My professional involvement in the West Point affair dates from the
morning of October the twenty-sixth, 1830. On that day, I was taking my
usual walk – though a little later than usual – in the hills surrounding
Buttermilk Falls. I recall the weather as being Indian summer. The leaves
gave off an actual heat, even the dead ones, and this heat rose through my
soles and gilded the mist that banded the farmhouses. I walked alone,
threading along the ribbons of hills … the only noises were the
scraping of my boots and the bark of Dolph van Corlaer’s dog and, I
suppose, my own breathing, for I climbed quite high that day. I was making
for the granite promontory that the locals call Shadrach’s Heel, and I had
just curled my arm round a poplar, preparing for the final assault, when I
was met by the note of a French horn, sounding miles to the north.
A sound I’d heard before – hard to live near the Academy and not hear it
– but that morning, it made a strange buzz in my ear. For the first time,
I began to wonder about it. How could a French horn throw its sound so
far?
This isn’t the sort of matter that occupies me, as a rule. I wouldn’t even
bother you with it, but it goes some way to showing my state of mind. On a
normal day, you see, I wouldn’t have been thinking about horns. I wouldn’t
have turned back before reaching the summit, and I wouldn’t have been so
slow to grasp the wheel traces.
Two ruts, each three inches deep, and a foot long. I saw them as I was
wending home, but they were thrown in with everything else: an aster, a
chevron of geese. The compartments leaked, as it were, one into the other,
so that I only half regarded these wheel ruts, and I never (this is unlike
me) followed the chain of causes and effects. Hence my surprise, yes, to
breast the brow of the hill and find, in the piazza in front of my house,
a phaeton with a black bay harnessed to it.
On top was a young artilleryman, but my eye, trained in the stations of
rank, had already been drawn to the man leaning against the coach. In full
uniform, he was – preening as if for a portrait. Braided from head to toe
in gold: gilt buttons and a gilt cord on his shako, a gilded brass handle
on his sword. Outsunning the sun, that was how he appeared to me, and such
was the cast of my mind that I briefly wondered if he had been made by the
French horn. There was the music, after all. There was the man. A part of
me, even then – I can see this – was relaxing, in the way that a fist
slackens into its parts: fingers, a palm.
I at least had this advantage: the officer had no idea I was there. Some
measure of the day’s laziness had worked its way into his nerves. He
leaned against the horse, he toyed with the reins, flicking them back and
forth in an echo of the bay’s own switching tail. Eyes half shut, head
nodding on its stem….
We might have gone on like this for some time – me watching, him being
watched – had we not been interrupted by a third party. A cow. Big blowzy
lashy. Coming out of a copse of sycamores, licking away a smear of clover.
This cow began at once to circle the phaeton – with rare tact – she
seemed to presume the young officer must have good reason for intruding.
This same officer took a step backward as though to brace for a charge,
and his hand, jittered, went straight to his sword handle. I suppose it
was the possibility of slaughter (whose?) that finally jarred me into
motion – down the hill in a long waggish stride, calling as I went.
“Her name is Hagar!”
Too well trained to whirl, this officer. He depended his head toward me in
brief segments, the rest of him following in due course.
“At least, she answers to that,” I said. “She got here a few days after I
did. Never told me her name, so I had to give her one.”
He managed something like a smile. He said, “She’s a fine animal, sir.”
“A republican cow. Comes as she pleases, goes the same. No obligations on
either side.”
“Well. There you … it occurs to me if …”
“If only all females were that way, I know.”
This young man was not so young as I had thought. A couple of years on the
good side of forty, that was my best guess: only a decade younger than me,
and still running errands. But this errand was his one sure thing. It
squared him from toe to shoulder.
“You are Augustus Landor, sir?” he asked.
“I am.”
“Lieutenant Meadows, at your service.”
“Pleasure.”
Cleared his throat – twice, he did that. “Sir, I am here to inform you
that Superintendent Thayer requests an audience with you.”
“What would be the nature of this audience?” I asked.
“I’m not at liberty to say, sir.”
“No, of course not. Is it of a professional order?”
“I’m not at -”
“Then might I ask when this audience is to take place?”
“At once, sir. If you’re so inclined.”
I confess it. The beauty of the day was never so lucid to me as at that
moment. The peculiar smokiness of the air, so rare for late October. The
mist, lying in drifts across the forelands. There was a woodpecker
hammering out a code on a paperbark maple. Stay.
With my walking stick, I pointed in the direction of my door. “You’re sure
I can’t fix you up with some coffee, Lieutenant?”
“No thank you, sir.”
“I’ve got some ham for frying, if you -”
“No, I’ve eaten. Thank you.”
I turned away. Took a step toward the house.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Pale Blue Eye
by Louis Bayard Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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HarperCollins
ISBN: 0-06-073397-7
