Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

Grafton was on watch as I came in. He didn’t waste time with paroles. He came running clumsily through the high timothy weed and he got himself alongside, as if we both were ships on a rough channel, and he slipped his arm around me, grasping my belt, and tugged me along. He was soaked in blood, mine and the brave young soldier’s, by the time we reached our bivouac. And I thought, near home in the Points, thinking still of the smell from the joss house, the odor of a people’s obligation to an ancient ordering of life, I could feel obliged in my own way. I could feel a kind of loyalty to men like Grafton, and the men and horses and the single dog I had dispatched: my fang . And to the currency of the United States of America, to the growth of whose fortunes I had given straight lips, sound cheeks, most of a nose, much of a chin, and, no doubt, a goodly portion of my mind.

Sam Mordecai came to see me in Washington. He told the terse, wise, merciful woman at my bedside that we had served together in the fray. He said that: “Comrades in the fray.”

“Poor fellow,” she said.

“Oh, Samuel, you rabbi from consternation,” I hissed up at him through the bandages, which seemed, on that particular moist, hot Washington afternoon, to be made of clay or rock and to have just come from the furnace in which they had baked all day. My words, I knew, were difficult to decipher, not nearly so clear, say, as Chun Ho’s or Adam’s to me.

“Billy,” he said, “your eyes. Why are they covered?”

“He does not wish to see,” she told him, “until he can be seen.”

“Will that occur?”

She said, “I have told him probably not.”

“It was their idea to bandage me, on the way here. Their thought was that my eyes were affected.”

She said, “It was yours to keep them bandaged.”

“She lies,” I whispered, “this demimondaine of the casualty ward.”

Young Sam said, “Surely, you do not wish to address her so. You always had the best of manners. Burton and I sought to emulate you.”

“He wishes to drive me to fizz and sizzle,” she said with, I thought, some pleasure. “But he cannot. This forenoon I assisted, in the absence of nurses, who were elsewhere at work, when the surgeons had off a poor fellow’s leg. Knee and below,” she said. “I was not driven away by that ghastly brutality, and I surely will not be offended by his attempts to woo my worst attentions.”

“Sam, she’s right. I am trying to get her into my narrow iron bed.”

“You would not, if you could see my face,” she said, “because I am the plainest of women. Let us cut holes in the bandage. Have a look.”

“Billy,” Sam said, “let’s do it.”

I said, “What brings you here, Sam?” I heard her release her breath, and then I heard the sound of her skirts against a neighboring bed as she moved away.

“You should let her, Billy. What a fine woman that is!”

“Sam. What?”

“Oh, Billy,” he said, and I could hear him start to weep, then stop.

“Who?”

“Sergeant Grafton.”

“How?”

“A cannonade. His poor horse went mad with the suddenness of it. His fright—”

“He threw him off?”

“He crushed his head. He danced on him in his fear. It was a jelly, his skull — white jelly and red jelly, bits of bone all through it.…”

I found no words. I breathed out against the hot, heavy bandages and then I breathed in. We’re coming , I heard him say, as gently as if to a boy.

“Billy, I shot the horse.”

“Sure,” I said.

“You think I was right?”

“It’s as good a deed as any other I can think of. Punishment for disobedience by an animal we’ve raised to serve us. Mercy, if horses are capable of pronouncing guilt upon themselves. Corrective, if another horse observed and could fathom it as retribution. Sam, my skin hurts, Jesus, it feels like they’re boiling it and poor Grafton. He was a decent man. He should have been an officer. Though maybe he was decent because he was one of us. Oh, Sam: Take up your pistol, pretend I’m a horse.”

He started in weeping again, and I put my hand up and he took it. He stopped, and so did I.

“You know what I intend to do, Billy? With this War? All of this?” I could feel the tension in his hand, the strength of his resistance to the strength in him of what he wanted to do — run mad, go screaming in the corridors and streets.

I lay back and let my hand drop. He kept it in his a few seconds more, then he released it.

“I am going to write something. For Harper’s Weekly or one of the larger newspapers. Maybe even a book.”

I heard the mockery in my voice. I fear that I did not wish to suppress it. “What will you call it? Two Years in the Company of an Assassin? The Brains and Blood of a Superannuated Sergeant? A Jew’s View of the War for Every Dollar? I do beg your pardon, Sam. You know I think you a fine man and a fellow who protected me. Forgive me.”

He was silent.

“I beg you, Sam. I beg your forgiveness. I am up to my former nostrils in self-pity. Apparently, I am not nearly so bold as I once thought.”

“You’re the bravest man I ever knew, Billy.”

“You thought of me so?”

“I still do.”

“But you forgive me.”

He seized my arm and shook my hand.

“Bless you, Sam. The cruelty with which I turned on you!”

“Your wounds, Billy. It’s your wounds.”

“Tell me of what you would write. I swear I want to know.”

“A kind of memoir, such as generals always write about their derring-do: And, oh, yes, the troops insisted upon dying every day, but here is how I sat in my saddle and sent them off to be burned alive and trampled to death and shot out of trees.”

“The memoir of an ordinary soldier. It’s a fine idea, Sam. I will be wealthy, I think, in spite of this face. I will somehow have money. If you do write the book, then come and see me, and perhaps I’ll be able to help you pay your printing bills.”

“Mr. Putnam or the Harper Brothers will do that. Or Mr. Fields, perhaps. Though I thank you.”

“Well, remember me anyway, Sam. Keep me in mind.”

“I will never forget you,” he said.

“Don’t you go writing me, mind. I have no wish to be a character in a book.”

“I’m going to write about Sergeant Grafton,” he said. “I’m going to keep him from disappearing away from us again.”

“Can that be done?” I asked M. We sat over coffee at half past six o’clock in the morning at a round table of small diameter in the window of Charney’s and Toller’s Coffee House, hard by Rector Street, where we had met by appointment as he came on to duty at the river and I, up much of the night in roaming, had paused in my rounds of the rain-slicked nighttime streets.

He drank his coffee unsweetened and undiluted, as did I. It was pleasantly bitter there, where they imported their own beans and roasted them on the premises, and the smell was a kind of dark perfume. He leaned back and gave his silent laugh. “Can that be done,” he finally said. “It is only the question that a man of letters asks himself each time he enters his room, shuts the door with a welcome kind of despair, and sits himself down before the awful, terrorizing whiteness of the white page. Can … that … be … done.”

I placed a morsel of Irish soda bread, rich with currants yet the dough sternly unsweet, into my mouth beneath the veil. He drank at his coffee. I knew he would not stay away from the topic.

“Can— Bless you, shipmate. It is the question. And not only because it is so difficult. A man at his desk, poised above the awful blankness, must ask himself this: Do I seek a stay against oblivion on behalf of my little actors on the vast page? Or do I seek my own eternal life? In case of the latter, it’s philosophy a man must drive for. If the former, a generous and a merciful and a slighter end, why then you can write down in their scratchy particularity the traits of a person and keep them fresh for as long as the paper lasts. If in some library in some city in some nation of the world that book exists, then your character’s saved from oblivion — your remembered personage, I mean. Your own character, the outline and contents of your soul, that is neglected for the persiflage and rump-de-dumps, the lace collars and bone buttons, of romance. The choice is part of the danger. So’s the oblivion, of course.” He laughed, his mouth wide, his head tilted back, his little eyes staring at the smoke-browned ceiling of the coffeehouse, and no sound rising from his lips.