The other two Negroes looked at each other. They were ready to start immediately. Today. Right now. Starting at what wasn’t important.
“Could you please be a little more specific?” I said.
Now the two Negroes looked at me: white men don’t like uppity niggers, and Negroes don’t like uppity niggers who could cost them a chance at four dollars’ pay for two hours’ work.
Burwell took another apple out of the basket and wiped it on his thigh. He rubbed it until it shone. “No,” he said, crunching into the apple. He managed to chew and smile at the same time.
“So when do you plan on telling your employees exactly what it is they’ll be doing?”
Another bite, another crunch. The same condescending smile. “I don’t.”
“You don’t.”
“That’s right.”
“You don’t plan on telling your men the nature of the job you’re hiring them for?”
“That’s right.” Burwell kept crunching, steadily working his way around the circumference of the apple.
“Look here,” one of the Negroes said. “This here man don’t speak for us. We two”—he thumbed himself and the other Negro—“is good workers and we don’t need to know nothing we ain’t supposed to know.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” I said.
“Don’t smart-talk me, boy,” the Negro said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to confuse you.”
The Negro may not have understood what I meant, but he knew enough to know it wasn’t intended to be flattering. He took a step toward me, and I let him get close enough that I was able to kick his back foot from underneath him and send him backward to the ground. I knew that the other Negro would be on me as soon as his friend went down, but before I could turn on him, an enormous, practically round white man with a horseshoe moustache, who looked like a walrus smuggled into a too-tight blue pinstriped suit, stepped out of the passing crowd and twisted the standing Negro’s arm behind his back.
“Thank you, Ferguson,” Burwell said, taking the last bite out of his apple.
The Negro I’d sent to the ground sprang up but, seeing Burwell’s man tighten his hold on his friend’s arm, stayed where he was. “We gonna settle this,” he said.
“Use your head,” I said, nodding in the direction of the busy thoroughfare. “There are women and children here.”
“What the fuck I care about women and children? We gonna settle this. Now.”
I reached into my jacket pocket and gently tossed him an apple. “Have an apple instead. It’ll help keep the doctor away.” Undoubtedly wishing he hadn’t, he caught it anyway.
Burwell clapped his hands, twice, with hands raised and even, like a child. He’d put his apple core in his mouth in order to applaud, but instead of removing it and throwing it away, he pulled it inside his mouth like a snake its doomed victim and chewed, swallowed.
“You two can go,” he said, pointing at the other two Negroes.
His leviathan of a bodyguard, if that’s what he was, released his prisoner’s arm and lumbered over to where Burwell was, placing his body between his boss and the two dismissed applicants. Before he crossed his arms over his chest—with slight difficulty, his chest being his stomach and vice versa—he pulled back his suit jacket to reveal a sheathed knife on one hip and a holstered gun on the other.
While his friend rubbed his sore arm, “Fuck you, fuck all of you,” the other Negro said, throwing the apple I’d tossed him straight down at the earth. It made a soft thud. The two of them walked away arguing.
“I’ll tell you tonight,” Burwell said.
It took me a moment to realize he was speaking to me and not his henchman. “You’ll tell me what tonight?”
“What your responsibilities will be. It’s the sort of job where it’s simply a matter of it being easier to show one than to tell one.”
“What makes you think I want the job?”
Burwell selected a pre-rolled cigarette out of a tin in his vest pocket, lit it. Eyes constricted to near slits from the smoke of his own making, “Because I get the feeling you’re a man not unlike myself,” he said.
He offered me a cigarette from the open tin. I rarely smoked, and even then only a cigar when I was drinking, but I took one anyway. I put it in my mouth and let him light it for me.
“A man smart enough to take advantage of an opportunity when it presents itself, in other words,” I said.
Smoking, smiling, “Among other things.”
For an instant we were two old friends enjoying a shared smoke amidst the sights and sounds of a simple spring morning in the market.
“Are you a religious man?” Burwell said.
“No.”
“Good.”
A squawking wagon pulled past, the last day on earth for a wagonload of chickens.
“Do you know where the cemetery is?” Burwell said.
“Yes.”
“Good.” Burwell dropped his cigarette to the ground, didn’t bother to toe it extinct. “I’m Burwell and this is Ferguson,” he said.
“David,” I said. I waited for someone to offer a hand to shake, but the two of them stepped into the crowd instead. Into their backs, “When do I start?” I said.
“Tonight, two a.m.,” Burwell said without turning around.
“Where? Where at two a.m.?”
“You said you knew where it was.”
And then they were gone.
*
Just like any other smart businessman, Burwell believed in diversification. Unlike most, though, he also strongly believed that his employees should be diversified as well, one helping hand rarely knowing what the other hand was up to. I worked the graveyard shift—literally—and never with another strong back to lessen the load on mine or another pair of vigilant eyes to watch it. Instead of complaining, I did what had to be done, and Burwell noticed, gave me enough work at good-enough pay that it wasn’t long before he was my sole employer. The Reverend King used to emphasize that every man needed a trade, needed to acquire at least one in-demand skill he was good at that he could always fall back on, and I was good at stealing corpses.
My specialty was the hook and pull. The key was to dig at the head of a recent burial using a wooden spade—wooden spades being much quieter than metal ones—and, after you’d reached the coffin, crack it open and place a rope around the deceased’s neck and carefully drag the corpse to freedom. The medical schools, Burwell emphasized, wanted their bodies fresh and with the organs and flesh intact and untouched, weren’t in the habit of paying for week-old rotting specimens or specimens with a pierced lung or a speared heart. Unlike some of my colleagues, I was also careful never to steal anything—no jewellery or watches or gold fillings—as this would have left me open to a felony charge if I’d gotten caught. Stealing a corpse, Burwell pointed out, was only a misdemeanour.
As lucrative a profession as it could be, however, grave robbery did have its downside. For one thing, as medical schools multiplied, bodysnatching was becoming so common that it was not unusual for relatives or friends of someone who had just died to watch over the body until burial, and then to keep watch over the grave after burial, to prevent the corpse from being stolen. For another, iron coffins were more and more employed by anyone well-off enough to afford one, or else the grave was protected by an expensive framework of underground iron bars. And there was always the threat of mob justice. In 1882, for example, a few years after I’d gotten my start, hundreds of Philadelphia Negroes stormed that city’s morgue. Six bodies that had been taken from their graves at Lebanon Cemetery, the Negro burial ground, had been discovered on the back of a wagon headed for the local medical college. The newspaper said that, at the morgue, one man asked all the others to bare their heads and swear on the bodies of their dead family members lying before them that they would murder the grave robbers as soon as they were found.
Of course, I never raised a single dead Negro from his grave in my life. I may hav
e been a mercenary, but I was a mercenary with morals. And just as long as I came up with enough bodies, Burwell allowed me the luxury of my ethics.
As to what else he was up to, you’d hear things, there’d be hints: smuggling (U.S.-way and this way both, depending on the tariff); moneylending; even simple thievery (a wagonload of canned peaches is never just a wagonload of canned peaches). But Burwell and Ferguson were the only ones I spoke to, and only about how many corpses were required and where I needed to deliver them. And even then, my only actual communication was with Burwell, Ferguson remaining as silent as he was sizable.
“Doesn’t he ever speak?” I asked Burwell once, Ferguson safely out of earshot.
“When he has something to say.”
“I’d like to be around when that happens.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
Initially, my only job was to get the body and deliver it to Burwell, who would hand it over to his contact at the medical school. After about a year of doing what I was told, and doing it well, Burwell entrusted me with making the handover as well, at an extra two dollars per body, not including what it cost me to feed and water my horse plus the wear and tear on my wagon, not to mention running the risk of making the trip to London with one or more recently exhumed cadavers in the back. Still, it was worth it. I was saving money at a rate that simply wasn’t imaginable before, even figuring in my monthly indulgence of five dollars’ worth of brand new books ordered directly from Reed’s Bookstore in New York.
It got to be that the only contact I had with Burwell was to surrender the cash I’d receive in London on delivery of the bodies, which he’d then hand right back over to me at a rate of fifty cents on the dollar. Naturally, the thought crossed my mind that, doing all the work and getting only half the profit, there were ways of increasing my take, such as skimming the top by miscounting a body or two, or even cutting out the middleman altogether and going into business for myself. The thought must have crossed Burwell’s mind too. Probably long before it did mine.
“Five, ten, twenty, twenty-five, thirty-five. Thirty-five, twenty-five, twenty, ten, five.” It was always the same: we’d meet wherever he sent word he wanted to meet, and I’d have to get down from my wagon and go to him in his; then he’d count out the money I handed over, twice—forward and backward—only to repeat the process when he paid me out my share. It was raining and October and dark, nothing besides Burwell and Ferguson and me but dull stars and black trees and a frozen moon. All business between us took place outdoors, in the open, no matter what the season or the weather. The entire time I knew him, I never knew Burwell to belong anywhere. He never had any home address that I was aware of, there wasn’t any saloon or restaurant he was known to frequent, there wasn’t even an office or a pretend place of business to carry out his dealings.
Done counting, “You never cease to surprise me, lad,” he said.
“How’s that?” He and Ferguson were out of the rain in their canopied buggy. I pulled my hat down lower so that the rain would roll off the brim easier. I was almost up to my ankles in field mud.
“Every count you bring me is always correct. Every dollar is always accounted for.”
“That’s the idea, isn’t it?”
“From where I stand. Someone else might say, not from where you’re standing.”
“You sound disappointed I’m honest.”
“You misunderstand me, lad—I didn’t say you were honest. You just haven’t stolen from me.”
The rain was dripping off the tip of my nose now as much as it was the brim of my hat. I just wanted my money and to go home and be warm and dry. Priorities are remarkably easy to unearth when you’re cold and wet and fatigued and tired of spending time with the recently deceased.
“And I’m not going to,” I said.
“You haven’t forgotten where you came from,” Burwell said.
“Believe me,” I said, “I’ve tried. Now can I have my pay?”
“Certainly, lad.” The stack of bills I’d handed him was still in his left hand. Once again, left to right, then back, “Five, ten, fifteen. Fifteen, ten, five.” He held out the money with a smile that said as soon as I reached for it, he’d pull it back.
“You’re short,” I said.
Ferguson, who up to now had seemed content to stare at the rain, turned his head. He still had the whip in his hand.
“Oh?” Burwell said. He squinted at the bills as if they’d deceived him. He began to count again. “Five, ten—”
“Cut this shit out, Burwell, and just give me my money. You know as well as I do, you owe me seventeen dollars, so just give it to me so we can both go home.”
Now Ferguson was staring at me with the same bored annoyance he had at the rain. The rain that had managed to make it past their canopy dripped from the ends of his moustache like the liquid remains of a pail of dead fish he’d just consumed in two easy swallows.
Burwell smiled at me again, this time like a parent who can’t help but be amused by a badly behaved child. “Seventeen. Of course. I must have miscalculated. Forgive me, lad.” He shuffled the bills and offered over the revised amount.
I took the money and climbed in my wagon and shook the reins. On the way home, I stopped myself—twice—from taking out what he’d handed me and counting it. If he wanted it to be fifteen, it was going to be fifteen.
I’m going to have to keep an eye on that sonofabitch, I thought. Because he sure as hell is keeping one on me.
*
We’re getting ready for bed and Loretta wants another log on the fire. I say it’s fine—it’s oranging warm and all the heat we’ll need until morning. Besides, the fire in the library will burn all night.
“Heat rises,” I say.
“For heat to rise, first there must be heat.”
I step out of my clothes and I’m ready for sleep, my long underwear my second skin for at least another month. Loretta has to get undressed in order to get dressed all over again, this time for the night. Winter is just another thing that’s more difficult for women.
Loretta unbuttons and pulls down and peels off until she’s standing naked with her backside to the fire.
“If you’re so cold, get ready and get into bed,” I say. I’m already under the blankets. Not that I object to the view.
“I am warming my centre.”
“What you’re going to do is set your ass on fire.”
Just for that, she pushes her rear end a little closer to the heat.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” I say. “Get in here and I’ll let you read to me for a while.” A naked woman, a few pages of Goethe, a cold night and a warm bed: what more does a man really need?
“This is how you try to succeed in getting a woman into your bed?”
“I’m not too concerned about getting her into bed. It’s what she does once she’s here that I’m thinking about.”
This at least elicits a smile. Loretta’s arms are covering her breasts, but only for warmth, not out of modesty. Never out of modesty.
“Let me tell you what I will do,” she says. “I will read to you if you let me take your photograph.”
I punch a burrow in my pillow and slip my head inside. “I don’t need a photograph. I already know what I look like.”
“This answer of yours, it is no longer amusing.”
“Maybe, but it’s not any less true.”
“What about others? Myself, for instance? What if I want a photograph of you?”
“You know what I look like too. Even more than me, actually. You see me all the time.”
“If you die before me, what then? I have nothing. This is not acceptable.”
“That’s what we have memories for.”
“People can forget. These memories, sometimes they do not work.”
“Then I suppose they weren’t worth remembering, then.”
Loretta silently pulls on her long wool socks, the night’s outfitting beginning. I know I won’t be hearing any German to
night.
*
Pride, arrogance, conceit—call it whatever you want, only never underestimate the supposedly sinful as a reliable indicator of healthily sprouting self-worth. Grave-robber solvent for the first time in my adult life, I tended to body first, instinctively knowing that soul would somehow follow. No ancient Greek sage may have said it, but if you’re feeling blue, buy a brand new pair of shoes.
Which I did—an imported pair of Randall, two-piece, russet riding boots from Detroit, the leather soaked in oil and jacked to expertly soften, then stretched over a crimping block to create just the correct turn—as well as a closetful of clean white shirts and perfectly tailored pants along with two dressing-table drawers neatly stacked with warm cotton underwear and socks and even abundant handkerchiefs, a different colour for every day of the week. Just clothes, just soon-to-be rotting rags fulfilling their final worldly function swathing their equally rotting owner on his final, six-feetbeneath sleep; but if clothes don’t make the man, they can certainly make the man feel better about what kind of man he’s stuck with being. I may have raised the dead for a living, but my shoes always shone and my pants were never without a sharp crease.
Fearing that I might be growing just a little bit smug—sitting about so smartly attired in my bigger, better rooming-house room (more room for more and more books; a window overlooking more than the wall of the house next door; my own small kitchen), a book of Latin verse resting on my knee, while sipping, not gulping, good whiskey—I took solace in remembering something I’d read a long time ago, so long ago I couldn’t remember where: “How can a man expect to gain another man’s respect if he doesn’t first respect himself?”
Quickly realizing that I’d never read any such thing—had, instead, heard the Reverend King say it, say it over and over—I then took solace in knowing that, although he taught me to know it, it was me and me alone who’d made it possible for me to live it.
Creatio ex nihilo. I should get that tattooed on my other arm, I thought.
David Page 18
