Azariah shoots back, “I know what the hell I’m doing.”
Walt shifts the wood, adds more newspaper, and hands Azariah another match. “See if that works better.”
Azariah scrapes the match on the brick underneath the oven, waits for the flame to catch, and lights the newspaper.
“Leave the door open for a few minutes,” Walt says, exactly how his father said it to him. “Give it a chance to burn.”
The two of them watch as the kindling catches fire.
“Well done.”
Azariah smiles. “What’s next?”
“You are going to help me typeset tomorrow’s edition.”
“Typeset?”
“Here. Watch.” Whitman sets up the trays on the composition table, showing Azariah how he will transpose his article from the green notebook to the print tray. “I learned to set type when I was about your age.”
Azariah says, “What should I do?”
“Mr. Hartshorne called it following the letters.”
“Following the what?”
“The letters. I have to find each of these letters in type”—he points to his script in the notebook—“and assemble the blocks in the tray so they can be run through the printing press. I work fast, but along the way I make a lot of errors.” Walt stops. “Your job is to tell me when I do.”
“Okay.” Azariah kneels on the table and is ready.
But Walt is stuck in his own history. “Back then, I worked at the Long Island Patriot, and I was Mr. Hartshorne’s apprentice. He was from Philadelphia, and while we set the daily edition, he used to tell me about meeting George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Can you imagine knowing such great men?”
“I can’t.” He pauses for a second, waiting for Walt to start working. “Ready, Mr. Whitman.”
“My brothers, George and Jeff, are named after them.”
“Mr. Whitman!”
“Oh yes.” He shakes off the past. “Can you read?”
“The nuns worked with me some,” Azariah says. “Can’t read words but I know the letters.”
“That’s exactly what I need.”
Once Walt begins, his hands move almost automatically, shooting from one tray to the next, finding the right letter, then sliding it into place, the metal crashing into the wood tray like tiny explosions. Azariah edits as Whitman works, and is surprisingly good at it. He catches several errors in the first column alone, catches that will save a lot of time with the printing.
In the article, with the headline SHERIFF HARRIS MURDERED, Walt begins with the suggestion that Lena Stowe might not have killed her husband and that Abraham’s death might instead have had something to do with the underground body-snatching business and not the sensationalized and slanderous accusations of the Mary Rogers botched abortion. Walt figures that the tension created between the headline and the Stowe lead will jar the reader in a way that benefits his argument. Then he goes on to describe the illegal cadaver business itself—the demand for bodies, the point of view of the colleges—and finally transitions into what happened that night: his personal account of Sheriff Harris’s murder and his own abduction.
This last part is where Whitman will grab the reader by the throat. He shifts into the first person, adopting a narrative style much like that in the stories he’s been publishing. He wants the reader to feel what he felt, to be called to action as it were. He reads the passage to Azariah about being in the wagon with the corpse:
Upon waking under the tarp, I saw her. The girl’s eyes, stretched wide open, glared as at some monstrous spectacle of horror and death. The sweat started in great globules seemingly from every pore of my face; my skinny lips contracted, and I showed my teeth; and when I at length stretched forth my arm, and with the end of one of my fingers touched her cheek, each limb quivered like the tongue of a snake; and my strength seemed as though it would momentarily fail me—
Azariah interrupts him. “No offense, Mr. Whitman, but that sounds a titch melodramatic.”
“A titch?”
Azariah says, “You sound like you ain’t never seen a body before.”
“Fair enough,” Walt says. “We’ll delete that paragraph, then.”
“And while we’re on it. Didn’t I tell you to stay away from James Warren?”
“You did.”
Azariah shakes his head. “And you nearly got yourself killed.”
Whitman smiles. “Nearly but not quite.”
“I let you teach me how to build a fire,” Azariah says, “now you got to let me teach you how to stay alive.”
With the blocks of type set in the tray, it is time to run the proof.
When Walt finishes the print run at eight in the morning, he takes a rest and stares out the front window. The sun stretches over the buildings on Nassau Street and through the glass, but the air is cold. Icicles form in the crevice where the wall is joined to the window.
Walt approaches the sleeping Azariah and gently rocks his shoulders. “Mr. Smith? It’s time.”
The boy stretches, looks around, and when he sees Walt, he grins. “I dreamed I was taking a bath with those women doctors.”
“My,” Whitman says. “Perhaps, then, you’ll return to the college for a spell after we’re done here? See if dreams come true?”
Azariah plays along. “How can I say no to that?”
They load the newspapers into the Aurora’s wagon. They will pull it street to street, searching out the boys Mr. Ropes has hired to sell it, an exhausting task Walt himself has performed only once before. He appreciates having Azariah along for this—he’s already helping by steadying the cart, which is always near tipping over on the cobblestones and sidewalks. They maneuver their way through the morning traffic, following the voice of their first newsboy. “Extra! Extra! Sheriff Harris murdered!”
Walt is astonished. Someone still beat him to the story. No matter, he thinks. They certainly won’t have the angle I do.
The first newsboy, a burly sixteen-year-old with a missing front tooth, comes into view. He’s standing on an upturned milk crate, holding the Tribune in each hand, calling out the headline. “Sheriff Harris murdered!”
Azariah and the newsboy size each other up.
“Who is this?” the newsboy says to Whitman.
“Who am I?” Azariah says. “Who the hell are you?”
Walt steps in between the two boys. “Now, gentlemen,” he says, “don’t we have business to perform?”
The newsboy agrees, and so steps down, takes the bundle of Aurora editions. He reads the headline. “A bit late to the party, no?”
“Ours is a better story,” Walt says.
“It always is,” the newsboy says.
“Just sell it,” Azariah says.
As they leave, the newsboy’s high voice hacks through the morning air: “Sheriff Harris murdered! Get the story here! Two cents!”
“What was that all about?” Walt says. “Do you know him?”
“It was nothing,” Azariah says. “His sort thinks they’re better than folks like me.”
Whitman studies the boy but doesn’t grasp his meaning. Both Azariah and the newsboys are shabbily dressed, their speech equally rough.
Azariah is not smiling now. He’s retreated deep within himself. The boy is a strange contradiction, Walt thinks. He operates with a maturity beyond his years, which Walt now believes is eleven or twelve.
“Let’s finish delivering these newspapers. We both could use some sleep.”
It is not until ten in the morning that Walt and Azariah return to the women’s college. Walt’s legs are heavy as tree stumps, his eyes dry and itchy. Mud cakes his boots and streaks his overcoat.
Azariah collapses in one of the classroom chairs.
“Let’s get you upstairs,” Walt says.
Azariah shakes his head. “I�
�ll never make it.”
“I’ll carry you.”
Azariah nods, and so Walt cradles him, the boy’s warm body pressed up against his own. He thinks of his own brothers and sisters, and he longs to be with them, but he’s grateful for this moment with his new friend. Azariah leans his head on Walt’s shoulder.
In the large dormitory room, the students are up and about. Most of them are reading. They smile and nod at Whitman as he carries Azariah around the curtain and lays him in bed. He’s already fast asleep.
On the other side of the curtain, Elizabeth Blackwell waits for Walt. “What happened?” she whispers.
Whitman puts his fingers to his lips. “I’ll tell you later.”
She nods.
Walt acknowledges Miss Zacky, Miss Onderdonk, Miss Perschon, and Miss Emsbury. They are an impressive group, he thinks, as he goes down the stairs and into his room.
With the door shut, he drops into the chair next to the bed, unbuttons his coat, and slips into a trancelike state where he wonders about his ten-year-old brother, Jeff. Up already, no doubt, the cows milked and morning chores finished. He is probably sitting at the kitchen table, the sun’s rays warming his arm through the window, the sound of Mother, Louisa, humming to herself behind him. On the table, a stack of flapjacks drips with hot maple syrup and a swirl of butter. The kitchen smells best in the morning, scented with coffee and pancakes, the mixture of bitter and sweet he will forever connect to growing up in that house.
The bed is too much to resist now, so he rolls onto the straw mattress, which crackles as he comes to rest. He closes his eyes and feels sleep take him over, his body weightless and spinning into darkness and silence.
Chapter 12
The protestors wake him. Their chants, rhythmic and agitating, shake him into consciousness. Idiots, he thinks. Surely they have better things to do than torture these poor women. Folks like these should be otherwise engaged. Walt stumbles out of bed, drowsy to the point of being uncoordinated, and into the classroom with every intent of going outside to confront them, but that’s when he hears the students in the dissection room, and he follows their voices instead.
He finds them standing around Lena Stowe’s half-dissected corpse, their cutting instruments to bear, their instructor monitoring their every move. “Careful as you cut,” Elizabeth Blackwell says. “The muscle tissue needs tension as you peel it back. Then make a buttonhole in the muscle, yes, right there.” Around them, jars and buckets line the counters and shelves, mixed with stacks of paper and publications: Outlines of Anatomy and Physiology, issues of The People’s Medical Journal and Home Doctor, and William MacKenzie’s An Appeal to the Public and to the Legislature on the Necessity of Affording Dead Bodies to the Schools of Anatomy. “Put your finger in the buttonhole,” Miss Blackwell continues, “and it will help you keep the muscle taut as you separate it from the chest cavity with your scalpel.”
Miss Zacky taps Elizabeth’s shoulder.
She turns around, and when she sees Walt, she smiles. “Mr. Whitman, good afternoon.” All the students stop and stare at him now, and he looks down at his own sleeping gown, disheveled, the chest open—
“Pardon me,” Walt says, taking a step toward Miss Blackwell, pulling his gown closed, and this is when Lena Stowe’s body comes into full view: on her back, rib cage visible, skin peeled back like fabric—tendons, cartilage, muscles, and nerve endings sprouting out of her body. Walt has always imagined the inside of the human body as bright red, like the blood from a cut, but instead, he sees shades of gray and faded yellow.
Miss Blackwell anticipates his reaction. “It’s a bit of a shock your first time, isn’t it?”
Whitman feels a bit light-headed. He grasps the table to steady himself, looking at the floor and then the body again. He is speechless. There’s something so awful about what is happening in this room, and yet so beautiful.
Miss Blackwell says, “More than anything else, Lena wanted us to keep this college going. She wanted her body to be used in the manner that we have used the bodies of others. If she had to die, she did not want to die in vain.” She pauses. “She told you so herself.”
A sliver of black pupil shines through the slit of Lena’s left eyelid, and her chapped lips are colorless. It is her hair that stands out to him most, long and flowing, just as it was before the trapdoor dropped out from under her. He reaches out and touches her cheek, which is ice-cold.
He runs his fingers across the front of her face and down her arm until he reaches her fingers, which slip between his own. Dirt lines her fingernails. Red welts around her wrists. On her left ring finger a tiny strip of skin is lighter than the rest.
“What about the baby?”
Elizabeth points to a tiny bundle of cloth on the counter. “The Hathaways will bury her with Lena.”
“Her?”
“The Stowes were going to have a daughter.”
Whitman holds on to this revelation in reverence, giving himself a chance to reflect on its significance. “Had she quickened?”
“The fetus measured almost six inches. There is no doubt.”
The room quiets down at this, acknowledging the second victim, and in the solitude, the protestors’ chants come through.
Whitman breaks the moment. “They’re still out there.”
“They never go away,” Miss Blackwell says.
“They should be otherwise engaged,” he repeats to himself.
“What happened to you, Mr. Whitman? Your face is swollen and bruising, and you have turned pale.”
Miss Zacky approaches from around the table, touches his forehead. “He’s warm too.”
“I’m overtired is all,” Walt says. “I had just fallen asleep when they woke me.”
Miss Zacky pulls him by the arm to a chair back against the wall. “You sit down,” she says. “Rest.”
“We’ll be finished here in a few minutes,” Elizabeth says, “and the Hathaways, Lena’s mother and brothers, will arrive soon after. I could use some help in the meantime—but only if you’re well enough.”
“I’d be happy to,” Whitman says.
From where he sits, Walt watches the students work. He’s impressed with Miss Blackwell’s leadership—she has stepped forward without trepidation, and the students have responded. This is good news. He wipes his forehead, exhausted. He has the sensation that if he stands, he might faint. Walt checks the clock on the counter next to him. Almost one already, which means his article on the sheriff’s murder will have made its way around the city. He wonders what the reaction will be, what folks will make of his suggestion that the Stowe murder was a setup by body snatchers. Whatever the reaction, he will have stirred the pot, which is exactly what he needed to do.
The students are finished now, and Miss Blackwell directs them in the cleanup. Miss Emsbury sweeps the floor. Miss Onderdonk takes out the trash. Miss Perschon wipes the counters. When Whitman says he’s feeling better, she even gives him a job. “Straighten up those books, won’t you?” He does, and when they’ve all finished their assignments, Miss Blackwell gives them more. Miss Zacky will check on Azariah Smith while the other students clean the classroom. Walt and Elizabeth must prepare the body for burial.
“After you put on some proper clothing, of course,” Elizabeth says.
Walt again looks down at his sleeping gown. He had forgotten.
Walt and Elizabeth fold the skin on Lena’s legs and arms, then sew the skin flaps together. To Walt, the dark thread looks like a jagged body tattoo. The chest is next, where the students have diligently investigated her insides. They removed her organs one by one, storing them in pots of water until only an hour ago, when they began readying the college for the Hathaways’ visit. While Walt and Elizabeth prepare the body, the students are in the large furnace room that doubles as a crematorium. Walt can smell the organs burning, a smell difficult to describe, but not at al
l as unpleasant as he would have thought.
Miss Blackwell reattaches the rib cage and while Whitman holds it in place, she stitches the skin together.
“They’ll be here soon,” she says.
Next, they have to fight Lena’s dead weight to get her dress on. Miss Blackwell works the arms into the sleeves and eases the dress up over the chest, turning the body on its side to fasten the back buttons.
After combing Lena’s hair, Elizabeth applies perfume to her neck and wrists, and Walt puts stockings on her feet, which cover up the sliced tendons. The body looks almost normal, he thinks. A few unnatural bunches remain in the chest, but it is the best they can do.
A banging at the front door jolts them, and they assume it is the protestors.
“I’ve never understood the opposition to dissection,” Miss Blackwell says. “I understand that it makes folks uncomfortable, of course, but it’s the only way to improve upon our knowledge of the human body. If dissection prevents resurrection, what about decomposition?”
Whitman is formulating an answer he hopes will give voice to people like him, who are not necessarily opposed to anatomical dissection but who seem to innately resist it. Before he can get the words out, however, she has moved on.
“In practical terms, what that opposition means is that families cannot bury their loved ones in church graveyards—this, of course, is the church’s fault, but it comes with a real cost to the families of the deceased. If I could speak to the public, without the influence of the church, I know I could convince New Yorkers of both the necessity and benefits of anatomical dissection—and you know me, Mr. Whitman. My faith is central to everything I do.”
She is devout if a tad idiosyncratic, he thinks.
“We learn so much by looking inside the human body. I know that an omnipotent God, the God I believe in, has no objections to dissection. He wants us to understand his creation, and that understanding brings me closer to him.”
Walt interrupts her. “But the theological problem of resurrection is not the only stumbling block,” he says. “And I have to be honest: What you’ve done to Lena’s body has had a great effect on me, and not a positive one.”
Speakers of the Dead Page 7