The Resurrectionist (20 page)

“And of what value is that?” Johnston said too quickly. His eyes were still on Nemo's face.

Mullins glanced at the others, looking as if he wished he had not spoken. “I just mention it because she's white, sir. And, uh . . .” Parks strained to find the proper words. “And not likely to have gotten into this kind of condition. She was common, but she was a churchwoman. That's what her sister says.”

“Thank you, Mister Mullins,” Johnston said. “Nemo, I trust you can manage the procurement?”

Nemo sniffed once and nodded his head.

“That's my good man,” Johnston said, smiling, and reached out to pat him on the shoulder. “Please see to it that she is here and in good condition for tomorrow morning.”

“I'll give it my full attention, Doctor Johnston. And I want to thank you, sir.”

“For what?”

“For teaching me what I know.”

Johnston blushed, and Nemo thought he saw his shirtfront puff out a fraction of an inch. When he turned back to the remaining students, he was already rolling up his shirtsleeves. “Gentlemen,” he began, his voice restored to its former composure, “we now return our attention to the great art of anatomy.”

Nemo could hear the whittling of the blades clear out the rear door.

R
OBERT
M
ULLINS WAS
standing beside the dissecting table with the scrap of newsprint in his hand, scanning its four lines of close type, when he and the others heard Albert Fitzhugh's whistling outside the building, followed closely by the sound of the dog pattering across the packed-dirt yard behind its master. Quickly he tucked the clipping back under the woman's left shoulder where he had found it and returned to his own table. Alma Bodifer had enjoyed no such greeting as her predecessor the day before, and little wonder, he thought, as he took another glance at the new cadaver: she was as ample as her surviving sister, the fact made even more evident by her nakedness in the unforgiving morning light. Against the black slate, her abundant flesh seemed ghastly white, grossly pallid, with her ponderous breasts sagging toward her armpits and the excess skin on the backs of her arms and legs pressed flat against the tabletop. Beneath the edges of the handkerchief over her face, Mullins saw her cheeks drooping downward as well, gravity pulling the fat there earthward.

“What time have you got, McEwan?” he said as he took up his scalpel.

“Ten till. He made it, by God.”

“He'll not make it ten minutes when Johnston gets here.”

“Now, Turner,” Mullins said, grinning, “Old Fitz may just pull through yet.”

“So long as his next check don't bounce.”

Mullins was casting about for a response when the laboratory door flew open, framing Fitzhugh in its bright opening. He paused a moment for the dog to precede him, but the animal stopped at the threshold as though galvanized, with its head raised and its long tail poised erect over its hindquarters. Fitzhugh looked down at it for a moment, then burst into a laugh.

“My God, what a dog! Do you see that, boys? He remembers. Memory like an elephant's.” He bent and scratched behind the dog's ears. “Of
course
you will wait outside, old boy. What a good dog he is.” He made cooing sounds of approval, then shut the door slowly, its lower panels stopping an inch shy of the dog's rigid snout.

Fitzhugh strode into the room magisterially and up to the table where his third obstetric cadaver lay. “What have we here? Quite the heifer,” he said. There was a smattering of laughter as he picked up the obituary.

“ ‘Alma Bodifer, aged forty-two,' ” he read. “Says she made the best cornbread in Cotton Town.” He chuckled as he wadded up the paper and tossed it aside. “Can you believe that?”

“Looks like she ate every bit of it.”

“Heifer means more cutting, Fitz.”

“By God, there is a lot of her, but I'm ready, boys. This is my last day with these bitches.”

“Third time's the charm, Fitz,” Mullins said from between the splayed brown legs of his cadaver.

“The next time I explore the female nether regions, gentlemen, it will be on my own time and at my own leisure.”

The ensuing laughter stopped abruptly with the sound of the door being opened again. Fitzhugh blushed as he looked up to see Johnston shutting the door on the immobile dog with a quizzical look on his face.

“Mister Fitzhugh,” he said, “I trust you have already begun your incision into the abdominal wall?”

“No, sir. I was just assaying my equipment.”

Mullins snorted into the perineum of his cadaver. Johnston's neck flushed as he looked down at the Bodifer woman.

“First the legs must be spread to access the perineal region,” he said. “Proceed.”

Fitzhugh struggled for a moment with the heavy thighs, then looked up at Johnston meekly. “Her hips don't seem to move right.”

“Stand aside, then.” Johnston pushed against the cadaver's thighs, trying to spread them. Neither leg would budge.

“Ideally, the thigh and gluteal region would have already been dissected,” he said between breaths, “affording easier articulation. We must be able to abduct the thighs to expose the perineum.” He stood and nodded at the tray of instruments at the foot of the table. “Two incisions through the thigh muscles near the genitalia, Mister Fitzhugh, to render the right hip mobile.”

Fitzhugh made the incisions in the right thigh. When Johnston nodded, he pushed at the leg again. It spread open with a cracking sound.

“Doubtless Nemo has been over this ground with you before, but next is the abdominal incision.” He watched intently as Fitzhugh carved a foot-long crescent on the cadaver's lower belly, pulling back against the flesh as he cut deeper through the layers of orange fat. A film of sweat formed on Fitzhugh's upper lip when the tissue of the uterine wall came into view.

“Good, then. Now, a light incision into the membrane of the uterus.” He winced as his student cut deeply into the organ.

“If this were in fact an actual cesarean operation, the uterus would be enlarged, with far more vascular tissue.”

“Swollen, you mean?”

“Enlarged enormously, yes. Which would give you a bigger target, would it not? Perhaps then you would need stitches only for the mother, and not her newborn as well.”

If Fitzhugh heard the insult, he ignored it as Johnston went on. “In practice you would follow with the removal of the fetus, cutting of the umbilicus, closing the uterus, et cetera.”

Fitzhugh looked relieved and moved to set his scalpel back on the tray.

“Now,” Johnston said. “Two birds with one stone. Proceed with a hysterectomy, as you would if you were to encounter tumors or a
naturally
ruptured uterus.”

“Nemo never said nothing about a hysterectomy.”

Johnston looked at him evenly. “You failed under Nemo's tutelage. Now you are under mine.” He picked up a long needle and began threading a length of suturing through its eye. “Dilate the opening in the vesicouterine pouch laterally.”

Fitzhugh looked at his tray of tools helplessly. Johnston leaned over the body's open cavity impatiently and stuck his hand inside it. “With your
fingers
, thusly,” he said. “The uterus remains attached to its surrounding organs by the broad ligaments alone. See?”

Almost imperceptibly, Fitzhugh nodded. Several of the other students were now standing in a loose circle around the table, anxious to see the next step of the surgery. Johnston handed Fitzhugh the needle dangling its length of catgut. “Pass this needle through the ligaments and set a firm ligature for each. Mind you steer clear of the Fallopian tubes for the third suture.”

The room was silent as Fitzhugh labored through the procedure. A bead of sweat dropped from his forehead into the open abdomen as he worked.

“Your suturing should be more expeditious,” Johnston said. “Imagine a live woman under your knife. In her place, would you not want the operation to proceed more rapidly?”

“This is quite difficult enough as it is, sir.”

“Not nearly so difficult as watching you perform it, Mister Fitzhugh.”

But Fitzhugh pressed on, sweating freely now, and even Johnston began to nod as he finally pressed the needle through the last gray band of ligament and tied it off firmly. Johnston handed him a pair of steel snips and he clipped the tissue cleanly.

“Very nice,” Johnston said as Fitzhugh lifted the pear-shaped uterus clear of the orange fat and set it down on the slate. “Final suturing of the peritoneum and abdomen is next. Carry on.” He pulled out his pocket watch and consulted it while his student made the final stitches. “Eight minutes. A frankly amateurish time, but you will improve with practice,” he said, his voice trailing off as he completed the sentence. A minute later Fitzhugh looked up at him expectantly, and clearly considerably relieved, as he tied off the last knot on the cadaver's belly.

“The final step is to plug the vagina with gauze,” Johnston said, “to stanch the drainage.”

“We have no gauze, sir,” Fitzhugh said in a light voice.

“Where the devil is Nemo when we need him?” Johnston said as he pulled the handkerchief from the cadaver's face and handed it to Fitzhugh.

But Fitzhugh did not take the cloth proffered to him. His eyes were fixed on the face of the cadaver lying before him, and they widened and contracted as if the muscles around them had become suddenly spasmodic.

“That's not the Bodifer woman,” Mullins said quietly.

Fitzhugh's jaws were working like those of a man trapped underwater. Johnston looked down at the face of the dead woman, at the flesh sagging beneath the high cheekbones, with a faint sense of recognition, then turned back to his student. Fitzhugh was gasping now, and sounds of choking came forth from deep within his throat. Still his eyes stuck fast to the cadaver's face. For an instant they left it, darting down the naked torso to the crosshatched lines of sutures on the abdomen and the pubic mound below them, and back to the face again. The sounds in his throat redoubled in volume, and he turned aside and vomited onto the floor with one hand set out for balance on the table. When he straightened, he saw that his fingertips were splayed against the dissected uterus.

“Her womb,” Fitzhugh said in a quavering whisper.

His throat hitched again, but he did not retch, only drew in a great shuddering lungful of air and pressed a hand to his face as he stepped backward and screamed, “Mother! Oh God, Mother!”

Fitzhugh's eyes rolled backward and his body followed them, arms thrown out as he collapsed, dragging down a tray of clattering scalpels and forceps as he fell. A long second of silence passed before Johnston and the others moved to assist him and the laboratory filled with their cries and the sounds of Stonewall scratching against the door, his barking panicked at first, then rising by degrees to a crescendo of hysterical fury.

He was still barking when they carried Fitzhugh out.

Friday

T
HE SLATE-BLUE CROSS ATOP THE
steeple of Ebenezer M.B.E. sputters and hisses, its old neon coursing through the glass tubes wearily, as though the chemical reaction between the neon and the electricity has reached its last half-life. Its glow, so bright through the darkest predawn hours, is now giving way to the sunlight filtering through the trees and bungalow roofs to the east. By degrees the streets are illuminated in hues of gray below the church set high upon its little knoll at the corner of Hardin and Pulaski, looking down regally on the barren landscape of inner-city blight that surrounds it.

Across the street, Jacob's car idles in the lot of an old service station with boarded windows, beside the abandoned gas pumps. The top is up, the air conditioner running, its condenser kicking in every few minutes as the fan drones and fills the car with cool air. Inside, Jacob has cranked his seat back as far as it will go, and he lies against the cool leather, dozing fitfully. The manila file folder he spent most of the night reading and rereading lies closed in his lap, a smear of grease on its tab still damp from its short tenure in his kitchen garbage can, where he had thrown it just after midnight. Three hours later, finally giving up on the prospect of sleep, he had risen and showered and snatched it out of the can and climbed into his car, bone-weary but anxious to have this errand over with before he could give it more thought.

The digital clock on the BMW's dashboard shifts over to six-thirty as the engine's fan whirs to life again. Jacob twists in his seat, sweating despite the rush of cool air. He is deep within a dream.

He is walking from the school toward the house where he grew up in West Columbia. It stands alone with the vast plain of the Midlands stretched out behind it, the scrub pines and rolling hills forming a scant topography, as though huddled, cringing, beneath the merciless sun. The rest of the neighborhood, the whole town, is gone. Between him and the house, the Congaree winds and flows, a big lazy mass of water on which the curls of eddies and waves glint like copper in the sunlight. There is no sound. His family is gathering on the front steps as if they intend to meet him. But no—there, with the surreal logic of the unconscious mind, is Jacob himself as a boy of five, the last out the storm door to stand on the brick porch with his parents. Jacob waves to himself as he comes down the hillside toward the river, his stride impossibly long and limber, like the gait of an astronaut on the moon. He is stopped by the water and waves again, his family's features somehow clear across the distance over the currents. His father gathers his mother and the young Jacob around him on the front steps. The wind is up and the collar of his father's plaid shirt flaps against his chin; under his callused hand, tufts of the boy's white-blond hair lift in the breeze.

Jacob can see no color in them through the metallic atmosphere of the dream; the scene is in sepia except for the sky above—a magenta backdrop against which the cumulus clouds scud and scurry in cottony haste, harried by the wind.

There is a camera in his hand, and he realizes the reason for this tableau: his father has brought them out to be photographed. The camera is a relic, older even than the Polaroid his father let him play with back in the seventies until he broke it. It is a nineteenth-century contraption of wood and glass, a tripod-mounted box complete with a black curtain to shield the photographer and his exposures from sunlight. Jacob sets it up and checks his family's position through the glass. When he is satisfied with their pose, he pauses to look on this vision of himself from those years long ago.

Such a beautiful boy! Jacob thinks. The cheekbones so delicate, the skin so clear and firm, seamless.

But his family stands there looking as dour as Puritans. His father will not meet his eyes; his mother seems distracted, as if worried that she has left the gas stove alight or a door unlocked. The boy looks at him as though he doesn't think much of what he sees.

Jacob pushes aside the camera's curtain and looks at them directly, trying to encourage them to make a good portrait. “Smile!” he shouts over the water, flapping his arms, but their expressions do not change. He gives up and tucks his head under the cloth once more, looking through the viewfinder again to be sure they have not moved out of the frame. “Suit yourself,” he says, and clasps the bulb that will discharge the flash. He is just about to take the picture when the boy speaks.

“I never hurt you,” he says to the grown Jacob through the camera's lens.

“Christ!” Jacob spits as he bolts upright in his seat, bumping his head against the metal frame of the convertible's top. He raises one hand to his forehead and the other to his eyes, rubbing them. “Christ,” he says again as the dream's force dispels in his mind.

The interior of the little car seems to him suddenly close and airless, and he reaches for the door handle in claustrophobic haste. As soon as the door swings out he stands, spilling the folder and its contents from his lap to the oil-slicked asphalt. A bell inside the car dings manically. For a moment he only stands in the cool morning air, trying to breathe it all into himself. But the papers begin to turn and shuffle in a low breeze and he bends to gather them again into the file. When they are back in some semblance of order, he reaches into the car and turns the key in the ignition, sets the alarm, and crosses Pulaski without a look for traffic in either direction.

R
EVEREND
G
REER IS
the first to arrive at the church a half hour later. He pauses a moment on the stairs below the church's front doors and studies Jacob. After a moment he seems satisfied with what he sees and proceeds up the concrete steps heavily, pulling a key ring from a pocket and nodding to his visitor, who steps aside.

“We'll talk inside,” is all he says by way of greeting.

The sanctuary is painted robin's-egg blue, with lavender carpet that matches the cushions on the wooden pews. The morning light falls gaily through the stained glass windows, which are small but busy with colored glass, rainbow hues from Noah's story set off by a single white dove, the serene face of a black Christ looking down through yellow rays. The room smells of flowers—lilies, Jacob thinks—and their scent hangs in the air with the oppressive weight of the odor in a funeral home. Greer moves silently over the carpet toward the back of the sanctuary and opens a white door. Jacob follows him through a threadbare hallway of Sunday school rooms and up a narrow staircase where someone has fitted a homemade rail fashioned out of plumbing pipe to the wall. At the top, Greer opens the door to his office, where an oak desk sits squarely in the middle of the room, and steps to the window. He turns on the air conditioning unit there, takes a seat behind his desk, and stares at Jacob wordlessly.

Jacob stands helplessly for a moment until Greer nods to a chair. He sits and crosses his legs, tapping the edge of the file folder against his ankle idly while he tries to decide how to open the conversation. A wisp of the dream flashes in his mind—the brick porch, his father's upturned collar—and he pushes it away by speaking.

“The school is prepared to make a donation to the church.”

“A love offering,” Greer smiles.

“You can call it what you want, just so long as the march doesn't happen this weekend.”

Greer nods for him to go on.

“I've been authorized to negotiate a contribution. A substantial one. For you and your church, your colleagues, to do with as you see fit. We suggest a scholarship endowment. I'll work with you to set one up if you wish to pursue that course. I can write out a check this morning for twenty-five thousand dollars.”

Again Greer nods, and Jacob lets the silence play out.

“But this is a one-time offer. The administration can see that this is a delicate and special situation, but this case will not set a precedent. I'm authorized to make one contribution, today. No more.”

“No march tomorrow or ever, you mean?”

Jacob shrugs. “No march tomorrow, no more talk about the basement.”

Greer picks up a letter opener from his desk and tests its point against an index finger. “I do not like ultimatums. To me, they smack of bygone days, of masters and servants. Of orders given and obeyed.”

“This is a business transaction, nothing more or less,” Jacob says, the words thick in his mouth. He can hear movement in the church below them, the sound of the organ in the sanctuary being warmed up, a major scale tentatively played.

“I'll take it under advisement,” Greer says, setting the letter opener back on his desk.

“There isn't time for advisement. I need your assurance that your church members won't be on campus this weekend.”

Greer's mouth tightens. “My people have operated without assurances in South Carolina for four hundred years. A few hours will kill neither you,” he says, “nor any of your
colleagues
.”

But he seems to have heard the organist too. He rises and motions for Jacob to follow him. They descend the narrow staircase. At its bottom Greer turns toward the back of the church, keys the lock to a rear door, and throws it open to a playground, where particolored swing sets and slides litter the concrete pavement, the entire play lot surrounded by a chain-link fence six feet high. Greer indicates it all with a wave of his hand.

“It's nice,” Jacob says after a moment.

“Perhaps it is. But look closer.” Greer's hand drops toward the base of the fence and Jacob sees on the concrete there a number of tiny glass vials and, in one back corner, two syringes lying on the pavement. Their plungers are orange-handled—the same sharps used at the hospital. He sees that the reverend is watching him intently, so he nods grimly.

Greer seems pleased. “Quite different from the playgrounds of your youth, isn't it, Mister Thacker? Perhaps you can see why I am not so eager to step and fetch at your school's behest.”

Jacob can feel the blood rising in his neck, in his cheeks. “The school has nothing to do with this,” he says. “And you don't know the first thing about me.”

Greer steps away and begins picking up the little vials. They clink together in his broad palm as he collects them. “Our youth operate in a world entirely bereft of your opportunities. Where you have networks and connections, they face closed doors and impossible odds. There is a great debt to be redressed.”

“I was no more connected than your youth,” Jacob says. “I worked my way up. Nobody ever offered me a handout.”

Greer pauses in his work to look over his shoulder with one eyebrow raised. “Oh? No decent schools in your neighborhood? No resources for a letter of recommendation? No community to see that you succeeded?”

“My community was West Columbia Textiles. My family poured their life into it.”

“Earning a living wage while my people were digging out from under Jim Crow.”

“It wasn't much of a wage. And they didn't do much living.”

Greer seems not to have heard. He picks up the syringes and studies them. “Addicts,” he says, shaking his head. “What's an addict? Somebody who's given up on living. Who's given up on the Lord.”

Jacob barely suppresses a snort of disgust. The file in his hands seems ready to leap from his grasp.

“Or,” Greer is saying, “someone who's faced obstacles so daunting you can only imagine them. Do you honestly expect me to be moved by the fact that you were born to a linthead family across the river?” Greer smiles, his eyes feline. “If I had a nickel for every cracker up-by-my-bootstraps story I've ever heard, I'd be a wealthy man. Am I supposed to feel sympathetic?”

Jacob is moving toward him across the concrete before he finishes the question. He holds the file out and slaps it against Greer's chest while the man takes a step back.

“I don't care a damn how you feel. Fuck you and your sympathy and your sanctity. Read that file. It's a copy of your record from the treatment clinic. A very interesting account of cocaine abuse and recovery. Confidential, up to now. But if it were to be leaked to the press, it would become public in record time. You'd be back down to your bootstraps in a week.”

Greer drops the syringes and the vials, a few of which shatter on the ground. He clutches the file against his chest weakly. “This is malpractice,” he says, his voice nearly a whisper.

“This is hardball. You dealt the play.”

Jacob turns back toward the church, already reaching into his pocket for the car keys. He feels the folded check in his pocket and stops, turns back to face Greer.

“And the donation,” he says, “is rescinded.” He is improvising now, well past the boundaries of the plan McMichaels gave him last night, but the freedom feels viscerally good. “I've taken it under advisement, and I don't think much of our contribution would actually reach your youth. We'll pursue other avenues for making a contribution.”

He leaves the reverend there, alone on the forlorn playground, looking for all the world like a soul lost in a purgatory of his own making, a shade wandering in a familiar, bitter landscape.