The Resurrectionist Read online

  It has been nearly a year since Jacob was last on this floor. Just before McMichaels kicked off the capital campaign, he charged Jacob with putting together a photographic retrospective of the school’s physical plant through the ages. Because McMichaels would not be satisfied with photocopied images from the school history book, Jacob had had to spend a long weekend here arranging photographic duplications of the original materials. He’d realized early in the weekend that Janice Tanaka was like a terrier over forms and paperwork; he’d left the building late Sunday night reeling from her intensive supervision—as if not only the school’s documentary past but its very history were solely her domain.

  After a second’s hesitation, Janice’s face relaxes from its wary expression and she rises to greet him, a full foot shorter than Jacob, which always inclines him to stoop when they shake hands. He remembers the story that Janice’s father enlisted in the U.S. Army just prior to World War II (good timing, he has always thought) and ended up stationed at Fort Jackson, fifteen miles east of the university, where Janice was born. Janice is as American as he is, but he can never help feeling that there is some reserve of samurai in her, some native allegiance passed down in the genes, that views him as the foreigner every time they meet. And now that he has once again broached her kingdom, he supposes it is so in some way.

  “Hello, Janice.” He speaks too loudly; his voice booms out in the quiet room like a football booster’s at a tailgate party.

  “Doctor Thacker,” she says quietly, precisely. “How may I help you?”

  Jacob’s voice is lower when he speaks again. “I need some information on the administration building’s history.”

  Janice looks almost chastened. “Were the photographs not satisfactory?”

  “Oh yes, fantastic. What I’m looking for now is a little less public-oriented,” he says, thinking, Interior stuff. Subterranean, even. “This is sensitive, Janice. I’ll have to ask for your discretion on this. I’m trying to find out some background on anatomy instruction in the building. Dissection. How it was done back in the day.”

  Jacob thinks he can almost see her eyes, behind the glasses, beginning to tick off files.

  “You’ll need primarily nineteenth-century materials,” she says.

  “I hope that’s all.”

  “Yes,” she says, nodding, and moves off to a wall of file drawers and begins pulling one out. It requires a bit of a heave from her; the drawer finally trundles out a yard or more, revealing a neat row of folders that he is certain are arranged with meticulous precision. He takes a seat at one of the oak tables set perpendicular to the filing cabinets, opens his portfolio, and flips until he reaches a blank sheet.

  Janice returns with a handful of manila folders and sets them on the table. He glances at the label on the first of them—1850s: Curricula—and opens it. It contains mostly administrative minutiae, course syllabi and enrollment records, grade reports and a small sheaf of recorded minutes from faculty meetings, set down in a flowing hand in ink that seems well along in the process of fading from the paper.

  He sets it aside and looks up to see Janice standing at his shoulder, frowning down at the folders and his hands on them. From her own hand dangles a pair of white cotton gloves. She holds them out to him.

  “Please put them on,” she says. “To preserve the documents.”

  Jacob pulls the white cotton, thin but pristinely clean, over his hands as Janice makes her way back into the stacks of cabinets. The second file, labeled Misc., seems more promising. He finds in it first a newspaper clipping advertising the school in the September 18, 1858, edition of the South Carolinian. It touts Dr. Frederick Augustus Johnston’s name boldly at the top and in heavy typeface promises “Income Potential and Expeditious Advancement.” Not the kind of recruitment currently in favor.

  As he sets it aside he finds himself staring into the face of a black man sitting for a posed portrait, a daguerreotype. The man is sitting formally erect and dignified in spite of his rather dandified getup of a paisley cravat and matching pocket square carefully arranged in the pocket of his black coat. He holds a bowler hat on his lap, and one hand is draped over the gold handle of a walking stick. His beard is neatly clipped and flecked with gray; the portrait reminds Jacob of images he has seen of Frederick Douglass, although this man is less hirsute, his eyes more distant.

  He turns the daguerreotype over. The photograph beneath it is a group portrait taken on the front steps of Johnston Hall, the same picture he has framed in his office, of the class of 1860. In the back he notes the lone black face, caught on celluloid hurrying past the group, as though trying to dodge the camera’s lens.

  He is looking back and forth between the daguerreotype and the class photo when Janice returns with a stack of slim ledgers, years printed on their spines in faded gilt. He sets a white fingertip on the black face.

  “Janice, who is this man?”

  She seems to stiffen slightly. “He was with the school for a number of years—1857 to 1866, I believe.”

  “In what capacity?”

  “His duties were rather vaguely defined,” she answers slowly. “It appears he was brought on as a general custodian. Over time he became an integral member of the staff, it seems. You’ll find his record here,” she says, and rests her small hand on the ledgers.

  “Did he have a name?”

  “Nemo Johnston.”

  “His name was Johnston?”

  “He took the name of his owner, as was the custom.”

  Jacob looks at her for a long moment before he speaks again.

  “Eighteen fifty-seven, you say.”

  “Before the war.”

  Jacob shakes his head slowly as he looks back at the daguerreotype, the group portrait. Context, he thinks. Context is everything. His skills as a diagnostician have grown rusty.

  “But why stay on? I mean after the war?”

  For answer Janice leans over and begins flipping through the other photographs in the folder, several of them showing Nemo Johnston in the anatomy lab and the other downstairs rooms of the old building. No cellar shots. There is one photograph in which he appears with his namesake in the lecture hall, Professor Johnston holding forth with a pointer in front of a skeleton, the slave and a young nurse looking on almost reverentially as Doctor Johnston addresses his students. Jacob pauses for a moment over the face of the nurse. It is turned in profile, but even so he sees that she was beautiful, with pronounced cheekbones and eyes pale and luminescent in the morning light of the lecture room. Even in black-and-white, he can see that her hair was as fair as his own.

  There is only one more photograph in the folder, and it arrests Jacob’s attention immediately. Another one taken inside Johnston Hall, he quickly determines. At the borders of the frame he can make out stark white light shining down through the tall windows of the current bursar’s office. But the men in the center of the photo seem swathed in shadow, the object on the table before the four students little more than a mass of darkness save for the bright gleaming bones the dissectors have laid bare of the ebony skin. Yet clearly no snapshot. This portrait was posed, the men dressed in dark frocks, each of them wearing a sort of Shriner’s cap on which is embossed a skull over two crossed bones. The students are grinning like hunters posed over a trophy, shoulder-to-shoulder behind the dissecting table. One of them has spread an anatomy book—probably Gray’s—across the cadaver’s pelvis and is gesturing to another who holds a scalpel. The young man at the other end of the table is smirking, his hand over the cadaver’s mouth.

  The image, despite its medical accoutrements, reminds him of photos he has seen of lynchings. Except that in front of the table, smiling like a minstrel, his dark face split by teeth bared white, kneels Nemo Johnston. The slave holds up the cadaver’s right hand—most of its fingers stripped of the flesh down to the bony knuckles—in a playful wave for the camera.

  The poor, dumb bastard. Jacob feels a stirring of disgust in his stomach. He wonders what Adam woul
d think of this, how he would interpret this photograph as any part of coming clean about the bones in the basement.

  “The Skull and Crossbones Club,” Janice says. “That photograph is probably from the 1860s. Nemo Johnston was a sort of unofficial mascot for the club in its early years.”

  “I always thought Skull and Crossbones was just a legend. People talk about it, but nobody ever claims to be a member.”

  “Isn’t that the nature of secret societies?”

  “You think it’s real?”

  Janice shrugs. “There is scattered evidence in the record of Skull and Crossbones surfacing in some years. It’s probably no more than an old boys’ club now, but the South Carolinian mentioned members trying to suppress Abraham Flexner’s report on the school at the beginning of the century.”

  “From what I know about Flexner, I can’t say I blame them.”

  “Really? His report to the Carnegie Foundation was epochal. He transformed medical education in this country.” Her eyes seem to light up talking about the man. “Abraham Flexner had a historian’s soul.”

  Jacob stares down at the grisly photograph. “God knows what he would have made of this.”

  Janice almost smiles. “I am an archivist, Doctor Thacker, which means I am a completist. What good is the historical record if it is not complete?”

  “I don’t see any good coming out of any of this, Janice. In fact, an incomplete record sounds pretty good right now.” Jacob sighs. “But I should have a file on it. Can I get copies of the photographs?”

  “You have to sign them out.”

  “But I’m not taking them anywhere.”

  Janice merely closes her eyes and shakes her head. With her eyes still closed, she reaches out to a wooden box on the table, pulls a form from it, and pushes it across the polished surface to Jacob.

  “I don’t remember this from last time.”

  “The policy has changed.”

  Jacob looks at the form. It is nearly a page long, a triplicate carbon with copies beneath the original in canary and pink. “The whole thing?”

  “The whole thing.”

  “This could take a minute,” he says, and pulls his Waterman pen from his jacket pocket.

  “Some things do,” she says.

  She waits patiently until the form is completed, then takes it and the file folders from him, back toward her desk, moving soundlessly over the carpet.

  When he picks up the first of the ledgers he can see the need for the cotton gloves. It is bound in calfskin but fragile-looking, its pages yellowed and brittle with age. He tries to hold it carefully—not an easy task for a doctor, used to handling books like the Physician’s Desk Reference and the Guide to Internal Medicine as mechanics do Chilton manuals.

  He turns the pages slowly, following the faded ink from month to month. The script is delicate and precise, perhaps the hand of F. A. Johnston himself. Some of the expenditures are truly strange. A column labeled Poultry for most years, a $300 debit in 1857 for a gelding. Another column for Anat. specimens, the amounts paid out varying enough to make Jacob think the school sometimes found itself bargain cadavers one way or another. But most of it is pedestrian stuff, what he would find in this year’s report: maintenance costs, materia medica and laboratory supplies, columns of tuition dollars brought in and salaries paid out. On the page for August he finds the purchase of Nemo Johnston, slave: the notation of an $800 loan from the Bank of Columbia, $700 of it marked down to a Robert Drake, the remaining $100 listed under Sundries. In the next year’s ledger, Nemo merited a column of his own, with his own expenses. Eighty-five dollars for a house in Rosedale, $20 per quarter for “necessities.” Telling indeed: beginning with 1858, there is no expense column for cadavers.

  Jacob rubs his eyes as he scans through the stacked, open ledgers. It seems to him that the school’s finances fluctuated wildly in the old days, a year or two of bounty followed by quarters that showed the school nearly going under. He sees that the school began to pay Nemo Johnston a small salary in 1861, well before emancipation, and that the salary rose every year. He can imagine why. Slave or not, they needed to keep him happy. And quiet.

  He flips the pages back and forth, scanning each column again. He pauses over a page in the 1864 ledger, an itemized list of the curriculum—courses taught and stipends paid to the faculty for each of them. F. A. Johnston listed as preceptor for most, a few other names for chemistry, biology, surgery. Jacob rubs his eyes, then squints at the page. Anatomy, winter quarter, 1865: N. Johnston, preceptor. Jacob smiles. Doctor Johnston may have spent too much time in the operating room that day, inhaled a little bit of ether. But as Jacob looks forward to the spring and fall quarters of the year he sees N. Johnston listed again for each of the courses: no separate stipend paid, but the ex-slave’s name put down as the instructor of record nonetheless.

  The columns and numbers are beginning to blur when Janice returns with a manila envelope holding his photocopies. He checks his watch and sees that he will be late for his two-thirty meeting with the Alumni Committee if he doesn’t leave soon. Still, he closes the last ledger, 1866, reluctantly. He hopes that in this last year’s record might be found notation of some stipend, some small retirement settlement that could be painted in the school’s favor if Nemo Johnston’s name becomes public knowledge. If it comes to that.

  Jacob taps one white finger on its leather cover. “Janice,” he says, “I’m going to need a copy of this ledger.”

  Janice picks up the book and holds it against her chest. He thinks her eyes have widened behind her glasses. “The whole thing?” she asks.

  Jacob only smiles at her as he closes his portfolio. But the smile fades as he sees his own surname on the lined pages of the ledger he just uncovered. “September 3rd, 1867,” the faded indigo reads, “S. Thacker. Dismissed. Immoral conduct.”

  PERHAPS BECAUSE THE name in the ledger will not leave his mind, perhaps because he has not crossed its threshold since Easter, or perhaps only because it is on the route back to the office, Jacob pauses at the wrought-iron gate of the Episcopal Cathedral on Gervais. He checks his watch quickly and decides he can show up for the Alumni Committee meeting a minute or two late. God knows the committee won’t be deciding anything fast.

  Once through the church’s heavy wooden doors he is immersed in the gloomy shadows of the nave. Above him Gothic arches soar to a height of three stories; his steps on the marble floor ring up toward them and echo back before they die somewhere in the side aisles. He opens one of the latched pew doors and sits, his hand lingering on the polished wood for a moment before he reaches for the kneeler and settles himself on it.

  This attitude of prayer, ingrained in childhood, has become awkward these last few years. He waits for a prayer to form itself in his mind. Instead he finds himself staring at his hands. He remembers how sometimes his father’s hand would settle on his clasped fingers during the prayers, like a secret between them, hidden from the closed eyes of the priest and their fellow parishioners. The gnarled knuckles, the thin gold wedding band, the calluses of his father’s palm nearly as rough as sandpaper on his child’s hands.

  Never in this grand place, though, not that he can recall. His family, like the other lintheads, dispensed instead to a clapboard chapel down the great hill and across the Congaree, its whitewashed modesty a relic of the real old-time mill-town days, its architecture as utilitarian as a commissary. A bit of beneficence from the mill owners—the real Episcopalians—but his father had said the Irish Catholic workers took to it easily enough.

  Immoral conduct, he thinks, wondering by what standard such was measured in those bygone days. Like Washburn? Would Jacob’s own case have merited the charge?

  Rising, he crosses himself reflexively, hoping that that gesture might count for something at least.

  As he makes his way back down the aisle he notices the votive candles flickering on the back wall of the nave. He fumbles a few bills out of his pocket as offering and lights one candle eac
h for mother, for father.

  HE IS HOME from work by five-thirty, in time to catch the local news and make certain that Washburn’s departure has gone unnoticed. In spite of himself, he would almost like to see Washburn on the broadcast, the cameras rolling as he is escorted off-campus and put into a conspicuously unmarked car, campus security loading him into the back seat as the cops do with the more mundane perpetrators. But he knows better; he has long since warmed to McMichaels’s binary view of things, in which every event can be placed in one of two categories, like columns on a balance sheet: Good for the School and Not Good for the School.

  As he shuts the door behind him he can hear Mary, his housekeeper, shuffling around in the laundry room. Mary has had a summer cold for two weeks now and is moving more slowly than usual, dragging her sandals across the tile. Oprah blares from the little television over the refrigerator as he comes into the kitchen, placing his briefcase on a barstool and skirting the ironing board she has set up in the middle of the floor. He takes a cold beer out of the refrigerator and reaches for the TV remote.

  He punches buttons on the remote until it calls up the glowing face of Sabrina O’Cannon on Channel 13. Though every renewal of her contract brings with it another morphing of her face closer to Barbie dimensions, she is still the best-looking anchor in town. He presses the mute button and keeps an eye on the screen for a graphic of the school’s seal or a live-action shot of the campus. If neither pops up before the weatherman comes on, he knows they are in the clear.

  Something is burning. Quickly he steps to the ironing board and lifts the iron laid across the back of one of his Robert Talbot shirts. He winces at the perfect brown outline it has left behind on the yellow broadcloth. At the rate she has been ruining his clothes, Mary may not be a bargain for much longer. When the façade of the Chapel Clinic appears on the screen, he sets the iron on the counter and reaches for the volume control.

  “But for allergy sufferers, fall can be nearly as torturous as the spring season,” Sabrina is saying. The screen shifts to a clinic shot inside the building, then a close-up of Ben Wheeler talking from behind his desk. Ben looks a little embarrassed as he discusses how “hay fever” is actually a misnomer and goes into a discourse on the multiple sources of allergens, which the reporter has mercifully cut short with some deft editing. It is a thirty-second piece that ends with a suggestion that allergy patients pay a visit to the specialists at Chapel: Good for the School. Jacob has forgotten that he set this interview up last week. Before he knows it, it will be early flu season and he’ll have to give Cassandra Stodghill, the ENT chair, a call.