The Resurrectionist (18 page)

H
E SAT ON
the cold marble floor of the Grand Mark's lobby with his back against a stone column and his hands dangling between his knees, only half interested in the desk clerk, who kept his eyes on the black man as though he might steal the great column itself the moment his back was turned. Twice the man had told him there were no rooms here for colored before he had heard the name Pollard and sent a bellhop upstairs to summon the guest. Now Nemo sat a full five yards from the warmth of the roaring hearth fire as he counted off the minutes of his wait.

The bellhop reappeared at the counter, a little breathless, and pointed out Nemo to the white man who followed him. Nemo felt his stomach tighten as the man started across the lobby, his boot heels clicking on the marble. He was white trash, no doubt, no matter the bright pattern of the satin vest he wore. His hair was black, long, and thinning, with a mustache of the same color drooping around the corners of his small mouth. When he was close enough, Nemo could see that the toes of his boots were scuffed through the polish and that the vest was frayed at the seams. He looked down at Nemo for a long moment before he spoke.

“You here for the package?”

“I reckon I am.”

“Well, come on, then. Ain't got all night to stand around jawing.”

He turned and started toward the grand stairwell, his heels tapping fast on the marble before Nemo could get to his feet.

“I say again, the boy can't have a room here,” the desk clerk called after them.

“It's all right. He's just going to haul some luggage for me,” Pollard said without turning, then, under his breath, “So shut the hell up.”

Nemo followed him up three flights of carpeted stairs, then down a gaslit hallway that was close with the fumes from the lamps. Pollard stopped at the last room and opened it with an iron key, a few stray hairs dangling over his forehead as he worked the lock. “This is going to be forty dollars,” he said as he turned the knob. “You got that kind of money, boy?”

Nemo took a deep breath. “Got it. But don't know as I can part with it.”

Pollard looked up and smiled, and Nemo could see that his teeth were yellowed and that one of his bicuspids was missing.

“You take a good look at this one and you'll part with it, all right.” He pushed the door open and nodded for Nemo to enter first.

The room was a study in disarray, with an unmade double bed in one corner and a half-dozen whiskey bottles standing empty on the dresser. A pile of dresses rested beneath the single window, as though thrown there. Cigar ashes dusted the carpet and a week's worth of newspapers lay sprawled beneath the room's single armchair.

The woman lay on the divan beside it. The red velvet fabric of the couch offset her alabaster face and the faint flush of her cheekbones such that she looked almost alive. One of her hands dangled toward the floor, motionless, the knuckles just touching the carpet. The other lay across her breast with its fingers splayed against her collarbone, near the soft fall of her golden hair.

She was completely nude, and Nemo could see that although she was thin, she was not too much so. Her breasts were firm and taut, and her pelvic bones, though visible through the flesh, were not pronounced. Her abdomen looked full and healthy, offset by a small tattoo of a rose just above the triangle of hair covering her pudenda.

Nemo took his time studying her, assessing the risk. He watched the breastbone for any sign of movement, studied the tattoo to see whether it rose or fell.

“Yeah, boy,” Pollard said behind him. “I think you in love.”

“You check her pulse?”

“Shit. She's dead, boy. You blind?”

“You mind if I check it?”

Pollard stepped forward as if to move between Nemo and the woman. “You don't get to touch her till you buy her.”

Nemo raised his hands deferentially. “All right. How'd she die?”

“Fever. Had it all week, couldn't work a lick. She just laid in here and burned up, I reckon.”

“When?”

“Sometime in the night. I checked on her about dawn and she was gone.”

“You didn't call a doctor?”

Pollard looked at the dead woman disgustedly. “Don't have a lot of cash flow right now. Even the damned room's on credit. You want her or not?”

“Why I pay you forty when I can get one free?”

“You can get a
nigger
for free, yeah. Dead niggers is always free. But this one ain't no nigger, is she?”

“No, she ain't.” She wasn't a Negro and she wasn't even common; she was beautiful. Nemo thought that next to Amy, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He knew that in Columbia she would be eagerly received.

“What's that, boy?” Pollard's lip had pulled back from the missing tooth. “You say ‘sir' to me, boy.”

Nemo nodded absently. “No,
sir
,” he said. “No sir, she ain't.” He nodded again. “Where you find her?”

“Find her? She's been with me six years.”

“She your wife?”

The man sneered through his blackened teeth. “No, boy. You stupid or what? She's my girl. She's a whore.”

Nemo stared at the man.

“You ask too many damned questions. If you want her, ante up. Else get the hell out.”

“Forty, you say?”

Pollard nodded. “Forty. And you do the toting.”

H
E HAD SMELLED
it ahead of him, the pungent odor of charred wood and old charcoal, carried for miles on the southeasterly breeze, and the smell had kept him awake for the last hours of his ride into Columbia. After two full nights without sleep, and with the wagon groaning under the weight of his supplies and the woman's body, he had welcomed the smell of his hometown as it incited him to stay awake, to keep going, these eighty-odd burned blocks of Columbia seeming to urge him back via the night breeze. As the wagon rumbled beneath him, Nemo thought back to the year before, remembering the drunken Federals smashing store windows, remembering Johnston feverishly hoisting a yellow hospital flag out front of the school to save it from the invaders. Later that night the fires had started and stray wads of burning cotton had blown pinwheeling down the streets like infernal sagebrush, some of them borne aloft on the February wind like comets. Toward midnight, anxious to catch a glimpse of the northern harbinger of fiery destruction, he had watched as Sherman himself rode past the school on a roan charger. He had seen nothing very intimidating about the man; he looked like any other sunburned cracker with half-crazy eyes.

But still, well into 1866, Sherman's legacy of fire remained in the air and in the white-hot memory of the whites. Outside Cayce, Nemo had seen what he took to be an omen that he would reach his destination: a gray wood barn in a fallow field, one of the few left standing, on which had been painted “Sherman Fucked a Cowe,” the dripping whitewashed letters ghostly in the moonlight.

He had known then that he was close, and now, with the dawn a half hour away, he rolled into the courtyard of the school and up to the back door of the building, quietly so as not to wake the students sleeping in the dormitory across the way. He climbed down from the buckboard with his joints popping and pulled the woman's body, wrapped in the soiled hotel sheets, to him. When he had her hoisted over his shoulder, he hooked a thumb into a two-gallon jug of formalin from the wagon bed. He pushed the back door open with his foot and stepped inside, the heavy oak swinging shut soundlessly behind him.

In the dissecting room he laid the woman out on Albert Fitzhugh's empty table and left her covered while he went to the cellar for his rubber tubing and an empty jug. He brought a candle back with him as well, its flame low and flickering on the walls but just light enough for him to work by. He rolled the sheets back from the body without looking at its face and placed the end of one tube into the empty jug and pulled the knife from his pocket and made the first cut on the upper inside thigh, where the femoral artery rose closest to the skin's surface.

He always made the thigh cut first, and as he had done so many times before, he made the inch-long incision cleanly through the artery and the blood came fast. It came too fast, and in pulsing gouts, jetting out from the thigh with the regular rhythm of a heartbeat.

Nemo stared at it, his bloodshot eyes hardly registering what they saw. After a long moment he shook his head and reached for the woman's wrist, feeling for a pulse, his own blood racing. He could barely discern a fluttering of blood beneath the pale skin of her wrist.

“Oh,” the woman said. “Oh.”

“Oh, damn,” Nemo said.

He had heard talk of comas, of death-sleeps. Once he had even opened a casket to find the underside of its lid clawed a half-inch deep, broken fingernails embedded in the wood from the frenzied struggle of a last hour spent in rabid claustrophobia. But never anything like this. The woman had been cool when he had carried her down the servant's stairwell of the Grand Mark, and cool this morning. She had never stirred during the long ride back over the rough country roads, through the cold night. It was impossible that she was still alive.

“Oh,
God
,” the woman said, her voice rising in volume as though fighting its way out of her chest. “Oh, God, I hurt.”

Instantly Nemo was making shushing sounds to her and reaching for a cloth to press against the wound in her leg. His hand settled on a box of the handkerchiefs used to prepare the cadavers for their first viewings, and he snatched out a handful of them and wadded them against the woman's thigh.

“Oh, God help me,” the woman said, and for the first time Nemo allowed himself to look her in the face.

Her eyes were wild with fear and pain and the confusion of this sudden reveille. They rolled in their sockets twice, the milky blue irises revolving drunkenly, then fixed on his face.

“Don't scream, honey,” Nemo said. “More you scream and writhe, more it bleeds.”

The woman's eyes widened further, this time with anger rushing into them. Her jaw clenched as she spoke. “Get your nigger hands off of me!”

“I'm going to stitch it up, ma'am. But you got to hold still.”

“Don't touch me again, you black bastard. Murder! Murder!”

Across the courtyard Nemo could see a lamp flare to light in a dormitory window. He looked down at the woman and saw that her hands were beginning to flop on the slate table as she tried to work life back into them.

“Ma'am, ma'am! You going to bleed to death we don't stop that blood. Just lie back.” He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed gently.

“I never did no nigger and never will!” she screamed. “Where's Reggie? Oh, God, get those black hands off of me!”

“Ssh, ssh. Ain't nobody going to hurt you. Just try to settle yourself.” He pressed against her shoulders until he felt her resistance give way. “That's better,” he said. “Tell me your name, child, while I tend to you.”

He removed his grip on her shoulders and pulled the handkerchiefs away to check the wound. He was looking around the room for the nearest needle or suture when one of her arms lifted from the table with the suddenness of a catapult and slapped across his face. He stepped back, his eyes watering. The woman's chest rose as she took in a great breath. “Murder!” she screamed.

Outside, Nemo could hear a door slamming, and when he looked up to the adjacent building he saw that two more windows were now lighted. From the courtyard came the sound of footsteps. He looked from the windows to the woman lying beneath him and saw that her chest was rising again with another inhalation. Quickly he grabbed the wad of bloodied cloths and pressed it against her mouth.

The woman gagged and he loosened his grip on her jaw, letting his hand go just slack enough to muffle her voice. Her eyes widened again and he hissed, “Be quiet. If you don't be quiet it'll only get worse.”

The woman nodded. Both of them listened as the footsteps crossed the courtyard and sounded on the back stairs. Nemo felt like weeping when he heard a dog's whine following them.

“Anybody home? You boys ain't having a cockfight without me, are you?”

Nemo heard the door slam shut and he shook his head at the woman to lie still. When the footsteps began to sound on the boards of the rear anteroom, she erupted into a fit of thrashing on the table, her voice keening through the cloths. Nemo pressed down, gripping her face harder.

“Sure sounds like a cockfight to me,” Albert Fitzhugh said from the next room. “Could have sworn I heard my old Dan tearing into some damn rooster.”

The dog whined sharply and there was the sound of a body hitting the floorboards. “Goddamn you, Stonewall, you stupid mutt. Where's a light in this place?”

His eyes still over his shoulder and on the dissecting room door, Nemo began to sing. The song was one of Amy's favorites—“Roll, Jordan, Roll”—and he sang it in a falsetto, loudly, as Fitzhugh fumbled at the door and finally jerked it open.