The Resurrectionist (24 page)

“Sorry,” he says. “Just had to get out of there.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” he says absently. “Well, yes. I hit a deer. Maybe I should say he hit me.”

He can feel the tension on the line before Kaye speaks again. “A deer? Where the hell are you?”

“Listen, I'm okay. I just grazed him. I don't think I hurt him much.”

“I think you're in shock. You need to get back here. I'm at my place. Come home, please.”

Jacob leans his head back against the seat. Between the spindly limbs of the pine trees he can see Venus shining brightly in the night sky, like a penlight through black velvet. “Kaye, there's a lot I need to tell you. I don't think I can come back now.”

He can almost hear Kaye shaking her head. “I don't care what you have to tell me. It doesn't matter. I want you to come home.”

“I got dirty, Kaye. I messed up bad with the school. I think they're going to take my license.”

“No. They won't.”

“Yes. They can do it.” He keeps his eyes on Venus up above, but the light is beginning to blur in his watering eyes. “Without that license, I'm nothing.”

“You never say that, Jacob. Never again,” Kaye says sharply. “This is it,” she says, her voice beginning to assume its courtroom cadence. “This is
it
. You mark this minute. This is as low as you get, ever.”

Jacob smiles as he holds the phone to his ear and watches Venus waver. This mix of Israel and the low country, he thinks, will either kill him or be his salvation.

“I know something happened tonight, and that's done. But that's not the end of it. You beat the pills and you can beat these bastards. I'm going to watch you do it, and I'm going to
make
you do it if I have to.”

Jacob sniffs, quietly so she won't hear it, and waits for her to go on. There is a long silence on the line, as though she has put a hand over the receiver, before she speaks again.

“
Neshome
, Jacob,” she is saying. “Remember it?”

“Let's see . . . neshome,” he says, finding it doesn't take long to run through the catalogue of Yiddish he's picked up the last few years.

“
Soul
,” she says. “Jacob, I've got someone here with me. I want you to talk to him. Talk to him and hear what he has to say, then you get over here.
Come home
,” she whispers fiercely.

Jacob hears the receiver being handed over, and a man comes on the line. It takes him a second to place the voice, and when he does he moves to switch off his phone. But the man's voice is as level and earnest as ever, almost beseeching, and talking fast. Jacob listens to him for a minute without speaking. Then he begins to nod slowly, hearing him out, and throws his head back against the seat and gives in, lets the tears he can no longer restrain course down his cheeks. He drifts for a moment until the man's voice brings him back with a question.

“Yes—yes, I'm still here,” he says.

The voice carries on, talking enough for years, it seems, in a minute's time.

“Yes,” Jacob says. “It's about fucking time. Yes.

“Yes,” he says, “I am.”

Jacob clicks the phone off, tosses it into the passenger seat, and presses forward against the shifter, forgetting the clutch. The road fills with the sound of scraping gears and he mutters as he depresses the clutch and slips the transmission into first and gives the engine gas. His tires skim in the gravel for a moment, then grab purchase and bark once as they get their grip on the asphalt. In an instant he is gone, leaving nothing behind him but the broken glass that glints in the starlight and the echoing wake of his engine as it winds eastward, until his taillights fade into the darkness leading back to Columbia.

Fernyear: 1866

T
HROUGH
R
OSEDALE THEY CAME DOWN
the sandy streets in double file, two abreast in a brutal symmetry, with Johnston at the head of the column carrying a burning pine knot aloft like a flaming caduceus. His face was stern, his jaw set in a firm line as it had been since this morning. But walking behind him, Doctor Ballard thought he saw something else in the face when Johnston's head turned to check the numbers on each house they passed—that in profile, the tightness around Johnston's eyes might have held in it a shade of grief.

“What will we do, professor?” he asked. “When we get there?”

“God knows,” Johnston said heavily, the words nearly drowned out by the murmuring voices of the men behind them.

“You know, sir, that these boys have violence in mind.”

Johnston nodded.

“And what will you do about it, sir?”

Johnston stopped walking and the men behind him halted quickly, nearly walking into his back. “I will do what I can, Doctor Ballard,” he said.

He resumed his pace and the others followed. But Ballard's question lingered in his mind, turning there like a living thing. It was the same question Johnston had posed to Sara the night before.

They had talked in his office for nearly an hour, with his curtains drawn and the lamp trimmed low. Or rather, he himself had talked, listening to his own voice, the measured cadences of it—calm, reassuring, composed. Arrangements would have to be made, he had told her. He would take care of things for her as best he could.

At the end, she had come to him and buried her head on his shoulder. “I've been a fool, Frederick.”

“There, there,” he said, stroking her hair. “I have been a fool as well.”

“Not so great as me.”

“No, no.”

He was patting her head when she looked up at him. He saw that her eyes, though bright, were dry.

“No, Frederick, I am the greater fool in this,” she said. “I trusted you.”

From farther back in the column, at the rear, Johnston could hear others arriving, hurrying to catch up as the crowd grew, breathless but full of questions. The voices behind him grew into a cacophony.

“How's Fitz?”

“Raving. They finally woke him up two hours ago and he is still screaming, last I heard.”

“My God. It's pitiable.”

“Of course it is. What kind of shape would you be in? His own mother, for Christ's sake.”

“It is an abomination.”

“The nigger will get his, I'll vouch for it myself.”

“I want a finger.”

“Sure. There ought to be enough to go around.”

“I'll save you an ear if you don't get there in time.”

“There will be no trophies,” Johnston said loudly, his voice quavering as he turned to the men behind him. “This is hardly a victory.”

But the men pushed past him, seeing that they had reached the house they sought. They swarmed into the yard, crushing the picket fence beneath them, and up to the porch and into the house. From the street, Johnston and Ballard watched as lights were struck inside. A kerosene lamp flared to life in the parlor window, and they could see candles moving toward the rooms at the back of the house.

“I suppose we should go inside,” Johnston said. Nodding, Ballard followed him up the walk and across the porch.

Inside, the front parlor looked as if it had been deserted long ago. Its furniture was threadbare, and there was nothing on the walls save a cheap mirror hanging over the fireplace. Johnston moved down the hall and Ballard followed him, shouldering his way through the milling students, who seemed to be growing more frustrated by the second. He saw that they had thrown open the cellar door, and he watched as a student in a bowler hat disappeared down the stairs.

The kitchen was as spartan as the front room had been, with a single plank table and chair against the west wall and a black cook stove squatting on its short legs in the opposite corner. Ballard bent to the stove, intending to see if its embers were still warm. When he opened the iron door, he saw that there was no need. The ash inside was fine and gray and a spider had woven a web in one corner. It scurried away from the light of his match.

“Sir?” one of the men said. When Ballard rose, he saw that the student was looking at Johnston and pointing at the table. On it lay, in the center, a pared-down butter knife. Johnston lifted it and felt its balance thoughtfully, as though he knew what its presence meant.

“I believe he is gone, gentlemen,” Johnston said, and he sounded almost relieved.

There was a sound of hurried steps on the cellar stairs and Mullins stuck his head through the open door. “He is not here, sir.”

“I was just saying as much, Mister Mullins.”

“There is something in the cellar, sir. We think you should see it.”

Again Ballard followed Doctor Johnston as he slowly descended the steps, as though the number of lights in the cellar and the high-pitched tone of the others' voices drew him downward. When he reached the bottom of the steps he paused, as the others had done, his attention arrested by the north wall of the cellar, by its bright colors and the intricate calligraphy of lines upon it.

The wall looked to be of sandstone and the cellar terminated abruptly against it, where Ballard guessed the builders had given up on digging farther into the earth. It was covered with words, hundreds of them, that were chiseled into the sandstone with the precision of a printer's press. Ballard stepped closer and saw that the words were names arranged in some strange chronology of Nemo Johnston's devising. He read a few of them before giving up, none of them familiar but most of them clearly Negro: names like Quash and Addie and Toby, half of them with surnames familiar to Ballard from his slave-owning patients but the rest as obscure as the southern hands' field songs had been when he first came south. Above the names, carved in larger type, was the legend “In my death, see how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.” The entire wall had been painted in three vertical stripes—green, yellow, and red—and the paint had run into the letters and coated them as well. Ballard stepped back from the garish colors with the hollow feeling in his gut as pronounced as it might have been had they found a charnel house here instead.

“He really has gone mad,” Mullins said. “This is the work of a demented mind.”

“No, not mad,” Johnston said. “The quotation is a passage from Poe. These names clearly have some significance to him. I suspect they have some significance to us as well. I recognize one or two of them. No, he has not gone mad, but he has most certainly gone.”

“And what of the colors?” Ballard asked.

Johnston sighed. “The colors,” he said, “are beyond my comprehension.”

He turned toward the stairs, and his footsteps sounded dully as he climbed them.

“What shall we do with the house, sir?”

Johnston paused on the stairs. “Yes, the house. I suppose there is no choice,” he said heavily. “Burn it.”

J
OHNSTON AND
B
ALLARD
stood on the sidewalk as the students ravaged the bungalow, stomping and crashing inside it. Johnston muttered to himself as the sound of glass breaking raged inside until there were no more windows left.

“Couldn't be helped, Ballard,” he said, and the younger man nodded his agreement. Ballard looked down the street, watching as the curtains on the other houses parted by inches to reveal eyes looking to assess the demolition of Nemo Johnston's place. The woman in the house next door had come out on her porch and was crying loudly, begging Johnston to stop the men inside.

“Take it easy there, auntie,” someone yelled from a broken parlor window. “You might be best back inside your house.”

“We're not here for you, old girl.”

But still the woman moaned and whimpered. When she saw the first candle put to a curtain in the parlor, she began to wail. Mullins and two of the others emerged from the house and looked at her strangely as they came to stand next to Johnston.

“They're all crazy, is what I think,” Mullins said.

“That is enough, Mister Mullins,” Johnston said quietly. The house was beginning to glow from the inside, amber light flickering on the shards of glass that still clung to the frames.

“Say, here comes Doctor Evans,” Mullins said. They turned to look down the sand road and saw Evans walking toward them quickly, accompanied by another man whom Johnston recognized as Jonathan Bateman, from the Columbia Bank, as they drew near. Johnston seemed instantly embarrassed by the banker's presence. He walked a few steps to meet him, stopping in front of the Negro woman's porch.

“Jonathan,” Johnston said, “I would have preferred that you had not seen this.”

Bateman nodded breathlessly and held out a handful of papers to Johnston. Johnston squinted at them, then moved closer to the woman's house, where the light from the flames next door was stronger. He frowned down at the papers, flipping through handwritten balance statements quickly but pausing at the last page, a sheet of watermarked stationery on which had been written a figure that made him catch his breath.

“The boy brought that note in this morning, sir. Since it was written in your hand, I treated it as your request.”

Johnston looked at the papers a moment longer, then handed them to Ballard and sat down heavily on the porch steps. Ballard studied the withdrawal notice, hardly believing it, then sat down himself.

“As I said, sir, it was written in your hand.” Bateman looked ready to flee down the street.

Johnston smiled so bitterly that the banker had to look away. “The paper is mine, Jonathan, as must be the ink, doubtless drawn from the well on my desk. But the hand, Jonathan . . .” He looked up at the dark night sky. “The
hand
belongs to another.”

Johnston's face was still turned to the sky when he spoke again. “Evans,” he said, “I believe I recall your once saying, years ago, that we had mortgaged the school's future to Africa. I must now concede that you were correct.”

He took the papers from Ballard and passed them to Evans. The bearded man studied them for a moment, his face coloring, then ripped them into pieces and let them fall to the ground.

“The betrayal,” Johnston hissed as the flames licked under the eaves of Nemo's house and began to consume the tarpaper above. Behind him the old woman wailed like a banshee. “I never did him harm, gentlemen. And this”—Johnston lifted a hand toward the burning house and let it drop to the shreds of paper at his feet—“this is my recompense.” He dropped his face into his hands.

“Ah, God, the betrayal.” Johnston lifted his head, and Ballard saw that the doctor's eyes glistened in the light of the flames. “I will never understand it, gentlemen. I treated him as if he were my own.”