The Resurrectionist

by Matthew Guinn

  “Well,” Nemo said, drawing the word out, “I did find him in Cedar Vale, indeed. At Mrs. MacCallan’s grave, matter of fact. Digging. He weren’t about to be discouraged by my claim.” Nemo leaned against the table and put his hands in his pockets. “Naturally, we articulated about it for some minutes, but his voice kept rising. Rose quite a bit when I showed him my blade. Weren’t a thing to do but the expeditious thing, so I done it.”

  “You cut his throat?”

  “Don’t forget about that kidney. He had his warning.”

  “This is murder, Nemo.”

  Nemo laughed his mortuary laugh. “No, sir. Now don’t go getting excited. It’s done now, and there’s one less speculating sack-’em-up man in the world and one more study for the college. He’ll do some good in the world now.”

  “My God. Nemo, you are colored. You have killed a white man. No matter his station in life, this is—”

  “Wasn’t at the station, sir. Had of been, he’d still be there.”

  “Damn it, Nemo!” Johnston’s cheeks had blanched. “You would be hanged for this. Hanged before they did worse to you, if you were lucky. You know well that merely assaulting a white man is a capital offense.”

  Nemo’s voice was soft when he spoke. “He won’t be missed, sir. He really was no-count. Check his pockets. Nothing in them but a fork and a heel of bread, and wasn’t no more in them when he was breathing.”

  Johnston laid his hands on the table and looked down at the dead man as though he were a kinsman.

  “You never turned me in, Doctor Johnston. Never. Because you know the things I’ve done, I’ve done without no say in matters.”

  Johnston looked up at Nemo. “Not a word of this. Not the first word of how he was procured.”

  Nemo smiled. “I’ll get that formalin now. I mean it now, Doctor Johnston, don’t you fret it a minute. Cedar Vale’s my graveyard. I can’t tolerate no freelancing in there. Next thing you know, bottom rail be on top.”

  Johnston watched his broad shoulders disappear down the stairs. Bottom rail, pshaw, he thought. You are on top of the whole game.

  FROM HIS CORNER of the dissecting room, where he watched the students bent over their cadavers, busily at work, Nemo judged the scene before him to be a beautiful sight this spring afternoon, a veritable vision of plenty. The twenty-five men so hastily concluding their training as Confederate surgeons were matched, each of them, with a cadaver of their own—better than two dozen white male specimens culled from the Union dead in the Shenandoah Valley. With the war going so strong and Lee and Stonewall Jackson still tearing up the Federals in Virginia, it seemed that his digging days were finally behind him. Twice this month he had been sent up to Raleigh to meet Champ, the University of Virginia’s man, at the midway point between the schools to gather up a wagonload of dead boys who had fallen far from their homes in Ohio, Wisconsin, or Maine. And they were fine specimens: young men in good health and well fed, perfect save for the odd missing limb or the angry-looking rash left on their abdomens by grapeshot. These days, Nemo’s procurement chores were hardly less pleasant than buying handkerchiefs by the carton, to cover the faces and genitals of the dead.

  This afternoon, however, the handkerchiefs over the cadavers’ faces had been removed for the dissection of the brain. With the tops of their skulls removed, the bodies looked oddly shortened, but Nemo was satisfied with the progress he observed as the students separated the lobes of the brains and traced the intricate network of the superficial cerebral veins. In his practicum lecture he had demonstrated the need for steady but light cutting, pointing out the thin coat on the veins from the median section along the longitudinal fissure to their termination in the sinuses. Seeing the students intent on their task, he settled back with a copy of Emerson’s Nature, reading it for perhaps the fifth time, content among the usual busy sounds of the dissecting room, punctuated now and then by a muttered curse or the tinny clang of a dropped instrument.

  “Boy, what you want to be reading Emerson for?”

  Nemo put a finger in the book to mark his place, just below a passage he had underlined in India ink the last time: “Even the corpse has its own beauty.”

  “Beg pardon, Mister Cullen?”

  “I said, why are you wasting your time with Emerson? That Yankee don’t know shit from apple butter.”

  “Emerson been good to me.”

  “He’ll put a lot of fool ideas in your head, is what he’ll do. The Messenger said it best. Called that last book of his ‘spasmodic idiocy.’ ”

  One of the other students laughed. “A man in your line of work ought to be reading Poe.”

  “I’ve read him. Read ‘The Premature Burial’ twice. He got it about right,” Nemo said, smiling. “But now, Poe seem to me to be the spasmodic one.”

  Cullen stiffened. “You wouldn’t be reading the Sears catalogue if it was up to me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cullen seemed ready to say more, but another student was calling out and beckoning to Nemo.

  “Nemo! Help me here with this dura mater, will you, boy?”

  JOHNSTON SHIFTED IN his chair, wishing he were anywhere else in the building except for this office, where the presence of Sara Thacker seemed to make the order of this familiar room, his carefully arranged books and diplomas, fade to inconsequence. Nearly a minute had passed since either of them had spoken, and still he found himself struggling for an adequate answer to her question. Every time he looked up into her gray eyes his resolve to answer her manfully collapsed.

  “I’ll say it again, then,” she said. “Three years.”

  “Yes,” Johnston said, stroking his beard.

  “And has the condition of the Negro hospital not improved dramatically? Has Doctor Evans not been pleased with my work?”

  “But Sara, I have admitted you to several lectures.”

  “And do you know how many babies I’ve delivered myself, when Doctor Evans’s affairs detained him at the Five Points Tavern? Seven breech babies I’ve turned in the womb. Seven!”

  “Your midwifery is to be commended, Sara.”

  “Midwifery! Doctor Evans would have put those women under the knife. Surely that demonstrates my ability to take the obstetrics course at the very least.”

  Johnston’s brow furrowed. “Can you imagine yourself among those boys in the dissecting laboratory? Can you imagine the disruption it would cause? There is already opprobrium enough for us, having a woman nurse on the staff. It can go no further, I am afraid.”

  Sara ignored him. “Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from the Geneva Medical School in 1849,” she said. “Three women have been admitted to Syracuse since. There is talk of a medical college being opened in Pennsylvania solely for females.”

  “Yes. In New York and Pennsylvania. Both of them a long way from here, Sara. But why not apply to them?”

  For the first time, Sara’s eyes faltered. “Would you have me leave?”

  “No. But what you are asking is simply impossible at this time.”

  Then her cheeks flushed. “You know I do not have the means. I can study here or not at all.”

  Johnston rose and walked behind her chair. He placed a hand on her shoulder and kneaded it softly. “Change comes slowly to the South. Give it time, my dear.”

  Sara dropped her head. “I believe you mean more time than I am likely to have.”

  “Patience, dear. The day will come.”

  “But when? Surely, Frederick, you know that I am capable.”

  “There is capable, and there is feasible. If we took a stand on the principle, we would lose the bulk of our enrollment. What good would it do to be a graduate of a defunct institution?”

  “It would do me a great deal of good, Frederick. But I can see how the institution figures in this.”

  Johnston put a hand on Sara’s other shoulder and bent down to kiss her sandy hair. But the gesture was awkward, for Sara was slowly shaking her head from side to side.

  SUNDAY MORNING, MA
Y 10, 1864, and Nemo Johnston was a spectacle of superfine raiment and bearing. His haberdashery was all in place, from the fine felt bowler just arrived from the Bloomingdale’s catalogue to his wool suit with a subtle stripe accented by a silk pocket square of the finest ivory hue. All of it set off by the gold-handled cane he had retrieved from Colonel Lamar’s coffin last week. He made his way leisurely down this public street dressed finer than most of Columbia’s white citizens, grinning like a death’s head.

  The Columbia South Carolinian folded under his arm bore news of a slave uprising down in All Saints Parish, two plantations over from Drake’s Windsor. With the Union gunboat blockade just off their shore, the rice aristocrats were losing control; two overseers had been killed—one shot, the other hanged—and there were now armed slaves loose in the low country. The newspaper compared the uprising to those of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, reminding its readers that upwards of fifty whites were dead before they brought Nat down. The South Carolinian writer, in fact, seemed nearly hysterical. Nemo had already read the article twice over his breakfast, but had decided that the news was so good he would carry the paper all day.

  The morning was especially fine, so he detoured from his usual route, drawn by singing in the Episcopal Cathedral on Gervais a block away. Rare indeed for the devil’s right hand to darken this door, but this was an extraordinary day. He slipped through the great doors and climbed the steps to the slave balcony soundlessly.

  Upstairs was full of the smell of starched cotton and sweated wool, black faces gleaming over the busy fans that could never cool these upper reaches in the Carolina heat. A nearly electric tension followed him as his brethren marked the appearance of the slave quarters’ boogeyman in this sacred place. He squeezed into an open seat beside a teenage girl—Tyree’s niece, he thought—who dropped her fan to the floor and stared at him, her head wobbling slightly, as though a timber rattler had come to service and alighted beside her. He showed her a mouthful of white teeth.

  The singing ended and the rector rose to the pulpit, bespectacled and albed and looking especially stern. Without preamble he leaned upon the great Bible propped before him and read: “ ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.’ So says Christ Jesus, in chapter twenty-three of Matthew’s gospel,” the rector said, “and it is a text with particular application to the congregation gathered here today.”

  Nemo leaned forward in his seat, hardly believing his luck. Years now since he had last emerged from this building with the bilious taste of its bland hypocrisy in his mouth, and he had sworn then that he had quit this godforsaken place for good. But now, on his first day back, the white preacher had welcomed him with a homecoming message, the truth at last. He gazed down upon the rows of white parishioners below and thought, You had it coming and now you going to get it, and all your chattel up here to witness it.

  “For it has come to be known here in Columbia—and throughout the South—that conditions within our domestic sphere untouched by northern aggression are not so blessedly tranquil as they have lately seemed,” the rector said. His face was tilted upward, as was Nemo’s; Nemo was beginning to wonder if the God he had heard discussed so warmly since he landed in Charleston might not be showing his presence after all. But when he lowered his gaze from the timbered ceiling, Nemo saw that the preacher’s eyes were raised not to heaven but to the balcony.

  “My sable brethren, these dry bones are not just the sins of the gambling house, the saloon, the bedchamber of your neighbor’s wife. These dry bones of iniquity are also the hardness of heart you may feel toward your masters, for as our Savior Christ has told us, we are all servants, and should be humble, gracious, obedient. This is no less true for the benighted child of Africa than for the sons and daughters of Europe—nay, it is even more so.”

  Nemo leaned back, settling against the pew heavily. It seemed that the preacher had read the morning paper too.

  He allowed himself to drift for a few moments then, knowing he had been burned again by this great white machine, all-powerful, with its plotting and knowing tentacles stretched out a half mile farther down any road he had yet chosen to travel. So for some minutes his mind was elsewhere, as it often was on moonless nights in Cedar Vale, prospecting among the remains of his people for forage to sneak through the back door of the medical school. As he did then, he thought not of this steaming southland but of vast dry plains far away, of mile-wide suns setting savannahs afire with the orange glow of sunset.

  But the man’s voice kept bringing him back. And the eyes, the pale blue eyes quick with life. Every time the preacher looked up from his text they rose to the balcony, scorching and accusative. When Nemo knew that Doctor Ballard, down front and center in the pews, had just performed an appendectomy on the rector’s daughter, Margaret, cauterizing the wound as he’d practiced on the body of Berenice MacCallan’s mother—and Berenice herself sitting two rows behind him now.

  Nemo thought back to assisting at the dress rehearsal of that procedure in the anatomy laboratory—the suturing and tying of Mrs. MacCallan’s dead appendix—when the preacher’s voice returned to him, the words seeping into his consciousness like the bite of formalin in the nose.

  “And hear me well, you servants, destined for a higher station in the glorious hereafter,” the preacher said—always, always, Nemo thought, a better place once dead. Poor Mrs. MacCallan hadn’t got there yet, as far as he could see. “Repentance never comes too late. I urge you to bring your dry bones into the light, to confess the sins of your plotting against your masters. I say to you, my black brothers, come forward and confess your sins and even the scribes and Pharisees among you will be forgiven.”

  He felt it welling up inside him, stronger than anything he had felt in years. Maybe it was Doctor Ballard sitting down front in his white suit looking innocent as a lamb, pure as a whited sepulcher. Maybe it was Berenice MacCallan murmuring “Yes, Lord” behind him, knowing nothing of the busy week her mama had had at the college, picked over by a third of the faculty before he laid her in the basement under a thick coat of lime. Maybe it was even the news from All Saints, turning the tide down by the Waccamaw, swapping bone for bone. Probably it was all these things. He saw it all now—this sermon, this moment—as the punch line to a great cosmic joke, two hundred years of irony echoing across the oceans from Africa to Columbia. And because he could do little else, he began to laugh. A chuckle at first, and one of his pew mates shushed him, but the preacher was off again on the dirty bones and Nemo, bone man himself, cackled aloud. Bowing over with it, he saw that he had clamped a hand on his neighbor’s knee—that of Tyree’s niece, who sat walleyed, transfixed and petrified by this contact in spite of the indignity.

  “No, child, I ain’t no Satan. Devil’s in the good seats,” he said, his throat hitching. “Downstairs. On the ground floor.”

  He was gone then, beyond restraint. A basso roar, peals of his laughter cascaded down from the balcony. Faces turned up toward its source, reddening—none of them redder than Ballard’s when he spotted Nemo. A handful of men rose and made their way up the aisle. In seconds he could hear them pounding up the stairs.

  “That’s right, white folks, send up the deacons!” he shouted before exploding again.

  There was a shuffle behind him, and Nemo felt hands hooking him under his arms. He had only a second to dab his glistening cheeks with his handkerchief before they hauled him up.

  Downstairs they hurled him clear of the nave steps onto the sidewalk. Rising, he replaced his pocket square and adjusted the bowler back to its steep angle. He set out for home with the gold cane tapping the sidewalk bricks smartly, evenly, his head held high. He was smiling again, for Nemo Johnston was superfine, a man among men, and despite the rough handling, entirely beyond their reac
h.

  EDWIN WINSTON SAT on a stool behind the wooden dispensing counter of the apothecary, his eyes intent on the pages of the ledger spread open before him, blissfully content among the familiar scents of calomel and castor oil. The morning was quiet, the only sounds at this moment the scratch of his pen’s nib against the paper and the creaking of the wooden stepladder on which Nemo stood, above and behind him, reaching for another bottle of patent medicine on the apothecary’s tall shelves. They had been at this work for an hour now, the professor of chemistry tallying off inventory as the slave called out quantities of Burnett’s Cod Liver Oil, McMunn’s Elixir of Opium, Dr. Wistar’s Balsam of Wild Cherry. Winston wrote out each number carefully in his ledger, periodically pausing to press a blotter on the pages to soak up the fresh ink from the fountain pen. The room was filled with lambent autumn light, dust motes dancing in it, and the light glinted off the doctor’s spectacles as he nodded at the figures in the ledger.

  “Barnes’s Magnolia Water,” Nemo said, “two quarts.”

  “Very good. That leaves only Winston’s Baby Syrup. How much?”

  Nemo shook a bottle, its liquid contents sloshing against the brown glass. “Just one half pint, Doctor Winston, near empty.”

  Winston smiled. “Going like hotcakes, is it not? I’ll mix up a new batch this evening. Ballard tells me he can hardly keep enough on hand for new mothers with colicky babies. The morphine is the ticket.” Winston looked up at Nemo. “I say this in the strictest of confidence, of course. The blend is proprietary. I am expecting word from the Patent Office any day now.”

  Nemo nodded as he descended the stepladder. “Congratulations to you, sir.”

  “Missus Winston is nearly beside herself with pleasure,” he said, blushing. He cleared his throat and looked back at the ledger. “All is satisfactory except for the laudanum count. One expects the students to dip into it from time to time, but this year’s boys are setting the record, I am afraid. Have you seen anyone back here more than usual?”