Speakers of the Dead

by J. Aaron Sanders

  Walt smiles. “I certainly would not want to deprive you of the experience.”

  The next morning at nine o’clock, Walt Whitman and Henry Saunders arrive at the New York University Medical College, a formal three-story building with Ionic columns. Dozens of medical students in white aprons and bowler hats file in and out the front entrance. All are men.

  A nurse called Mrs. Huxley directs them to the white-haired Dr. Liston. “Welcome,” he says. “Please come inside.” He leads the duo through the back door and down a long hallway to his office, a spacious corner room bright with natural light. “Mrs. Huxley?” he calls into the hallway, “tea, please?” He invites them to sit.

  “On behalf of everyone at the Women’s Medical College of Manhattan,” Whitman says, “thank you for the use of your wagon.”

  “Glad I could be of service,” Liston says. “In your message, you said you wanted to discuss another matter?”

  Before Walt can answer, there’s a knock at the door.

  Mrs. Huxley appears with tea. She’s a sturdy woman with a puckered face. “Oh, and, Doctor?”

  “What is it, Mrs. Huxley?”

  “They are waiting for you in surgery.”

  “I’ll be there presently.”

  Mrs. Huxley nods and recedes.

  Liston waits for the door to close. “You were about to say.”

  “Do you know James Warren?”

  “He is one of the few men who supply bodies to us.”

  “How does that work exactly?”

  “He’s a businessman,” Liston says. “We let him know what we need, and he acquires it.”

  “But grave robbing is illegal.”

  “We prefer to say that the body business is just shy of legal.”

  “Did Abraham Stowe know James Warren?”

  “We all know him.”

  Walt sips his tea. “What would someone like Mr. Warren think of Abraham Stowe’s support of the Bone Bill?”

  Liston is quick to answer. “I cannot imagine Mr. Warren even knows what the Bone Bill is.”

  Saunders says, “Do you think Lena killed Abraham, Dr. Liston?”

  Liston looks away. “I knew Abraham before he met Lena, and her worries were justified.”

  “Enough to kill him?” Henry says.

  “One never knows what compels one person to kill another.”

  Whitman says, “How can we find Warren?”

  “It should not be difficult,” Liston says. “Grave robbers search the obituaries, and they go to the source. I find these dealings distasteful, but we must have bodies.”

  Walt presses. “How do you contact him?”

  “Sorry, Mr. Whitman.”

  “Where does he operate?”

  Liston shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

  “A name. A street. Anything.”

  “These men may be criminals, but they provide invaluable resources to medicine, and I have to protect that.” Liston stands.

  “But the Stowes were innocent.”

  “My advice to you: Let Abraham and Lena rest in peace. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  Walt and Henry buy a Tribune and return to the women’s college. In the dining room, they review the obituaries. From the dissection room, Whitman can hear the students’ voices as they deconstruct Lena’s corpse. That they speak in calm tones in spite of the grievous circumstances reveals the depth of their trust in Elizabeth, a sentiment he shares. Yet he still has not been able to look at Lena’s eviscerated body. He cannot bear the thought, even if it was her wish.

  He and Mr. Saunders concentrate on three obituaries in today’s Tribune: thirty-five-year-old Roberto Palmero, crushed by a fire engine; nineteen-year-old Angela Pasqualini, who died in childbirth; and Maggie Runkel, a fourteen-year-old cholera victim.

  Henry says, “Which one will the body snatchers dig up, do you suppose?”

  Whitman doesn’t know exactly. It might be any of the three; it might be none of them. There are twenty more obituaries too, all of which are as remarkable or unremarkable as the next. “Perhaps we should ask Miss Blackwell.” He hopes Henry will volunteer so he does not have to see what they’ve done to Lena.

  Saunders anticipates this. “You need to look, Walt. She was your friend.”

  “That she was.” Whitman stands, takes a deep breath. “Miss Blackwell?” he calls.

  He beckons her to the dining room, where they present her with their analysis of the obituaries.

  “You were right about James Warren,” Walt says, “and we need to find him.”

  “And you need me to identify which of these bodies is the most medically desirable.”

  Saunders points out the three to her.

  She reads the notices. “All of them are useful, for different reasons.”

  “But if you can select only one,” Henry says.

  “The pregnant woman buried with her infant would bring the highest price.”

  Saunders says, “But what doctor would dissect an infant?”

  Miss Blackwell smiles. “Which one wouldn’t, Mr. Saunders?”

  Walt says, “We will stake out the woman’s grave, and wait for Mr. Warren.”

  She continues reading. “Of course, Mr. Palmero’s lower body has been demolished by the fire engine, and who knows what we might learn from that?”

  “So Mr. Palmero, then?”

  “Then again,” she says, pointing to Maggie Runkel’s obituary, “what kills more people in New York than fires or childbirth?”

  “Cholera,” Walt says.

  “And she who cures cholera,” Elizabeth says, “shall rule the medical world.”

  Chapter 7

  Maggie Runkel is buried near the back of the St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral graveyard at Mulberry and Prince Streets. Walt Whitman and Henry Saunders have set up watch behind a graveside tree, which affords no shelter from the swirling wind that slashes through Walt’s clothing. He cannot remember ever feeling so cold in all his life, and his father’s words come tumbling back to him: The worst is yet to come. His father the optimist.

  The cemetery surrounds the cathedral—headstones jut like crooked teeth out of the gray, unyielding ground. The cathedral itself is dark and quiet, the priest having locked up and retired to the rectory hours ago.

  Henry wants to go home, return tomorrow night better equipped for the weather, but Walt refuses to leave. “I need to see this through.”

  “By catching our death of cold?” Saunders says. “Let’s go back to the Pewter Mug and drink.”

  Walt reaches into his pocket and produces a flask of whiskey. “Be my guest.”

  Henry takes the flask, tips it back. “How well did you really know Abraham and Lena?”

  “Well enough.”

  “Is it possible she killed him?”

  Whitman glares at Saunders.

  “A fair question, I believe, given our undertaking.”

  “I can understand how she might appear guilty to an outsider, but you have to trust me.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  The cemetery descends into silence, and Walt can’t help but think of the deceased beneath their feet, how each of them lived as he lives, full of hopes and aspirations, and now dead and gone.

  “No. She didn’t kill him.” Whitman blows in his hands. Maybe they should call it a night, try again tomorrow.

  Saunders says, “I read your stories in the Democratic Review.”

  “Have you now?”

  “And your novel, Franklin Evans, in the New World.”

  Franklin Evans has sold thousands of copies so far and has earned him seventy-five dollars, with another fifty to come.

  “I’m gratified to be published in the same periodical as Charles Dickens, William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
>
  “It is quite a feat indeed.”

  Whitman continues. “And the first two chapters to my next novel, The Madman, were recently published in the Washingtonian.”

  “Impressive.”

  “I’m determined to be a writer of note,” Walt says, fully aware that he is trying to impress Henry. “I make it a point to write every morning, first thing. The entire manuscript for The Madman will soon be complete.”

  “What about your work at the Aurora?”

  “That work I begin midafternoon after my walk.”

  “Yes,” Saunders says, “your walks are the subject of much discussion around the office.”

  “Mr. Ropes does not like them,” Whitman says. “But they are part of my process, and I get my work done.”

  “Indeed, nobody knows how.”

  Whitman is not unaware of the discussions he provokes, but he is surprised by Mr. Saunders’s seeming complicity in them. Walt’s methods are unconventional for sure, but the results speak for themselves. Indeed, on any given day, he authors the lion’s share of what the Aurora’s readers have come to expect six days a week. Where there is no problem, no such complaint should exist.

  The two men sit in silence until Walt can no longer bear it. “And what did you think of Franklin Evans?”

  “I love your poems.”

  Henry’s ambivalence toward his novel cuts deep.

  Whitman wants to ask Saunders to clarify, when he hears the noises—a click first, then whinnying and clomping tumbling on the wind toward them—voices, wheels scraping, and hooves hammering away at the thick silence of the night. A freight wagon pulled by a team of two horses creaks up to the cemetery gate.

  Two men head for the freshly dug grave. The shorter of the two hauls a large bundle on his shoulder and drops it in the dirt. His face is concealed by the brim of his hat and a mustache. He unwraps the white bundle and spreads the canvas upon the ground, while the other man, much taller, broad-shouldered and muscular, picks up the two shovels and pickax wrapped inside. Their actions signal a mundane attitude toward the work, as if digging up a corpse is the most normal task in the world.

  Walt turns to Henry, whispers: “Which one is Warren?”

  “The shorter one.”

  “Who is the other guy?”

  Henry shrugs. “No idea.”

  The two men start digging. The taller man breaks up the ground with the pickax while Warren scoops up the dirt with his shovel. They make fast progress, benefiting not only from their obvious experience but also from the loose dirt used to bury the girl earlier that same day. And the deeper they go, the easier the digging, or at least that’s how it appears from where Whitman sits.

  “What’s your plan?” Saunders whispers.

  “When they remove the body,” Walt says. “I’ll approach them.”

  “No offense,” says Henry, “but that’s not much of a plan.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “I thought we’d approach him before they dig up the body.”

  Whitman whispers, “That’s your idea of a better plan?”

  It doesn’t take long for the body snatchers to reach the coffin, and when they do, Walt scuttles in for a better view. His knees and back are sore from crouching, and his fingers and toes sting from the cold. He finds a good vantage point from behind a tree near the disinterred grave, a spot raised by the tree’s roots.

  The tall man sits on the edge of the grave, chipping away at the casket lid with the pickax, when Warren joins him with the lamp.

  “. . . that’s what impressed me,” the tall man is saying. “It wasn’t just a dead body. What Abraham Stowe did to Mary Rogers was artistic.” He holds up the pickax. “He created the scene like a painter might do on a canvas.”

  Warren says, “I saw the body, and it was horrible.”

  “You’re a philistine, Snuffy. You have no sense of beauty. In life or in death.”

  Snuffy? Walt looks back at Henry, who can only shrug again.

  The man continues: “That corpse was an artistic masterpiece worthy of the pen of Mr. Poe. His most recent work is not his best, but ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’? My God, what a story.” He swings the pickax, and the tip sinks deep in the wood. “And Stowe’s wife is equally worthy of a Poe story. The way she killed her husband was elegant and well thought out.”

  “Jesus,” Warren says, “watch the head. They love the head.”

  “I goddamned well know they like the head.” The tall man chisels off a square piece of the coffin lid, tosses it aside. “Now shine that lamp here.”

  James Warren leans over, and the lamp illuminates the young woman’s face: her black hair, white skin, sunken eyes—

  The sight of her lifeless face takes Walt Whitman’s breath. The poor girl. So young, and now dead. His thoughts turn to his sisters, Hannah and Mary. What if it were they who had died only to have their bodies stolen?

  “I don’t pay you to stand there, Snuffy,” the tall man says. “Now get the fucking hook.”

  Warren trudges to the wagon. “Get the fucking hook,” he mimics.

  When Warren returns, the tall man takes the enormous hook from him and slips the tip into the skin just under the girl’s chin, pulling the hook upward so that it lodges between her neck and jaw. He tugs the rope to make sure the hook is secure, her teeth clacking together, and then he climbs out of the grave, tosses the other end of the rope over a low-hanging tree branch—not the same tree Walt stands behind but near enough to unnerve him—and pulls downward with his whole strength.

  But the girl doesn’t move.

  “Come on, darlin’,” the tall man says, “rise and shine.” He yanks the rope again as if ringing a massive church tower bell, and this time the corpse does move, rising up out of the coffin, standing upright for only a moment as if resurrected, before flopping onto the ground.

  “She’s a real cherry.” An animated Warren unwraps the shroud like a child opening a gift. “And she’s mine!” He lifts the white dress over her head, then lowers himself on top of her.

  And that’s when Whitman has seen enough. He charges Warren and kicks him in the side. “Have you no respect?” He kicks him again, and when the man attempts to stand up, Walt knocks him down with a forearm to the chest.

  “I was only joking,” Warren manages to say. At the sight of Walt, he seems confused, and in the middle of coughing, he spits out, “Who the fuck are you?”

  Whitman thinks about kicking him again but holds back. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “I am,” Warren says, “most of the time.”

  It isn’t that Walt has forgotten about the tall man, but the adrenaline of the moment has taken over, and he stands over Warren in the afterglow of his attack. When he hears a click, Whitman turns around to find a shotgun pointed at his chest.

  “I’m with Snuffy,” the tall man says. “I’d like to know who the fuck you are.”

  Walt stands up straight, reaches out his hand. “Walt Whitman. Reporter with the Aurora. And I’m doing a story on the glorious underworld of body snatching.”

  The tall man doesn’t shake his hand. “Who sent you?”

  “No one sent me.”

  The tall man aims his shotgun at Walt’s chest. “I see it on your face. Tell me.”

  But before Walt can respond, the man strikes him in the head with the butt of his gun. A bolt of pain bursts from his nose to the back of his neck, and his eyes water.

  “Now, how does that help anything?” Whitman says. “Nobody sent me—”

  The man raises his gun again.

  “I came on my own, as I said, to do a story on body snatching.”

  The tall man lowers the gun. “You’re really a goddamned reporter?”

  Walt nods. Blood trickles out of his nose, over his lips, and into his beard. He bends over to catch h
is breath. The pain is thick and heavy. He wipes his nose with his sleeve. “Did you have to hit me?”

  “Spying on folks in the middle of the night is a dangerous business,” the man says.

  Whitman hears Warren stir behind him, but it is already too late. Warren tackles him and comes to rest on top of him. “You son of a bitch.” He raises his fist.

  “Snuffy,” the tall man interjects. “Get off the poor gentleman.”

  “But—”

  “No, your actions were highly inappropriate and this man had every right to kick the shit out of you. It’s something I’ve been meaning to get to myself.”

  Warren reluctantly releases Walt, curses under his breath. “I’ll kick the shit out of you.”

  “Now, sir,” the tall man says, “let me help you to your feet so we can do this interview for your newspaper.” He reaches out his hand. “I’m a reader myself; just read this amazing book that changed my life, and I am more than happy to help a reporter get his story, contribute to society and what-not. I see it more as an opportunity than a duty, really—”

  Whitman reaches for his outstretched hand, but doesn’t see the butt of the shotgun rushing toward him until it connects with his jaw. The pain is searing, but quick. A flash of light before the blackness.

  Chapter 8

  The blackness slips into images of the Long Island home where Walt was born: the two-story clapboard colonial with green shutters and white doors, the red barn next to it, and the large oak tree between the corral and house. It is the same oak tree Walt used to sit under when he needed a break from working in the fields. Sometimes he read, sometimes he wrote, and sometimes he wandered around in his own head. Each musing ended the same way, with his father standing over him, face red and fists clenched.

  The voice comes from another room. “Walter Junior?” He turns around but sees no one. “Junior.” He spins around to find his father standing next to him, clean-shaven, eyes tucked beneath his brow, and his white hair sticking straight up. “How many times do I have to tell you? It’s time to work.”

  He opens his eyes to see the face of a young woman, and it takes him a moment to realize that she is dead. Her skin is not pale as much as colorless. And she stinks. Like Lena Stowe now, she is defined by both absence and presence—the life in her given over to tissue upon tissue upon tissue.