The Night Inspector (2 page)

That is why some very few of us served with the volunteers of New York as what we called marksmen.
Snipers
, the men of infantry or horse called us, and, behind our backs,
assassins
. An Englishman I met said
thugs
. In the woods around Paynes Corners, where I was born, the hamlet lying two hundred miles and more from Manhattan, a small crossroads and then a church and a fur-trading shop for victuals, I learned my forest craftiness. I could hide, and I could seek. I was a solitary child, and powerful of limb. And I was reckless, and born with great vision, though not, alas, of the interior, spiritual sort. But I saw in the dark if there was a hint of a sliver of moon in the sky. How natural, then, with my youth and young manhood passed in patrolling a trapline and hunting for my meals, that I would make a marksman when called to the War.

It was a Sharps that I carried into the trees. I wore a pannier of sixty rounds, and always a pistol in a holster at my back. The knife I wore at my left side, and I drew with my right. It was good for game, and bad for men, I once told the sergeant who saw me out and up and hunting Rebels.

“Kindly do not boast of the assassinations, Mr. Bartholomew. You fire your weapon, but in this chain of command, you
are
my weapon. And I think we owe it to the dead to never boast about our work.”

“It is the brigadier’s wish and your command that I take to the trees and shoot men down.”

“Truly said, Mr. Bartholomew. I wonder if I rebuke myself while addressing you.” He looked away as he spoke, though I was whole of face, and had smooth enough skin, and all of my nose and lips and jaw. I watched a fly hover at his ear. I thought to seize it, and I could have. He turned, and he read my expression, I suppose, and drew back a pace. “This triumph of ours,” he said, “our killing them off, is no pleasure to me. Those are men like us.”

“No, Sergeant,” I said, “with all respect. They are dead, and we are not, and that’s the nature of our transaction.”

Smoke from the cooks’ wagons blew in on us. He tried not to smile, I think. He said, “As you were, Mr. Bartholomew.”

I drew myself taut.

He said, “I hope you return safe and well.”

“Sergeant.”

“And I wonder how you sleep, bless you.”

“Fitfully,” I said.

He nodded. He caressed his ginger beard, which did not give him the appearance of age I believe he sought. He covered his lips an instant with his fingers, and I saw his fatigue, and his fear, of course. He was from a village up on the Hudson and had been raised in wealth. He was a powerful leader in battle, and in sum a man of strength. Many months later, when the hunters took me down, I tried to ask him to kill me, but I could
not work my jaw. He only wrapped my head in what I later learned was his shirt, and he carried me across his saddle, propped against his breast, to a Southern farrier, who thought to cauterize some of the area of wound.

When I had stopped screaming, I heard the sergeant tell the farrier, “You enjoyed that.” I heard him cock his piece, and I waited for him to fire. Someone, I remember thinking, should be shot. Then I remembered that I had already filled the bill.

But I did take precautions, and I lasted a good long while. I always fastened twigs and leaves to my cap and my shoulders and sleeves. I used cold coals from the cookfires and darkened my face, my wrists, and the backs of my hands. At three hundred yards and more, a hand in dense brush, if it is a white man’s hand, will flare like the tail of a deer. I dulled the barrel of the Sharps with coal as well, to eliminate reflection, and I carried it by the barrel lest it shake the leaves above me. A Rebel sentry, on seeing the motion of the branches, might aim at them and fire, not having the skill to allow for the rolling of the earth and how a rifle ball, fired over long distance, falls. He’d miss the leaves and kill the man. I did not intend to die by accident, and I knew a good shooter had to believe that everything solid and still was an illusion, and that it all was always moving, up and down, around, away.

Into the tree, then, and up, then screened and with my back against the trunk if possible, I worked with telescope for surveillance and rifle scope for aiming. It then was a matter of resistance: wind against bullet; will to be still and invisible against the tickle of spider, ant, or fly; lungs against the seized breath; finger to trigger; cheek to stock; and, always, despair against an imitation of God Almighty in a tree to smite a boy perhaps not wearing shoes or a man who had removed his officer’s insignia to hide his rank (the sign of value in a corpse) from someone like me. I always shook and wavered, and I always steadied up. I was, finally, a hunter, and I killed them.

At Yale College, where I was to study theology ancient and modern,
I read in the novels of Maria Edgeworth and the poetry of Keats. I ate sweets, in other words, and grew chubby of mind. When my uncle Sidney Cowper asked me to name the sage of our time, I told him Washington Irving. He threatened to remove his financial support, and my mother, who had given up life for a career in widowhood, naturally wept. I amended my deposition: William Ellery Channing, I testified. “Though,” I added, for a taste of danger and as a sop to what I thought of as courage, “I do admire Mr. Charles Brockden Brown.” Uncle had clearly read neither. He cleared his throat and urged the conversation toward finances and, in particular, the desperation of the chronically unemployed, among whose number he clearly foresaw me.

Although, I must say, Uncle Sidney Cowper did not dislike me. Indeed, he was as fond of me as any man I knew was fond of any man. He was a great, bulky fellow, as tall as my father and far more meaty. He was handsome in his way, my mother said, and he took his responsibilities—as surrogate for his brother, my father, dead of fever when I was but seven and my mother little more than a girl—with a responsibility I must call overzealous. He always braced me with his large, heavy hands: “Chin back, Billy. Head erect and unmoving. Don’t
waver
, son! Keep your belly in”—he’d have done well to follow his own advice—“and puff out your chest like a soldier.
That’s
a man.” Throughout such advice, his hands worked my body as if it were clay, poking at the point of my chin and cupping the back of my head, patting my belly just above the balls and pulling at my tiny tits as if I were to be shaped for once and for all by him. I did not like his hands on me, and when I saw them on my mother—not her belly nor her breast, but over her shoulders and neck of a sufficiency—I decided that my regret over the loss of my father was redoubled: once for his death and my loneliness, and once because greedy Uncle Sidney was going to wear away the flesh of those my father had left behind.

At Yale College, I learned enough to learn enough, and I was therefore situated in Cheerie’s Chop House on an evening in 1867 when I
needed to be. It was undistinguished by its food or drink, but for me it was a kind of home. Cheerie had been a drover with us at Malvern Hill, and he had vowed to live as far from horses as he could, if he might live. He did, and so he lived on Eleventh Street and ran his chop house on Twenty-third, and he swore that he rarely roasted a horse to serve as venison to his patrons. He owned, I’d have thought, fifteen hairs, which he pasted with pomade to the top of his oval, pale head. He seated me without my asking it at a recessed table where the shadows fell. He left it to me to light the candle or not, depending upon whether I chose to read as I drank my wine, or eat in the gray-blue light that curtained me, permitting me to remove the mask in something like seclusion and wear only the dark silk veil.

M dined that night at eight. He had stopped on his way to the Customs in the morning, asking Cheerie to hold a small table for his supper. Cheerie was a good comrade. We had nearly died together in a canonade that killed a half a dozen horses and covered us in their blood and ropes of blue intestine. We gave each other courtesies. When he smiled his great white teeth, I thought of horses shrieking and exploding. Christ Himself may know what Cheerie thought of when he looked at me.

I had noticed M on Broadway as I walked the town at dawn and as he was going to his job. I knew his visage from a Boston paper. Then I had observed him; I had, during the War, been excellent at seeing how a man moved through his terrain. And, noting the place at which he worked, I had as well seen an acquaintanceship with him as something to possess. I stood. I was wearing the mask, not yet the veil. I walked slowly across the sawdust of the wooden floor among the peculiar rectangular tables that Cheerie had bought when a ladies’ dresses manufactory had failed in one of the recent economic convulsions. I moved into the man’s soft, myopic vision. Even his beard looked soft. He reminded me, though his hair was darker, of dead Sergeant Grafton.

“Sir,” I said. He look up and squinted, as though I were dozens of yards away. I could study the pores of his strangely youthful skin. He did
not, through his complexion, manifest his service on the sea or on the shore.

I said, “Sir. I beg your pardon for this intrusion. I have read your work. I have read
The Ambiguities
and its analysis of your profession. I have read
The Whale
. I think it a blinding brilliance, the epitaph of our economy.”

His eyes dropped, then returned, squinting at the mask. “No,” he said, “but with thanks. I wrote expressly
not
for money when I spake my piece about the whale. And I was given justice: I made no money. Though, to be sure, it remains the king of most kings.” He could not keep his eyes from my mask, even as he knew I observed their fascinated study.

“Begging to differ,” I said.

He gestured at the vacant chair, and I nodded, then sat.

“You were differing,” he said.

“The whale does triumph over your captain’s will, and that of the industry on whose behalf he fished. It’s a type of the national economy that founders when nature, in the guise of a whale, decides to strike.”

“But it was Ahab, a man, mighty or not, who struck through the …”

“Mask,” I finished for him.

“My regrets. I could not say my thought without including your misfortune. My most profound regrets.” He swallowed half his glass of claret wine, then waved his arm for a waiter, saying, “Please to dine with me, Mr.—”

“Bartholomew,” I said. “William Bartholomew. I am honored.”

“And I am flummoxed,” he said, leaning back his large head, affecting to laugh, though uttering no sound, as his nose pointed toward the ceiling and his mouth gaped into the air.

My dinner was brought, and wine was poured. He sat silently when I replaced the mask with my veil, although he as well as I heard someone at a nearby table gasp. I watched him close his eyes as the mask came up and the veil dropped over my head. I was charmed by his willingness to
shy away from what I thought he’d spent his life in trying to peruse. And then we spoke, as we ate pork and cabbage, of what he called his career. He reserved his anger not so much for those writers who had pronounced him mad, or simply gone dry on him, but for the Brothers Harper, who had printed his books. I noted my recollection of Putnam’s, whose printing of his
Piazza Tales
I had read at with little interest. He asked me about something called
His Fifty Years of Exile
of which I had never heard, and I lied that I had read it.

“But it’s the publishers you blame, sir.”

He said, “They are mere manufacturers of black shapes on white pages. They post me invoices still, for books of theirs, often by me!, that I’ve been sent. But not a human word about the writing of language to be read by students of human ways.”

“You see,” I said, “that is what
The Whale
was, I maintain: a critique of the philosophy of numbers.”

“You’re a watchful man, Mr. Bartholomew.”

“No—won’t you call me Billy?”

“Call me Herman,” he said.

“An honor.”

“And likewise. But may I ask you, Billy, about your …”

“Face.”

“Exactly that. Yes. Was it the War?”

“It was the War. The interests of money and the will of our Commander decreed it. Battle for the rights of the industrialists, battle for the rights of the agriculturists, battle on behalf of bullyrag Abe, who saw
himself, I
insist, as the issue:
my
will,
my
national entity,
my idea
of indivisibility. Crush the farmboys and the desperate Negroes into one another with a thunderclap. And see to it—be sure!—that one William Bartholomew receive the national hoofprint in his head. I’m a coin imprinted with Abe’s earnestness.”

He shook his head and permitted me to pour him more of Cheerie’s sour wine. “I cannot reprove your bitterness,” he said. “I know its taste. Though I believe the righteousness of the President’s motives. You cannot
start a nation and permit it to founder. The experiment is too holy, too vast. And the black slaves? What of them, Billy?”

“Engines of economy. It was money was the prize.”

“Poor man,” he said. Then: “I meant that of
all
men, not you, you understand.”

“Poor man,” I replied.

“You were struck with a minié ball? May I ask?”

“I saw my fellowman countless times, with a devastating insight. Twice, and once with devastation equal to that which I dispensed, he saw me in return.”

He gazed and gazed, but I gave him nothing more. He dropped his red-rimmed eyes.

“Tell me,” I said, “of that extraordinary moment when your Ishmael feels the hands of the other men as they squeeze the sperm of the killed whale on board their ship. It was an instant of brotherhood surpassing the interests of money, was it not? And would your man not feel a great sorrow, given his great gloom? Would he not sense, having felt the hand of brotherhood, that they were soon to lose hold of one another?”

“You have read the book,” he answered, nodding slowly, permitting himself a smile. “You have
studied
it. Yet I must wonder: Have I written as much of economic matters as you seem to suggest? Did I not speak of the beef-and-ale of those actual men? And about the fishiness of the fishes? The brine of their sea? I did intend to. And, surely, I was intent, I can tell you, upon capturing—well, suggesting, at any rate, rendering as well as I could, the superb high will of Ahab. His shuddering desire to be dignified under heaven—under heaven’s oppression.” His hands moved with precision upon the surface of the table, though in service of exactly what I could not tell, at first. He arranged, as he spoke, the angles of cutlery to glass, of nappery to butter dish. His body seemed to seek the exactness of purpose about which he spoke. I realized then that he wanted—he was yearning—to write on paper with a pen. “I have some poems,” he said.