He murdered my father to protect himself.
He wouldn’t hesitate to kill me for the same reason.
“Did he ever say anything like that to you?” I ask. “Did he threaten to harm you?”
“No,” Mom says, her voice tiny. But suddenly her eyes jerk in their sockets. “I’ll kill your mother,” she hisses. “I’ll send Mama down the river and she’ll never come back. Just like the little niggers who disappeared.”
Mom is speaking in the half whisper of a terrified child, and the sound leaves me cold. I hug her again in reassurance. “I know you’re afraid of him. But I’m not. The best protection we have is the truth. And the truth is in Daddy’s coffin.”
Her eyes flicker. “Why do you think that? What can Luke’s body tell you?”
“I’m not sure. It may be that Lena is the answer. In my dream, Daddy was trying to tell me something about Lena, and I have to find out what it is.”
“Do you really believe that? That he was trying to reach you?”
“No. I think I saw something on the night Daddy died. Saw it and then blocked it out. But I won’t know what it was until they open that coffin and I look inside. Maybe not even then. It might take a repeat autopsy. But, Mom…I can’t do any of this without your help.”
She looks down at the table, fear battling something else in her eyes. “Luke was a sweet boy,” she murmurs. “Whatever he went through overseas hurt him badly, but it was our family that finished him off.”
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.
Chapter
55
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.
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: When it’s your own folks, it’s different.
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?”
“Yes. Could you hold up your jacket so that it covers my hands and the leopard?”
“I guess so. You’re not going to ruin it, are you?”
“No, sir.”
As he unfolds his jacket, I carefully examine Lena. Parting the orange-and-black fur beneath her jaw, I can still see the stitching where Pearlie repaired her after the night my father died.
“Like this?” asks Mr. McDonough, making a tent of his jacket.
“Perfect.” I hold Lena under the tent with my left hand and spray some orthotolidine on her coat with my right. Then I turn her in my hands and cover her other side with the chemical.
“What happens now?” asks Mr. McDonough.
“We wait.”
Photographers once used suit jackets as portable darkrooms in the field. The advent of digital photography has probably made that practice a thing of the past, but on this day, the knowledge serves me well.
“Can you turn on some AC?” Mr. McDonough asks.
“No. We don’t want this chemical blowing around the car.”
“Is it toxic or something?”
“No,” I lie.
“Huh. Well, what’s supposed to happen?”
“If there’s blood, it’ll glow blue.”
“How long does it take?”
“A minute or two.”
Mr. McDonough looks interested. “Can I see?”
“Yes, if we get anything. I want you to witness it.”
After two minutes pass, I raise the tail of the jacket and peer into the darkness. Lena’s head is glowing as though painted with blue-dyed phosphorous.
My heart is pounding. Grandpapa never mentioned Lena in any version of the story he told me of the night my father died. But he definitely told me to put her into the coffin. And soon, I may know why.
“What do you see?” asks the funeral director.
“Blood.”
“Can I look?” He sounds like an excited four-year-old.
“In a minute.”
I carefully turn Lena in my hands and examine her head. Though smeared quite a bit—probably from cleaning by Pearlie—the blood appears to have been deposited in small gouts. There’s also some fine spray that Pearlie apparently missed with her cleaning rag. Most of the blood seems to have been deposited on Lena’s head, while very little touched her body. It’s almost as though her head was stuffed into a wound to try to stanch severe bleeding. Did Daddy shove my favorite stuffed animal into his chest to try to save himself? It’s certainly possible, though with the large exit wound in his back, that measure wouldn’t have saved him.
You’re looking right at the answer, says a voice in my head. Looking but not seeing…
The blue glow is stronger now. Slowly, I turn Lena’s head and examine it from every angle.
I study the stitches beneath her chin. Why was she torn there? If Daddy stuffed her head into a bullet wound, what could have torn her cloth covering? A smashed rib? Possibly. As I turn Lena’s head to examine her nose, the answer hits me like ice water thrown in my face.
On top of Lena’s snout is a perfect arch of glowing blue, almost exactly the size of the maxillary arch in an adult human being. There’s not enough detail to make a comparison with individual teeth, but I know without checking that the arch on Lena’s fur will perfectly match the arch of Daddy’s upper teeth.
My father suffocated to death.
For the first time, the reality of that night plays out in my mind’s eye exactly as it happened. Grandpapa shoved Lena into Daddy’s mouth, possibly to muffle his screams of pain, but more probably to finish the job of murdering him. While Daddy lay bleeding on the floor like a gutshot deer, while Pearlie ran down from the big house to the slave quarters, my grandfather shoved my favorite companion down Daddy’s throat and held his nose to finish him off. To silence him forever.
But my father will be silent no longer. Like the blood of Abel, Daddy’s blood is crying out from the ground. And like Abel’s murderer, my grandfather will soon be marked. Marked and punished.
“Can I look now?” asks Mr. McDonough.
I nod absently.
He lifts the jacket and stares into the darkness. “I’ll be damned. Just like CSI.”
“Just like that,” I murmur. “I need to see the body again, sir.”
He rolls down the window and cranes his neck to look around. “Van’s already carried it back to the home.”
“I need to see it before it goes to Jackson.”
“You’d better get going, then. The van from the medical examiner’s office could already be waiting there. They’ll just transfer the coffin between vehicles without ever taking it into the prep room.”
I crank the engine, back the car onto the asphalt lane, and accelerate toward the cemetery gate four hundred yards away.
“You got to drop me at my car, remember?” says Mr. McDonough.
“I can’t take the time. I’ll bring you right back.”