The Resurrectionist: A Novel Part 8

Pauline looks at the picture again and sets her lighter down carefully. Jacob feels suddenly foolish for bringing it here. "It's crazy, I know," he says, reaching for the paper.

Her hand stops him, her fingers splayed across the paper, pressing down on the creases where he had folded it. When he looks up to meet her eyes, he sees that they are fixed on the nurse's face.

"I guess every family's got skeletons," she says, still looking down at the picture. Then she exhales a plume of smoke and looks at him tenderly, a deep sadness in her pale gray eyes.

TEN MINUTES LATER Jacob is sitting on the porch of Pauline's little bungalow out back of the store, his foot tapping against the floorboards while he waits for his aunt to return from inside. She has been moving slowly since she locked the store and flipped its OPEN sign around. He listens to her rummaging around inside the little house. When she emerges from the front door, he sees that she carries a small black book and two Budweiser tallboys. He shuts his eyes as she settles into the chair next to him and pops the can of beer open. Then he feels the cold aluminum pressed against his hand.

"Thanks, but I've got to be back at work."

Pauline ignores him. "Take it. Go ahead."

He takes the beer and tilts it back, a token sip. Pauline opens hers and gives it a long pull before setting it down on the porch floor and opening the little book in her lap. It is old, the gilt of the cross on its cover and the edges of the pages nearly worn off. She shows him the t.i.tle page-the Book of Common Prayer-then flips through it to the back and pulls out a handful of old pictures. She shows him snapshots of his father and herself as children, then an older picture-not black-and-white now, but sepia-of men in straw hats and suspenders at a picnic beneath live oaks.

"That's my granddaddy James, grown then." She shuffles the picture to the back of the stack. "Here's one when he was a boy." She shows him a shot of a boy in a cart drawn by a goat.

"And here's one of James with his mother, Sara, when he was I reckon one year old."

Jacob looks at the portrait and sees a little boy in a christening gown perched on the lap of the woman from the school picture.

"Sara Thacker," Pauline says. "The midwife."

Jacob studies the eyes in the portrait. "All right. But I'm not getting it. What's the secret?"

For answer Pauline turns the Book of Common Prayer back to its front, the pages for baptisms and confirmations. He sees that James Thacker was baptized at Saint Mary's, Lexington, on April 18, AD 1867. The name and dates are written on the page in flowing script. But though there are two lines reserved for parents' names, only one is filled, with Sara Thacker's small signature.

Jacob looks up and sees that Pauline has been watching him intently. "Your daddy never told you because he never wanted it spoken of. He was ashamed."

Jacob shakes his head slowly.

"She was what you nowadays call a single mother," Pauline says. "Only they didn't call it that back then. What they called it was a disgraced woman and her b.a.s.t.a.r.d son. Can you imagine what it was like for Granddaddy James growing up? He probably had to whip every boy in school, every year. But they made a life of it. Granddaddy James never turned mean, bless his heart. And people loved Sara. Loved her. They say she birthed half the babies in Lexington County."

Jacob looks down at the blank line again. "So who was the father?"

"She never did say."

Jacob shakes his head again. "You have to have some idea."

"Nope. She wouldn't say. You think she was the first poor girl to get herself in trouble? But she never told who the father was, not even to James. Never married, either."

Pauline shuts the book gently, traces the cross on its cover with her finger. "And that is the Thacker family tree. I wish you wouldn't be angry with your daddy. He wanted a better life for you."

She lights a cigarette and stares out across the lawn at the lake. "Back in the forties a bomber plane went down in that lake, couple miles from the dam. A B-25. They flew them on training missions out from the army air base down in Lexington. There's a rich doctor up in Greenville's been raising money to bring it up, put it in a museum. He's been at it for years. A lot of folks think he's crazy. It's down deep, and it's been down there a long time."

"I think I see what you're saying."

"I'm just telling you, a lot of things in the past are just plain gone. Sometimes it's more trouble than it's worth going after them."

Jacob takes a deep drink from his beer. Immoral conduct, he thinks as the Budweiser turns bitter in his mouth. "I still don't see why Dad never told me about her-especially after I started at the school. It makes no sense."

"I'm thinking," Pauline says, tapping the cover of the book in her lap, "that n.o.body knew about the school. Granddaddy James used to tell stories about Sara all the time, about her and all those babies. But he never said anything about the medical school. I've never heard mention of her working anywhere but West Columbia. I thought you were the first Thacker up there. h.e.l.l, you were the first one of us to even go to college."

Jacob rises from his chair and stretches. He can feel the alcohol beginning to seep into his bloodstream.

"They're going to be looking for me at the school if I don't get back there soon. It's been a h.e.l.l of a lunch break." He sighs. "And I've got an afternoon full of meetings."

As they walk back to his car, Pauline surprises him by taking his hand, holding it in hers like a girl. When he opens the car door she hugs him tightly.

"You take care of yourself," she says in her Marlboro voice, "and don't wait so long before you come back out here again."

He kisses her cheek and gets in the car. As he pulls out of the lot, he watches her in his rearview mirror turning the store sign around again, looking frail through the gla.s.s. When she is gone from his view he reaches for his cell phone and punches in the number for the school's directory so that he can call Janice Tanaka and ask her where in the h.e.l.l one goes to find a 130-year-old birth certificate.

Fernyear: 1864.

JOHNSTON WOKE WITH HIS HEAD ON his desk. His lamp had burned down to the last threads of the wick and the sky outside was at its blackest pitch. He pulled out his pocket watch and looked at it: 3:50. Nemo should have been back with the MacCallan woman by two or three at the latest, but he was late-never a good omen for a resurrection man.

Johnston gathered his coat and hat. He was trying to plot out the shortest route to the colored cemetery when he heard the sc.r.a.pe of the back door, followed by the thump of a heavy bundle being dropped on the wooden floor. He sighed and put his coat back on the wall hook. Rolling up his sleeves, he started down the hall.

In the dissecting room Nemo had laid out a body on a table and was cutting the cords that bound a second bundle at his feet. His knife severed the hemp cords effortlessly and he lifted the sheeted body to its place with a grunt.

"Two?" Johnston said. "In one evening? Extraordinary." He pulled the sheet off Ossie MacCallan and brushed dirt from her cheek. "What is your guess here? Do you think the colored doctor got it right?"

"Looks it, sir." Nemo stretched the other body across the next table and rested a hand on its ample belly. "Might as well warn you now, boss. Got a white man here."

Johnston gave a start. "That is strictly off-limits. What do you think we are?"

"He's a no-count, sir, just an old buckra off the rail line. Confederate deserter's my guess." Nemo's hand hovered over the covered face. "You ready?"

Johnston nodded. Nemo rolled the covering back to reveal a begrimed face, black whiskers, and a trail of tobacco juice-apparently permanent-at one corner of the mouth. The face still wore a grimace, and a delicate open line ran halfway across the neck beneath the chin.

"I can tell you cause of death right now, sir. Going to be exsanguination by a severed carotid artery. You find a puncture wound to the left kidney under this stain here." He gestured to a darkened patch on the sackcloth shirt.

Johnston turned the man's jaw to have a better look at the slit throat.

"It's that neck that done it. Kidney weren't more than a warning."

"Nemo, this man's flesh has not yet cooled. There is no sign of rigor. He can't be even a day old."

"No, sir. He ain't but two, three hours old. I'll get the formalin directly."

"Wait. I suspect there is foul play involved here. Where was he buried?"

"Didn't say he was buried, sir."

Johnston covered his face. "Out with it."

"Well," Nemo said, drawing the word out, "I did find him in Cedar Vale, indeed. At Mrs. MacCallan's grave, matter of fact. Digging. He weren't about to be discouraged by my claim." Nemo leaned against the table and put his hands in his pockets. "Naturally, we articulated about it for some minutes, but his voice kept rising. Rose quite a bit when I showed him my blade. Weren't a thing to do but the expeditious thing, so I done it."

"You cut his throat?"

"Don't forget about that kidney. He had his warning."

"This is murder, Nemo."

Nemo laughed his mortuary laugh. "No, sir. Now don't go getting excited. It's done now, and there's one less speculating sack-'em-up man in the world and one more study for the college. He'll do some good in the world now."

"My G.o.d. Nemo, you are colored. You have killed a white man. No matter his station in life, this is-"

"Wasn't at the station, sir. Had of been, he'd still be there."

"d.a.m.n it, Nemo!" Johnston's cheeks had blanched. "You would be hanged for this. Hanged before they did worse to you, if you were lucky. You know well that merely a.s.saulting a white man is a capital offense."

Nemo's voice was soft when he spoke. "He won't be missed, sir. He really was no-count. Check his pockets. Nothing in them but a fork and a heel of bread, and wasn't no more in them when he was breathing."

Johnston laid his hands on the table and looked down at the dead man as though he were a kinsman.

"You never turned me in, Doctor Johnston. Never. Because you know the things I've done, I've done without no say in matters."

Johnston looked up at Nemo. "Not a word of this. Not the first word of how he was procured."

Nemo smiled. "I'll get that formalin now. I mean it now, Doctor Johnston, don't you fret it a minute. Cedar Vale's my graveyard. I can't tolerate no freelancing in there. Next thing you know, bottom rail be on top."

Johnston watched his broad shoulders disappear down the stairs. Bottom rail, pshaw, he thought. You are on top of the whole game.

FROM HIS CORNER of the dissecting room, where he watched the students bent over their cadavers, busily at work, Nemo judged the scene before him to be a beautiful sight this spring afternoon, a veritable vision of plenty. The twenty-five men so hastily concluding their training as Confederate surgeons were matched, each of them, with a cadaver of their own-better than two dozen white male specimens culled from the Union dead in the Shenandoah Valley. With the war going so strong and Lee and Stonewall Jackson still tearing up the Federals in Virginia, it seemed that his digging days were finally behind him. Twice this month he had been sent up to Raleigh to meet Champ, the University of Virginia's man, at the midway point between the schools to gather up a wagonload of dead boys who had fallen far from their homes in Ohio, Wisconsin, or Maine. And they were fine specimens: young men in good health and well fed, perfect save for the odd missing limb or the angry-looking rash left on their abdomens by grapeshot. These days, Nemo's procurement ch.o.r.es were hardly less pleasant than buying handkerchiefs by the carton, to cover the faces and genitals of the dead.

This afternoon, however, the handkerchiefs over the cadavers' faces had been removed for the dissection of the brain. With the tops of their skulls removed, the bodies looked oddly shortened, but Nemo was satisfied with the progress he observed as the students separated the lobes of the brains and traced the intricate network of the superficial cerebral veins. In his practic.u.m lecture he had demonstrated the need for steady but light cutting, pointing out the thin coat on the veins from the median section along the longitudinal fissure to their termination in the sinuses. Seeing the students intent on their task, he settled back with a copy of Emerson's Nature, reading it for perhaps the fifth time, content among the usual busy sounds of the dissecting room, punctuated now and then by a muttered curse or the tinny clang of a dropped instrument.

"Boy, what you want to be reading Emerson for?"

Nemo put a finger in the book to mark his place, just below a pa.s.sage he had underlined in India ink the last time: "Even the corpse has its own beauty."

"Beg pardon, Mister Cullen?"

"I said, why are you wasting your time with Emerson? That Yankee don't know s.h.i.t from apple b.u.t.ter."

"Emerson been good to me."

"He'll put a lot of fool ideas in your head, is what he'll do. The Messenger said it best. Called that last book of his 'spasmodic idiocy.' "

One of the other students laughed. "A man in your line of work ought to be reading Poe."

"I've read him. Read 'The Premature Burial' twice. He got it about right," Nemo said, smiling. "But now, Poe seem to me to be the spasmodic one."

Cullen stiffened. "You wouldn't be reading the Sears catalogue if it was up to me."

"Yes, sir."

Cullen seemed ready to say more, but another student was calling out and beckoning to Nemo.

"Nemo! Help me here with this dura mater, will you, boy?"

JOHNSTON SHIFTED IN his chair, wishing he were anywhere else in the building except for this office, where the presence of Sara Thacker seemed to make the order of this familiar room, his carefully arranged books and diplomas, fade to inconsequence. Nearly a minute had pa.s.sed since either of them had spoken, and still he found himself struggling for an adequate answer to her question. Every time he looked up into her gray eyes his resolve to answer her manfully collapsed.

"I'll say it again, then," she said. "Three years."

"Yes," Johnston said, stroking his beard.

"And has the condition of the Negro hospital not improved dramatically? Has Doctor Evans not been pleased with my work?"

"But Sara, I have admitted you to several lectures."

"And do you know how many babies I've delivered myself, when Doctor Evans's affairs detained him at the Five Points Tavern? Seven breech babies I've turned in the womb. Seven!"

"Your midwifery is to be commended, Sara."

"Midwifery! Doctor Evans would have put those women under the knife. Surely that demonstrates my ability to take the obstetrics course at the very least."

Johnston's brow furrowed. "Can you imagine yourself among those boys in the dissecting laboratory? Can you imagine the disruption it would cause? There is already opprobrium enough for us, having a woman nurse on the staff. It can go no further, I am afraid."

Sara ignored him. "Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from the Geneva Medical School in 1849," she said. "Three women have been admitted to Syracuse since. There is talk of a medical college being opened in Pennsylvania solely for females."

"Yes. In New York and Pennsylvania. Both of them a long way from here, Sara. But why not apply to them?"

For the first time, Sara's eyes faltered. "Would you have me leave?"

"No. But what you are asking is simply impossible at this time."

Then her cheeks flushed. "You know I do not have the means. I can study here or not at all."

Johnston rose and walked behind her chair. He placed a hand on her shoulder and kneaded it softly. "Change comes slowly to the South. Give it time, my dear."

Sara dropped her head. "I believe you mean more time than I am likely to have."

"Patience, dear. The day will come."

"But when? Surely, Frederick, you know that I am capable."

"There is capable, and there is feasible. If we took a stand on the principle, we would lose the bulk of our enrollment. What good would it do to be a graduate of a defunct inst.i.tution?"

"It would do me a great deal of good, Frederick. But I can see how the inst.i.tution figures in this."

Johnston put a hand on Sara's other shoulder and bent down to kiss her sandy hair. But the gesture was awkward, for Sara was slowly shaking her head from side to side.