The House Girl (40 page)

Save them,
Jack had said. Dorothea was alive, but weakened from loss of blood. The baby, I could not rightly say. I recalled a lecture at the medical college, given not by Dr. Coggins but a colleague of his, a specialist in obstetrics, about the surgical procedure of opening up the woman’s abdominal cavity so that the fetus might be removed, sometimes with the effect of saving mother and child, sometimes of saving one, and other times with loss of both. It was possible. I had the tools to operate; my sharp knives waited within my bag, and Jack could fetch what else I needed. But life was ebbing away from Dorothea, I could see the blood seeped deep into the mattress on which she lay, her face pale under the light of the gas lamp glowing on the bedside table.
Save them
. I knew that I must act quickly. And so I did.

You must know already the end of this sorry episode. I do not want to fix in your mind the images that will remain forever in mine so I will end here with no further particulars.

Dorothea did not survive, her blood loss was too great, nor the baby boy that we pulled from her, purple and still. Jack held the infant to him with one arm as he sat beside Dorothea on the bed, clutching her still-warm hand in his. As I watched him, I felt a coldness in my limbs as though I stood at the center of a frigid storm, myself alone at its dead calm center. I could not move, I could only bear mute witness to the enormity of Jack’s grief. By and by I went to the bed and sat with him. I do not recall if any words were spoken or embraces exchanged, only that we sat together, mourning, and that was the last Jack and I have ever been so long and so peaceful in each other’s company.

After a time, we heard the sound of horses arriving. The dawn had now broken, and a pale pink light streaked across the floor of the room where the two of us huddled by the bed and the lamp as though it were still night. I looked outside and saw Langston dismount and Dr. Coggins rushing towards the house with his black doctor’s bag, the mirror image of mine. I heard his heavy steps on the stairs. I stood before the door as he entered the room.

What has happened here? Dr. Coggins asked me, his eyes casting quickly over the scene of Jack and Dorothea and the little one. Jack remained perched on the bedside and did not acknowledge the new arrivals.

I began to recount the night’s events but Dr. Coggins held up a hand to stop my narrative and stepped closer to me, putting his face directly in front of mine, so close that I could count the stubbed gray whiskers on his chin.

Have you been drinking? he said. I smell it on you, on your breath.

Langston stood some distance behind Dr. Coggins, his head turning from the trio on the bed to me as Dr. Coggins uttered his accusation. It was the set of Langston’s jaw, solid and sure, and the slight nodding of his head that told me he had informed the doctor of my state when he had come to collect me from Mrs. Bursy’s.

I did not reply to Dr. Coggins. There was nothing I could say. Cold were my fingers, my feet numb, the distance between myself and these others—their cheeks warm and red from riding, so sure in themselves and their rightness—stretched boundless before me. Dr. Coggins walked to the bed, to the ruined body of Dorothea, gazing all the while at the blood, the blood everywhere in the room that in the darkness had not seemed so blackish red as it did now in the dawn light.

You are a disgrace, he said. At the words, Jack lifted his head away from his sorrow, staring at me, the horror reflected in his eyes. Nothing that I do, no wounds I suture or fevers I chill, will ever erase that image from my mind.

Still I said nothing. I backed away from Dr. Coggins, from Jack’s gaze and Langston, still nodding, and left the room. What was I to say? I have returned again and again to that night, to the knock on Mrs. Bursy’s door, the curve of the baby’s spine under Dorothea’s tight skin, the movement of her eyes, the first cut of the scalpel as I began the procedure, each step that led to Dr. Coggins’s accusation, my departure.

Please save them,
Jack had said. In the years since that night I have asked myself, what should I have done differently? Would a better man, a more sober man, a more sober doctor, have chosen a different course?

The answer I have come to again and again is no.

After the death of Dorothea and the little one, named Michael Abel before his burial, I left Randolph Township and the company of Dr. Coggins and all others I knew there. I made no efforts to clear my name or salvage my professional reputation; they would have been in vain, I am certain, and I lacked the wherewithal to try. A great despondency descended upon me.

I traveled south. In Jackson, I renewed my acquaintance with the bottle and sought out temporary work where no one would care what my past held so long as I could mix powders and poultices, stitch a wound, bleed a fever, pull a tooth. I worked there for a spell, and then moved on, and then again I moved. I became a sort of wandering country doctor, roaming from one town to the next, finding cheap lodging, seeking out my patients wherever I might find them. In the main I treated poor farmers, whites and free blacks, rural folk who lived far from towns or any manner of apothecary. Burns, broken limbs, chilblains, cuts. Cholera, malaria, smallpox, typhus, other maladies the likes of which I had never seen nor knew the first bit of how to cure.

In the spring of the year 1851, my wanderings brought me again to the state of Virginia. I wish now that I could say that some noble purpose prompted my return. A desire, perhaps, to attempt reconciliation with Jack, to atone in some way for the death of Dorothea. In fact no such thoughts entered my mind. I traveled without purpose or design, from one accommodating tavern to the next, from one paying patient to another, and in this way I came again to Virginia. My faith in the things I had once held true and dear, the medical sciences, and indeed the Lord above, had all but left me. There was no place for me, I believed, no profession, no family, no home.

And that is when Mr. Rust found me, lying on the ground one cold and damp morning outside a tavern that I had begun to frequent. He knew I was a doctor. He had noticed me ministering to the sickly and infirm of the surrounding area, so he said, and wanted to offer me a professional position at a decent wage. I listened to him, not there that morning but later the next day when we met as planned at the same tavern. He bought a bottle and poured me the first glass, the liquid fracturing the light from the late-afternoon sun that filtered through the tavern’s open door, looking to my eyes like the light that had burned out the open windows of Jack’s house that night. I drank it back and held out my glass for another.

My assignment was simple. Fugitives, both real and supposed, were delivered regularly to Mr. Rust. Generally, he conducted his own medical examinations on the offered goods but was never certain what he might be looking at. He often suffered losses on account of deaths, or damage so severe the fugitives weren’t fit for any useful purpose. I was to be an improvement upon his methods—an insurance policy, of sorts. I would examine each fugitive before a sale was concluded and say yea or nay to each, so that Mr. Rust could be certain that what he was buying, even if it looked broken beyond repair, could be mended and sold on. But the mending I did would be of the most minimal sort. My instructions were to disguise, to treat ills only as far as they would impede a sale, with remedy appearing only as an occasional and incidental result. This is the scheme to which I agreed. That day in the tavern, I drank with the slavecatcher Mr. Rust, and I shook his hand.

Why did I make company with a man like Benjamin Rust? It is a question I know you are bound to ask and I have no simple answer. I have never been a political man. I reckon the workings of government and the law are best left to philosophical, intellectual, considered men, among whose number I have never counted myself. That is why his offer did not strike me as either right or wrong in its particulars; it simply was, just as the institution of slavery, that I have lived my whole life in close approximation to, simply is. Fugitive slaves in the possession of men like Mr. Rust are likely to be needing medical attention of one sort or another, and I reckoned that I was as good or bad a candidate to supply it as any other.

Even this is no explanation, I realize. Mine was a choice made of the basest kind of weakness. It was not even so much a choice as a simple surrender. My funds were all but exhausted, my health was poor, a cough racked my chest at night, and my clothes hung as though I were a strawman intended to frighten away the birds. My life was devoid of any purpose or meaning, any person to watch over me or give me care, any person for whom I felt the barest stirring of emotion. In this state of near death—and it was a sort of death, I know that now—I had existed those long months since Dorothea’s passing. Every day I drew breath, I drank my whiskey, my heart pumped nothing more than blood. I was empty of all but the barest markings of a man—legs to walk, a mouth to drink, a head to nod as Mr. Rust instructed me to meet him the next day at the abandoned barn. I shook his hand. Yes, I said. Yes.

The next day I arrived at the assigned place, at the hour instructed, and the first delivery came, shackled behind a gray mule led by a patroller whom Mr. Rust greeted by name. Hiram, he said. How fine to see you. Many of the patrollers who sold to Mr. Rust were lawfully required to return any fugitives back to their rightful owners, but Rust paid sums far greater than the rewards offered for return. And so they came instead to him, in secret, many of them shamefully. The patrollers had some base code amongst them, despite the nature of their work, but for most avarice was a more powerful urge and it was this instinct to which Mr. Rust appealed.

I remember well that first morning. I remember the mule’s braying loud and hoarse as a foghorn throughout the hours as I examined the fugitives on offer. I remember a girl, her clothes nearly torn from her back, her legs bloodied. I remember an elderly Negro man, and the shaking of his head. I bought my freedom, he said to me as I probed his ribs. I’m a free man. A free man. A free man. A free man. A free man. He said it again and again, and sometimes his voice was drowned by the god-awful braying of that mule, and sometimes it seemed he whispered into my ear, even long after he was sold, long after I left that place and went directly to the tavern, not even stopping to wash the smell of sweat and blood from my person.

Once I commenced working for Mr. Rust, my days took on a routine more or less, with all my work accomplished by midafternoon and my nights free for the tavern. This was the purgatory to which I was condemned, and it seemed like God’s hand. Retribution for what I had done.

So it went, month after month, the dark faces and cracked bleeding feet of my patients blending one into the other just as my days and nights blurred into one long blinding twilight.

So it went, until the morning I saw Josephine.

The day after I first examined Josephine at the barn, I rode to Mr. Rust’s farm to check again on the status of her injuries. I would often administer further care in cases like hers where the wounds were severe or unsightly and might, if not healed properly, affect the price to be fetched later at sale.

I loosed my horse in Mr. Rust’s side field and walked through the long grass to the wooden shed he had erected on his property for the purpose of sheltering slaves before they were sold on. His was a neglected, aging farmhouse with sloped roof and graying shingles, the land overgrown with tall grasses and chickweed. There had once been cattle, I think, and some horses—the barn is still there, the doors sagging on their hinges. It was next to the barn that he had built the shed, just a thin-walled box of a place with cracks in the timber and a tar-paper roof that in a heavy rain dripped down onto those souls locked inside. Inside were six low cots, three on either wall, and a table set at one end with two three-legged stools pushed beneath it. There were no windows, and a large padlock secured the door.

I released the padlock and the door swung open silently. Bo was directly to my left, on his side with his back to the door, and he breathed steadily in sleep. Josephine was laid out on the cot farthest from the door, beyond the circle of light that fell from the open doorway. Someone had covered her with a blanket, and that, and the darkness of the room, had the effect of shrouding her body. Her head was turned towards the wall, and all I saw of her was a knot of dark hair cast across the pillow. She was still and I worried that she had died in the night, that I had been wrong to think there was something inside her that would persevere.

I stepped forward to check her pulse, and she turned her head towards me, and for a moment I froze there, looking down at her across the expanse of empty cots. Her good eye—the left—was toffee-colored, lighter than I would have expected, shot through with green or blue, some color that seemed not to belong there. The light struck that eye and the contours of her face and I could see her studying me, examining.

I advanced into the room, pulled a stool to her bedside and sat; all the while her eye remained on me. Carefully I unwrapped the dressing on her bad eye to reveal a lid tightly closed, the skin swollen a dark purplish black. Josiah had said he didn’t touch her, that he’d found her with an eye like that, and I did believe him. But someone must have struck her across the face, and looking down at that good eye, exposed and alive, I felt a bristling, a sense that something was wrong with a world that permitted, indeed encouraged, the infliction of pain without reason or consequence. During my medical training I had been taught to characterize symptoms and measure the markings of disease, to remove emotion from all our scientific inquiries and attempts at remedy. It was a course that had always come easy to me, which is perhaps why I had remained in the profession, even after Dorothea’s passing. I could focus my mind on the patient as a combination of numbers, colors, symptoms, and facts.

But Josephine’s one-eyed gaze troubled me more than I could say. I saw her not as a doctor, but as a man of faith who had lost himself. Why had her left eye survived? Why had the other closed so firmly with perhaps, as I then feared, a permanent loss of sight? Was it kindness that had spared the left and brutality that had closed the right? In the case of sickness and accident, it was God’s will or fate or luck that struck a person down. But here it was a man’s fist, a man playing at God. A merciless God. And myself playing at it too, in my work for Mr. Rust. I looked at her face and saw no healing there. Just an angry man with heavy fists, a wasted life, a stinking mouthful of drink and shame.