The Resurrectionist (13 page)

The Columbia
South Carolinian
folded under his arm bore news of a slave uprising down in All Saints Parish, two plantations over from Drake's Windsor. With the Union gunboat blockade just off their shore, the rice aristocrats were losing control; two overseers had been killed—one shot, the other hanged—and there were now armed slaves loose in the low country. The newspaper compared the uprising to those of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, reminding its readers that upwards of fifty whites were dead before they brought Nat down. The
South
Carolinian
writer, in fact, seemed nearly hysterical. Nemo had already read the article twice over his breakfast, but had decided that the news was so good he would carry the paper all day.

The morning was especially fine, so he detoured from his usual route, drawn by singing in the Episcopal Cathedral on Gervais a block away. Rare indeed for the devil's right hand to darken this door, but this was an extraordinary day. He slipped through the great doors and climbed the steps to the slave balcony soundlessly.

Upstairs was full of the smell of starched cotton and sweated wool, black faces gleaming over the busy fans that could never cool these upper reaches in the Carolina heat. A nearly electric tension followed him as his brethren marked the appearance of the slave quarters' boogeyman in this sacred place. He squeezed into an open seat beside a teenage girl—Tyree's niece, he thought—who dropped her fan to the floor and stared at him, her head wobbling slightly, as though a timber rattler had come to service and alighted beside her. He showed her a mouthful of white teeth.

The singing ended and the rector rose to the pulpit, bespectacled and albed and looking especially stern. Without preamble he leaned upon the great Bible propped before him and read: “ ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.' So says Christ Jesus, in chapter twenty-three of Matthew's gospel,” the rector said, “and it is a text with particular application to the congregation gathered here today.”

Nemo leaned forward in his seat, hardly believing his luck. Years now since he had last emerged from this building with the bilious taste of its bland hypocrisy in his mouth, and he had sworn then that he had quit this godforsaken place for good. But now, on his first day back, the white preacher had welcomed him with a homecoming message, the truth at last. He gazed down upon the rows of white parishioners below and thought,
You had it coming and now you going to get it, and all your chattel up here to witness it
.

“For it has come to be known here in Columbia—and throughout the South—that conditions within our domestic sphere untouched by northern aggression are not so blessedly tranquil as they have lately seemed,” the rector said. His face was tilted upward, as was Nemo's; Nemo was beginning to wonder if the God he had heard discussed so warmly since he landed in Charleston might not be showing his presence after all. But when he lowered his gaze from the timbered ceiling, Nemo saw that the preacher's eyes were raised not to heaven but to the balcony.

“My sable brethren, these dry bones are not just the sins of the gambling house, the saloon, the bedchamber of your neighbor's wife. These dry bones of iniquity are also the hardness of heart you may feel toward your masters, for as our Savior Christ has told us, we are all servants, and should be humble, gracious, obedient. This is no less true for the benighted child of Africa than for the sons and daughters of Europe—nay, it is even more so.”

Nemo leaned back, settling against the pew heavily. It seemed that the preacher had read the morning paper too.

He allowed himself to drift for a few moments then, knowing he had been burned again by this great white machine, all-powerful, with its plotting and knowing tentacles stretched out a half mile farther down any road he had yet chosen to travel. So for some minutes his mind was elsewhere, as it often was on moonless nights in Cedar Vale, prospecting among the remains of his people for forage to sneak through the back door of the medical school. As he did then, he thought not of this steaming southland but of vast dry plains far away, of mile-wide suns setting savannahs afire with the orange glow of sunset.

But the man's voice kept bringing him back. And the eyes, the pale blue eyes quick with life. Every time the preacher looked up from his text they rose to the balcony, scorching and accusative. When Nemo knew that Doctor Ballard, down front and center in the pews, had just performed an appendectomy on the rector's daughter, Margaret, cauterizing the wound as he'd practiced on the body of Berenice MacCallan's mother—and Berenice herself sitting two rows behind him now.

Nemo thought back to assisting at the dress rehearsal of that procedure in the anatomy laboratory—the suturing and tying of Mrs. MacCallan's dead appendix—when the preacher's voice returned to him, the words seeping into his consciousness like the bite of formalin in the nose.

“And hear me well, you servants, destined for a higher station in the glorious hereafter,” the preacher said—always, always, Nemo thought, a better place once dead. Poor Mrs. MacCallan hadn't got there yet, as far as he could see. “Repentance never comes too late. I urge you to bring your dry bones into the light, to confess the sins of your plotting against your masters. I say to you, my black brothers, come forward and confess your sins and even the scribes and Pharisees among you will be forgiven.”

He felt it welling up inside him, stronger than anything he had felt in years. Maybe it was Doctor Ballard sitting down front in his white suit looking innocent as a lamb, pure as a whited sepulcher. Maybe it was Berenice MacCallan murmuring “Yes, Lord” behind him, knowing nothing of the busy week her mama had had at the college, picked over by a third of the faculty before he laid her in the basement under a thick coat of lime. Maybe it was even the news from All Saints, turning the tide down by the Waccamaw, swapping bone for bone. Probably it was all these things. He saw it all now—this sermon, this moment—as the punch line to a great cosmic joke, two hundred years of irony echoing across the oceans from Africa to Columbia. And because he could do little else, he began to laugh. A chuckle at first, and one of his pew mates shushed him, but the preacher was off again on the dirty bones and Nemo, bone man himself, cackled aloud. Bowing over with it, he saw that he had clamped a hand on his neighbor's knee—that of Tyree's niece, who sat walleyed, transfixed and petrified by this contact in spite of the indignity.

“No, child, I ain't no Satan. Devil's in the good seats,” he said, his throat hitching. “Downstairs. On the
ground
floor.”

He was gone then, beyond restraint. A basso roar, peals of his laughter cascaded down from the balcony. Faces turned up toward its source, reddening—none of them redder than Ballard's when he spotted Nemo. A handful of men rose and made their way up the aisle. In seconds he could hear them pounding up the stairs.

“That's right, white folks, send up the deacons!” he shouted before exploding again.

There was a shuffle behind him, and Nemo felt hands hooking him under his arms. He had only a second to dab his glistening cheeks with his handkerchief before they hauled him up.

Downstairs they hurled him clear of the nave steps onto the sidewalk. Rising, he replaced his pocket square and adjusted the bowler back to its steep angle. He set out for home with the gold cane tapping the sidewalk bricks smartly, evenly, his head held high. He was smiling again, for Nemo Johnston was superfine, a man among men, and despite the rough handling, entirely beyond their reach.

E
DWIN
W
INSTON SAT
on a stool behind the wooden dispensing counter of the apothecary, his eyes intent on the pages of the ledger spread open before him, blissfully content among the familiar scents of calomel and castor oil. The morning was quiet, the only sounds at this moment the scratch of his pen's nib against the paper and the creaking of the wooden stepladder on which Nemo stood, above and behind him, reaching for another bottle of patent medicine on the apothecary's tall shelves. They had been at this work for an hour now, the professor of chemistry tallying off inventory as the slave called out quantities of Burnett's Cod Liver Oil, McMunn's Elixir of Opium, Dr. Wistar's Balsam of Wild Cherry. Winston wrote out each number carefully in his ledger, periodically pausing to press a blotter on the pages to soak up the fresh ink from the fountain pen. The room was filled with lambent autumn light, dust motes dancing in it, and the light glinted off the doctor's spectacles as he nodded at the figures in the ledger.

“Barnes's Magnolia Water,” Nemo said, “two quarts.”

“Very good. That leaves only Winston's Baby Syrup. How much?”

Nemo shook a bottle, its liquid contents sloshing against the brown glass. “Just one half pint, Doctor Winston, near empty.”

Winston smiled. “Going like hotcakes, is it not? I'll mix up a new batch this evening. Ballard tells me he can hardly keep enough on hand for new mothers with colicky babies. The morphine is the ticket.” Winston looked up at Nemo. “I say this in the strictest of confidence, of course. The blend is proprietary. I am expecting word from the Patent Office any day now.”

Nemo nodded as he descended the stepladder. “Congratulations to you, sir.”

“Missus Winston is nearly beside herself with pleasure,” he said, blushing. He cleared his throat and looked back at the ledger. “All is satisfactory except for the laudanum count. One expects the students to dip into it from time to time, but this year's boys are setting the record, I am afraid. Have you seen anyone back here more than usual?”

Nemo shrugged his shoulders. “They a few claiming stomach ailments.”

Winston seemed about to inquire further, but before he could speak again the door opened and Johnston entered, looking flushed and triumphant. He shut the door behind him carefully and smiled at Winston and Nemo as he leaned against it.

“We have a most propitious new enrollment,” he said at last.

Winston shut the ledger. “This late? The term began two weeks ago.”

“Trust me, Winston, you will be happy to make whatever adjustments are necessary. Our new man is a refugee from the low country, a gentleman who has lately vacated his lands for fear that Sherman's march will proceed to the seaboard. Nemo, do you remember a Mister Albert Fitzhugh from All Saints Parish?”

Nemo stiffened slightly. “Two plantations over from Windsor, I recall.” He remembered much of the Fitzhughs, from what he had heard at Christmas visiting-time from the slaves five miles down the coast. Fitzhugh, it was said, had shot a field hand named Monday in the face for working too slowly at harvesttime. He had left the body in the fields as a reminder to the others, who watched it picked over by crows as they hoed the nearby rows. Two nights later, some of them had stolen out to the field and buried the body in a levee. “Folks said the old gentleman was a Christian man.”

Johnston waved a hand in the air. “He may have been, but it is the son I am talking about. He spends money like a pagan.” Johnston crossed the room and set a paper on the counter in front of Winston.

“Check those figures, Winston. I negotiated special terms for his admission. It seems there is no accredited high school in the parish. Certain tuition adjustments were thus in order to make his matriculation amenable to our standards.”

Winston's eyes widened behind the glass lenses. “By what terms did you arrive at these fees?”

“He will need tutorials to bring him up to speed. His mathematical ability is atrocious, his chemistry even worse, Winston. We will all have to take a special interest in his progress.” Johnston turned to Nemo. “I am placing his success in the anatomy course in your hands, Nemo.”

Nemo began to speak, but the doctor turned on his heel and motioned for the slave to follow him. “To the dissecting room, Nemo. Mister Fitzhugh expressed an interest in beginning the course of study immediately.”

After a moment's pause, the slave followed him, hurrying to catch up so that he could hold the door open for the doctor. Johnston was already talking again, a stream of words pouring forth that Winston did not hear. Neither did the chemist note the silence that ensued once they had gone beyond the shut door, so intent was he on scribbling ratios of morphine, sugar, and corn syrup on his shirt cuff, all the quantities doubled from his last production run of Winston's Baby Syrup. He could hardly wait to share the news with Mrs. Winston.