Frederick Busch: The Night Inspector

She said, “I know your thoughts.”

I thought, I know what it says on your body.

She said, “I told you the stories, Billy. Stories aren’t always the truth. Not all of it.”

I had to smile. She could not see it. “No,” I said aloud. “I enjoyed them, however.”

“And I did, too, dear Billy.”

“What did you mean?”

“How much of it did I mean? Or what was my meaning?”

“Either,” I said. “Both.”

But she was looking past me, and I turned. M, carrying a small storm lantern, had walked down the dangerous steps — he had probably sprung, like a ship’s boy on his voyage out — and had walked past Delgado. I would have enjoyed watching that — and he had come now to the laden lighter, onto which he stepped. A man forward on the brig called to him, and M waved his hand but continued on his way. He stood, and he shouted into the wind, which prevented us from hearing him.

“Billy, what does he say?” Jessie asked.

M was pinning his little badge upon the cloaking flap on the front of his oilskins.

“I imagine that he says,” I replied, “ ‘I am an inspector. Thus, I inspect.’ ”

“Truly,” she said, with some wonder in her voice.

“It is what I would expect,” I said.

M produced a bone-handled folding knife, and he cut away at the net about the tun.

“The cost of the net diminishes the profits,” Mr. North said, almost singing. He had the practiced ability to make any statement into song — the less musical the statement, the more, apparently, he sang it: Life is a tale full of sound and fury, sung by an idiot. I thought of M and his Hamlet, his Iago, his Timon, his Lear.

M now labored at the tun, standing on his toes and working to gain access to what might have been two hundred gallons and more, but which in its place should have been children, born into slavery and freed by Jessie and Porter and North, by M and by me.

M beckoned, and Jessie said, “Do not go, sweet Billy.”

“Kiss me good-bye, Jessie.”

“Farewell, you mean?”

“Please.”

She stepped forward, removing her hood, inclining her wonderful sad face, and put her arms on mine. She turned her head and kissed the scarf at the mouth of the mask. Then she leaned in beneath the mask and nipped at the flesh of my neck. She sucked upon it, and she bit it hard, and then she licked it, as if she were a child. Then she looked up and into my eyes and pulled the hood back over her. She patted my arms and stepped back.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

Jessie nodded, and smiled her smile of regret. She said, “It was Lydia Pinkham’s mixed in with the juices of fruits.”

I recited those words as I turned and went along the dock of the wharf to the brig, sitting low in the water which sometimes lapped over onto her deck. I could not understand her meaning: the juices of fruits, the Lydia Pinkham’s. I stepped on, slipping as the rhythm of the rocking of the ship betrayed me, but M was there to catch me by each shoulder with his broad hands and to steady me.

“We’re in horror, shipmate,” he said. “This is a cargo out of the imagination of someone more stirring and capable than I.” He held up the lantern and directed me to peer down and in.

I smelled the vomit first, and then the stench of the leavings of locked-in bodies. The contents were, I saw, three children, or four, heaped in upon each other. It struck me as likely that they had been in there for days; I could not imagine their surviving the entire journey in this fashion, although I had of course no assurance now that Florida had been their home port. They might have come up from Philadelphia, for all I knew, and they might have made the entire journey in the tun. What Jessie had meant about juices of fruits and Lydia Pinkham’s was now, naturally, clear. They had been offered refreshment, and it had struck them unconscious; drugged, they were packed in their barrels and carried only heaven knew how far, for how long.

What had not been clear to her, or to her operatives, was how much of the opium dissolved in alcohol could be tolerated by a child who was deprived of fresh air and exercise, perhaps on account of the cost, and perhaps because the traders did not know. Now they might know. Terrified and helpless, without adequate air to breathe, and in the absolute dark, they had been accidentally poisoned and purposely shipped. You are born, and the world bends down to feed you, and its teat is icy, its pap is poisoned, and you are dead because a child, and black.

“All dead?” I asked him. “Not a breath from them?”

“The child on top, the little portion of person, is dead, I perceive. I do not harbor hope for the others.”

“We must open the tuns and have them out,” I said.

“Get off my boat,” the fellow behind us said.

I watched M tug at his oilskins and turn. “I am a deputy inspector of Customs in the Port of New York,” he said. “I carry, with this badge, the authority of the federal government.”

“I carry,” the other said, “with this peacekeeper, the authority of point five six calibers of half a dozen cartridges, and more where they came from. And I seen your hand in your pocket, you, and I am told you always goes armed. Hands out, nothing in ’em, all easy and slow, thank you, gentlemen. I am the captain, and my word, as you know, is law. This”—he motioned with his pistol—“is its authority, you could say.”

“Jessie spoke of us — of me — to you?”

“Don’t know no Jessie. Mr. North told me.”

“He must have sung it.”

The captain, bald, short, soaked through in his long-sleeved seaman’s shirt, smiled his dirty gray-yellow fangs. He held a cavalry pistol upon us by crossing his left hand in front of his face and, with his right, resting his weapon upon his left forearm. He knew what he was about, and I did not wish to see M wounded. So I brought my hands out, but insisted on leaving them at my sides and not up.

“He does croon whatever in hell he says, doesn’t he, our Mr. North?”

“Jessie must have arranged this with Mr. North,” I said to M.

“I don’t work with any Jessie, I told you.”

“Neither, I think, do I,” I said.

“You are full of mystifications, ain’t you? Off the vessel, please, gents.”

We stood then on the dock as the other tuns came over.

M said to the man with the gun, “There are children in the cargo.”

“It’s a cargo of children, as I understand it. Some large ones, one or two as what you might call an adult. But it’s little slavies for the most part.”

“Slaves,” I said.

“Remember them?” the gunman said, smiling. “We recently had some disputations on the subject. Slaves? The niggers we bred?”

“Great and brave and small men died for this,” M said. “That we might come, in so short a period, to this . And at her behest.”

“Yes.”

“A black woman and, beside her, a black man, engaged in the selling—”

“White men, too, are involved,” I said.

“Yes, shipmate. But that is not the astonishment. Is it?”

I shook my head. M saw a pale, painted mask bound up in a sodden gray cloth that moved in nervous gestures. Sam, I realized, and I turned to find his face, was seeing it all. I saw his face beneath his narrow-brimmed, round derby hat as he leaned at the rail — beyond the conspirators, above them and Adam and the schooner and the brig, and over us, of course, looking down to study us, memorize us, make of us something larger and more of some whole about which, I had no doubt, he was thinking so hard that his sad eyes bulged and his sallow cheeks were round as if with held breath.

I was going to kill the one on board the brig who held the gun. I turned to face him, and I moved away from M so that any return of fire at me might miss him. I slowly inserted my hand into my right-hand pocket, and I forced myself to breathe out and then in as I grasped the butt of the.31.