by Ed McBain
He tapped on the door of George Newton’s office. “Morning, Dr. George. It’s train time again.”
The doctor looked up as if he had forgotten where he was. “Train time?—Oh, yes, of course. Your family. Sit down, Grandison. Perhaps we should talk.”
He forced himself to keep smiling, because it didn’t do any good to argue with a man who could break your life in two. He wasn’t often asked to sit down when he talked to the doctors, and he made no move toward the chair. He assumed an expression of anxious concern. “Is there anything I can help you with, Dr. George?” he said.
The doctor tapped his pen against the ledger. “It’s just that I’ve been thinking, you know. Twelve dollars a month for train fare, for you to go and see your wife.”
“And child,” said Grandison, keeping his voice steady.
“Yes, of course. Well, I was thinking about it, and I’ll have to talk it over with the rest of the faculty—”
I could take a second job, he was thinking. Maybe earn the money for train fare myself . . .
But Dr. George said, “I shall persuade them to purchase your family.”
It took him a moment to sort out the words, so contrary were they to the ones he had anticipated. He had to bite back the protests that had risen in his throat. “Buy Rachel and George?”
The doctor smiled. “Oh, yes. I shall explain that we could save enough money in train fare to justify the purchase price within a few years. It does make fiscal sense. Besides, I have lately come to realize how much you must miss them.”
Grandison turned these words over in his mind. If one of the cadavers had got up from the dissecting table and walked away, he could not have been more surprised. He never mentioned his wife and son except to respond with a vague pleasantry on the rare occasion that someone asked after them. Why had the doctor suddenly taken this charitable notion? Why not when the baby was first born? Dr. George was a kind man, in an absent-minded sort of way, but he hardly noticed his own feelings, let alone anybody else’s. Grandison stood with his back to the door, the smile still frozen to his lips, wondering what had come over the man.
George Newton rubbed his forehead and sighed. He started to speak, and then shook his head. He began again, “It may be a few months before we can find the money, mind you. It should take about thirteen hundred dollars to buy both your wife and son. That should do it, surely. I’ll write to your wife’s mistress in Charleston to negotiate the purchase.”
Grandison nodded. “Thank you,” he whispered. The joy would come later, when the news had sunk in. Just now he was still wondering what had come over Dr. George.
______
“I’m going to be moving out one of these days,” he told Alethea Taylor that night after supper.
She sat in her straight-backed chair closest to the lamp, embroidering a baby dress. “You’ll be needing to find a place for your family to live,” she said, still intent upon her work.
He laughed. “The world can’t keep nothing from you, Miz Taylor. Dr. George told you?”
“Fanny told me.” She set the baby dress down on the lamp table, and wiped her eyes. “She’s been after George to bring them here, and he promised he would see to it.”
“I wondered what put it into his head. Saying he was going to buy them, right out of the blue, without me saying a word about it. I can’t make out what’s come over him.”
She made no reply, but her frown deepened as she went on with her sewing.
“I don’t suppose you know what this is all about?”
She wiped her eyes on the hem of the cloth. “Yes. I know. I may as well tell you. Dr. George and Fanny are—well, man and wife, I would say, though the state of Georgia won’t countenance it. Fanny has a baby coming soon.”
He was silent for a bit, thinking out what to say. Dr. George was in his forties, and looked every minute of it. Fanny was a slender and beautiful sixteen. He knew how it would sound to a stranger, but he had known Dr. George five years now, and for all the physician’s wealth and prominence, he couldn’t help seeing him as a gray-haired mole, peering out at the world from his book-lined burrow, while the graceful Fanny seemed equal to anything. He knew—he knew—of light-skinned women forced to become their owners’ mistresses, but Fanny was free, and besides he couldn’t see her mother allowing such a thing to happen. Miss Alethea did not have all the rights of a white woman, though you’d take her for one to look at her, but still, there were some laws to protect free people of color. Through her dress-making business, Miss Alethea had enough friends among her lady clientele that if she’d asked, some lady’s lawyer husband would have intervened. The white ladies hated the idea of their menfolk taking colored mistresses, and they’d jump at the chance to put a stop to it. Someone would have been outraged by such a tale, and they would have been eager to save Miss Alethea’s young daughter from a wicked seducer. But . . . Dr. George? He couldn’t see it. Why, for all his coolness in cutting up the dead, when it came to dealing with live folks, Dr. George wouldn’t say boo to a goose.
“He didn’t . . . force her?” he asked, looking away as he said it. But when he looked back and saw Miss Alethea’s expression, his lips twitched, and then they both began to laugh in spite of it all.
Miss Alethea shook her head. “Force? Dr. George? Oh, my. I can’t even think it was his idea, Mr. Harris. You know how he is.”
“Well, is Miss Fanny happy?” he said at last.
“Humph. Sixteen years old and a rich white doctor thinks she hung the moon. What do you think?” She sighed. “When a man falls in love for the first time when he’s past forty, it hits him hard. Seems like he’s taken leave of his senses.”
“Oh. Well,” he cast about for some word of comfort, and settled on, “I won’t tell anybody.”
She stabbed her needle at the cloth. “Shout it from the rooftops if you feel like it, Mr. Harris. It’s not as if they’re keeping it a secret. He wants to marry her.”
He smiled. “Anybody would, Miss Alethea. Mary Frances is a beautiful girl.”
“You misunderstand, Mr. Harris. I’m saying that he means to marry her.”
“And stay here? And let folks know about it?”
She nodded. “I’m saying. Live as man and wife, right there on Greene Street.”
Now he realized why George Newton had suddenly understood the pain of his separation from Rachel, but he felt that the doctor’s newfound wisdom had come at the price of folly. St. Paul’s seeing the light on the road to Damascus might have been a blessed miracle, but Dr. George’s light was more likely to be a thunderbolt. “He can’t do that,” he said. “Set her up as his wife.”
“Not without losing his position he can’t.” The needle stabbed again. “Don’t you think I’ve told them that?”
“And what did he say?”
“He’s going to resign from the medical school, that’s what. Says he has money enough. Going to continue his work in a laboratory at home. Huh!” She shook her head at the folly of it.
He thought about it. Perhaps in Charleston such a thing might work. Down in the islands, certainly. Martinique. Everybody knew that the French . . . But here?
“I even asked him, Mr. Harris, I said straight out, Do you remember Richard Mentor Johnson?” His expression told her that he did not remember, either. But she did. “Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky. He was the vice president of the United States, back when I was a girl. Under President Van Buren. Folks said that he had killed the Indian chief Tecumseh, which they thought made him a hero. But then he had also married a woman of color, and when word of that got out, they tried to run him out of office on account of it. When his first term was over, he gave up and went home to Kentucky. And, do you know, Mr. Johnson’s wife wasn’t even alive by that time. She had died before he ever went to Washington to be vice president. Just the memory of her was enough to ruin him. Now, how well does Dr. George think he will fare in Georgia with a live colored wife in his house?”
“But Miss Fanny�
�to look at her—”
“I know. She’s whiter to look at than some of the doctors’ wives, but that makes no difference. This is a small town, Mr. Harris. Everybody knows everybody. Fanny can’t pass in Augusta, and they both say they’ve no mind to go elsewhere.”
He thought he had made all the proper expressions of sympathy and commiseration, but he was thinking just as much about the effect that Dr. George’s folly would have on him. Would this change of heart mean no more robbing Cedar Grove? Or in his madness would the doctor insist on obtaining an equal number of bodies from the white burying ground? Equality was a fine thing, but not if it got him hanged by a white lynch mob.
He swept the upstairs hall four times that morning, waiting for Dr. George to be alone in his office. Finally the last visitor left, and he tapped on the door quickly before anyone else could turn up. “Excuse me, Dr. George. We’re getting low on supplies for the anatomy classes,” he said.
He always said “supplies” instead of “bodies” even when they were alone, just in case anyone happened to overhear.
Dr. George gave him a puzzled frown. “Supplies? Oh—oh, I see. Not filled our quota yet? Well, are there any fresh ones to be had?”
“A burying today,” he said. “Little boy fell off a barn roof. I just wondered if you wanted me to take him.”
“Yes, I suppose so. He’s needed. Though we could use a yellow fever victim if you hear of one. Must teach the Southern diseases, you know. Medical schools up north don’t know a thing about them.” Dr. George looked up. “Why did you ask about this boy in particular? Do you know him?”
That didn’t matter. He had known them all for years now. Some he minded about more than others, but all of them had long ceased to be merely lumps of clay in his hands. “It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t mind bringing him in. I just wondered what you wanted me to do, and if there’s to be a new dean—”
The doctor leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Yes, I see, Grandison. You have heard.”
“Yes.”
“It’s true that I am resigning the post of dean. I felt that it was better for the college if I did so.” He picked up a sheaf of papers from his desk and held it out with a bemused smile. “But it seems that I shall be staying on as Emeritus Professor of Anatomy, after all. This is a petition, signed by all of the students and faculty, asking that I stay. And the Board of Trustees has acceded to their request.”
“Do they know?”
“About Fanny? They do. They profess not to care. I suppose when one is a doctor, one sees how little difference there really is between the races. Just a thin layer of skin, that’s all, and then it’s all the same underneath. Whatever the reason, they insist that I stay on in some capacity, and I shall.”
“So nothing will change? For me, I mean?”
George Newton shook his head. “We still must have bodies, and the only safe place to obtain them is from Cedar Grove. That has not changed. And I fancy that I shall still have enough influence to bring your family to Augusta. I do not intend to shirk my duty, so you may go and see to yours.”
______
Madison Newton was born on the last day of February, red-faced, fair-haired, and hazel-eyed, looking like a squashed cabbage leaf, but a white one, after all.
“It’s a fine baby,” he had said to Fanny, when she brought the baby to her mother’s house on a mild day in March.
Fanny switched the blanket back into place, so that only the infant’s nose peeped out. “People only want to look at him to see what color he is,” she said. “What do they expect? He had sixteen great-great grandparents, same as everybody, and only one of them was colored. All the rest of him from then on down is white. Of course, that doesn’t change what he is to most folks’ way of thinking.”
He had kept smiling and said the plain truth: that the infant was a fortunate child, but he had been angry, and his annoyance had not left him. That night in Cedar Grove in a fine mist of rain, he dug as if he could inflict an injury upon the earth itself. “I reckon Miss Fanny is whiter in her head than she is on her face,” he said to the darkness, thrusting the shovel deep into the ground. “Feeling sorry for a light-eyed baby born free, his daddy a rich white doctor. I guess pretty Miss Fanny wants the moon, even when it’s raining.”
He spared hardly a thought for the man in the box below. Some drunken laborer from the docks, hit too hard over the head in a brawl. He had even forgotten the name. An easy task tonight. No shells or flowers decorated this grave site. The dead man had been shunted into the ground without grief or ceremony. Just as well take him to the doctors, where he could do some good for once. His thoughts returned to his grievance. Spoiled Miss Fanny had never given a thought to his baby when she was complaining about her own son’s lot in life. How would she have liked to be Rachel—separated from her husband, and left to raise a child without him, knowing that at any time old missus might take a notion to sell that child, and nothing could be done to stop it.
He brushed the dirt from the pine box, and stove in the lid with his shovel point. Miss Fanny Taylor didn’t know what trouble was, complaining about—
A sound.
Something like a moan, coming from inside the smashed coffin. He forgot about Fanny and her baby, as he knelt in the loose dirt of the open grave, pressing his ear close to the lid of the box. He held his breath, straining to hear a repetition of the sound. In the stillness, with all his thoughts focused on the dark opening before him, he realized that something else was wrong with the grave site. The smell was wrong. The sickly sweet smell of newly decaying flesh should have been coming from the box, but it wasn’t. Neither was the stench of voided bowels, the last letting-go of the dead. All he smelled was rotgut whiskey.
He gripped the corpse under the armpits and pulled it out of the grave, but instead of sacking it up, he laid the body out on the damp grass. It groaned.
He had heard such sounds from a corpse before. The first time it happened, he had been unloading a sack from the wagon into the store room at the medical college. He had dropped the sack and gone running to Dr. George, shouting that the deader from the burying ground had come back to life.
George Newton had smiled for an instant, but without a word of argument, he’d followed the porter back to the store room and examined the sacked-up body. He had felt the wrist and neck for a pulse, and even leaned into the dead face to check for breath, but Grandison could tell from his calm and deliberate movements that he knew what he would find. “The subject is dead,” he said, standing up, and brushing traces of dirt from his trousers.
“It just died then. I heard it moan.”
Dr. George smiled gently. “Yes, I believe you did, Grandison, but it was dead all the same.”
“A ghost then?”
“No. Merely a natural process. When the body dies, there is still air trapped within the lungs. Sometimes when that air leaves the lungs it makes a moaning sound. Terrifying, I know. I heard it once myself in my student days, but it is only a remnant of life, not life itself. This poor soul has been dead at least a day.”
He never forgot that sound, though in all the bodies that had passed through his hands on the way to the dissecting table, he had never heard it since.
The sound coming now from the man stretched out on the grass was different. And it changed—low and rumbling at first, and then louder. He knelt beside the groaning man and shook his shoulder.
“Hey!” he said. “Hey, now—” His voice was hoarse and unnaturally loud in the still darkness of Cedar Grove. What can you say to a dead man?
The groan changed to a cough, and then the man rolled over and vomited into the mound of spaded earth.
He sighed, and edged away a few feet. He had seen worse. Smelled worse. But finding a live body in the graveyard complicated matters. He sat quietly, turning the possibilities over in his mind, until the retching turned to sobbing.
“You’re all right,” he said, without turning around.
“This is
the graveyard. Badger Benson done killed me?”
“I guess he tried. But you woke up. Who are you, anyhow?”
“I was fixing to ask you that. How did you come to find me down in the ground? You don’t look like no angel.”
He smiled. “Might be yours, though. You slave or free, boy?”
“Belong to Mr. Johnson. Work on his boat.”
“Thought so. Well, you want to go back to Mr. Johnson, do you?”
The man stretched and kicked his legs, stiff from his interment. “I dunno,” he said. “Why you ask me that?”
“ ‘Cause you were dead, boy, as far as anybody knows. They buried you this morning. Now if you was to go back to your master, there’d be people asking me questions about how I come to find you, and they’d take you back to Johnson’s, and you’d still be a slave, and like as not I’d be in trouble for digging you up. But if you just lit out of here and never came back, why nobody would ever even know you were gone and that this grave was empty. You’re dead. You don’t let ’em find out any different, and they’ll never even know to hunt for you.”
The man rubbed the bruise on the back of his head. “Now how did you come to find me?”
Grandison stood up and retrieved the shovel. “This is where the medical school gets the bodies to cut up for the surgery classes. The doctors at the college were fixing to rip you open. And they still can, I reckon, unless you light out of here. Now, you tell me, boy, do you want to be dead again?”
The young man raised a hand as if to ward off a blow. “No. No!—I understand you right enough. I got to get gone.”
“And you don’t go back for nothing. You don’t tell nobody goodbye. You are dead, and you leave it at that.”
The young man stood up and took a few tentative steps on still unsteady legs. “Where do I go then?”