Rotters (37 page)

A hand groped for the grass; I saw bloody knuckles and snapped fingernails. A second hand joined the first and this one held not one but a fistful of Polaroids, and as Harnett floundered over the edge and writhed through the cold mud, several of these pictures fluttered free. My eyes were too well trained. I saw an image of a body, nothing I could yet recognize as my mother, lying inside a coffin; in another photo, she was outside the coffin; in another, sprawled aslant next to her
plot; in another, doing the splits across the stone that bore her name. She was positioned like a bloated rag doll in dozens of ridiculous and impossible poses—I cataloged each image as Harnett, still screaming, peeled them from the mud—and in several photos she was joined by the man who had lusted after her while she was alive. In these photos Baby held her body to him and kissed at her puffy face and more—but Harnett had peeled these last photos away and before I knew it was tearing them to pieces and chewing them and choking as the sharp corners split him down his insides.

He squirmed in the mud until every last piece was ingested, and then he clutched his gut and screamed. I winced as something inside me smothered. Coldness took over. All at once Harnett’s behavior struck me as unseemly. “Stop crying,” I said. He didn’t listen. I stood and walked over to him. “Stop crying,” I said again. He wailed and banged his forehead against the frozen ground. It was so loud that it scared me; then I became angry that I was scared. I kneeled and poked him in the side. “Stop crying.” I pushed him. “Stop crying!” I kicked him in the hip, in the knee, in the neck.
“Stop crying!”
I shoved at him until he was faceup and then I punched, knuckles into open eyes and streaming nose.
“STOP CRYING! STOP CRYING! STOP CRYING!”
He screamed until my face was covered with his blood. I wiped it away with an arm. I would act properly even if he wouldn’t. I stood, leaving him snaking in blind circles, and tucked in my shirt and patted down my hair.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, kneeling beside her.

Boggs had at least returned her to a funereal pose. I searched her swollen and purple face for signs of the woman I had known, and after a minute or two I smiled in recognition. There: the broad cheeks, the longish nose, the disfigured ear.

The ear—I leaned over and took a closer look. Typically ears were one of the first features to deteriorate, yet her left one was miraculously intact. I examined the old wound, imagining the Gatlin shovel strike that had so crudely carved it. Harnett had undoubtedly seen it, too; above, he was still blubbering in the moonlight. I knew he was upset about what Boggs had done in this grave. I knew he was rabid that a copy of each picture was safely nestled inside the Rotters Book. Still, I wished he’d shut up. He was just jealous that another man had touched her, no matter that it had been his failures that had denied her any man’s touch for sixteen years.

I was the only one in that graveyard deserving of Valerie Crouch. I remembered the soft fuzz of her cheeks; I reached out and touched taut and mealy skin. I nuzzled into her neck in search of her scent of wood and milk; I smelled only the grave’s usual potency.

Why was she withholding herself? I felt a flash of irritation. I had come too far, across two states, down six feet of earth, for her to ignore me. I put an arm around her shoulders and threaded another around her waist. Carefully I gathered her in my arms. Her head rolled against my cheek. Before I knew it she was in my lap, her body blue and turgid and squeaking like rubber. I said
shhh
and rocked her and petted her cold straw hair. One arm was missing and one of her legs was just a sleeve of skin, and the amount of PVC pipe inside the coffin brought home just how catastrophic her injuries had been, how hard the mortician had slaved in his effort at reassembly.

She sank from my clutches. I became frustrated, first at her, then at myself. I muttered bad words she would have cuffed me for when she was living, and followed them with
solemn apologies. I turned my face to the stars and cursed the Incorruptibles, those so-called saints who had so greedily soaked up all the miracles for themselves. If anyone had been a saint, it had been my mother, yet here she was, as grossly moldered as the worst of sinners.

I tucked her in. I put my lips to her tumescent ear and whispered good-night. For a few minutes I fell asleep at her side. Yet morning beckoned. My fingers found the long, cold length of a leg bone among the PVC piping and I plucked it from the coffin and used it to help myself to the surface. I set it safely aside and took up the Root.

That night I was a Filler, not a Digger. All that I had excavated from myself since my mother’s death I would now fill with expertise beyond that of the Resurrectionist or Lionel or any Digger who had ever lived. I would raise bodies like a hard rain sucks worms to the surface. I would become hero to a few; to everyone else I would be the whip of flame flickering through feverish nightmares. I would become the Son, and I’d take the name in her honor, not his.

The Son’s first act was to fix what Harnett had broken. I repaired her mangled grave as the mortician had repaired her body. The Root was my scalpel, the dirt her muscle fiber, the grass her skin, the graveyard her body.

A
LMOST OVERNIGHT THE CABIN
lapsed into squalor. The whiskey bottle that Crying John had left was polished off within seconds of our return. I curled on my bedsheets, my mother’s stolen leg bone tucked beneath my pillow, and divorced myself
from the man who now shambled about the room, kicking things and belching liquor. There were still some things I could learn from the bastard, and I would learn them, but I would not allow Ken Harnett to destroy another Crouch.

Trapped within the bolts and bars of his self-made prison, he rumbled about accepting disgraceful deals from disinterested pawnbrokers, then drank away the disappointment, as well as the measly profits, in a single sitting. He slept at unusual, random hours. I would hear the
crick-crick
of the rocking chair and the weak sizzle of the fire in the middle of the night and try to block it out with convoluted melodies I used to play in band; conversations I’d had with Boris; imagined dialogue from his new friend, the trombonist Mac Hill. The very word
trombone
dazzled me, and I fantasized how I might splice the leg bone beneath my pillow with my trumpet in time for Ted’s next lesson. I would fall back asleep with these bizarre delusions swirling through my brain, confident that the soul, if it existed at all, was located in the skeleton—after all, that was the part that persevered, long after the rest dissolved to dust.

What happened next was probably inevitable. It seemed like lifetimes ago when we had both huddled next to the crypt in Lancet County waiting for the Woman in Black to end her vigil, and Harnett had condemned “Bad Jobs.” His description of digs-for-hire had haunted me ever since:
Any Digger who starts down that path, he’s pretty well near the end
, he had said.
You can’t do those kinds of jobs and live with yourself
.

It was the nearest thing there was to suicide, he had suggested, and because he was the proudest Digger with the purest of standards, none could have predicted his rapid slide toward such work—none except me; I had seen all hope and reason leave his eyes the night he beheld my mother’s corpse.

Once the first Bad Job was completed, a second was waiting. Harnett retained enough of his faculties to forbid me to go along, yet derived a self-loathing pleasure from supplying me with posthumous details. Example: a family of religious fanatics in Maine wished to enact what they referred to as a “miracle resurrection” of the clan patriarch. The entire dynasty gathered at their large country estate to luxuriate in the charade, praying over a giant feast before retreating to their guest bedrooms while Harnett watched through binoculars from the nearest field. While they slept, Harnett took care of business. He removed the dead patriarch, returned the dirt so that it looked untouched, then arranged the body in prayer formation against the headstone. The envelope of cash waiting as promised beneath the back steps of the house was labeled
Miracle Money
.

Another example: an anonymous party desired access to an Aurora, Texas, grave that supposedly housed the remains of the pilot of a UFO that had exploded against Judge Proctor’s windmill in 1897. As explained by newspaper accounts of the time, local residents helped Proctor toss the refuse down a well—from which subsequent residents drank and grew terribly deformed—before burying the humanoid beneath an innocuous stone in the local graveyard. Though the stone itself had been stolen in the 1970s, Harnett used old photographs to triangulate the location. When he returned from the trip he headed straight to bed despite my interrogation. His eyes were haunted and he said only one thing: “Never ask me about it again.”

For a while he resisted the worst jobs of all. While it was true that the original body snatchers had stolen cadavers for medical use, the nabbing of bodies had become a Digger
taboo. I tried not to think about the leg bone beneath my pillow. That had been a one-time occurrence. I was sure of it.

Harnett, on the other hand, at first excused himself with quasi-humanitarian reasoning. Most medical skeletons were shipped from India, he said, where young people were kidnapped and murdered to meet the demand. By stealing bones for profit, he was simply helping to counter that atrocity, he claimed. We turned away from each other at the blatant lie. Plastic skeletons had been adopted a long time ago. Even Gottschalk had one.

That was just the beginning. At the request of museums or private collectors he dug up carcasses of the hideously deformed, sufferers of rare and fabulous diseases. He sliced slabs from fresh remains for someone who desired to make candles out of body fat. He nabbed a selection of hands, feet, and genitals for a famous experimental artist in Brooklyn. He stole the skull of a supposed saint that a church wanted as a holy relic. When this last group refused to pay, Harnett cackled mirthlessly and resorted to something he called the Brookes Method—piling a stack of bones on the doorstep of a defaulting client. A book in Harnett’s library suggested to me that the grisly technique was named after Joshua Brookes (1761–1833), a surgeon who refused to pay his resurrection men five guineas, only to wake up one morning to find bones piled at each intersection bordering his college. The scare tactic still worked. Harnett might have lost everything else, but he got his money.

While he jetted across the country, I proved his theory. Specifying allowed me to refill graves with an accuracy possibly unrivaled in history. The dead, witness to my successes, became my friends, teachers, and confidants. The more I
handled dead flesh, the more my own felt alive. Where once there had been no growth, I grew thicker, stronger, hairier, as if I were soaking up remnant life forces still swirling within each carcass. My broader shoulders required a new coat; I found one to my liking just an hour away from Bloughton beneath a Polaroid. My old shoes were flimsy jokes; I found a pair of boots six feet under a small memorial park just north. I didn’t need a brimmed hat but took one anyway off a body I dug up east of town; I thought it made me look mysterious and maybe even a little dashing. All of these clothes I chose with Foley in the back of my mind. Though they reeked, they were about as heavy metal as it gets.

One balmy late-April evening I found myself back in Lancet County. After resurfacing from a new belly with three thick bracelets of glittering gemstones, I ambled over to pay a visit to Nathaniel Merriman. There I found a fresher grave to Nathaniel’s left:
ROSE MERRIMAN, LOYAL DAUGHTER
. Here lay the Woman in Black. Guiding her from her father’s grave was the first act that had gained me notoriety among the Diggers, and I felt a twinge of sadness. I sat between the two plots and brushed my hands through the grass. Soon the remains of father and daughter would mingle. I envied them. On my way out of town I stopped by Floyd and Eileen’s bar for some beef jerky, just for old time’s sake.

It was the first day of May when Harnett dug up the body of a teenager and plotted to ransom it to the family. I was appalled. He tried to assure me that the family had done something evil enough to deserve it, but I wouldn’t listen. He had become a monster; the fact that eighteen hours later he changed his mind and returned the body to the grave did nothing to convince me otherwise. He mumbled about the almost-successful 1876 plot to steal Abraham Lincoln’s body
in hopes of exchanging it for the release of a prisoner, about how sometimes you had to do bad things for virtuous ends. I told him to get his shit, we had work to do.

“We” was a generous way to put it. His inebriated fingers no longer functioned properly. He made a mess of the sod. His tarps weren’t level and dirt ran like rainwater. Repeatedly I saved us from imminent disaster, often having to wrench some crappy shovel from his blundering hands. I was usually the one to crowbar the casket, and when I found Polaroids I did my best to keep them to myself.

His humiliation became suffocating. He had gone through maybe two dozen shovels since the New Year. He acted out perilously, digging in broad daylight or during the traffic peaks of Memorial Day and Mother’s Day. I called him stupid. He called me a chicken. It was after one of these fights that I returned from school to find him sprawled across the hearth. He had shit his pants. I dragged him to the bathroom, stripped him of his soiled clothes, and shoved him beneath the freezing shower. Moments like these shucked him of all leverage. He agreed to any deal I offered. Yes, he’d sign that F-filled report card or write a note fabricating an excuse for my continued absences—anything I wanted, as long as I did not speak of what he had become.

In mid-May, as I cased a memorial park two hours down the interstate from Bloughton, I came upon a funeral in progress. One of the mourners was Claire, the caseworker who had prepared me as best she could for life in Bloughton. To get a better look, I edged within twenty feet of her. In her simple black dress and dark lipstick she looked even prettier than I remembered. I thought about saying hello. Maybe I would look to her like a man now, maybe we could go out for coffee. Mere Reality was swept away with the breeze. Then
the last invocation was spoken and the crowd broke apart and for a moment she looked right at me. There was no recognition. She looped her arm through that of a man who was probably her husband and walked away. I forced myself to laugh. Such warm, live flesh was not for me.