“Do you think anyone saw us talking?”
“Maybe you should go down to the platform.”
They dragged the kitchen table and the thick gray rug. Together they lifted the door in the floor — it was a tight fit — and the musty air flickered the candles. She took some food and a lantern and descended into the darkness. The door closed above her and the table rumbled back into place.
She had avoided the services at the colored churches in town. Randall forbade religion on his plantation to eliminate the distraction of deliverance, and churching never interested her once she came to South Carolina. It made her seem strange to the other colored residents, she knew, but seeming strange had not bothered her for a long time. Was she supposed to pray now? She sat at the table in the thin lamplight. It was too dark on the platform to make out where the tunnel began. How long would it take them to root out Caesar? How fast could he run? She was aware of the bargains people made in desperate situations. To reduce the fever in a sick baby, to halt the brutalities of an overseer, to deliver one from a host of slave hells. From what she saw, the bargains never bore fruit. Sometimes the fever subsided, but the plantation was always still there. Cora did not pray.
She fell asleep waiting. Later, Cora crawled back up the steps, perching just beneath the door, and listened. It might be day or night in the world. She was hungry and thirsty. She ate some of the bread and sausage. Moving up and down the steps, putting her ear to the door and then retreating after a time, she passed the hours. When she finished the food, her despair was complete. She listened by the door. There was not a sound.
The thundering above woke her, terminating the void. It was not one person, or two, but many men. They ransacked the house and shouted, knocking over cabinets and upending furniture. The noise was loud and violent and so near, she shrank down the steps. She could not make out their words. Then they were done.
The seams in the door permitted no light and no draft. She could not smell the smoke, but she heard the glass shatter and the pop and crackle of the wood.
The house was on fire.
Stevens
~ ~ ~
THE Anatomy House of the Proctor Medical School was three blocks away from the main building, second from last on the dead-end street. The school wasn’t as discriminating as the better-known medical colleges in Boston; the press of acceptances necessitated an expansion. Aloysius Stevens worked nights to satisfy the terms of his fellowship. In exchange for tuition relief and a place to work — the late-night shift was quiet and conducive to study — the school got someone to admit the body snatcher.
Carpenter usually delivered just before dawn, before the neighborhood roused, but tonight he called at midnight. Stevens blew out the lamp in the dissection room and ran up the stairs. He almost forgot his muffler, then remembered how cold it had been last time, when autumn crept in to remind them of the bitter season to come. It rained that morning and he hoped it wouldn’t be too muddy. He had one pair of brogues and the soles were in a miserable state.
Carpenter and his man Cobb waited in the driver’s seat. Stevens settled in the cart with the tools. He slid down until they got a healthy distance away, in case any of the faculty or students were about. It was late, but a bone expert from Chicago had presented that night and they might still be carousing in the local saloons. Stevens was disappointed about missing the man’s talk — his fellowship often prevented his attendance at guest lectures — but the money would remove some of the sting. Most of the other students came from well-off Massachusetts families, spared worries over rent or food. When the cart passed McGinty’s and he heard the laughter inside, Stevens pulled his hat down.
Cobb leaned around. “Concord tonight,” he said, and offered his flask. As a matter of policy Stevens declined when Cobb shared his liquor. Though still in his studies he was certain of various diagnoses he’d made about the state of the man’s health. But the wind was brisk and mean and they had hours in the dark and mud before the return to the Anatomy House. Stevens took a long pull and choked on fire. “What is this?”
“One of my cousin’s concoctions. Too strong for your taste?” He and Carpenter chortled.
More likely he had collected last night’s dregs at the saloon. Stevens took the prank in good cheer. Cobb had warmed to Stevens over the months. He could imagine the man’s complaints when Carpenter suggested that he stand in whenever one of their gang was too besotted, or incarcerated, or otherwise unavailable for their nocturnal missions. Who’s to say this fancy rich boy could keep his tongue? (Stevens was not rich and was fancy only in his aspirations.) The city had started hanging grave robbers lately — which was ironic or fitting depending on one’s perspective, as the bodies of the hanged were given to medical schools for dissection.
“Don’t mind the gallows,” Cobb had told Stevens. “It’s quick enough. The people are the thing — it should be a private viewing, if you ask me. Watching a man shit his guts, it’s indecent.”
Digging up graves had fastened the bonds of friendship. Now when Cobb called him Doctor, it was with respect and not derision. “You’re not like that other sort,” Cobb told him one night when they carried a cadaver through the back door. “You’re a wee shady.”
That he was. It helped to be a wee disreputable when you were a young surgeon, especially when it came to materials for postmortem dissection. There had been a body shortage ever since the study of anatomy came into its own. The law, the jail, and the judge provided only so many dead murderers and prostitutes. Yes, persons afflicted with rare diseases and curious deformities sold their bodies for study after their demise, and some doctors donated their cadavers in the spirit of scientific inquiry, but their numbers scarcely met the demand. The body game was fierce, for buyers and sellers alike. Rich medical schools outbid the less fortunate ones. Body snatchers charged for the body, then added a retainer, then a delivery fee. They raised prices at the start of the teaching period when demand was high, only to offer bargains at the end of the term when there was no longer a need for a specimen.
Morbid paradoxes confronted Stevens daily. His profession worked to extend life while secretly hoping for an increase in the deceased. A malpractice suit called you before the judge for want of a skill, but get caught with an ill-gotten cadaver and the judge punished you for trying to obtain that skill. Proctor made its students pay for their own pathological specimens. Stevens’s first anatomy course required two complete dissections — how was he supposed to pay for that? Back home in Maine, he’d been spoiled by his mother’s cooking; the women on her side were gifted. Here in the city, tuition, books, lectures, and rent had him subsisting on crusts for days on end.
When Carpenter invited Stevens to work for him, he did not hesitate. His appearance scared Stevens, that first delivery months before. The grave robber was an Irish giant, imposing in frame, uncouth in manner and speech, and carried with him the reek of damp earth. Carpenter and his wife had six children; when two of them passed from yellow fever, he sold them for anatomical study. Or so it was said. Stevens was too scared to ask for refutation. When trafficking in cadavers, it helped to be immune to sentimentality.
He wouldn’t be the first body snatcher to open a grave to find the face of a long-lost cousin or a dear friend.
Carpenter recruited his gang at the saloon, rowdies all. They slept the day, drank well into the evening, and then set off for their pastime. “The hours are not great, but suit a certain character.” Criminal character, incorrigible by any measure. It was a low enterprise. Raiding cemeteries was the least of it. The competition was a pack of rabid animals. Leave a prospect to too late in the evening and you were liable to discover someone else had pilfered the body first. Carpenter reported his competition’s clients to the police, broke into dissection rooms to mutilate their deliveries. Brawls erupted when rival gangs converged on the same pauper’s field. They smashed one another’s faces among the tombstones. “It was raucous,” Carpenter always said when he finished one of his stories, grinning through his mossy teeth.