The Resurrectionist (11 page)

J
ACOB FIDGETS THROUGH
the entire Wednesday staff meeting. He has cleaned himself up tolerably well, with a shower and shave and a charcoal suit fresh from the cleaners, and he tries to keep his hands clenched so that no one will notice the half-moons of dirt under his fingernails. But his head is still cloudy with fatigue and the lingering effects of the cheap gin, and the meeting seems to crawl through its agenda at a glacial pace. In practice he could have seen a half-dozen patients in as much time. These strange gatherings, a mix of all types from the college's spectrum of officials, have always amused him—the striking conglomerate of research scientists like Kirstin Reithoffer seated next to business officers, grabby development people trying to explain the subtleties of an “ask” to surgeons—but not today. Although he and the dean seem to be the only ones aware of it, things have changed; this meeting to discuss the school's weekly forward momentum is more pro forma than any of the others could imagine.

For the past hour McMichaels has fiddled with a glass paperweight, a gift from a local Kiwanis group, that he seems to find fascinating. Toying with it behind the huge mahogany desk, he looks like a superannuated child, just waiting for the meeting to grind to a halt. “Anything else?” he asks, squinting at the refraction of light through the milky glass.

Jacob glances down at his planner. Its agenda seems like the material of a fairy tale to him now, none of it significant. “The alumni magazine,” he says. “We still haven't selected anyone for the cover.”

“You send me a memo on that, Jake?”

“Sure. Week or so ago.”

“Elizabeth.” McMichaels sighs, as though his secretary's name alone were explanation for the sheaves of papers he has misplaced over the years. He sets the paperweight down on the desktop gently. “What about Branson Hodges? When was his last contribution?”

In the back of the room, Bennett rifles through a stack of papers. “Uh, '84, sir. Alumni annual fund.”

The dean snorts. “Tightwad. Yup, put Hodges on the cover. Class of '82. He's got the biggest plastic surgery practice in Savannah. And still single. He's capable of a big damned gift. Put Hodges on the cover and see what he coughs up. Are we through here?”

Jacob checks his notepad. “That does it.”

The dean nods all around, and the suits and white coats leave the table. “Good. I'm due on the fairway in fifteen minutes.” He shucks his arms out of his suit jacket and hangs it on the coat tree behind his desk. “Jake, make sure your photographer gets a good shot of old Hodges. Lighting, touchup, whatever they do.” He mimes a golf swing and winks at Jacob as the imaginary club comes to rest, perfect form, behind his back. “I want him to look good. Make the son of a bitch look just like Paul Newman.”

Jacob nods and the dean casts an eye toward the door as it closes after the last faculty member.

“Jake,” he says quietly, “what the hell happened this morning?”

“We got bushwhacked, Jim. Apparently Adam Claybaugh put in a call to Clemson yesterday. This Sanburn is connected all the way up. I've been on the phone all morning with the Historical Society. Looks like our hands are tied because the building's on the historical register. Best I could do was get him to commit to a two-week time frame. And no press, at least not yet. The Legal Department is drawing up the papers today.”

McMichaels shakes his head sadly. “Claybaugh, you say?”

Jacob nods.

“That Anatomy Department is going to be the death of me.” His brow knits as though he were working out a complex problem. Then he shakes his head again. “Can't touch him, damn it. He's tenured.”

Jacob is shocked by the implication. “You'd fire Adam?”

McMichaels's eyes are burning fiercely when he speaks. “You're fucking-A right I would. This is a disaster for the school,” he hisses. Then his face softens. “Claybaugh is a PhD anyway, Jake. He's not one of the brotherhood.”

There is a long silence before Jacob speaks. “I'm not sure there isn't a way to spin this positively, sir. We've got a pretty big surplus in the capital fund. What if we set some of that aside? I could get to work on it. Maybe the key is to face this head-on. We could arrange a symposium on it, something commemorative. Get the ball in our court.”

McMichaels looks at him incredulously. “Are you back on the Xanax? All the black community will think of is Tuskegee. Syphilis, for God's sake.” When he sees the change in Jacob's face, he puts a hand on his shoulder. “Ah, Jake. I'm afraid the strain is getting to me.”

The hand squeezes Jacob's shoulder, then drops. McMichaels moves across the room to open a closet and pulls out a bag stuffed with golf clubs. Its strap creaks on his shoulder as he turns to leave.

“Someone's going to have to take a fall if this goes public, Jake. You'd better be thinking about Claybaugh. That's a viable option. There aren't many others left.”

J
ACOB HAD TOLD
himself that a midday drive would clear his head, that a few miles on the road with the top down might help him sort out whether what McMichaels had said was truly as ominous as he feared. But before he had even crossed the Gervais Street bridge over the Congaree, he realized it was no accident that his break from routine had taken him away from campus and headed west.

And now, twenty miles into the piney Midlands on the Old Chapin Road, he takes the cutoff to Lake Murray without a second thought, though he has not driven this stretch in half a dozen years. The lake comes into view on his left, through the trees, stretching across the horizon vast and green under the hazy sky. A half mile out, a motorboat churns the water, towing a skier, but otherwise the lake's surface is placid, as though in surrender to the August heat. When he pulls into the gravel lot of his aunt Pauline's store and shuts off the engine, the only sound is the lapping of water against the clay banks.

The store is built shotgun-style, long and narrow like the mill house he grew up in, only larger. It stands on brick pilings a yard above the ground, its white-painted clapboards weathered and flaking. When he climbs the steps to the porch and reaches for one of the two screen doors, he can already hear the chirring of crickets inside.

The door slaps shut behind him and he takes it all in, all of it as he remembers: the long shelves along the walls built from two-by-fours and plywood, stocked with all manner of country sundries, from paper towels to boxes of ammunition. In the back sits an old ice cream freezer that has been covered with window screen, where the crickets are singing, and next to it a water tank topped with Styrofoam minnow buckets, a net for fishing out the minnows hung on its side. And there, behind a little cash register set on a glass case stocked with spinner baits and plastic worms, sits Aunt Pauline, a cigarette burning in one hand while she tots up figures in a spiral notebook with the other. She looks up from the notebook, squinting over her readers, and smiles at Jacob.

“We're fresh out of night crawlers, doc.”

He smiles back at her. “Do I look like a worm fisherman to you, Pauline?”

She takes a long drag off her cigarette and stubs it out in the ashtray next to the register. “No, honey, you look like big money. Come over here and give me a hug, you weasel. I haven't seen you in ages.”

He goes to her, wraps his arms around her skinny shoulders, inhales her scent of smoke and coffee and cheap perfume. Then she holds him at arm's length and looks him over.

“Yes, sir. Your daddy would be proud. You cleaned up real good.”

“I'm sorry I haven't been around. I stay too busy for my own good.”

“Appreciated the Christmas card last year. That's one good-looking girl you been going with.”

Jacob smiles. “Kaye's Jewish. So it's not supposed to be a Christmas card. They're called holiday cards now. You know, to be more inclusive.”

“Well, goddamn,” Pauline says. “Times change.”

“I guess they do.”

She drops her eyes long enough for Jacob to look at her face. Pauline is nearing seventy and looks every year of it. Though her eyes are still bright, her cheeks are wrinkled beneath them, and fifty-odd years of sun and alcohol and nicotine have weathered her skin to the hue of a tobacco leaf. No wonder Pauline and his mother never got along: she must exhale smoke in her sleep.

But she is moving before he can think on it further, pulling up a stool for him next to hers at the counter and motioning for him to take it, asking questions about his job and life all the while. Before he sits, he pulls the folded paper out of his back pocket and straightens it on the glass countertop. Pauline's eyes settle on it for a quick moment, then cut away as she lights another cigarette.

Jacob stares down at the photocopied picture of the lecture room, at Professor Johnston and his slave, at the nurse.

“This is from the school's archives,” he says. “It's probably from the 1860s. I can't get it out of my head that the woman looks like Dad.”

Pauline looks at the picture again and sets her lighter down carefully. Jacob feels suddenly foolish for bringing it here. “It's crazy, I know,” he says, reaching for the paper.

Her hand stops him, her fingers splayed across the paper, pressing down on the creases where he had folded it. When he looks up to meet her eyes, he sees that they are fixed on the nurse's face.

“I guess every family's got skeletons,” she says, still looking down at the picture. Then she exhales a plume of smoke and looks at him tenderly, a deep sadness in her pale gray eyes.

T
EN MINUTES LATER
Jacob is sitting on the porch of Pauline's little bungalow out back of the store, his foot tapping against the floorboards while he waits for his aunt to return from inside. She has been moving slowly since she locked the store and flipped its
OPEN
sign around. He listens to her rummaging around inside the little house. When she emerges from the front door, he sees that she carries a small black book and two Budweiser tallboys. He shuts his eyes as she settles into the chair next to him and pops the can of beer open. Then he feels the cold aluminum pressed against his hand.

“Thanks, but I've got to be back at work.”

Pauline ignores him. “Take it. Go ahead.”

He takes the beer and tilts it back, a token sip. Pauline opens hers and gives it a long pull before setting it down on the porch floor and opening the little book in her lap. It is old, the gilt of the cross on its cover and the edges of the pages nearly worn off. She shows him the title page—the Book of Common Prayer—then flips through it to the back and pulls out a handful of old pictures. She shows him snapshots of his father and herself as children, then an older picture—not black-and-white now, but sepia—of men in straw hats and suspenders at a picnic beneath live oaks.

“That's my granddaddy James, grown then.” She shuffles the picture to the back of the stack. “Here's one when he was a boy.” She shows him a shot of a boy in a cart drawn by a goat.

“And here's one of James with his mother, Sara, when he was I reckon one year old.”

Jacob looks at the portrait and sees a little boy in a christening gown perched on the lap of the woman from the school picture.

“Sara Thacker,” Pauline says. “The midwife.”

Jacob studies the eyes in the portrait. “All right. But I'm not getting it. What's the secret?”

For answer Pauline turns the Book of Common Prayer back to its front, the pages for baptisms and confirmations. He sees that James Thacker was baptized at Saint Mary's, Lexington, on April 18, AD 1867. The name and dates are written on the page in flowing script. But though there are two lines reserved for parents' names, only one is filled, with Sara Thacker's small signature.

Jacob looks up and sees that Pauline has been watching him intently. “Your daddy never told you because he never wanted it spoken of. He was ashamed.”

Jacob shakes his head slowly.