Greg Iles - Blood Memory

I wait for more, but she doesn’t speak again. “Mom? Will you help me?”

When her eyes finally rise to meet mine, I see something I never saw in them as a child.

Courage.

“Tell me what to do,” she says.

The gravediggers have been at work for over two hours, their sweat-soaked backs bent over shovels and spades in heat that’s already blistering at 11 A.M. There are six of them, elderly but muscular black men in khaki work suits. They dig slowly but steadily, like long-distance runners, their forearms rippling in the sun, and they take cigarette breaks every half hour. They retire behind a wall to do this, sharing their Kools with the backhoe operator, who sits on his yellow machine like an emperor, waiting to move the casket the last few yards to the funeral home’s van. Because it lies in the oldest, most thickly wooded part of the cemetery, our family plot poses problems for the backhoe. But the gravediggers have got the coffin uncovered now. Its burnished lid gleams dully in the sun. They’re widening the hole for their straps, and soon a hoist will bring up what was meant to lie here for eternity.

It took ninety minutes of dedicated effort to set this process in motion. First I drove my mother to the Wall Street office of Michael Wells’s attorney, who’d left his breakfast to meet us to make out an affidavit. Then we walked across the street to the courthouse and filed the affidavit with the chancery judge, who signed an ex parte court order authorizing exhumation for a repeat autopsy on Luke Ferry. With the court order in hand, I dropped Mom by her shop and called the funeral director, the cemetery superintendent, and the medical examiner in Jackson. The medical examiner’s office was so agreeable that I suspected they’d received a call from Special Agent Kaiser of the FBI.

As prescribed by custom in Mississippi, the funeral director is present as a witness. A kind and florid man of seventy, Mr. McDonough has monopolized the white burial trade in Natchez for fifty years. He stands in the shade in his shirtsleeves, his black suit jacket folded over a brick wall. He discouraged my intention to “view the remains,” as he put it. I tried to allay Mr. McDonough’s anxieties by telling him I have considerable experience with both death and autopsies, but he only sighed and said, “No matter how much experience you have, when it’s your own folks, it’s different.”

I’ll know in a few minutes.

My primary concern is the condition of my father’s body. Mr. McDonough checked his records this morning and learned that Daddy’s coffin wasn’t placed in a vault before burial, which simplifies the exhumation process but also increases the chance that water has penetrated the casket. My grandfather-who handled the funeral arrangements-is apparently one of the few who knows the origin of the custom of using vaults in America. In the last century, to gain admission to medical school, applicants were required to provide one cadaver. This resulted in a great many thefts of corpses. The coffin vault was adopted as a deterrent to body snatching, because two or three strong men were required to lift the vault off a coffin. Most people today buy vaults believing that they’ll prevent water from reaching their beloved, and this is partly true. But eternity is a very long time. Water carved the Grand Canyon, and it can penetrate anything made by man, given enough time. Grandpapa saw no reason to pay good money for a preventive measure that was only temporary.

He did, however, buy the finest bronze casket available, probably to impress his friends and to appease my distraught mother. That particular model had a gum-rubber burp seal, which allows gases from decomposition to escape the coffin but prevents the entry of moisture. So there’s a decent chance that I won’t have to endure a horror show when they open the lid.

I’ve passed the morning by watching the mound of dark earth slowly grow beside the grave I’ve visited as often as I could over the years. It’s less dirt than you’d expect. Graves aren’t six feet deep anymore. By law only twenty-four inches of earth are required above the casket lid, just enough to keep dogs from uncovering the dead after the mourners have gone.

One of the gravediggers in the hole shouts for something called a crow’s foot. A man with a red bandanna on his head brings a five-foot-long bar with a flat toe on one end to the edge of the grave. I move closer to the hole and watch the first man insert the toe of the crow’s foot under the end of my father’s coffin.

“You got to break the vacuum, see?” says Mr. McDonough, who’s now standing at my shoulder. “That coffin lies there all those years, it really settles into the dirt. But once you break that seal, you can pull her right on up.”

The coffin comes loose with a sucking sound, like opening a Tupperware dish with something old inside. The gravediggers climb down into the hole and sling heavy straps under both ends of the coffin, then set up a block and tackle. With the combined efforts of man and machine, the long bronze box is soon resting on the grass beside the hole. Though covered with brown dirt, the casket still gleams like something brought up from a pharaoh’s tomb in Egypt.

Mr. McDonough signals the backhoe operator to move as close as he can to the obstructing wall. As the driver cranks up the diesel engine, I tell McDonough to have him stand down.

“Something wrong, Miss Ferry?”

“I want to open it.”

Mr. McDonough is obviously perturbed by my request. “Out here in the sun?”

“It’s done routinely with exhumations for retrieving DNA samples.”

The funeral director is well practiced at looking unflappable, but my aggressiveness with the dead is clearly not to his taste. “Well, I’ve never done one that way,” he says finally.

“Nevertheless.”

He shrugs in surrender. “The family owns the body. You can do what you want. I’ll open her up for you.”

“Thank you.”

He takes a hexagonal key from his pocket, bends over the foot of the casket, and begins turning a recessed nut. The Tupperware sound returns, this time magnified tenfold, a long, slow release of pressure that carries with it the chemical odor of embalming fluid.

I tried to prepare myself before I came, by studying some old photographs of Daddy. But the dead never quite resemble our memory of the living. The body changes quickly after death, mostly through loss of water. Even if he’s well preserved, the man I see when they open the box might look like a stranger to me. He’ll be wearing a suit, which alone would make him a stranger in my eyes. I never saw my father in a suit. Never saw him wear anything but faded Levi’s and a T-shirt. I thought they should have buried him in that, but the day before the funeral, Aunt Ann showed up with an expensive black suit that I suspected belonged to one of her ex-husbands.

Mr. McDonough straightens up from the casket and looks at me with something like challenge in his eyes. “You want me to open it now?”

“Please.”

He turns and lifts the upper half of the coffin lid until the hinges stop, then walks away without looking inside. The gravediggers have moved away, though whether to escape the sight or the smell, I don’t know. It might be out of respect, but I doubt it. If I weren’t here, they would be horsing around like men on any job. I’ve seen it enough times to know.

The open coffin lid blocks my view. I’ll have to walk around the casket to see inside. My palms are sweating. Contrary to what most people believe, embalming is designed to provide a well-preserved corpse for viewing at the funeral home, but not much longer. If the embalmer does a poor job, the corpse can quickly become something like a prop in a horror movie, a ghoul floating in its own rotting fluids. Even if the embalmer does an excellent job, anaerobic bacteria can survive in the body, waiting only for the slightest bit of moisture to begin the process of decomposition.