The Resurrectionist (19 page)

Fitzhugh stood in the doorway, the dog beside him, its hackles raised. He looked unsteady, and Nemo could see that his eyes were even more red-rimmed than his own.

“Good morning, Mister Fitzhugh,” Nemo said.

Fitzhugh listed to his left for a moment, then straightened up. “Well, I'll be damned,” he said. He looked down at Stonewall as if the dog could offer a commentary on the scene. Stonewall only growled.

“Stonewall never has liked you, you know,” Fitzhugh said. “Can't say I blame him. In here with your embalming stuff and a dead one and hardly enough candlelight to see your own hand in front of you. Damned creepy.”

Nemo forced a smile. “I suppose it is, Mister Fitzhugh. Just getting a jump on the day.”

“And my God, that singing. You've got a voice like a busted fiddle.”

Nemo only smiled, his teeth and eyes glistening in the candlelight. Fitzhugh took a step into the room. “What have you got there? Looks like a hell of a pair of legs.”

“She's not ready yet, sir. Still working on her.”

“Let's have a look. She looks like something special.”

“No, sir. She's not too special yet. Need another little while to get her ready.”

“Oh, come on,” Fitzhugh said, smiling. “I doubt she'd mind.” He took another step forward.

Nemo had to strain to make his voice level. “Can you come back in a half hour, Mister Fitzhugh?”

Fitzhugh weaved and reached out a hand behind him, his fingers settling finally on the door he had opened. He rocked back and forth with it for a moment until he caught his balance. He looked at Nemo for half a minute and then shrugged. “Why not? I've got to take a shit anyway.”

Then he was gone, the outside door banging shut behind him, and Nemo could hear his footsteps tramping to the outhouses. The dog whined alongside him.

Reluctantly, Nemo turned to look down at the woman. Her eyes had rolled back, all whites beneath the painted lids. He bit his lip and bent to check the cut in her leg. The blood was seeping slowly from it now. He looked back to her face and realized that his left hand, as though of its own accord, was still clamped firmly around her mouth. He bent close and removed the handkerchief. A slow exhalation of air, like the faintest of cellar breezes, brushed past his ear. He heard nothing else.

He held his ear against her mouth for a full minute, hoping, before he rose slowly and reached for the tubing again, slipping the rubber hose into the unresisting thigh. He picked up another hose and held it ready as he cut the jugular and inserted it. He bent over the woman as he rubbed her body, kneading the blood toward the incisions and into the tubing, down to the jug at his feet. Had Fitzhugh still been in the room, he would have seen the silent tears streaming down Nemo's face as he took up the old song again, calling over Jordan more softly this time, singing it now in the tuneless voice of the damned.

T
HE DISSECTING ROOM
was filling fast with morning light and the students roused by it as Nemo sat on his stool in the corner, yesterday's
South Carolinian
held out in front of his face. He tried his best not to hear the comments the students made about the new woman, tried not to watch as Fitzhugh, bolstered now by two pots of coffee, pantomimed his reenactment of finding Nemo hunched over the woman. As his story wound up to its crescendo, the dog beneath the dissecting table began to bark, the sound earsplitting in the big room, until Fitzhugh finally settled him down.

“What's the order of the day, Nemo?” Fitzhugh called out as he patted the dog's head. “Might I have a few moments alone with this lovely lady before we begin?”

Nemo chided himself for leaving the woman's face uncovered, though he doubted they would have granted her that dignity for long anyway. He rattled the paper, turned a page. “First procedure is the cesarean,” he said. “Abdominal exposure and incision into the uterus. Mind you don't make the cuts too deep.”

“Right, right,” Fitzhugh said, either too preoccupied by the dead woman or still too drunk to catch the reference to Addie Kennedy. He picked up a scalpel from his tray and began. Following Fitzhugh's lead, the others too began to get down to their business, and Nemo settled back gratefully into the familiar, wordless hum of the busy laboratory.

Fitzhugh made the cut on the abdomen just below the rose tattoo. The blade sank into the soft flesh, and as it did Nemo and the others heard a long hiss of gas escaping. One of the students nearby coughed. Fitzhugh stepped back and put a hand to his face. “Are you sure she's well embalmed?” he asked.

“Same as the others,” Nemo said.

“I may need some assistance here.”

The
South Carolinian
rattled again. “Can't help with this one. Doctor Johnston told me expressly.” He wet his fingertip against his tongue and turned another page, over to the obituaries, and started when he saw Mary Elizabeth Fitzhugh's name at the top of the listings in large type. Her name was followed by a long list of her ancestral relations and a history of her debut in Charleston, then her married years with Albert Fitzhugh, Senior, among the swaying rice fields and gentle ocean breezes of All Saints Parish.

Nemo lowered the paper and peered over it at Mary Elizabeth Fitzhugh's sole surviving relation. His mother just barely gone and him raring about drunk all night, looking for a chance to gamble on roosters killing each other. Nemo could not understand it. Yet he knew that Doctor Johnston would explain it as some kind of expression of grief.

He could see that Fitzhugh had pared back the epidermis and was cutting at the underlying fat with slow, deliberate strokes. If he ever had to perform the surgery on a living person, Nemo thought, the woman would need a double dose of ether and a blood transfusion. Beneath the table, the dog panted, its tongue lolling out of its mouth. Fitzhugh had clamped the tip of his own tongue between his teeth as he concentrated on the delicate work.

“There!” he cried. “Or almost. I think I can see the uterine wall.”

“Make your lateral incision,” Nemo said, his voice distant.

Fitzhugh made the cut and frowned down at it. He set the scalpel aside and reached into the cavity with both hands. When he raised them the others saw that they were full of scarlet and white tissue, latticed and perforated with decay. In his hands the tissue fell apart, dissolving between his fingers like dirty snow melting. His face was contorted with disgust.

“Something's wrong,” he said. “Is this some kind of joke?”

Nemo rose from his stool. “Yep, something wrong. Haven't seen nothing like that before.”

“You haven't, have you?”

“I have not.”

“Why do I wonder?” Fitzhugh said, his cupped hands still half filled with the diseased tissue. “You bring me niggers that are no good, so I ask you for a white specimen. You bring me a white woman, and her insides are eaten up like an old cheese.” He held the ruined uterus aloft as if to present it as evidence. “Something is wrong, all right. The problem, I am beginning to see, is you, Nemo. I will speak with Doctor Johnston about this in the clearest of terms. You are sabotaging my medical career.”

“Doctor Johnston going to tell you that you don't need my help with that.”

Fitzhugh made a growling sound of inexpressible rage and flung his hands at Nemo. The fragments of the dead woman's uterus flew across the space between them and hit Nemo full in the face. He heard the impact as much as felt it as the tissue struck wetly against his skin and dripped down from his forehead to his shirtfront, then the floor. He wiped at his eyes and closed the distance to Fitzhugh in two strides. Stonewall was barking wildly now and rocking back on his haunches, ready to lunge.

“Stay away from me,” Fitzhugh shouted. “You crazy nigger, stay away from me or he'll tear your throat out.”

Nemo pulled the knife from his pocket and held it out. He turned the blade until it glinted in the room's light. “Any dog that comes after me going to be a dead dog in a minute's time. You take him by the collar now and walk him out and you'll live to see another day. Don't, and I'm going to make a specimen out of you right here.”

Fitzhugh had backed up to his table, his buttocks against the slate top and his hands out behind him. “You would, would you? In front of all these witnesses?”

Nemo registered the movement of Fitzhugh's hands too late. The white man's right arm arced out toward him with the scalpel pointed downward and raked across his chest, leaving a burning line behind it. Nemo raised his own knife from his side and lowered his head to go in, his eyes on the point of Fitzhugh's shirt just below the sternum. His knife was still rising when he felt someone take hold of his forearm and yank back. Nemo pulled, already sensing himself stronger than this new antagonist, until he caught the scent of talcum powder and, behind that, a sweetish wisp of ether.

“You know I cannot overpower you, Nemo. Allow me to appeal to your reason,” Johnston said behind him. “And you, Fitzhugh, put down that scalpel or I shall expel you this afternoon.”

Nemo and Johnston hung poised in the strange embrace as Fitzhugh reluctantly tossed the scalpel aside. One of the students handed him a cloth and he mopped at his face with it, then wiped his hands on it violently.

“Your future, Nemo,” Johnston whispered in his ear. “Think of the opportunities you will squander with this violence.” The doctor squeezed Nemo's arm almost tenderly. “I implore you to use your reason,” he said.

Slowly, by degrees, Nemo allowed his muscles to relax. When he felt Johnston's hand slip away, he placed the knife back in his pocket and lifted his hand to the long cut on his chest, assessing its depth. His eyes never left Fitzhugh's face.

“You saw that, Doctor Johnston,” Fitzhugh was saying. “With your own eyes. He took up a weapon against a white man, sir, with a clear intent to murder. I demand you contact the authorities this instant.”

“Oh, shut up, Fitzhugh,” Johnston said. “We are the only authority needed here.” He stepped around Nemo and toward Fitzhugh. He glanced at the open abdomen of the dead woman and his gaze stopped there, as though his intellect had been aroused despite the uproar. He picked up a scalpel and prodded the tissue, his brows knitting. “Tragic. What kind of abortifacient was used, one can only imagine,” he said. “Probably chemical. Come here, Fitzhugh, and have a look at the fetus.”

“I don't want to see it,” Fitzhugh said sullenly.

“No. Of course you do not.” He turned and stretched to his full height, until his eyes were level with Fitzhugh's. “That is because you are an imbecile. Another student with even a hint of scholarly curiosity would have treated this scenario as an opportunity. You, however, have rendered it an occasion for unmanly complaint and common violence.”

Fitzhugh's mouth dropped open. Beneath the table, Stonewall whined sympathetically.

Johnston looked down at the dog and gave it a sharp kick. “Out, out with this cur. I have let things go too far. Mister Fitzhugh, you will accompany the animal out of the building. If you choose to grace our hall with your presence again, it will be at seven o'clock sharp tomorrow morning. I will supervise the remainder of your dissection practice myself.”

Fitzhugh stood as if struck dumb until Johnston made a flicking motion with his hand. Then he bent and took a handful of the dog's ruff and dragged him away. A few paces from the doorway he turned and shouted, “I'll have your job yet, boy! I'll get my justice!”

“You might,” Nemo said quietly. “You just might have it yet.” He looked down at his chest. The cut was not deep, but he knew it would scar.

In the heavy silence that followed, one of the students cleared his throat. “The boy did assault a white man, sir.”

“And was he not assaulted first? Round and round we go, and where does it get us? Surely I do not need to furnish you with an answer. Today's business goes no further than this room, gentlemen. Am I clearly understood?”

There were murmurs of assent, most of them reluctant. Johnston turned to Nemo.

“And you, Nemo, will atone for your lapse of judgment by having another female specimen on this table by seven tomorrow.”

Now it was Nemo's jaw that slackened.

“But Doctor Johnston,” he said. “This poor woman—”

“Is dead, Nemo. Neither our pity nor our sympathy can help her one iota.” He raised his voice to address both Nemo and the students. “Our business, as I have told each of you a hundred times, is the living.”

“The living,” Nemo said.

“Yes, the living. The dead teach us, yes. But beyond that, their value is negligible.”

Johnston seemed to be waiting for Nemo's assent. But Nemo only stared at the floorboards beneath his feet. On one of them lay a fragment of gossamer tissue, white and delicate as a dogwood petal.

One of the students, Mullins, finally broke the heavy silence. “Alma Bodifer died Sunday. They buried her yesterday. I know because her sister cleans my room.”