A Long Day at the End of the World Read online

  The mind erasers had prepared me for this moment. At the bar, as I told my story, I had come to believe that he was at Tri-State, my story sounding more true with every drink. Eventually that truth provided a point of embarkation for my tumbling sadness.

  But why him? I could think only of the lake and his five long years underwater. I was sure that’s where he’d be—if there was any sense to this universe, his bones would be locked underwater.

  My mother’s phone was busy. My sister in Houston picked up on the first ring. “Can you fucking believe it?” she said. My mother always said with a mix of pride and horror that my sister had a sailor’s mouth.

  My sister went on to explain that the funeral director in Santa Fe had looked at the remains and decided they consisted mostly of concrete dust. Maybe a few bone fragments, but those appeared to be animal bone. Squirrel or dog. Nothing human.

  We commiserated for a while about the situation, describing a range of emotions from outrage to disbelief.

  “At least he was already dead,” I said, meaning not recently alive when he arrived at Tri-State, meaning the exhumation. A flurry of small darts flew hard against my skull.

  We laughed about that, but it wasn’t a real laugh. We agreed we had two goals. The first was to calm down our mother, who my sister said had sounded pretty hysterical on the phone. Our mother had dug him up and now she would blame herself for what had happened to him at Tri-State. Plus, she had talked to that stupid box for a bunch of years, a box of nothing.

  The second goal was to find our father’s body.

  15

  HICKORYLAND BAR-B-QUE STEAK HOUSE, some old clothing and furniture shops with vintage storefronts, and, along the town square, hanging baskets filled with various flowers. This was the old downtown of Jasper. Unlike Tuscaloosa, where half the downtown was being leveled in the name of “revitalization,” Jasper appeared to offer an almost quaint Southern setting—most of its old brick buildings intact from a hundred years ago.

  Having located a parking place next to the looming Walker County Courthouse, I covered my flag with a half-open map of Alabama. Then I strolled toward the veterans’ monument I’d seen on the corner. As in Tuscaloosa, the names of soldiers killed in battle from World War I to Vietnam were engraved on a series of marble tablets. Resting on one tablet, a small American flag extended from a wreath of red, white, and blue plastic flowers. This patriotic all-weather wreath was the kind placed on graves, while the flag was of the medium-size cloth variety people waved in parades.

  And then front and center on the town square—as if waiting in ambush—a Confederate soldier abruptly stood above me on a tall pillar. Two more soldiers waited at the base of the stone-and-marble monument, flanked by the word COMRADES chiseled in bold letters. And sure enough, on a green wire easel in front of the monument, someone had placed a Confederate Battle Flag made out of the same plastic material as that red, white, and blue wreath stationed nearby.

  I couldn’t help but focus intently on the official sign attached to the carved slab—commemorating the dead remained a strong impulse for most people, as I knew only too well.

  The Confederate Monument was erected on November 13, 1907 and dedicated May 2, 1908 by the Jasper Chapter No. 925, United Daughters of the Confederacy, under the leadership of Elizabeth Cain Musgrove to honor the 1900 soldiers who served from Walker County. This monument was placed on the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage May 19, 1999 by the Elizabeth Cain Musgrove Chapter No. 1929, UDC.

  Unlike the Southern Baptists who actually promoted racism for so long, the United Daughters of the Confederacy was an ostensibly nonracist organization whose policies resulted in a great deal of racial strife. The group expressly functioned as a Southern white women’s “heritage” organization, whose primary actions involved the preserving and erecting of Confederate monuments throughout the region. But I also knew it had another mission—to promote a “truthful history of the War Between the States.” Since its inception in 1894, this meant, for example, making sure school textbooks offered a sympathetic view of Southern history and that local cultural events always did the same. Among the claims of this “truthful history” was the insidious position that Confederate soldiers were simply fighting to protect “states’ rights”—hence the insistence on referring to the war as the War Between the States—and not to preserve the institution of slavery.

  It was clear, however, that “heritage” rather than history drove the UDC program. This genteel organization of Southern ladies had little use for the reality of documented human suffering. In 1989, for instance, the group’s official magazine ran an article whitewashing the torments of slave ships, claiming that sixteen inches of allotted deck space per slave wasn’t really so bad, given that more area opened up quickly due to passenger deaths. At all costs the organization strove to honor the bravery and commitment of the Confederate soldiers, even at the price of ignoring the evils of slavery.

  From the perspective of the UDC, as well as the less genteel Sons of Confederate Veterans, it was the North that had desecrated the South during the Civil War. The body of the South had not only been defeated, supine on the battlefield, but had also been dragged around and abused like Hector’s corpse at Troy. As a first example, they would point to the flames of Atlanta and General Sherman’s incendiary march to the sea. Hence the monuments and attempts to heal. Hence the bitterness and lack of remorse. And it didn’t help matters that the honor code once so dominant in the Old South—a creed drawn from classical thought and mores, especially the valorous elements of Marcus Aurelius’s stoicism—still echoed throughout the region. Some Southerners experienced any federal activity related to that original disgrace as a fresh violation of that code, from Reconstruction to civil rights to contemporary implementation of the Voting Rights Act. In the South, desecration was intensely tied to dishonor. Disturbed ground and disturbed integrity.

  Not only did Achilles viciously transgress the warrior code in his treatment of Hector, but he also wanted his opponent’s body devoured by “dogs and vultures”—a primal fear of classical culture. This wasn’t just about the rotting and tearing of expired flesh. The Greeks believed that the stage between death and burial—that in-between threshold of travel—required great diligence by the living in the form of ritual and interment. Only with this care could the dead make their way into Hades. Otherwise, an abandoned and unritualized body remained doomed to roam the banks of the River Styx, a shade with a name but no passage. Thus Priam begged Achilles for the body of Hector. Thus the ghost of Patroclus entreated Achilles to bury him. Elpenor pleaded with Aeneas. And later on Antigone brashly buried the discarded body of her brother, Polynices, after it was decreed by Creon that the corpse be left to the animals and wind, “a feast for birds and dogs.”

  In an obvious and to me dishonorable act of omission, and like Achilles himself, the most devout practitioners of that Southern code of honor blatantly failed to identify their own desecrations. Though I didn’t expect a more democratic tribute—I wasn’t insane—it was still logical to note the absence from this “truthful history” of any monuments acknowledging the names of Indians driven from their land, or the names of black people shackled by slavery. There were no inscriptions recognizing those lynched in the Jim Crow era or the civil rights workers killed in their later struggle. Many homegrown acts of murder and humiliation were simply ignored, an inherent blindness of the code that originally proved disastrous for the South. And yet the system still held such power that only after a fierce existential struggle could a relative “Southern liberal” like Walker Percy—often held up as an intellectual conscience of the place—as well as his character Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer, repudiate the creed fifty years ago, and then only in its most ruinous aspects.

  * * *

  Swiftly glancing around with my cheap digital camera, a machine that would have held no place among my father’s collection of high-quality equipment, I framed an artless snapshot of the Confederate fl
ag and headed back to the car. Inside, I drew the Alabama map away and playfully pointed the viewer at the flag case.

  But my bemusement widened to surprise when a strange commingling of images reflected back from the case: the Stars and Stripes, the Confederate Battle Flag with soldiers, a camera, a photograph, and me. The effect was hallucinogenic and the too-quick reality fracture suggested more breakage to come. Here I was, in my sudden corridor of collapsed meaning—the dislocated son of a dislocated father—floating above a plastic battle flag and soldiers that together hovered over a disarranged and thus dishonored American flag. For a few moments I drifted inside that image, or images, bewildered at my point of reference. If only I’d carried two (or three) cameras around like my father, I could have clicked the chorus of images together, holding a machine in each hand.

  As careful excavation of ancient settlements has shown, the Cherokees once buried their relatives with an assortment of gifts for the afterlife, including shell beads, pendants, rattles, and clay pipes. If I could ever open that lid to my father’s coffin—return to the scene of my failure and reverse my playing dead in the ground—I’d leave him that picture for his travels, the one I didn’t have.

  16

  WITH THE NEWS that her box contained no sign of her husband, my mother was in bad shape. Sometimes crying. Sometimes waxing philosophical. Sometimes yelling loudly into the receiver.

  “It’s the Shit Fairy again,” she complained with conviction. Now that she lived in Santa Fe, she always wore at least five turquoise rings and one Southwestern Indian necklace around town. Yet my mother was tough underneath all that style—a worthy adversary even for the Shit Fairy. She remained clearheaded about finding my father’s body.

  She stayed closely in touch with the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, which worked in tandem with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the state medical examiner’s office to identify the bodies. Over the next few days, from conversations with the people on the ground as well as our own online investigations, we learned that we had a potential problem—actually several looming difficulties—in locating my father’s body.

  The main problem stemmed from the fact that my father had been embalmed and buried twelve years before. The embalming process eradicates some genetic markers, thereby reducing the chances of matching DNA from family members. Not that it would be impossible to identify an embalmed body through DNA, simply less likely.

  Exposure to the elements also diminished the possibility of a DNA match. Not only had my father been embalmed and buried for seven years, but he had been raised from the dead and discarded at Tri-State for another five.

  Finally, we understood that it might be harder to identify those bodies whose remains had been commingled in pits and vaults. At this point, we knew that several metal vaults had been found in the bushes, piled high with bodies, and that more pits had been discovered stuffed with many more corpses. Over the years, the putrefaction may have transferred DNA from one body to another, contaminating and possibly precluding a genetic identification of a particular corpse. It was a gruesome image, flesh melting into flesh. And if my father lay underwater in such a vault, the prospects of a match diminished even further.

  As the author of our ill fortune, and our tormentor by way of overwrought biblical allusions, would the Shit Fairy pass up these opportunities? Could the Shit Fairy forgo another shot at Lazarus, Job, and the Flood?

  Shit Fairy or not, we had to face up to the fact that the authorities would not retrieve viable DNA samples from all the bodies scattered and abandoned at Tri-State. We had to hope it didn’t go that far. We had to hope that some identifying physical or circumstantial evidence—which the medical examiner’s office now asked for—would lead to his discovery.

  At this basic level of inquiry, however, we had factors going both ways. My father had no broken bones, no prosthetic devices that might distinguish him. On the other hand, he had died nearly twelve years before, theoretically making his state of decay more advanced than the newly deposited bodies at Tri-State. Generally, it takes nature about twelve years to transform an unembalmed body six feet under into a skeleton, depending on the climate and soil composition. The embalming helps to preserve the flesh, but the quality of that procedure varies dramatically from mortician to mortician. Yet the five years of exposure at Tri-State would hasten decay, the rate again determined by his exact location. And then there was the exhumation: He had arrived in his casket, whereas most other bodies would have shown up in body bags. We had heard reports that a few corpses still lay in their caskets in the woods. Would the Shit Fairy be so hospitable?

  Finally, they asked about his clothes, which seemed strange to us—as if any mortal garment might withstand twelve years of putrefaction. My mother, however, remembered exactly what he had on. A plaid shirt and chinos, a brown sport coat to dress him up for the grave, and new custom-made cowboy boots.

  As my mother told the story, several weeks before my father fell ill they had traveled to Santa Fe, where my father, unbeknownst to my mother, purchased a pair of $800 cowboy boots. True, they were individually made to fit his feet, and they had his name inscribed inside the heel, but $800! Now retired from IBM, he needed to begin practicing frugality, my mother complained.

  I guess they had quite a row about that, an unusual occurrence for them, and my mother still felt a little guilty about it. Hell, she said, how was she to know he’d be dead within a few months? Anyway, because rigor mortis had set in, the funeral home had trouble getting those boots on, so, with my mother’s blessing, they had slit the backs and pried his cold feet inside.

  By Tuesday, February 26, the body count at Tri-State had risen dramatically to over three hundred, and another deeper, wetter pit had been found. The local authorities kept raising the number of charges against Brent Marsh, the alchemical operator of the crematory, who still remained in the Walker County Jail with bond set at $100,000. And there was still no word on my father’s whereabouts.

  It was a good night for another foray into smoke, drink, and rain. Again I set out for La Cruda. As it happens, however, I remember very little about that night, whether mind erasers were imbibed or not, whether I rose to those strained heights of drunken clarity. I don’t even recall whether I did my crying jag before the faithful at the conclusion of the evening. No after-glimpse of comradeship, apocalyptic rantings, or the beauty of the walk home. Nothing about the particulars of the rain.

  But I do recall waking late again, and again hearing the indecipherable choked crying of my mother on the answering machine, and again calling my sister for the story.

  They found him in his coffin in the woods, not too far from the main crematory building.

  The lid was on the coffin and the body was dry.

  They found him because the Shit Fairy had chosen to sit this one out. And because those well-made custom cowboy boots still had my father’s name written clearly in one heel.

  Part Two

  17

  MY APOCALYPSE BEGAN WITH WATER, I’m pretty sure of that.

  Somewhere in my child’s brain, when I was still going to Sunday school and learning about the Bible, I heard about the Great Flood and mixed it up with my father. God would choose someone, just a regular person like Noah or Daddy, and have him build a big boat called an Ark. The rest of the people had done something wrong called Sin—a vague thing related to hitting or biting another child—and God was angry. Very angry. You should not bite or hit other people (or your dog) so that they fall down. God had picked Daddy because he liked to hammer, but Daddy didn’t build a boat and then the rain came and the bulldozers came and the water rose so high over his farm that Daddy forgot to tell the local animals. So they died and we only had a car and Noah sent out a raven and we moved to Missouri and later that day the sun came out.

  And goddammit … (it was a word my father said when he was angry). And goddammit God promised—like I promised not to lie about peeing outside—that he wouldn’t do it again. God vowed
with his big Pledge of Allegiance hand held high that the waters wouldn’t rise again but then he did flood Daddy’s farm and so God was very strong but sort of a liar.

  Something like that.

  I grew up thinking about water. About apocalypse. It made some sense. The Russians did have a zillion warheads pointed at us and we at them and of course my father did fly those big bombs over the Atlantic Ocean. (Was that why God flooded his first home?)

  And some people, more particularly our neighbors, kept water in their bomb shelters, but we never had a bomb shelter so we were out of luck. (Was that why we kept moving around so much, to get away from the bombs? Was it a grown-up version of hide-and-seek?)

  And in a related apocalypse, I wondered if I’d wake up one day and find everyone jabbering in a different language called Babel. The tower was called Babel, too, and I figured the big end-of-the-world-type missiles would stand about that tall. Unfortunately, in Babel-land, it would be impossible to knock on someone’s bomb shelter and ask for a glass of water or a drink from their hose—because even if they answered they wouldn’t know what you were talking about. (Was that why cereal boxes and comic books advertised that ubiquitous magic decoder ring on the back, an instrument of translation which, if held high enough in the air on a closed fist, pulled bits of intelligible information from the neighbors’ gibberish-smacking mouths?)

  And that was another thing, speaking of comic books, supposedly only Jesus could walk on water, but couldn’t Superman do that, too? I mean the guy could spin the whole world backward if he wanted to—which made it yesterday—a feat that would also be helpful if the world happened to end and you needed another day to make things right. But then if Superman could make it yesterday, couldn’t he also take a simple stroll across a stretch of water? Across a lake? Across my father’s pastures and fields sunk fathoms below?