of birch. It was pleasing that no thoughts came into my head or, if they did, were instantly banished by my care with the heavy axe and my concentration on meeting the top of each section with the wet, sharp blade. When I heard the door from the mudroom off the kitchen slam to, I knew to stand and catch my breath. I held the axe across my body with both hands, and I was uncertain about my intentions with it.

  This thought seemed to catch Uncle Sidney, for he stopped in his progress toward me and studied his nephew, but then, to his credit, he came up within inches of me and looked into my eyes. He wrapped the skirts of his long coat beneath his legs, and he sat on the chopping block. I stepped back a pace, whether for the easier placement of a blow or for safety’s sake, I do not know.

  Water poured off the shakes of the roof and into a couple of barrels, while the wind blew rain upon us and the spruces about the house nodded under the onslaught. My uncle said, “So what do you say, Billy? Was the slamming necessary? A gentleman doesn’t slam doors. Nor does he invade the privacy of others. Don’t pout, son.”

  “Uncle, would you not call me ‘son’?”

  “It’s your dear father’s prerogative, eh?”

  I didn’t know what prerogative was, but I nodded.

  “Understood. Next?”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “What’s on your mind, Billy? Come along.”

  “Why … my mother, Uncle Sidney.”

  “Yes. We were conferring, she and I.” He stared hard into my eyes, defying me to comment. “On matters of great moment.”

  “I don’t think my father would approve, Uncle Sidney. I—may I speak frankly, sir?”

  “As I’ve taught you, son—ah: lad. As you know to do. With courtesy.”

  “Sir, I don’t think it’s right, you making the beast with my mother.”

  I waited for the blow. None came. He smiled. He reached out his hand and cupped my thigh from behind. He kneaded gently and most intimately. He said, “I don’t actually care very much which one of you it is,” he said. “It could be you. It could be her. I’m pleased to let you choose which one.” His hand came around to the front of my thigh and began to climb. I stepped back and raised the axe to my shoulder. “There are virtues to each,” he said, smiling as if she had just set down his evening meal.

  I said the only thought I had: “Do you mean, sir, that my mother is … with you because she’s keeping you off me?”

  His smile went wider, his eyes disappeared between the folds of skin beneath and around them, and then the smile faded and his eyes returned. He studied me, and I knew he knew me very well. He was certain, I thought, that I would permit her to sacrifice the wholeness of her intimate being to preserve the wholeness of mine.

  I lifted the axe from my shoulder and my body tensed. So did his. He stood as I raised the axe above my head, and he moved backward, straddling the block, as I brought it down. He skipped backward, nimbly for such a large man, and I missed by him little. The blade was buried deep in the chopping block.

  “You might have hurt me!” he said, his feelings apparently damaged though his body was sadly unscarred.

  “I regret that I did not, Uncle Sidney.”

  “I suppose you do. I’m going back inside, Billy. Your mother and I must … talk. Why don’t you stay out here and split more wood. Say for another half an hour? You won’t get too wet, I pray.”

  He could dominate me physically, unless I killed him while he slept or while his back was turned. He would have me in a fashion I had heard about from boys in the district, but which I didn’t entirely understand. I had to push and pry to get the axe out of the block, and I worked at that as I thought. Or he would have my mother—I again heard the snuffling of his breath, and the sound of my mother panting. I would have to kill him, I thought. I could not permit my mother to give herself to him, in violation of my father’s memory and of herself.

  Though she had not been weeping. I was certain of that. She had been concerned for their privacy, I thought, hearing again the way she said her concerns that someone might hear.

  I would have to kill him, I thought again.

  We sat in Madison Square and watched as a pointy-snouted street dog stalked doves. M was to imminently depart for his office, and I was coming off a night’s wandering, intending to walk downtown with him in the direction of Mr. Lapham Dumont, whose services I had to enlist. He ate a small green apple that was sour-tasting, he said around small nibbles of the tight flesh of the fruit, as traffic pounded and whinnied and rattled on the stones where Broadway and Fifth Avenue crossed, the western street going east and the eastern going west. The island there was a cinched-in belt, a kind of waist of an X, a collection point for streams of commerce and conveyance and noise.

  “Dr. Osgood read from 15th Corinthians,” he said, as if to the apple. “Mal’s company of volunteers was present, a good number of them, strapping and sorrowing lads. They carried his coffin from the house to the funeral cars—black vehicles, several black horses, though a few of them were chestnut; none were white. A white horse, I think, would have been frightening somehow. They first walked through the hall, single f
ile, orderly, attentive, somber. They looked on Mal and then passed through. They returned again to take his coffin up. They, alive, in their uniforms, and he, so dead, in his. Elizabeth had dressed him. I know not how. The wound was so apparent, despite everyone’s best efforts. Such wounds, you know, are taken up by those who live. Do you not think so? You have had experience—”

  “In wounds? Oh, yes.”

  “No, Bill. In surviving the wounded dead and assuming their wounds. On the body of the soul, I say. Am I wrong?”

  “No. I remember a man who was shot in the lungs. Whenever I cough, I think of his blood coming out between his lips.”

  “A fallen comrade,” he said.

  I made no reply.

  “He was a boy. He was dressed as a man. Why not? He wished to be one. He even wore the ceremonial sword.”

  “They buried him with his sword?”

  “Do you not think it fitting?”

  “Of course. And his pistol? Was he buried wearing that?”

  He turned to gaze on my mask and then at my eyes. Even as his vision was concentrated upon me, he seemed to me, as always, to be staring in more than out. “He wears only the sword. The coroner’s jury have the pistol still.” He waited for me to speak, but I did not. “You should have seen it. And you would have, leastwise, been invited to, on the strength of our deep acquaintanceship. It was only family there, you see. They carried him from the hearse to the cemetery ground. I must report myself composed. I think that Lizzie and I were both composed. Although when he was lowered in, tucked away for the last time in his boy’s life, and the sound issued of earth as it fell upon the coffin, and Stanwix shuddered as if struck by lightning or some other force invisible, I wished to gnash and wail at the skies.”

  “Is that where you would look?”

  “For what?”

  “For God.”

  “I look nowhere for God. If he be manifested, I will see. If he be considered, it will be within my speculations.” He nibbled at the core of the apple and tossed it to the dog, who ran from it, then ran back toward it, sniffed it cautiously, and chewed it down. “I regard my surviving son, a stripling boy, who cannot, often, hear. So perhaps I will learn to listen for God. Perhaps if I hear, Stanny will as well. Will we walk, then?” His eyes were wet, and he turned, so that I saw his back as we left the park; he was in hiding, behind himself.

  I said, as we were closer to his striking off for the district office on the North River, and as I would turn toward the Exchange and, nearby, the office of Lapham Dumont, “We must protect the children, mustn’t we?”

  He stopped his long stride and lifted his head. “From what?”

  “From the loss of their youth. From, in a case I know, actual slavery.”

  “To whom?”

  “Agriculturists.”

  “Where?”

  “South. Deep South.”

  “They are Negro youth?”

  “Near infants, some of them.”

  “Whom we might rescue?”

  I nodded.

  “I would save a young life or two,” he said.

  “We might speak of it again. But it might serve the children were we to do so in confidence. Entre-nous, as they say.”

  “Confidence is my game,” he said. As he heard his own words, his face brightened, and he smiled. “Confidence,” he said.

  “More on it later?” I said.

  He clapped me across the shoulders with great power. “More,” he said, as if someone were pouring him a drink.

  I walked the length of the narrow second-story office that was shared by traders like Dumont who also shared clerical assistance and runners. He was in a room made of wooden half-walls with frosted glass from, say, the waist to just above the head of the average man. One might have the illusion of privacy if not the privacy itself. He sat in a wooden chair at his desk and opposite was a client’s wooden chair. There were few books and no pictures. Light was from the gas fixtures suspended from the ceiling above each little office. He pushed his chair back as I stepped in and sat.

  “No,” I said, as if to the dog in the park, “you stay.”

  “It’s useless,” he whispered. “I’m in arrears. I haven’t the money.”

  “Yet,” I said.

  “Of course.” He had his gray handkerchief out, and he rubbed it on his face, then dried his hands in it. His red face shone, and his nose seemed lighted from within. “I will have your money. It’s an obligation,” he said. “Hate it though I might. The skins of bears. How could I?”

  I permitted the mask to regard him. I compelled him, with its unreadable stare, I hammered him down until he was impaled in his seat. I waited seconds more. “The question,” I said in a low, level voice, “is how will you?”

  “Will what? That is: will I what? Do what?”

  “Assist me.”

  “In what endeavor, sir?”

  “In none about which you need to know or, indeed, will know. I require from you a manifest, an order for carting, and a receipt. Don’t trouble yourself in dating the documents, since I will act, in this instance, as your clerk.”

  “Manifest of what? For what? Who to? Why?”

  “The cargo will consist of whatever might come in tun or half-tun barrels.”

  He lifted his eyes to stare at the mask. “And what will you be placing in the barrels?”

  “There might be nothing in them. There will, in all probability, be no barrels. That is not your concern. Yours is to produce the papers I require, signed by yourself.”

  “What protects me, Bartholomew?”

  “I’ll protect you, Dumont. Just as I have done.”

  “From who did you ever protect me?”

  “William Bartholomew. He is an acid-etched man of measureless cruelty. A welsher needs protecting from a man like that. He would as soon tear your kidneys out and grill them with bacon for his dinner. I have it on authority he has forborne from devouring whatever’s edible in you only because he wants you alive to pay your obligation to him. I believe this. Do you believe this?”

  He nodded his long neck, his bony head. “A good deal of it I do. I do.”

  “Good. You sound married to my proposal,” I said.

  He nodded again, this time silently, as he rubbed at his face with his knuckly, long fingers.

  “The paperwork,” I said.

  “Agreed. Do I need to shake your hand?”

  I smiled. He could not see me. I stood and said, “Within the week, then?”

  “Today,” he said. “Tomorrow. As you wish.”

  “The money shortly thereafter?”

  “That’s as I can.”

  “It’s as I say.”

  “The money thereafter. Rest assured.”

  “Yes, Lapham.”

  He wiped at his face with his handkerchief, and I left before he blew his nose.

  Someone was hurting a child, though it might have been a woman I heard—perhaps a small woman, I thought. Over the noises of the city’s dawn, as wagons slowly rolled on wheels that splintered upon the cobbles under the burden of hides, beef halves, dead poultry buried in ice, fresh flowers for the breakfast tables of the wealthy, or the furniture from households in arrears, I heard the steady cry of someone small, with a high voice, being hurt. It was remarkably regular, and soon enough it became one of the many sounds—you could even hear the doves coo, and the scolding by dirty sparrows—that constituted the calling awake of those who knew how to sleep.

  Oh and Oh and Oh.

  No, I thought: a child. I could not discern whether it was a response to hard blows, or the prodding of some instrument—fire poker, knife, the buckle of a belt—but it was regular and forceful, for the sounds were clearly part of an expulsion of breath, a response to a shock.

  An engine at the New York and Harlem freight depot on White Street gave out a huffy demand, and I waited for the clash of metal that would signal cars being joined or pulled separate. I kept my eyes closed and kept my arms crossed as I lay on the
cot. I thought of Malcolm lying in his uniform, sword at his side and apparently not armed for his journey with my revolver. It was an investment, but I would not mind its return. It had traveled with me, after all, up and down several states along our seaboard. It had saved my life and it had cost the lives of others. Seamen and their scrimshaw and clasp knives and trunks: shooters and their weapons.

  The crying had grown ragged, the noises breaking into pieces as the one who uttered them also must break. Oh-uh, Oh-uh. One of the manufactories shrieked its whistle to signal in the workers for the day. Now it was Uh and then a silence, then Uh. Whoever administered the punishment was growing tired, I thought, and was pausing between blows. Of course, it was also possible the child was dying. As the small noise among a hundred loud ones became more and more noticeable for its absence, I thought: unconscious or dead. I thought: That’s a nice bit of luck for someone.

  Then I thought of Uncle Sidney Cowper, who would let me choose which of us, my mother or I, would be snug harbor to his needs. It was at this time in my life that I dreamed of his notebook and found it in the woodpile and thought to incur his obligation by returning it. I learned something about transactions, and it has stood me in good stead all my life: Know the rules; do not trade with hope, but rather, if possible, with advantage harvested and, like the fruits in glass my mother stored every summer, put by for a need. To wit: I should have read his entries and labored to decipher their use by me to keep him off us. Instead, I ambled and prattled and offered and smiled. He thanked me, but the violence with which he pulled the leather notebook from my outstretched hand instructed me that I had just let go of something useful. A resource is to be cherished: William Bartholomew on M. And watch it now come to fruit.