The Resurrectionist

by Matthew Guinn

  Nemo shrugged his shoulders. “They a few claiming stomach ailments.”

  Winston seemed about to inquire further, but before he could speak again the door opened and Johnston entered, looking flushed and triumphant. He shut the door behind him carefully and smiled at Winston and Nemo as he leaned against it.

  “We have a most propitious new enrollment,” he said at last.

  Winston shut the ledger. “This late? The term began two weeks ago.”

  “Trust me, Winston, you will be happy to make whatever adjustments are necessary. Our new man is a refugee from the low country, a gentleman who has lately vacated his lands for fear that Sherman’s march will proceed to the seaboard. Nemo, do you remember a Mister Albert Fitzhugh from All Saints Parish?”

  Nemo stiffened slightly. “Two plantations over from Windsor, I recall.” He remembered much of the Fitzhughs, from what he had heard at Christmas visiting-time from the slaves five miles down the coast. Fitzhugh, it was said, had shot a field hand named Monday in the face for working too slowly at harvesttime. He had left the body in the fields as a reminder to the others, who watched it picked over by crows as they hoed the nearby rows. Two nights later, some of them had stolen out to the field and buried the body in a levee. “Folks said the old gentleman was a Christian man.”

  Johnston waved a hand in the air. “He may have been, but it is the son I am talking about. He spends money like a pagan.” Johnston crossed the room and set a paper on the counter in front of Winston.

  “Check those figures, Winston. I negotiated special terms for his admission. It seems there is no accredited high school in the parish. Certain tuition adjustments were thus in order to make his matriculation amenable to our standards.”

  Winston’s eyes widened behind the glass lenses. “By what terms did you arrive at these fees?”

  “He will need tutorials to bring him up to speed. His mathematical ability is atrocious, his chemistry even worse, Winston. We will all have to take a special interest in his progress.” Johnston turned to Nemo. “I am placing his success in the anatomy course in your hands, Nemo.”

  Nemo began to speak, but the doctor turned on his heel and motioned for the slave to follow him. “To the dissecting room, Nemo. Mister Fitzhugh expressed an interest in beginning the course of study immediately.”

  After a moment’s pause, the slave followed him, hurrying to catch up so that he could hold the door open for the doctor. Johnston was already talking again, a stream of words pouring forth that Winston did not hear. Neither did the chemist note the silence that ensued once they had gone beyond the shut door, so intent was he on scribbling ratios of morphine, sugar, and corn syrup on his shirt cuff, all the quantities doubled from his last production run of Winston’s Baby Syrup. He could hardly wait to share the news with Mrs. Winston.

  NEMO MOVED QUIETLY down the midnight-dark cobblestone streets, the moon dim above him through the blanket of fog that had settled over the town and its river-basin valley as though it meant to choke out all the life there. The fog was packed densely between the buildings, spilling out of the alleys and into Harden Street, damping the usual glare of the street’s opulent gaslights to irregular flickers little stronger than candles. Against the stones, his footfalls were strangely muted by the close air, short echoes tapering quickly into the fog and dying there.

  How strange, this near silence. Ten years ago he could not have imagined a city the size of Columbia, but he had grown to love it—its colors and noise, so many sounds, even at night, from the horses and milk cows in their stalls on every block to the ruckus of the red-light district down on Huger, near the river, throwing up its bawdy roar into the wee hours. A steady din that rivaled the slave quarters at Christmas, every night. It had always made his work easier. But tonight, it seemed, he alone was stirring.

  He paused to check the address written on his hand against the numbers he could just make out on the iron placard fastened to the front of a brick townhouse. When he was certain the address was correct, he stepped up to the front door and gave the brass bellpull two short yanks. After a moment he heard sounds of movement inside, and the door was thrown open to reveal Albert Fitzhugh in a silk dressing gown. Fitzhugh’s eyes seemed unaccustomed to the darkness outside; for nearly a minute he only stared at his caller, as though without recognition. Nemo saw that behind him the parlor was heavily furnished, its walls adorned in a flocked wallpaper against which hung an oval portrait of an aristocratic-looking white woman. When his eyes fell again to Fitzhugh’s face, he saw that it had reddened.

  “My God. You are at my front door.” He looked up and down the street in spite of the fog and the hour. “Are you insane, boy?”

  “Doctor Evans said—”

  “Go around back.” The door slammed shut.

  Grinning, Nemo stepped off the narrow porch and hooked around its banister into the alley, waving at the fog as he had once swiped at spiderwebs in the dense thickets of All Saints. This new boy had become his cross to bear, certainly, but even this cross came with certain amusements. He remembered the day Johnston had introduced them in the dissecting room, how they had found Fitzhugh sitting on top of the demonstration desk in the midst of a monologue to the other students about the gout that had regrettably kept him out of this great fight, about the lodgings he had secured for himself and his mother on Harden Street, about his and his mother’s decision that he could best be of service to the cause as a Confederate surgeon. At his feet had lain a mottled hound with brown ears and doleful eyes. The dog had risen, growling, when Nemo entered the room. Johnston had settled a hand on Nemo’s shoulder then, smiling uncomfortably.

  “Mister Fitzhugh, tell us again the name of your companion.”

  Fitzhugh had dropped off his perch on the desk and begun scratching the dog under its jowls.

  “Stonewall. He’s an English pointer. Best bird dog in the low country. I paid a hundred Confederate dollars for him and he was worth every penny of it.”

  Nemo had suppressed a smile. He had just read an article in the South Carolinian reporting sorrowfully that the Confederate dollar was now trading nine to one against gold. This dog was depreciating fast.

  Despite Fitzhugh’s ministrations, the dog still growled at Nemo. “Doesn’t like niggers, though,” Fitzhugh said thoughtfully. “Might want to keep that boy clear of him.”

  “Perhaps he may not have a place in the dissecting laboratory,” Johnston had said carefully.

  Fitzhugh straightened to his full height. “He goes where I go.”

  Johnston cleared his throat. “Very well, then. But this Negro is your preceptor in anatomy. Some compromise will have to be reached.”

  Fitzhugh had nearly quit just then, but at Johnston’s urging, and with assurances from the other students of Nemo’s abilities, Stonewall had been retired with a kick under the table set aside for his master. Yet even after Doctor Johnston had gone, the dog still growled and yipped as Nemo set out Fitzhugh’s dissecting knives and saws, and nipped once at his ankle. Fitzhugh laughed, so Nemo had thrown the sheet off the dead corporal from the Wisconsin Regulars a little more abruptly than usual, to showcase the bruising on the dead man’s collarbones and around the bayonet wound in his chest, which was now leaking pale formalin. Once Fitzhugh had recovered from his pallor, he spoke almost reverently.

  “My first patient.”

  “Don’t look like he’s going to make it.”

  Fitzhugh had glared at him. “I used to own niggers down in the country,” he said.

  Nemo had folded the sheet evenly. “That a fact, captain?” he had said, already moving away with the folded sheet, glad to put some distance between the dog and his ankles.

  “And I believed in the whip,” Fitzhugh had said to Nemo’s back.

  He could hear the dog now, barking furiously in the kitchen at the rear of the house. Fitzhugh was waiting for him there in the open doorway, one hand against the jamb and the other knotted into the ruff of Stonewall’s neck.
r />   “What in God’s name are you doing here, and at this hour?”

  “I was saying that Doctor Evans want you down to the Negro hospital to watch a live birth. Woman’s been in labor two hours and he can’t hold the baby off much longer.”

  “You woke me for this? A nigger live birth?”

  “Doctor Evans say it’s time for you to start your obstetrics training.”

  Fitzhugh seemed too furious for speech. He caught a flicker of movement in Nemo’s eyes and turned. Behind him, on the townhouse’s back staircase, stood a middle-aged woman in a voluminous satin robe, her hair bundled under a linen sleeping cap. Nemo recognized her as the woman from the portrait in the parlor, only heavier and with more pronounced cheekbones than the portraitist had recorded. She clutched the stair railing nervously as she looked down on them.

  “Albert, what is it?” she said, her voice giving way to a heavy cough.

  “Get back to bed, dear,” Fitzhugh said gently. “You should be resting.”

  With a worried glance, the woman climbed the steps out of sight. Fitzhugh turned back to Nemo. “The town air disagrees with Mother,” he explained, “and the last thing she needs is a strange nigger interrupting her sleep.”

  “You want I should send Doctor Johnston out for her? Cough sounds deep.”

  “I’ll attend to Mother, thank you,” Fitzhugh said archly. He looked down at the dog, whining in his grip. “I’m inclined to turn Stonewall loose on you for bothering her.”

  Nemo did not budge, only raised his hands in a gesture of strained patience. “What you want me to tell Doctor Evans? That woman can’t wait long.”

  The door was already shutting on Fitzhugh’s response. “Come back when you have a paying patient,” he said.

  Nemo turned to make his way back to the school. He had taken perhaps a half-dozen steps on the courtyard bricks when a shape came out of the fog in front of him, too quickly for him to reach into the pocket where he kept the knife. A face pressed close to his before he could see that it was female, and smiling.

  “I knew that voice. You Cudjo from over on Windsor, ain’t you?”

  The face was not only smiling but beautiful, a honeyed brown the color of deep amber, yet he squared his shoulders just the same.

  “Who’s asking?”

  “It’s Amy, Mister Cudjo. Don’t you remember me?”

  Nemo felt his shoulders loosen, remembering a thirteen-year-old with ribbons plaited in her hair, fanning rice from a grass basket into one of the hollowed-out trunks that served as mortars after the harvest, her smile as bright as the sun.

  “Toby and Maria’s Amy?”

  Her smile broadened. “That’s me,” she said, nodding. “Come up with Mister Albert and Mrs. Libby. Ain’t this a fine town?” She held out a hand to him, almost formally, and he took it. Her touch was cool and warm at the same time.

  “How come you didn’t stay with your mama?”

  “Daddy said she too old to travel. Sent me instead. I’m so glad to be out of them All Saints fields I don’t know what to do with myself.”

  Nemo placed his other hand on top of hers, encircling it with the darker skin of his own.

  “Well, you out of the frying pan, girl,” he said, sighing as he looked back at the townhouse. “Let’s just hope you ain’t landed smack in the fire.”

  NEMO SAT ON his front porch in his favorite rocking chair, reading a week-old South Carolinian, warming his bones in the weak afternoon sunlight that bathed his west-facing house. This December had started breezy and cold and showed no signs of letting up any time soon. Twice this week he had begun his mornings by breaking ice on the surface of his well, dropping the bucket hard to crack through the icy skim, which shattered like glass in the predawn stillness. But this afternoon was warm enough, just barely, to sit outside and take in some fresh air, to watch the sun play out its hues over the rooftops of Rosedale and read a little news of the war.

  All the news this month, like most of November’s, was of William Tecumseh Sherman. His name had been anathema to the southern press since Meridian, and now, with Atlanta and Savannah burned to cinders, the South Carolinian seemed to be straining to find epithets enough to heap on the Yankee war criminal. Charleston would be next, the paper said gloomily; all Columbia could do for its sister city was offer consolations from its safe distance up in the Midlands, clear of the sea and too insignificant to burn. Yet still the city was shrouded by an anxiety he could feel in the air, could sense in the quick gait of people on the streets, the quiet apprehension of the horses and livestock.

  Maybe it was the newcomers who spread the unease; half of Charleston and Savannah, it seemed to Nemo, had been here since the harvest moon, fleeing Sherman’s swath of destruction with as many of their belongings as they could carry. The city was loud with their low-country accents, all the boardinghouses full. They had brought their things, and they had brought their money too: Nemo saw an article on the front page announcing that Columbia was now home to fourteen banks, when just five years ago there had been only three. He reminded himself to point out the piece to Doctor Johnston, who would be pleased by the growth potential the article indicated. Lately the doctor had been nearly disconsolate over the progress of the war.

  Nemo heard the rasp of metal on metal out at his front gate. Without moving the newspaper held in front of him, he dropped his left hand to the pocket of his overcoat. He felt the cold steel of his knife there and pulled it out slowly, placing it at the proper angle across his lap.

  He folded the paper over to the second page, lowering it, and as he did so he caught sight of a group of figures at his front gate, silhouetted in the orange light of the lowering sun. He counted five of them. He was about to speak when he saw one of them drag a stick along his fence pickets. It rattled against the fence and fell silent.

  “Say, Mister Nemo. You really the booger-man?”

  The speaker’s head just barely cleared the top of the fence.

  “Who that out there projecting in my yard?”

  His deep voice startled a couple of the boys, who stepped back closer to the road. But the speaker pressed forward, through the open gate, and walked a half-dozen slow steps up the walkway. Nemo saw that his feet were swaddled in old croker sacks against the cold, and that he wore no coat.

  “I say, you really the booger-man?”

  “Step closer, child. I can’t see your eyes.”

  “Ain’t afraid. Mama tell me you going to hell.”

  “Come closer, child. I got to be able to look you in the face.”

  As if emboldened by invoking his mother, the boy stepped up nearly to the porch. Nemo saw that he was standing on one of his pansies, the croker-sack binding on his foot crushing the flower, which had been holding out strong against the winter cold, still blooming purple and yellow.

  “Mama say you going straight to hell. She say the plat-eye going to get you and take you down there hisself.”

  “I got something to tell you, child,” Nemo said, setting the newspaper down and leaning as far forward as the rocking chair would allow, his chin poised over the porch rail. “I am the plat-eye.” He raised two fingers in the direction of the boy’s eyes and wriggled them like brown snakes.

  The wail seemed to begin deep within the child’s body and rose in crescendo as if to match his widening eyes. In seconds the sound reached a full-pitched scream, and he turned and ran down the lane with his shirttail flapping. The others followed him like a Greek chorus of woe in rapid transit, pursued by Furies.

  Nemo rocked back and laughed deeply. “Oh, my,” he said, wiping his cheeks.

  Just at the edge of his yard, by the bare crape myrtle that marked the property line he shared with Mrs. Thompson next door, the boys parted like a stream around a woman coming down the sandy walk. He saw that it was Amy, and he laughed again at her expression of consternation as she shut the gate behind her.

  “Oh, me,” he said by way of greeting. “What a man’s got to do to keep his property p
rivate.”

  Amy shook her head, but he saw the wisp of a smile on her light-brown face. “That was Aunt Sampson’s boy. You gone catch hell from her tomorrow. Tonight, if she get mad enough.”

  “I ain’t catching nothing. Ma Sampson ought to keep her mouth shut around that boy. He got a big enough mouth without putting gossip into it.”

  “Least we know he gets it natural.” Amy settled languidly down on the top step, at Nemo’s feet. The paper lay on the boards beside him, forgotten as he latched his fingers between hers, but he put the knife back in his coat pocket quietly. Almost two months of Saturday visits from Amy now, since the night at Albert Fitzhugh’s place, and still he marveled at how his heart raced when he was near her, pounding through the mellow tenor of these afternoons.

  “What you reading in that paper?”

  “Nothing much. Says Wade Hampton got Columbia all stitched up tight. Says Sherman going to get Charleston sure, Augusta maybe, but we holding tight.”

  Amy looked up at him sharply. “How old that paper?”

  “Monday.”

  “Need to get you a new one. Roony come by the Fitzhughs’ this afternoon saying Sherman’s going to be across the Congaree at the New Year.”

  “Naw.”

  She nodded. “Wait and see.”

  “Lord, Lord,” Nemo said. “He’ll burn Columbia all right.”

  But Amy seemed unconcerned. “They say he’s taking freed slaves with him as he goes. Whole train of them, just following behind, heading north.” She hooked an arm around his leg, like a child would. “Let’s you and me pack it up and take off, Nemo. Or leave it all, just take what we can carry.”

  “Where’d it go better for us, gal? Where you think we’d have a better stake?”

  Amy smiled, her eyes dreamy. “Chicago. New York. Boston.” She said the names as though they were incantations. “Or we could go back. Across the water. I hear there’s boats leaving out of New York for Liberia every week now. I’ve got some pennies saved up. I know you do.” She hugged his leg a little harder.