Jacob watches him as his eyes cut from the poster to the people gathered on the lawn. “And I decided not to write that letter,” he says. “I don’t think I really need to. But it’s your call, Jim. Say the word and I’ll turn this board around.”
“You touch it and I’ll tear it to pieces.”
“No harm,” Jacob says. “I’ve got another copy of that picture sitting in a fax machine across town. And right beside it is a list of the fax numbers for everybody here.” He pulls his cell phone out from his pants pocket just enough for Jim to get a good look at it. “Want me to make the call?”
“You’re finished, you fucking runt.”
Jacob only smiles back harder and throws an arm around the dean’s shoulder. “I’m just waking up, Jim. I’ve got a feeling you are too. Smile for the people.” With his arm around McMichaels, he steers them both back to the podium.
“I spoke a moment ago about official recognition,” Jacob says, “and Dean McMichaels is here to make good on that promise.” With his free hand, Jacob reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out the check he has carried since Thursday. He holds it up high, thinking that although it is beginning to show some wear, it should photograph well enough. “I have a check here from the dean’s own discretionary fund in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars. It is made out jointly to the Reverend Marcus Greer and Professor David Sanburn, pro tempore custodians of the Nemo Johnston Historical Fund, for the express purpose of underwriting the first annual symposium on slavery and antebellum medicine at the South Carolina Medical College.”
The applause from the Ebenezer congregation is deafening as Jacob holds the check aloft. One of the photographers says something to McMichaels, and the dean nods as absently as a sleepwalker, raises his own hand to the check, and clutches a corner of it weakly between his thumb and forefinger. Beneath the clapping, Jacob can hear the cameras still snapping, recording it all for posterity, and he smiles for them with an intensity he has not felt in years.
He turns to McMichaels and sees such a deep malevolence in the dean’s eyes that he cannot help speaking again, shouting over the noise to be heard. “This is the first installment of the dean’s pledge of two hundred thousand dollars to this project,” he says, making up the numbers as he goes and hoping they sound about right, “which we hope will culminate in a museum dedicated to Nemo Johnston and bearing his name.”
The applause turns into cheers, waves of sound coming up the steps and over the podium. Jacob sees McMichaels’s arm beginning to falter. He lowers the check and presses it into the dean’s hands, which are trembling now, then moves aside for the dean to take the podium. When McMichaels steps up to it, he seems to be leaning on it for support, his throat working as the applause slowly tapers.
Jacob is beginning to move down the stone steps of Johnston Hall when McMichaels clears his throat and starts in on his standard thumbnail history of the school—pure autopilot. This speech is not going to be one of his best. After just a few sentences, sure enough, McMichaels begins to falter.
Jacob pauses on the steps. “Foundations, Jim,” he says to help him. “All the way down.”
As the dean resumes the halting speech, Jacob turns and starts to walk across the grass, the voice behind him growing fainter with every step. He can see Kaye across the lawn, see that she has stood up now and is coming to meet him. There are tears in her eyes, but she is smiling as she moves through the bands of sunlight that drop through the old oaks.
When he reaches her he will hold her for a long time, he thinks. Then he will take her hand—small and fine and pulsing with life—in his, and as they walk away from the campus they will talk of new plans for other paths, elsewhere.
But for now there is time simply to walk on the soft grass and watch her come toward him through the green-dappled sunlight; time enough to feel it all, from the great blue dome of the sky to the whispering earth beneath his feet, knowing that all of it—everything—is alive.
Fernyear: 1875
THE SOUND OF VOICES CAME TO him first, voices pitched keen with the energy of morning and the promise of the day ahead. Then, in the distance, the piercing cries of seabirds, and beneath them the sound of water lapping against the wood of docks and hulls. For a long time he lay on his back with his eyes closed and listened, trying to hear it all. He reached out a hand to the sleeping form of Amy beside him and let his palm rest on her belly, feeling its warmth in the sheets as it rose and fell with her peaceful breathing.
He opened his eyes. Morning light had crept through the muslin drapes and shot muted rays across the room. Once again dawn had come and he had slept through it, this luxury becoming habit with them now as each year the hard labor of Carolina receded further into the benighted past.
The baby too was sleeping in. Nemo rose, stretching to his full height, and stepped over to the bassinet. He grinned down at his firstborn, come late to him and welcomed twice as heartily for it. One child given to this fifty-odd-year-old ex-slave, and a son: Cudjo.
He walked to the tall windows and parted the drapes a few inches, breathing in the warm salt air as it drifted into the room. Below him, Kingston stretched out like a quilt patched together from a thousand rooftops, honeycombed with roads that widened as they neared the water. Down in the harbor hundreds of sails, bone-white in the morning sunlight, bobbed at the docks. A dozen more traversed the water farther out, their pale canvas dipping and rising on the ocean waves, coming and going as they pleased.
He loved these mornings, the quiet that was not quiet, the lull that was filled with early activity. Below him he could hear Maria as she unlocked the front door of the hospital and propped it open with the crate that would seat his late-arriving patients this afternoon, when the waiting room was full and the line stretched out the door. The last to come were the ones he was always most anxious to treat—the ones who, having reluctantly given up on the local healers, had decided to visit Doctor Johnston at last.
He breathed in the sea air again, deeply, then threw open the drapes to the brilliant Caribbean sunlight. He turned back to his family with his arms held out wide, his silhouette midnight black against the white light. Amy and Cudjo began to stir in their bedclothes, and his voice came loud and deep and clear: “Sleepers, awake!”
Historical Note
THE EVENTS OF THE RESURRECTIONIST ARE drawn from actual medical practice in the southern United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth.
For historical grounding I am indebted primarily to two late scholars, Abraham Flexner and Robert L. Blakely.
Abraham Flexner was a crusader for medical college reform in the early twentieth century; his report for the Carnegie Foundation, entitled Medical Education in the United States and Canada, was published in 1910. Flexner’s exposé of the schools of his era—many of them rife with charlatanry, operated without regulation for pure profit—ushered in a new era of medical reform. For sheer revelatory content, his report rivals any novelistic invention.
In 1989, the archaeologist Robert Blakely was called to the Medical College of Georgia when human remains were discovered in the earthen cellar of the campus’s oldest building during renovations. His work, aided by the cooperation of MCG authorities, culminated in the publication of Bones in the Basement: Postmortem Racism in Nineteenth-Century Medical Training (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1997). Though I have taken the liberty of changing names and locales from the scholarly account, the character of Nemo Johnston is drawn from the enigmatic biography that Bones in the Basement sketches of Grandison Harris, a slave purchased by the MCG faculty prior to the Civil War. Harris functioned as the school’s janitor, butler, and body snatcher—or resurrectionist, in the parlance of the day. With the faculty’s silent endorsement and support, Harris routinely pillaged Augusta’s African American cemetery, Cedar Grove, until his retirement in 1905. Harris died in 1911, having never divulged his activities and without facing official censure for carrying out his nocturnal duties. To
date, the location of Grandison Harris’s remains in Cedar Grove is unknown.
These are the facts, the known historical record. With them I’ve attempted to tell another kind of truth.
—M.G.
July 4, 2012
Acknowledgments
My sincere thanks to Keith Stansell, MD; Robert Bailey, PA; Shelby Bailey, RN; and the late Michael Casey, PhD, all of whom provided invaluable guidance on matters of modern medical practice and anatomy.
To my many close readers and closer friends—Kristen (first, always), Amy Bowling, Nancy Sulser, Helen Braswell, Kay Largel, Floyd Sulser, Paul Rankin, Steve Yates, Scott Sutton, and Park Ellis—thank you for always asking to see the next page; it kept them coming.
For invaluable help along the way, I am grateful to my parents, Wendell and Jane Guinn, and to Kathleen Yount, Tammy McLean, Phoebe Spencer, Taylor Batey, John Evans, Maude Schuyler Clay, Langdon Clay, Thomas Ezell, Tina Brock, Jerry Ben-Dov, Sharon Ben-Dov, and the members of the Hard Times Literary and Drinking Society.
To Alane Salierno Mason, for her astute editing and for taking a chance on my work, thank you.
And to Andre Dubus III, what words suffice? Andre—thanks for everything.
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Matthew Guinn
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Guinn, Matthew.
The resurrectionist : a novel / Matthew Guinn. — First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-393-23931-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-393-24061-0 (ebook)
1. Medical Students—Fiction. 2. Secrets—Fiction.
3. Corpse removals—Fiction. 4. African Americans—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3607.U4856R47 2013
813'.6—dc23
2013003760
ISBN 978-0-393-23931-7
ISBN 978-0-393-24061-0 (e-book)
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