The Underground Railroad

Digging up graves had fastened the bonds of friendship. Now when Cobb called him Doctor, it was with respect and not derision. “You’re not like that other sort,” Cobb told him one night when they carried a cadaver through the back door. “You’re a wee shady.”

That he was. It helped to be a wee disreputable when you were a young surgeon, especially when it came to materials for postmortem dissection. There had been a body shortage ever since the study of anatomy came into its own. The law, the jail, and the judge provided only so many dead murderers and prostitutes. Yes, persons afflicted with rare diseases and curious deformities sold their bodies for study after their demise, and some doctors donated their cadavers in the spirit of scientific inquiry, but their numbers scarcely met the demand. The body game was fierce, for buyers and sellers alike. Rich medical schools outbid the less fortunate ones. Body snatchers charged for the body, then added a retainer, then a delivery fee. They raised prices at the start of the teaching period when demand was high, only to offer bargains at the end of the term when there was no longer a need for a specimen.

Morbid paradoxes confronted Stevens daily. His profession worked to extend life while secretly hoping for an increase in the deceased. A malpractice suit called you before the judge for want of a skill, but get caught with an ill-gotten cadaver and the judge punished you for trying to obtain that skill. Proctor made its students pay for their own pathological specimens. Stevens’s first anatomy course required two complete dissections-how was he supposed to pay for that? Back home in Maine, he’d been spoiled by his mother’s cooking; the women on her side were gifted. Here in the city, tuition, books, lectures, and rent had him subsisting on crusts for days on end.

When Carpenter invited Stevens to work for him, he did not hesitate. His appearance scared Stevens, that first delivery months before. The grave robber was an Irish giant, imposing in frame, uncouth in manner and speech, and carried with him the reek of damp earth. Carpenter and his wife had six children; when two of them passed from yellow fever, he sold them for anatomical study. Or so it was said. Stevens was too scared to ask for refutation. When trafficking in cadavers, it helped to be immune to sentimentality.

He wouldn’t be the first body snatcher to open a grave to find the face of a long-lost cousin or a dear friend.

Carpenter recruited his gang at the saloon, rowdies all. They slept the day, drank well into the evening, and then set off for their pastime. “The hours are not great, but suit a certain character.” Criminal character, incorrigible by any measure. It was a low enterprise. Raiding cemeteries was the least of it. The competition was a pack of rabid animals. Leave a prospect to too late in the evening and you were liable to discover someone else had pilfered the body first. Carpenter reported his competition’s clients to the police, broke into dissection rooms to mutilate their deliveries. Brawls erupted when rival gangs converged on the same pauper’s field. They smashed one another’s faces among the tombstones. “It was raucous,” Carpenter always said when he finished one of his stories, grinning through his mossy teeth.

In his glory days, Carpenter elevated the ploys and chicanery of his trade to a devilish art. He brought rocks in wheelbarrows for undertakers to bury and carried away the deceased. An actor taught his nieces and nephews to cry on demand, the craft of bereavement. Then they made the rounds of the morgue, claiming bodies as long-lost relatives-although Carpenter was not above simply stealing bodies from the coroner when he had to. On more than one occasion, Carpenter sold a cadaver to an anatomical school, reported the body to the police, and then had his wife, dressed in mourning clothes, claim it as her son. Whereupon Carpenter sold the body again to another school. It saved the county the expense of burial; no one looked too closely.

Eventually the body trade grew so reckless that relatives took to holding graveside vigils, lest their loved ones disappear in the night. Suddenly every missing child was perceived to have been a victim of foul play-snatched, dispatched, and then sold for dissection. The newspapers took up the cause in outraged editorials; the law stepped in. In this new climate, most body snatchers extended their territory, riffling the graves of distant cemeteries to space out their raids. Carpenter turned to niggers exclusively.