“He is what the hands call a stray nigger, sir,” Caesar said.
“Be that as it may, he is in the yard now. I suppose I rounded him up for you. Caesar, help me move your master to his desk, will you? We will arrange him facedown.”
Caesar stepped forward and hooked his hands under Drake’s shoulders. Johnston took the legs as gingerly as he could.
“Bring that whiskey with me,” Drake said.
Before they could lay Drake out to Johnston’s satisfaction, the lord of the manor had downed another glass of bourbon. He lay breathing heavily as Johnston took his materials out of the leather bag, careful to array the scalpels, saw, and glass cups on the desk out of Drake’s vision. Frowning, Johnston chipped at a smear of dried blood on a scalpel blade with his thumbnail.
“Should we bother with unbuttoning your shirt, Robert? Or would you prefer that I cut it?”
“Cut it down the back, damn it. I’m not moving another inch.” He held out the empty glass. “Caesar, again.”
“And Caesar, a tallow, after you’ve replenished Mister Drake.”
Johnston sliced at the broadside cotton while Caesar poured. When Caesar came around the desk with a candle, Johnston handed him a bell-shaped glass cup slightly larger than a shot glass.
“A delicate thing, isn’t it? And in and of itself hardly an impressive apparatus. But one of the cornerstones of modern medicine, nonetheless. I will place them on Mister Drake’s back, two at a time. You will hold them in place while I administer heat with the candle.” Caesar looked at him with horror. But Johnston, disciple of Benjamin Rush, would go to his grave convinced of the salubrious effect of blistering and bloodletting. It was inconceivable to essay surgery without this preparatory treatment to draw out the infection. “You are capable of that small task, are you not?”
“I will endeavor my best, sir,” Caesar said.
“Excellent.” Johnston set two cups on Drake’s white back below each shoulder blade. “Hold them by the rim, fast to the skin. Do not lift them until I say so. Take another drink, Robert.”
While Drake gulped the whiskey, Johnston bent the candle to the peak of the first glass cup, one hand spread out beneath it to catch dripping wax. After thirty seconds, Drake began to groan as the flesh beneath the glass reddened. When the skin began to rise Johnston moved the candle to the other cup. Wax dripped on his palm and he blew at it. When the skin once more rose into a welt, he set the tallow aside and pulled his watch from its vest pocket. The second hand completed three quarters of its circuit and he nodded to Caesar, who removed the cups and set them on the desk blotter abruptly, one of them nearly rolling off to the floor. On Drake’s back now were two perfect circles, each the size of a silver dollar. The red flesh seemed to glow angrily above his twitching muscles.
“Excellent,” Johnston said with satisfaction. “Two more and we are done.”
Caesar cleared his throat. “I don’t believe I’ll be able to assist you again, sir.”
“That’s my good man, Caesar,” Drake said. His speech was beginning to slur. He waved the glass over his shoulder and murmured, “Pour.”
Johnston looked at Caesar coldly. A glance revealed the butler had lost what little stomach he may have had before. The close air of the room seemed to be affecting him.
“I cannot perform the surgery without aid. Caesar, since you are unable to provide assistance beyond libation, step outside and send in that Cudjo. The fresh air may renew your vigor.”
“Cudjo!” Drake spat. “Do you mean to kill me, man?”
“You know my opinion of his abilities, Robert. He is quite adept.”
“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.
AN 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 nex
t 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.”
CUDJO 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
THE 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.”
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