“Not too many-about a hundred per cremation. We handle about sixty cremation requests a year, so we’d save about six thousand dollars if we switched. But if you factor in Trinity’s pickup and drop-off, the savings would be bigger.”
“How so?”
“We have to take the bodies out to East Tennessee Cremation, and then we have to go pick them up, either at the end of the day or sometime the next day. So that’s a hundred and twenty roundtrips. We’re only about fifteen miles from there, so it’s not a huge problem, but it can get complicated, especially if we have several burials going on at the same time, too. Trinity picks up the bodies and then returns the cremains, and that can save a lot of time. They courted us pretty hard, and we thought about switching, but in the end we decided to stick with East Tennessee Cremation.”
“Because?”
“I’ve known the folks there for twenty years. They do a good job, they keep their facility spotless, and they’re extremely professional.”
“Unlike the folks at that Georgia place?”
He laughed. “You sound like some fast-talking courtroom lawyer now. You’ve been spending way too much time being cross-examined. Look, I don’t know anything bad about them. But I don’t know anything great about them either. What it comes down to is, I don’t want to stop doing business with people I know and like, just for the sake of a hundred bucks here and there.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “No further questions at this time. Oh, except the name and number of the person I should call at the place over in Alcoa?”
“EAST TENNESSEE CREMATION.” The woman who answered sounded slightly out of breath, as if she’d had to dash for the phone.
“Is this Helen Taylor?”
“Yes. Can I help you?”
I introduced myself and began a convoluted explanation of why I was calling.
“Norm Witherspoon told me you’d probably be calling,” she said, as soon as I gave her an opening. “I heard you lecture a few years ago at the Tennessee Association of Funeral Directors. You were showing pictures of how a body decays if the embalming job’s not good. You’re welcome to come out anytime.”
I wasn’t sure if she was extending the welcome in spite of my criticisms or because of them. Either way, I was quick to accept the invitation. “When would be a good time to visit?”
“Up to you. I’m here Monday through Friday, eight A.M. to five P.M. We’ve got three cremations scheduled today, so pretty much anytime you come, I’ll be putting somebody in, taking ’em out, or running them through the processor.”
“Sounds like they’re getting their money’s worth from you,” I said. “No wonder you sounded winded when you answered the phone.”
“There’s not a lot of downtime, that’s for sure,” she said. “I’m just finishing one now, and I thought I’d start the next one right after lunch.”
I checked my watch; I’d just eaten a sandwich at my desk, but I tended to eat early. It was not quite eleven-thirty.
“All right if I come on over in about an hour?”
“I’ll be looking for you.” She gave me directions, and after I’d gone through the morning’s mail, I headed out. The mail gave me an idea, so on the way I made a quick stop by Peggy’s. She wasn’t in, luckily, because I was pretty sure she wouldn’t have let me borrow her postage scale if she’d known what I planned to use it for.
CHAPTER 7
FROM THE STADIUM I HEADED DOWNSTREAM ALONG Neyland Drive, past the veterinary school and under the Alcoa Highway bridge. The bridge pilings were marked with horizontal lines at one- foot intervals, showing towboat pilots how much clearance they had between the waterline and the bottom of the bridge.
At the intersection of Neyland and Kingston Pike, I turned right, then also took the next right, onto the ramp for Alcoa Highway southbound. Crossing the high concrete bridge that I’d passed beneath only a moment before, I looked downriver, where the mansions of Sequoyah Hills lined the right-hand bank. I lived in Sequoyah, but my house-tucked into an incongruously modest little block of bungalows and ranchers-was probably worth one-tenth the price of these riverfront villas. I’d had the chance, when I first started teaching at UT, to buy one of the big houses, but the price-fifty-five thousand dollars-seemed astronomical at the time, at least on a professor’s salary. Twenty years later that house was worth at least a million, maybe more. The ones lining the waterfront were even more expensive. “Yeah, but I don’t have to worry about barge traffic washing away my yard,” I said out loud, then laughed at myself. “Okay, Brockton, not only are you talking to yourself, but what you’re saying is a total crock.”
UT Hospital and the hills behind the Body Farm reared up on my left. On my right a UT cattle farm-green pastures dotted with black-and-white Holsteins-nestled in the big bend of the river. It was the place where the Tennessee first curved southward, starting its serpentine slide toward the Gulf of Mexico, sixteen hundred meandering miles away.
Acting on a sudden impulse, I veered off at the Cherokee Trail exit-the exit for the medical center-and threaded under the highway and around to the back corner of the hospital employees’ parking lot. We’d received a donated body several weeks before, and I remembered a note in the chart indicating that the donor-a man in his seventies-had undergone double knee replacement within the past two years. That made his knees newer than any I’d dug out of the boxes in the skeletal collection, and I had a sudden hankering to see them.
I found him just off the main trail curving up into the woods and toward the river. He lay on his back near a fallen tree trunk, his skull detached and slightly downhill from his postcranial skeleton. A camera tripod stood nearby, with a black plastic mailbox fastened incongruously to the top. The mailbox was an improvised housing for a night-vision camera; the camera, sheltered by the weatherproof plastic, was connected to a motion sensor, so that when nocturnal carnivores-raccoons and opossums, mainly-came foraging, we could capture their feeding habits. The project was a Ph.D. candidate’s dissertation research, and I’d marveled over some of the photos, which showed cuddly raccoons reaching deep into body cavities to pluck out special delicacies. In the cold, clear light of dawn-actually the scorching, hazy light of high noon-I could see gnaw marks on the cheekbones, the hands, and the feet. But I was more interested at the moment in the hingelike hardware installed where the knees had once been.
I’d had the opportunity during my teaching career to witness two orthopedic surgeries-a hip replacement and a cervical-spine fusion-and I’d come away from both procedures marveling at the combination of precise control and bloody brute force. The neck surgery in particular was an astonishingly choreographed performance by a neurosurgeon and an orthopedist. First they yanked and gouged out three crumbling disks from the patient’s neck, at times reaming within a millimeter of the spinal cord; next they tapped pegs of precisely machined cadaver bone into place between the sagging vertebrae; finally they screwed an arched titanium bracket onto the front of the neck, to buttress the spine while the bones knitted together. As the pair of surgeons drilled and tapped and bolted, I couldn’t help comparing them to cabinetmakers. The hip replacement by comparison was heavy carpentry-sawing off the proximal end of the femur, drilling a hole down into the shaft, and then pounding the stem of the metal prosthesis into the opening.
The body on the hillside-body 67–07, the sixty-seventh donated body of the year 2007-was almost entirely
