The Resurrectionist (5 page)

“At skinning a fucking deer! I'll not have him in here at my back with a knife, by God.”

“He will only assist, Robert, nothing more.” Johnston nodded at Caesar, indicating the foyer. “Would you like some laudanum?”

Despite his pain, Drake nearly turned over on the desk. “You've had laudanum all this time? Blistering my back with nothing but whiskey, and you've had laudanum?”

“I can only give you ten grains. I intended to conserve it until the moment of greatest need.”

“I am in great need, I assure you.”

Johnston took a pewter tin and a pack of papers out of his bag. He shook the tin over one of the papers, much as he would salt a delicacy, and handed the paper to Drake. “Under the nose, Robert. Sniff it vigorously.”

Drake needed little encouragement. He snorted the powder, sniffled twice, and sipped from his glass. “All you doctors, God. I never send for you if I can help it, because things always get worse after you arrive.”

“Surgery without pain is a chimera, Robert,” Johnston said as he set two more cups on Drake's lower back.

“Surgery is just shit, I say.”

“You'll be at greater ease presently,” Johnston said as Caesar and Cudjo entered, the former ushering his taller and darker companion into the room with a sardonic flourish.

“Hold these cups where they are, Cudjo, firmly. I will attempt to move at greater haste.” Cudjo took his place as Drake muttered. Johnston set to work with the candle again, Cudjo watching intently as the skin puckered and reddened. As he touched the flame to the last cup, Johnston looked at Cudjo appraisingly. “Doing all right?”

“Capital, sir,” he said, his lips thinning into a smile.

“Robert, feeling pain?”

Drake said only, “Oh, mammy.”

“Fine, then. We will remove the foot with dispatch, at the ankle. Cudjo, take firm hold of the heel and toes. Hold them fast.”

“Mammy, mammy,” Drake said, the words rising to a falsetto singsong as the slave grasped his foot.

Johnston picked a scalpel from the small array on the desk. At the first incision, low on the Achilles tendon, blood spurted onto his shirtfront, crimson on the starched white. He worked the blade around and under, to the front of the foot, then rose again to complete the circle. Arterial blood shot into his eye and he paused to wipe his face with a handkerchief. At the corner of his vision he saw Caesar stumbling out of the room.

“Your knife, Cudjo.”

“Sir?”

“Your blade, quickly.” He snapped his fingers.

Cudjo loosened his hold on the rapidly blanching foot and produced the knife. Johnston set to with it on the remaining ligaments, cutting each with a precise nick of the blade, realizing that this humble tool would speed his already efficient amputation regimen—a point of considerable pride—by as much as ten seconds.

“Bone saw,” he said.

He was pleased to feel the slave set the saw into his outstretched palm without further prompting. He made six vigorous passes, the saw blade first grinding, then singing as it picked up speed, and the foot came off in Cudjo's hands. Johnston retrieved his needle and sutures himself, selecting a number-four catgut. Three minutes later the arteries were closed and the stump swaddled in the remains of Drake's shirt. Johnston and Cudjo carried the semiconscious Drake back to the armchair. Johnston propped the foot up with two volumes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, watching the spread of the bloodstain on the bandage. After a moment he added Emerson's
English Traits
to the stack, then, convinced the elevation was suitable to stanch the blood flow, sat down himself.

“Cudjo, be a good man and bring me a glass of whiskey. Ask in the kitchen for rags to clean up this room.” He sighed as Cudjo handed him an amber glass. He hoped the day's roughest work was now behind him.

A
N HOUR LATER,
the room cleared of the operating debris, which Cudjo had carried out in a single bloody bundle, Drake showed signs of reviving. His mood was uplifted considerably after a second dose of laudanum, which caused him to giggle intermittently as Johnston collected his equipment.

“How much of that dope do you carry with you on a call, Johnston? I would like to procure a bit more of it. You can roll the cost into your fee.”

Johnston smiled. “I've left four more powders here on your desk, Robert. One dose every six hours for the next day, then back to the whiskey as you need it.”

“All right, then,” Drake said, and giggled. “Oh, mammy.”

“As to the fee, there is none. How could I bill the man who has been my host for so many memorable hunting seasons?” Johnston snapped his bag shut. “I would, however, like to engage you in a business transaction.”

The host stopped giggling. “What business?”

“Cudjo. I would like to purchase him for the medical school.”

“What in hell for?”

Johnston looked out the window. “As a valet. A butler and custodian. The faculty needs a man. I'm prepared to offer you a promissory note, drawn on the Bank of Columbia, for eight hundred dollars.”

Drake bellowed with laughter. “A business transaction, indeed! You're no businessman, Johnston. That nigger's run off six times in four years. Eight hundred dollars! I'll be glad just to get shut of him.” He wiped his eyes. “Cudjo's half wild. Those Senegalese never tame. I'd have let him go at six hundred.”

“Six hundred, then. As men of honor.”

Drake's eyebrows narrowed. “Seven hundred. Seven hundred and you leave me a bit more of that dope. My foot is killing me.”

C
UDJO RECEIVED HIS
initial anatomy lesson under moonlight, in the open air of the phaeton as he guided it to Columbia, urging the horses over roads winding farther north than he had ever ventured. The carcass of the doe lay splayed between him and Johnston in the rear seat, skinned naked in the starry night air. They had retrieved it at the doctor's urging from the hunting lodge smokehouse that afternoon, while the news of Cudjo's sale still hung over the slave like a fog of ambivalence; he was delivered from Drake and the malarial heat of Windsor, but to what new fate? As Johnston strolled along the bank of the Waccamaw, seeming delighted that his transaction had proceeded so smoothly, Cudjo had gathered up his scant belongings from beneath the lodge. It was short work. He had loaded the doe into the phaeton and trundled it to the river while the doctor still mused, looking down into the tea-colored waters, the slave having said his last goodbye to Windsor and All Saints Parish.

But now, near midnight, they were approaching the outskirts of Columbia, well into the foreign elevations of the South Carolina Midlands. As they crossed the wooden bridge over the Congaree River, Cudjo looked over his shoulder, trying to follow the tics of Johnston's riding crop as it pointed out the musculature of the doe's carcass. Johnston had said that one mammal could substitute as well as another for an extempore general lecture and was now making good on the claim. While the wheels lumbered over the last bridge planks, the tip of the crop stopped once more, hovering over the base of the doe's spine.

“Recapitulation now, Cudjo. This is?”

“That's the loin.”

“No.
Gluteus maximus
.” The crop rose as though to indicate the heavens above. “Sound it out.”

Cudjo repeated the Latin slowly. The crop rose and fell with each syllable, then dropped back to the doe.

“Much better. And this?”

“Flexor.”

“Very good.
Flexor longus digitorum
. And here?”

“Semitendinosus.”

“Excellent.” Johnston smiled, his teeth gleaming in the moonlight like the bone nubbins of the doe's severed limbs. “You are a most extraordinary Negro. I cannot help but feel I've made a bargain today. Seven hundred dollars for a man of your capabilities and a month's worth of venison thrown into the bargain—whether Drake knew of the deer or not,” he added, as though troubled by his conscience on the matter of the doe. He fell silent for a while.

Cudjo had lapsed into a doze when the crop prodded him gently on the shoulder.

“Say, Cudjo. I've been thinking that Cudjo is no name for an adjunct to the faculty of the Carolina School of Medicine and Physic. We need something with a bit more élan.”

The slave seemed to pause thoughtfully before he spoke. “Cudjo always been all right with me.”

“Fine, but Cudjo is a name fit for an animal, not for a person of some stature.”

“Cudjo is African,” he said quietly.

Johnston seemed not to have heard. “How about something biblical? We need something with a few syllables to it. Solomon? Nebuchadnezzar. No, too grandiose. Simeon is plain, but it would do. Saul. Theophilus. Both are good, though I am inclined toward Theophilus.”

The slave's shoulders seemed to have drooped as Johnston ran through his catalogue. So low that his voice could barely be heard, he said a single word: “Nemo.”

“Nemo? You know Latin, then? Nemo means ‘no man.' Can you read Latin?”

“Slave can't read.”

“I asked if
you
can read.”

“I reads a little, when I can.”

“Excellent. That will be one less thing to teach you. Nemo, then? Why not? Fair enough. You should have some say in the matter. Nemo it is, and will be from the moment I introduce you to your new masters in Columbia.”

Why not, indeed, the slave thought as the phaeton rumbled toward its destination and his new home. After it all, after his faint memories of Africa and the black pirate ships, one transfer of ownership to another, from Senegal to South Carolina—why not “No Man”? In his homeland, the matter of a name could incite a fight to the death. But he was not there now, and had not been for decades. If not only his body and soul but his very name was at the behest of other men, why not become No Man?

After this long day, begun on the soft banks of the Waccamaw and set to end in a strange place, he saw no point in resisting it. Today he had in fact felt the tug of becoming no man at all. Yet he had countered it, and thus had another reason to be drawn to a new name. There at the lodge, with the doctor down by the river, he had made a gesture of protest. He figured his ties to Windsor were cut permanently now, unless Drake came looking for him—after the hunting season had begun, after the guests began to arrive at the lodge for the annual pursuit of big game. It was a ritual farewell in the African style, a last missive. With a rock and a tenpenny nail, Cudjo had pounded Robert Drake's severed left foot into the front wall of the lodge. There, among the antlers, it would drip off its flesh and bleach white in the autumn sun like the other bones—one more trophy, one more memento of conquest.

Nemo: it was a name that could serve its owner well. No man could be a good man to be indeed.

Tuesday

T
HE DISSECTING LAB IS IN THE
Chapel Clinic, but as if in a nod to the bygone days when human dissection was frowned upon by church and state alike, even this postmodern building of oblique angles and mirrored glass has placed it in the basement. Even in the twilight years of the twentieth century, it wouldn't do to have sidewalk-level windows looking in on a room where such work is done.

Jacob takes the steps down two at a time, trading the morning sunlight outside for the sterile gloom of fluorescent light on tile. He is still smarting from the Internal Review Board meeting that just adjourned and is anxious to see the friendly face of Adam Claybaugh. Despite the grim nature of his vocation—and his rank as an endowed professor—Adam has always been among the most accessible of the faculty, a living rebuke to the stereotypical notion of the anatomy professor as a vaguely cadaverous old soul. Adam is a triathlete, robust and brimming with energy, as likely as not to appear for a lecture in running shorts, fresh from another of his quick eight-mile runs. Jacob remembers him from his own tenure in the anatomy lab as an apt mentor, a sharp contrast to his subjects—both the cadavers themselves and the pasty-faced first-years charged with taking them apart.

He finds him now seated behind the large desk at one end of the dissecting room, eating a salad. Before him lie the two dozen cadavers that will greet the first-years tomorrow, each covered with a white sheet but still exuding its strange bouquet of preservation and rot. At their feet Adam has set out the dissecting kits in their familiar brown plastic boxes, perched atop the copies of
Grant's Dissector
. Tomorrow morning the sheets will be pulled back and the students will set to work on the back muscles, allowing them in the time-honored ritual to make their first cuts before turning the cadavers over to reveal the dead faces. For today, however, the dead bide the time patiently, like a silent cast awaiting the first act. Their dreadful muteness Jacob learned to abide, but the smell still galls him, invading the nostrils and creeping down into the lungs, like an affront to the living.

Adam's voice booms down the long room. “Young apprentice!” he shouts as Jacob walks past the rows of bodies. “Is it homecoming week already?” He rises and stretches out a hand. “Jake, it's been too long.”

Jacob can feel his bones grinding under the handshake. “Go ahead and finish your lunch, Adam. How you can eat down here is beyond me.”

Adam shrugs. “Used to it. But I'm about to make forty-odd vegetarians out of the incoming class. Until the new year, anyway.”

Jacob pulls up a chair and looks out over the still forms. “When I finished gross I swore I'd never darken your door again.”

“You ought to come back now and then,” Adam says through a mouthful of bean sprouts. “Get your bearings reoriented.”

“It's not the kind of place you return to for sentimental reasons. Every doctor's idea of the worst patient is a Goner. The patients down here are Confirmed Goners.”

“Way Goners. I know all the jokes. But damn, Jacob, the dead are the key to the living. I'm always having to preach that, over and over.” Adam's voice, as always, alternates between enthusiasm and reverence, the only tones in which he speaks of the dead. “You get into practice for a few years and tend to forget it. Or, say, get swallowed up in the administration.”

“Oh, boy, don't start. I'll be back in practice in a year, I hope.”

Adam looks at him thoughtfully. “You got a raw deal, Jake. I'm sorry about it.”

“What the hell. Probation's two years, then I'm clear.”

“I'll be glad to see you out of Johnston Hall. You're probably the only one left over there with a soul.”

Jacob can't argue this, and for a full minute there is only the sound of Adam chewing lettuce. He pokes a fork at his salad. “I saw Lorenzo down at the Iron Horse last night. Hear you've got some bones in the basement.”

Jacob sighs. “I hope Lorenzo doesn't talk himself out of a job. But yeah, a bunch of them. I'm hoping you can come take a look. The crew that found them wants us to call the coroner.”

Adam smiles. “McTeague? He's a moron.”

“A moron who likes his picture in the papers.”

“And you don't want the papers in on this.”

“Hell, no.”

“Why not?” Adam leans back in his chair. “It's the school's dirty little secret. We ought to come clean.”

“Are you crazy? We're in the middle of a capital campaign, Adam. It'll send our donors flying.”

Adam waves a hand toward the bodies arrayed down the long room. “These are the only donors that count.”

“I'm not going to argue abstractions with you, Adam. These guys are crucial, yes, but they don't pay our salaries.” In spite of himself, Jacob has allowed his voice to rise. “It's not pure, I know it, but it's necessary. PR is the dirty work that keeps the machine running.”

Adam sets his fork down and takes a paper bag out of a desk drawer. He pulls a plum from it and offers it to Jacob. Jacob shakes his head. Adam takes a bite from the plum and looks at Jake for a long moment as he chews slowly. “All right, Jake. I'll help you with your dirty work. I've already got an idea of what's down there, though. You know the full history of our august institution?”

Again Jacob shakes his head. “Some of it. I heard about it all through school. Everybody did. I figured it was just rumors, like a ghost story.” There had always been folklore concerning medical students and cadavers and always would be; the morbid symbiosis was as old as the profession itself, a way to maintain the precarious balance between the ghoulishness of anatomy and the higher purpose it served. Five or six years ago, a pair of anatomy students had dressed their cadaver in a suit and sunglasses and left him propped up, sitting, in the waiting area of the emergency room. Tad Bowling and his partner, Jacob remembers. They'd been expelled that very day. But they had all laughed, the students. There was a weird callousness about it, the way you had to set the boundaries between yourself and your cadaver—as though it weren't human anymore. How else could you pop the pelvis like a wishbone, split the nose, saw the jaw off a fellow human being? He remembers, though, that until this week the basement door of Johnston Hall has always been padlocked.

“No rumors, no ghost story. The dissecting room was in the current registrar's office until the turn of the century. I figure when they finished with the bodies for the course, they just took them downstairs and buried them. Quietly. Public perception, you know.”

Jacob ignores the jab. “Not too bad, so far.”

“No. If that was all, you could call the coroner yourself. But from what I've heard, they were all black. The cadavers. Deceased slaves before the war and freedmen during Reconstruction. Not good enough to be seen as patients but fine for anatomy subjects.”

Jacob thinks of the old photograph in his office. The dark face in the back flashes in his mind, featureless.

“You're sitting on a powder keg over there. Have been for more than a century.” Adam stands up and stretches, his massive biceps bunching under the sleeves of his T-shirt. “Yeah, I'll help you with your dirty work, Doctor Thacker. But first I want you to help me with a little of mine.”

T
HE HOLDING TANK
is a giant cylinder of polished stainless steel, and Jacob and Adam have to climb a set of perforated metal stairs on its circumference to reach the top. This room is off-limits to the medical students, and for good reason: as shocking as the sight of dozens of dead bodies in the dissecting lab might be for the new student, seeing them afloat in a thousand gallons of formaldehyde would be worse.

A week before, this tank was full of the naked bodies, floating vertically in the preservative and crowded close on one another. Now that Adam has set most of them out for the incoming class, their ranks are thinned. A few leftovers are all that remain, their scalps just showing above the surface. Their hair is cropped close to the skull when they are processed, so the tank reveals a half-dozen crew-cut scalps poking from the viscous liquid, most of them gray-stubbled, bobbing in the formaldehyde like a new genus of bad apples. “Players,” they had called them back in school, Jacob remembers.

“I'm looking for the thin female,” Adam says. “Should be the best demonstrator I've had in years. Beautiful musculature.” He takes a last bite from the plum as he manipulates the grapple over the tank like the grab-a-toy game at a fairground. Jacob winces as its tines close around a head. A body comes up out of the liquid, its face set in a grimace and streaming formaldehyde, and Adam lowers it back gently. “Wrong one.”

Jacob looks toward the ceiling. “Meant to tell you I met with your former colleague this morning.”

“Washburn?”

“The one. He's a son of a bitch. Black-market organ sales? I could hardly believe it.”

“He was a bad hire. Never had a proper respect.”

“He'd have taken the school down with him if he could.”

Adam settles the grapple over a head and lowers it onto the dome of the skull. “Yep. That's why I turned him in.”

Jacob is stunned by this admission—the whistleblower rules allow for complete anonymity—but is glad that Adam feels he can confide in him.

“There she is.” The cadaver is younger than Jacob expected; small wonder that Adam has given her his top spot for the fall semester. Beyond her prunish hands and the sullen droop of her breasts, she appears to have been a woman in vigorous middle age.

“I think I'll call her Beatrice. Does she look like a Beatrice to you? It seems fitting.”

“It is. We named our man Henry. Not very imaginative, I know. I used to have dreams of old naked Henry climbing off the table and chasing me with a scalpel.”

“Yep, the revenge nightmare. There's the old guilt. Grab a pair of gloves and help me get her on the gurney, will you?”

Jacob steps down the stairs, pulls two latex gloves from a box on the wall, and tugs them on as he waits by the gurney. Adam lowers Beatrice to him, the body revolving slowly with the grapple, still dripping formaldehyde, in a slow-motion pirouette.

“Put her facedown, Jake.”

Jacob takes hold of the ankles and tugs on the legs until the toes are aligned near the foot of the gurney. Adam lowers the head and Beatrice's body meets the metal slab an inch at a time, knees to chest.

“Grab the head, please, so I don't drop her on the face.” He does as he is told, careful to keep his shirtsleeves clear of the grapple's tines. He can feel Beatrice's short hair bristling under the latex. As the grapple rises again he turns the head to lay the face on its side. Beatrice's watery brown eyes are open, looking through him.

Adam springs down the steps and pushes the gurney out into the lab. Jacob almost has to trot to keep up. “Want to try your hand again?” Adam says over his shoulder. “See if you've still got it?”

Jacob is beginning to remember that a little of Adam's eccentricity goes a long way. He is ready to get out of this basement. Whether Adam cares to acknowledge it or not, the world moves at a different pace aboveground. “I've got a crisis brewing, Adam. Don't have the time.”

“Ah, time. I'm disappointed, young apprentice. You've forgotten the great philosophical lesson of the anatomy lab. Time is
all
you have. Take a look around. If this isn't a sight to keep time in the proper context, I don't know what is. These people are out of time.
You
have plenty.” He brandishes a scalpel at Jacob. “First step is the incision,” he says, handing it over. “Proceed.”

With a sigh, Jacob takes the scalpel and leans close to the back. But not too close; he remembers well the hazard of cadaver juice spurting into a mouth or an eye. He makes three long incisions through the skin, as if to carve the partial outline of a box on Beatrice's back. The cuts are bloodless. This is the first time in years he has even thought to make a cut without a hemostat and gauze at hand. But God, the feel of the scalpel in his hand.

“Step two: reflect the skin from the posterior musculature.”

“Is a buttonhole okay?”

“Absolutely.”

He carves a quarter-sized hole in the skin below the neck and pushes it through. With a finger through the flesh, he joins forefinger and thumb and pulls the skin away as though drawing down a very reluctant window shade. The tissue parts with a wet sucking sound. Beatrice's musculature is indeed remarkable. The latissimus dorsi are well formed and even, looking under this exposure like a pair of wings spanning the shoulder blades. He pulls until the flesh is stripped away down to the end of the incisions and lays it over the buttocks, the flap of skin draped over Beatrice's posterior like a miniskirt.

“Well done,” Adam says. “Your half of our barter is completed. Glad to see you've still got a light touch.” He picks up a ketchup bottle from his desk and sprinkles phenoxyethanol on the corpse before covering her with a sheet. He tucks the corners in under the shoulders almost tenderly.