Rotters (48 page)

The cash wouldn’t last. We both knew it. Discussing eventualities would get us nowhere, so we didn’t bother. That first week in Glasgow we slept in hostels and ate at pubs, filling our bellies with jellied breads and mushy peas. Harnett looked like a drinker and they never stopped offering him pints. He smiled and waved them off and the silence continued.

We tended to our wounds. My cough wasted into a sore throat that left its mark in a new coarsening of my voice. The cuts on my hip and shoulder probably needed stitches, but we survived with storebought pharmaceuticals. Miraculously I had no serious burns, though every inch of skin that had been exposed during the fire went pink and peeled. Harnett’s smoke inhalation had left him with a bronchitis that would
not quit, but day by day his cricks and limps resolved. With time, our worst traumas scabbed over.

The stories didn’t begin until we were on the train to Edinburgh. Harnett craned his neck to watch exhaust pump from industrial columns. From the scrap metal lining the rails to the mongrel dogs lifting their legs against funny little shrubs, everything seemed to delight him. Even more vitality returned to him when we stepped onto Edinburgh’s cobblestoned streets. He pointed at the castle looming catastrophically at the top of the hill and laughed at my amazement. We ducked into a door among the zigzagging storefronts and bought cups of soup and carried them to a side road, where Harnett exclaimed happily upon finding an underground bookshop still in business. He rummaged among the dusty stacks and haggled with the portly owner and finally handed to me a clothbound stack of pale yellow pages:
The Diary of a Resurrectionist, 1811–1812, To Which Are Added an Account of the Resurrection Men of London and a Short History of the Passing of the Anatomy Act
.

“If you’re going to start a library,” he said, “that’s book number one.”

It had cost the equivalent of three days’ worth of food, and I metered the words out as if they were equally as essential.
The complaint as to the scarcity of bodies for dissection is as old as the history of anatomy itself
, it began. Harnett spoke aloud these words as I read them, and there was a pride in his expression I had never before seen. Maybe the Diggers were finished and maybe they should not have existed for as long as they did. But they had come from noble stock, and this was what he wanted to show me.

We traveled by foot to Greyfriars Churchyard, where
Harnett showed me the giant barred mortsafes erected to keep out the resurrection men, or sack-’em-up men, as they were also called. These cages, as well as wrought-iron coffins, cemetery watchtowers, and buried barbed wire, proved the mettle of these men—despite the unsavory work and the threatening mobs, they risked it all, for money, yes, but also for the snatching of life from the jaws of disease and injury. Their bravery was matched by those surgeons who hid the illegal remains in their flower gardens or beneath their floorboards. We were not the first victims of mob violence—that was what Harnett was trying to tell me.

“And that’s how it began.” Harnett tested the mortsafe’s strength. “The sack-’em-ups over here became the Diggers over there. A few generations later you have Lionel, and one generation after that, you have me.”

“And then me,” I added.

Harnett stood and brushed his hands on his pants.

“But it’s over now,” he said. “You have to know that.”

I tapped my wooden fingers and surveyed the necropolis.

“Just because there’s not as many of us anymore? That’s your reason?”

“Because there’s no heroism,” Harnett said. “Not anymore.”

So this trip to the beginning was really the end. I read my book and tried to come to terms with the feeling of emptiness. We slept in parks and took remainders of food that locals and tourists seemed only too happy to give us. One day Harnett led me to a farm and made me watch the cows eat from their trough until I couldn’t take the mystery any longer.

“I give up.”

“The trough,” he said. “Look closer.”

We moved near enough to feel the heat of the bovines and hear the flies that zipped about their tails. The trough was
coffin shaped. Further investigation proved it to be one of the legendary iron coffins, repurposed as a feeding bin so long ago that the farmer probably had no idea of the relic’s consequence. There were other examples: a former “putrefaction house,” built to allow bodies to fully rot before burial, was now a confectionary; those nicks in the side of the church were bullet holes from a gunfight between competing sack-’em-ups; those red stains betrayed a parking lot’s former life as a slaughterhouse before it was shut down when the overcrowding of graves led to pestilence.

The mysteries of the past were solved in our every waking moment, and Harnett hoped that the knowledge might make giving up digging easier for me. As we walked away from the farm, I realized that my sense of loss could not possibly compare to his.

“I only wish,” he said one night as we sat at a carnival erected in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, “that I could’ve seen the pyramids. Dug there like Lionel. Now, those were tombs.”

“Well,” I said, “we are in Europe. We could start heading that direction.”

He shrugged. “Little low on funds.”

“That’s nothing new.”

We bought another corn dog and split it.

“When the anatomy laws were finally passed here, common knowledge was that it marked the end of grave robbing.”

“It was kind of the beginning,” I said.

“That’s correct,” he said. “It was the start of the real work. But ours is a chapter they’ll never know how to write. We were the reason things were missing or misplaced. Lionel used to say we were the thieves of stillness.” He took a deep breath. The lights on the rides began flashing.

“Can’t we ever go back?”

“Kid, look at us. We’re down to nothing. So no,” he said. “Well, that’s not entirely true. You can, if you want. What happened at the school—you know they’re pinning that on me.”

Seen from Edinburgh’s serenity, the boy who had wreaked such repugnant vengeance was a stranger. Giant waves of shame shook through me. It had been I who had chased Harnett from Bloughton, I who had burned down his home. Harnett let me twist in silence for several minutes, yet I felt no malice. If anyone was inclined to forgive Bad Jobs, it was my father.

“So what about the Gatlins?” I finally asked.

“Until they have my body, they might come after you.”

“Let them.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“I know how to run,” I said. “I know how to fight.”

“The fighting has to end sometime.”

“It will,” I said. “With me, I’m the last one.”

Harnett stretched and leaned against the rock ledge at our back. Pink clouds held back the rain and the air smelled like sugar.

“Everything we learned from Lionel, this is where we learned it.” He scanned the sky and looked more placid than I had ever seen him. I knew instantly that if I returned to the States alone, this was how I wanted to remember my father. “What Boggs said was the truth. We were brothers. We were.” He looked at me, then at his feet. “I should have come for you. I should have found you.”

Regret hurt so badly that my fingers, those that remained, went numb.

“I’m sorry.” As insufficient as it was, it was all I could say. “Harnett, I’m sorry.”

“Hey, kid,” he said. “Call me Ken.”

W
E DRANK OUR TEA
on the front steps of an old church after awakening from a night in the park and laughing at the patterns the grass had left on our faces. Fog hung close to the ground, smearing the morning streetlights, and so it was a great surprise when a young man emerged from the haze. With his shoulder bag and secondhand jacket he looked like a student, but it was his American accent that all but confirmed it.

“One of you Ken Harnett?” he asked.

We glanced at each other over the steaming rims of our paper cups.

“Oh, that’s awesome,” the man said. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

Harnett was instantly suspicious. “Really?”

“Really! I’m an American!”

Harnett and I shared another glance.

The guy laughed a little. “I guess that’s probably obvious,” he said. “Anyway, I’m with the Study Abroad program. Engineering. That’s not at George Square, unfortunately. It’s over at the Kings Buildings, couple miles south of city center. You know it?”

Harnett nodded.

“Awesome, awesome. It’s always awesome to meet a countryman! I’m from North Dakota! But anyway, anyway. I have something for you.”

He reached into an inside jacket pocket and withdrew an envelope. It was stained and wilted, as if it had traveled a long distance to reach us.

“I’ve got a little job-type thing at the mail center and a few days back this thing came in, inside a bigger envelope, and it had these special instructions. It said it was for an American guy named Ken Harnett who was over here with his seventeen-year-old son. And it had a list of the places where you might be hanging out. And here’s the craziest part. There was money. Fifty bucks. I’m not kidding, like a fifty-dollar bill just taped to the bottom of the letter. Most guys maybe just would’ve pocketed the cash but I was thinking—”

Harnett’s hand was out. “Give it to me.”

“Oh, right.” The guy looked down at the letter somewhat forlornly. “I’ve been to every hostel and park within like twenty miles of here. The cemeteries, too, for some reason.”

Harnett snapped his fingers. “Give it.”

The guy shrugged. “Not that the British guys wouldn’t have done the same thing, but a fellow American—”

Harnett swiped the letter from the guy’s hand and went about tearing it open. The student was too surprised to be offended.

“I wish we could give you something,” I said. “But you got that fifty, at least.”

“Yeah, hey, no, that’s cool, it’s just awesome I found you, you know? Now I got a story.”

A few more niceties were offered, but it was clear that the conversation was finished. Eventually he made an excuse about classes and scooted away.

Harnett looked like a dying man just informed of a cure. He pushed the note into my hand. In a familiar elderly squiggle, it read:

K./ J.—

Msg. fr. Lahn—Lio. dec’d. No funeral. Have arr. flowers.
URGENT: at Lio.’s request, epitaph added: Job 20:15. Alerting
Dggrs. Burial: 29th. Tix at EDI. Godspeed.—Kx

“He’s dead,” I said. “Lionel’s dead.”

Harnett was shaking his head.

I felt my heart pound with hope.

“He’s not dead?”

Harnett swiped the letter back and shook it.

“He is. He is dead. He is dead and I am sad.” Then, to my surprise, his face broke into the gladdest smile I’d ever seen. “But he’s left us a gift.”

When a pastor in street clothes arrived ten minutes later he chuckled at my agitation, unlocked the church, and ushered me inside to a large Bible parted upon a pulpit. I paged forward and back. The man nudged me aside and licked his finger. After a moment he pointed at the relevant verse.

“ ‘He will spit out the riches he swallowed; God will make his stomach vomit them up.’ ” I repeated this to Harnett seconds later. He grabbed my elbow and began pulling me down the sidewalk.

“The treasure,” he said.

“Wait. You mean it’s real?”

“ ‘The riches he swallowed.’ ”

We were heading in the direction of the bus station, which would take us toward the A8 and the Edinburgh Airport, where Knox had plane tickets waiting.

“It’s with him.” I slapped my head. “It’s inside his coffin.”

“ ‘God will make his stomach vomit them up.’ ”

“He wants us to dig it up. That’s why he showed us the plot.”

Harnett glanced at the sky and up there I saw what he saw: a way out for both of us, enough money for him to live out his vagabond days in Europe and for me to follow whichever path I saw fit. He whispered, “You crazy bastard.”

“But Knox sent the same note to all the Diggers,” I protested. “There’s no time, we’ll never get there in time.”

“The note said the twenty-ninth. That’s two days. There’s time.” Harnett picked up his pace. “But you’re going to have to shut up and get moving.”

By midday we found ourselves at Glasgow International Airport, nearly one month after we had arrived, once more with nothing but the clothes on our backs, an old trumpet, and one backpack held together by threads. Heading for the security checkpoint, I again slipped the segment of my mother’s leg bone into my pants leg and glanced at a mounted television monitor. There was a storm system heading for the Southeastern U.S. that they were calling Tropical Storm Gilbert, but it was expected to weaken before landfall. The weatherman sounded confident. I didn’t give it another thought.

W
E FLEW INTO
W
ASHINGTON
, D.C., under slate skies. The first spots of precipitation I saw were against the windows of a rental car that we had no intention of returning. By the time we hit Richmond, Virginia, the rain was battering us like machetes, popping against the hood and windshield with
such force that I kept seeing Harpakhrad sailing toward the glass.

The radio told the tale. Tropical Storm Gilbert was now Hurricane Gilbert and was bearing down on the Outer Banks at Category Five levels. Winds were expected to reach 150 miles per hour. Anything within five hundred yards of shoreline was doomed. Massive evacuations were widespread. You couldn’t buy bottled water. By the time we hit North Carolina a caravan of cars clogged the interstate, heading in the opposite direction. We never considered stopping. In mere hours we could call our digging days done and Valerie Crouch could at last rest in peace.

We were forced to pull off for gas about two hours from Lionel’s. Vehicles idled in crowded lines for a chance at the pumps. Rain moved horizontally, ripping hoods from people’s heads as they watched their words being stolen into the sky. There was a feeling of impending apocalypse; men were giddy with the threat. Harnett spent five seconds in the rain to enter the store and came back soaked to the skin. He threw a cheap shovel and flashlight into the backseat. He tossed me trail mix, evidence of a tragic lack of Doritos. Outside, an armoire bungeed to a pickup bed was disassembled by the wind. We lost thirty minutes, an hour. And the radio station kept the bad news coming: Lionel’s house looked to be ground zero.