In his glory days, Carpenter elevated the ploys and chicanery of his trade to a devilish art. He brought rocks in wheelbarrows for undertakers to bury and carried away the deceased. An actor taught his nieces and nephews to cry on demand, the craft of bereavement. Then they made the rounds of the morgue, claiming bodies as long-lost relatives — although Carpenter was not above simply stealing bodies from the coroner when he had to. On more than one occasion, Carpenter sold a cadaver to an anatomical school, reported the body to the police, and then had his wife, dressed in mourning clothes, claim it as her son. Whereupon Carpenter sold the body again to another school. It saved the county the expense of burial; no one looked too closely.
Eventually the body trade grew so reckless that relatives took to holding graveside vigils, lest their loved ones disappear in the night. Suddenly every missing child was perceived to have been a victim of foul play — snatched, dispatched, and then sold for dissection. The newspapers took up the cause in outraged editorials; the law stepped in. In this new climate, most body snatchers extended their territory, riffling the graves of distant cemeteries to space out their raids. Carpenter turned to niggers exclusively.
The niggers did not post sentries over their dead. Niggers did not pound on the door of the sheriff, they did not haunt the offices of the newspapermen. No sheriff paid them any mind, no journalist listened to their stories. The bodies of their loved ones disappeared into sacks and reappeared in the cool cellars of medical schools to relinquish their secrets. Every one of them a miracle, in Stevens’s view, providing instruction into the intricacies of God’s design.
Carpenter snarled when he said the word, a mangy dog hoarding his bone: nigger. Stevens never used the word. He disapproved of racial prejudice. Indeed, an uneducated Irishman like Carpenter, steered by society to a life of rummaging graves, had more in common with a negro than a white doctor. If you considered the matter at length. He wouldn’t say that aloud, of course. Sometimes Stevens wondered if his views weren’t quaint, given the temper of the modern world. The other students uttered the most horrible things about the colored population of Boston, about their smell, their intellectual deficiencies, their primitive drives. Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man’s equal.
On the outskirts of Concord, they stopped at the small wooden gate and waited for the custodian’s signal. The man waved his lantern back and forth and Carpenter drove the cart inside the cemetery. Cobb paid the man’s fee and he directed them to this night’s bounty: two large, two medium, and three infants. The rain had softened the earth. They’d be done in three hours. After they refilled the graves, it would be as if they were never there.
“Your surgeon’s knife.” Carpenter handed Stevens a spade.
He’d be a medical student again in the morning. Tonight he was a resurrection man. Body snatcher was an accurate name. Resurrection man was a bit florid, but it held a truth. He gave these people a second chance to contribute, one denied them in their previous life.
And if you could make a study of the dead, Stevens thought from time to time, you could make a study of the living, and make them testify as no cadaver could.
He rubbed his hands to stir the blood and started to dig.
North Carolina
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Runaway or conveyed off, From the subscriber’s residence, near Henderson, on the 16th inst. a negro girl named MARTHA, belonging to the Subscriber. Said girl is of a dark brown complexion, slightly made, and very free spoken, about 21 years of age; she wore a black silk bonnet with feathers; and had in her possession two calico bed quiltings. I understand she will try to pass as a free girl.
RIGDON BANKS
GRANVILLE COUNTY, AUGUST 28, 1839
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SHE lost the candles. One of the rats woke Cora with its teeth and when she settled herself, she crawled across the dirt of the platform in her search. She came up with nothing. It was the day after Sam’s house collapsed, though she couldn’t be sure. Best to measure time now with one of the Randall plantation’s cotton scales, her hunger and fear piling on one side while her hopes were removed from the other in increments. The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.
By then Cora only needed the candlelight for company, having collected the particulars of her prison. The platform was twenty-eight paces long, and five and a half from wall to tracks’ edge. It was twenty-six steps up to the world above. The trapdoor was warm when she placed her palm against it. She knew which step snagged her dress when she crawled up (the eighth) and which liked to scrape her skin if she scrabbled down too fast (the fifteenth). Cora remembered seeing a broom in a corner of the platform. She used it to tap the ground like the blind lady in town, the way Caesar had probed the black water during their flight. Then she got clumsy or cocky and fell onto the tracks, losing both the broom and any desire beyond huddling on the ground.
She had to get out. In those long hours, she could not keep from devising cruel scenes, arranging her own Museum of Terrible Wonders. Caesar strung up by the grinning mob; Caesar a brutalized mess on the floor of the slave catcher’s wagon, halfway back to Randall and the waiting punishments. Kind Sam in jail; Sam tarred and feathered, interrogated about the underground railroad, broken-boned and senseless. A faceless white posse sifted through the smoldering remains of the cabin, pulled up the trapdoor and delivered her into wretchedness.
Those were the scenes she decorated in blood when awake. In nightmares the exhibits were more grotesque. She strolled back and forth before the glass, a customer of pain. She was locked in Life on the Slave Ship after the museum had closed, ever between ports and waiting for the wind while hundreds of kidnapped souls screamed belowdecks. Behind the next window, Miss Lucy cut open Cora’s stomach with a letter opener and a thousand black spiders spilled from her guts. Over and over, she was transported back to the night of the smokehouse, held down by nurses from the hospital as Terrance Randall grunted and thrusted above her. Usually the rats or bugs woke her when their curiosity became too much, interrupting her dreams and returning her to the darkness of the platform.
Her stomach quivered under her fingers. She had starved before, when Connelly got it in his mind to punish the quarter for mischief and cut off rations. But they needed food to work and the cotton demanded the punishment be brief. Here, there was no way to know when she would eat next. The train was late. The night Sam told them about the bad blood — when the house still stood — the next train was due in two days. It should have arrived. She didn’t know how late it was, but the delay signified nothing good. Maybe this branch was shut down. The entire line exposed and canceled. No one was coming. She was too weak to walk the unknowable miles to the next station, in the dark, let alone face whatever waited at the following stop.