Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: Pain at the shoulder and rib and elbow and thigh from flinging myself against the latched, heavy door — Panting behind me of Lizzie and Bessie, while Fanny wailed and Stanwix, alone among us as always, from where the corridor curved, stood in his silence and the nighttime of his solitude — In the door, then, and in myself with Lizzie and Bess behind — The poor boy so pale, paler than the bedclothes, and his fine face stained with the startling boldness of his blood, and so much of it — The weapon of his own destruction in his square, strong hand — Then Fanny crowding in, and the cries as of seabirds in a frenzy on the water far from home — The silence I felt, I felt it, from Stanwix Melville, the only remaining male in our small family who might one day sire a son — And no stern words behind us, like a pennant on a scuttled vessel’s mast — All had done their best — All had done their all — Lord in whom I would believe and fear I may not — How little he has done to deserve this dying — Why might you not have taken me? — I wished to say this to Lizzie — Could not — Lips sealed — Silences among us broader than the oceans of unspoken words in the past — My children blighted — Household boiling in silences of fever — Gall for dinner — Bile for tea — Great emptiness abounding in our rooms—

TUESDAY, SEPT 10: The boy returns — It is Lizzie who receives him — Their exchange — Dulcet tones, assuredly — And off to bed—

WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: And nothing of the money needed and the money spent? — And no recriminations — Loving kiss from child to mother, and to bed—

TUESDAY, SEPT 10: The world revolving in the boy, perhaps — His feeling he is guilty of the sins against the house — Wastrel, roaring-boy, drunkard, pretender — The having done an awful deed for which there is no recompense — Yet we did not hear of such, we do not, will not — He was a boy on the verge of man — He died in purity, though surely he was tempted — I have been tempted — Flesh, drink, vanity, language—

WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: Truly, I did belabor him for acquiring hurtful habits — Truly, I did threaten him with exile from the house — A boy alone in the grinding city — Only the Guard, sent on duty, would have given him a home — To be banished, nearly banished, from the rooms he had known—

TUESDAY, SEPT 10: Did she threaten him with me? — Was it the danger posed by his sometimes silent, sometimes cruel, sometimes angry father? — But why hast Thou forsaken me, so the Jewish stripling cried to his Father — People of The Law, they stood between a Father and His Son — Bitter truth, cruel salts of truth, ashes and gall, the unmoving lips of the Father, aloof—

WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: Child, it is The Law compels and mangles me —Even Jehovah might lament—

TUESDAY, SEPT 10: His mother, awake and alone at three of the morning — Sitting in the darkness of her solitude — Taking refuge in another room — But what deep-diving men are easy in a life, a household, its empty, echoing rooms?

WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: The batterer father, like wrath incarnate — Bursting through — And was it then the shot was fired? — Only then? — And Stanny, fearful at the pursuit, willing himself away from the world of such sounds?

TUESDAY, SEPT 10: I did not see him with my eyes — I did not sniff like a dog at his breath — Nor did I hear the timbre and tone of his mother’s voice — What a sailor does not see he does not know — It is why some cruel god of the navigators invented heavy fog — The fear of the woman and her daughters through the ultimate day—

WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: The shot—

TUESDAY, SEPT 10: It seems, now, such a small matter — Lizzie in the kitchen and the washing up undone because the girl was no longer retained — Money being once more an issue with us — With our creditors! — I upstairs in my little room, squinting against the glare of the spirit lamp — Gaslight too bright at night for my aching eyes — Mal in the small corridor swinging the pistol about, crying “Hey!” and “Ho!” and “Surrender your arms!”—The children shouting for fear, mock fear, I think — And I, emerging from the room to terrify them to silence with my visage and my thoughts, written upon my forehead, I suspect, like Cain’s own brand, of such violence — Lizzie up from her chores to see — True mother, wary of the silence and not the former clattering and chattering — My roaring at them all to see to the dishes — Failure to respect their mother, etc. — Fanny weeping and Stanny struck dumb — Mal’s scowl a mirror to my own, I think — Lizzie silent and suddenly pale — The moment of stillness like the failure of a heart to beat — Our little house suspended in the silence — The swing of my arm as if self-motivated, with not a consideration from my brain — Mal’s pistol, which could have discharged at any or all, spilling from his fingers — His hand at his mouth, a fearful small boy, no man in the Guard with a sword at his belt and a pistol in hand — Fearful small boy — Are you such a poor shabby fellow? Are you a good, honorable one or good-for-nothing? Now you must announce it to me! — Monstrous man to hulk over them and bellow, glower, blink his weak, infernal eyes—

WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: Lizzie tumbling slowly down the back staircase — Her white, loose thighs exposed — Not recently this naked to my eyes — Her thin cry of surprise, and then the fall — My sense that I had struck her — Probably not — It is not what I would seek to do — My arm upraised, perhaps, would startle her, as happens with horses and dogs — While true that I have spoken harshly to them all — My sense of despair mounting, my need to sleep and sleep not unlike Malcolm’s, I think — The restlessness of the spirit in the Melvilles — My fury at small provocations, the sign of larger motivations to rage yet unannounced but present in the household and in my heart — Yet no harsh words to Mal upon his late arrival at home — No dire warnings beforehand, nor cruel greetings on the night — The door stove in, the bloody bedclothes and the bled, wounded boy — My girls and Lizzie in their sorrows, I in my own and separate sorrows, and my Stanwix, son, so silent and immense-eyed — The sword on the sash at Malcolm’s side—

The waiter brought us more port. “It’s very good,” Sam said.

“Yes. It is, though—”

“I meant the fortified wine,” Sam said. “However, I would admit to some confidence in what you have just read. What do you think?” His face demonstrated a carefully managed blankness, as if he feared to be accused of requiring me to express an approval. While I read, he had set down half a dozen brown stubs of pencil, of various lengths, and he had littered his side of the banquette table with cedar shavings. “If anything, of course,” he said.

“Sam, did he tell you these thoughts?”

“Of course not, Billy. I wrote them. I created them.”

“And you are certain of these insights, then? That he— Sam, how can you know this?”

He opened his mouth as if to speak, then seemed to think better of it, and he laid a finger upon his lips, and he smiled with a gentle, knowing humor. Finally he did speak, but to say only this: “Invention also speaks a certain truth, Billy. Have you not recounted your adventures in battle? And subtly altered what another might term fact?”

I did not reply. I found that I could not. And so I pressed on. “And why would he think — he so formerly famed for his abilities to recall and construct scenes of vividness and drama — why would he think so illogically? So repetitively? The dates repeated as if only they, of all the thirty in the month, had meaning. These thoughts are so contradictory and so unverifiable. So speculative, that is to say, Sam. Hysterical! You think of him as crazed?”