The Resurrectionist (4 page)

The phaeton rounded a bend and the road split before it, a hand-painted sign adorned with the legend
windsor
pointing to the left. The horses tugged right.

Presently the branches overhead began to thin and the soft undulating sound of flowing water ahead hastened the animals' steps. The wagon dipped into a small hollow and rose on the other side to a low bluff a hundred yards from the Waccamaw River. The horses stopped and snorted, nostrils flaring as a breeze off the river brought to them the coppery scent of blood.

Johnston opened his eyes slowly, expecting to see before him the inspiring grace of Windsor's twelve-columned façade. What he saw instead was an imposing structure of a different sort: a hard-weathered lodge propped ten feet above the marsh ground on stilts of cypress trunks, a set of bowed plank steps leading up to a high porch that bristled with the antlers of perhaps three dozen whitetail bucks. They were nailed to the wall beneath the gabled roof as densely as the clapboard wall could accommodate them, from twelve-pointers down to spikes, so that the front of the old building looked to his sleep-clouded eyes like either a wall of outsized thorns or the many-tined skeleton of a prehistoric beast.

“Hallo there, master!” a voice called. “Good day, sir!”

The greeting was robust, but when Johnston's eyes separated the man who issued it from the shadowy space beneath the lodge, the greeter seemed markedly less than glad for the company. A slave nearly six feet tall stepped from the shadows, wiping a blood-smeared knife on his trouser leg. Behind him hung the carcass of a fat doe hamstrung on two hooks fixed to the lodge floor above. He slipped the knife into his pocket and shrugged his shoulders. Johnston smiled.

“Ah, me. I am not so lost as I feared I might be. If I know my man, you are Drake's Cudjo, head huntsman of Windsor and guide extraordinaire. Am I mistaken?”

“No, sir.”

“And that fine specimen of venison behind you would be one of your master's prime herd, taken—let me think—a good two weeks before Windsor's season begins. Again, am I mistaken?”

“Again, sir, you ain't.”

Johnston slipped down from the phaeton seat like a man ten years younger. “Cudjo, you are still a boy with appetites beyond the limits of his master's beneficence. But I must say I am pleased to see you nonetheless.” He stepped to the carcass and felt of it, glanced into the tub set below to catch the entrails. “Still warm, Cudjo.”

“Yes, sir. She was a pretty thing.”

“I'd guess her weight at a hundred and twenty.”

“No more than hundred, hundred and ten, master, this back say. I can't lie, Doctor Johnston. She was a pitiful sight, caught up in the worm fence a half mile down the river. When I saw her neck was nearly broke, there weren't much else to do.”

Johnston held up a hand. “You may as well save that for Mister Drake. Carry on,” he said, and sat down on a section of log. He had always held Cudjo's skill at dressing deer in the highest esteem and had watched him each year cleaning the gentlemen's kills with a regard bordering on envy. Put him in another country, perhaps in another era, Johnston would tell his friends over their evening whiskeys, and Cudjo could have stood with the most senior of Johns Hopkins surgeons in an operating theater. Not in this country, they would say, laughing, and sure as hell not in my era.

After a moment of Cudjo's shuffling, the knife reappeared and continued slicing against the hide, shearing it from the crimson muscle as precisely and smoothly as though it were working through butter rather than tissue. As he had always done—and as none of the other skinners bothered to attempt—Cudjo cut the fat from the muscle as he went, long ribbons of the pearl-like material falling to the tub in gossamer sheets. Johnston realized that the slave had been talking for several moments as he worked, his voice as raspy as the blade on the hide, hints of Senegal in the cadences and lilt of his words.

“Shame, shame about him. Say it ain't getting but worse. Say he ain't left the house in a week.”

“Drake? Drake will be better on the morrow, I assure you. There will be adjustments, to be sure. Perhaps no hunting for him this season.”

“Say they had to open the windows on his study, even with the mosquitoes so bad, on account of the smell.”

“That is the nature of gangrene.”

“He going to lose the foot?”

“Impossible to say without a proper diagnosis, of course. It's likely. Say, may I take a look at your knife there?”

Cudjo halted his methodical work and wiped the blade on his trousers before handing it over heel-first.

“Extraordinary,” Johnston said, balancing the blade across his fingers. “What manner of knife is this? The heft is nearly perfect.” He scraped the blade against his forearm and sheared more hair than he had intended.

Cudjo chuckled, the sound like wind in corn husks. “Ain't nothing but an old butter knife, sir. Took the emery wheel to it. See, your old hunting knife got too much shaft to it, don't bend. Butter knife'll ground down thin, so she'll bend. Little flex in the blade makes the cutting easier.”

Like a scalpel, Johnston thought. But with an extra three inches of cutting edge and a tang strong enough for it to double as a tendon blade. He handed it back to Cudjo and nodded toward the deer. “You're nearly finished here, are you not?”

“Yes, sir. She just ready for the smokehouse now.”

“Well, put her in, then. I will wait for you in the phaeton.”

Cudjo stared at the doctor blankly. “You aim to turn me in?”

Johnston turned on his heel. “I've never answered questions put to me by a slave, Cudjo, and don't intend to begin now.” He stopped a few steps short of the carriage. “You can handle a two-in-hand, can't you?”

The slave had the doe over his shoulder, but he turned to face Johnston before he spoke. “I can, sir, and a four-in-hand just as well.”

“Very well. Put the venison in the smokehouse and then you shall drive me to Windsor, where no person shall be turned in for alleged deeds I did not witness.” Johnston climbed into the phaeton's passenger seat and shut the little door. “And Cudjo, make sure to bring that knife of yours.”

“Yes, sir!” the slave said, moving more briskly now.

“We shall retrieve the venison on our way out of the parish this evening,” Johnston said, though he knew that Cudjo, enveloped in the smoldering smokehouse now, was beyond the range of his voice.

D
RAKE'S LIBRARY AT
Windsor was paneled in English walnut, wood imported on the same ship that had brought the pewter chandelier hanging above the shelves of leather-bound classics that reached to the twelve-foot ceilings. Johnston noted that the books were ordered in the meticulous manner of an owner who never bothered to read them. Drake, he knew, was not a man for poetry or essays—not a man for books of any kind, in fact, that were not ledgers or accounts; he had probably never delved further into his library than to glance at the engraved frontispiece of Scott's
Ivanhoe
. These books, like the library itself, were but part of the grand image of the planter-scholar so beloved in the low country—a creature as rare in Johnston's experience as the fabled albino alligator of the Waccamaw Swamp.

Whatever kind of man Drake was or purported to be, he was at present a man in considerable discomfort. His face was drawn, his eyes hollowed, his neckerchief soaked with the acrid sweat of sickness. He sat in a leather armchair by the fireplace, a half-empty decanter of bourbon beside him and a glass in his hand. Propped on an ottoman in front of him was the gangrenous left foot. A blind man could have located it by the olfactory sense alone, Johnston thought. It was well that Drake had not waited another day to send for him. The big toe had already swollen and blackened around the raw cut. It turned a bruised green at its root, then shaded into yellow at the sole, with crimson runners of infection stretching across the arch of the foot. Drake's houseman, Caesar, stood behind the chair, slowly fanning the air with a palmetto branch. He looked rather green himself.

“Don't get up, Robert,” Johnston said with a faint smile as he set his bag on the floor.

“Goddamn it, you know I couldn't if I wanted to. I can't bear to put any weight on it. Every time Caesar gets close to it, I flinch. I can feel the
air
on it, Johnston, like a pressure.”

Johnston traced the tip of his finger down the arch of the foot. Drake groaned and sipped from his glass.

“We will attend to it this morning. Caesar, all the windows shut directly, if you please. It will not do to operate with the swamp miasma permeating the room.”

At the mention of operation, Drake motioned for more whiskey. Caesar filled his glass and began lowering the windows in their casements.

“You mentioned a fox trap in your telegraph,” Johnston said. “I'm grateful it did not catch you at the ankle.”

“That goddamned Cudjo has set them out all over the place. It would have caught me, by God, but I was just dismounting when it sprang. He sets them with a hair trigger.”

“A most enterprising boy, he is. I met him on the road.”

Drake grunted. “That figures. His task this morning was to go down by the shore to see to the crab traps. Never where he should be. Look for him south, he's north. Look east, and he's west.”

“He is what the hands call a stray nigger, sir,” Caesar said.

“Be that as it may, he is in the yard now. I suppose I rounded him up for you. Caesar, help me move your master to his desk, will you? We will arrange him facedown.”

Caesar stepped forward and hooked his hands under Drake's shoulders. Johnston took the legs as gingerly as he could.

“Bring that whiskey with me,” Drake said.

Before they could lay Drake out to Johnston's satisfaction, the lord of the manor had downed another glass of bourbon. He lay breathing heavily as Johnston took his materials out of the leather bag, careful to array the scalpels, saw, and glass cups on the desk out of Drake's vision. Frowning, Johnston chipped at a smear of dried blood on a scalpel blade with his thumbnail.

“Should we bother with unbuttoning your shirt, Robert? Or would you prefer that I cut it?”

“Cut it down the back, damn it. I'm not moving another inch.” He held out the empty glass. “Caesar, again.”

“And Caesar, a tallow, after you've replenished Mister Drake.”

Johnston sliced at the broadside cotton while Caesar poured. When Caesar came around the desk with a candle, Johnston handed him a bell-shaped glass cup slightly larger than a shot glass.

“A delicate thing, isn't it? And in and of itself hardly an impressive apparatus. But one of the cornerstones of modern medicine, nonetheless. I will place them on Mister Drake's back, two at a time. You will hold them in place while I administer heat with the candle.” Caesar looked at him with horror. But Johnston, disciple of Benjamin Rush, would go to his grave convinced of the salubrious effect of blistering and bloodletting. It was inconceivable to essay surgery without this preparatory treatment to draw out the infection. “You are capable of that small task, are you not?”

“I will endeavor my best, sir,” Caesar said.

“Excellent.” Johnston set two cups on Drake's white back below each shoulder blade. “Hold them by the rim, fast to the skin. Do not lift them until I say so. Take another drink, Robert.”

While Drake gulped the whiskey, Johnston bent the candle to the peak of the first glass cup, one hand spread out beneath it to catch dripping wax. After thirty seconds, Drake began to groan as the flesh beneath the glass reddened. When the skin began to rise Johnston moved the candle to the other cup. Wax dripped on his palm and he blew at it. When the skin once more rose into a welt, he set the tallow aside and pulled his watch from its vest pocket. The second hand completed three quarters of its circuit and he nodded to Caesar, who removed the cups and set them on the desk blotter abruptly, one of them nearly rolling off to the floor. On Drake's back now were two perfect circles, each the size of a silver dollar. The red flesh seemed to glow angrily above his twitching muscles.

“Excellent,” Johnston said with satisfaction. “Two more and we are done.”

Caesar cleared his throat. “I don't believe I'll be able to assist you again, sir.”

“That's my good man, Caesar,” Drake said. His speech was beginning to slur. He waved the glass over his shoulder and murmured, “Pour.”

Johnston looked at Caesar coldly. A glance revealed the butler had lost what little stomach he may have had before. The close air of the room seemed to be affecting him.

“I cannot perform the surgery without aid. Caesar, since you are unable to provide assistance beyond libation, step outside and send in that Cudjo. The fresh air may renew your vigor.”

“Cudjo!” Drake spat. “Do you mean to kill me, man?”

“You know my opinion of his abilities, Robert. He is quite adept.”