“Monsieur sait que c’est comme il faut.”
“Bien sur. Mais ma verre, elle est vide.”
“Je regrette, monsieur, et je reconnais mon erreur. Voilà.”
The captain poured more of the clear liquor into the glass of the inspector, who toasted him and emptied his drink. They apparently agreed that the ship might receive its full inspection in the morning, and they shook hands. Borofsky bowed deeply, and M inclined his head.
“Thus,” he said to me, “I stand on an unmoving deck. It is what I do in my life at home and in my office. The deck may slope or sway, but it goes no place in particular. Let’s disembark, shipmate. Let’s set out on the little voyage home.”
I said to the captain, “Good night, sir.”
“Enchanté,” he said, looking away.
In the dinghy, and moving through the chop toward the docks, I looked over M and saw the yellow and golden and sometimes green-looking lights as filtered by mist and a yellow fog and blown dark smoke.
“I shall leave you,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“I must leave you at the office and return. We must not abandon the vessel, in fact, once we’re aboard.”
“You’ll wait out the morning?” I thought of the potato spirits.
“Regulations established by the Surveyor of the Port of New York. I am a servant of the servants of the people, Bill. We’ll have a night of it again, though.”
“I look forward to it.”
He said, “You’ve warmed my heart on a bleak night.”
“I’ll bring you the pistol, then.”
“I’ll find the money. How much, would you say?”
“Five dollars,” I said. “No, four, let’s say.”
“A week’s pay,” he said.
“I’m in no hurry for the money.”
“A debt’s a debt. It’s a creature I know by heart.”
We sat in silence, but surrounded by noise — the small splash of his oars, wielded with power and efficiency, against the black waters; the roaring of a furnace on the shore; the seething of the wind against the surface and the perforations of my mask; the little grunt he made as he held an oar, like a rudder, in the water while digging in with the other to turn us. The man of oceans, of three-masted ships, of naked brown girls and sailors who stalked their boys with hard hands and filleting knives: He rowed me, I thought, in a little boat. How could he bear this disintegration?
“Land ho,” I said, with what I hoped was jest in my voice. I regretted at once my having reminded him of real voyages, and of landings made after considerable danger.
“You sound like a sea dog” is all he said, letting us drift to the barge, lifting his face to silently laugh in the flare of the lantern, a smudge on the fog.
I had a furrow up my inner arm, tender and debilitating, because I fell from a tree like a boy in mid-climb who goes frightened, stiff, and incapable. In fact, they had begun to stalk me. I was not as frightened of dying, though I did not wish to, as I was unnerved by considering they thought of me as a creature one might shoot. I had been, for a while, invulnerable; I had been, for a while, an eye at the end of a telescopic sight, a finger on the trigger of the Sharps, but no one they might know. I was, when I hunted them, a force and not a man. And before my little detachment was sent to the western theater, while we still were hunting in Virginia, I was up a tree in a blind I had built — lashed boughs for a shooting platform, a breastworks of bushes and limbs for camouflage — and I was daily awaiting the passage below me of reinforcements for Spotsylvania. Hearing my fire, artillery hidden in a copse hard by would begin to bombard the road. I would make my escape because I was a creature of the woods, Sergeant Grafton had been informed by the lieutenant relaying orders.
“They think you virtually a ghost,” the sergeant told me.
“From dying of fright,” I said.
“Not you, Mr. Bartholomew. You’re a cold one.”
“That’s shivering—from fright.”
“That’s trembling from eagerness to kill someone,” he said, clapping me gently on the shoulder. “You aren’t human, though you’re decent enough for all that.”
On the third day, kneeling to micturate over the edge of the blind, I heard the clatter of wheels; then a horse, perhaps because he caught my scent, whinnied. With my flies undone, I lay back to check my cap, and then I lay the blackened barrel over the breastworks and sighted on the road. The clatter, and now a creaking, approached the track below me, coming from the east, to my right, and moving toward the north and west. First I saw the two horses, nervously stepping because reined and harnessed to what frightened them, a platform on wagon wheels, swaying and making odd sounds because it was jerry-rigged and poorly balanced on the axle. In the platform, four men were kneeling, two at each side. Their rifles pointed south and north, one of each couple aiming at the tree line, one of each aiming at the thickets on the side of the road.
They were looking out for me, I thought. They didn’t know my name or face, but they knew what I did. And you are, in this world, what you do. And they therefore did know me. They expected me. They wished to kill me, and I shook with the authority of my fright: They were after me.
I could take each man on my side of the cart, I thought, and surely one on the other side, and probably each and every one of the four. Someone behind them — for two ragged columns followed of lean, dark men, many of them with shaved heads because of the lice that infested them, all of them hard-looking, bitter, nourished only by rage or despair — one of them would harvest me.
Breathing was difficult, for I forced myself to breathe shallowly for silence’s sake; yet I wished to gulp at the sky, to chew the air, to relieve my stoppered chest. I went over the side and dove off the limb like a squirrel. My foot caught, my rifle was nearly pulled from my grasp, and I hit, balls and belly and all, the limb beneath my blind. I held my weapon. I held the limb. They heard me and poured a dozen rounds, at least, into the tree. A ball went up the limb, possibly a ricochet from a complete miss, and it gathered bark and brought it through my shirt and up my arm, just above the armpit, and along the underside, leaving a furrow that ended at the forearm, loaded with sap and bark and bits of cloth.
I was away by then, running a line of retreat I had marked out days before. The barrage began and some of them were killed. We found the rolling platform from which they had cut the horses as they fled. I lay in the blood of the Rebels on the platform, tilted up on its two wheels, bracing myself at the bottom with my feet while Sergeant Grafton cut away my shirt and poured liniment into the wound.
I refused to cry out.
He swabbed with the fragments of my shirt to clean away the bits of cloth and tree, and then he poured more liniment on.
“Survive my tender attentions, Mr. Bartholomew, and you’ll surely survive the wound.”
“Agreed,” I forced through my teeth.
“We’ll get you a shirt from a corpse, if you like.” He nodded at Sam, who stood reluctantly.
“No,” I said to Sam, “don’t bother with a shirt. Their skin will do me.”
Sam looked at Sergeant Grafton, who said, “He’s joking, Sam.”
“You’re sure?” Sam asked.
“No,” Sergeant Grafton said.
I was still tender and sore when we made our way to harry the Army of Tennessee, which the Rebels wanted to bring from Tuscumbia toward Central Georgia to block Sherman’s move out of Atlanta. We came down through North Charleston and were a long way from Milledgeville in Georgia, where couriers were to find us, when we stopped in a shabby hamlet the name of which none of us knew. I counted seven bullet-pocked houses, but Sergeant Grafton said there were only six, because one I had counted was only an estimable outhouse. Its seat was wide enough for two, and it was elevated with interior steps, a palace that reminded me of nothing so much as the privy at our place in Paynes Corners, home to my aging mother and, in a sense, to my unmourned uncle. All the structures were in need of paint, inside and out, as we found, moving warily from building to building by twosomes. We sheltered, once we had found ourselves alone, in a low house with a small porch and a back door; it was situated closest to the scrubby brush that ran toward the woods and farthest of them all from the long, uncultivated field that would be a killing ground if we were jumped.