Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: For a man to be accused in his own home of madness is madness redoubled and cruelty heaped upon cruelty — Is it not enough? Is it not enough, I said — I shrieked it, bellowed it, declaimed it in thunder — Is it not enough that a man be exiled from his profession, must he be exiled from his family too? — Lizzie, sitting upon her bed, weeping for an hour into the most absurdly small handkerchief — Live with your father, by all means, for it is with his money that we have lived and with yours we have purchased this house and with his smile of unmeant affection he may send you abroad as he has sent me — I have seen the Village of Lepers built upon a dung heap and I will be the leper, squatting on ordure, while you hasten to your father’s house — You did not berate him, you say, and so he enters and you embrace in a sticky celebration of his abstemiousness and your benefaction, and up he goes, and off, and then to kill himself with a noisy gun while all the day long you hover near his door and yet do not hear the pistol’s report.

TUESDAY, SEPT 10 & WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: Must it, then, have been the gruffness of the father? — How else to account for a boy who stays out until dawn and is reported to have returned with no liquor upon his breath — The mother, unlatching the door for him, not having uttered any but welcoming words and, naturally, the mildest of reprovals—“Down, dog, and kennel!” I’d have told him at the door — Must it not have been the wicked father in his old, maritime ways, who behaved toward his boy as if the boy had been a boy — Who else but a boy, a man must wonder, could sleep so many hours of the day — It was the staying up late, certainly, and yet even of a weekend day, say Sunday, spent at home, most of it was spent in bed — But might he not have spun the pistol like someone in a Wild West magazine, instead of sleeping the days away? — Asleep or playing with his pistol, he behaved like a boy and, like a boy, needed the discipline administered by men — I had warned him too severely about his character and habits, according to his mother, my devoted wife — No sane man speaks such treason to himself without he makes a mask from behind which to say his piece and beg for peace — Sane madness — And here the man sits and writes and says what he must or what he may, while his son sleeps and wakes, sleeps and wakes, and then, waking finally, forever sleeps — The night inspector at his occupation — Something further might come of this—

TUESDAY, SEPT 10: Thought back to the day when she claimed I lifted my hand to her — Aberration in the process of observing and comprehending — It was on the back stairs, Lizzie, not the front — Strong drink not involved — I, declaiming with the righteousness that weakens my writing as well as my speech — Lizzie prodding with her surprising, infrequently manifested temper — A foul father, she cries, a fallow father, a man of vast uselessness to his sons and daughters who employs them as whipping posts for his temper — Not so, cries the tyrannical husband and father, I have never laid hand upon a one of them — Think you not that words, or mocking laughter, or a blank and inattentive face may not cause wounds? — She cries out and out, I at the stairway top and she partway down on the narrow step with a hamper of laundry in hand — Disappeared, then, into the coppery nimbus, bright and dull at once, but she with no face, great spots in my vision and pain in the temple so vast that to have been shot there, as dear Malcolm was, would have been to sustain barely any pain — True, then, that my hand was upraised, as whose might not be in such a moment of despair — The body does know when to rescue the man from his mind — Hence blindness of the eye as a type of blindness in the brain — The spots before me like giant holes into which I might plunge to escape — Such a violence of feature to present, I think! — And so she, forgetting her place — Do I dare jest here?! — Lizzie stepping back upon the air and falling in place of her desperate, despairing husband, who would have fallen an instant later from the pain her mockery had given him—

WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: Recalled with awful honesty the time I struck her as she stood before me at the landing of the front steps — I in from work and she with a kind of desperation rarely seen by me — Crying, wailing, as if a dervish in a feverish land — Anent the terrible pallor of Stanny and his silences and Mal’s determination to use the Guard as a way to the West and then a way to find combat — Thinking, never saying, how the boy so lacking in discipline or energy would surely find a way, in warfare, to die — And why did I not speak to my daughters with more than a mocking smile nor do else but chastise my boys — Crying back to her, Not so! — The soles of my feet afire from the hot stones of the hellfire city where heat poured down from the sun and out from manufactories and up from furnaces and engines and the moisture hung in the air like a stench made visible — Clambering upon the cargo vessels, prying into packages and crates, thumping barrels and squinting with sore eyes the manifests of crooked owners and their crooked masters and their crooked bosuns and their mercantile accomplices lined, like great herring gulls, along the wharf — Scrawling in the government notebook with a government pencil — Pinning into the cloth of my lapel the inches of heavy, dull badge — Inspector U.S. Revenue, as if I am equally the government’s property, along with my notebook and my federal locks — To lock in what? To lock what away? — And, true, I had gone by myself to Delmonico’s, so close to home — The growling of garrulous men — Smoke of cigars and sweet, heavy shag I did smoke to contribute to the clouds of manhood in the dark, interior air — A chop as heavy as a chunk of ballast, and a wine from the Rioja spilling from its decanter into the table’s candlelight a river of promise — Before me on the table, from August Brentano’s newsstand, The Reminiscences of Rufus Choate —He knew the city as it once had been, to those of somewhat noble lineage, born to reign, but some only rained upon — And, no, Lizzie, I am not stupid with drink — Stupid, rather, with fatigue, and with regret at having spent such pleasant hours when she awaited me — As if I had forgot I had a wife and family and house and debts for the acquisition of each — The Choate, for example, purchased with an allowance for books made possible by Lizzie’s decision that I’m a man of the book and thus must own books — To so chastise me for bookishness when it was she who once regarded that as no wound upon the family’s opportunities, but a triumph of which to boast! — Did I, then, strike her in the face and send her backward, limbs flying gracelessly and dangerously against the banister and steps until she rested, still and still and still at the foot, in the foyer? TUESDAY, SEPT 10: Malcolm home late — Lizzie at door — Three A.M., and Lizzie still awake, thus at the door to admit our boy — Pleasant of expression and filled, like a younger child, with powerful regret — No odor of strong drink, nor expressions from Lizzie of anything but her fatigue and disappointment — Slinging his arm around his mother’s neck and kissing her good night, his skin clear, his expression open to inspection, and his words those of a boy en route to manhood — So to bed — For she never declaimed an anger or resentment, eh? — And I was abed, not having warned him of aught but duty, never a threat — So, twirling the pistol at the edge of the bed, or even seated, lest, he might have thought, he would be required by his duties as soldier to one day defend himself while seated, say at a cookfire or in a mess tent — Silly but understandable, and barely 18 years of age, a precious boy—