The Night Inspector (10 page)

“I do lead a life,” he said. “I
am
the man I was. I am my own secret now, however. I am my darkest, best-held secret. Do I wish to be? I would prefer not to. Do I choose? I do not. Shipmate: Like the nation, I was divided from myself; like the nation, I was wounded; riven, like the nation, I healed; like you now, Bill, I am healthy; we are whole.”

We are untruthful, I thought. But for the first time in a day and night, I felt the profoundest attraction of sleep. I had been fatigued, of course. But now, in the gently rocking barge, under the hissing of the lamp and the clinking of his glass on his decanter, under the pouring stream of his throaty voice, its rise and fall, the deft articulation of his syllables like water over rock and log and streambed, and in the absoluteness of his despair, and the charm of his denying it, I felt—there is no other description—quite at home. I had him, or would have him soon. And his possession of me, or his attraction to me, his wish to know me because I mattered to his artist’s demand for darkness, and his need to know what lay behind the apparent, and my sense of my advantage over him—the comfort of gain, which I felt with my sound flesh and through the deep ache inside my jaw and nose and neck—closed my eyes and set me, sprawling in my chair and loose-jointed, asleep.

“Ho!” he called, and I was up, blinking, my hand inside my coat and on the butt of the Colt. “A ship lies to,” he said from the door that went up the short flight of stairs to the deck of the barge. “Are you in the mood for a bit of rowing, shipmate?”

I was too stupid with sleep, too weak with ease, to answer.

“Shake a leg,” he called, seizing a heavy oilskin coat from a peg beside the door and holding it out for me. He was wearing another such coat, and a sailor’s knit cap, and he looked, for the first time, like the man who had written of sailing on small, wooden craft to the other side of the world.

I put on the coat and tied a kerchief over my head so that it hung upon the mask—the less salt of the sea, the better for its paint and varnish. I set an oilskin cap he gave me over the kerchief, and thus I protected my face—from the elements, and from men’s scrutiny—the more. Then we were out and up and down again, to a dinghy tied to the barge. M took the oars and at his direction I cast off. A lantern on a hook behind him swung in the wind and chop of the channel, and he peered above it out toward a looming, lit vessel, its outlines blurred by fog and mist, that rocked at her chains.

He worked at the oars like a boy, demonstrating great strength in his wrists and hands, and showing a fine eye as he subtly corrected his course. I did not enjoy feeling like a lump of supercargo, a leather pouch of mail, say, heaped into the back of the boat. When he did not look over his shoulder, he seemed to stare at me, leaning in and digging with the oars, then leaning back to propel us. Perhaps he looked over my shoulder to navigate according to a light onshore. I could not tell. But it seemed to me that he addressed my face, my mask upon my face, as he rowed backward into the mist.

A thumping combination of whistle and drum rolled in toward us and seemed to shatter against the mist and wind before it might strike. Several bursts of sound came tinnily in again, and he said, “Pilot’s gone for the night. Cargo to be cursorily examined—we’ll note there is one, and what its contents are. Inspection in the morning. I’ll make for the larboard in hopes of a bit less motion when we tie to the ladderway.”

I could not imagine a bit
more
motion, nor could I see myself, white signboard of a face lit beneath the ship’s lights, coming up a ladder without terrorizing a man on watch, or falling into the black, oily waters of the harbor to drown. But we bumped rather more gently than I thought we might into the timbers at the side of the ship. And M made us fast quite expertly. Salt and mist and the reek of rotting vegetables, the stink of rat ordure and the corruption by the sea of wood itself, blew over us. Under it all, I could smell skin, and the vomitous musk of fear on my breath as it rose and was trapped beneath the mask. M set my hands and then feet aright, and as I climbed he followed close. No one greeted us, so he put his hands on my shoulders to steer me out of his way, and then led us to the gallery outside the captain’s cabin.

The master, named Borofsky, shook our hands. I made him uneasy, and he backed toward his broad desk, which was covered with charts held down by books. He took a manifest from the drawer and showed it to M, who moved closer to the light and who accepted a glass of Polish spirits distilled from potatoes. Small and trim, careful in his motions, Borofsky poured a full one, and I knew that they had drunk together
before. He lifted his own full glass before me, raising his eyebrows and averting his eyes, and I shook my head. He and M clinked glasses and drank the liquor down. Each smacked his lips and cleared his throat and made soft roaring sounds. M rubbed his full, bluntly trimmed beard, while Borofsky tugged at each end of his mustache and adjusted the buttons on his trim blue coat worn over dirty brown-red trousers.

“Ça va?”
he said to M.

M answered,
“Je ne sait pas cet mot ci—ah: moment! Je comprends. Vous portez, donc, le cognac en barils, et quelque fromage de France. Hein?”

“Monsieur sait que c’est comme il faut.”

“Bien sur. Mais ma verre, elle est vide.”

“Je regrette, monsieur, et je reconnais mon erreur. Voilà.”

The captain poured more of the clear liquor into the glass of the inspector, who toasted him and emptied his drink. They apparently agreed that the ship might receive its full inspection in the morning, and they shook hands. Borofsky bowed deeply, and M inclined his head.

“Thus,” he said to me, “I stand on an unmoving deck. It is what I do in my life at home and in my office. The deck may slope or sway, but it goes no place in particular. Let’s disembark, shipmate. Let’s set out on the little voyage home.”

I said to the captain, “Good night, sir.”

“Enchanté,”
he said, looking away.

In the dinghy, and moving through the chop toward the docks, I looked over M and saw the yellow and golden and sometimes green-looking lights as filtered by mist and a yellow fog and blown dark smoke.

“I shall leave you,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“I must leave you at the office and return. We must not abandon the vessel, in fact, once we’re aboard.”

“You’ll wait out the morning?” I thought of the potato spirits.

“Regulations established by the Surveyor of the Port of New York. I am a servant of the servants of the people, Bill. We’ll have a night of it again, though.”

“I look forward to it.”

He said, “You’ve warmed my heart on a bleak night.”

“I’ll bring you the pistol, then.”

“I’ll find the money. How much, would you say?”

“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.