The Resurrectionist: A Novel Part 5

The columns and numbers are beginning to blur when Janice returns with a manila envelope holding his photocopies. He checks his watch and sees that he will be late for his two-thirty meeting with the Alumni Committee if he doesn't leave soon. Still, he closes the last ledger, 1866, reluctantly. He hopes that in this last year's record might be found notation of some stipend, some small retirement settlement that could be painted in the school's favor if Nemo Johnston's name becomes public knowledge. If it comes to that.

Jacob taps one white finger on its leather cover. "Janice," he says, "I'm going to need a copy of this ledger."

Janice picks up the book and holds it against her chest. He thinks her eyes have widened behind her gla.s.ses. "The whole thing?" she asks.

Jacob only smiles at her as he closes his portfolio. But the smile fades as he sees his own surname on the lined pages of the ledger he just uncovered. "September 3rd, 1867," the faded indigo reads, "S. Thacker. Dismissed. Immoral conduct."

PERHAPS BECAUSE THE name in the ledger will not leave his mind, perhaps because he has not crossed its threshold since Easter, or perhaps only because it is on the route back to the office, Jacob pauses at the wrought-iron gate of the Episcopal Cathedral on Gervais. He checks his watch quickly and decides he can show up for the Alumni Committee meeting a minute or two late. G.o.d knows the committee won't be deciding anything fast.

Once through the church's heavy wooden doors he is immersed in the gloomy shadows of the nave. Above him Gothic arches soar to a height of three stories; his steps on the marble floor ring up toward them and echo back before they die somewhere in the side aisles. He opens one of the latched pew doors and sits, his hand lingering on the polished wood for a moment before he reaches for the kneeler and settles himself on it.

This att.i.tude of prayer, ingrained in childhood, has become awkward these last few years. He waits for a prayer to form itself in his mind. Instead he finds himself staring at his hands. He remembers how sometimes his father's hand would settle on his clasped fingers during the prayers, like a secret between them, hidden from the closed eyes of the priest and their fellow parishioners. The gnarled knuckles, the thin gold wedding band, the calluses of his father's palm nearly as rough as sandpaper on his child's hands.

Never in this grand place, though, not that he can recall. His family, like the other lintheads, dispensed instead to a clapboard chapel down the great hill and across the Congaree, its whitewashed modesty a relic of the real old-time mill-town days, its architecture as utilitarian as a commissary. A bit of beneficence from the mill owners-the real Episcopalians-but his father had said the Irish Catholic workers took to it easily enough.

Immoral conduct, he thinks, wondering by what standard such was measured in those bygone days. Like Washburn? Would Jacob's own case have merited the charge?

Rising, he crosses himself reflexively, hoping that that gesture might count for something at least.

As he makes his way back down the aisle he notices the votive candles flickering on the back wall of the nave. He fumbles a few bills out of his pocket as offering and lights one candle each for mother, for father.

HE IS HOME from work by five-thirty, in time to catch the local news and make certain that Washburn's departure has gone unnoticed. In spite of himself, he would almost like to see Washburn on the broadcast, the cameras rolling as he is escorted off-campus and put into a conspicuously unmarked car, campus security loading him into the back seat as the cops do with the more mundane perpetrators. But he knows better; he has long since warmed to McMichaels's binary view of things, in which every event can be placed in one of two categories, like columns on a balance sheet: Good for the School and Not Good for the School.

As he shuts the door behind him he can hear Mary, his housekeeper, shuffling around in the laundry room. Mary has had a summer cold for two weeks now and is moving more slowly than usual, dragging her sandals across the tile. Oprah blares from the little television over the refrigerator as he comes into the kitchen, placing his briefcase on a barstool and skirting the ironing board she has set up in the middle of the floor. He takes a cold beer out of the refrigerator and reaches for the TV remote.

He punches b.u.t.tons on the remote until it calls up the glowing face of Sabrina O'Cannon on Channel 13. Though every renewal of her contract brings with it another morphing of her face closer to Barbie dimensions, she is still the best-looking anchor in town. He presses the mute b.u.t.ton and keeps an eye on the screen for a graphic of the school's seal or a live-action shot of the campus. If neither pops up before the weatherman comes on, he knows they are in the clear.

Something is burning. Quickly he steps to the ironing board and lifts the iron laid across the back of one of his Robert Talbot shirts. He winces at the perfect brown outline it has left behind on the yellow broadcloth. At the rate she has been ruining his clothes, Mary may not be a bargain for much longer. When the facade of the Chapel Clinic appears on the screen, he sets the iron on the counter and reaches for the volume control.

"But for allergy sufferers, fall can be nearly as torturous as the spring season," Sabrina is saying. The screen shifts to a clinic shot inside the building, then a close-up of Ben Wheeler talking from behind his desk. Ben looks a little embarra.s.sed as he discusses how "hay fever" is actually a misnomer and goes into a discourse on the multiple sources of allergens, which the reporter has mercifully cut short with some deft editing. It is a thirty-second piece that ends with a suggestion that allergy patients pay a visit to the specialists at Chapel: Good for the School. Jacob has forgotten that he set this interview up last week. Before he knows it, it will be early flu season and he'll have to give Ca.s.sandra Stodghill, the ENT chair, a call.

"Why you change my show?"

Mary stands beside him with another of his shirts in her hands, her eyes baggy with cold. Her suffering with common ailments, especially at work, is always conspicuous. When she is sick, she strains toward epic suffering.

"Is that your next victim?" he asks, nodding at the crumpled oxford. He holds the singed Talbot aloft for her to see. She shrugs.

"I'd raise h.e.l.l if this happened at the cleaners, Mary."

Mary makes a sound of agreement. "Cleaners charge a dollar-fifty each. I charge seven dollars an hour," she says as she smoothes the new shirt out on the board.

Jacob considers the options of taking her up on this line of reasoning, but decides it is hopeless. Mary is p.r.o.ne to finger wagging and neck rolling, so he is wary of being too critical. Her back is to him anyway as she sprinkles water on the shirt and begins to press it.

He takes a seat behind the breakfast counter and gazes at the television. After a few minutes the local stories are finished and the news crew takes a stab at international affairs with some footage of the Middle East. A swarthy man runs past the camera carrying a child with a head contusion and Jacob trims the volume down a little further, on a level with the squeaking of the ironing board. He takes another sip of his beer.

"Want me to take you home?"

Mary looks at him indignantly. "Can't walk with this cold."

"Did you take the vitamins I gave you?"

"I took some echinacea and ginseng."

"Take the vitamins, Mary. Everything else just makes expensive urine." He picks up his keys from the counter and fingers them, idly pressing the blue-and-white roundel on the car key. In the garage he can hear the convertible's alarm system chirping, activating and deactivating. "Your brother still living with you, Mary?"

"Don't look like he ever going to leave."

"Frank's okay with that?" Jacob has seen Mary's husband only once. He works the third shift at the chicken plant across the river and sleeps during the day.

"They don't hardly cross paths. But one day he going to come home and find Big Junior on his couch watching the TV and kick him on out. I've been telling Big Junior it's time to come up with some rent money."

"He still looking for work?"

"Big Junior mostly just drinks gin. But he say he's looking." She shakes out the shirt and fits it over a hanger. "What you got for him?"

"Nothing special. But if he's interested, I can pay fifteen an hour."

"He'll be interested."

"Good. Tell him I'll pick him up at four. Tomorrow morning."

"Four a.m.?" Mary shakes her head. "All right. I reckon he'll still be up then." She inspects the shirt and seems to find it acceptable. In truth it is perfect, better than the cleaners, no matter the charge. She takes the ironing board down with a screech and carries it to the laundry room, moving a little faster now. She likes riding in Jacob's car with the top down, always urging him to take the long route to her house in Rosedale. She steps back into the kitchen with her purse and an empty hanger.

"Mind if I take that yellow shirt home? Yellow look good on Frank. Only ruined on the back. Suit coat'll cover it fine."

Jacob cannot resist needling her a little. "I was thinking I'd give it to charity. But I suppose I could take it out of your pay."

Mary stares at him as though he were a simpleton, then smiles faintly as he throws up his hands.

"Sure. With my compliments."

Mary fits the Talbot over the hanger and leaves him alone in the kitchen. A moment later he hears the garage door trundling upward and a car door shutting, but still he lingers, waiting until the weatherman strides in front of the computerized map of South Carolina and jabbers away, indicating points of interest on a map that seems mostly static. A storm front pushing up from the coast, he says, but otherwise quiet, just the stifling heat of late summer in the Midlands. Some precipitation likely later in the week, but just the heat for now, holding steady.

Jacob switches the television off as the camera cuts back to Sabrina O'Cannon and stares for a moment at the dark screen, her face lingering in his mind. Then sets his beer down, pulls the archives file from his briefcase, and flips through the copies until he finds the shot of the nurse in the lecture hall. He leans close, studying the woman's features, feeling a stir in his memory, then moves to the bedroom, hurrying now.

He pulls a s...o...b..x down from the closet shelf and dumps its contents on the bed, then rifles through the old pictures until he finds his father's service portrait from Korea. By the time he has carried it back to the kitchen, he can hear his pulse beating in his ears.

Side by side, the resemblance is unmistakable. He hadn't seen it before because it was impossible. But the high cheekbones, the sandy hair, the gray eyes, are the same. Except for the distance in time, the woman in the photograph could have been his father's twin.

Fernyear: 1861..

THE WOODEN SPADE SLID INTO THE earth soundlessly, worming into the newly turned soil like a hungry thing. Then rose, its blade full, and swung a swift half circle to the tarpaulin laid across the foot of the grave, where it shook its burden gently onto the canvas. Thus began the second coming of Quash Jones.

Nemo had been at this strange work of body s.n.a.t.c.hing for nearly four years now-four winters since Doctor Johnston first brought him here to Cedar Vale under moonlight-and he had long since caught its rhythms and cadence. In minutes he had cleared the outline of the three-foot square he would dig deeper until he struck the head of Quash's coffin. The exchange of soil from the grave to the canvas tarpaulin, though rapid, was nearly soundless; Nemo was fast, but he handled cemetery dirt as carefully as he did fireplace ash. The twin pillars of nocturnal procurement, Johnston had told him that first night, were swiftness and silence. He had learned the lesson well.

It would be nice to finally see Quash doing some good in the world, he thought as he worked under the faint light of the single open slit in his lantern. Quash was a bad slave and a worse neighbor, a man with a back so ridged and scoured from beatings that the children gaped in horror when he worked shirtless. Whether his perpetual rage was the result of the beatings or the cause of them, no one could agree or dared to ask, but to Nemo it was a pointless debate. Whatever troubles a man had in his work, he should keep them to himself. But Quash had raved about the slave quarters in Rosedale every Sunday like a drunken demon, scattering the gangs of children and shouting filthy words to the women on the porches. The men generally went inside until he moved on-Quash was the biggest Ibo most of them had ever seen-but that changed when the school bought Nemo a house on the corner of Paradise and Hardin. He had stayed in his rocking chair when Quash first pa.s.sed the picket fence out front, but the second time, Quash made the mistake of stopping to exchange words.

"Hey there, conjure-doctor," he brayed, leaning on Nemo's front gate. "You got anything can beat this?" He held his gallon jug aloft, his thumb hooked through its handle, and waved it. He was swaying.

"Got plenty can beat it," Nemo said in an even voice. "What good it doing you?"

"Hanh," Quash said. He took a long pull on the jug and leaned harder on the gate. The pickets were beginning to weave with him. "If you got something better, why don't you bring it on out?"

The gate broke loose with a crack and fell into the yard, Quash nearly following it. The jug wavered in the air as he caught his balance. When he looked up, Nemo was standing on the brick walkway an arm's reach away, his hand outstretched. In it he held something that arrested Quash's attention immediately: a chicken's foot and crow feathers, bound with wire that had also been run through the palm of a withered child's hand.

Quash seemed to be speechless, and Nemo gave him a long minute to look at the hand of glory before he moved it closer. Quash began to turn, but Nemo s.n.a.t.c.hed the arm that held the jug and lifted it. It was dead weight. He pa.s.sed the talisman over the mouth of the jug three times, quickly, then looked Quash in the eye.

"Drink it now," Nemo said quietly, "and you'll die tonight."

Quash looked down at the jug as though he held a serpent in his hand. Nemo waited. For a moment it seemed that Quash was sorely tempted to take the risk. But then, like a flame rekindling, his face darkened, his features twisting. He threw the jug to the bricks and walked off while the whiskey soaked into the ground.

Shoulder-deep in Quash's grave, Nemo allowed himself a low chuckle at the recollection. "Quash Jones, you was one dumb son of a b.i.t.c.h," he said.

The shovel resumed its work, the wooden blade making only the slightest of sounds when it struck stones that would have rattled against a metal tool. This was the hardest part of it for Nemo, the stage when he had dug himself down into a vertical coffin of his own. It was now when the claustrophobia came back to him, his legacy from the pirates' barrac.o.o.n on the Windward Coast, his last home in Africa. Down in the dungeon dug below sea level, he had been terrified at the babble of foreign tongues he now knew were probably Fante, Yoruba, and Ga, but none of them the Wolof of his mother. The strangers' languages echoed and cascaded off the dripping stone walls and quieted only at night, when the shush of waves against the sh.o.r.e hushed the foreigners' snores and murmurs with the taunting sound of freedom outside. He had been buried alive. When they threw open the doors and herded them all down the tunnel toward the waiting ships, he thought it was to be eaten by the whites.

In his hands the shovel vibrated as it hit hard against something solid, and Nemo cursed himself for letting his thoughts wander so. At his feet he could make out the patch of pine board the shovel had struck. He lowered and raised the shovel a half dozen more times until he had cleared the dirt from the head of the coffin, then carefully set the shovel on the ground above, next to the lantern. His crowbar was there, beside the length of rope, and he took it now. Kneeling, he pried at the seams of the coffin lid, putting his shoulders into it so that the boards came apart slowly under the force. The last one he had to bend upward, and the brittle wood broke in his hands, snapping loudly enough to be heard beyond the magnolias and cedars that ringed the cemetery.

He stood up to his full height, his eyes just above the grave's rim, and looked out across the cemetery for five minutes. No movement, no lights approaching. Just the new moon above, full up by now, glowing silver in the sky but no bigger than a rind. A resurrectionist's moon. His hand snaked out to the rope and dragged it down.

Within a minute he had a noose around Quash's neck and was pulling him out of the narrow hole in the coffin with a series of jerking movements. Quash was heavy and he was big; parts of him caught on the splintered ends of the coffin lid and Nemo had to brace his feet against the other side of the hole to heave him free. When he had the body upright and propped against the earth, he began to strip it while Quash leaned against him, head lolling to one side. Nemo squatted to take down his pants and Quash's belly pressed against his face. He put a hand to his cheek, and it came away wet and smelling of rot. In spite of all the spirits he had poured into himself, Quash was going to go fast. Nemo had found that the young ones generally did that, having died early from some long-festering but hidden illness. Quash, dropped dead in the fields yesterday at noon, was no exception. His liver had probably busted at last from all the rotgut whiskey. But Johnston wanted to know for sure; he wanted Quash's liver for a temperance lecture. Nemo stuffed the trousers and shirt into the coffin and climbed out of the hole, the rope in his hand like a leash. He spoke to the body as he pulled it upward.

"Well, Quash, you no-count, you finally moving up in the world. You going to school."

He dragged the earth-laden tarp to the edge of the hole and pushed one end of it over, careful to keep a good grip on an edge of the canvas so he could use it to wrap Quash for the trip back. The dirt slid off the tarpaulin with a hissing sound. In seconds the grave was full again and Nemo was dancing a slow tattoo on the earth, keeping his feet aligned symmetrically as he had seen gravediggers do after the funeral parties had departed. This last step in the process was crucial, as Johnston had told him so many times. "No need to be neat about the job, except at the surface," Johnston would say. "There, Nemo, we must be scrupulous. Not a flower left out of order, not a clod out of place. Should a mourner come to pay his respects tomorrow, he should detect nothing amiss. People have sentiments about these matters, but if they never know the grave is empty, they are just as well off. And the school is a great deal better off."

When he was satisfied that the raw earth matched the image he had burned into his brain before starting to dig, Nemo turned back to Quash. He pulled him behind a wooden headstone and loosened the noose, cutting a length from the rope to bind the body. Roughly he pushed against the legs, stiff with rigor mortis, until he had worked the heels up under the b.u.t.tocks. He pulled the arms back and tied them to the ankles, pushed Quash's head down against one of his shoulders, and lifted him onto the tarpaulin. He used the remaining rope to truss the bundle tight, until it was the size of an ordinary grain bag that would attract no special attention in the back of the wagon as he trundled through the streets of downtown Columbia.

It was a hard line of work, to be sure, but it was his portion. Take it or leave it, as the white folks liked to say. But he had never heard a slave, who had no choice of leaving anything, use the phrase. So he had taken it. But still, after nearly four years of nighttime visits to this place, he was haunted by ghosts of Senegal, by those wisps of religious instruction he remembered from his mother. Doctor Johnston's maxim-"The metaphysical is entirely secondary to the physical"-had never comforted him much. In Africa he could have expected an instant death for desecrating a grave and disturbing the spirits, and after that death, an eternity of torment from the ancestors and their demons. Here, this work was sanctioned by a group of the most respected white men in town, and there were no demons. Johnston had only laughed when he had expressed his fears of a plat-eye or angry spirit taking them on that first night in Cedar Vale. And true enough, since then the only glowing eyes he had seen here were those of possums and rats, or the stray racc.o.o.n venturing into the city. Night dwellers like himself.

Nemo grunted as he picked up the body. He held it close to his side like an overpacked duffel as he started down the hill toward the mule and wagon waiting to carry his parcel to its postmortem appointment with Doctor Johnston. A slave, he knew, was either a creature of adaptation or just another dead body; Quash could attest to that with mute eloquence. Nemo had adapted.

But one folkway he could not discard. Always he brought along some piece of crockery to leave on the grave, following the ancient ritual of leaving a container nearby to catch the spirit of the departed if it was loosed. This time it was four pieces of cracked ceramic, brown and white, one of them a neck with a thumb hook shaped into it. Though the jagged edges looked raw as broken bone, the kiln-fired smooth surfaces gleamed in the pale moonlight. He left them at the head of the empty grave as Quash's only memorial, tokens from that sunny afternoon two long years ago on his front walk, by the broken gate, in the Carolina springtime.

NEXT DAY QUASH met a hero's welcome in the dissecting room. Nemo had spent the early morning hours embalming him-making the cuts to each side of the groin and the jugular to drain him, then catheterizing the three incisions and pumping in Doctor Johnston's prescribed mixture of turpentine, a.r.s.enic, and formalin-and was finishing his sutures when the sun crested the downtown skyline. He could see the first students arriving in the deep shadows of the yard, kicking at the chickens or stopping off at the outhouses in back before coming inside to settle in for the day's work. By seven o'clock there were fourteen men in the high-ceilinged room, crowded around Quash's body like children ringing a schoolyard fight.

"Big b.a.s.t.a.r.d, wasn't he?"

"Look at this back."

"How many lashes, do you figure?"

"Never mind that. Go ahead and make the cut. I want to see if the musculature has been damaged as well."

"Hey there, Nemo, hand me a number eight, will you?"

Nemo pa.s.sed the scalpel to an outstretched hand and stepped over to the body on the adjacent table. "You gentlemens finished with Toby?"

One of the bearded faces peered out of their huddle. "Yes, done. Nothing but hash now," he said.

Nemo gathered up the sheet on which the body lay. As was the custom, the sheet had been twisted to cover the face and genitals, and when it pulled free of Toby's face, he saw that both the eyes had been removed. He was wrapping up the remains when a brown vial landed in the middle of the bundle, clinking against a rib. Its label read F. Brown's Extract of Jamaican Ginger.

"Who threw this bottle?" he asked.

One of the students stiffened and turned a flushed face to him. It was Porter, the one who had lingered longest in the outhouse. "I beg your pardon?" he asked in a clenched voice.

"Mister Porter, this ginger won't do you an ounce of good, if I may say. Have you tried Trommer's malt extract?"

"I have not."

Nemo smiled as he cinched the sheet. "I fetch you some directly. Works twice as well."

The man nodded, and Nemo lifted the remains of Toby from the table. Toby was maybe forty pounds of weight now, reduced by cutting to little more than bone and ligament. He carried him easily in one hand and picked up the full bucket of Quash's blood from the floor with the other. At the cellar door he paused to set the bucket down as he turned the k.n.o.b. The voices called from the dissecting room almost as soon as he had opened the door.

"Shut that door, d.a.m.n it."

"My G.o.d, what a stench!"

But Nemo paid the voices little heed, for beneath the shouting he heard a light knocking on the front door of the building. He set the bucket on the cellar's top step and tossed the bundled sheet down the stairs, where it landed on the clay with a m.u.f.fled thump. In seconds he had locked the cellar and was stepping quietly across the foyer to the great doors. He swung the heavy oak open on the morning sunshine and saw a white woman standing on the front steps, a valise beside her.

"Good morning," she said, the sunlight glinting in her gray eyes. Nemo had never seen eyes of so light a shade. A moment later he realized she was holding out her hand to be shaken.

"Good morning, ma'am," he said, taking the hand uneasily and giving it a quick shake. Back at Windsor the penalty for such contact would have been nearly fatal. He wondered where on earth this woman could have come from.

"I'm here about the circular," the woman said. "The advertis.e.m.e.nt for a nurse?"

Nemo nodded and ushered her into the cool foyer with a slight bow. "Certainly, ma'am," he said, watching the woman as she stood with the valise held in front of her with both hands, her eyes taking in the banister, the sweeping staircase, the tall ceilings. She was hardly bigger than a girl. "May I tell Doctor Johnston who's calling?"

The young woman's eyes had come to rest on a portrait of Benjamin Rush that Doctor Johnston had hung in the front hall. She studied the doctor's features as though she did not think much of what she saw.

"Sara Thacker," she said, looking at him again. Then she sniffed once, her nostrils flaring slightly. "And you may as well tell him that you fellows need a housekeeper as well."

JOHNSTON HELD A CHAIR for the young woman, then took a seat behind his desk uneasily. A nurse, by his definition-or indeed as defined by any of his contemporaries-was by nature matronly and plain. This Sara Thacker, though dressed modestly enough in a simple linen dress, was neither. Her face bore no rouge and her sandy hair was drawn back in the simple ponytail favored by rustic women, but that hair was l.u.s.trous and her gray eyes were too bright, he thought, ever to blend into the dull wards of the Negro hospital or settle cheerfully on such menial work as the emptying of bedpans. Most troubling of all, beneath the linen dress he could detect no corset.

Johnston looked over her letters of reference, nodding from time to time. After a few long moments he peered over the top of the stationery at Sara, his eyes narrowed over his spectacles.

"These are strong recommendations, particularly the reference from Major Anderson. He describes your conduct during the summer's malaria outbreak as 'heroic.' That is high praise indeed from a decorated military man."

The young woman's eyes wandered to the window. "I did what was required," she said softly. "I'm afraid Major Anderson is in for a hard time."

"He certainly is. It is fortunate for you that he deemed it inadvisable to carry women with him to Fort Sumter."

"I would have gone," she said. "There will be a sore need for nurses there."