Helen had started out more than twenty years earlier working as a secretary in the office of a company that made metal cemetery vaults. Several years later, when the owner of the vault company branched out and opened a crematorium, he trained Helen to run it. After serving a two-year apprenticeship, she took the examination to become a licensed funeral director. Although she passed the exam with flying colors, the licensing board turned her down-they’d never licensed a female funeral director, nor anyone who’d apprenticed at an independent crematorium. After two years of training, Helen wasn’t willing to take rejection lying down. She hired an attorney, who threatened to sue the licensing board for discrimination. A few weeks later, she received a letter containing her funeral director’s license.
In its first year of operation, the crematorium had burned only four bodies, leaving her plenty of time for secretarial work. This year, she said, the number would top four hundred. Business was so good, in fact, that the crematorium was beginning an enormous expansion. She raised the blinds behind her desk and pointed out the window at a fresh excavation and enormous concrete slab. Within a year, she told me, they’d be moving to a new building five times this size. It would be equipped with a chapel for services, a viewing window, and a remote- control ignition switch, so a family member could push a button to start the cremation. The old building would remain a crematorium, but it would shift from cremating humans to cremating pets, a business that was growing by leaps and bounds. She pulled out a binder filled with architectural drawings and floor plans of the new building. I noticed it would have three furnaces rather than just two; I also noticed a large room labeled COOLER, which I asked about. The cooler would be able to hold up to sixteen bodies, she told me proudly.
“Sixteen? That’s a lot of bodies,” I said. “Nearly as many as the Regional Forensic Center can hold. You’re not planning to start killing people off, are you?”
She laughed. “I don’t have to. I’ve had as many as six or seven bodies come through here in a day,” she said. “Not often, but when it happens, I need someplace to put them. Can you imagine four or five bodies stacked up in here on a day like today?” She had a point there. The small building was air-conditioned, but between the blistering sun outside and the ovens inside, the temperature was probably close to ninety. She did need a cooler, and if business was growing like she said it was, it might not be long before she’d have that cooler filled. I was impressed with the operation, and when I said so, she beamed.
“If you’d told me twenty years ago this is what I’d be doing, I wouldn’t have believed you,” she said. “But here I am, and I love what I do.”
“I’m sometimes surprised where I ended up, too,” I said, “but I wouldn’t change it. I’m never bored, I’m sometimes able to do a good deed for victims or families, and I get to meet interesting people like you.”
“Let’s go take a look,” she said. She led me through a connecting door into the crematorium’s work space, which was every bit as spartan and utilitarian as the outside had hinted it would be. This garage was a two-furnace garage, the ovens parked side by side, their stainless-steel fronts bristling with dials and knobs and lights. She pushed a button on the furnace on the left, and a thick door slid up, revealing an arched interior about eight feet long, two feet high, and three feet wide. The interior walls of the furnace were brick-a pale, soot-stained brick, similar to what I’d seen pottery kilns made of.
I edged up for a closer look. “You mind if I stick my head in?”
“Not at all,” she said. “Just let me fasten this safety latch first-I’d hate for that door to fall and decapitate you.” The door was six inches thick, its steel cladding insulated with a layer of firebrick; it probably weighed at least a hundred pounds. She fitted a stout, L-shaped cotter pin into a slot beneath the lower edge of the door, the guillotine’s equivalent of the safety on a gun.
The firebrick-refractory brick, she called it-was tan and fine-grained, with several paler spots where small chips had flaked off. I reached up and rubbed a finger over one. A few grains, somewhere between sand and ceramic in texture, flaked off in my hands. “Does this just naturally flake away over time?”
She nodded. “They have to be relined about every two years.”
The floor and the roof of the combustion chamber were made of concrete; a spiderweb of cracks zigzagged through the roof. “Are these cracks a problem? Can you just patch them, or do you have to chip out the whole top when you reline it?”
“Actually, those are normal,” she said. “The very first time you fire up a brand-new cremation furnace, you get that cracking-the heat’s so intense.”
As I leaned in farther, an image from Hansel and Gretel popped into my head. “You’re not going to shove me in,” I said, “and turn me into gingerbread?”
“Not hardly.” She laughed. “If I turn this burner on, you won’t come out looking anything like a gingerbread man. Here, let me show you the ‘before’ version, and then I’ll show you ‘after.’ It’s quite a contrast.” A metal gurney was parked along one wall of the building. It held a cardboard box the size and shape of a coffin. She tugged at the lid and raised it enough to give me a look.
An ancient man-not a day less than ninety, I guessed-lay within, slightly to one side of the centerline. He was thin and shriveled and had clearly been shriveling for years. There was room enough in the container for him and two more bodies his size. The man’s face was collapsing into his mouth, and I knew without pulling down a lip that the jaws were toothless. The root sockets were probably long gone, smoothed out over the past ten or twenty years, as the bone resorbed and filled them in.
“Looks like he had a long life,” I said.
“His
I stepped away, and Helen wiggled the lid back into place, then wheeled the gurney to the gaping maw of the furnace. “Here,” I said, “let me give you a hand with that.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she said. “I do this five or six times a day. It’s not that hard. The gurney has rollers built into the top.” She gave a shove to the end of the box, and it slid easily until it was halfway off the gurney and tipped down onto the floor of the furnace. She shoved a little harder, and I heard the bottom of the box scraping along the concrete.
Once the box was all the way in, she removed the cotter pin and pressed the button that lowered the furnace door. She pushed a glowing red button labeled AFTERBURNER, and I heard a low whoosh, like a gas fireplace lighting up. “I knew fighter planes had afterburners,” I said. “I didn’t know cremation furnaces had ’em, too. Is it faster than the speed of sound?”
She rolled her eyes at the joke.
“Seriously, though, why do you turn on the afterburner first?”
“This is a secondary burner, just before the exhaust flue,” she explained. “Makes sure everything’s burned before the gases go out the stack. If TVA’s power plants burned coal this cleanly, you wouldn’t see all that haze between downtown Knoxville and the mountains.”
She tapped her finger on a small glass disk set into the door, no bigger than the security peephole in the front door of my house. “You can watch through there if you want,” she said, “but you won’t be able to see much. Mostly just flame.” She reached for a glowing green button labeled PRE-IGNITION, and I put one eye to the little window. A jet of yellow flame, roughly the size of the Olympic torch, blossomed from the hole in the roof of the furnace and flickered downward, flaring outward when it hit the lid of the box. Within moments the cardboard began to burn and the flame spread. “Okay,” I heard Helen say, “now I’m going to switch on the combustion burner.” The bloom of yellow flame suddenly turned blue and filled the entire upper portion of the chamber. I watched, mesmerized, as the cardboard collapsed, revealing the contours of the frail body. And then, for a brief moment before flame and smoke obscured my view altogether, I saw the withered flesh catch fire, and somehow it struck me as a cleansing, even a holy thing. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” I heard myself whisper. It was an impromptu benediction from an unlikely source-me, a doubt-filled scientist who dealt daily in death-given to a total stranger, a man I had never seen before, and whom no one would ever see again.
After a moment I stepped back and turned to Helen. She was watching me closely, I noticed, and she seemed slightly embarrassed when I caught her looking. It was as if she knew she’d intruded on some private exchange. “Funny thing,” I said. “I see bodies all the time-I actually burned a couple of corpses last week as a research experiment-but this was different. This was a person.” She nodded. I could see that she understood what I meant and that I’d eased her embarrassment by what I’d said.
“Do you want to see the ‘after’ version now?” She pointed at the other furnace, and I stepped four feet to the right. She opened the door, and I felt a blast of heat as the door slid down. A human skeleton was laid out in perfect anatomical order on the concrete floor. The bones were grayish white and brittle-looking, completely calcined. Except for the skull, which had rolled to one side and cracked into several large pieces, and the rib cage,
