Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

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 file, 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?”