The Resurrectionist Page 3

  As the laughter subsided, Johnston strode across the room to a closed door adjacent to the slate board. “First things first, however. Today you embark on the road of dissection—this morning, this very hour. Your course of study begins in the room beyond, our dissection room, where you will first taste the exquisite elixir, the sublime experience, of gross anatomy.” As he expected, the students were on the edge of the benches now. With a sweep of his arm, Johnston threw open the door.

  If the third class of the Carolina College had been bracing for their first sight of a human cadaver, they were soon either sorely disappointed or vastly relieved. What greeted them in the next room was the sight of a half-dozen slate tables on which had been arranged the bodies of as many dead goats. Some lay on their sides, staring out toward the lecture hall with glassy eyes, but most, already stiffened from the embalming process, lay on their backs, short horns against the slate, little hooves pointing to the ceiling.

  Johnston could almost feel the silence behind him. “We begin with small mammals,” he said under his breath, then, turning to face the students, he cried, “Gentlemen, to the goats!”

  TWO HOURS LATER the faculty was again convened. Despite Johnston’s efforts, two of the incoming class had stomped out of the dissecting room within minutes of making the first cut on their animals, muttering about dental school. Four others had followed, leaving him half his original enrollment. Worse still, the last defectors had thought to ask for a refund of their tuition, which Johnston reluctantly granted. Now he was embroiled in the first heated faculty meeting of the year—on the first day of the semester.

  “Gentlemen,” Evans was saying, “this day’s debacle has convinced me that small mammals simply will not do for a proper anatomy course.”

  Ballard, the new man from Boston, sniffed. “I must say, I had no idea conditions were so primitive in the South.”

  “We are not alone in using animals for the anatomy course,” Winston said. “Mississippi has used pigs for years.”

  “Cats in Chattanooga, I have heard.”

  “Chattanooga is a third-rate diploma mill, Stanton.”

  “Which places us in the second tier, I suppose?”

  Ballard’s voice rose above the others in his clipped Yankee accent. “At some point these boys will be turned loose on bipedal mammals. We must have cadavers. Human cadavers.”

  “And how will you get them?” Stanton said between puffs on his meerschaum. “Mister Ballard, you may be too recently arrived to be aware of the fact, but the South Carolina legislature made human dissection illegal years ago.”

  “It is true, Ballard,” Evans said. “A lamentable fact, but we are limited by law to executed convicts and deceased slaves. I provide what I can from the colored hospital, but that procurement is difficult work. There is the matter of discretion, and this is not a large town.”

  The room fell silent for a moment. Then Johnston spoke for the first time.

  “Today’s misfortunes lie entirely at my feet, gentlemen. We have had a run of bad luck with the unseasonably cool July and August. In a normal year we could expect two or three fresh cadavers from malaria or sunstroke, but Doctor Evans’s charges have been few, and as of late, fatalities nil. We’ve fared no better with dead hands from the plantations out of town. I hazarded on the goats, and lost. Although I maintain that a lower mammal is perfectly sufficient for limited instruction, our students quite clearly think otherwise.”

  Ballard drummed his fingers on the table. “What about the Scottish way?”

  Evans snorted. “These boys? They come here to put an end to physical labor, digging included.”

  But Ballard would not be dissuaded. “Edinburgh as recently as the twenties required each student to procure his own cadaver—it was viewed as a sort of rite of passage. Each man brought his own Gray’s and his own body to the course.”

  “And you, in Boston? Did you?”

  “I would have, had it been required.”

  “Our boys would revolt at the idea.”

  “What about a Negro?” Winston said in his quiet voice. “I mention it because we seem to be at an impasse on the issue of the labor of the thing. I too doubt the boys would find the task agreeable, nor can I imagine any of ourselves doing the work. But a boy procured for the purpose —”

  Evans laughed. “Bully for you, Winston! A nigger body snatcher! An African sack-’em-up man!”

  “I want no part of my own remuneration sacrificed to buy a slave,” Ballard said. “Entirely too much expense.”

  “Expensive, no doubt,” Winston said, “but also a permanent solution. Our present trouble would be resolved in perpetuity.”

  “A boy fit to do the work of cadaver procurement could cost a thousand dollars.”

  “True,” Johnston said, and the others turned to look at him. “Goats are cheaper. But we also lost half of our student body this morning. Their tuition money followed them. I think Winston’s proposal is valid. These are desperate times, and may require desperate measures.”

  “So we will recruit again,” Stanton said, shaking his head. “No one has been across the river in a year or more, nor to the coast. Simply recruit as we have done, I say, and the cost-to-profit ratio will remain in our favor.”

  “You know well that Chapman’s running a school in Charleston that offers the degree in six months,” Evans said. “We cannot compete with him. And Georgia . . .” He trailed off, as though Georgia were beyond explanation. “Perhaps this cuffy could also serve as a kind of manservant, or as janitor for the school. Would that not improve your ratio?”

  “It might. A butler for functions would enhance our profile in the community.”

  “I saw a notice yesterday of an estate auction near Camden,” Winston said. “Rock Meade Plantation, a total loss after the fire. There will be upwards of two hundred slaves on the block.”

  Johnston cleared his throat. “Colleagues, if we move to proceed on this proposal, no vulgar display at auction will be necessary. I had a wire not an hour ago from All Saints Parish, Windsor Plantation. An old friend of mine with whom some of you have acquaintance, Robert Drake, has lately had a rough encounter with a fox trap and requests my attentions immediately. He owns four or five hundred hands and may be able to spare a boy for a reasonable amount.”

  Stanton laughed and twisted his fingers into his beard. “Ah, Johnston,” he said, “you are always a step or two ahead of the game. What dealings do you have in mind at Windsor?”

  “Drake’s telegraph mentioned gangrene. He may find himself increasingly amenable to a fair transaction.”

  “At Camden they will be selling some by the pound,” Winston said worriedly. “The notice said as much.”

  “If the faculty will vote their trust in me, I will bring back someone ideal for the job, whether priced by the pound or in a round figure. We yet have some credit remaining with the Columbia Bank.”

  Stanton relit his pipe, smoke clouding his face. “All right, then, damn it. I had my heart set on a new barouche for the springtime, but I suppose it can wait another year. I stand with Johnston and move to vote. Any further discussion, gentlemen?”

  A second motion was made for a vote, and Johnston emerged victorious. He would leave for Windsor in the morning in the school’s two-horse phaeton, to see what could be done about bringing back in it a school slave.

  THE SANDY ROAD wound through the outskirts of All Saints Parish under cypress and live oak that hung low enough to form a cavern of branches over the white lane. The sun, so fierce elsewhere, was here subdued, filtered through the millions of dense small leaves so that the road at midmorning seemed steeped in twilight. Crickets chirred in the shadows, a soft counterpoint to the hissing of the wagon wheels in the sand and the muted plod of the horses’ hooves out front of the phaeton.

  On the bench, Johnston slept. In one hand he held a volume of Cicero, a finger marking the place where he had acceded to sleep. He held the reins loosely in the other. His head nodded in time wit
h the bobbing of the horses’ manes. Like any good country doctor, he could ride for an hour or two at a stretch like this, letting the pair of animals yoked in front carry him to whatever house call awaited at whatever distant hamlet and back again. And like most of those country doctors, he had known the bemused dislocation of waking before a strange tavern or commissary, the sonorous motion of wheels replaced by the sound of his mares lapping at the trough out front, only to find that he had a mile—or two or three—to retrace back to some crossroads where his equine pilots had taken the wrong fork in the road. But for now he slept in the soft doze of the low-country afternoon.

  The phaeton rounded a bend and the road split before it, a hand-painted sign adorned with the legend windsor pointing to the left. The horses tugged right.

  Presently the branches overhead began to thin and the soft undulating sound of flowing water ahead hastened the animals’ steps. The wagon dipped into a small hollow and rose on the other side to a low bluff a hundred yards from the Waccamaw River. The horses stopped and snorted, nostrils flaring as a breeze off the river brought to them the coppery scent of blood.

  Johnston opened his eyes slowly, expecting to see before him the inspiring grace of Windsor’s twelve-columned façade. What he saw instead was an imposing structure of a different sort: a hard-weathered lodge propped ten feet above the marsh ground on stilts of cypress trunks, a set of bowed plank steps leading up to a high porch that bristled with the antlers of perhaps three dozen whitetail bucks. They were nailed to the wall beneath the gabled roof as densely as the clapboard wall could accommodate them, from twelve-pointers down to spikes, so that the front of the old building looked to his sleep-clouded eyes like either a wall of outsized thorns or the many-tined skeleton of a prehistoric beast.

  “Hallo there, master!” a voice called. “Good day, sir!”

  The greeting was robust, but when Johnston’s eyes separated the man who issued it from the shadowy space beneath the lodge, the greeter seemed markedly less than glad for the company. A slave nearly six feet tall stepped from the shadows, wiping a blood-smeared knife on his trouser leg. Behind him hung the carcass of a fat doe hamstrung on two hooks fixed to the lodge floor above. He slipped the knife into his pocket and shrugged his shoulders. Johnston smiled.

  “Ah, me. I am not so lost as I feared I might be. If I know my man, you are Drake’s Cudjo, head huntsman of Windsor and guide extraordinaire. Am I mistaken?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And that fine specimen of venison behind you would be one of your master’s prime herd, taken—let me think—a good two weeks before Windsor’s season begins. Again, am I mistaken?”

  “Again, sir, you ain’t.”

  Johnston slipped down from the phaeton seat like a man ten years younger. “Cudjo, you are still a boy with appetites beyond the limits of his master’s beneficence. But I must say I am pleased to see you nonetheless.” He stepped to the carcass and felt of it, glanced into the tub set below to catch the entrails. “Still warm, Cudjo.”

  “Yes, sir. She was a pretty thing.”

  “I’d guess her weight at a hundred and twenty.”

  “No more than hundred, hundred and ten, master, this back say. I can’t lie, Doctor Johnston. She was a pitiful sight, caught up in the worm fence a half mile down the river. When I saw her neck was nearly broke, there weren’t much else to do.”

  Johnston held up a hand. “You may as well save that for Mister Drake. Carry on,” he said, and sat down on a section of log. He had always held Cudjo’s skill at dressing deer in the highest esteem and had watched him each year cleaning the gentlemen’s kills with a regard bordering on envy. Put him in another country, perhaps in another era, Johnston would tell his friends over their evening whiskeys, and Cudjo could have stood with the most senior of Johns Hopkins surgeons in an operating theater. Not in this country, they would say, laughing, and sure as hell not in my era.

  After a moment of Cudjo’s shuffling, the knife reappeared and continued slicing against the hide, shearing it from the crimson muscle as precisely and smoothly as though it were working through butter rather than tissue. As he had always done—and as none of the other skinners bothered to attempt—Cudjo cut the fat from the muscle as he went, long ribbons of the pearl-like material falling to the tub in gossamer sheets. Johnston realized that the slave had been talking for several moments as he worked, his voice as raspy as the blade on the hide, hints of Senegal in the cadences and lilt of his words.

  “Shame, shame about him. Say it ain’t getting but worse. Say he ain’t left the house in a week.”

  “Drake? Drake will be better on the morrow, I assure you. There will be adjustments, to be sure. Perhaps no hunting for him this season.”

  “Say they had to open the windows on his study, even with the mosquitoes so bad, on account of the smell.”

  “That is the nature of gangrene.”

  “He going to lose the foot?”

  “Impossible to say without a proper diagnosis, of course. It’s likely. Say, may I take a look at your knife there?”

  Cudjo halted his methodical work and wiped the blade on his trousers before handing it over heel-first.

  “Extraordinary,” Johnston said, balancing the blade across his fingers. “What manner of knife is this? The heft is nearly perfect.” He scraped the blade against his forearm and sheared more hair than he had intended.

  Cudjo chuckled, the sound like wind in corn husks. “Ain’t nothing but an old butter knife, sir. Took the emery wheel to it. See, your old hunting knife got too much shaft to it, don’t bend. Butter knife’ll ground down thin, so she’ll bend. Little flex in the blade makes the cutting easier.”

  Like a scalpel, Johnston thought. But with an extra three inches of cutting edge and a tang strong enough for it to double as a tendon blade. He handed it back to Cudjo and nodded toward the deer. “You’re nearly finished here, are you not?”

  “Yes, sir. She just ready for the smokehouse now.”

  “Well, put her in, then. I will wait for you in the phaeton.”

  Cudjo stared at the doctor blankly. “You aim to turn me in?”

  Johnston turned on his heel. “I’ve never answered questions put to me by a slave, Cudjo, and don’t intend to begin now.” He stopped a few steps short of the carriage. “You can handle a two-in-hand, can’t you?”

  The slave had the doe over his shoulder, but he turned to face Johnston before he spoke. “I can, sir, and a four-in-hand just as well.”

  “Very well. Put the venison in the smokehouse and then you shall drive me to Windsor, where no person shall be turned in for alleged deeds I did not witness.” Johnston climbed into the phaeton’s passenger seat and shut the little door. “And Cudjo, make sure to bring that knife of yours.”

  “Yes, sir!” the slave said, moving more briskly now.

  “We shall retrieve the venison on our way out of the parish this evening,” Johnston said, though he knew that Cudjo, enveloped in the smoldering smokehouse now, was beyond the range of his voice.

  DRAKE’S LIBRARY AT Windsor was paneled in English walnut, wood imported on the same ship that had brought the pewter chandelier hanging above the shelves of leather-bound classics that reached to the twelve-foot ceilings. Johnston noted that the books were ordered in the meticulous manner of an owner who never bothered to read them. Drake, he knew, was not a man for poetry or essays—not a man for books of any kind, in fact, that were not ledgers or accounts; he had probably never delved further into his library than to glance at the engraved frontispiece of Scott’s Ivanhoe. These books, like the library itself, were but part of the grand image of the planter-scholar so beloved in the low country—a creature as rare in Johnston’s experience as the fabled albino alligator of the Waccamaw Swamp.

  Whatever kind of man Drake was or purported to be, he was at present a man in considerable discomfort. His face was drawn, his eyes hollowed, his neckerchief soaked with the acrid sweat of sickness. He sat in a leather armchair by
the fireplace, a half-empty decanter of bourbon beside him and a glass in his hand. Propped on an ottoman in front of him was the gangrenous left foot. A blind man could have located it by the olfactory sense alone, Johnston thought. It was well that Drake had not waited another day to send for him. The big toe had already swollen and blackened around the raw cut. It turned a bruised green at its root, then shaded into yellow at the sole, with crimson runners of infection stretching across the arch of the foot. Drake’s houseman, Caesar, stood behind the chair, slowly fanning the air with a palmetto branch. He looked rather green himself.

  “Don’t get up, Robert,” Johnston said with a faint smile as he set his bag on the floor.

  “Goddamn it, you know I couldn’t if I wanted to. I can’t bear to put any weight on it. Every time Caesar gets close to it, I flinch. I can feel the air on it, Johnston, like a pressure.”

  Johnston traced the tip of his finger down the arch of the foot. Drake groaned and sipped from his glass.

  “We will attend to it this morning. Caesar, all the windows shut directly, if you please. It will not do to operate with the swamp miasma permeating the room.”

  At the mention of operation, Drake motioned for more whiskey. Caesar filled his glass and began lowering the windows in their casements.

  “You mentioned a fox trap in your telegraph,” Johnston said. “I’m grateful it did not catch you at the ankle.”

  “That goddamned Cudjo has set them out all over the place. It would have caught me, by God, but I was just dismounting when it sprang. He sets them with a hair trigger.”

  “A most enterprising boy, he is. I met him on the road.”

  Drake grunted. “That figures. His task this morning was to go down by the shore to see to the crab traps. Never where he should be. Look for him south, he’s north. Look east, and he’s west.”