Jane (3 page)

I needed to lift my head to observe my lower body, but the spasm that racked my neck and back with even the smallest movement forced a speedy look. It revealed a similar configuration. The lower right trouser leg was gone. A dull ache in my right calf reminded me of the claw wounds there and the blue-green poultice that packed it. The front of my trousers loosely covered my bottom half, and I assumed the backs were underneath my buttocks and legs.

The thought struck me that such an arrangement of my clothing had to have been accomplished by my new friend, and I wondered at his inventiveness.
Would an imbecile have achieved so ingenious a sickbed?
He had applied medicine that appeared to have prevented infection of my wounds, ones that while severe showed neither redness nor swelling nor suppuration, and provided substantial analgesia.

How long had I been unconscious?
I realized with horror that my modesty must certainly have been compromised.
What of my bodily functions?
I felt clean and dry below, and detected no unsavory odors from my nether regions.
Stop!
I ordered myself. The accomplishment of urination and defecation in the presence and with the help of a strange male was certainly an embarrassment, but it was far from my greatest concern.

Suddenly a tight packet of leaves plopped down on the opposite side of the nest and a moment later came the man, leaping with utter grace and agility up over its side. Thankfully, his private parts were covered with a loincloth of sorts, really just a short animal skin tied at the waist covering the front of him, with what appeared as the wooden hilt of a large weapon protruding across his taut, rippling belly. His long legs were exquisitely muscled, as were his buttocks, and even his feet, bare of coverings of any kind, possessed great definition and obvious strength. As he came close and squatted unselfconsciously beside me, I thought that the sinuous toes, flexible and as powerful as fingers, were much like an ape’s—good for climbing.

He held my gaze, seeming pleased at the clarity he saw in my eyes, and spoke.

“Tarzan,” he uttered with great certainty.

All right,
I thought,
he is not an imbecile. We have simply not learned proper communication with each other.
I touched the center of my chest lightly with my right hand.

“Jane,” I said and nodded my head, smiling. I touched my breastbone again. “Tarzan…” I shook my head with definitive negativity and frowned.

His expression was at first quizzical. Then he smiled. He tapped my chest lightly. “Jane,” he said. Then he tapped his own. “Tarzan.”

He understood!

I returned the smile to encourage him, though to be honest, my smile was entirely sincere. There was hope to communicate with this creature.
No,
I corrected myself.
Not a creature. A man
.

And a beautiful one at that.

I lay still and quiet as he opened the banana leaf he had tied up with thin vine and revealed inside it wood mold and nuts, and the fruit of the pawpaw tree.

He first applied the delicate fuzz to my wound, and the moist paste caused it to disappear. Then he grabbed the flat rock from the nest’s rim and, pulling out his blade, broke the nuts’ shells with the hard handle. He offered the nut meat to me in the palm of his hand. Yet I did not take or eat them. I was staring hard at the blade.

He held it out flat in front of me to see.

“Boi-ee,”
he said proudly.

“
Bowie
?” I said, astonished.
What was this man, this “Tarzan,” doing with a Bowie knife, and how on earth did he know its proper name?
My father had such a blade in his collection of weapons. I had heard the story of Jim Bowie, the frontiersman who had died at the American Battle of the Alamo and had given the famous knife its name. There was nothing else about the man squatting beside me, or his home, that remotely bespoke of the civilized world.

And suddenly a Bowie knife.

This was a mystery, but perhaps more confounding was my trust in the man—Tarzan. I’d not questioned the grey mold he had rubbed into the poultices on my shoulder and calf, but I somehow assumed that it would improve my condition.
How had I come to trust this wild man, a being whose life and mind were becoming more bewildering to me with every passing moment?

He again extended his hand holding the nuts, and though I felt no hunger I was moved to accept them. It was a token of faith and friendship. Indeed, he seemed pleased when I put them in my mouth and chewed. He smiled and went to work peeling the pawpaw, gutting it of its black seeds.

When he held out a portion to me—the simple sharing of food between members of a family—I wondered how it had come to this so very quickly.

I brought the yellow fruit to my lips and took a bite. Nothing I had tasted in my life, I thought, had ever been so sweet.

Together we quickly devoured the meal, and when he rose again, I knew that he was off to gather more. As he stood on the lip of the nest preparing to slide the Bowie knife into its sheath, a rare ray of sunlight pierced the thick canopy above to glint blindingly off the blade. I closed my eyes and saw …

*   *   *

… reflected January sunlight glittering off the razor-edged scalpel in its small wooden chest. The sight of the serrated bone saw, knives and drills and probes with their ebonized handles filled me with satisfaction. My very own dissection kit.

Yet standing there alone in the bright high-ceilinged chamber with two rows of sheet-draped cadavers—alone if one did not count the bodies of the deceased—I could feel a nervous flutter in my chest. The sickly sweet and acrid smell of formaldehyde, and the flesh it prevented from putrefying, stung my nose.
Get your bearings, girl. You’re in the gross-anatomy laboratory at Cambridge. No time for floundering!

The medical students would be arriving any moment. Would it be the jocular, shoulder-bumping playfulness that I saw in the lecture hall, courts, and arches, I wondered, or would they quiet and grow still in this strange sepulcher?

There was a clattering at the door as a laboratory servant, his arms piled with tin pails, hurried in and began placing one at the foot of every table, for discarded parts I guessed.

I recognized the young man, Mr. Shaw, a graduate of the medical college who had yet to find a position in the world. The professor of human anatomy had happily taken him on to this posting that was both lowly in its tasks and most necessary to the smooth functioning of the laboratory. Servants, though they were called, were valued very highly, and the best of them, like Mr. Shaw, fetched and carried and mounted specimens that were produced by the students’ work. Some servants were paid as much for their services as college lecturers.

“Your first day, Miss Porter?” Shaw inquired.

I nodded.

“Make sure you keep the face covered,” he said of the corpses. “That’s the bit that can give you a nasty shock. My first day the towel fell off and I found myself staring at a granny with half of her skin flayed down to the muscle and an eyeball hanging down by the optic nerve. I retched into one of these buckets every few minutes till the end of the session.” He set down one of the pails near my feet. “Apparently it was a record-breaking spew … my classmates never let me forget it.”

“I’ll take your advice, Mr. Shaw. I’ll wait a bit to uncover the face.”

“Good luck to you, miss.”

The laboratory was filling with young men, two to a table. Presently one of them took his place across from me. He was a fresh-faced boy with skin so pale and translucent that blue veins formed a delicate map across his cheeks and forehead.

“I’m Woodley,” he said. “You’re Jane Porter.”

I could hear snickering from the tables on either side of us and the row across the aisle. I’d prepared myself for all manner of derision. The first woman to gain entry into this hallowed laboratory was sure to stir controversy and even indignation.
I have every right to be here,
I repeated to myself for the hundredth time that day and almost unconsciously pulled back my shoulders and thrust out my chin.

The movements, subtle as they were, did not go unnoticed by a too-handsome young man I knew from the anatomy lecture hall. Arthur Cartwright’s family was old, and they had managed to preserve their wealth and prestige in the previous century that had seen so many of them collapse into genteel poverty. Cartwright wore his arrogance like a badge of honor. All he did was smirk at me.

“Shall we?” Woodley asked.

Leaving the face covered with a small towel, Woodley pulled the sheet away, revealing what looked to be a middle-aged man. It was already a partly dissected cadaver, as I had joined the class in the middle of its term. I could see that the skin of one forearm had been peeled away, revealing musculature that looked decidedly like the stringy meat on a dried-out turkey carcass. A large opening in the abdomen exposed the intestines and multitudinous folds of the mesentery tissue. A repulsive odor wafted up from the belly and hit me with a force that knocked me back on my feet.

“I know,” said Woodley. “The gut stinks far worse than the rest. You’ll get used to it. Or you won’t.”

I was aware that even though work had begun on all the tables around mine and Woodley’s, everything that was being said here, and probably my reel backward from the odor of the abdominal cavity, was being closely observed by Cartwright and the others. They were all most certainly waiting for an opportunity to chime in with a barb, a pun, or their idea of a witty rejoinder … at my expense, of course.

“Mr. Woodley,” said Cartwright in a most unctuous tone, “perhaps you should help Miss Porter with the dissection of the rectum.”

I thought how apropos was my fellow student’s choice of body parts, as that was the precise orifice I’d just silently affirmed I would associate with Arthur Cartwright for the rest of my days.

But what I said aloud was, “Thank you, but I can take care of myself very well.”

“I’m quite sure you can.” The five words were spoken by Cartwright with such lewd innuendo that his corner of the laboratory erupted with laughter.

I gathered my wits and fixed my eyes on the flayed corpse. In the most demure tone I could summon, I said, “Mr. Woodley, might you show me this man’s testicles?”

There were roars of laughter, hoots and howls. Not a full minute had passed before the professor of anatomy, the most revered of lecturers, was in our midst. He was a clean-shaven man, and his barrel chest lent power to his otherwise tall, rangy appearance.

“Gentlemen!” The single word was close to a shout, and he spoke it with blatant irony. These were ruffians he was addressing, his tone revealed—anything but well-bred university men. The professor’s usual good nature and easy manner had vanished. His Midwest American twang seethed with gravitas as he continued. “You are working on human cadavers that were once living, breathing men and women. Somebody’s father, mother, child. It is the reason that we in the dissection room wear black coats, not the white of scientists and physicians—out of respect for the dead. There will be no laughter in the anatomy laboratory. No horseplay. Ever. Now get on with it.”

In that moment, the silence of the dead filled the room, and the students returned, chastened, to their grisly business.

I felt the professor looming above me, He whispered into my ear, “You should have known better.”

I turned and spoke so softly I doubted Woodley, across the table, could hear. “Sorry, Father. You may come to regret the mountains you moved to get me into this classroom.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said and, moving away, called over his shoulder, “Button up that coat, Mr. Cartwright. You look like a trash collector.”

I returned my eyes to the cadaver.

Woodley addressed me with mock dignity. “Was it the testicles you wished to be shown, Miss Porter? Or the scrotal sac?”

“Neither, Mr. Woodley. I think I’ll investigate the larynx.”

I felt his eyes on me as I removed the smallest of the scalpels from the instrument kit and attempted to make my first incision, this to remove the skin in the center anterior of the neck. Nothing happened under the knife.

“The human hide is tougher than you think,” Woodley told me. “Pressure should be firm, but not so firm as to slice through any more than the derma. Think of cutting into an overcooked heel of roast beef.”

I tried again. To my delight, the bloodless flesh parted. Having exposed what lay beneath, I closed my eyes and recalled what I had studied so carefully in my anatomy text.

“I had the larynx last term,” Woodley said. “Remove the mucous membrane posteriorly to expose the laryngeal muscles and the inferior laryngeal nerve. Then you can remove the lamina of the thyroid cartilage on one side to view the remaining laryngeal muscles.”

I thanked him and set to work carefully and assiduously in the soft tissue. I found myself handling the new knives and probes with unexpected dexterity. It was as though I had used the tools all my life. Nothing was so sublime or miraculous as the human body. So many secrets buried in flesh and bone.

Ah, there they were, the vocal cords!

I paused, awestruck, as a treasure hunter would before opening a long-lost cask of golden coins. I was startled when Woodley spoke again.

“You seem to know what you’re looking for in there.”

“Are you familiar with Dubois’s paper on the development and evolution of the larynx? That the mammalian larynx issues from the fourth and fifth branchial arches of the embryo, implying,” I continued, perhaps too zealously, “that the human voice box evolved from the gill cartilage of fish? Those structures that once filtered oxygen from water now filter air … and make sound!” I remembered then that I ought to keep my voice down.

“Ah, this is what all the excitement is about,” Woodley said. “Dubois’s ‘missing link.’ His ‘Java man’ fragments.”

“I’d say they’re rather more than
fragments.
A tooth. A thighbone … and a complete skullcap.”

“It hasn’t been proved that they’ve come from the same individual.”