Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  Grandison worked in one of the hospitals, assisting the doctors at first, but as the number of casualties strained their ability to treat them, he took on more and more duties to fill the gap.

  “I don’t see why you are working so hard to patch those Rebels up,” one of the porters said to him one day, when he went looking for a roll of clean bandages. “The Federals say they are going to end slavery, and here you are helping the enemy.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t see any Federals in Augusta, do you? I don’t see any army coming here to hand me my freedom. So meanwhile I do what I’m supposed to do, and we’ll see what transpires when the war is over.” Besides, he thought, it was one thing to wish the Confederacy to perdition, and quite another to ignore the suffering of a single boy soldier who couldn’t even grow a proper beard yet.

  Sometimes he wondered what had happened to the man he “resurrected” who wasn’t dead—whether the fellow had made it to some free state beyond the mountains, and whether that had made any difference.

  He didn’t know if freedom was coming, or what it would feel like, but for the here and now there was enough work for ten of him. So he stitched, and bandaged, and dressed wounds. I’ve handled dead people, he told himself. This isn’t any worse than that.

  But of course it was.

  The boy was a South Carolina soldier, eighteen or so, with copper-colored hair and a sunny nature that not even a gaping leg wound could dampen. The pet of the ward, he was, and he seemed to be healing up nicely what with all the rest and the mothering from Augusta’s lady hospital visitors. The nurses were already talking about the preparations to send him home.

  Grandison was walking down the hall that morning, when one of the other patients came hobbling out into the hall and clutched at his coat sleeve. “You got to come now!” the man said. “Little Will just started bleeding a gusher.”

  He hurried into the ward past the crippled soldier and pushed his way through the patients clustered around the young man’s cot. A blood-soaked sheet was pulled back revealing a skinny white leg with a spike of bone protruding through the skin. Jets of dark blood erupted from the bone splinter’s puncture. Without a word Grandison sat down beside the boy and closed his fingers over the ruptured skin.

  “I just tried to walk to the piss pot,” the boy said. He sounded close to passing out. “I got so tired of having to be helped all the time. I felt fine. I just wanted to walk as far as the wall.”

  He nodded. The mending thigh bone had snapped under the boy’s weight, severing a leg artery as the splintered bone slid out of place. The men crowded around the bed murmured among themselves, but no one spoke to the boy.

  “Shall I fetch the surgeon?” one of the patients asked Grandison.

  He shook his head. “Surgeon’s amputating this morning. Wouldn’t do no good to call him anyhow.”

  The boy looked up at him. “Can you stop it, sir?”

  He looked away, knowing that the sir was for his medical skills and not for himself, but touched by it all the same. The red-haired boy had a good heart. He was a great favorite with his older and sadder comrades.

  “Get a needle?” somebody said. “Sew it back in?”

  He kept his fingers clamped tight over the wound, but he couldn’t stay there forever. He wanted to say: Y’all ever see a calf killed? Butcher takes a sharp knife and slits that cord in his throat, and he bleeds out in—what? A minute? Two? It was the same here. The severed artery was not in the neck, no, but the outcome would be the same—and it was just as inevitable.

  “But I feel all right,” said the boy. “No pain.”

  He ignored the crowd around the bed and looked straight into the brown eyes of the red-haired boy. “Your artery’s cut in two,” he said. “Can’t nothing remedy that.”

  “Can you stop the bleeding?”

  He nodded toward his fingers pressed against the pale white skin. The warmth of the flesh made him want to pull away. He took a deep breath. “I have stopped it,” he said, nodding toward his hand stanching the wound. “But all the time you’ve got is until I let go.”

  The boy stared at him for a moment while the words sunk in. Then he nodded. “I see,” he said. “Can you hold on a couple minutes? Let me say a prayer.”

  Somebody said, “I got paper here, Will. You ought to tell your folks good-bye. I’ll write it down.”

  The boy looked the question at Grandison, who glanced down at his hand. “Go ahead,” he said. “I can hold it.”

  In a faltering voice the boy spoke the words of farewell to his parents. He sounded calm, but puzzled, as if it were happening to someone else. That was just as well. Fear wouldn’t change anything, and it was contagious. They didn’t need a panic in the ward. The room was silent as the boy’s voice rose and fell. Grandison turned away from the tear-stained faces to stare at a fly speck on the wall, wishing that he could be elsewhere while this lull before dying dragged on. These last minutes of life should not be witnessed by strangers.

  The letter ended, and a few minutes after that the prayers, ending with a whispered amen as the last words of the Lord’s Prayer trailed off into sobs.

  He looked at the boy’s sallow face, and saw in it a serenity shared by no one else in the room. “All right?” he said.

  The boy nodded, and Grandison took his hand away.

  A minute later the boy was dead. Around the bedstead the soldiers wept, and Grandison covered the still form with the sheet and went back to his duties. He had intended to go to the death room later to talk to the boy, to tell him that death was a release from worse horrors and to wish him peace, but there were so many wounded, and so much to be done that he never went.

  The war came to Augusta on stretchers and in the form of food shortages and lack of mercantile goods—but never on horseback with flags flying and the sound of bugles. Augusta thought it would, of course. When Sherman marched to the sea by way of Savannah, troops crowded into the city to defend it, and the city fathers piled up bales of cotton, ready to torch them and the rest of the town with it to keep the powder works and the arsenal out of Union hands, but Sherman ignored them and pushed on north into South Carolina.

  Three months later the war ended, and federal troops did come to occupy the city.

  “I am a throne, Grandison!” Tommy Wilson announced one May morning. “And Madison here, he’s only a dominion.”

  “That’s fine,” he said without a glance at the two boys. He was cleaning out the little work room at the college on Telfair Street. It had been his headquarters and his storage room for thirteen years now, but the war was over and he was free. It was time to be his own master now somewhere else. He thought he might cross the river to Hamburg. Folks said that the Yankees over there were putting freedmen into jobs to replace the white men. He would have to see.

  Tommy Wilson’s words suddenly took shape in his mind. “A throne?” he said. “I thought a throne was a king’s chair.”

  “Well, a throne can be that,” said Tommy, with the air of one who is determined to be scrupulously fair. “But it’s also a rank of angels. We’re playing angels, me and Madison. We’re going to go out and convert the heathens.”

  “Well, that’s a fine thing, boys. You go and—what heathens?”

  “The soldiers,” said Madison.

  Tommy nodded. “They misbehave something awful, you know. They drink and fight and take the Lord’s name in vain.”

  “And by God we’re gonna fix ’em,” said Madison.

  “Does your father know where you are?”

  Tommy nodded. “He said I could play outside.”

  Madison Newton shrugged. “Mr. Hope don’t care where I go. He’s living up at my house now, but he’s not my daddy. He says he’s gonna take Momma and their new babies up north with him, but me and Cissie can’t go.”

  Grandison nodded. Fanny Newton was now called Fanny Hope, and she had two more babies with magnolia skin and light eyes. He wondered what would become of Dr. George’s two children. />
  “Don’t you go bothering the soldiers now,” he told the boys. “They might shoot the both of you.”

  Tommy Wilson grinned happily. “Then we shall be angels for real.”

  “Do we call you judge now, Mr. Harris?” Either the war or the worry of family had turned Miss Alethea into an old woman. Her hair was nearly white now, and she peered up at him now through the thick lenses of rimless spectacles.

  He had taken his family to live across the river in South Carolina, but he still came back to Augusta on the occasional errand. That morning he had met Miss Alethea as she hobbled along Broad Street, shopping basket on her arm, bound for the market. He smiled and gave her a courtly bow. “Why, you may call me judge if it pleases you, ma’am,” he said. “But I don’t expect I’ll be seeing you in court, Miss Alethea. I’ll be happy to carry your shopping basket in exchange for news of your fine family. How have you been?”

  “Oh, tolerable,” she said with a sigh. “My eyes aren’t what they used to be—fine sewing in a bad light, you know. The boys are doing all right these days, grown and gone you know. But I do have young Madison and Cissie staying with me now. Mr. James Hope has taken their mother off to New York with him. Their little girls, too. You know they named the youngest after me? Little Alethea.” She sighed. “I do miss them. But tell me about you, Mr. Harris. A judge now, under the new Reconstruction government! What’s that like?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t do big law. Just little matters. Fighting drunks. Disturbing the peace. Stealing trifling things—chickens, not horses.” They both smiled. “But when I come into the court, they all have to stand up and show me respect. I do like that. I expect Fanny—er, Mrs. Hope—knows what I mean, being up there in New York and all.”

  The old woman sighed. “She hates it up there—would you credit it? Poor James Hope is beside himself with worry. Thought he was handing her heaven on a plate, I reckon. Come north where there’s been no slaves for fifty years, and maybe where nobody knows that Fanny is a woman of color anyhow. Be really free.” She shook her head. “Don’t you suppose he expected her to thank God for her deliverance and never want to come back.”

  “I did suppose it,” he said.

  “So did the Hopes. But she’s homesick and will not be swayed. Why, what do you suppose Mr. James Hope did? He took Fanny to meet with Frederick Douglass. The great man himself! As if Mr. Douglass didn’t have better things to do than to try to talk sense into a little Georgia girl. He did his best, though, to convince her to stay. She’ll have none of it.”

  “Do you hear from her, Miz Alethea?”

  She nodded. “Regular as clockwork. In every letter she sounds heartbroken. She misses me and her brothers and sisters. Misses Madison and Cissie something fierce. She says she hates northern food. Hates the cold weather and that ugly city full of more poor folks and wickedness than there is in all of Georgia. Fanny has her heart set on coming home.”

  “But if she stays up there, she could live white, and her children could be white folks.”

  Alethea Taylor stared. “Why would she want to do that, Mr. Harris?”

  She already knew the answer to that, of course, but stating the truth out loud would only incur her wrath, so he held his peace, and wished them all well.

  A year later, James and Fanny Hope did return to take up residence in Augusta, and perhaps it was best that they had, for Miz Alethea died before another year was out. At least she got to be reunited with her family again, and he was glad of that.

  He did not go to the burying. They laid her to rest in Cedar Grove, and he forced himself to go for the sake of their long acquaintance. At least she would rest in peace. He alone was sure of that.

  He wished that she had lived to see her new grandson, who was born exactly a year after his parents returned from the North. The Hopes named the boy John, and he was as blond and blue-eyed as any little Scotsman.

  Privately Grandison had thought Fanny had been crazy to come back south when she could have passed in New York and dissolved her children’s heritage in the tide of immigrants. But before the end of the decade, he knew he had come round to her way of thinking, for he quit his post of judge in South Carolina, and went back over the river to work at the medical school. Perhaps there were people talking behind his back then, calling him a graven fool, as he had once thought Fanny Hope, but now he had learned the hard way. For all the promises of the Reconstruction men, he got no respect as a judge. The job was a sham whose purpose was not to honor him or his people, but to shame the defeated Rebels. He grew tired of being stared at by strangers whose hatred burned through their feigned respect, and as the days went by, he found himself remembering the medical school with fondness.

  He had been good at his job, and the doctors had respected his skills. Sometimes he even thought they forgot about his color. Dr. George had said something once about the difference being a thin layer of skin, and then underneath it was all the same. Many of the faculty had left during the war, but one by one they were coming back now to take up their old jobs at the medical college, and he knew that he was wishing he could join them as well.

  He was wearing his white linen suit, a string tie, and his good black shoes. He stood in front of the desk of Dr. Louis Dugas, hat in hand, waiting for an answer.

  Dugas, a sleek; clean-shaven man who looked every inch a French aristocrat, had taken over as dean of the college during the war years. In his youth he had studied in Paris, as Dr. George had, and it was Dugas who had traveled to Europe to purchase books for Augusta’s medical library. It was said that he had dined with Lafayette himself. Now he looked puzzled. Fixing his glittering black eyes on Harris’s face in a long-nosed stare, he said, “Just let me see if I understand you, my good man. You wish to leave a judiciary position across the river and come back here to work as a porter.”

  Grandison inclined his head. “I do, sir.”

  “Well, I don’t wish to disparage the virtues of manual labor, as I am sure that the occupation of porter is an honorable and certainly a necessary one, but could you just tell me why it is that you wish to abandon your exalted legal position for such a job?”

  He had been ready for this logical question, and he knew better than to tell the whole truth. The law had taught him that, at least. Best not to speak of the growing anger of defeated white men suddenly demoted to second-class citizens by contemptuous strangers. He’d heard tales of a secret society that was planning to fight back at the conquerors and whoever was allied with them. But as much as the rage of the locals made him uneasy, the patronizing scorn of his federal overseers kindled his own anger. They treated him like a simpleton, and he came to realize that he was merely a pawn in a game between the white men, valued by neither side. It would be one thing to have received a university education and then to have won the job because one was qualified to do it. Surely they could have found such a qualified man of color in the North, and if not, why not? But to be handed the job only as a calculated insult to others—that made a mockery of his intelligence and skills. At least the doctors had respected him for his work and valued what he did. Fifteen years he’d spent with them.

  Best not to speak of personal advantage—of the times in the past when he had prevailed upon one or another of the doctors to treat some ailing neighbor or an injured child who might otherwise have died. The community needed a conduit to the people in power—he could do more good there than sentencing his folks to chain gangs across the river.

  Best not to say that he had come to understand the practice of medicine and that, even as he approached his fiftieth year, he wanted to know more.

  At last he said simply, “I reckon I miss y’all, Dr. Dugas.”

  Louis Dugas gave him a cold smile that said that he himself would never put sentiment before other considerations, but loyalty to oneself is a hard fault to criticize in a supplicant. “Even with the procuring of the bodies for the dissection table? You are willing to perform that task again as before?”

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p; We must mutilate the dead so that we do not mutilate the living. He must believe that above all.

  He nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Very well then. Of course we must pay you now. The rate is eight dollars per month, I believe. Give your notice to the South Carolina court and you may resume your post here.”

  And it was done. What he had entered into by compulsion as a slave so many years before, he now came to of his own volition as a free man. He would return to the cart and the lantern and the shovel and begin again.

  Well, all that was a long time ago. It is a new century now, and much has changed, not all of it for the better.

  He steps out into the night air. The queasy medical student has tottered away to his rooms, and now the building can be locked again for the night. He still has his key, and he will do it himself, although his son George is the official porter now at the medical college—not as good as he himself once was, but what of that? Wasn’t the faculty now packed with pale shadows—the nephews and grandsons of the original doctors? A new century, not a patch on the old one for all its motorcars and newfangled gadgets.

  He will walk home down Ellis Street, past the house where James and Fanny Hope had raised their brood of youngsters. One of the Hope daughters lived there now, but that was a rarity these days. There was a colored quarter in Augusta now, not like the old days when people lived all mixed together and had thought nothing about it.