by Ed McBain
He struck wood sooner than he had expected to. Six feet under, people always said. But it wasn’t. Three feet, more like. Just enough to cover the box and then some for top soil. Deep enough, he supposed, since the pine boards would rot and the worms would take care of the rest.
He didn’t need to bring up the coffin itself. That would disturb too much earth, and the doctors had no use for the coffin, anyhow. Dr. Newton told him that. It might be stealing to take a coffin, he had said. Wooden boxes have a monetary value. Dead bodies, none.
He stepped into the hole, and pushed the dirt away from the top of the box. The smell of wet soil made him dizzy, and he willed himself not to feel for worms in the clods of earth. He did not know whose grave this was. They had not told him, or perhaps they didn’t know.
“You didn’t want to be down there anyhow,” he said to the box. “Salted away in the wet ground. You didn’t want to end up shut away in the dark. I came to bring you back. If the angels have got you first, then you won’t care, and if they didn’t, then at least you won’t be alone in the dark any more.”
He took the point of the shovel and stove in the box lid, pulling back when he heard the wood splinter, so that he would not smash what lay beneath it. On the ground beside the grave, he had placed a white sack, big enough to carry away the contents of the box. He pulled it down into the hole, and cleared away splinters of wood from the broken box, revealing a face, inches from his own.
Its eyes were closed. Perhaps—this first time—if they had been open and staring up at him, he would have dropped the shovel and run from the graveyard. Let them sell him south rather than to return to such terrors. But the eyes were shut. And the face in repose was an old woman, scrawny and grizzled, lying with her hands crossed over her breast, and an expression of weary resignation toward whatever came next.
He pulled the body out through the hole in the coffin lid, trying to touch the shroud rather than the flesh of the dead woman. She was heavier than he had expected from the look of her frail body, and the dead weight proved awkward to move, but his nerves made him hurry, and to finish the thing without stopping for breath: only get her into the sack and be done with it.
He wondered if the spirit of the old woman knew what was happening to her remains, and if she cared. He was careful not to look too long at the shadows and pools of darkness around trees and gravestones, for fear that they would coalesce into human shapes with burning eyes.
“Bet you ain’t even surprised,” he said to the shrouded form, as he drew the string tight across the mouth of the sack. “Bet you didn’t believe in that business about eternal rest, no more’n the pigs would. Gonna get the last drop of use out you, same as pigs. But never mind. At least it ain’t alone in the dark.”
She lay there silent in the white sack while he spent precious long minutes refilling the hole, smoothing the mound, and placing the shells and flowers back exactly as he had found them.
He never found out who the old woman was, never asked. He had trundled the body back to the porter’s entrance of the medical college, and steeped her in the alcohol they’d given him the money to buy as a preservative. Presently, when the body was cured and the class was ready, the old woman was carried upstairs to perform her last act of servitude. He never saw her again—at least not to recognize. He supposed that he had seen remnants of her, discarded in bits and pieces as the cutting and the probing progressed. That which remained, he put in jars of whiskey for further study or scattered in the cellar of the building, dusting it over with quicklime to contain the smell. What came out of the classes was scarcely recognizable as human, and he never tried to work out whose remains he was disposing of in a resting place less consecrated than the place from which he had taken them.
“Well, I suppose the first one is always the worst,” said Dr. Newton the next day when he had reported his success in securing a body for the anatomy class. He had nodded in agreement, and pocketed the coins that the doctor gave him, mustering up a feeble smile in response to the pat on the back and the hearty congratulations on a job well done.
The doctor had been wrong, though. The first one was not the worst. There were terrors in the unfamiliar graveyard, that was true, and the strange feel of dead flesh in his hands had sent him reeling into the bushes to be sick, so that even he had believed that the first time was as bad as it could get, but later he came to realize that there were other horrors to take the place of the first ones. That first body was just a lump of flesh, nothing to him but an unpleasant chore to be got over with as quick as he could. And he would have liked for them all to be that way, but he had a quota to fill, and to do that he had to mingle with the folks in Augusta, so that he could hear talk about who was ailing and who wasn’t likely to get well.
He joined the Springfield Baptist Church, went to services, learned folks’ names, and passed the time of day with them if he happened to be out and about. Augusta wasn’t such a big town that a few months wouldn’t make you acquainted with almost the whole of it. He told people that he was the porter up to the medical college, which was true enough as far as it went, and no one seemed to think anything more about him. Field hands would have been surprised by how much freedom you could have if you were a town servant in a good place. There were dances and picnics, camp meetings and weddings. He began to enjoy this new society so much that he nearly forgot that they would see him as the fox in the henhouse if they had known why he was set among them.
Fanny, Miz Taylor’s eldest girl, made sport of him because of his interest in the community. “I declare, Mister Harris,” she would say, laughing, “You are worse than two old ladies for wanting to know all the goings-on, aren’t you?”
“I take an interest,” he said.
She shook her head. “Who’s sick? Who’s in the family way? Who’s about to pass?—Gossip! I’d rather talk about books!” Miss Fanny, with her peach-gold cheeks and clusters of chestnut curls, was a pretty twelveyear-old. She and her young sister Nannie were soon to be sent back to South Carolina for schooling, so she had no time for the troubles of the old folks in dull old Augusta.
When she thought he was out of earshot, Fanny’s mother reproved her for her teasing. “Mary Frances,” she said. “You should not poke fun at our lodger for taking an interest in the doings of the town. Do you not think he might be lonely, with no family here, and his wife back in Charleston? It is our Christian duty to be kind to him.”
“Oh, duty, mama!”
“And, Fanny, remember that a lady is always kind.”
But he had not minded Miss Fanny’s teasing. To be thought a nosey “old lady” was better than to be suspected of what he really was. But in the few months before she left for school, Miss Fanny had made an effort to treat him with courtesy. She was well on her way to being a lady, with her mother’s beauty and her father’s white skin. He wondered what would become of her.
He was in the graveyard again, this time in the cold drizzle of a February night. He barely needed a lantern anymore to find his way to a grave, so accustomed had he become to the terrain of that hallowed field. And this time he would try to proceed without the light, not from fear of discovery but because he would rather not see the face of the corpse. Cheney Youngblood, a soft-spoken young woman whose sweet serenity made her beautiful, had gone to death with quiet resignation on Saturday night. It had been her first child, and when the birthing went wrong, the midwife took to drink and wouldn’t do more than cry and say it weren’t her fault. At last Miz Taylor was sent for, and she had dispatched young Jimmie to fetch Dr. Newton. He had come readily enough, but by then the girl had been so weak that nothing could have saved her. “I’d have to cut her open, Alethea,” Dr. Newton had said. “And she’d never live through that, and I think the baby is dead already. Why give her more pain when there’s nothing to be gained from it?”
At dawn the next morning he had just been going out the door to light the fires at the college when Alethea Taylor came home, red-eyed and dishev
eled from her long night’s vigil. “It’s over,” she told him, and went inside without another word.
The funeral had been held the next afternoon. Cheney Youngblood in her best dress had been laid to rest in a plain pine box, her baby still unborn. He had stood there before the flower-strewn grave with the rest of the mourners, and he’d joined in the singing and in the prayers for her salvation. And when the minister said, Rest in peace, he had said “Amen” with the rest of them. But he knew better.
Three-quarters of an hour in silence, while the spadefuls of earth fell rhythmically beside the path. He would not sing. He could not pray. And he tried not to look at the shadows that seemed to grow from the branches of the nearby azaleas. At last he felt the unyielding wood against his spade, and with hardly a pause for thought, he smashed the lid, and knelt to remove the contents of the box. There had been no shroud for Cheney Youngblood, but the night was too dark for him to see her upturned face, and he was glad.
“Now, Cheney, I’m sorry about this,” he whispered, as he readied the sack. “You must be in everlasting sorry now that you ever let a man touch you, and here I am seeing that you will get more of the same. I just hope you can teach these fool doctors something about babies, Cheney. So’s maybe if they see what went wrong, they can help the next one down the road.”
He stood at the head of the coffin, gripping her by the shoulders, and pulled until the flaccid body emerged from the box. Fix his grip beneath her dangling arms, and it would be the act of a moment to hoist the body onto the earth beside the grave, and then into the sack. He did so, and she was free of the coffin, but not free.
Attached by a cord.
He stood there unmoving in the stillness, listening. Nothing.
He lit the lamp, and held it up so that he could see inside the box.
The child lay there, its eyes closed, fists curled, still attached to its mother’s body by the cord.
His hand was shaking as he set down the lantern on the edge of the grave, and reached down for the child. After so much death, could he possibly restore to life … He took out his knife, but when he lifted the cord, it was withered and cold—like a pumpkin vine in winter.
Dr. Newton sat before the fire in his study, clad in a dressing gown and slippers. First light was a good hour away, but he had made no complaint about being awakened by the trembling man who had pounded on his door in the dead of night, and, when the doctor answered, had held out a sad little bundle.
He was sitting now in a chair near the fire, still shaking, still silent.
Dr. Newton sighed, poured out another glass of whiskey, and held it out to his visitor. “You could not have saved it, Grandison,” he said again. “It did not live.”
The resurrection man shook his head. “I went to the burying, Doctor. I was there. I saw. Cheney died trying to birth that baby, but she never did. She was big with child when they put her in the ground.”
“And you think the baby birthed itself there in the coffin and died in the night?”
He took a gulp of whiskey, and shuddered. “Yes.”
“No.” Newton was silent for a moment, choosing his words carefully. “I saw a man hanged once. I was in medical school in those days, and we were given the body for study. When we undressed the poor fellow in the dissecting room, we found that he had soiled himself in his death agonies. The professor explained to us that when the body dies, all its muscles relax. The bowels are voided … And, I think, the muscles that govern the birth process must also relax, and the gases build up as the body decays, so that an infant in the birth canal is released in death.”
“And it died.”
“No. It never lived. It never drew breath. It died when its mother did, not later in the coffin when it was expelled. But it does you credit that you tried to save it.”
“I thought the baby had got buried alive.” The doctor shook his head, and Grandison said, “But people do get buried alive sometimes, don’t they?”
Newton hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “It has happened,” he said at last. “I have never seen it, mind you. But one of my medical professors in Paris told the tale of a learned man in medieval times who was being considered for sainthood. When the church fathers dug him up, to see if his body was in that uncorrupted state that denotes sanctity, they found the poor soul lying in the coffin on his back, splinters under his fingernails and a grimace of agony frozen on his withered features.” He sighed. “To add insult to injury, they denied the fellow sainthood on the grounds that he seemed to be in no hurry to meet his Maker.”
They looked at each other and smiled. It was a grim story, but not so terrible as the sight of a dead child wrapped in its mother’s winding sheet. Besides, first light had just begun to gray the trees and the lawn outside. That night was over.
Cheney Youngblood had been early on, though. And he was sorry for her, because she was young and kindly, and he had thought her child had lived, however briefly. A year or so after that—it was hard to remember after so long a time, with no records kept—a steaming summer brought yellow fever into Augusta, and many died, burning in their delirium and crying for water. Day after day wagons stacked with coffins trundled down Telfair Street, bound for the two cemeteries, black and white. The old people and the babies died first, and here and there someone already sick or weakened by other ailments succumbed as well. New graves sprouted like skunk cabbage across the green expanse of the burying field.
Now he could dig and hoist with barely a thought to spare for the human remains that passed through his hands. By now there had been too many dark nights, and too many still forms to move him to fear or pity. His shovel bit into the earth, and his shoulders heaved as he tossed aside the covering soil, but his mind these days ranged elsewhere.
“I want to go home,” he told George Newton one night, after he had asked for the supplies he needed.
The doctor looked up, surprised and then thoughtful. “Home, Grandison?”
His answer was roundabout. “I do good work, do I not, doctor? Bring you good subjects for the classes, without causing you any trouble. Don’t get drunk. Don’t get caught.”
“Yes. I grant you all that, but where is home, Grandison?”
“I have a wife back in Charleston.”
Dr. Newton considered it. “You are lonely? I know that sometimes when people are separated by circumstance, they find other mates. I wonder if you have given any thought to that—or perhaps she—”
“We were married legal,” he said. “I do good work here. Y’all trust me.”
“Yes. Yes, we do. And you want to go back to Charleston to see your wife?”
He nodded. No use in arguing about it until the doctor thought it out.
At last Newton said, “Well, I suppose it might be managed. We could buy you a train ticket. Twelve dollars is not such a great sum, divided by the seven of us who are faculty members.” He tapped his fingers together as he worked it out. “Yes, considered that way, the cost seems little enough, to ensure the diligence of a skilled and steady worker. I think I can get the other doctors to go along. You would have to carry a pass, stating that you have permission to make the journey alone, but that is easily managed.”
“Yes. I’d like to go soon, please.” He was good at his job for just this reason, so that it would be easier to keep him happy than to replace him.
Not everyone could do his job. The free man who was his predecessor had subsided into a rum-soaked heap; even now he could be seen shambling along Bay Street, trying to beg or gamble up enough money to drown the nightmares.
Grandison Harris had no dreams.
“Excuse me, Dr. Newton, but it’s time for my train trip again, and Dr. Eve said it was your turn to pay.”
“Hmm … what? Already?”
“Been four weeks.” He paused for a moment, taking in the rumpled figure elbowdeep in papers at his desk. “I know you’ve had other things on your mind, sir. I’m sorry to hear about your uncle’s passing.”
&n
bsp; “Oh, yes, thank you, Grandison.” George Newton ran a hand through his hair, and sighed. “Well, it wasn’t a shock, you know. He was a dear old fellow, but getting up in years, you know. No, it isn’t so much that. It’s the chaos he’s left me.”
“Chaos?”
“The mess. In his will my uncle left instructions that his house be converted to use as an orphanage, which is very commendable, I’m sure, but he had a houseful of family retainers, you know. And with the dismantling of his household on Walker Street, they have all moved in with me on Greene Street. I can’t walk for people. Eleven of them! Women. Children. Noise. Someone tugging at my sleeve every time I turn around. And the Tuttle family heirlooms, besides. It’s bedlam. And Henry, my valet, is at his wit’s end. He’s getting on in years, you know, and accustomed to having only me to look after. I would not dream of turning them out, of course, but …”
Grandison nodded. Poor white folks often thought that servants solved all the problems rich people could ever have, but he could see how they could be problems as well. They had to be fed, clothed, looked after when they got sick. It would be one thing if Dr. George had a wife and a busy household already going—hen maybe a few extra folks wouldn’t make much difference, but for a bachelor of forty-five used to nobody’s company but his own, this sudden crowd of dependents might prove a maddening distraction. It would never occur to George Newton to sell his uncle’s slaves, either. That was to his credit. Grandison thought that things ought to be made easier for them so he wouldn’t be tempted to sell those folks to get some peace. He considered the situation, trying to think of a way to lighten the load. He said, “Have you thought about asking Miz Alethea if she can help you sort it out, Doctor?”
“Alethea Taylor? Well, I am her guardian now, I know.” Newton smiled. “Is she also to be mine?”