Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  Grandison shrugged. “If it was me, I would go west. Over the mountains into Indian country. You go far enough, there’s places that don’t hold with slavery. I’d go there.”

  The man turned to look at him. “Well, why don’t you then?” he said. “Why don’t you go?”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m not the one who’s dead. Now are you leaving or not?”

  “Yeah. Leaving.”

  “You’ve got three hours before sunup.” He handed the shovel to the resurrected man. “Help me fill in your grave, then.”

  DR. GEORGE NEWTON—DECEMBER 1859

  It is just as well that I stepped down as dean of the medical college. I haven’t much time to wind up my affairs, and the fact that Ignatius Garvin is ably discharging my former duties leaves me with one less thing to worry about. If I can leave my dear Fanny and the babies safely provided for, I may leave this world without much regret. I wish I could have seen my boy grow up . . . wish I could have grown old with my dearest wife . . . And I wish that God had seen fit to send me an easier death.

  No one knows yet that I am dying, and it may yet be weeks before the disease carries me off, but I do not relish the thought of the time before me, for I know enough of this illness to tremble at the thought of what will come. I must not do away with myself, though. I must be brave, so as not to cause Fanny any more pain than she will feel at losing me so soon.

  So many papers to sift through. Investments, deeds, instructions for the trustees—my life never felt so complicated. Soon the pain will begin, and it may render me incapable of making wise decisions to safeguard my little family. At least I have safeguarded the family of our faithful college servant, Grandison Harris. Thank God I was able to do that in time, for I had long promised him that I would bring his Rachel and her boy to Augusta, so I did a few months back. I am not yet fifty, sound in body and mind, and newly married. I thought I had many years to do good works and to continue my medical research. I suppose that even a physician must think that he will never face death. Perhaps we would go mad if we tried to live thinking otherwise.

  I wonder how it happened. People will say it was the buggy accident just before Christmas, and perhaps it was. That gelding is a nervous horse, not at all to be depended upon in busy streets of barking dogs and milling crowds. I must remember to tell Henry to sell the animal, for I would not like to think of Fanny coming to harm if the beast became spooked again. I was shaken and bruised when he dumped me out of the carriage and into the mud, but did I sustain any cuts during the fall? I do not remember any blood.

  Dr. Eve came to look me over, and he pronounced me fit enough, with no bones broken, and no internal injuries. He was right as far as it went. My fellow physicians all stopped by to wish us good cheer at Christmas, and to pay their respects to their injured friend. They did not bring their wives, of course. No respectable white woman accepts the hospitality of this house, for it is supposed that Fanny’s presence taints the household. We are not, after all, legally married in the eyes of the law here. Fanny professes not to care. Dull old biddies, anyhow, she declares. But she has certainly charmed the gentlemen, who consider me a lucky man. And so I was, until this tragedy struck—though none of those learned doctors suspected it.

  I wish that I had not. I wish that I could go innocently into the throes of this final illness, as would a child who had stepped on a rusty nail, not knowing what horrors lay before me. But I am a trained physician. I do know. And the very word clutches at my throat with cold fingers.

  Tetanus.

  Oh, I know too much, indeed. Too much—and not enough. I have seen people die of this. The muscles stretch and spasm, in the control of the ailment rather than the patient, an agonizing distension such as prisoners must have felt upon the rack in olden days. The body is tortured by pain beyond imagining, but beyond these physical torments, the patient’s mind remains clear and unaffected. I doubt that the clarity is a blessing. Delirium or madness might prove a release from the agony, yet even that is denied to the sufferer. And there is no cure. Nothing can stop the progression of this disease, and nothing can reverse its effects. I have, perhaps, a week before the end, and I am sure that by then I will not dread death, but rather welcome it as a blessed deliverance.

  Best not to dwell on it. It will engulf me soon enough. I must send for James Hope. I can trust him. As the owner of the cotton mill, he will be an eminently respectable guardian for my wife’s business interests, and since James is a Scotsman by birth, and not bound by the old Southern traditions of race and caste, he will see Fanny as the gentlewoman that she is. He treats her with all the courtly gentility he would show to a duchess, and that endears him to both of us. Yes, I must tell James what has happened, and how soon he must pick up where I am forced to leave off.

  My poor Fanny! To be left a widow with two babies, and she is not yet twenty. I worry more over her fate than I do my own. At least mine will be quick, but Fanny has another forty years to suffer if the world is unkind to her. I wish that the magnitude of my suffering could be charged against any sorrow God had intended for her. I must speak to James Hope. How aptly named he is! I must entrust my little family to him.

  It was nearly Christmas, and Rachel had made a pound cake for the Newtons. He was to take it around to Greene Street that afternoon, when he could manage to get away from his duties. Grandison looked at the cake, and thought that Dr. George might prefer a specimen from the medical school supply for his home laboratory, but he supposed that such a gesture would not be proper for the season. Rachel would know best what people expected on social occasions. She talked to people, and visited with her new friends at church, while he hung back, dreading the prospect of talking to people that he might be seeing again some day.

  He took the cake to the Newton house, and tapped on the back door, half expecting it to open before his hand touched the wood. He waited a minute, and then another, but no one came. He knocked again, harder this time, wondering at the delay. As many servants as the Newtons had, that door ought to open as soon as his foot hit the porch. What was keeping them so busy?

  Finally, after the third and loudest spate of knocking, Fanny herself opened the door. He smiled and held out his paper-wrapped Christmas offering, but the sight of her made him take a step backward. His words of greeting stuck in his throat. She was big-bellied with child again, he knew that. She looked as if it could come at any moment, but what shocked him was how ill she looked, as if she had not eaten or slept for a week. She stared out at him, hollow-eyed and trembling, her face blank with weariness. For a moment he wondered if she recognized him.

  “My Rachel made y’all a pound cake. For Christmas,” he said.

  She nodded, and stepped back from the door to admit him to the kitchen. “Put it on the table,” she said.

  He set down the cake. The house was unnaturally quiet. He listened for sounds of baby Madison playing, or the bustle of the servants, who should have been making the house ready for the holiday, but all was still. He looked back at Fanny, who was staring down at the parcel as if she had never seen one before, as if she had forgotten how it got there, perhaps.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Shall I fetch Miss Alethea for you?”

  Fanny shook her head. “She’s been already. She took Madison so that I can stay with George,” she whispered. “And I’ve sent most of the others around there, too. Henry stayed here, of course. He won’t leave George.”

  Something was the matter with Dr. George, then. It must be bad. Fanny looked half dead herself. “Shall I go for Dr. Eve?” he asked.

  “He was here this morning. So was Dr. Garvin. Wasn’t a bit of use. George told me that from the beginning, but I wouldn’t have it. I thought with all those highfalutin doctors somebody would be able to help him, but they can’t. They can’t.”

  “Is he took bad?”

  “He’s dying. It’s the lockjaw. You know what that is?”

  He nodded. Tetanus. Oh, yes. They had covered it in
one of the medical classes, but not to consider a course of treatment. Only to review the terrible symptoms and to hope they never saw them. He shivered. “Are they sure?”

  “George is sure. Diagnosed himself. And the others concur. I was the only one who wouldn’t believe it. I do now, though. I sit with him as long as I can. Hour after hour. Watch him fighting the pain. Fighting the urge to scream. And then I go and throw up, and I sit with him some more.”

  “I could spell you a while.”

  “No!” She said it so harshly that he took a step back in surprise. She took a deep breath, and seemed to swallow her anger. “No, thank you very kindly, Mr. Harris, but I will not let you see him.”

  “But if Dr. George is dying—”

  “That’s exactly why. Don’t you think I know what you do over there at the medical college? Porter, they call you. Porter. I know what your real duties are, Mr. Harris. Known for a long time. And that’s fine. I know doctors have to learn somehow, and that nothing about doctoring is pretty or easy. But you are not going to practice your trade in this house. You are not going to take my husband’s body, do you hear?”

  He said softly, “I only wanted to help you out, and maybe to tell him good-bye.”

  “So you say. But he is weak now. Half out of his mind with the pain, and he’d promise anything. He might even suggest it himself, out of some crazy sense of duty to the medical college, but I won’t have it. My husband is going to have a proper burial, Mr. Harris. He has suffered enough!”

  It doesn’t hurt, he wanted to tell her. You don’t feel it if you’re dead. He did not bother to speak the words. He knew whose pain Fanny was thinking of, and that whatever Dr. George’s wishes might be, it was the living who mattered, not the dead. Best to soothe her quickly and with as little argument as possible. He did not think that the other doctors would accept George Newton’s body anyhow. That would be bringing death too close into the fold, and he was glad that he would not be required to carry out that task. Let the doctor lie in consecrated ground: There were bodies enough to be had in Augusta.

  “I’ll go now, Miss Fanny,” he said, putting on his best white folks manners, if it would give her any comfort. “But I think one of the doctors should come back and take a look at you.” He nodded toward her distended belly. “And we will pray for the both of you, my Rachel and I. Pray that he gets through this.” It was a lie. He never prayed, but if he did, it would be for Dr. George’s death to come swiftly—the only kindness that could be hoped for in a case of tetanus.

  Dr. George died after the new year in 1860. The illness had lasted only two weeks, but the progress of the disease was so terrible that it had begun to seem like months to those who could do nothing but wait for his release from the pain. Grandison joined the crowd at the doctor’s funeral, though he took care to keep clear of Fanny, for fear of upsetting her again. In her grief she might shout out things that should not be said aloud in Augusta’s polite society. The doctors knew his business, of course, but not the rest of the town. He reckoned that most of Augusta would have been at the funeral if it weren’t for the fact of the doctor’s awkward marriage arrangements. As it was, though, his fellow physicians, the students, and most of the town’s businessmen came to pay their respects, while their wives and daughters stayed home, professing themselves too delicate to endure the sight of the doctor’s redbone widow. Not that you could see an inch of her skin, whatever its color, for she was swathed from head to foot in black widow’s weeds and veils, leaning on the arm of Mr. James Hope, as if he were the spar of her sinking ship.

  “Left a widow at eighteen,” said Miss Alethea, regal in her black dress, her eyes red from tears of her own. “I had hoped for better for my girl.”

  He nodded. “She will be all right,” he said. “Dr. George would have seen to that.”

  Miss Alethea gave him the look usually reserved for one of her children talking foolishness. “She’s back home again, you know. Dr. George was too clouded at the last to do justice to a will, and Mr. James Hope had to sell the house on Greene Street. He vows to see her settled in a new place, though, over on Ellis, just a block from Broad Street. Having it built. There’s all Dr. George’s people to be thought of, you know, and the Tuttle folks, as well. Fanny has to have a house of her own, but I’m glad to have her by me for now, for the new baby is due any day—if it lives through her grief. We must pray for her, Mr. Harris.”

  Grandison looked past her at the tall, fair-haired Scotsman, who was still hovering protectively beside the pregnant young widow, and wondered if the prayer had already been answered.

  The cellar was paved with bones now. Each term when the anatomy class had finished with its solemn duties of dissection, the residue was brought to him to be disposed of. He could hardly rebury the remains in any public place or discard them where they might be recognized for what they were. The only alternative was to layer them in quicklime in the basement on Telfair Street. How many hundred had it been now? He had lost count. Mercifully the faces and the memories of the subjects’ resurrection were fading with the familiarity of the task, but sometimes he wondered if the basement resounded with cries he could not hear, and if that was why the building’s cat refused to set foot down there. The quicklime finished taking away the flesh and masked the smell, but he wondered what part of the owners remained, and if that great getting up in the morning that the preacher spoke of was really going to come to pass on Judgment Day. And who would have to answer for the monstrous confusion and scramble of bones that must follow? Himself? Dr. George? The students who carved up the cadavers? Sometimes as he scattered the quicklime over a new batch of discarded bones, he mused on Dr. George peering over the wrought iron fence of white folks’ heaven at an angry crowd of colored angels shaking their fists at him.

  “Better the dead than the living, though,” he would tell himself.

  Sometimes on an afternoon walk to Cedar Grove, he would go across to the white burying ground to pay his respects to Dr. George, lying there undisturbed in his grave, and sometimes he would pass the time of day with the grassy mound, as if the doctor could still hear him. “Miss Mary Frances finally birthed that baby,” he said one winter day, picking the brown stems of dead flowers off the grave. “Had a little girl the other day. Named her Georgia Frances, but everybody calls her Cissie, and I think that’s the name that’s going to stick. She’s a likely little thing, pale as a Georgia peach. And Mr. James Hope is building her that house on Ellis like he promised, and she’s talking about having her sister Nannie and young Jimmie move in along with her. I thought maybe Mr. James Hope would be moving in, too, the way he dotes on her, but he’s talking about selling the factory here and going back to New York where his family is, so I don’t think you need to linger on here if you are, sir. I think everything is going to be all right.”

  Dr. George hadn’t been gone hardly more than two years when the war came, and that changed everything. Didn’t look like it would at first, though. For the rest of the country, the war began in April in Charleston, when Fort Sumpter fell, but Georgia had seceded in January, leaving Augusta worried about the arsenal on the hill, occupied by federal troops. Governor Joe Brown himself came to town to demand the surrender of the arsenal, and the town was treated to a fine show of military parades in the drizzling rain. Governor Brown himself stood on the porch of the Planters Hotel to watch the festivities, but Captain Elzey, who was in command of the eighty-two men at the arsenal, declined to surrender it. He changed his mind a day or so later when eight hundred soldiers and two brigadier generals turned up in the rain to show the arsenal they meant business. Then Captain Elzey sent for the governor to talk things over, and by noon the arsenal and its contents had been handed over to the sovereign State of Georgia, without a shot fired. That, and a lot of worrying, was pretty much all that happened to Augusta for the duration of the war.

  When the shooting actually started in Charleston, he was glad that Rachel and the boy were safe in Augusta, instead of bei
ng caught in the middle of a war, though personally he would have liked to see the battle for the novelty of it. Everybody said the war was only going to last a few weeks, and he hated to have missed getting a glimpse of it.

  Folks were optimistic, but they were making preparations anyhow. Two weeks after Fort Sumpter, Augusta organized a local company of home guards, the Silver Grays, composed mostly of men too old to fight in the regular army. Mr. James Hope came back from New York City to stand with the Confederacy and got himself chosen second member of the company, after Rev. Joseph Wilson, who was the first. Rev. Wilson’s boy Tommy and little Madison Newton were the same age, and they sometimes played together on the lawn of the Presbyterian church, across the road from the college. Sometimes the two of them would come over and pepper him with questions about bodies and sick folks, and he often thought that you’d have to know which boy was which to tell which one wasn’t the white child. Fanny kept young Madison as clean and well-dressed as any quality child in Augusta.

  The months went by, and the war showed no signs of letting up. One by one the medical students drifted away to enlist in regiments back home.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll have to worry about procuring any more cadavers for classes, Grandison,” Dr. Garvin told him.

  “No, sir,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot of the students are fixing to quit and join up.”

  Dr. Garvin scowled. “I expect they will, but even if the school stays open, this war will produce enough cadavers to supply a thousand medical schools before it’s over.”

  There wasn’t any fighting in Augusta, but they saw their share of casualties anyhow. A year into the war, the wounded began arriving by train from distant battlefields, and the medical school suspended operation in favor of setting up hospitals to treat the wounded. The City Hotel and the Academy of Richmond County were turned into hospitals in ’62 to accommodate the tide of injured soldiers flowing into the city from far off places with unfamiliar names, like Manassas and Shiloh. Many of the faculty members had gone off to serve in the war as well. Dr. Campbell was in Virginia with the Georgia Hospital Association, seeing to the state’s wounded up there; Dr. Miller and Dr. Ford were serving with the Confederate forces at different places up in Virginia, and Dr. Jones was somewhere on the Georgia coast contributing his medical skills to the war effort.