The Resurrectionist

by Matthew Guinn

  “No, she ain’t.” She wasn’t a Negro and she wasn’t even common; she was beautiful. Nemo thought that next to Amy, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He knew that in Columbia she would be eagerly received.

  “What’s that, boy?” Pollard’s lip had pulled back from the missing tooth. “You say ‘sir’ to me, boy.”

  Nemo nodded absently. “No, sir,” he said. “No sir, she ain’t.” He nodded again. “Where you find her?”

  “Find her? She’s been with me six years.”

  “She your wife?”

  The man sneered through his blackened teeth. “No, boy. You stupid or what? She’s my girl. She’s a whore.”

  Nemo stared at the man.

  “You ask too many damned questions. If you want her, ante up. Else get the hell out.”

  “Forty, you say?”

  Pollard nodded. “Forty. And you do the toting.”

  HE HAD SMELLED it ahead of him, the pungent odor of charred wood and old charcoal, carried for miles on the southeasterly breeze, and the smell had kept him awake for the last hours of his ride into Columbia. After two full nights without sleep, and with the wagon groaning under the weight of his supplies and the woman’s body, he had welcomed the smell of his hometown as it incited him to stay awake, to keep going, these eighty-odd burned blocks of Columbia seeming to urge him back via the night breeze. As the wagon rumbled beneath him, Nemo thought back to the year before, remembering the drunken Federals smashing store windows, remembering Johnston feverishly hoisting a yellow hospital flag out front of the school to save it from the invaders. Later that night the fires had started and stray wads of burning cotton had blown pinwheeling down the streets like infernal sagebrush, some of them borne aloft on the February wind like comets. Toward midnight, anxious to catch a glimpse of the northern harbinger of fiery destruction, he had watched as Sherman himself rode past the school on a roan charger. He had seen nothing very intimidating about the man; he looked like any other sunburned cracker with half-crazy eyes.

  But still, well into 1866, Sherman’s legacy of fire remained in the air and in the white-hot memory of the whites. Outside Cayce, Nemo had seen what he took to be an omen that he would reach his destination: a gray wood barn in a fallow field, one of the few left standing, on which had been painted “Sherman Fucked a Cowe,” the dripping whitewashed letters ghostly in the moonlight.

  He had known then that he was close, and now, with the dawn a half hour away, he rolled into the courtyard of the school and up to the back door of the building, quietly so as not to wake the students sleeping in the dormitory across the way. He climbed down from the buckboard with his joints popping and pulled the woman’s body, wrapped in the soiled hotel sheets, to him. When he had her hoisted over his shoulder, he hooked a thumb into a two-gallon jug of formalin from the wagon bed. He pushed the back door open with his foot and stepped inside, the heavy oak swinging shut soundlessly behind him.

  In the dissecting room he laid the woman out on Albert Fitzhugh’s empty table and left her covered while he went to the cellar for his rubber tubing and an empty jug. He brought a candle back with him as well, its flame low and flickering on the walls but just light enough for him to work by. He rolled the sheets back from the body without looking at its face and placed the end of one tube into the empty jug and pulled the knife from his pocket and made the first cut on the upper inside thigh, where the femoral artery rose closest to the skin’s surface.

  He always made the thigh cut first, and as he had done so many times before, he made the inch-long incision cleanly through the artery and the blood came fast. It came too fast, and in pulsing gouts, jetting out from the thigh with the regular rhythm of a heartbeat.

  Nemo stared at it, his bloodshot eyes hardly registering what they saw. After a long moment he shook his head and reached for the woman’s wrist, feeling for a pulse, his own blood racing. He could barely discern a fluttering of blood beneath the pale skin of her wrist.

  “Oh,” the woman said. “Oh.”

  “Oh, damn,” Nemo said.

  He had heard talk of comas, of death-sleeps. Once he had even opened a casket to find the underside of its lid clawed a half-inch deep, broken fingernails embedded in the wood from the frenzied struggle of a last hour spent in rabid claustrophobia. But never anything like this. The woman had been cool when he had carried her down the servant’s stairwell of the Grand Mark, and cool this morning. She had never stirred during the long ride back over the rough country roads, through the cold night. It was impossible that she was still alive.

  “Oh, God,” the woman said, her voice rising in volume as though fighting its way out of her chest. “Oh, God, I hurt.”

  Instantly Nemo was making shushing sounds to her and reaching for a cloth to press against the wound in her leg. His hand settled on a box of the handkerchiefs used to prepare the cadavers for their first viewings, and he snatched out a handful of them and wadded them against the woman’s thigh.

  “Oh, God help me,” the woman said, and for the first time Nemo allowed himself to look her in the face.

  Her eyes were wild with fear and pain and the confusion of this sudden reveille. They rolled in their sockets twice, the milky blue irises revolving drunkenly, then fixed on his face.

  “Don’t scream, honey,” Nemo said. “More you scream and writhe, more it bleeds.”

  The woman’s eyes widened further, this time with anger rushing into them. Her jaw clenched as she spoke. “Get your nigger hands off of me!”

  “I’m going to stitch it up, ma’am. But you got to hold still.”

  “Don’t touch me again, you black bastard. Murder! Murder!”

  Across the courtyard Nemo could see a lamp flare to light in a dormitory window. He looked down at the woman and saw that her hands were beginning to flop on the slate table as she tried to work life back into them.

  “Ma’am, ma’am! You going to bleed to death we don’t stop that blood. Just lie back.” He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed gently.

  “I never did no nigger and never will!” she screamed. “Where’s Reggie? Oh, God, get those black hands off of me!”

  “Ssh, ssh. Ain’t nobody going to hurt you. Just try to settle yourself.” He pressed against her shoulders until he felt her resistance give way. “That’s better,” he said. “Tell me your name, child, while I tend to you.”

  He removed his grip on her shoulders and pulled the handkerchiefs away to check the wound. He was looking around the room for the nearest needle or suture when one of her arms lifted from the table with the suddenness of a catapult and slapped across his face. He stepped back, his eyes watering. The woman’s chest rose as she took in a great breath. “Murder!” she screamed.

  Outside, Nemo could hear a door slamming, and when he looked up to the adjacent building he saw that two more windows were now lighted. From the courtyard came the sound of footsteps. He looked from the windows to the woman lying beneath him and saw that her chest was rising again with another inhalation. Quickly he grabbed the wad of bloodied cloths and pressed it against her mouth.

  The woman gagged and he loosened his grip on her jaw, letting his hand go just slack enough to muffle her voice. Her eyes widened again and he hissed, “Be quiet. If you don’t be quiet it’ll only get worse.”

  The woman nodded. Both of them listened as the footsteps crossed the courtyard and sounded on the back stairs. Nemo felt like weeping when he heard a dog’s whine following them.

  “Anybody home? You boys ain’t having a cockfight without me, are you?”

  Nemo heard the door slam shut and he shook his head at the woman to lie still. When the footsteps began to sound on the boards of the rear anteroom, she erupted into a fit of thrashing on the table, her voice keening through the cloths. Nemo pressed down, gripping her face harder.

  “Sure sounds like a cockfight to me,” Albert Fitzhugh said from the next room. “Could have sworn I heard my old Dan tearing into some damn rooster.”
>
  The dog whined sharply and there was the sound of a body hitting the floorboards. “Goddamn you, Stonewall, you stupid mutt. Where’s a light in this place?”

  His eyes still over his shoulder and on the dissecting room door, Nemo began to sing. The song was one of Amy’s favorites—“Roll, Jordan, Roll”—and he sang it in a falsetto, loudly, as Fitzhugh fumbled at the door and finally jerked it open.

  Fitzhugh stood in the doorway, the dog beside him, its hackles raised. He looked unsteady, and Nemo could see that his eyes were even more red-rimmed than his own.

  “Good morning, Mister Fitzhugh,” Nemo said.

  Fitzhugh listed to his left for a moment, then straightened up. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. He looked down at Stonewall as if the dog could offer a commentary on the scene. Stonewall only growled.

  “Stonewall never has liked you, you know,” Fitzhugh said. “Can’t say I blame him. In here with your embalming stuff and a dead one and hardly enough candlelight to see your own hand in front of you. Damned creepy.”

  Nemo forced a smile. “I suppose it is, Mister Fitzhugh. Just getting a jump on the day.”

  “And my God, that singing. You’ve got a voice like a busted fiddle.”

  Nemo only smiled, his teeth and eyes glistening in the candlelight. Fitzhugh took a step into the room. “What have you got there? Looks like a hell of a pair of legs.”

  “She’s not ready yet, sir. Still working on her.”

  “Let’s have a look. She looks like something special.”

  “No, sir. She’s not too special yet. Need another little while to get her ready.”

  “Oh, come on,” Fitzhugh said, smiling. “I doubt she’d mind.” He took another step forward.

  Nemo had to strain to make his voice level. “Can you come back in a half hour, Mister Fitzhugh?”

  Fitzhugh weaved and reached out a hand behind him, his fingers settling finally on the door he had opened. He rocked back and forth with it for a moment until he caught his balance. He looked at Nemo for half a minute and then shrugged. “Why not? I’ve got to take a shit anyway.”

  Then he was gone, the outside door banging shut behind him, and Nemo could hear his footsteps tramping to the outhouses. The dog whined alongside him.

  Reluctantly, Nemo turned to look down at the woman. Her eyes had rolled back, all whites beneath the painted lids. He bit his lip and bent to check the cut in her leg. The blood was seeping slowly from it now. He looked back to her face and realized that his left hand, as though of its own accord, was still clamped firmly around her mouth. He bent close and removed the handkerchief. A slow exhalation of air, like the faintest of cellar breezes, brushed past his ear. He heard nothing else.

  He held his ear against her mouth for a full minute, hoping, before he rose slowly and reached for the tubing again, slipping the rubber hose into the unresisting thigh. He picked up another hose and held it ready as he cut the jugular and inserted it. He bent over the woman as he rubbed her body, kneading the blood toward the incisions and into the tubing, down to the jug at his feet. Had Fitzhugh still been in the room, he would have seen the silent tears streaming down Nemo’s face as he took up the old song again, calling over Jordan more softly this time, singing it now in the tuneless voice of the damned.

  THE DISSECTING ROOM was filling fast with morning light and the students roused by it as Nemo sat on his stool in the corner, yesterday’s South Carolinian held out in front of his face. He tried his best not to hear the comments the students made about the new woman, tried not to watch as Fitzhugh, bolstered now by two pots of coffee, pantomimed his reenactment of finding Nemo hunched over the woman. As his story wound up to its crescendo, the dog beneath the dissecting table began to bark, the sound earsplitting in the big room, until Fitzhugh finally settled him down.

  “What’s the order of the day, Nemo?” Fitzhugh called out as he patted the dog’s head. “Might I have a few moments alone with this lovely lady before we begin?”

  Nemo chided himself for leaving the woman’s face uncovered, though he doubted they would have granted her that dignity for long anyway. He rattled the paper, turned a page. “First procedure is the cesarean,” he said. “Abdominal exposure and incision into the uterus. Mind you don’t make the cuts too deep.”

  “Right, right,” Fitzhugh said, either too preoccupied by the dead woman or still too drunk to catch the reference to Addie Kennedy. He picked up a scalpel from his tray and began. Following Fitzhugh’s lead, the others too began to get down to their business, and Nemo settled back gratefully into the familiar, wordless hum of the busy laboratory.

  Fitzhugh made the cut on the abdomen just below the rose tattoo. The blade sank into the soft flesh, and as it did Nemo and the others heard a long hiss of gas escaping. One of the students nearby coughed. Fitzhugh stepped back and put a hand to his face. “Are you sure she’s well embalmed?” he asked.

  “Same as the others,” Nemo said.

  “I may need some assistance here.”

  The South Carolinian rattled again. “Can’t help with this one. Doctor Johnston told me expressly.” He wet his fingertip against his tongue and turned another page, over to the obituaries, and started when he saw Mary Elizabeth Fitzhugh’s name at the top of the listings in large type. Her name was followed by a long list of her ancestral relations and a history of her debut in Charleston, then her married years with Albert Fitzhugh, Senior, among the swaying rice fields and gentle ocean breezes of All Saints Parish.

  Nemo lowered the paper and peered over it at Mary Elizabeth Fitzhugh’s sole surviving relation. His mother just barely gone and him raring about drunk all night, looking for a chance to gamble on roosters killing each other. Nemo could not understand it. Yet he knew that Doctor Johnston would explain it as some kind of expression of grief.

  He could see that Fitzhugh had pared back the epidermis and was cutting at the underlying fat with slow, deliberate strokes. If he ever had to perform the surgery on a living person, Nemo thought, the woman would need a double dose of ether and a blood transfusion. Beneath the table, the dog panted, its tongue lolling out of its mouth. Fitzhugh had clamped the tip of his own tongue between his teeth as he concentrated on the delicate work.

  “There!” he cried. “Or almost. I think I can see the uterine wall.”

  “Make your lateral incision,” Nemo said, his voice distant.

  Fitzhugh made the cut and frowned down at it. He set the scalpel aside and reached into the cavity with both hands. When he raised them the others saw that they were full of scarlet and white tissue, latticed and perforated with decay. In his hands the tissue fell apart, dissolving between his fingers like dirty snow melting. His face was contorted with disgust.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  Nemo rose from his stool. “Yep, something wrong. Haven’t seen nothing like that before.”

  “You haven’t, have you?”

  “I have not.”

  “Why do I wonder?” Fitzhugh said, his cupped hands still half filled with the diseased tissue. “You bring me niggers that are no good, so I ask you for a white specimen. You bring me a white woman, and her insides are eaten up like an old cheese.” He held the ruined uterus aloft as if to present it as evidence. “Something is wrong, all right. The problem, I am beginning to see, is you, Nemo. I will speak with Doctor Johnston about this in the clearest of terms. You are sabotaging my medical career.”

  “Doctor Johnston going to tell you that you don’t need my help with that.”

  Fitzhugh made a growling sound of inexpressible rage and flung his hands at Nemo. The fragments of the dead woman’s uterus flew across the space between them and hit Nemo full in the face. He heard the impact as much as felt it as the tissue struck wetly against his skin and dripped down from his forehead to his shirtfront, then the floor. He wiped at his eyes and closed the distance to Fitzhugh in two strides. Stonewall was barking wildly now and rocking back on his haunches, r
eady to lunge.

  “Stay away from me,” Fitzhugh shouted. “You crazy nigger, stay away from me or he’ll tear your throat out.”

  Nemo pulled the knife from his pocket and held it out. He turned the blade until it glinted in the room’s light. “Any dog that comes after me going to be a dead dog in a minute’s time. You take him by the collar now and walk him out and you’ll live to see another day. Don’t, and I’m going to make a specimen out of you right here.”

  Fitzhugh had backed up to his table, his buttocks against the slate top and his hands out behind him. “You would, would you? In front of all these witnesses?”

  Nemo registered the movement of Fitzhugh’s hands too late. The white man’s right arm arced out toward him with the scalpel pointed downward and raked across his chest, leaving a burning line behind it. Nemo raised his own knife from his side and lowered his head to go in, his eyes on the point of Fitzhugh’s shirt just below the sternum. His knife was still rising when he felt someone take hold of his forearm and yank back. Nemo pulled, already sensing himself stronger than this new antagonist, until he caught the scent of talcum powder and, behind that, a sweetish wisp of ether.

  “You know I cannot overpower you, Nemo. Allow me to appeal to your reason,” Johnston said behind him. “And you, Fitzhugh, put down that scalpel or I shall expel you this afternoon.”

  Nemo and Johnston hung poised in the strange embrace as Fitzhugh reluctantly tossed the scalpel aside. One of the students handed him a cloth and he mopped at his face with it, then wiped his hands on it violently.

  “Your future, Nemo,” Johnston whispered in his ear. “Think of the opportunities you will squander with this violence.” The doctor squeezed Nemo’s arm almost tenderly. “I implore you to use your reason,” he said.

  Slowly, by degrees, Nemo allowed his muscles to relax. When he felt Johnston’s hand slip away, he placed the knife back in his pocket and lifted his hand to the long cut on his chest, assessing its depth. His eyes never left Fitzhugh’s face.

  “You saw that, Doctor Johnston,” Fitzhugh was saying. “With your own eyes. He took up a weapon against a white man, sir, with a clear intent to murder. I demand you contact the authorities this instant.”