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.
Mr. McDonough looks pointedly at his watch.
As I take my first step, I force myself to recall my time in Bosnia working with the War Crimes Commission. When the UN backhoes uncovered the long trench, I saw three hundred men, women, and children in various stages of decomposition. Mothers holding infants. Toddlers riddled with machine-gun bullets. Little girls clinging to dolls, the last things they saw before their skulls were caved in by rifle butts. Whatever is in this casket can’t compare with that in horror. And yet…the funeral director’s voice whispers in my mind:
I step around the casket and look down.
My first reaction is disbelief. Except for the black suit, my father looks much as he did in life. To a passerby, he would appear to be a young man napping quietly after Sunday dinner. A whiskery black beard covers his cheeks and chin, a beard he never wore in life. This beard is not made of hair-it’s mold-but compared to the terrible changes I could have seen, a beard of mold is nothing.
“Would you look at that,” says Mr. McDonough, a certain pride in his voice. “He looks as good as Medgar Evers.”
Lena the Leopardess lies cradled in the crook of my father’s arm. The sight of her orange-and-black-spotted fur is almost more than I can bear. I slept with Lena every night until my father was buried. And except for my dreams, I haven’t seen her in twenty-three years.
“They exhumed old Medgar for James Earl Ray’s trial a few years back,” says Mr. McDonough, “and he looked like they’d just buried him. Your daddy’s the same. Old Jimmy White was doing my prep work back then. You can’t find help like that now.”
“Could I have a few moments, please?”
“Oh. Yes, ma’am.”
Mr. McDonough takes a few steps back.
I feel like a character in a Disney fairy tale. As though I’ve struggled on a long journey to get to this spot, and now, by simply bending over and kissing his cold lips, I can wake my sleeping prince and live happily ever after.
But I can’t.
The longer I look at my father’s face, the more certain that becomes. His cheeks have actually sunken in quite a bit-his eyes, too, despite the plastic eye caps they put beneath the lids to maintain the illusion of normalcy. With a quick motion like a bird pecking at something on the ground, I bend and pluck Lena from Daddy’s arms.
“Close it up,” I say.
Mr. McDonough closes the casket and signals his van to approach.
“You saw me remove this stuffed animal, correct?” I say.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I know I should wait, but I can’t. “Mr. McDonough, could you come with me to my car for a minute?”
He glances at his watch again. “I really should be getting back to the home. There’s a service going on right now.”
I meet his eyes and silently plead for chivalry, something that almost always works with Southern men.
“Well, just for a minute,” he says.
“Could you bring your jacket?”
He retrieves his jacket from the wall, then follows me to my mother’s Maxima, which is parked on the grass between two walled plots. I open the trunk and remove the box of forensic chemicals I brought from New Orleans to use in my bedroom. The sight of the luminol bottle makes me think of little Natriece and her saucer eyes on the day she spilled the fluid and found the bloody footprints. This job is too sensitive for luminol, which not only consumes the iron in hemoglobin as it reacts with it, but also damages the genetic markers in the blood it detects, making valid DNA testing impossible. Today I’m going to use orthotolidine, which will reveal any latent blood on Lena’s coat, but also maintain the integrity of the genetic markers.
“Could you get inside with me?” I ask, climbing into the driver’s seat.
After a brief hesitation, the funeral director gets into the passenger seat beside me. “What’s in that bottle?”
“A chemical that detects hidden blood.”
He purses his lips. “This some kind of criminal investigation?”
