The Resurrectionist: A Novel Part 17

"I'm playing the back nine at the country club in the morning." McMichaels says finally. "I'll check in at the office afterward. If the letter is on my desk, I'll know you're with us."

"With you, right," Jacob says quietly as he opens the door to the sound of the party outside. He looks at them once more, then turns to make his way through the crowd.

He is in the anteroom, hurrying across the open s.p.a.ce and fishing his valet ticket out of his pocket, when a smiling Adam Claybaugh comes through the front door, looming in the entrance larger than life in his tuxedo. He begins to speak, but Jacob shoulders his way past roughly, half hoping that Claybaugh will raise a fist so that he can wrap up this evening with a full-scale brawl, go all the way back down to his origins. But Adam only looks after him, shocked. Shaking his head, he turns back to the ballroom and sees McMichaels and Reithoffer coming out of the study, Malloy and Hauser filing out after them. His face clouds.

Jacob is down at the turnaround, restlessly kicking at the pea gravel as he waits for the valet, when he hears the sound of heavy footsteps behind him. Adam is calling his name almost desperately, his deep voice strained. When he reaches Jacob he grabs his arm and turns him around.

"They set you up, didn't they?"

"Leave me alone, Adam." He tries to free his arm from Adam's grasp.

"They can't do it."

"They have done it. It's over."

"Get on the right side of this, Jake, and the rest will work itself out."

Jacob looks up at him, smiling bitterly. "You really believe that?"

"I know it."

Jacob jerks his arm free. He wipes at his nose, tears starting in his eyes as he speaks. "f.u.c.k you, Adam. I just picked up the tab for your purity. So take your Eagle Scout bulls.h.i.t somewhere else."

The BMW pulls into the turnaround and Jacob starts toward it. After a few steps he turns back with a finger jabbing the air. "You guys. All the same. Always somebody else taking the fall."

Jacob climbs into the car and puts it into motion, the wheels already spinning in the gravel, before the valet can shut the door. Adam watches the little car speed down the drive until it rounds a corner and the taillights disappear.

When he turns to climb the stairs again, Kaye is standing at the top of them, her face knotted with concern as she looks down the drive after the car. "Adam, what's happened?" she says. "What have they done to Jacob?"

He is beginning to answer her when he hears the voices inside the house subside, the crowd beginning to hush. In its place, insistent, comes the bell-like sound of a knife tapping against a crystal gla.s.s: McMichaels calling for a toast.

THE BMW ROARS down the westbound lane of the Old Augusta Highway, scattering the early-fallen sycamore leaves that have piled up on the shoulder as Jacob winds the car up to 95, straining to push it into the triple digits on the straightaways. He checks the tachometer and drops the shift down to fourth gear as he clears the grove of sycamores and bursts into an open s.p.a.ce of bottomland where cornfields stretch out on either side of the road. The wind coming in over the windshield is bracing and as strong as a hand against his face. He hears it in the cornstalks just off the shoulders, whistling through the dry leaves that nod at his pa.s.sage through the late-evening mist that has settled over the bottom. The pedal beneath his foot is taut, pressed nearly to the floor, when he sees the needle rise and hover at one hundred. His tachometer has reached nearly into the red, which suits him. He envisions blowing the engine just as he reaches the state line. And after that, he cannot say.

The little car dips and curves as the cornfields withdraw behind him and he enters more woods, this time pine and darker than the open night sky. His headlights carve a pa.s.sage through the dark tunnel of branches, the xenon lamps burning like flashbulbs against the blackness framed by pine needles. The engine gives a throaty rumble as he downshifts again for a short curve, tossing the car into the turn to maintain his speed, and as he straightens into the next stretch he sees out front of him at perhaps seventy yards a deer grazing on the shoulder.

Jacob reacts with frantic swiftness, but his movements seem slowed to half speed as he downshifts again and the engine howls in protest. He moves his foot to the brake pedal, presses it too hard, and he feels the brakes clamp down. The deer is still there, just inches outside the white line, staring into the oncoming lights. He sees now, while he feels the brake disks pumping beneath his foot and hears the tires begin to whine, that it is a buck, with a rack of antlers that seems to grow larger in each half second that draws him closer to it. He tugs the steering wheel to the left, but it moves only a fraction of an inch, the warring momentum of the car and the pull of the brakes keeping him on a dead line straight ahead.

The deer's head is raised and c.o.c.ked against the noise of the car when it begins to move. Jacob sees the great body gathering its strength in the hind muscles and then it is nearly aloft, beginning a leap as he closes the last ten yards before impact with the tires squealing now like wounded things. The deer's front legs rise with a glacial slowness and he is nearly under it when he hears his back wheel catch the gravel on the road's shoulder and the car begins to spin.

He throws his hands up as the deer looms outsized in front of the windshield, rising now. He feels the impact of its rear hoof on the car's hood first, then hears it as the hind leg slides down the hood to the headlight, which bursts under the pressure with a hollow explosion of gla.s.s. The car twists again, under the deer now, and in spite of himself, Jacob looks upward as it pa.s.ses over the two-seater's c.o.c.kpit, seeing it all out of sequence as the car spins: the th.o.r.n.y tangle of antlers, a black hoof trailing blood as it vaunts skyward, the alpine white of its pelt below the raised tail, every bristle of the pale fur as distinct as a pixel, pristine. Then it is gone.

The BMW shudders sideways across the road and off the blacktop, hitching as the tires finally catch in the roadside gravel and it vibrates to a stop on the eastbound shoulder.

Jacob hears the clapping of hooves on asphalt, followed by a sound of crashing brush that fades quickly into the forest, leaving behind it only the ticking and humming of the engine and his own labored breathing. He raises a hand to his face, his scalp, checking for injury, but he can find none. For a long moment he stares out into the black walls of the pine trees where the animal disappeared, wishing he could see through the darkness to the deer, hoping it is all right. The vision of it pa.s.sing overhead flashes through his mind again and he shakes his head at the intensity of it. No way all that could have crossed the visual cortex that fast, he thinks. Impossible.

He unbuckles his seatbelt and climbs out of the car, walks around to the front to have a look at the hood. The metal is crimped into a crease that runs down the lower third of the pa.s.senger side to the gouged pocket of the headlamp, which is dark now. Across the road he sees the shards of its gla.s.s cover lying on the asphalt and glimmering faintly. He walks over and kicks them off the road.

He is still standing in the westbound lane, parsing through the sequence of the buck's flight and trying to fashion some order from it, when he hears his cell phone ringing. Slowly he crosses the road and sits down in the car, fumbling in the light of the dashboard for the phone before he finds it and picks it up, presses the green b.u.t.ton.

"Jacob, my G.o.d. Where did you run off to?"

"Sorry," he says. "Just had to get out of there."

"Are you all right?"

"Yeah," he says absently. "Well, yes. I hit a deer. Maybe I should say he hit me."

He can feel the tension on the line before Kaye speaks again. "A deer? Where the h.e.l.l are you?"

"Listen, I'm okay. I just grazed him. I don't think I hurt him much."

"I think you're in shock. You need to get back here. I'm at my place. Come home, please."

Jacob leans his head back against the seat. Between the spindly limbs of the pine trees he can see Venus shining brightly in the night sky, like a penlight through black velvet. "Kaye, there's a lot I need to tell you. I don't think I can come back now."

He can almost hear Kaye shaking her head. "I don't care what you have to tell me. It doesn't matter. I want you to come home."

"I got dirty, Kaye. I messed up bad with the school. I think they're going to take my license."

"No. They won't."

"Yes. They can do it." He keeps his eyes on Venus up above, but the light is beginning to blur in his watering eyes. "Without that license, I'm nothing."

"You never say that, Jacob. Never again," Kaye says sharply. "This is it," she says, her voice beginning to a.s.sume its courtroom cadence. "This is it. You mark this minute. This is as low as you get, ever."

Jacob smiles as he holds the phone to his ear and watches Venus waver. This mix of Israel and the low country, he thinks, will either kill him or be his salvation.

"I know something happened tonight, and that's done. But that's not the end of it. You beat the pills and you can beat these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. I'm going to watch you do it, and I'm going to make you do it if I have to."

Jacob sniffs, quietly so she won't hear it, and waits for her to go on. There is a long silence on the line, as though she has put a hand over the receiver, before she speaks again.

"Neshome, Jacob," she is saying. "Remember it?"

"Let's see . . . neshome," he says, finding it doesn't take long to run through the catalogue of Yiddish he's picked up the last few years.

"Soul," she says. "Jacob, I've got someone here with me. I want you to talk to him. Talk to him and hear what he has to say, then you get over here. Come home," she whispers fiercely.

Jacob hears the receiver being handed over, and a man comes on the line. It takes him a second to place the voice, and when he does he moves to switch off his phone. But the man's voice is as level and earnest as ever, almost beseeching, and talking fast. Jacob listens to him for a minute without speaking. Then he begins to nod slowly, hearing him out, and throws his head back against the seat and gives in, lets the tears he can no longer restrain course down his cheeks. He drifts for a moment until the man's voice brings him back with a question.

"Yes-yes, I'm still here," he says.

The voice carries on, talking enough for years, it seems, in a minute's time.

"Yes," Jacob says. "It's about f.u.c.king time. Yes.

"Yes," he says, "I am."

Jacob clicks the phone off, tosses it into the pa.s.senger seat, and presses forward against the shifter, forgetting the clutch. The road fills with the sound of sc.r.a.ping gears and he mutters as he depresses the clutch and slips the transmission into first and gives the engine gas. His tires skim in the gravel for a moment, then grab purchase and bark once as they get their grip on the asphalt. In an instant he is gone, leaving nothing behind him but the broken gla.s.s that glints in the starlight and the echoing wake of his engine as it winds eastward, until his taillights fade into the darkness leading back to Columbia.

Fernyear: 1866.

THROUGH ROSEDALE THEY CAME DOWN the sandy streets in double file, two abreast in a brutal symmetry, with Johnston at the head of the column carrying a burning pine knot aloft like a flaming caduceus. His face was stern, his jaw set in a firm line as it had been since this morning. But walking behind him, Doctor Ballard thought he saw something else in the face when Johnston's head turned to check the numbers on each house they pa.s.sed-that in profile, the tightness around Johnston's eyes might have held in it a shade of grief.

"What will we do, professor?" he asked. "When we get there?"

"G.o.d knows," Johnston said heavily, the words nearly drowned out by the murmuring voices of the men behind them.

"You know, sir, that these boys have violence in mind."

Johnston nodded.

"And what will you do about it, sir?"

Johnston stopped walking and the men behind him halted quickly, nearly walking into his back. "I will do what I can, Doctor Ballard," he said.

He resumed his pace and the others followed. But Ballard's question lingered in his mind, turning there like a living thing. It was the same question Johnston had posed to Sara the night before.

They had talked in his office for nearly an hour, with his curtains drawn and the lamp trimmed low. Or rather, he himself had talked, listening to his own voice, the measured cadences of it-calm, rea.s.suring, composed. Arrangements would have to be made, he had told her. He would take care of things for her as best he could.

At the end, she had come to him and buried her head on his shoulder. "I've been a fool, Frederick."

"There, there," he said, stroking her hair. "I have been a fool as well."

"Not so great as me."

"No, no."

He was patting her head when she looked up at him. He saw that her eyes, though bright, were dry.

"No, Frederick, I am the greater fool in this," she said. "I trusted you."

From farther back in the column, at the rear, Johnston could hear others arriving, hurrying to catch up as the crowd grew, breathless but full of questions. The voices behind him grew into a cacophony.

"How's Fitz?"

"Raving. They finally woke him up two hours ago and he is still screaming, last I heard."

"My G.o.d. It's pitiable."

"Of course it is. What kind of shape would you be in? His own mother, for Christ's sake."

"It is an abomination."

"The n.i.g.g.e.r will get his, I'll vouch for it myself."

"I want a finger."

"Sure. There ought to be enough to go around."

"I'll save you an ear if you don't get there in time."

"There will be no trophies," Johnston said loudly, his voice quavering as he turned to the men behind him. "This is hardly a victory."

But the men pushed past him, seeing that they had reached the house they sought. They swarmed into the yard, crushing the picket fence beneath them, and up to the porch and into the house. From the street, Johnston and Ballard watched as lights were struck inside. A kerosene lamp flared to life in the parlor window, and they could see candles moving toward the rooms at the back of the house.

"I suppose we should go inside," Johnston said. Nodding, Ballard followed him up the walk and across the porch.

Inside, the front parlor looked as if it had been deserted long ago. Its furniture was threadbare, and there was nothing on the walls save a cheap mirror hanging over the fireplace. Johnston moved down the hall and Ballard followed him, shouldering his way through the milling students, who seemed to be growing more frustrated by the second. He saw that they had thrown open the cellar door, and he watched as a student in a bowler hat disappeared down the stairs.

The kitchen was as spartan as the front room had been, with a single plank table and chair against the west wall and a black cook stove squatting on its short legs in the opposite corner. Ballard bent to the stove, intending to see if its embers were still warm. When he opened the iron door, he saw that there was no need. The ash inside was fine and gray and a spider had woven a web in one corner. It scurried away from the light of his match.

"Sir?" one of the men said. When Ballard rose, he saw that the student was looking at Johnston and pointing at the table. On it lay, in the center, a pared-down b.u.t.ter knife. Johnston lifted it and felt its balance thoughtfully, as though he knew what its presence meant.

"I believe he is gone, gentlemen," Johnston said, and he sounded almost relieved.

There was a sound of hurried steps on the cellar stairs and Mullins stuck his head through the open door. "He is not here, sir."

"I was just saying as much, Mister Mullins."

"There is something in the cellar, sir. We think you should see it."

Again Ballard followed Doctor Johnston as he slowly descended the steps, as though the number of lights in the cellar and the high-pitched tone of the others' voices drew him downward. When he reached the bottom of the steps he paused, as the others had done, his attention arrested by the north wall of the cellar, by its bright colors and the intricate calligraphy of lines upon it.

The wall looked to be of sandstone and the cellar terminated abruptly against it, where Ballard guessed the builders had given up on digging farther into the earth. It was covered with words, hundreds of them, that were chiseled into the sandstone with the precision of a printer's press. Ballard stepped closer and saw that the words were names arranged in some strange chronology of Nemo Johnston's devising. He read a few of them before giving up, none of them familiar but most of them clearly Negro: names like Quash and Addie and Toby, half of them with surnames familiar to Ballard from his slave-owning patients but the rest as obscure as the southern hands' field songs had been when he first came south. Above the names, carved in larger type, was the legend "In my death, see how utterly thou hast murdered thyself." The entire wall had been painted in three vertical stripes-green, yellow, and red-and the paint had run into the letters and coated them as well. Ballard stepped back from the garish colors with the hollow feeling in his gut as p.r.o.nounced as it might have been had they found a charnel house here instead.

"He really has gone mad," Mullins said. "This is the work of a demented mind."

"No, not mad," Johnston said. "The quotation is a pa.s.sage from Poe. These names clearly have some significance to him. I suspect they have some significance to us as well. I recognize one or two of them. No, he has not gone mad, but he has most certainly gone."

"And what of the colors?" Ballard asked.

Johnston sighed. "The colors," he said, "are beyond my comprehension."

He turned toward the stairs, and his footsteps sounded dully as he climbed them.

"What shall we do with the house, sir?"

Johnston paused on the stairs. "Yes, the house. I suppose there is no choice," he said heavily. "Burn it."

JOHNSTON AND BALLARD stood on the sidewalk as the students ravaged the bungalow, stomping and crashing inside it. Johnston muttered to himself as the sound of gla.s.s breaking raged inside until there were no more windows left.

"Couldn't be helped, Ballard," he said, and the younger man nodded his agreement. Ballard looked down the street, watching as the curtains on the other houses parted by inches to reveal eyes looking to a.s.sess the demolition of Nemo Johnston's place. The woman in the house next door had come out on her porch and was crying loudly, begging Johnston to stop the men inside.