The Dress Lodger by Sheri Holman Read Free Book Online

of the new Board of Health, the sexton must mix great shovelfuls of quicklime into the mounds of earth that partner all fresh six-foot troughs to corrode diseased bodies into instant bones. We may have watched him of an evening chop and turn, heave and pat, raising pure white drifts throughout the yard, and when he was done, drive the flat headstones into place like sledding accidents gone face-first into snowbanks.
    The sexton’s dog, who is usually left tied up to warn off intruders, who would at the skittering of a squirrel or the fluttering of a mourning dove bark until all the veins stood out on his muscular neck, died two weeks earlier from gnawing a brick of unbroken lime. The sexton himself is down with the ‘flu he periodically picks up from the bodies he handles and is sleeping it off at his sister’s house. It has been two hysterical years since Burke and Hare were caught; the town has calmed down; the graveyard, no longer patrolled, is once more the exclusive domain of its tenants. On the alternate night of our beginning, as Henry creeps across the town moor, crunching through shimmering floes of broken glass, skirting the ghostly skeletons of dumped cattle given their last rites by rats, his is the only ghost that stirs.
    (Later, at the Labour in Vain, Henry will tell Gustine that the laudanum he took to calm him for the task had, in fact, the opposite effect. Once he had leapt the cemetery wall, he had the sensation of skiing wildly through the night, of trees and stones and shadows rushing too fast past him, of time itself speeding downhill. He carried a burlap sack, a shovel, and a crowbar; he could feel the sweat running down the back of his neck and realized his arms were shaking from clenching the crowbar. Henry later told Gustine that he made an enormous effort to slow his racing heart.)
    Despite the frozen look of the land, it is not cold. The soil gives off a damp chill from the previous night’s rain but the warm air soups a lazy white fog in the hollows between mounds. Henry moves efficiently through the thicket of last century’s gravestones, barely glancing at the names. There had been no feared epidemic to frost these graves with lime, and Henry moves past them quickly. He needs to select his grave as he would a fresh fish, and he knows that a young woman, first cousin to the couple who took the back table at the Labour in Vain that night, was interred this morning. The couple looked so wretched he doubted they could have afforded a sturdy coffin. Probably the cheapest of nails and few enough of those. He wants only to finish this awful thing, to slap the wet body onto the slab and say to his students, Here, I have done it. That I may not ever again be accused of conspiring with murderers, I have dirtied my own hands with grave soil, I have carried the dead weight of a body on my own shoulders. That I may never again be accused.
    (Have you ever taken laudanum? he will ask Gustine later, sitting with his elbows on the same back corner burying table where earlier he had narrowed fragments of that grieving couple’s conversation into a point on the map of Trinity’s graveyard, a brilliant patch of earth buzzing as though freshly sifted with cocaine, underneath which sleeps a pale first cousin. No, she will shake her head. I never have.)
    Henry is so dizzy he hardly knows how his shovel makes connection with the soil or how the first clod of earth comes to hit his boot. It rained the night before and the dirt is heavy, pregnant with earthworms and busy black pill bugs, but he digs and digs like a man possessed. At last, he is doing it. He is the teacher now; he is doing what Sir Astley Cooper never had the guts to do, what Knox would rather pay professional murderers to do. Time moves in fits and starts as he digs deeper and deeper, not the required six feet, barely four, when his shovel strikes home. He flings it aside, wedges the crowbar beneath the floor on which he stands, prying back the