Upstairs, he hurls the shovel into a supply closet with a clang, knowing that neither he nor McMichaels will be wanting to see another shovel for a long, long time.
JACOB FIDGETS THROUGH the entire Wednesday staff meeting. He has cleaned himself up tolerably well, with a shower and shave and a charcoal suit fresh from the cleaners, and he tries to keep his hands clenched so that no one will notice the half-moons of dirt under his fingernails. But his head is still cloudy with fatigue and the lingering effects of the cheap gin, and the meeting seems to crawl through its agenda at a glacial pace. In practice he could have seen a half-dozen patients in as much time. These strange gatherings, a mix of all types from the college’s spectrum of officials, have always amused him—the striking conglomerate of research scientists like Kirstin Reithoffer seated next to business officers, grabby development people trying to explain the subtleties of an “ask” to surgeons—but not today. Although he and the dean seem to be the only ones aware of it, things have changed; this meeting to discuss the school’s weekly forward momentum is more pro forma than any of the others could imagine.
For the past hour McMichaels has fiddled with a glass paperweight, a gift from a local Kiwanis group, that he seems to find fascinating. Toying with it behind the huge mahogany desk, he looks like a superannuated child, just waiting for the meeting to grind to a halt. “Anything else?” he asks, squinting at the refraction of light through the milky glass.
Jacob glances down at his planner. Its agenda seems like the material of a fairy tale to him now, none of it significant. “The alumni magazine,” he says. “We still haven’t selected anyone for the cover.”
“You send me a memo on that, Jake?”
“Sure. Week or so ago.”
“Elizabeth.” McMichaels sighs, as though his secretary’s name alone were explanation for the sheaves of papers he has misplaced over the years. He sets the paperweight down on the desktop gently. “What about Branson Hodges? When was his last contribution?”
In the back of the room, Bennett rifles through a stack of papers. “Uh, ’84, sir. Alumni annual fund.”
The dean snorts. “Tightwad. Yup, put Hodges on the cover. Class of ’82. He’s got the biggest plastic surgery practice in Savannah. And still single. He’s capable of a big damned gift. Put Hodges on the cover and see what he coughs up. Are we through here?”
Jacob checks his notepad. “That does it.”
The dean nods all around, and the suits and white coats leave the table. “Good. I’m due on the fairway in fifteen minutes.” He shucks his arms out of his suit jacket and hangs it on the coat tree behind his desk. “Jake, make sure your photographer gets a good shot of old Hodges. Lighting, touchup, whatever they do.” He mimes a golf swing and winks at Jacob as the imaginary club comes to rest, perfect form, behind his back. “I want him to look good. Make the son of a bitch look just like Paul Newman.”
Jacob nods and the dean casts an eye toward the door as it closes after the last faculty member.
“Jake,” he says quietly, “what the hell happened this morning?”
“We got bushwhacked, Jim. Apparently Adam Claybaugh put in a call to Clemson yesterday. This Sanburn is connected all the way up. I’ve been on the phone all morning with the Historical Society. Looks like our hands are tied because the building’s on the historical register. Best I could do was get him to commit to a two-week time frame. And no press, at least not yet. The Legal Department is drawing up the papers today.”
McMichaels shakes his head sadly. “Claybaugh, you say?”
Jacob nods.
“That Anatomy Department is going to be the death of me.” His brow knits as though he were working out a complex problem. Then he shakes his head again. “Can’t touch him, damn it. He’s tenured.”
Jacob is shocked by the implication. “You’d fire Adam?”
McMichaels’s eyes are burning fiercely when he speaks. “You’re fucking-A right I would. This is a disaster for the school,” he hisses. Then his face softens. “Claybaugh is a PhD anyway, Jake. He’s not one of the brotherhood.”
There is a long silence before Jacob speaks. “I’m not sure there isn’t a way to spin this positively, sir. We’ve got a pretty big surplus in the capital fund. What if we set some of that aside? I could get to work on it. Maybe the key is to face this head-on. We could arrange a symposium on it, something commemorative. Get the ball in our court.”
McMichaels looks at him incredulously. “Are you back on the Xanax? All the black community will think of is Tuskegee. Syphilis, for God’s sake.” When he sees the change in Jacob’s face, he puts a hand on his shoulder. “Ah, Jake. I’m afraid the strain is getting to me.”
The hand squeezes Jacob’s shoulder, then drops. McMichaels moves across the room to open a closet and pulls out a bag stuffed with golf clubs. Its strap creaks on his shoulder as he turns to leave.
“Someone’s going to have to take a fall if this goes public, Jake. You’d better be thinking about Claybaugh. That’s a viable option. There aren’t many others left.”
JACOB HAD TOLD himself that a midday drive would clear his head, that a few miles on the road with the top down might help him sort out whether what McMichaels had said was truly as ominous as he feared. But before he had even crossed the Gervais Street bridge over the Congaree, he realized it was no accident that his break from routine had taken him away from campus and headed west.
And now, twenty miles into the piney Midlands on the Old Chapin Road, he takes the cutoff to Lake Murray without a second thought, though he has not driven this stretch in half a dozen years. The lake comes into view on his left, through the trees, stretching across the horizon vast and green under the hazy sky. A half mile out, a motorboat churns the water, towing a skier, but otherwise the lake’s surface is placid, as though in surrender to the August heat. When he pulls into the gravel lot of his aunt Pauline’s store and shuts off the engine, the only sound is the lapping of water against the clay banks.
The store is built shotgun-style, long and narrow like the mill house he grew up in, only larger. It stands on brick pilings a yard above the ground, its white-painted clapboards weathered and flaking. When he climbs the steps to the porch and reaches for one of the two screen doors, he can already hear the chirring of crickets inside.
The door slaps shut behind him and he takes it all in, all of it as he remembers: the long shelves along the walls built from two-by-fours and plywood, stocked with all manner of country sundries, from paper towels to boxes of ammunition. In the back sits an old ice cream freezer that has been covered with window screen, where the crickets are singing, and next to it a water tank topped with Styrofoam minnow buckets, a net for fishing out the minnows hung on its side. And there, behind a little cash register set on a glass case stocked with spinner baits and plastic worms, sits Aunt Pauline, a cigarette burning in one hand while she tots up figures in a spiral notebook with the other. She looks up from the notebook, squinting over her readers, and smiles at Jacob.
“We’re fresh out of night crawlers, doc.”
He smiles back at her. “Do I look like a worm fisherman to you, Pauline?”
She takes a long drag off her cigarette and stubs it out in the ashtray next to the register. “No, honey, you look like big money. Come over here and give me a hug, you weasel. I haven’t seen you in ages.”
He goes to her, wraps his arms around her skinny shoulders, inhales her scent of smoke and coffee and cheap perfume. Then she holds him at arm’s length and looks him over.
“Yes, sir. Your daddy would be proud. You cleaned up real good.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t been around. I stay too busy for my own good.”
“Appreciated the Christmas card last year. That’s one good-looking girl you been going with.”
Jacob smiles. “Kaye’s Jewish. So it’s not supposed to be a Christmas card. They’re called holiday cards now. You know, to be more inclusive.”
“Well, goddamn,” Pauline say
s. “Times change.”
“I guess they do.”
She drops her eyes long enough for Jacob to look at her face. Pauline is nearing seventy and looks every year of it. Though her eyes are still bright, her cheeks are wrinkled beneath them, and fifty-odd years of sun and alcohol and nicotine have weathered her skin to the hue of a tobacco leaf. No wonder Pauline and his mother never got along: she must exhale smoke in her sleep.
But she is moving before he can think on it further, pulling up a stool for him next to hers at the counter and motioning for him to take it, asking questions about his job and life all the while. Before he sits, he pulls the folded paper out of his back pocket and straightens it on the glass countertop. Pauline’s eyes settle on it for a quick moment, then cut away as she lights another cigarette.
Jacob stares down at the photocopied picture of the lecture room, at Professor Johnston and his slave, at the nurse.
“This is from the school’s archives,” he says. “It’s probably from the 1860s. I can’t get it out of my head that the woman looks like Dad.”
Pauline looks at the picture again and sets her lighter down carefully. Jacob feels suddenly foolish for bringing it here. “It’s crazy, I know,” he says, reaching for the paper.
Her hand stops him, her fingers splayed across the paper, pressing down on the creases where he had folded it. When he looks up to meet her eyes, he sees that they are fixed on the nurse’s face.
“I guess every family’s got skeletons,” she says, still looking down at the picture. Then she exhales a plume of smoke and looks at him tenderly, a deep sadness in her pale gray eyes.
TEN MINUTES LATER Jacob is sitting on the porch of Pauline’s little bungalow out back of the store, his foot tapping against the floorboards while he waits for his aunt to return from inside. She has been moving slowly since she locked the store and flipped its OPEN sign around. He listens to her rummaging around inside the little house. When she emerges from the front door, he sees that she carries a small black book and two Budweiser tallboys. He shuts his eyes as she settles into the chair next to him and pops the can of beer open. Then he feels the cold aluminum pressed against his hand.
“Thanks, but I’ve got to be back at work.”
Pauline ignores him. “Take it. Go ahead.”
He takes the beer and tilts it back, a token sip. Pauline opens hers and gives it a long pull before setting it down on the porch floor and opening the little book in her lap. It is old, the gilt of the cross on its cover and the edges of the pages nearly worn off. She shows him the title page—the Book of Common Prayer—then flips through it to the back and pulls out a handful of old pictures. She shows him snapshots of his father and herself as children, then an older picture—not black-and-white now, but sepia—of men in straw hats and suspenders at a picnic beneath live oaks.
“That’s my granddaddy James, grown then.” She shuffles the picture to the back of the stack. “Here’s one when he was a boy.” She shows him a shot of a boy in a cart drawn by a goat.
“And here’s one of James with his mother, Sara, when he was I reckon one year old.”
Jacob looks at the portrait and sees a little boy in a christening gown perched on the lap of the woman from the school picture.
“Sara Thacker,” Pauline says. “The midwife.”
Jacob studies the eyes in the portrait. “All right. But I’m not getting it. What’s the secret?”
For answer Pauline turns the Book of Common Prayer back to its front, the pages for baptisms and confirmations. He sees that James Thacker was baptized at Saint Mary’s, Lexington, on April 18, AD 1867. The name and dates are written on the page in flowing script. But though there are two lines reserved for parents’ names, only one is filled, with Sara Thacker’s small signature.
Jacob looks up and sees that Pauline has been watching him intently. “Your daddy never told you because he never wanted it spoken of. He was ashamed.”
Jacob shakes his head slowly.
“She was what you nowadays call a single mother,” Pauline says. “Only they didn’t call it that back then. What they called it was a disgraced woman and her bastard son. Can you imagine what it was like for Granddaddy James growing up? He probably had to whip every boy in school, every year. But they made a life of it. Granddaddy James never turned mean, bless his heart. And people loved Sara. Loved her. They say she birthed half the babies in Lexington County.”
Jacob looks down at the blank line again. “So who was the father?”
“She never did say.”
Jacob shakes his head again. “You have to have some idea.”
“Nope. She wouldn’t say. You think she was the first poor girl to get herself in trouble? But she never told who the father was, not even to James. Never married, either.”
Pauline shuts the book gently, traces the cross on its cover with her finger. “And that is the Thacker family tree. I wish you wouldn’t be angry with your daddy. He wanted a better life for you.”
She lights a cigarette and stares out across the lawn at the lake. “Back in the forties a bomber plane went down in that lake, couple miles from the dam. A B-25. They flew them on training missions out from the army air base down in Lexington. There’s a rich doctor up in Greenville’s been raising money to bring it up, put it in a museum. He’s been at it for years. A lot of folks think he’s crazy. It’s down deep, and it’s been down there a long time.”
“I think I see what you’re saying.”
“I’m just telling you, a lot of things in the past are just plain gone. Sometimes it’s more trouble than it’s worth going after them.”
Jacob takes a deep drink from his beer. Immoral conduct, he thinks as the Budweiser turns bitter in his mouth. “I still don’t see why Dad never told me about her—especially after I started at the school. It makes no sense.”
“I’m thinking,” Pauline says, tapping the cover of the book in her lap, “that nobody knew about the school. Granddaddy James used to tell stories about Sara all the time, about her and all those babies. But he never said anything about the medical school. I’ve never heard mention of her working anywhere but West Columbia. I thought you were the first Thacker up there. Hell, you were the first one of us to even go to college.”
Jacob rises from his chair and stretches. He can feel the alcohol beginning to seep into his bloodstream.
“They’re going to be looking for me at the school if I don’t get back there soon. It’s been a hell of a lunch break.” He sighs. “And I’ve got an afternoon full of meetings.”
As they walk back to his car, Pauline surprises him by taking his hand, holding it in hers like a girl. When he opens the car door she hugs him tightly.
“You take care of yourself,” she says in her Marlboro voice, “and don’t wait so long before you come back out here again.”
He kisses her cheek and gets in the car. As he pulls out of the lot, he watches her in his rearview mirror turning the store sign around again, looking frail through the glass. When she is gone from his view he reaches for his cell phone and punches in the number for the school’s directory so that he can call Janice Tanaka and ask her where in the hell one goes to find a 130-year-old birth certificate.
Fernyear: 1864
JOHNSTON WOKE WITH HIS HEAD ON his desk. His lamp had burned down to the last threads of the wick and the sky outside was at its blackest pitch. He pulled out his pocket watch and looked at it: 3:50. Nemo should have been back with the MacCallan woman by two or three at the latest, but he was late—never a good omen for a resurrection man.
Johnston gathered his coat and hat. He was trying to plot out the shortest route to the colored cemetery when he heard the scrape of the back door, followed by the thump of a heavy bundle being dropped on the wooden floor. He sighed and put his coat back on the wall hook. Rolling up his sleeves, he started down the hall.
In the dissecting room Nemo had laid out a body on a table and was cutting the cords that bound a second bundle at his fe
et. His knife severed the hemp cords effortlessly and he lifted the sheeted body to its place with a grunt.
“Two?” Johnston said. “In one evening? Extraordinary.” He pulled the sheet off Ossie MacCallan and brushed dirt from her cheek. “What is your guess here? Do you think the colored doctor got it right?”
“Looks it, sir.” Nemo stretched the other body across the next table and rested a hand on its ample belly. “Might as well warn you now, boss. Got a white man here.”
Johnston gave a start. “That is strictly off-limits. What do you think we are?”
“He’s a no-count, sir, just an old buckra off the rail line. Confederate deserter’s my guess.” Nemo’s hand hovered over the covered face. “You ready?”
Johnston nodded. Nemo rolled the covering back to reveal a begrimed face, black whiskers, and a trail of tobacco juice—apparently permanent—at one corner of the mouth. The face still wore a grimace, and a delicate open line ran halfway across the neck beneath the chin.
“I can tell you cause of death right now, sir. Going to be exsanguination by a severed carotid artery. You find a puncture wound to the left kidney under this stain here.” He gestured to a darkened patch on the sackcloth shirt.
Johnston turned the man’s jaw to have a better look at the slit throat.
“It’s that neck that done it. Kidney weren’t more than a warning.”
“Nemo, this man’s flesh has not yet cooled. There is no sign of rigor. He can’t be even a day old.”
“No, sir. He ain’t but two, three hours old. I’ll get the formalin directly.”
“Wait. I suspect there is foul play involved here. Where was he buried?”
“Didn’t say he was buried, sir.”
Johnston covered his face. “Out with it.”
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