Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

No notebook, though, and no frantic, frowning scrawl of notes. It had come after, I thought. After Sergeant Grafton’s brains had spilled upon Sam’s trouser legs and boots. After the blood of his horse had sprayed Sam’s face.

I recalled how I had teased him, when I had wished only to fall on the ground near his feet and groan, when I returned, winded, from a mission. I had been in a vulnerable position, which is to say that although I was camouflaged with branches and leaf and grass I had tied upon myself and over even my forage cap, I was without cover, spraddle-legged on the rise above their camp. I could kill some, but then, if they had some nerve and could remember what good marksmen most of them were, they would have a clean shot into me as I rolled — it was my plan — away and down until the hill protected me from their fire.

I could not still the racing of my heart, nor the sighing of my breaths, which I drank rather than inhaled. I was certain they would hear me, had perhaps already heard me and were lying in wait while a few — I counted seven — pretended to build the fire up for the heating of lead to pour into the shot molds I saw through my telescope. At one instant, I closed my eyes and braced my body on the ground, head sideways on the scrubby grass, all of me shivering as if a terrible fever were passing through my body. No shot came, of course, for they were unaware of me, and I forced myself to count to ten. On the final count, I required that I raise my head. I did. And then I ordered my eyes to open. They obeyed.

Before me, on the ground, inches from my slowly moving head, was a bright blue bird with a duller blue breast that was brighter, still, than any blue I had seen, including those of the bluebird in my own upstate countryside, and the blues of Union soldiers and the first Confederate uniforms, and the blues of poor countrywomen like my mother, dressed in dull and inexpensive hues. I did not know its name, nor do I know it now. But I can see him. For he stood before me, a slowly writhing dark red worm in his mouth, and he stared along his blunt beak as if to challenge me to contend for the meal. My life, in the War, had so many times been held, like a worm, and like the worms to which I consigned my targets, at the mercies of a small creature of large appetite. I must find the lesson in this, I instructed myself.

I extended my rifle, and I lined up the first shot, having, with the telescope, now stowed in my jacket, selected the second and the third. I sighted, first, on the small black kettle that was on, really in, the fire. A sergeant with leather gloves and a stained leather cloth held in one gauntleted hand was preparing to pour the lead. The bright blue bird flew up, and one of the ranks — a country boy like me, I supposed — stuck out a hand, no doubt out of reflex in response to the color and motion. Another looked up, and I froze. But I was too convinced they had spotted me to do what was wisest: remain in position and let their eyes accept me as an aspect of the countryside. I breathed out, and I fired. I fired again. The kettle took the first shot, and the second struck the fire — wasted powder. The sergeant was caught in the face and chest as he kneeled above the lead, and he began to scream. I saw his flesh give off a dirty smoke that rose around him.

Several of them came to his assistance, while the veterans moved away, toward their picketed horses and the trees. I caught one of them first, for he would be a cleverer soldier than those who had gone toward the wounded target. I then swung back, and I took the first one to reach the screaming sergeant, and then the second, who had halted while I shot. Some of them were firing, and one of them was good. He was excellent. He burned the back of my neck where I lay, and I howled. Then I remembered to roll, and I went flailing down the hill, bruising myself on the ammunition case and on my pistol every time I went around. I held on to the rifle so that my elbows and upper arms might take the brunt of my striking the ground, for I would need the rifle far more than I would hate the soreness of my arms. Nevertheless, I struck my face twice with my own firing mechanism, and I could feel the blood from the back of my neck.

I was moving through the evergreen forest below the little rise and well into its shadows before they could mount a pursuit. I panted and groaned my way, stilling myself twice to listen for them, then running on, whimpering by now like a child. I stopped close to the farther edge of the woods, and I caught my breath; it seemed to take me half an hour, although it was moments only, and then I forced my head back, although it stung, and more than that, and then I walked with a feigned ease back toward our encampment.

“Jupiter,” Sam called out.

I replied with “Your anus.”

“It’s Ur -anus, Mr. Bartholomew.”

But I was already there, closer to him than he had thought, and I was enjoying a bit, I confess, his exclamations over the blood at my neck and the bruises and cuts upon my face and hands.

He said, “I’ll fetch the sergeant to see to your wounds. I heard the firing.”

I was about to nod to his wide eyes, and to affect a veteran’s silence, when my intestines crawled about and began to thrash within me as if some animal, the size, say, of a raccoon or mink, had burrowed into my belly to dig its home. I leaned my rifle at him, and he caught it with a kind of surprise. “Trench,” I confessed, and I ran to it, crossing our camp and frightening one of the horses. If he brought our pursuers with his nickering, I would probably be killed as I sat on the log at our trench, but I would be fortunate to get there, and not to be caught with my trousers on the ground or filled with my wastes.

It was the burning, watery discharge of pure fear, and I was grateful to Burton for having left behind a few sheets of an Athens newspaper he had found. I did not think about smearing myself, as the flies gathered and my own odor choked me as it rose, with the facts or lies the Rebels told themselves about the War. I was happy to have lived, and happy to be through some of my terror in a private moment, and happy enough to consider that I would soon have to do it, or something very like it, again.

Later, as we led our horses with their hooves wrapped in pieces of flannel that Burton carried in a sack for the purpose, Sam, beside me, whispered, “I have never known you to leave your weapon, Mr. Bartholomew.”

“Nature is the breaker of habits,” I replied.

“It was an honor to be trusted.”

“I was, shall we say, relieved, Sam.”

Sergeant Grafton hushed us angrily, and he was right. I patted Sam on his bony shoulder, and he turned his head in surprise, no doubt at the intimacy of my gesture. I saw him lay his wide, intelligent eyes upon me, and I knew that he was — as I considered wind and drop and angle when I laid a shot — puzzling out a way in which to think about me.

While I, in the remainder of that morning’s march, as the sun came fully up and we stripped the horses’ hooves and rode, was remembering how, when spring came to Paynes Corners, I came home to build a new outhouse at my mother’s place. I made the seat narrow, but sturdy, and I built the inside platform a little lower to the ground. Although I did salvage some of the wood from the old one, I set most of it afire where it stood and, guarding against leaping sparks with a ready bucket of water, I watched the flames, and then the sinking wood, and then the dropping of the platform, the crashing of the walls, and the burning of what lay beneath the wood and in the soil. I expected to smell something, at some point, like the roasting of beef. But it all finally smelled the same — a kind of acrid, intimate odor rode on the darker smell of burning wood. We were all, finally, the same, waste and lumber and Uncle Sidney. That evening, I noticed that my mother was gaining weight, and we roasted early lamb and gnawed the small rib bones.