“I had no idea,” she said. “That’s horrible! What do they do?”
“What can they do? They just go on like everybody else,” Will said. “Some try to get in with the libbies when they can. They really aren’t much different from the men in the pool who never marry. There aren’t enough women in any case.”
Josephine had said something about Dinah having expool boyfriends, she recalled. She looked curiously at Will, wondering if he was an expool. She glanced at his hand to see his wedding finger was bare.
She absolutely was not going to ask him if his sperm were viable.
He smiled. “It’s okay to ask. Yes, I’m in the pool.”
She closed her eyes, feeling her cheeks burn with color. “I wasn’t going to.”
“We’ll just forget about it then,” he said, laughing. “On with the autopsy.”
Grateful, she looked again at the form under the blanket, to where she could make out the ridge of his nose to the points of his toes. “I really don’t have much experience with dead people,” she said. “Just two up close. Once I had to cut into a dead pregnant woman to save a baby. I didn’t have much time, obviously, and certainly no chance to look around inside, but I’ve thought about it since.”
“I can see why,” he said. “Who was the other dead person you knew up close?”
“My mother.”
He took a long look at her. Then he walked behind her, reached for the great barn door, and rolled it closed, blocking out the sunlight. She was thankful he didn’t ask for any details.
“Will anyone come in?” she asked.
“No. My family’s down with Bennie’s people. Unlike you, most people avoid this place when I have a cadaver.”
“Does Benny’s family know what you’re doing?” Gaia asked.
“No.”
He handed her a carpentry apron, which she looped over her head and tied around her narrow waist. A rectangle of sunlight fell through an open window of the loft above, and Will pushed the workbench with its burden into the light. When she touched the cloth by the cadaver’s head, Will put out a hand.
“I’m keeping his face covered,” he said.
She nodded.
When he slid the blanket up, it was a lot of dead body, with only a modest undergarment covering his loins. A long, bloodless incision had been cut from collarbone to below the navel. The skin, devoid of the normal hue of blood in the capillaries near the surface, looked tough and gray. Benny had been a thin man, and his hipbones showed through his skin. She looked at the way the man’s ribs held up his skin over his chest.
“It was the idea of cutting away the ribs that made me stop,” Will said. “I couldn’t think of any other way to get to his heart.”
“Maybe we could look at other things first,” she said, “and come back.” There had been an anatomy chart in Q cell, and she remembered talking it over with some of the imprisoned doctors, but it had been a tidy drawing labeled with bright red and blue colors. There were no labels here. She gently tugged the cold, supple skin to the sides, and Will helped without needing to be asked. Everything inside was the color of skinless potatoes and turnips, glistening and streaked with black and green.
She had nothing to compare it to, no way of knowing what was healthy and normal, or what might be diseased. I’m way out of my league, she thought for the second time that day.
“That must be the lower intestine,” Will said, pointing to the most obvious thing.
“You’ve done some studying?”
“A little.”
He passed her a wooden slat, and gently she nudged the white, soft, bulbous hoses aside, slowly following the lower intestine upward to find the smaller intestine and the stomach. She found what she thought might be the liver, and then the gall bladder. It surprised her how much of the anatomy chart came back to her, maybe because the connections all made sense.
“Do you have another slat?” she asked. “Here. Hold this aside.”
She nudged some of the larger intestines to the side, looking for a kidney deeper in. It was a darker, smooth color, and she carefully followed a ureter to the man’s bladder. Just below the bladder, she found a dense, slippery lump.
“Hey,” she said.
“What is it?”
She was so surprised, she put a finger in to gently push the bladder aside to see it more clearly: a uterus. The man had a uterus. It even had little fallopian tubes attached, and little round glands that might be ovaries.
She leaned in so closely to peer at the uterus that a strand of her hair fell in the cadaver. “Woops,” she said.
“What did you find?” Will asked.
She straightened, her eyes wide, and blinked in amazement. She brought up her apron to wipe her hair and tucked it back. Then she lifted the man’s undergarments to confirm he was truly a man, externally. He was.
“I don’t know what to think,” she said. Confused, she went back in, nudging around with her slat and one careful fingertip.
“Are you ever going to tell me?” Will asked. “Because I have no idea what’s going on.”
“He has a uterus,” she said. “I think it’s connected to his urinary tract. Look here. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Will was silent a moment. “This may come as a surprise, but I have no idea what a uterus looks like.”
“It looks like that,” she said impatiently, giving it a nudge.
When she looked up at him, his mouth was turning in mirth. “And now I know. Thank you very much,” he said.
She straightened. “I thought you knew something about animals giving birth. Mx. Dinah told me that.”
“From the outside,” he said, smiling more.
She laughed, relaxing a little. She liked Will, she realized. “This is a bizarre thing to do together.”
“No, really?”
She glanced back at the cadaver. “Do you think the other expools could be like Bennie? With uteruses?”
“I have no idea.”
“It sure would be nice to know,” she mused.
“That’s definitely connected to why he couldn’t have children, isn’t it?” Will asked.
“Absolutely.”
“How do you think it happened to him?”
She didn’t know, but an inchoate idea was coming to her. It must have happened early in his development. He could have even been a girl first. Possibly, just possibly, some hormone was affecting the pregnant mothers of Sylum, changing their girl babies so they developed into boys before they were born. She wished Leon were there. With his knowledge of genetics and the infertility that plagued the Enclave, he would have a plausible theory. She would have to remember what she could on her own and see if the library had anything.
“Do you know if there are even numbers of male and female animals in the village, like horses and sheep?” she asked.
“As far as I know. If you don’t mind, I think I’ve had enough.”
She glanced up and saw Will frowning slightly, troubled.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s just, I was sure I wouldn’t find anything, but in a way this is worse,” he said. “It’s so hopeless, really. There’s no cure for this kind of infertility, is there?”
“No.”
She tucked her hair behind her ear again and began pulling the man’s abdomen back together. A churning turned over in her belly, enough for her to notice, and then it passed. “Do you have any thread? I can do this,” she offered. “My dad was a tailor.”
Will passed her a spool of white thread and a large needle, and she sewed the sides of skin together in a neat seam. He used a wet cloth to carefully clean smudges of dark blood around the incision. After he covered the body again, Will braced his hands on the workbench and bowed his head. In the quiet barn, he lifted his right hand and touched it to his heart for a long moment. When he looked up again at Gaia, his brown eyes were searching, pensive, and transparent with grief.
“This was a mistake,” he said finally. “We can’t ever tell anybody what we’ve done here. You know that, don’t you?”
She was tempted to argue. They’d discovered something huge, something that might be relevant to many of the men in Sylum, and yet what, practically, did the information do for them? It was only a tease, an explanation with no cure. Will was right.
“I know,” she said softly. “Poor Benny.”
“I’m not sure you see,” he said. “People trust me here. If they knew I did this, they’d think twice about having me take care of the ones they love. They’d worry I did it to others who are already buried. Any comfort I could give would never be the same. Why didn’t I realize this before?”
“Is there another morteur in Sylum?” she asked.
“I’m it,” he said.
Just as I’m the only midwife, she thought. “We’re like the life and death team,” she said, and wrapped the loose end of the thread back around the spool.
When she glanced up again, Will was watching her oddly. A cautious, curious smile gradually warmed his features, and she realized that Will could be very handsome if he wanted to be. Or rather, he already was handsome, whether he wanted to be or not. There was a small mole at the base of his throat she hadn’t noticed before. Her gaze drifted to his square shoulders, his modestly buttoned shirt, his strong hands braced on the workbench, and she went still inside.
Standing across from him over a cadaver had become a private, binding thing, and the longer neither of them moved, the stronger it became. If she looked up to meet his gaze, they would both know it was true.
It made her miss Leon.
In the loft above, some invisible mouse skittered in the hay.
She took a short step backward and held up her hands. “I should clean up.”
“Let me get you some fresh water.”
Her stomach rolled unpleasantly, and she stepped back to the bench beside the wall. By the time Will returned, she was leaning over and hoping she wouldn’t throw up.
“I think I’m getting sick,” she said.
He set the water down before her and bent to look at her face. “It’s probably the acclimation sickness. It can come on fast.”
“Is it nausea? Headache?”
“Yes. It can get intense.”
“Will Maya get it, too?” Gaia asked, alarmed. “She can’t afford to lose any more weight.”
Will hesitated. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
She closed her eyes and leaned forward again. “Is there any treatment?”
“You’re asking the wrong person.”
“Who do I ask, then?” Gaia said. Her stomach clenched in a slow roll, and her mouth salivated ominously. Oh, no, she thought, gritting her teeth. She lurched through the door, headed for the grass at the side of the drive, and retched up her breakfast.
“Great,” she muttered. Sweat broke out across her forehead and the back of her neck. She spat, trying to clear a drooly line of saliva, and then spat again. Waiting to see if any more would come, she braced herself on a wooden fence rail. The sunlight on the drive multiplied itself before her eyes. Her stomach cramped, then eased, then rolled again.
“Here,” Will said, and passed her a damp cloth.
She touched it to her forehead and her lips, waiting. Before long, another wave rose in her and she leaned over, expectant for an awful, hovering moment before she threw up again. The shakes started next.
“Can I do anything for you?” he asked.
“If I had any idea what this is, it would help,” she said.
“Ginger or peppermint tea, maybe, for the nausea. With honey and salt, if you have them. I don’t want to get dehydrated. Will I get a fever?”