Arthur Tor steals the dead for a living. As a resurrection man, he creeps around graveyards with his shovel, hoping to dig up corpses so he can sell them to the local medical college and pay his tuition there. He also holds a strange position in underground society. If someone is dying a slow, painful death, the family members come to Arthur and beg him to end their loved one’s pain. Arthur can never refuse, and he helps the dying cross the threshold without more pain in a process he calls the Black Rounds. Unfortunately, the local judge has gotten wind of Arthur’s activities and has sworn to send him to prison—or the hangman’s noose.
Jesse Fair has fled his corrupt family in Baltimore and landed in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he becomes the town gravedigger and, eventually, the undertaker. He works hard to help grieving families through their pain with warmth and compassion. Some of these families make odd requests for their dearly departed, and Jesse discovers that the undertaker often has to deal with the absurd side of death. But his nefarious family is still searching for him. Relentlessly. And once they find him, Jesse will have to make a terrible choice.
When Jesse catches Arthur in the act of robbing a grave, the two of them form a strange friendship and even stranger partnership that digs deep into social taboos—and into their own souls.
In his first book since his critically-acclaimed novel The Importance of Being Kevin, Steven Harper spins a heartfelt, uplifting story of suspense, life, and love against the backdrop of a Michigan town at the edge of the frontier.
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It’s 1890. Arthur is a resurrection man who digs up recently-buried corpses and sells them to the local university medical school, where he’s also a student. Jesse, the local gravedigger, catches Arthur at the grave of Mr. Elmer Pitt, but instead of turning Arthur in, Jesse offers to help with the digging in exchange for breakfast with Arthur. Unfortunately, Arthur has gotten the attention of a local judge, who has a grudge against the medical school—and against Arthur. After breakfast, Arthur and Jesse end up in Arthur’s room at a boarding house, where they spend considerable time alone.
Sometime later, they rearranged their disheveled clothes and scampered down the stairs with naughty schoolboy laughter chasing after them. The clock on Mrs. Gruber’s mantle said Arthur had half an hour to make his ten a.m. class.
“Doc likes me,” Arthur said, straightening his collar, “but I still shouldn’t be late for anatomy.”
“And I have a grave to dig.” Jesse took out a gold pocket watch and checked it against Mrs. Gruber’s mantle clock. “Funeral’s at three. I need to get cracking.” He glanced at Arthur. “It’s not a hanging offense, you know.”
“What isn’t?”
“What we just did. Upstairs. You can go to jail for it, but not the noose, no matter what Judge Winter says.”
“I don’t really want to find out,” Arthur said.
Jesse cocked his head. “Winter said you were filling graves, and he didn’t mean with dirt. He said he knows something you could hang for. What are you doing?”
The question caught Arthur completely off-guard. He floundered. “I’m not … I don’t …”
“Look,” Jesse said slowly, “I’m the last person to judge, so to say. But if we’re going to—” he hesitated “—commit more acts like we did just now, I think I need to know what I’m getting into.”
Arthur licked his lips. “Jesse, I hardly—”
“Mr. Tor?”
Mrs. Gruber, her shoes muddy from the street, was waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs. Arthur jerked his words to a halt. Had she heard anything? But no—she looked distressed, not angry.
“Hello, Mrs. Gruber,” he said. “This is Mr. Fair. He’s a … patient of sorts. We were just—”
“Mr. Tor,” she interrupted in her thick German accent, “I need … I wondered if perhaps …”
And Arthur understood. It always went this way. A hesitation, a slight stammer, an unwillingness to meet his eyes paired with an equal unwillingness to back down. The Black Rounds had found him again. Arthur’s fear drained away, replaced with stolid resignation. He glanced at the mantle clock again. He would be late to class. It couldn’t be helped. “You have someone … special I should see.”
“My niece.” Mrs. Gruber wrung her handkerchief. “She is … how you say … in a bad way. I come now from my brother’s house. We have little money for a doctor, but people said I could ask …”
Arthur nodded. People always said you could ask. In corner conversations and across fences, down dark hallways and over night-time pillows, people always said you could ask. Every place had someone you could ask, and if you listened hard enough in the quiet places, you learned who it was. This place had Arthur Tor.
“Half a moment, Mrs. Gruber.” Arthur dashed upstairs and snatched up a worn Gladstone bag he’d bought used months ago and stocked with the bits and pieces he’d scavenged from the labs and classrooms at the University. When he came down, Jesse was engaged in conversation with Mrs. Gruber.
“My husband was a good man,” Mrs. Gruber was saying. “Always with the kind word or a penny for the children. Schatz adored him.”
“He’s buried in Forest Hill Cemetery?” Jesse asked, and off Mrs. Gruber’s nod, added, “Their diggers do fine work. Deep, solid graves, no mixing up the coffins like in some cemeteries I could mention, and they look after the greenery real nice. He’s in good hands there.”
“Shall we?” Arthur said quickly. “Jesse, you can come along. You’ll see what I do.”
Jesse gave him an odd look, but nodded and followed them both outside.
Mrs. Gruber’s brother, one Friedrich Bloss, lived only a few blocks away in a tidy flat squashed in among other tidy flats. Elise, the daughter, occupied the only bedroom. Arthur examined her while her parents wrung their hands in the doorway and Jesse sat with Mrs. Gruber in the front room. Elise’s breathing came fast and shallow, and endless, wracking pain tightened her face like a drum ready to split. He gingerly placed an ear against her chest. Her breasts were hard piles of gravel. The cancer had advanced so far, Arthur couldn’t even tell where it had originated. Sadness stole over him. There was only one outcome here.
“How long has she been like this?” Arthur asked.
In halting English, Mr. Bloss explained that Elise had become visibly sick a month ago, but had confessed to feeling bad long before that and keeping it to herself. The family hadn’t money for a doctor, so they had sent her to bed and hoped. Elise had worsened. Now she slid in and out of consciousness, every muscle and nerve raked raw, until breathing itself was a white-hot horror. There was no treatment, and her remaining time, whether two days or twenty, would be endless hours of fiery pain.
Death hovered about the room in a soft fog, unwilling or unable to coalesce just yet, knowable and untouchable at the same time. Arthur’s bag sat on the floor, heavy with a power of its own. Elise opened her eyes for a blink, and Arthur saw the pain there. He also saw a longing he had seen a dozen times before, a longing for freedom and an end to fear. Arthur swallowed, and his hands shook a little. For a moment, he was twelve years old and standing beside his sister Sally’s bed. Her swollen face and greenish skin betrayed the infected tooth that was poisoning her blood and killing her in an agony of inches. He had watched her with the heaviest feeling of hopelessness and helplessness a boy could feel.
“Please, Arthur,” Sally had whispered. “Help me.”
Then Arthur was back with Elise. Her eyes slid shut. Arthur spoke her name, but she didn’t answer. She only exhaled pain. Arthur let out a long sigh of his own. The next part might be simple, but it wasn’t easy.
“There is no recourse,” he said gently, and the Blosses both nodded. They knew. They always knew. It was why they called on Arthur, the not-yet doctor who moved through the city with his black bag. Arthur, the one who was willing to do what doctors would not. Somehow, the ones in need knew to come to him.
So far, he’s written more than two dozen novels and over fifty short stories and essays. When not writing, he plays the folk harp, lifts weights, and spends more time on-line than is probably good for him. He teaches high school English in southeast Michigan, where he lives with his husband. His students think he’s hysterical, which isn’t the same as thinking he’s funny.
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