Frederick Busch: The Night Inspector

He opened his mouth wide and seemed about to silently laugh. And then his mouth dropped shut and he, in turn, dropped down to his knees in the stern. “I have mouths to feed,” he said in a thin, bitter voice.

I returned my attention to the lighter. I called to Sam and Adam to lie low. Two more shots sounded, and nothing seemed to have hit. As I counted, he had at most three chambers full, though no quantity of cartridges would keep me from him. I saw him kneel beside a half-tun barrel, and I sighted, tried to allow for wind across us from the west, and for the dip of the prow as the current struck us, as the tide surged under us, and I fired two rounds. One or both took him down, and he did not move. I saw a head at the forward hatch, and I put two rounds there. A man began to howl his pain, and I could only think that I had struck him in the jaw or neck, for, surely, if he was not dead, he was very seriously wounded.

I said to them, “Kindly bring us in, gentlemen. Their gun will be silent.”

Sam began at once, Adam an instant later, so that we wobbled in our course and then straightened, then made good speed. M stood again in the stern, his gaff hook like a spear in his hand, his shoulders squared, his chin upthrust. No one spoke.

“In the mercy of the Lamb, in the mildness of the Father who is Child,” the voice came chanting from the hatch. “Mr. Porter is sorely wounded. I think the bones of his shoulder are shattered.” I shook my head in regret for my poor marksmanship. Pistols are unreliable. “Our captain is dead. I alone am left to tell the tale. I throw myself upon your mercy in assurance that it will be as the mercy of the Lamb.”

“Come up,” I called.

“In the assurance—”

“Up, Mr. North. And you forgot to report on Miss Jessie. Is she safe?”

“Below decks and safe and well, sir.”

“Come up, Mr. North.”

He appeared as a hat, and then a sweating, round face, and then a good gabardine suit with stains upon its sleeves and matching waistcoat. In his hand was what appeared to be a small, folded handkerchief, stained but once white.

“A flag of surrender, sir. The rules of war. The principles of engagement — I beg all parties to attend. A flag of surrender!”

I put a single.31 round into his belly, at the line of his belt, and I saved the other against emergencies. I wanted the shot in his lower stomach because he would die the more painfully, poisoned by his own bowel. I estimated Porter to be almost bled to death. I lay my head against the warm revolver and the cold, damp scarf. Sam and Adam rowed again, I heard, and we came abutting the lighter, onto which M made us fast. I lay where I was, uncertain for an instant whether we were in a tree in Rebel country or the river off New York. M clambered past me, and I saw the men I had killed and wounded, and I smelled their blood as if it were spilling, all of it, at once, as I lay there, and as if — the scene came through my mind and left, but I remember it — my companions on board the lighter were filling tuns with the blood I had caused to flow. I saw Jessie’s face, and I felt her neck and hair, and then I was up, upon my knees, and then standing, and I watched as M and Adam forced the tun and searched inside for someone’s missing child.

Soon, for I joined them in the labor, we had opened them all. It was a perversion of Christmas, I thought, unfastening these great casks that were to provide to their inhabitants a gift and to those who shipped them the even greater gift of having given liberty to someone enslaved. Everything was slimy with a mixture of salt and fresh water, the blood from the rowers’ hands, and the terrible fluids of the bodies within the tuns. We found only death, and its stink of decomposing bodies in their embarrassing disarray was potent. It made for a liquor I thereafter drank in my dreams. For they were children. They were made of the tender eyelids, the short, thin fingers and soft limbs that we, who were grown in the world, were required by what is proper and right in life to cradle against us, and protect.

M retrieved his gaff, which he had carried aboard the lighter like a spear for great fishes, and he turned from us, by the small cabin among the lengths of rope with which the tuns had been lashed down. They lay beneath his feet like snakes. He stared into the glare above Manhattan that prefigured a lurid dawn. And he only shook his head.

Then, as if possessed of a sudden, he drew himself tall, stepped backward among the serpents, then strode at the side of the lighter and hurled his wooden gaff pole with its iron hook, high and into a darkness that accepted it, as if the morning skies, or what lay behind them, had absorbed his assault.

He stared after his vanished weapon, and then he turned, with a terrible, tortured face, to confront us.

“These babes,” he said, “these darksome pips of humanity, abandoned by man and woman and God. How can we? How can He ?”

Adam sat with his back pressed into the deckhouse, and he stared at the tun. For myself, I committed impracticality, seizing my Navy Colt by its barrel and tossing it, as if with barely a consideration, over the side.

M sought, I saw, to muster a smile for me, but he clearly could not.

And, barely a quarter of an hour later, we fought our way downstream, M at the tiller, steadying our path and correcting, upon occasion, but permitting us to slowly float with a kind of rocking that sickened us as, aided by the sail, we retreated. The day came up, dispersing the golden shimmer under which we had labored at dawn, replacing it with a sullen red light that spoke of dampness and heat.

We were alone on the water for a while in our silence. He swung us out, at Warren Street, and we continued to drift as shipping came up, as a cutter of the river police swung past us — he stood, pulling at his oilskin coat, so that his badge caught the sun — and we began to hear the carts and wagons in the streets, the clash of crates and pallets as they were swung up and set down, the huffing of the switching engines in the yards. Gulls cackled, and the pigeons wheeled above the warehouses, into and out of the soft light.

Adam had begun, on seeing the children, to lament in a deep, hoarse voice that he could not still; I watched him try, for the sake of his dignity, or because he had no wish to share with pale-skinned men the profundity of his feelings. But he had wept, and so had M, who had assaulted the sky. I was emptied, and I sat upon my haunches in the Customs boat and waited. Sam had watched us all. And now we drifted, M steering us, into the Customs wharf, a half an hour before he might go off duty.

“I must make for my office. I cannot speak of what we witnessed and endured. I will not. Adam: You are a man, and a companion, and I offer my salute, my handshake, sir — will you?”

Adam took his hand and promptly released it. His hands, like mine and Sam’s, were bloody. His face looked washed clean of energy and will, but I knew better. He would direct his life, and he would never forgive us. He looked at me, then more briefly at Sam, and he climbed from the boat to the dock, and he quickly walked away.

M said, “Billy, you were used, I take it. So was I, by you. But I like you, while I confess to a near womanly love for your Sam. You enlivened me; he will make me live a good while longer, on the pages he will write.” Sam’s face lit, like the globe of a gas lamp, and his smile stretched wide. “You will write them, Sam.

“As to your fishing for the shabby author fish, I know too well the world’s waters not to recognize bait, Billy, or lure, or line. But I cannot see it all as insult, and you’re a good fellow, and a hero of the republic. I’m a restless man, and I shan’t lie down for long. Something further may come of this.”