Frederick Busch: The Night Inspector

And then she brought up her right hand, which she’d leaned on the arm of her chair that was closer to me. She touched the side of her right breast, and my fingers moved in response. She let her fingers trail to the jutting dark nipple, and she touched it as if in discovery. Then she pulled up her robe, though she did not fasten it closed, but let it drape her nakedness so that a man on the bed, attending her every breath and gesture, might see much but hardly all of what he just had seen.

She leaned back. “Economics,” she said. “Are they not the considerations by men who do not care for babies about the burdens imposed when women, large with children fathered by men, give birth in great pain?”

I knew so little of her, and I thought to learn more.

“What do you know about babies, Jessie?”

She shook her head. “I’ll read to you.”

“No,” I said.

Then she turned in the chair to face me, the gown opening so that I might once more see her breasts, and so that she could fasten her dismaying light eyes upon me. I wondered who had passed down eyes of such coloration if her mother was African or Polynesian, and her father a slave. There was a white man in the woodpile, I thought. I thought, too, of the loveliness of her face, the strength of her long throat, the savagery in her tattoos. She was a letter I had read with my fingers, like a man long blind who at last has a message he was years before intended to receive.

She said, as tranquilly as if she offered to pour wine or turn up the lamp, “Then I’ll swallow you down. Would you like that?”

She came toward the bed in slow, leonine paces.

“What, though, do you mean about babies?” I lay back, but on an arm, so that I might watch her face.

“There are children at the school still.”

“In Florida?”

“Yes. In Florence. At … that place. They are, I suppose you would say, the last crop of slavery. They were intended as slaves, and now there is no legitimate market. There’s your word again, Bill.” She stood at the foot of the bed and reached back to unfasten her hair. All the while, she was expressionless; all the while, she regarded me unblinking. “They will be kept there and used.”

“The trade goes on?”

“Everyplace. Dark skin is the color of money. It is everyplace still negotiated.”

“Unless someone — the Freedman’s Bureau?”

“They are saving adults in the Carolinas. We have enquired.”

“We.”

Suddenly she let her head hang. “I am — I am a member of a group. We are most of us colored. We are determined to rescue these children. These babies of slaves.”

“Is one of them yours, Jessie?”

“Would it make a difference to you?”

“Jessie, are you a mother torn from her child? How can this be?”

“Can you help me, Bill?”

“Is there a profit in it?”

“Moral or commercial?” Her voice was low and even.

“Jessie, is there a commission in it for a man who trades?”

She said, “Their lives here will be difficult. But they will eat as they need to, and be free, as they come of age, to go as they please. There will be capital behind them, yes. So, yes. A commission for a trader? Yes, Bill. And he — you — will be serving me. It is I who have begged you. It is I before you here.”

So I said, “Yes.”

Her head came up, her features curtained from me by her hair.

“Lie back,” she said, moving toward me again. “Lie down, Billy.”

“What do you know,” M asked me after an evening of brandy I had bought us, “about what one might think of as ‘high art’?”

I thought at once of the crotch of a tree, a butternut, perhaps, and of shivering in the cold of dawn because the tree wasn’t thickly leafed. I came down from there and crawled back to the derision of my sergeant. But I was able to stand and piss a steaming arc onto the hardpan of our encampment, and I was alive to watch the steam and smell myself. The decision, made so promptly, to come safely down from the tree: high art, I thought.

I cannot say I trembled more vigorously when stalking my first than I did any number of men later. I was bade begin my special service, and I did. Several men waved me good-bye and even clapped me for luck on the shoulder. One called, “Greetings to Johnny Reb from the 109th Volunteers!” This practice was to greatly diminish, and at the last I was avoided, as if the men were frightened of a contagious disease of which I was the carrier. It was not I, myself, their manner intimated; it was the disease.

We were then in Culpeper, the weather warming smartly and the air a blur of flies drawn in by the horses and our own rank stench. In Paynes Corners, we had called them sweat bees, though the sergeant called them deer flies. They stayed with a man. They were not deterred. My head was wreathed with them as I crawled, then wriggled on my belly, through a long, stony meadow. Beyond it was a steep hill, and past the hill a depression of scree and weed and stunted firs. Beyond that lay an evergreen forest and, at its far edge, or so we’d been instructed, was a detachment of Rebel horse. They were described as starved lean, and wonderfully trained, and stupidly brave. Of course, you could have described so many of them in that manner. And would I kindly, encased with sweat bees that circled and circled and stung and stung again, make my way over rabbit droppings and the skulls of mice or voles, owl pellets, anthills, and murder some Confederate raiders?

It took me all of the morning to approach the forest. Its floor was shaded and therefore a litter of needles and dead branches. Every step was a possible bone-crack alarm. In my soft deerhide moccasins, and as slowly as a dancer, feeling more prey than hunter, I took half of the afternoon, swollen with bites and running in sweat, to find the tree at the farther edge and begin my climb. The rifle weighed so heavily, the higher I rose, that I feared to drop it. The telescope and cartridges, fastened against me, had frayed my skin and bruised my ribs. My legs shook as I stood on the limb, facing back to the Union lines, and I took a final gulping breath before I stepped and shimmied and finally sat, halfway around on the side that faced the Confederates, hidden or partly disguised by branches, but surely a decent target if they sought one. They had hunted, most of them, in order not to starve. If they saw me, they would have me.

I was blackened and disguised with brush. But the blue of the uniform made a spectacular target. The sergeant had insisted I go uniformed lest, apprehending me, they hang me as a spy. The uniform would help them shoot me from the trees, I told him. But he served a lieutenant who served a colonel who served a brigadier, and I was therefore an extension of tactics, and therefore a target, faded and filthy and blue.

I could not hear them, for the wind came from behind me and carried sound in their direction. I heard only the flies, and the groaning of branch upon branch where one tree had fallen into another, and of course the wind as it blew around my ears. I slowly turned my head so that my right ear was straight-on to their camp. Perhaps I’d heard the noise of metal on metal, but it probably was my imagination, I thought — my bowel-deep fear. The scent of pitch mixed with gun oil was so powerful that I expected to see it, around me, as a cloud.

Finally, then, I dared the motion required to remove and extend the telescope. The pressure at my chest meant I’d been holding my breath, and I forced myself to shallowly, silently, breathe. A gray and white bird flew into me, quite nearly, and then veered away, scolding. The man I watched looked up at the sound, and he gazed at me, I thought. I held my breath. He looked away. There were several of them, ragged and bony and hard. Walking into a country tavern and spying them, a man of sage counsel would turn at once and depart.