Transgressions, Volume 4

by Ed McBain

  She stabbed her needle at the cloth. “Shout it from the rooftops if you feel like it, Mr. Harris. It’s not as if they’re keeping it a secret. He wants to marry her.”

  He smiled. “Anybody would, Miss Alethea. Mary Frances is a beautiful girl.”

  “You misunderstand, Mr. Harris. I’m saying that he means to marry her.”

  “And stay here? And let folks know about it?”

  She nodded. “I’m saying. Live as man and wife, right there on Greene Street.”

  Now he realized why George Newton had suddenly understood the pain of his separation from Rachel, but he felt that the doctor’s newfound wisdom had come at the price of folly. St. Paul’s seeing the light on the road to Damascus might have been a blessed miracle, but Dr. George’s light was more likely to be a thunderbolt. “He can’t do that,” he said. “Set her up as his wife.”

  “Not without losing his position he can’t.” The needle stabbed again. “Don’t you think I’ve told them that?”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He’s going to resign from the medical school, that’s what. Says he has money enough. Going to continue his work in a laboratory at home. Huh!” She shook her head at the folly of it.

  He thought about it. Perhaps in Charleston such a thing might work. Down in the islands, certainly. Martinique. Everybody knew that the French … But here?

  “I even asked him, Mr. Harris, I said straight out, Do you remember Richard Mentor Johnson?” His expression told her that he did not remember, either. But she did. “Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky. He was the vice president of the United States, back when I was a girl. Under President Van Buren. Folks said that he had killed the Indian chief Tecumseh, which they thought made him a hero. But then he had also married a woman of color, and when word of that got out, they tried to run him out of office on account of it. When his first term was over, he gave up and went home to Kentucky. And, do you know, Mr. Johnson’s wife wasn’t even alive by that time. She had died before he ever went to Washington to be vice president. Just the memory of her was enough to ruin him. Now, how well does Dr. George think he will fare in Georgia with a live colored wife in his house?”

  “But Miss Fanny—to look at her—”

  “I know. She’s whiter to look at than some of the doctors’ wives, but that makes no difference. This is a small town, Mr. Harris. Everybody knows everybody. Fanny can’t pass in Augusta, and they both say they’ve no mind to go elsewhere.”

  He thought he had made all the proper expressions of sympathy and commiseration, but he was thinking just as much about the effect that Dr. George’s folly would have on him. Would this change of heart mean no more robbing Cedar Grove? Or in his madness would the doctor insist on obtaining an equal number of bodies from the white burying ground? Equality was a fine thing, but not if it got him hanged by a white lynch mob.

  He swept the upstairs hall four times that morning, waiting for Dr. George to be alone in his office. Finally the last visitor left, and he tapped on the door quickly before anyone else could turn up. “Excuse me, Dr. George. We’re getting low on supplies for the anatomy classes,” he said.

  He always said “supplies” instead of “bodies” even when they were alone, just in case anyone happened to overhear.

  Dr. George gave him a puzzled frown. “Supplies? Oh—oh, I see. Not filled our quota yet? Well, are there any fresh ones to be had?”

  “A burying today,” he said. “Little boy fell off a barn roof. I just wondered if you wanted me to take him.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. He’s needed. Though we could use a yellow fever victim if you hear of one. Must teach the Southern diseases, you know. Medical schools up north don’t know a thing about them.” Dr. George looked up. “Why did you ask about this boy in particular? Do you know him?”

  That didn’t matter. He had known them all for years now. Some he minded about more than others, but all of them had long ceased to be merely lumps of clay in his hands. “It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t mind bringing him in. I just wondered what you wanted me to do, and if there’s to be a new dean—”

  The doctor leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Yes, I see, Grandison. You have heard.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s true that I am resigning the post of dean. I felt that it was better for the college if I did so.” He picked up a sheaf of papers from his desk and held it out with a bemused smile. “But it seems that I shall be staying on as Emeritus Professor of Anatomy, after all. This is a petition, signed by all of the students and faculty, asking that I stay. And the Board of Trustees has acceded to their request.”

  “Do they know?”

  “About Fanny? They do. They profess not to care. I suppose when one is a doctor, one sees how little difference there really is between the races. Just a thin layer of skin, that’s all, and then it’s all the same underneath. Whatever the reason, they insist that I stay on in some capacity, and I shall.”

  “So nothing will change? For me, I mean?”

  George Newton shook his head. “We still must have bodies, and the only safe place to obtain them is from Cedar Grove. That has not changed. And I fancy that I shall still have enough influence to bring your family to Augusta. I do not intend to shirk my duty, so you may go and see to yours.”

  Madison Newton was born on the last day of February, red-faced, fair-haired, and hazeleyed, looking like a squashed cabbage leaf, but a white one, after all.

  “It’s a fine baby,” he had said to Fanny, when she brought the baby to her mother’s house on a mild day in March.

  Fanny switched the blanket back into place, so that only the infant’s nose peeped out. “People only want to look at him to see what color he is,” she said. “What do they expect? He had sixteen great-great grandparents, same as everybody, and only one of them was colored. All the rest of him from then on down is white. Of course, that doesn’t change what he is to most folks’ way of thinking.”

  He had kept smiling and said the plain truth: that the infant was a fortunate child, but he had been angry, and his annoyance had not left him. That night in Cedar Grove in a fine mist of rain, he dug as if he could inflict an injury upon the earth itself. “I reckon Miss Fanny is whiter in her head than she is on her face,” he said to the darkness, thrusting the shovel deep into the ground. “Feeling sorry for a light-eyed baby born free, his daddy a rich white doctor. I guess pretty Miss Fanny wants the moon, even when it’s raining.”

  He spared hardly a thought for the man in the box below. Some drunken laborer from the docks, hit too hard over the head in a brawl. He had even forgotten the name. An easy task tonight. No shells or flowers decorated this grave site. The dead man had been shunted into the ground without grief or ceremony. Just as well take him to the doctors, where he could do some good for once. His thoughts returned to his grievance. Spoiled Miss Fanny had never given a thought to his baby when she was complaining about her own son’s lot in life. How would she have liked to be Rachel—separated from her husband, and left to raise a child without him, knowing that at any time old missus might take a notion to sell that child, and nothing could be done to stop it.

  He brushed the dirt from the pine box, and stove in the lid with his shovel point. Miss Fanny Taylor didn’t know what trouble was, complaining about—

  A sound.

  Something like a moan, coming from inside the smashed coffin. He forgot about Fanny and her baby, as he knelt in the loose dirt of the open grave, pressing his ear close to the lid of the box. He held his breath, straining to hear a repetition of the sound. In the stillness, with all his thoughts focused on the dark opening before him, he realized that something else was wrong with the grave site. The smell was wrong. The sickly sweet smell of newly decaying flesh should have been coming from the box, but it wasn’t. Neither was the stench of voided bowels, the last letting-go of the dead. All he smelled was rotgut whiskey.

  He gripped the corpse under the armpits and pulled it out o
f the grave, but instead of sacking it up, he laid the body out on the damp grass. It groaned.

  He had heard such sounds from a corpse before. The first time it happened, he had been unloading a sack from the wagon into the store room at the medical college. He had dropped the sack and gone running to Dr. George, shouting that the deader from the burying ground had come back to life.

  George Newton had smiled for an instant, but without a word of argument, he’d followed the porter back to the store room and examined the sacked-up body. He had felt the wrist and neck for a pulse, and even leaned into the dead face to check for breath, but Grandison could tell from his calm and deliberate movements that he knew what he would find. “The subject is dead,” he said, standing up, and brushing traces of dirt from his trousers.

  “It just died then. I heard it moan.”

  Dr. George smiled gently. “Yes, I believe you did, Grandison, but it was dead all the same.”

  “A ghost then?”

  “No. Merely a natural process. When the body dies, there is still air trapped within the lungs. Sometimes when that air leaves the lungs it makes a moaning sound. Terrifying, I know. I heard it once myself in my student days, but it is only a remnant of life, not life itself. This poor soul has been dead at least a day.”

  He never forgot that sound, though in all the bodies that had passed through his hands on the way to the dissecting table, he had never heard it since.

  The sound coming now from the man stretched out on the grass was different. And it changed—low and rumbling at first, and then louder. He knelt beside the groaning man and shook his shoulder.

  “Hey!” he said. “Hey, now—” His voice was hoarse and unnaturally loud in the still darkness of Cedar Grove. What can you say to a dead man?

  The groan changed to a cough, and then the man rolled over and vomited into the mound of spaded earth.

  He sighed, and edged away a few feet. He had seen worse. Smelled worse. But finding a live body in the graveyard complicated matters. He sat quietly, turning the possibilities over in his mind, until the retching turned to sobbing.

  “You’re all right,” he said, without turning around.

  “This is the graveyard. Badger Benson done killed me?”

  “I guess he tried. But you woke up. Who are you, anyhow?”

  “I was fixing to ask you that. How did you come to find me down in the ground? You don’t look like no angel.”

  He smiled. “Might be yours, though. You slave or free, boy?”

  “Belong to Mr. Johnson. Work on his boat.”

  “Thought so. Well, you want to go back to Mr. Johnson, do you?”

  The man stretched and kicked his legs, stiff from his interment. “I dunno,” he said. “Why you ask me that?”

  “’Cause you were dead, boy, as far as anybody knows. They buried you this morning. Now if you was to go back to your master, there’d be people asking me questions about how I come to find you, and they’d take you back to Johnson’s, and you’d still be a slave, and like as not I’d be in trouble for digging you up. But if you just lit out of here and never came back, why nobody would ever even know you were gone and that this grave was empty. You’re dead. You don’t let ’em find out any different, and they’ll never even know to hunt for you.”

  The man rubbed the bruise on the back of his head. “Now how did you come to find me?”

  Grandison stood up and retrieved the shovel. “This is where the medical school gets the bodies to cut up for the surgery classes. The doctors at the college were fixing to rip you open. And they still can, I reckon, unless you light out of here. Now, you tell me, boy, do you want to be dead again?”

  The young man raised a hand as if to ward off a blow. “No. No!—I understand you right enough. I got to get gone.”

  “And you don’t go back for nothing. You don’t tell nobody good-bye. You are dead, and you leave it at that.”

  The young man stood up and took a few tentative steps on still unsteady legs. “Where do I go then?”

  Grandison shrugged. “If it was me, I would go west. Over the mountains into Indian country. You go far enough, there’s places that don’t hold with slavery. I’d go there.”

  The man turned to look at him. “Well, why don’t you then?” he said. “Why don’t you go?”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m not the one who’s dead. Now are you leaving or not?”

  “Yeah. Leaving.”

  “You’ve got three hours before sunup.” He handed the shovel to the resurrected man. “Help me fill in your grave, then.”

  DR. GEORGE NEWTON–DECEMBER 1859

  It is just as well that I stepped down as dean of the medical college. I haven’t much time to wind up my affairs, and the fact that Ignatius Garvin is ably discharging my former duties leaves me with one less thing to worry about. If I can leave my dear Fanny and the babies safely provided for, I may leave this world without much regret. I wish I could have seen my boy grow up … wish I could have grown old with my dearest wife … And I wish that God had seen fit to send me an easier death.

  No one knows yet that I am dying, and it may yet be weeks before the disease carries me off, but I do not relish the thought of the time before me, for I know enough of this illness to tremble at the thought of what will come. I must not do away with myself, though. I must be brave, so as not to cause Fanny any more pain than she will feel at losing me so soon.

  So many papers to sift through. Investments, deeds, instructions for the trustees—my life never felt so complicated. Soon the pain will begin, and it may render me incapable of making wise decisions to safeguard my little family. At least I have safeguarded the family of our faithful college servant, Grandison Harris. Thank God I was able to do that in time, for I had long promised him that I would bring his Rachel and her boy to Augusta, so I did a few months back. I am not yet fifty, sound in body and mind, and newly married. I thought I had many years to do good works and to continue my medical research. I suppose that even a physician must think that he will never face death. Perhaps we would go mad if we tried to live thinking otherwise.

  I wonder how it happened. People will say it was the buggy accident just before Christmas, and perhaps it was. That gelding is a nervous horse, not at all to be depended upon in busy streets of barking dogs and milling crowds. I must remember to tell Henry to sell the animal, for I would not like to think of Fanny coming to harm if the beast became spooked again. I was shaken and bruised when he dumped me out of the carriage and into the mud, but did I sustain any cuts during the fall? I do not remember any blood.

  Dr. Eve came to look me over, and he pronounced me fit enough, with no bones broken, and no internal injuries. He was right as far as it went. My fellow physicians all stopped by to wish us good cheer at Christmas, and to pay their respects to their injured friend. They did not bring their wives, of course. No respectable white woman accepts the hospitality of this house, for it is supposed that Fanny’s presence taints the household. We are not, after all, legally married in the eyes of the law here. Fanny professes not to care. Dull old biddies, anyhow, she declares. But she has certainly charmed the gentlemen, who consider me a lucky man. And so I ways, until this tragedy struck—though none of those learned doctors suspected it.

  I wish that I had not. I wish that I could go innocently into the throes of this final illness, as would a child who had stepped on a rusty nail, not knowing what horrors lay before me. But I am a trained physician. I do know. And the very word clutches at my throat with cold fingers.

  Tetanus.

  Oh, I know too much, indeed. Too much—and not enough. I have seen people die of this. The muscles stretch and spasm, in the control of the ailment rather than the patient, an agonizing distension such as prisoners must have felt upon the rack in olden days. The body is tortured by pain beyond imagining, but beyond these physical torments, the patient’s mind remains clear and unaffected. I doubt that the clarity is a blessing. Delirium or madness might prove a release
from the agony, yet even that is denied to the sufferer. And there is no cure. Nothing can stop the progression of this disease, and nothing can reverse its effects. I have, perhaps, a week before the end, and I am sure that by then I will not dread death, but rather welcome it as a blessed deliverance.

  Best not to dwell on it. It will engulf me soon enough. I must send for James Hope. I can trust him. As the owner of the cotton mill, he will be an eminently respectable guardian for my wife’s business interests, and since James is a Scotsman by birth, and not bound by the old Southern traditions of race and caste, he will see Fanny as the gentlewoman that she is. He treats her with all the courtly gentility he would show to a duchess, and that endears him to both of us. Yes, I must tell James what has happened, and how soon he must pick up where I am forced to leave off.

  My poor Fanny! To be left a widow with two babies, and she is not yet twenty. I worry more over her fate than I do my own. At least mine will be quick, but Fanny has another forty years to suffer if the world is unkind to her. I wish that the magnitude of my suffering could be charged against any sorrow God had intended for her. I must speak to James Hope. How aptly named he is! I must entrust my little family to him.

  It was nearly Christmas, and Rachel had made a pound cake for the Newtons. He was to take it around to Greene Street that afternoon, when he could manage to get away from his duties. Grandison looked at the cake, and thought that Dr. George might prefer a specimen from the medical school supply for his home laboratory, but he supposed that such a gesture would not be proper for the season. Rachel would know best what people expected on social occasions. She talked to people, and visited with her new friends at church, while he hung back, dreading the prospect of talking to people that he might be seeing again some day.

  He took the cake to the Newton house, and tapped on the back door, half expecting it to open before his hand touched the wood. He waited a minute, and then another, but no one came. He knocked again, harder this time, wondering at the delay. As many servants as the Newtons had, that door ought to open as soon as his foot hit the porch. What was keeping them so busy?