The Night Inspector (18 page)

I found a strayed mare, on which we carried tarpaulins and blankets and food, rather early in my association with Sergeant Grafton when we were moving down through southern Pennsylvania. I sat back against a tree as he shouted at Burton and as Sam Mordecai went trotting off with a resoluteness I found charming, since he’d no idea where he should seek the horse.

The sergeant shouted, “Bartholomew, you lazy bugger assassin!” But I merely smiled and pulled my hat low upon my head and closed my eyes.

I opened them, only seconds later, and I called to him, “The fruits of my catnap, Sergeant. She’s in a grove of plum trees.”

He walked over and cut a chew of tobacco for himself and inserted it into his mouth. Then, around it, he said, “Specifically plum?”

“I do know a plum tree when I see one.”

“And you saw one.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, Sergeant, goddamn it, Bartholomew. Stand up and give me a goddamned report!”

“Sergeant, the lazy bugger assassin”—and he began to smile—“reports that he dreamed of seeing the runaway mare in a grove of plums.”

“I’m going to send Burton, on the strength of your dream, to look for plum trees. Is that what you suggest?”

“It is.”

“And I’ll never doubt you again, I suppose.”

“I suppose you’ll try, Sergeant. But you’ll wonder.”

He spat some tobacco juice between my feet. When he looked up, he was grinning. “Did you see me swallow any of this and choke to death?”

“I’m willing to be patient,” I told him, and he began to sputter into a laugh.

Of course, we found the horse, and in a grove of trees that Burton thought, though he couldn’t be sure, were plums.

It wasn’t until we were pretty far south, halfway through the Carolinas, that I dreamed the dream about the woman and woke, shouting, to terrify Grafton and Burton and bring Mordecai running over from where he’d mounted watch. The night was cold and wet, heavy rain on everything for hours, and we were soaked and miserable to start with. We had rolled into our blankets and covered ourselves with tarpaulins because we hadn’t the grit, nor had Grafton the heart to order us, to make shelters with rope and tent halves, using the low limbs of slender dogwoods, the only trees near where we had stopped.

“Are you drunk, Mr. Bartholomew?”

“No, Sergeant, and I wish I was.”

“You were dreaming?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Because? Afraid because? Go back to your watching, Mr. Mordecai. Wake Mr. Burton in two hours and see if you can sleep. If not, find a way to make a fire in a rainstorm and I’ll put you in for medals. Mr. Bartholomew? Why afraid?”

“Because of what I dreamed.”

He slid down into his blanket and tarp and he rolled over. He murmured, “Which was?”

I slid down in my own blanket roll and pretended not to hear. I did hear his voice again, but I ignored it. He was snoring soon enough, as all soldiers learn to do, in rain or snow or landslide of mud or manure: Stop, do the necessaries, close your eyes, and sleep.

I tried to keep my eyes open in the cold and soak and darkness, for I
did not want to live inside that dream again. I blinked myself awake a few times, but then I could not help but fall—as if down a cliff face or into a mining pit, for thousands of yards, and at great speed—into sleep. I was not invaded by the dream again, although I thought of it at once on waking, and left the camp, as if to relieve myself, because I did not wish to speak of it in any particulars. Fortunately, Sergeant Grafton was too uncomfortable and moody to demand an accounting of my nighttime vagaries.

I had dreamed of a tall woman in a dress the color of trilliums, that clean whiteness, who wore a gauzy cloth in her hair that matched the dress. Her arms were long, and I could see, as the light cloth was pressed against her by a wind, that her thighs were long as well. She had a long face, a long, straight nose, and a very wide mouth. Her throat was long, too, and it was arched, strained, as if she tried to hear. It was me, I thought in the dream. She was trying to listen for me, for she knew that I was on my way. She hadn’t the face of anyone I knew, but it was a face to which I was powerfully attracted, and I coveted her body, thinking that I would spare her if she would lie down with me.

How wrong, I said in the dream, to kill her if she doesn’t.

I was drenched, then, in someone’s dark saliva. I smelled a stink, as of manure. But it was tobacco, of course, and Sergeant Grafton was passing along the lieutenant’s instructions, handed down from the brigadier to the colonel to our lieutenant to Grafton, and then, in their vileness, to me. I choked at the smell. She turned, as if she’d heard me gasp.

I stared at her, stared into her dark, intense eyes. I ran my eyes like fingers along the frown marks at her mouth, etched beneath her tan. She nipped at my fingers, as if to promise pleasure. I closed my eyes, then opened them, and I stared at her lips. I felt charged, and full, and then I tingled with release, and I stared and I surged, and I cried aloud, and her face exploded as if I had caught it in my sight and fired.

So I waited for a week, and then for weeks, to learn that I’d been ordered to kill a woman.

What I wish to depose here is that I
never
had such a presentiment about Malcolm. Learning as I did, and learning what I did, I was as staggered as his parents must have been. But that cannot be, of course. But I was, indeed, staggered. And I did feel somehow responsible. And I did say “somehow” as a cowardly begging off. You see, my mind or nighttime soul or whatever aspect of us is involved in dreaming
is
a part of this recollection. That is what I mean to say. For, while the articles in the New York papers were either unsigned, or not by him, the editorial piece in the
Advertiser
, printed in Boston and left behind at my office by a Massachusetts traveler in French writing machines (for which he wanted much and promised little), was signed by one S. Mordecai. I read it two weeks after I had read the story in
The New York Times
.

But it had not happened yet on the afternoon of which I speak, and it had not happened that night. “He was the same boy,” his father told me days afterward, as we sat in his office on the barge, he as inspector for the night and I as the comforting friend. The fire was high although it had been a sweltering September day, and he drank too much gin. He ran with sweat, and his tears ran with it; he was all a-glisten, and his broad workingman’s hands trembled more than I had ever seen. “He was the same boy during the day before we found him. I have been assured. He skylarked with the other clerks at the Atlantic and Great Western. He was merry. Although I must report to you, shipmate, that he sported with the pistol. You told him it was a serious weapon. You repeatedly passed the warning along, and I somberly echoed it. But he listened to neither. He was careless with it, bringing it to work, apparently, although I didn’t know, of course. I would otherwise have taken a hand.”

He sighed. “I already did—had I told you? There had been too much coming home in the late watches of the night. We had given warning. I took his key away that opened the night latch, and I told him he must be in and quiet in his room by a decent hour, nine bells. We rise early, after all, and he had work as well. For two nights, he stayed in. His uniform, you see, had just arrived, and he must try it on in the evenings, and
parade for his sisters. But, then, no: out into the night, and away until dawn, and we, rising and falling like a young man’s feelings, staggering, then, through the long days’ exhaustion. So it would not do.”

“Of course not,” I said, but he did not hear me.

“I came downstairs for my breakfast. Lizzie spoke of the night before. I had been asleep, having worked at something about the Holy Land after supper, but Lizzie, often a lighter sleeper, had gone downstairs at one or two of the morning, summoned by Malcolm’s rapping at the door. She did remonstrate, she says, but in a motherly and gentle way. Can you not hear it? ‘Dear fellow, this is simply
too
late. Can you not try harder for us?’ So she says it was, and so it was. In and up goes Malcolm and up he remains in the morning, late for work. Lizzie sends one of the girls—I had left for work by now, and was at the river and plying what must forever be my trade. And she goes up and calls at his door, and he says, ‘Yes.’

“That is his last word. And that it should be ‘Yes,’ in affirmation of his sister, or of home and domestic love, or of his own fault in jeopardizing his job, I find nearly intolerable in the weight of emotion with which it lands upon me, shipmate. ‘Yes.’ ”

“Yes,” I said.

“I told Lizzie to leave him be. His reception at work would be his own worst punishment, and he would learn, if from nothing else, then from that. A man must take the consequences, I told her, and off I went.”

“Oh,” I said. “I see. It was
then
that you went, and not earlier.”

“Earlier? What was—earlier. Yes. Lizzie tried during the day, at odd hours, to rouse him. It was not unusual for him to sleep so hard, so deep, that he could not be wakened. He loved to sleep, that fellow, and so dearly he sleeps now at Woodlawn. Sleeps he and sleeps he, down at the bottom, where the oozy weeds about him twist.

“That was a day, you might recall, when we ate a chop and drank some ale and spoke of the War, and the need for compassion for those who surrendered. I did have difficulty in persuading you! But of course, you were there, and they tried to shoot you down, and you, in turn, them.
So much more simple for the unwounded man to be compassionate. I admired so your willingness to turn—ah, you see.…”

“The other cheek. Indeed. What’s left of it. So I am given to understand that you were late returning.”

“Returning?”

“Home. The night you found—”

“Tardy and tied to the masthead and lashed for it, I can promise you. She lit into me with the Cat that night. But paused to tell me of his long sleeping, his silence all the day, and the door locked from within. I had it down, I can tell you. I sent it off the hinges and down.”

He poured gin and missed the glass with a good deal of it. I rose to take the bottle from his hands and pour again. He nodded his gratitude. He could not speak. His eyes looked painted on, not pained; his eyes looked dead in his gleaming face.

“In bed,” he whispered. “In his nightclothes. Pistol on the pillow. Head at the far corner of the bedclothing. Eyes unclosed. A terrible wound in his temple. Bits of skull and skin, skeins of drying blood. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, my Malcolm dead. His eyes not shut, and looking at me”—his head came up, his own eyes rested upon me, giving little light forth—“and Lizzie atop him, pulling at his shoulders, demanding that her son wake up.”

“Poor soul.”

“He must have been playing with the pistol, for his hand was still around it, you see.”

“Oh. Around it, then. I thought it was upon the pillow.”

“As was the hand in which it lay. Of course.”

“Of course. Please …”

“I took her from the room and then returned. I had to tell him good-bye.”

According to a newspaper, the coroner’s jury said this verdict: “That the said Child came to his death by Suicide by shooting himself in the head with a pistol at said place while laboring under temporary insanity
of Mind.” According to another: “The deceased was one of two sons in the family, their father well-known in literary circles.” According to a third: “The youth, 18 years of age, son of a well-known literary gentleman, committed suicide yesterday by shooting himself with a pistol.” And, weeks later, according to Mr. S. Mordecai, in the
Boston Weekly Advertiser:
“The boy was armed with a deadly pistol, suitable for military purposes. He was enlisted in the Guard of the Army of the United States. Soldiers die, with and without pistols, and perhaps there is solace in the boy’s embrace of danger. By all accounts, his father knew dangerous days in his own youthful past, and perhaps he and his grieving wife can find comfort in what we might think of as the courage of their son.” You sob sister, Sam, I thought as I read.

“In his coffin, he lay so sweetly, with the ease of a gentle nature. Ah, Mackie: You never gave me a disrespectful word, nor in any way ever failed in your filialness,” he said, more to the gin in his glass than to me. If a ship came in, I thought, I would have to pretend to be the inspector. And I should like, I thought, to see the captain and the pilot who would hand the lading bill to a man in a little white mask.

Filialness, I thought.

“But just a boy,” he said. “And his brother cannot
hear
. He wanders the house in his own interior silence, as if he has heard, already, far too much. The gunshot, I wonder.” He looked up. “Do you think?”

“I have been deafened by shots.”

“Just so.”

“But they were shots that I fired. The detonation in the cartridge, you see, occurs at the level of the ear. It is natural, at times, for a loss of hearing to take place.”

“But not, then, you think, if the shot occurs elsewhere? In a different room?”

“Perhaps your son—Stanwix?”

“Stanny, yes.”

“It may be that he wishes not to have
heard.”

He shook his head. “I must drink my drink,” he said. “As to wishing and hearing: He has heard, and we all, one way and another, have heard. There is no retreat from knowledge. If there were— But you don’t think him mad? My son?”

“Perhaps sad, then. Sad?”

“Sad,” he said. “The universe is diminished and it closes in upon us when a child dies. Certainly, sad.” He said, “We buried him in his military apparel, did I say? He has gone from us a soldier. But he fights no more.”

It was half past five, and Mrs. Hess’s place was still, it being too early for the nightbirds and too late for those who wandered through the city after midnight and into the dawn. Through the thick carpeting and past the flock of the wallpaper and under the heavy door with its brass handle and silent latch came sounds of women laughing or talking low while conducting the tasks one associates with kitchens in the latter afternoon. Jessie had not lit the lamps, and we lay in shadows and a kind of grainy light that strives for darkness. She smelled like the docks—of heat, and spices of the bitter sort, and heavy oils. She tasted like foods I had not eaten but had read about—mangoes, and the milk of coconuts. And, for all our long acquaintance and fondness, I despaired of knowing her.