Frederick Busch: The Night Inspector

Adam said, “Isn’t that justice, Lord?”

“Is that what it is, Adam?”

He looked at me and said no more.

M said, “The children beneath her.”

I nodded.

“They never wakened,” he said.

“Sir, I was thinking that. She had thought to see to them, and she had protested their lightening the load. Surely that is what they’re about now. Throwing overboard their investment.”

“They’re bad businessmen, then,” he said, “for they invested a great deal of money in these lives.”

“They’re entangled in the business of avoiding imprisonment. They’re scrabbling for their lives now. At the end, Adam, I think she must have thought of the children.”

He looked away. He did not reply.

M said to me, “Were you thinking of Mal? He went to sleep and they went to sleep, and none of them did wake.” He said then, with only a small pause, “Will you, Adam, first of men, take hold of the mouth of this great barrel? It will be for only a moment, I promise.”

Adam moved around him to the gunwale, and he seized the lip of the tun with both hands.

“That is right. You understand. For only a moment, now.” Adam pulled against the current and M, standing back and then lunging, dashed the pole of the gaff against the side of the tun. He reared back and did it again, then again. Staves parted, and one split. He struck hard, he was breathing hard, and the color was up in his pale face. Soon enough, the staves parted wide, and we could see her drawn-up thighs between them. I would have pulled her skirts down to cover them if M had let me, but, seeing me about to move, he ceased his battering and held his hand aloft. “We are engaged now, Billy, in a burial.”

Sam said, low, “She must be hid, then?”

M replied, “They all must be hid. Hence, to the awful floor, cinnamon-colored child.”

I said, “She is no child.”

“She was somebody’s child,” M said.

Adam, staring at the tun he held against the current, said, “Maybe she’s my child.”

I said, “Truly, Adam?”

“Truly enough,” Sam said, as if he knew.

Adam said, “Truly enough.”

“Enough,” M said. He said, “Adam, let them go. And may there be a Lord, and may He await them.”

Adam stepped back and sat, and the tun fell away, then began to bob and revolve and then speed up, dipping, catching the river as it poured upon them within, dipping lower now, bobbing less, spinning and then, of a sudden, out of sight beneath the river’s surface as if they never had been born. Some others now drifted near us, bobbing, sealed, lives put by as if canned for use a season hence.

M said, “And what meaning lurks in this? What cause? How dare we witness this and live? And yet we do, and then we do.”

“Can we rescue them?” Sam asked.

“You must row, Sam,” I said.

“He is right,” M said. “Row, good fellows, will you? Can we not catch them up?”

“They might be alive inside,” Sam said. “One of them might breathe.”

“Contraband,” Adam said. “Slaves. They didn’t know you need to keep them alive.”

M said, “I suspect they will roll them all overboard. Some will drift to an embankment, or over to New Jersey, where they will snag on the reeds and marsh grass, or come to rest, poor children, in gravel or mud. Or they may sail, when the tide goes out, all the way from the North River and out past the Battery, past Dimond Reef, into the East River’s mouth. They’ll grow waterlogged, no matter how earnestly the cooper worked to seal the tuns. They’ll sink at sea, or they’ll sink in harbor, or they’ll sink before they drift past Christopher Street.”

“We must hook them and bring them aside and open them up and give the living children asylum. One might live. Two! One, maybe.”

As I spoke, a second tun went under.

“They are drowning before us,” I said to M, as if he were the captain and I were his crew. “How dare we not rescue them?”

“There is no rescue,” he said. “The one that came to us was opened. These are shut. We cannot wrestle them on board, for each is greater than any one of us, and loaded with — yes, and waterlogged, I think. And if we open them in the water, surely they will ship a hundred gallons of river in and drown them in place or sink them under. There is no asylum,” M said. “And all of them, you know it, are dead of asphyxiation or from swallowing their own liquids or some other cause. It does not matter, to them, what the cause might have been. You know it.”

We sat in the silence that his words made among us.

Then I pointed ahead of us. “They,” I said, “are cutting their losses, as it is called. So that when they have discarded these small lives in great barrels, they may reverse their engines and back away from the wreck — the reef, as you call it — and may live to invest another day.”

“The black folks are the losses,” Adam said. “I don’t see but one white corpse come down on us. Plenty of black ones, though, in the water, under it, everyplace — dead black babies in the water. Why’d they bother and be born?”

“There is Mr. North still left, Adam,” I said.

“No,” Adam said, “he’s pretty much white, sir.”

“Get us closer, can you? I beg you. Get me a little closer to them?” I said it to the men behind me, but I stared ahead, at a third spinning cask, and at the investors on board their boat.

“Will you?” M cried. There were tears in his eyes and on his seamed cheeks. “Will you haul us to them? Will you bend?”

We made more speed as the light brightened further, and I lay at the prow once more, my legs behind me in a marksman’s delta, my scarf, so sodden as to retain the shape of whatever pressed upon it, folded now before me. I extended my arms, and I rested my left upon the scarf and gripped the bottom of my right, which held the heavy Colt, to steady my weapon and give me true aim. My hands felt slick, as if the new blisters already ran their pus and blood. They felt clumsy and thick. But I had no doubt of their ability to grasp the weapon and to shoot it true.

“Is it rescue of the remaining tuns, Billy, or is it revenge?” M’s voice was high and hoarse, and I knew that he mourned not only the Negroes discarded, in their barrels, as if they were spoilt goods, but again — and for all of his life — his child, who had gone to sleep and had not wakened.

I called back, “It is nothing that feels right, sir. It is action in the face of the event.”

“What a pragmatical man you are, Billy! In your flinty heart, you are a sailor.”

I cocked the Colt, and I sighted over the hammer block along the front sight. As the dawn lay out along the nearby shore and on the green, fast water, the river seemed broader, their vessel seemed smaller, and they, upon its deck, in frantic motion, appeared ludicrous to me, like puppets in a children’s show who danced to a jig. Yet the cruelty of the morning was in the children themselves, lost at their young age, like Jessie in hers: suffocated, drowned, and thrown away.

By now the vessel was close enough, and the light upon us full enough, for me to read the craft’s unobstructed name: She was the Sweetheart , out of Cape Sable. Her captain was using his gun. I heard the dry crack of the pistol and I said, “We are under fire.”

And Sam, in a tight, familiar voice, said, “It is like old times, Mr. Bartholomew.”

I heard the groan as they shipped their oars. We drifted in, and I waited.

Adam said, “All it is, I tell myself, is dying. But I am not calmed down.”

“A minute more,” I said.

I was staring ahead, then I turned to report to them and saw that M had not sat down. “Sir,” I said, “you are most vulnerable as a standing target. Will you take cover?”