Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

“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 shifted 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.