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