The Resurrectionist

by Matthew Guinn

  “What a woman, huh, Jake? Still as beautiful as the day I met her on the beach at Edisto,” McMichaels says, stuffing a cracker in his mouth and putting an arm around his wife.

  Bitsy blushes and laughs shyly. “And he’s still carrying on like a fool,” she says.

  Jacob stuffs the check in the pocket of his jacket and sets his drink on the table, then reluctantly picks up the folder. He smiles and reaches out a hand to the dean. “You are a very lucky pair of people,” he says.

  “Can’t you stay a while longer, Jacob?”

  “No, ma’am. But I’ll be back tomorrow night with everyone else. Thank you for your hospitality.”

  And with that he leaves them, standing together in front of the cold fireplace as though posing for a portrait in one of the southern lifestyle magazines, the expensive ones, as modern-day exemplars of a kind of feudal grace, long ago lost. A couple from another time, in whose kingdom he has briefly interloped.

  Fernyear: 1866

  NEMO STOOD IN DOCTOR JOHNSTON’S DOORWAY with the bloodied handkerchief pressed against his face, as he had for nearly five minutes now, with his shoulder leaning against the jamb and his eyes on the doctor, who had not yet looked up from the clutter of papers on his desk. Beneath the handkerchief his nose still throbbed, but the sharp pains had ebbed and he was nearly certain the bleeding had stopped. Nevertheless, he kept the stained cloth in place. He wanted Johnston to see it.

  As though finally giving up on the problem before him, Johnston shuffled the papers into a single stack and set them aside. He looked up at Nemo wearily, then ducked his head an inch to peer over his spectacles at the man in his doorway. His eyes narrowed.

  “Nemo, my heavens. Have you been in some kind of a scrape?”

  “Same kind of scrape I’ve been having. Albert Fitzhugh.”

  Johnston rose from behind the desk and stepped up to Nemo’s face. He lowered the slave’s hand and touched the nose gently, squinting at the clotted blood in each nostril. His fingers pressed gently against the bridge of the nose, testing it. “Not broken,” he said. “But we should get you a cool cloth for the swelling.”

  “Albert Fitzhugh fell out in the surgery theater not halfway through an amputation. Fainted dead away. Mrs. Harris lying there on the table, half asleep with the ether, and him just cutting his eyes from the saw to her thigh. Doctor Evans telling him to go on and make the cut and Mrs. Harris starting to cry and Mister Fitzhugh’s eyes cutting back and forth like a possum’s. So Doctor Evans takes his arm to guide him, and when the saw blade makes the first cut he’s greening up around the gills, and when he hits the bone he faints and falls right on top of Mrs. Harris. I laid him out on the floor and commenced to patting his cheeks. Minute later he wakes up and cocks me across the face.” Nemo raised a finger of his own to the injury. “You seen what he done.”

  Johnston turned and walked back to his desk. He sat down heavily, and Nemo could hear the leather seat of his chair creak as he leaned back in it.

  “I apologize on behalf of Mister Fitzhugh,” he said after a long pause.

  Nemo said nothing. His hand clenched and unclenched around the handkerchief.

  “This is unprecedented,” Johnston went on, “and unacceptable. Perhaps it might alleviate your anger to know that Mrs. Fitzhugh is down with her rheumatism and a grave case of the flux. Her situation is dire. Could it not be that the mother’s illness is weighing heavily on her son?”

  Nemo stuffed the handkerchief in his pocket, next to his knife. He looked down at the floor for a moment before he spoke.

  “If it were Mrs. Fitzhugh would be one thing. But this ain’t a matter of one thing. This is his second year here, sir. He ain’t never going to pass the obstetrics course. He failed the cesarean practical last week. Tore old Addie Kennedy’s uterus all to pieces. And you know what he told me? Told me to bring him a white cadaver and he wouldn’t have no problems. Said a nigger cadaver’s naturally defective.”

  Johnston was staring at a spot on the ceiling when he spoke. “Could you get him a white cadaver?”

  Nemo felt like laughing. “I could get him Helen of Troy, he’d still botch that surgery. Can’t even do a basic amputation. What happened in the theater today, most of the students could make that cut with one eye closed. You and me could do it in our sleep.”

  Nemo thought he saw the doctor stiffen slightly at the last phrase, but he could not help himself from speaking once more. “Why can’t he just go?”

  Johnston leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk, then removed his spectacles and rubbed the red spots where the glasses had been resting. “I am afraid it is not so simple as that,” he said. “There are financial exigencies involved.” He sighed. “Let us see what changes another month will bring.”

  “That’s what you told me in February, sir. And February last year.”

  “Well, he cannot keep repeating the course in perpetuity, can he?”

  Nemo arched an eyebrow, and Johnston caught the gesture. “No,” he said, in answer to his own question. “He cannot. Twice is the most I can allow him to repeat and still live with myself.” He turned his spectacles in his hand and stared at them, bemused. “But there should be some recompense for this indignity you have endured. I will raise your salary two dollars a week, Nemo, in lieu of a more formal apology. I would do more, but that is all I can manage at present.” He looked up at Nemo with a weak smile.

  “Didn’t come asking for a raise, sir.”

  Johnston set the spectacles back on his nose, tucked their wire loops behind his ears, and pulled the stack of papers to him. “Two dollars a week it is, then. That will surely make matters more tolerable for you.”

  He pulled a sheet of paper covered with figures from among the others and tapped it with his forefinger. “This is a notice from the Roth Brothers’ apothecary supply house in Charleston. It is on the brink of receivership and financial ruin, it says, and is no longer able to offer delivery service to the Midlands.” The doctor sighed. “Carolina may never recover from last year’s destruction, Nemo. We are still feeling it. These are hard times for all of us. But we must take them as our portion and persevere.”

  “I guess I’m dismissed, then?”

  But Johnston seemed not to have heard the question. He only stared down at the invoice, the shadow of a smile starting around the corners of his mouth.

  “Say, perhaps there is a silver lining here after all,” he said, lifting the paper. “How would you like to go down to Charleston in my stead, to gather up our supplies? The scenery would do you good, and a few days’ vacation would allow matters with Mister Fitzhugh to cool somewhat. Yes indeed, this sweetens the deal considerably. I would make the journey myself, but Mrs. Fitzhugh’s condition truly is dire. From what Ballard tells me, I doubt if she will last the night.” Johnston paused and cleared his throat. “A delegation from the school will be expected at the funeral. So, what do you say to a trip to the coast?”

  “Supply house still down on Queen Street?”

  “Indeed it is. The address is here on the letterhead. I shall attach Doctor Evans’s requisition list and write out a pass for you if you agree. I think it would be a capital diversion.”

  Fifteen minutes later Johnston had completed a draft of the pass assuring any and all interested white men that he allowed and guaranteed Nemo Johnston’s free passage from Columbia to Charleston and back, for this second week of March in the Year of Our Lord 1866. He signed the paper with a flourish and escorted the Negro to the door with his papers. At the threshold he paused and rested a hand on Nemo’s shoulder.

  “The world moves at its own pace, Nemo, however we wish it to proceed. Someday Mister Fitzhugh will be gone, and you will still be with us. In the meantime I advise forbearance and patience. Patience, Nemo, for this too will pass.”

  Nemo took the papers and nodded, eager to be gone. His footsteps sounded dully on the floorboards of the empty hallway. He was at the front door when he heard a soft voice behind him:
“You should go away.”

  He turned and saw Nurse Thacker leaning against the foyer wall, deep in the shadows, with a bundle of linens under one arm. One of her feet was propped up against the wall behind her, like a girl would stand, making her look even younger in the dim light than she did in the daytime.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Nemo said. “Going now. Don’t you fret it.”

  She came off the wall and closed the distance between them in an instant, then took hold of his arm with a nervous strength.

  “Don’t play the Negro with me, Nemo,” she said, her grip on him tensing. “When have I ever talked down to you?”

  “You haven’t, ma’am.”

  Her voice softened. “Then hear me now,” she said, pulling him toward one of the front windows. “Look around this place. Do you remember what it was like before?”

  He remembered much from the years before she came: the foot-deep mud right up to the Negro hospital’s front door where now there burned twin gaslights over a path of pea gravel, flanked by azaleas beginning to bloom; remembered the scant candlelight that once flickered in the gloomy interior, now flooded with light that gleamed on the hard-polished windows.

  “Do you think Doctor Johnston remembers? It is not in his nature to remember. And so we do the work and the fruits of it pass us by. You really should go.”

  “All due respect, Miss Sara, some ain’t as free to come and go as others.”

  Her eyes drifted away from the hospital toward some undefined point in the darkness. “And others,” she said, “are not as free as they seem.”

  Her fingers fell away from his arm and he stepped away from her toward the door, taking a long look at this strange white woman who stood like a daydreaming child in the two-story foyer, a bundle of linens pressed tight against her belly.

  Outside, he patted the papers in his coat pocket, thinking of destinations farther than Charleston, wondering if Nurse Thacker dreamed as he did of places beyond the reach of the mapped world’s compass, where all the men like Albert Fitzhugh might find their authority revoked, stranding them in some new realm of justice and reckoning.

  CHARLESTON, AS EVER, sang with a level of activity that beggared belief, even at suppertime on the last day of the week. Nemo’s ears rang with the din as he and Ben Joyner loaded up his wagon at the curb in front of the supply house. Traffic thundered against the paving stones as delivery wagons like his hurried to complete the day’s runs with their red-faced drivers yelling at their horses for more speed. The racket echoed off the storefronts and mingled with the cries of the fishmongers who had taken their carts in hand to roll them inland from the street corners at the harbor, anxious to be rid of the last of the day’s catch before it spoiled. On this block alone, three taverns had thrown open their doors to the street. The raucous sounds from within them seemed to be intensifying by the minute.

  As Ben loaded the last clinking crate of medicine bottles onto the wagon, a jet-black barouche flew by with its iron-rimmed wheels clattering against the cobblestones. The pair of white faces in the back seemed especially pale in the bracing late-winter air. Their Negro chauffeur rode high above the pavement, haughty in his livery, and cracked his whip over the horses’ heads as they passed. Nemo watched the fine carriage speed eastward down Queen Street, at the end of which he could see the two-story Slave Market standing tall. It was now home to the Reconstruction government of the city, Ben had said, but it still looked as evil as the day Nemo first saw it. Its whitewashed stucco walls reflected the pastels of the setting sun in the gloaming, the colors shifting slowly.

  “You needing anything else?”

  Nemo turned back to the wagon bed, then looked at Ben. “Got enough in there to dope up Columbia till July. What else I be needing?”

  Ben smiled slyly. “Oh, something under the table. Something else a medical school might need.” He leaned in close. “Specimens, you know.”

  “I reckon they still dying in Columbia, Ben.” He held out his hand, and Ben took it.

  “I’m talking about a white one,” Ben said. His grip was firm and insistent. Nemo nodded and Ben leaned a little closer.

  “Man come by here this morning wanting to unload a white woman. Old man Roth run him off, said he ain’t in no body-snatching business. Heard him say something about the Grand Mark Hotel. Ain’t but two blocks over, on Broad Street.”

  “Why you telling me this?”

  Ben smiled as broadly as a child. “Always ready to help out a friend, brother. And plus, I hear some coin jangling in your pocket.” His smile narrowed. “Them Roths don’t pay me enough to starve proper.”

  Nemo took a gold dollar from his pocket. Ben looked intently at the Indian head balanced on the broad palm and reached for it. The hand clenched shut.

  “You got me a name?”

  “Pollard. Don’t know no first name, but you won’t need it. Everybody knows Pollard. He’s around town right regular.”

  Nemo placed the dollar in Ben’s hand. Ben stepped off the curb and started toward the tavern nearest them, his gait sprightly as he spoke over his shoulder.

  “Pleasure doing business with you, Mister Nemo. Anybody asks me, I tell them Nemo Johnston’s first-rate, yes I do.”

  Nemo climbed up to the buckboard wearily and shook the reins. The horses started forward, toward Meeting Street, where he would take a right over to Broad. The Slave Market glowed ahead of him, its rainbow hues fading now as the sun departed, leaving the façade only coral against the blackness of Charleston Harbor, and beyond that, the blue Atlantic.

  HE SAT ON the cold marble floor of the Grand Mark’s lobby with his back against a stone column and his hands dangling between his knees, only half interested in the desk clerk, who kept his eyes on the black man as though he might steal the great column itself the moment his back was turned. Twice the man had told him there were no rooms here for colored before he had heard the name Pollard and sent a bellhop upstairs to summon the guest. Now Nemo sat a full five yards from the warmth of the roaring hearth fire as he counted off the minutes of his wait.

  The bellhop reappeared at the counter, a little breathless, and pointed out Nemo to the white man who followed him. Nemo felt his stomach tighten as the man started across the lobby, his boot heels clicking on the marble. He was white trash, no doubt, no matter the bright pattern of the satin vest he wore. His hair was black, long, and thinning, with a mustache of the same color drooping around the corners of his small mouth. When he was close enough, Nemo could see that the toes of his boots were scuffed through the polish and that the vest was frayed at the seams. He looked down at Nemo for a long moment before he spoke.

  “You here for the package?”

  “I reckon I am.”

  “Well, come on, then. Ain’t got all night to stand around jawing.”

  He turned and started toward the grand stairwell, his heels tapping fast on the marble before Nemo could get to his feet.

  “I say again, the boy can’t have a room here,” the desk clerk called after them.

  “It’s all right. He’s just going to haul some luggage for me,” Pollard said without turning, then, under his breath, “So shut the hell up.”

  Nemo followed him up three flights of carpeted stairs, then down a gaslit hallway that was close with the fumes from the lamps. Pollard stopped at the last room and opened it with an iron key, a few stray hairs dangling over his forehead as he worked the lock. “This is going to be forty dollars,” he said as he turned the knob. “You got that kind of money, boy?”

  Nemo took a deep breath. “Got it. But don’t know as I can part with it.”

  Pollard looked up and smiled, and Nemo could see that his teeth were yellowed and that one of his bicuspids was missing.

  “You take a good look at this one and you’ll part with it, all right.” He pushed the door open and nodded for Nemo to enter first.

  The room was a study in disarray, with an unmade double bed in one corner and a half-dozen whiskey bottles standing empty o
n the dresser. A pile of dresses rested beneath the single window, as though thrown there. Cigar ashes dusted the carpet and a week’s worth of newspapers lay sprawled beneath the room’s single armchair.

  The woman lay on the divan beside it. The red velvet fabric of the couch offset her alabaster face and the faint flush of her cheekbones such that she looked almost alive. One of her hands dangled toward the floor, motionless, the knuckles just touching the carpet. The other lay across her breast with its fingers splayed against her collarbone, near the soft fall of her golden hair.

  She was completely nude, and Nemo could see that although she was thin, she was not too much so. Her breasts were firm and taut, and her pelvic bones, though visible through the flesh, were not pronounced. Her abdomen looked full and healthy, offset by a small tattoo of a rose just above the triangle of hair covering her pudenda.

  Nemo took his time studying her, assessing the risk. He watched the breastbone for any sign of movement, studied the tattoo to see whether it rose or fell.

  “Yeah, boy,” Pollard said behind him. “I think you in love.”

  “You check her pulse?”

  “Shit. She’s dead, boy. You blind?”

  “You mind if I check it?”

  Pollard stepped forward as if to move between Nemo and the woman. “You don’t get to touch her till you buy her.”

  Nemo raised his hands deferentially. “All right. How’d she die?”

  “Fever. Had it all week, couldn’t work a lick. She just laid in here and burned up, I reckon.”

  “When?”

  “Sometime in the night. I checked on her about dawn and she was gone.”

  “You didn’t call a doctor?”

  Pollard looked at the dead woman disgustedly. “Don’t have a lot of cash flow right now. Even the damned room’s on credit. You want her or not?”

  “Why I pay you forty when I can get one free?”

  “You can get a nigger for free, yeah. Dead niggers is always free. But this one ain’t no nigger, is she?”