Free John the Posthumous by Jason Schwartz Page A

sockets filled with cloth. Relics are brought to a meadow, a pasture, a knoll—where the families tell pitiful tales at the funeral pile.
    The skeletons in old schoolrooms—these are black, given the inscriptions. They list the illnesses, in order, and relate the terms of the murders. Fits, for instance, with bules—and then the king’s evil. A man and a woman stabbed through the hands on a staircase.
    A treatise concerning Mrs. Trundle’s disease, from 1760, cites the demeanor of the bedsheets, and offers an inventory of hospital objects, beginning with a bistoury and a capital saw. The former, according to the annotation, is engraved with the surgeon’s name. The latter has a stag handle, split in the middle. In certain editions, scarecrowsstand in an anteroom — an error, I presume, despite mention of a dwarf-wall. The illustration, overleaf, exhibits four dogs on a cross.
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    I n the first postscript, the hearts are mistaken for dead birds. Doubtless the ants are thought a dis appointment. When the horse becomes a house, fur thermore, termites appear on the floor.
    The room would be easier to see in an exploded view.
    The sternum, imagined as a sword or a dagger, makes a more worrisome claim. The tail of the pancreas terminates at the spleen.
    Listen for rales in the lungs and a catch in the throat.
    When the child is supine, as here, the liver hides behind the ribs. The windpipe attracts spiders at night.
    In the second postscript, a boy watches the body. It is said to resemble a table of beetles. The heart is said to resemble a skinned animal or a burnt skull. It waits in the rain, at any rate, like other objects.
    Embalmed, it is properly brown. It will sink if you drop it into a pond.
    In the third postscript, the wife is buried, or set afire, or brought by cart to the mourners. A later translation cites John, at great length, and places the bones and clothing in the road—beside the cleft, as the afternoon passes.
    M aps of the body, in early anatomy, display the organs as houses in a town. The colors are quite bright—or rather dim. The heart is thought to contain eight rooms—or ruins , given the eventual corruption of the term.
    In line drawings of a particular kind, the heavens divide the victims into wretched sections. The legend, decorated with garlands and the like, abbreviates each name. Diagrams of skeletons behave more obligingly, or at least provide a finer distraction.
    Models of the heart, in wooden versions, in old hospitals—these can be nailed to walls or used for kindling. Blankets cover the skulls—while the wardrobe drops four stories.
    Were you to arrange my organs on a table, the lungs, I expect, would sit below the hornets, and the heart at one o’clock.
    Wound dolls, in the form of Devils, are marked at the throat, the hoof, the tail. The heads are stuffed with horsehair and stitched with wool. The letters concern amputation, but can also show the placement of veins.
    Ax mannikins, for surgeons, are said to resemble nuns. Thorns can replace the eyes, surely, though seams are customary. Pinholes suggest a gloomier room, later in the year. The lips are black specks—grime or tar or soot.
    Skeletons, on maps of the towns—such figures often replace annotations. In Bonelawn, as Bethlehem was once known, torches mean retreat or flight. In Mildred, there are rowboats for drownings. In Townsend, shovels and pickaxes for disease. Maps of the battlefields use red circles for smallpox and red dashes for blood. Bodies are shown as dots at the bottom of the sheet.
    M y recipe for tripe requires a slip of buff paper, a woman’s name embossed at the top. A fold, lengthwise, should hide nine words. The hand should slant.
    Calf’s liver, potted, is better in winter. Calf’s heart is simpler, despite the veins and clots. Sheep’s lights, beaten and trimmed, and then plunged into boiling water, drained, dredged with flour, and baked for two hours—these are garnished with parsley.
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