The Resurrectionist: A Novel Part 10

The wail seemed to begin deep within the child's body and rose in crescendo as if to match his widening eyes. In seconds the sound reached a full-pitched scream, and he turned and ran down the lane with his shirttail flapping. The others followed him like a Greek chorus of woe in rapid transit, pursued by Furies.

Nemo rocked back and laughed deeply. "Oh, my," he said, wiping his cheeks.

Just at the edge of his yard, by the bare c.r.a.pe myrtle that marked the property line he shared with Mrs. Thompson next door, the boys parted like a stream around a woman coming down the sandy walk. He saw that it was Amy, and he laughed again at her expression of consternation as she shut the gate behind her.

"Oh, me," he said by way of greeting. "What a man's got to do to keep his property private."

Amy shook her head, but he saw the wisp of a smile on her light-brown face. "That was Aunt Sampson's boy. You gone catch h.e.l.l from her tomorrow. Tonight, if she get mad enough."

"I ain't catching nothing. Ma Sampson ought to keep her mouth shut around that boy. He got a big enough mouth without putting gossip into it."

"Least we know he gets it natural." Amy settled languidly down on the top step, at Nemo's feet. The paper lay on the boards beside him, forgotten as he latched his fingers between hers, but he put the knife back in his coat pocket quietly. Almost two months of Sat.u.r.day visits from Amy now, since the night at Albert Fitzhugh's place, and still he marveled at how his heart raced when he was near her, pounding through the mellow tenor of these afternoons.

"What you reading in that paper?"

"Nothing much. Says Wade Hampton got Columbia all st.i.tched up tight. Says Sherman going to get Charleston sure, Augusta maybe, but we holding tight."

Amy looked up at him sharply. "How old that paper?"

"Monday."

"Need to get you a new one. Roony come by the Fitzhughs' this afternoon saying Sherman's going to be across the Congaree at the New Year."

"Naw."

She nodded. "Wait and see."

"Lord, Lord," Nemo said. "He'll burn Columbia all right."

But Amy seemed unconcerned. "They say he's taking freed slaves with him as he goes. Whole train of them, just following behind, heading north." She hooked an arm around his leg, like a child would. "Let's you and me pack it up and take off, Nemo. Or leave it all, just take what we can carry."

"Where'd it go better for us, gal? Where you think we'd have a better stake?"

Amy smiled, her eyes dreamy. "Chicago. New York. Boston." She said the names as though they were incantations. "Or we could go back. Across the water. I hear there's boats leaving out of New York for Liberia every week now. I've got some pennies saved up. I know you do." She hugged his leg a little harder.

Nemo shook his head. "Ain't no way I'm crossing that ocean again, child. Not Nemo." He closed his eyes against the idea, remembering the barked orders of the pirates and the ceaseless heaving in the hold of their Fair Dealer, the endless tossing that grew frenzied when the storms came. He still remembered the sloshing of the waste tubs and once, with the timbers groaning as though the ocean meant to rend the ship to kindling, a child smaller than himself being pitched headfirst into the filth.

He shook his head again. "You don't know about it. You was born in All Saints. Can't know."

The two of them were silent for a moment, staring out as the sun dipped below the last tarpaper roof across the way. Finally Nemo spoke.

"We got plenty of Africa here. All that rice culture down in the low country ain't nothing but Africa. The levees, the drainage ditches. Who you think taught the buckra how to work it all, how to keep the harvest flow water fresh? It was Africans, Amy. Senegalese. I reckon if we can make it this far, we can see how much farther the road going to go."

But his words sounded hollow and he felt he had spoken too much. Optimism, he had found, could be a dangerous thing, like a cutting tool that could just as easily turn on its wielder. To break the leaden silence, he asked the question that was never far from the surface of his mind.

"Mister Fitzhugh been leaving you alone?" he said, embarra.s.sed.

She responded too loudly for his liking. "He left me alone since you gave me that conjure powder. Old possum don't bother me as long as I put it in his food."

Nemo smiled. "Wasn't conjure nothing, child. Just old saltpeter. Keep his manhood down like it ought to be."

Amy leaned close to him and whispered, "I know it ain't conjure powder, but Mrs. Thompson over there don't know it. You notice you ain't heard her broom on the boards since she come out. She ain't missing a word you say."

He looked across to the porch next door, where Mrs. Thompson stood with a broom in her hands, eyes down to the floor.

Nemo rose and held out his arm for Amy. "Let's walk uptown, see what's doing," he said, then whispered as she took his elbow, "You good for business, child."

Thursday.

THE MORNING SUN IS SLANTING THROUGH the blinds when Kaye begins to stir. Jacob has been awake, propped against the headboard, since three. For the last half hour he has stared through the blinds as the sun has risen, watching the night give way slowly, the sky going from black to bruised shades of blue to the nearly blinding whiteness that is now filling the room, superseding the light cast by the little lamp on his nightstand. Before that he had read-read with an intensity he had not known since his days in medical school, when a biochemistry or internal medicine book had been, for the long night before exams, the tangible key to his future. Because Abraham Flexner's Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation had had the opposite effect of the soporific he'd hoped for. Instead of being bored back to sleep, he'd felt something begin to turn inside him, as if heating up. It was ever thus, Flexner may as well have been saying. In chapter after chapter he exposed charlatanry and worse, puncturing the thin veneer of piety laid over it all. There had been many Nemo Johnstons, used and discarded. And perhaps many more like Sara Thacker. Only once the sun had begun to come up had Jacob set the book down-laid it across his chest as if to trade the darkness within its pages for the sunrise.

The sheet is pushed down nearly to Kaye's waist. She lies facing away from him, and the slatted light from the window blinds stripes her gorgeous back. With his finger, he traces the line of her spine up from the rise of her hips to the ma.s.s of tousled black hair on the pillow, tucking a few loose strands behind her ear. He leans over to run his finger under her fine jawline and kisses her ear. Her eyes are closed but she is smiling.

"Guten Tag," she says.

"Welcome back."

"So you said last night."

"I'll keep saying it."

Kaye opens her eyes. She gathers up the sheet and turns over to look at him. "How long have you been up? You've got circles under your eyes."

"I'm fine, Mother."

"I'm serious. You'd think you were the jetlagged one."

"I had a dream about my dad. He was standing with your father." Though he takes care not to mention Meyer to Kaye more than he must, he has thought about the old man almost every day of the past year. He is glad Meyer did not live to see him brought before the Physicians' Task Force, glad that Meyer did not have to stand up for his protege at the hearing. The last time Jacob saw Meyer was at Beth Shalom, where Meyer had lain wrapped in white linen from head to toe, looking like a corpse from another time in history, which to Jacob seemed appropriate. When the rabbi spoke the last words in Hebrew and let the dirt sift through his fingers, Jacob had cried as hard as the family.

"They were together?"

"Together."

"And?"

"There's nothing else. They just stood there, looking at me."

"How strange."

"We are both thirty-something orphans, Kaye. That's strange in itself."

"I'm twenty-nine," she says absently, and pushes her bangs out of her eyes. "Is that the book Daddy gave you?"

Jacob nods. "The one. I hate to admit it, but I never read it before. Didn't seem to have the time." The reprint of Flexner's 1910 Report is an odd book-so odd, in fact, that Jacob had at first thought it a joke when Meyer presented it to him after he'd pa.s.sed his boards. Meyer had scrawled an inscription on its t.i.tle page: "To Dr. Jacob Thacker, May 1990, with all best wishes. Read it, Jake, to remember we are as much about art as science-and still have a long way to go."

He picks up the book from his chest. "It's amazing, Kaye. I had no idea. Most of the medical schools at the turn of the century were run for profit. I mean, for profit alone. You can almost see that in the school records, but Jesus, not like this guy Flexner tells it. They'd let anybody in. More students meant more cash flow." He begins rifling through the pages, looking for those he has dog-eared.

"Get this-the typical southern school spent more on advertising than on laboratories. They almost had to; there were seven medical schools in South Carolina in 1900. Seven. They were churning out doctors like hairdressers. Listen to this: 'It is a singular fact that the organization of medical education in this country has. .h.i.therto been such as not only to commercialize the process of education itself, but also to obscure in the minds of the public any discrimination between the well trained physician and the physician who has no adequate training whatsoever.' "

"Sounds like the law school."

"Funny. But this is worse." He reads again. " 'The Carolina anatomy room, containing a single cadaver, is indescribably foul. The cadaver on display was in such a state of advanced putrefaction that-' "

"Okay, enough."

"All right. One more thing, though: 'The situation at Columbia is utterly hopeless. The university ought not much longer permit its name to be exploited by a low-grade inst.i.tution, whose entrance terms-if the phrase can be used-are far below that of its academic department.' Can you believe that? Jesus, Kaye. The s.h.i.t they shoveled down our throats. The s.h.i.t I've been shoveling." He taps the page with his finger. "There's no glorious history in here. Just a bunch of dirty laundry, things the school should never have gotten away with. McMichaels is full of s.h.i.t. He's got to know that. I ought to blow this whole bas.e.m.e.nt thing wide open."

Kaye reaches out a hand to his and closes the book gently. "What do you think Daddy would tell you?"

Jacob shuts his eyes and shakes his head. "No," he says. He can feel her eyes on his face, so he says it again.

"No. I've worked too hard."

When she speaks again, her voice is next to his ear, soft. "No one has ever said otherwise."

He closes his eyes tighter. "One more year. That's the deal. Then I'm out."

Then, before he can push it away, a memory of Meyer comes to him, from one of the many times Jacob had gone to his mentor's office ready to quit. Meyer had sat him down and listened.

That morning, on rounds, Jacob had diagnosed a fever of unknown origin in one of his patients. His supervisor, Dr. Sanderson, had nearly exploded.

"Let me guess," Meyer replied. "Too vague?"

Meyer had stood up and pulled a copy of Tinsley Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine down from his bookcase. He flipped through the pages a moment, then set it down on the desk, opened to a page of diagnostic diagrams with symptoms on one side and diagnoses on the other.

"Tinsley Harrison was a friend of mine, Jake. A good man and a h.e.l.l of a doctor. This book of his is used across the country. Which means that somewhere out there, right now, some intern is looking at these pages, as nervous as you, hoping this little diagram will prove him worthy as a diagnostician."

Jacob said nothing. He had looked at the same diagram himself the day before.

"Do you really think it's this simple?" Meyer said. He sat down and shut the book. "John Sanderson does, and that's what makes him weak. The need for absolute certainty. No great doctor ever has that need." Meyer leaned back in his wooden office chair, tapped his chest. "The great ones make the connections here."

"Right. But you can't go into surgery without some certainty, Meyer."

"True. But you can't go in with absolute certainty, either. I am not advocating la.s.situde. I am advocating a combination of knowledge and gut instinct. Do you know, Jake, that there are twenty-seven different procedures for an appendectomy, all equally viable? I imagine that keeps Sanderson awake at night."

Meyer leaned over the desk and fixed his eyes on Jacob. "What falls to the great ones is to make the connections others cannot see," he said. "Half knowledge, half gut instinct. Those are the connections no book can teach you."

Jacob opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling, wondering why his head is so full of memory this morning. This past of his, so distant most days that it seems threatened with fading out entirely, is on him like a fever. He turns on his side and looks deeply into Kaye's eyes. "No," he says, "One more year. Too much sacrifice to waste it now."

Kaye sighs. It burns him that she has always been more rational than he, has always possessed the ability to reconcile decisions and consequences better than he ever could. "Your choice," she says, as though this were at its root a problem as solvable as an equation. "A year, then. But it's your year, Jacob. If you stick it out, you'll have to do your job." She pushes the book aside. "You have to let this go. You'll have to forget it."

"Sometimes I worry that I've forgotten too much already. Like the school." He takes a deep breath, his eyes still on the ceiling, and says, "I went out to see Aunt Pauline yesterday."

Kaye props herself up on an elbow, leans closer.

"At her combined grocery store and bait shop."

Kaye smiles. "Quite a combination."

"Indeed. A lovely establishment." But he hates the tone of his voice as he says it.

"How long has it been?"

"Six years. Dad's funeral. She's getting old, Kaye."

"Is that why you went?" she asks quietly. He can tell she is trying not to push him too hard.

"I just don't have that many connections left," he says. He starts to tell her more, tell her everything, when he feels her hand on his chest, soft and warm.

"You have me."

"I do," he says, swallowing hard. "And that's enough. Forget the rest."

Kaye glances at the clock beside the bed. "I'm not due in until nine. Can you go in a little late today?"

"Sure. Time is all I've got."

Kaye sits up now, not bothering to adjust the sheet that has fallen to her waist. "Come here, then. Let me help you forget for a while."

Soon enough he is forgetting it all.

THE CLERK AT the Lexington County Courthouse is everything Janice Tanaka is not: from his scuffed comfort shoes to the oily comb-over on his head, he radiates the kind of Deep South indolence that is implicitly banned on campus. Jacob stands at the counter of the Birth Records Division for nearly a minute waiting to be acknowledged, watching the man read The State at his desk and sip from a coffee-stained mug as though unaware of his presence. Just as Jacob is reaching to ring the little bell on the counter, he rises from his chair with an underwater slowness and makes his way over.

"Help you?"

"Yes, thanks. I need a birth certificate from 1866. Do your records go back that far?"

"Oh, they go way back," the clerk says, waving a hand at the stacks of shelves behind him. "You doing a little genealogy? It's usually just little old ladies come in here."

"It's nothing personal," Jacob says, hoping the county won't require him to fill out a form, to give his name. "It's a birth that probably had no father listed. The infant was a James Thacker."

"Genealogy is simple," the clerk says, "if you got a paternal name."

"I told you I don't."

The clerk nods, smirking. "That kind of genealogy is what we call woodpile research."

"I know the joke. I'd rather not hear it."

The clerk returns Jacob's look sourly as he pulls a spiral notebook from his shirt pocket. "Spell that out for me?"

"James Thacker. Should be 1866."