Transgressions, Volume 4

by Ed McBain

  Finally, after the third and loudest spate of knocking, Fanny herself opened the door. He smiled and held out his paper-wrapped Christmas offering, but the sight of her made him take a step backward. His words of greeting stuck in his throat. She was big-bellied with child again, he knew that. She looked as if it could come at any moment, but what shocked him was how ill she looked, as if she had not eaten or slept for a week. She stared out at him, hollow-eyed and trembling, her face blank with weariness. For a moment he wondered if she recognized him.

  “My Rachel made y’all a pound cake. For Christmas,” he said.

  She nodded, and stepped back from the door to admit him to the kitchen. “Put it on the table,” she said.

  He set down the cake. The house was unnaturally quiet. He listened for sounds of baby Madison playing, or the bustle of the servants, who should have been making the house ready for the holiday, but all was still. He looked back at Fanny, who was staring down at the parcel as if she had never seen one before, as if she had forgotten how it got there, perhaps.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Shall I fetch Miss Alethea for you?”

  Fanny shook her head. “She’s been already. She took Madison so that I can stay with George,” she whispered. “And I’ve sent most of the others around there, too. Henry stayed here, of course. He won’t leave George.”

  Something was the matter with Dr. George, then. It must be bad. Fanny looked half dead herself. “Shall I go for Dr. Eve?” he asked.

  “He was here this morning. So was Dr. Garvin. Wasn’t a bit of use. George told me that from the beginning, but I wouldn’t have it. I thought with all those highfalutin doctors somebody would be able to help him, but they can’t. They can’t.”

  “Is he took bad?”

  “He’s dying. It’s the lockjaw You know what that is?”

  He nodded. Tetanus. Oh, yes. They had covered it in one of the medical classes, but not to consider a course of treatment. Only to review the terrible symptoms and to hope they never saw them. He shivered. “Are they sure?”

  “George is sure. Diagnosed himself. And the others concur. I was the only one who wouldn’t believe it. I do now, though. I sit with him as long as I can. Hour after hour. Watch him fighting the pain. Fighting the urge to scream. And then I go and throw up, and I sit with him some more.”

  “I could spell you a while.”

  “No!” She said it so harshly that he took a step back in surprise. She took a deep breath, and seemed to swallow her anger. “No, thank you very kindly, Mr. Harris, but I will not let you see him.”

  “But if Dr. George is dying—”

  “That’s exactly why. Don’t you think I know what you do over there at the medical college? Porter, they call you. Porter. I know what your real duties are, Mr. Harris. Known for a long time. And that’s fine. I know doctors have to learn somehow, and that nothing about doctoring is pretty or easy. But you are not going to practice your trade in this house. You are not going to take my husband’s body, do you hear?”

  He said softly, “I only wanted to help you out, and maybe to tell him good-bye.”

  “So you say. But he is weak now. Half out of his mind with the pain, and he’d promise anything. He might even suggest it himself, out of some crazy sense of duty to the medical college, but I won’t have it. My husband is going to have a proper burial, Mr. Harris. He has suffered enough!”

  It doesn’t hurt, he wanted to tell her. You don’t feel it if you’re dead. He did not bother to speak the words. He knew whose pain Fanny was thinking of, and that whatever Dr. George’s wishes might be, it was the living who mattered, not the dead. Best to soothe her quickly and with as little argument as possible. He did not think that the other doctors would accept George Newton’s body anyhow. That would be bringing death too close into the fold, and he was glad that he would not be required to carry out that task. Let the doctor lie in consecrated ground: There were bodies enough to be had in Augusta.

  “I’ll go now, Miss Fanny,” he said, putting on his best white folks manners, if it would give her any comfort. “But I think one of the doctors should come back and take a look at you.” He nodded toward her distended belly. “And we will pray for the both of you, my Rachel and I. Pray that he gets through this.” It was a lie. He never prayed, but if he did, it would be for Dr. George’s death to come swiftly—the only kindness that could be hoped for in a case of tetanus.

  Dr. George died after the new year in 1860. The illness had lasted only two weeks, but the progress of the disease was so terrible that it had begun to seem like months to those who could do nothing but wait for his release from the pain. Grandison joined the crowd at the doctor’s funeral, though he took care to keep clear of Fanny, for fear of upsetting her again. In her grief she might shout out things that should not be said aloud in Augusta’s polite society. The doctors knew his business, of course, but not the rest of the town. He reckoned that most of Augusta would have been at the funeral if it weren’t for the fact of the doctor’s awkward marriage arrangements. As it was, though, his fellow physicians, the students, and most of the town’s businessmen came to pay their respects, while their wives and daughters stayed home, professing themselves too delicate to endure the sight of the doctor’s redbone widow. Not that you could see an inch of her skin, whatever its color, for she was swathed from head to foot in black widow’s weeds and veils, leaning on the arm of Mr. James Hope, as if he were the spar of her sinking ship.

  “Left a widow at eighteen,” said Miss Alethea, regal in her black dress, her eyes red from tears of her own. “I had hoped for better for my girl.”

  He nodded. “She will be all right,” he said. “Dr. George would have seen to that.”

  Miss Alethea gave him the look usually reserved for one of her children talking foolishness. “She’s back home again, you know. Dr. George was too clouded at the last to do justice to a will, and Mr. James Hope had to sell the house on Greene Street. He vows to see her settled in a new place, though, over on Ellis, just a block from Broad Street. Having it built. There’s all Dr. George’s people to be thought of, you know, and the Tuttle folks, as well. Fanny has to have a house of her own, but I’m glad to have her by me for now, for the new baby is due any day—if it lives through her grief. We must pray for her, Mr. Harris.”

  Grandison looked past her at the tall, fair-haired Scotsman, who was still hovering protectively beside the pregnant young widow, and wondered if the prayer had already been answered.

  The cellar was paved with bones now. Each term when the anatomy class had finished with its solemn duties of dissection, the residue was brought to him to be disposed of. He could hardly rebury the remains in any public place or discard them where they might be recognized for what they were. The only alternative was to layer them in quicklime in the basement on Telfair Street. How many hundred had it been now? He had lost count. Mercifully the faces and the memories of the subjects’ resurrection were fading with the familiarity of the task, but sometimes he wondered if the basement resounded with cries he could not hear, and if that was why the building’s cat refused to set foot down there. The quicklime finished taking away the flesh and masked the smell, but he wondered what part of the owners remained, and if that great getting up in the morning that the preacher spoke of was really going to come to pass on Judgment Day. And who would have to answer for the monstrous confusion and scramble of bones that must follow? Himself? Dr. George? The students who carved up the cadavers? Sometimes as he scattered the quicklime over a new batch of discarded bones, he mused on Dr. George peering over the wrought iron fence of white folks’ heaven at an angry crowd of colored angels shaking their fists at him.

  “Better the dead than the living, though,” he would tell himself.

  Sometimes on an afternoon walk to Cedar Grove, he would go across to the white burying ground to pay his respects to Dr. George, lying there undisturbed in his grave, and sometimes he would pass the time of day with the grassy mound, as if t
he doctor could still hear him. “Miss Mary Frances finally birthed that baby,” he said one winter day, picking the brown stems of dead flowers off the grave. “Had a little girl the other day. Named her Georgia Frances; but everybody calls her Cissie, and I think that’s the name that’s going to stick. She’s a likely little thing, pale as a Georgia peach. And Mr. James Hope is building her that house on Ellis like he promised, and she’s talking about having her sister Nannie and young Jimmie move in along with her. I thought maybe Mr. James Hope would be moving in, too, the way he dotes on her, but he’s talking about selling the factory’ here and going back to New York where his family is, so I don’t think you need to linger on here if you are, sir. I think everything is going to be all right.”

  Dr. George hadn’t been gone hardly more than two years when the war came, and that changed everything. Didn’t look like it would at first, though. For the rest of the country, the war began in April in Charleston, when Fort Sumpter fell, but Georgia had seceded in January, leaving Augusta worried about the arsenal on the hill, occupied by federal troops. Governor Joe Brown himself came to town to demand the surrender of the arsenal, and the town was treated to a fine show of military parades in the drizzling rain. Governor Brown himself stood on the porch of the Planters Hotel to watch the festivities, but Captain Elzey, who was in command of the eighty-two men at the arsenal, declined to surrender it. He changed his mind a day or so later when eight hundred soldiers and two brigadier generals turned up in the rain to show the arsenal they meant business. Then Captain Elzey sent for the governor to talk things over, and by noon the arsenal and its contents had been handed over to the sovereign State of Georgia, without a shot fired. That, and a lot of worrying, was pretty much all that happened to Augusta for the duration of the war.

  When the shooting actually started in Charleston, he was glad that Rachel and the boy were safe in Augusta, instead of being caught in the middle of a war, though personally he would have liked to see the battle for the novelty of it. Everybody said the war was only going to last a few weeks, and he hated to have missed getting a glimpse of it.

  Folks were optimistic, but they were making preparations anyhow. Two weeks after Fort Sumpter, Augusta organized a local company of home guards, the Silver Grays, composed mostly of men too old to fight in the regular army. Mr. James Hope came back from New York City to stand with the Confederacy and got himself chosen second member of the company, after Rev. Joseph Wilson, who was the first. Rev. Wilson’s boy Tommy and little Madison Newton were the same age, and they sometimes played together on the lawn of the Presbyterian church, across the road from the college. Sometimes the two of them would come over and pepper him with questions about bodies and sick folks, and he often thought that you’d have to know which boy was which to tell which one wasn’t the white child. Fanny kept young Madison as clean and welldressed as any quality child in Augusta.

  The months went by, and the war showed no signs of letting up. One by one the medical students drifted away to enlist in regiments back home.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll have to worry about procuring any more cadavers for classes, Grandison,” Dr. Garvin told him.

  “No, sir,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot of the students are fixing to quit and join up.”

  Dr. Garvin scowled. “I expect they will, but even if the school stays open, this war will produce enough cadavers to supply a thousand medical schools before it’s over.”

  There wasn’t any fighting in Augusta, but they saw their share of casualties anyhow. A year into the war, the wounded began arriving by train from distant battlefields, and the medical school suspended operation in favor of setting up hospitals to treat the wounded. The City Hotel and the Academy of Richmond County were turned into hospitals in ’62 to accommodate the tide of injured soldiers flowing into the city from far off places with unfamiliar names, like Manassas and Shiloh. Many of the faculty members had gone off to serve in the war as well. Dr. Campbell was in Virginia with the Georgia Hospital Association, seeing to the state’s wounded up there; Dr. Miller and Dr. Ford were serving with the Confederate forces at different places up in Virginia, and Dr. Jones was somewhere on the Georgia coast contributing his medical skills to the war effort.

  Grandison worked in one of the hospitals, assisting the doctors at first, but as the number of casualties strained their ability to treat them, he took on more and more duties to fill the gap.

  “I don’t see why you are working so hard to patch those Rebels up,” one of the porters said to him one day, when he went looking for a roll of clean bandages. “The Federals say they are going to end slavery, and here you are helping the enemy.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t see any Federals in Augusta, do you? I don’t see any army coming here to hand me my freedom. So meanwhile I do what I’m supposed to do, and we’ll see what transpires when the war is over.” Besides, he thought, it was one thing to wish the Confederacy to perdition, and quite another to ignore the suffering of a single boy soldier who couldn’t even grow a proper beard yet.

  Sometimes he wondered what had happened to the man he “resurrected” who wasn’t dead—whether the fellow had made it to some free state beyond the mountains, and whether that had made any difference.

  He didn’t know if freedom was coming, or what it would feel like, but for the here and now there was enough work for ten of him. So he stitched, and bandaged, and dressed wounds. I’ve handled dead people, he told himself. This isn’t any worse. than that.

  But of course it was.

  The boy was a South Carolina soldier, eighteen or so, with copper-colored hair and a sunny nature that not even a gaping leg wound could dampen. The pet of the ward, he was, and he seemed to be healing up nicely what with all the rest and the mothering from Augusta’s lady hospital visitors. The nurses were already talking about the preparations to send him home.

  Grandison was walking down the hall that morning, when one of the other patients came hobbling out into the hall and clutched at his coat sleeve. “You got to come now!” the man said. “Little Will just started bleeding a gusher.”

  He hurried into the ward past the crippled soldier and pushed his way through the patients clustered around the young man’s cot. A blood-soaked sheet was pulled back revealing a skinny white leg with a spike of bone protruding through the skin. Jets of dark blood erupted from the bone splinter’s puncture. Without a word Grandison sat down beside the boy and closed his fingers over the ruptured skin.

  “I just tried to walk to the piss pot,” the boy said. He sounded close to passing out. “I got so tired of having to be helped all the time. I felt fine. I just wanted to walk as far as the wall.”

  He nodded. The mending thigh bone had snapped under the boy’s weight, severing a leg artery as the splintered bone slid out of place. The men crowded around the bed murmured among themselves, but no one spoke to the boy.

  “Shall I fetch the surgeon?” one of the patients asked Grandison.

  He shook his head. “Surgeon’s amputating this morning. Wouldn’t do no good to call him anyhow.”

  The boy looked up at him. “Can you stop it, sir?”

  He looked away, knowing that the sir was for his medical skills and not for himself, but touched by it all the same. The redhaired boy had a good heart. He was a great favorite with his older and sadder comrades.

  “Get a needle?” somebody said. “Sew it back in?”

  He kept his fingers clamped tight over the wound, but he couldn’t stay there forever. He wanted to say: Y’all ever see a calf killed? Butcher takes a sharp knife and slits that cord in his throat, and he bleeds out in—what? A minute? Two? It was the same here. The severed artery was not in the neck, no, but the outcome would be the same—and it was just as inevitable.

  “But I feel all right,” said the boy. “No pain.”

  He ignored the crowd around the bed and looked straight into the brown eyes of the red-haired boy. “Your artery’s cut in two,” he said. “Can’t noth
ing remedy that.”

  “Can you stop the bleeding?”

  He nodded toward his fingers pressed against the pale white skin. The warmth of the flesh made him want to pull away. He took a deep breath. “I have stopped it,” he said, nodding toward his hand stanching the wound. “But all the time you’ve got is until I let go.”

  The boy stared at him for a moment while the words sunk in. Then he nodded. “I see,” he said. “Can you hold on a couple minutes ? Let me say a prayer.”

  Somebody said, “I got paper here, Will. You ought to tell your folks good-bye. I’ll write it down.”

  The boy looked the question at Grandison, who glanced down at his hand. “Go ahead,” he said. “I can hold it.”

  In a faltering voice the boy spoke the words of farewell to his parents. He sounded calm, but puzzled, as if it were happening to someone else. That was just as well. Fear wouldn’t change anything, and it was contagious. They didn’t need a panic in the ward. The room was silent as the boy’s voice rose and fell. Grandison turned away from the tear-stained faces to stare at a fly speck on the wall, wishing that he could be elsewhere while this lull before dying dragged on. These last minutes of life should not be witnessed by strangers.

  The letter ended, and a few minutes after that the prayers, ending with a whispered amen as the last words of the Lord’s Prayer trailed off into sobs.

  He looked at the boy’s sallow face, and saw in it a serenity shared by no one else in the room. “All right?” he said.

  The boy nodded, and Grandison took his hand away.

  A minute later the boy was dead. Around the bedstead the soldiers wept, and Grandison covered the still form with the sheet and went back to his duties. He had intended to go to the death room later to talk to the boy, to tell him that death was a release from worse horrors and to wish him peace, but there were so many wounded, and so much to be done that he never went.