A Long Day at the End of the World Read online

  Finally, during the five-year period of the Tri-State Crematory Incident, Brent Marsh sent 660 families a collection of human cremains. At first glance one would think these people were spared the horror of desecration, but obviously these husbands and wives and children and grandchildren had to think twice about the cremains they’d solemnly scattered, or placed in a vase on a shelf somewhere. Recall that DNA does not survive cremation. Add to this fact the strong suspicion that Brent Marsh had neither carefully nor individually burned the bodies he’d managed to cremate. In sum, these families lived in the unsettled state of not knowing whose cremains they’d obtained—whether relative, stranger, or some combination thereof. And if a complete stranger, then the possibility always existed that the loved one’s body remained unidentified and undeciphered among the blended names of decay. Inevitably these people had a different question: Whose ashes and whose dust?

  And within all these groups, the questions of ashes and dust and flesh and bone registered different intensities on the disturbance scale. Within my own family, for example, we ranged from the mildly agitated (my sister’s indifference to the idea of her own corpse left in the woods) to the strongly afflicted (my mother’s struggle through a broad palette of torments) to the obsessively disarranged (my irreligious descent into End-Times putrescence). But what about the more religiously inclined victim-families? Even though cremation remained disfavored among conservative Christian groups, my guess was that at least two-thirds of the affected families in this rural corner of the Deep South would identify as evangelicals, with the figure possibly even higher due to the region’s dearth of Catholics and lapsed Protestants. But this certainly didn’t dictate a prescribed emotional response.

  On the one hand, it was true that evangelical Christians tend to embrace the solace of design, imputing the desecration to God’s overall plan. For these faithful, everything happened for a reason. Your crappy job at Wal-mart happened for a reason, your divorce happened for a reason, the 9/11 attacks happened for a reason, etc. Consolation also lay in the knowledge that the dead (assuming a personal relationship with Jesus themselves) now basked in the glory of God in heaven, blissfully relieved of their corporeal burden. The early Christians, to the great shock of their Roman oppressors, bravely stepped into the ring with hungry lions who predictably, and as if by design, always tore them apart and devoured their flesh. The diminishment of the material world—including the natural world—worked as a necessary corollary to the elevation of the spiritual.

  And yet for the more apocalyptically minded Christians, I wondered if a desecrated body might present more disquiet. Technically, in End-Times theology, only the soul of the deceased rested in heaven with God—not the body—and only Jesus’ Second Coming would raise the dead in their “resurrected and glorified bodies.” To me, as to most believers, I presumed, the exact transaction remained pretty mysterious beyond the obvious image of grave doors flying open and millions of corpses clattering to heaven. Was it exclusively the dead body Jesus remade, or could he also conjure a new one?

  I had two other thoughts about the families and their relationship to the dead. The first transcended religion and cut across all demographics. It was about the body itself. Some living bodies had been close to those once-living bodies. They were lovers, daughters, sons, fathers, and mothers of those bodies. They’d participated in the special human bond of touch, the intimacy of the social animal that made its indelible impression on our primate brains. Now those bodies were dead and that was hard enough. And now they were separated from those bodies and that was harder still. But to think of their people as lost among the others at the Tri-State Crematory, in the myriad and awful fashions arranged by Brent Marsh, was a dark thing indeed. Such transgression affected humans terribly, changing them forever at their core.

  Another phenomenon also dealt with how the victims thought about their own bodies. How racism had inscribed and scarred their own bodies. About half the desecrated corpses were white, roughly corresponding to the racial makeup of corpses received at Tri-State. Brent Marsh, it seems, was an equal opportunity desecrator. And yet it had to inflame racial passions for some white Southerners to discover—having entrusted their deceased relative to a white funeral home—that a black crematory operator had dishonored the body. It was sad to think that some people would almost certainly blame the entire race of the perpetrator.

  * * *

  The summer of 2002 passed in silence, with no further disclosures about Tri-State. Suddenly, in September we learned that a good percentage of the families could have been spared the trauma of the desecration.

  Again, Norman Arey presented the news for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reporting that the Walker County Sheriff’s Department had failed to act decisively on a tip about decomposing bodies at the Tri-State Crematory. And with this, a weirdly Gothic Southern tale came to life, filled with dark turns.

  It all began on October 3, 2000—sixteen months before officials ultimately moved in—when a new propane delivery man, Gerald Cook, appeared at Tri-State for a routine service call. Having arrived before Brent Marsh, he began looking around the property for a large enough tank for his deposit. As he later stated in court, he observed a tremendous amount of “trash and debris … just clutter, a lot of junk. It was scattered everywhere.” And when he turned the corner of one building, suddenly he saw skeletal remains—skulls, bones, and “one whole body with a little skin clinging to it” apparently heaped together by a nearby backhoe. Concerned and disturbed, Cook related the experience to his boss, who the next day reported the entire story to Sheriff Wilson.

  Shockingly, the police did nothing. As Sheriff Wilson explained in the newspaper, “I felt it was a regulatory issue at the time … bodies not being disposed of in a timely manner. There wasn’t much we could do then. If somebody tells me they saw bodies at a funeral home, I would expect that.”

  It seems odd, to say the least, that skulls and bones and skinless corpses piled high behind a building by a backhoe could be so easily dismissed. It is difficult to imagine, say, that one could legally dump bodies together in a mound at a funeral home and leave them outside for months. It would seem too that any understanding of decay—of skulls and bones versus freshly dead bodies—would mean that the bodies had been there a long time. And if the bodies had been there a long while, didn’t that mean a family on the receiving end had been defrauded somehow? Personally I could think of an array of potential crimes suggested by the tip, some of which would ultimately prove untrue, from fraud to theft to organ trafficking. But even as he apparently assumed the tip to be valid—that bodies lay outside in a heap in various stages of decomposition—Sheriff Wilson stated it was “nothing to be upset about.”

  Which played into outsiders’ black-humored comment that maybe folks up there in the Georgia hills were unfazed by bodies left out in the woods and junked together by a backhoe. Culturally, the joke went, it wasn’t so much of a big deal. As a transplanted Southerner, I knew the joke wasn’t quite fair. But in some ways I think the comedians were onto something. Maybe the old-line Protestant stranglehold on the culture, with its disavowal of this world while waiting for the next, rendered law enforcement peculiarly blasé to a report of torn and abused bodies lying decomposed in the open. In the Deep South, as the vision portends, nightmare rested just behind the eyes.

  The tale went on.

  By October 2001 the deliveryman, Gerald Cook, knew that the local authorities had no intention of investigating, having sat on the story for a year. And during that period he’d seen more compromised bodies, including one twenty feet from the propane tank so decomposed it appeared “like it was melted.” This time he called his aunt, an administrative assistant for the FBI in Rossville, who anonymously contacted the Environmental Protection Agency. According to the newspaper account, when the EPA initially seemed skeptical about the story, she asked, “What if I told you I was walking my dog and the dog found a human bone, would that do?” Yes, that would d
o.

  Now the EPA alerted the Walker County Sheriff’s Department about a dog finding a human bone—the implication being that the dog had found the bone outside the crematory property. Federal pressure plus a dog and its bone. Finally the local police leapt into action.

  So it was in November 2001—more than a year after the initial complaint—that Captain Stanfield knocked on Clara Marsh’s door, located next to the crematory, and asked her about the dog and its bone. To this, Mrs. Marsh replied that the story just couldn’t be true, and that her son, Brent, had traveled out of town. Stumped, Captain Stanfield returned to his car, and on the way looked around the buildings adjacent to Clara Marsh’s house (noncrematory buildings) for human bones. He didn’t see any. He then tried unsuccessfully to locate the dog but naturally could not find the complaining (and nonexistent) dog-owning neighbor. Having exhausted his leads, he reported back to his superior, Major Morrison.

  As Major Morrison later correctly explained, Captain Stanfield couldn’t search the crematory grounds without permission or a warrant. Quite incorrectly, though, Morrison stated, “We had no reason to suspect.” Employing the same easy logic, they had strong reason to suspect: With two credible reports of decayed bodies, one from the propane deliverer and now another from the dog owner, they had solid grounds to “suspect” Brent Marsh of defrauding his customers. The time lag necessitated such a conclusion. All they had to do was present their credible evidence to a judge, who would have swiftly granted a search warrant for Tri-State based on “probable cause.”

  With two strikes against the Walker County Sheriff’s Department, maybe the federal authorities were not willing to risk a third. After Gerald Cook’s aunt again contacted the EPA in February 2002, this time more specifically detailing the horrible things her nephew had seen, the EPA sent its own people to the crematory. Outside a fence at Tri-State, these agents discovered a human skull, quickly bringing an end to Brent Marsh’s secret career in modern-day alchemy.

  But the damage was done. Ultimately the sheriff’s department’s apparent blunders, by my own estimation, allowed the desecration of up to a hundred additional bodies, as well as the problematic cremation of perhaps a hundred more. These were horrors perpetrated in this world, on this side of heaven and hell, on this side of the biblical Apocalypse.

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  UNFORTUNATELY FOR ME, and others, the biblical Apocalypse did not coincide with my own private apocalypse, the one I’d arrived at on the road.

  Even for End-Timers, who believe in the literal fact of Revelation, the cataclysm remains an event of the future. The thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, the raising of the dead in their “glorified bodies,” the founding of “a new heaven and a new earth”—all these longed-for events remain a few steps away.

  My tribulation, on the other hand, unfolded in a brighter present. I traveled through my ruin, and the road went everywhere. And by now I realized that my portal no longer resembled a line of photographs hovering in the distance, a movable doorway in a remote region of sky. Instead, the entrance lay behind me in the form of revelatory messages nailed to wood just after the suburbs and dead ends of Tuscaloosa, the transparent flags straight from the Holy Ghost asking that I Please do God’s will today. And I guess I was doing God’s will, as best I could saddled with my dead-ender’s burden of unbelief and my A gene–triggered hypersensitivity in which God’s will had become our will and we had spoiled everything. Now I rode inside tribulation itself, headed inexorably toward a final freeze-frame.

  Faster I sped back to Highway 69 and took off north-northeast through wooded hills scarred by tiny dirt roads leading up to timber clear-cuts; past black-eyed Susans in ditches, swaths of kudzu, an occasional farm; past the hamlet of Bremen and more of the same until I reached Dodge City—no Wild West town this place but a regular disturbed area complete with McDonald’s, Conoco, Jack’s, Dollar General, and Texaco—and then onto the entrance ramp at Interstate 65. It was my trip’s sole stretch of superhighway and immediately I was struck by its smoothness—the extreme glassiness of surface like all those fake lakes I’d encountered, past and present, the mirroring effect on hungry eyes.

  Again I rolled down my window, and the cars and trucks and world outside seemed farther away than usual—a trick of perspective, a streaming of events that had clear direction, yes, but no chance of balance or organization. Our world was like one of those old pinball machines I’d played as a kid, a zinging contraption we’d shoved so hard the TILT light came on and now the levers didn’t work—but still, stupidly, we kept flapping away at the air, unaware the game was over and we’d lost our turn.

  Stupid humans, I thought. Isn’t that what each disciple admitted off camera? In their moments of letting go, didn’t they ask forgiveness for being limited and stupid guys? Maybe we had to admit our own stupidity to understand the grandness of our self-inflicted debacle. And—following all manner of signs—I exited Interstate 65 at the town of Good Hope.

  * * *

  Historically speaking, I wasn’t the only one who had a problem with apocalyptic ground.

  … I looked and He opened the sixth seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became like blood …

  No, I don’t mean those, not the five separate earthquakes mentioned in Revelation—but the three big ones that rattled out from the New Madrid fault from December 1811 to February 1812, still the greatest rumbles east of the Rockies since the European settlement. With a roar like thunder, the land surged and dropped, fissured and sank, blew sand into the air in small volcanoes, and ejected coal from black swamps. Along the Mississippi River, the uplifts created waterfalls and sent forth huge waves that gave the illusion the mighty river had changed direction, flowing backward to the north. Entire islands disappeared. A vast nonfake lake of twenty-five thousand acres formed in Tennessee, called Reelfoot Lake, as water from the river poured into a wide subsidence. Yet it wasn’t merely the intensity of the quakes emanating from the bootheel of Missouri but the extraordinary breadth of the affected area: Sidewalks trembled in New York, buildings shook in D.C., church bells rang out in Boston.

  And the quakes kept coming: Two hundred moderate-to-large tremors occurred through March and hundreds of small shudders continued into the next year. Day after day of unsteadiness, with each first tremble hinting at an ultimate rise and fall.

  Such unprecedented shaking activated eschatological thoughts in many people, including the Cherokees, whose mountain homeland lay just a few hundred miles away. It was a rough time for the tribe: Americans continued their land incursions, the frontier market economy destabilized traditional roles, and Christian missionaries hammered away against their long-held spiritual practices. As a result, some Cherokees embraced the new ways and converted to Christianity, discarding their collectivized methods and creating larger and larger farms. A small percentage even went so far as to purchase black slaves to work those farms. In response to all this upheaval, the Cherokee apocalyptics—who tended to come from more traditionally minded people—cautioned the tribe that by abandoning the old ways they would suffer divine retribution. Following one quake in March 1812, a Cherokee conjurer, who may or may not have possessed the A gene, warned of “intense darkness” that would last three days, “during which all the white people would be snatched away as well as all Indians who had any clothing or household articles of the white man’s kind.” Some believed it was already too late. An old woman named Laughing Molly warned that “hailstones as large as hominy blocks would fall, all the cattle would die and soon thereafter the earth would come to an end.”

  Not to be left out of a good doomsday story about the South, de Soto passed somewhere near the bottom of the earthquake zone 270 years before the first tremor. Following a battle with the Pacaha Indians, which culminated in the desecration of a burial temple, the explorer sent scouts into the very heart of that precarious bootheel to look for treasure and a northwest passage to the sea. B
ut the land appeared thinly populated, and so de Soto—whose marauding was not of the sustainable variety—couldn’t travel in that direction without a proper concentration of Native settlements to pillage. Even if a land corridor to the water did exist, his army would starve trying to reach it.

  And even worse, there was no gold. No silver. No rich and glorious civilization waited to the north, glinting in the sun. As far as booty was concerned, he was stuck with those crappy freshwater pearls he’d looted long ago.

  With such bad news, the exalted commander must have begun to consider that after all the miles and everything his soldiers had endured—after all the arrows and spears they’d dodged and all the Indians they’d lanced from their tall horses—the expedition had simply failed. A man like de Soto had only one choice. He told his soldiers to keep going. He pointed his army west and then south again, on what would become an increasingly disordered path.

  * * *

  By June 2003, after more than a year of official silence, we abruptly received new information about Tri-State from the deposition of the chief medical examiner of the state of Georgia.

  Most startling to me, the medical examiner revealed that my father had been one of the earliest unfortunate arrivals at the site, one of only five identified bodies left uncremated during the initial year of 1997. Until the deposition, the greater public, including me, had no idea of the number of bodies abandoned each year, or that only five identified corpses had been desecrated in that beginning year. Apparently Brent Marsh accelerated his alchemical activities as time progressed. In addition to the five in 1997, authorities had managed to identify twenty-seven uncremated bodies for 1998, forty-three for 1999, forty-nine for 2000, eighty-one for 2001, and nineteen for 2002 (the story having broken in mid-February of that year).