David (23 page)

I first heard his name from a man who heard it from another man that if a man was interested in making some quick and easy money, he should tell the first man who would let the second man know who would be sure to put the interested man in touch with a man called Burwell. I was twenty-eight years old, and ten uninterrupted years of hard, honest labour had netted me approximately seventy-five dollars in savings and a far less approximate awareness that hard-working, honest people tend to die alone in small rented rooms with worn-out bodies and washed-out souls. I told the man I was interested who told the other man who set up a meeting with Burwell.

Considering that, whatever it was we'd be doing, I was fairly certain it wouldn't be legal, I was surprised when instructed to show up in the Market Square on Saturday at nine a.m. There wasn't a busier time or place in Chatham than Saturday morning in the market. I'd been told to wait near the wagon set up nearest to Wellington Street West, which I did, pretending to find the bushel baskets of apples and onions and tomatoes as interesting as I could. After another and then another young Negro added their own mute admiration of the vegetables, the farmer—the man, anyway, who'd been sitting in the buggy seat with his back to us—climbed down and joined us at the rear of the wagon.

“Take a few, lads,” he said.

The other two Negroes seemed as puzzled as me, didn't know if he was referring to the produce or to what we were there to be paid for. The man laughed, enjoying our confusion.

“The farmer charged me enough to borrow his wagon, we might as well take a few apples home with us.” Then the man, Burwell it would seem, did just that, loaded down the pockets of his jacket with as many apples as would fit. He was white and clean-shaven and wore silver spectacles, but his leathery-looking skin, and something about his eyes—the way they narrowed when he spoke—suggested someone who'd spent the majority of his life outdoors, who'd only recently taken to the relative ease of city life. There were spider veins, broken capillaries, up and down his nose.

“I'll put my cards on the table, lads. What I'm looking for is someone not unlike myself, someone smart enough to take advantage of an opportunity when it presents itself.” Burwell watched the assorted Saturday morning crowd wander past, tipped his hat at a blue-bonneted, busily made-up matron and her two equally fussily attired young sons. The three of us stood there with our pockets full of apples, watching him.

“What I ask of my employees, lads, is simple: loyalty and common sense. What I can offer in return is just as straightforward: four dollars per man for a couple hours' work per night, sometimes once, sometimes twice, sometimes more than that, every week.” His accent wasn't Scottish—wasn't anything—but the way he used “lad” reminded me of Scots I had met.

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 have 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.