A Long Day at the End of the World

by Brent Hendricks

  With this revelation, my conception of my father’s place in the desecration changed dramatically. In truth, I hadn’t given the timing much consideration. For all I’d known, Brent Marsh had commenced his abandonment with good speed, having performed a number of dark tricks by October 1997, the month my father appeared at Tri-State in his dirty coffin. As it turned out, the pits had yet to be dug and the burial vaults to be filled. The woods and outbuildings were not yet littered with corpses. Whatever it was that ultimately set Brent Marsh off, that triggering event had not occurred. If it was hoarding disease, it hadn’t clicked in; if it was something else—something I couldn’t even guess at—it hadn’t happened.

  As I digested the new numbers over the next several days, I realized it was quite possible that my father’s was the first body abandoned at the site, having arrived in his enclosed casket after being underground those seven years. From the deposition it appeared that only a few bodies had shown up in caskets, and undoubtedly none of the others, given the infrequency of exhumation, had come from the ground.

  Could my father have been the activating agent of the Tri-State story? Had Brent Marsh simply dragged his coffin off a little ways into the woods, a less pressing (and less putrefying) problem to be taken care of on the next day? Was my father the trigger?

  Maybe one thing led to another—a body left here and a body tossed there, and so the great disturbance began. Surely he could get away with this one, the proprietor-alchemist must have thought, and he did get away with it for five years.

  * * *

  For me, this knowledge cast my father in quite a different role. He was not merely the familiar body whose death I experienced concretely on the ground, an expired thing who showed me what it was like being dead. Instead he was the first, or nearly the first, a lone sentinel whose tenure marked the entire span of the Tri-State Crematory Incident. Along with Brent Marsh, he was there from the beginning.

  And he knew something else the others didn’t know: what it was like being dead. In fact he’d been dead nearly seven years—a unique experience that provided a wealth of knowledge for the latest arrivals concerning their new state and their new home. He could reassure the newly dead—he could show them they were not alone. In my mind, he became the keeper and gatekeeper of the Tri-State Crematory, watching silently as Brent Marsh made his choices.

  Mostly, they had either the vaults or the pits, either the flesh-reducing burial vaults or shallow trenches in the ground. As my father explained to these unlucky arrivals, they would endure the brunt of desecration, losing themselves into the bodies of others, DNA vanishing too quickly into the commingled darkness. For the more fortunate there were the woods, a scattering in the brush that allowed some individual change and a change of seasons. It was a better fate, my father explained, except for the animals and the elements, the coyotes and rain.

  I took some odd comfort in this concept. My dead father, as witness, recorded each body’s placement at Tri-State. He drew a map of the grounds and numbered each discarded corpse, cross-referencing each number to his numbered list. It was some solace, I supposed, my father’s Book of the Dead, though I imagined the book written in a language inaccessible to the living. Ultimately his evidence wouldn’t help, for example, when the authorities rushed in on Brent Marsh’s day of reckoning. Still someone kept track. The keeper kept track.

  And my father revealed to all the new arrivals his own experience of being dead, delivering his soliloquy in the same unknown tongue. And though the story slipped away in that incomprehensible language, I knew his general theme, I knew the message I’d gleaned so far from playing dead. To be dead, my father taught—or, more accurately, his body taught—was about returning to the earth. Always dust to dust. It was an old story and the only story. Heaven lay in the ground.

  * * *

  The irony was not lost on me that I could feel my father more dead than alive.

  After my graveside failure to imagine his dead body, I’d changed my approach. Having failed in one connection, I’d tried again. And so from the beginning, with both his exhumation and Tri-State, I’d made him a witness to his own decay and the loud deposit of bodies in the split ground. Denied my own ritual by desecration, I’d begotten a thing observant of the rituals of the dead; I’d begotten a father who so tangibly showed me his fading flesh that I learned to look out from his vacant eyes. I’d learned too well to consider the dead, causing my brain to backfire in the rawness of it all.

  And though less intense than my father’s gone body, the gatekeeper story felt closer to me than any pictures of my living father. Even the bad images, the one, for example, of the baseballs hurtling toward my head in our ugly backyard, felt clouded by resentment, a hazy anger occluding pieces of time I couldn’t quite grab hold of. And the good ones, the ones I couldn’t imagine at all, these lay even farther back from my border of sullenness.

  But now the chasm offered a second chance. Not only might my father appear along the road like one of my wildflowers, sprung from disturbed ground, but I sensed another looming presence as well. All around the End pressed forward from the troubled background of Alabama, past and present, and from the troubled arc of my own history and those Tribulation images of the Tri-State Crematory. On this trip I rode with apocalypse. I rode inside. And certainly that terrible event, both real and figurative, felt more alive than my alive father. I could feel the burgeoning power of its linkage—the exhilarating mix, in the alchemical dark of my mind—of prophecy, father, Shit Fairy, photographs, suburbs, lakes, bodies, and the South. I could feel the blending of all these and more, a movement whose thrill felt a little like love.

  And amid this sweep of convergence and acceleration, it seemed like time itself was coming to an end. A final scene in a final act. And yet wasn’t this direction set in motion long ago, when my father snapped his first pictures of apocalypse? Hadn’t he crunched our linear time together? The past flew toward us and entered our eyes; our eyes flew back toward the past. And on that last day Jesus did all the shooting, and when he finished—when the aperture of the earth opened and closed in that final moment—everything was still-life all over.

  23

  ACCORDING TO SAINT PAUL, the actual phenomenon of time is different as it approaches an end point. It contracts. It piles up on itself like a train wreck. Increasingly, events from the past take on a symbolic quality, and then those events come crashing into the present, loaded with meaning. I like to think of it this way: In the End everything feels like déjà vu.

  * * *

  “Déjà vu,” I said aloud, pronouncing it like a good Alabamian for effect: “deja view.” As I approached the bridge for Guntersville, which was a nexus for many of the historical elements I’d already contemplated, the town seemed like a good place to get it straight: In a line loomed Hernando de Soto, the Cherokees, and the Confederacy. Just ahead stretched a massive fake lake.

  Halfway across the bridge I stopped the car and got out—feeling biblical and tall in my black boots—and when some redneck teenagers in a Dodge Ram rode by and yelled, “Faggot,” I didn’t yell back. I was concentrated down to the optic nerve.

  I began with the smooth water that lay beneath me. I closed my eyes. And suddenly through the sky fell the glittered bodies of river things—mollusks, frogs, and fish—descended from heaven in backward rapture and dropped once again into the flowing water. I saw a dark cloud of passenger pigeons blacken the horizon, their bodies plunged downward with the roar of shotguns. Now Union artillery pounded the town—flashing soldiers and light, soldiers and flags—while peaceable keelboats, flatboats, and steamboats carried slaves in manacles, carried Cherokees west to the land of the dead. Footmen in chain mail. Horsemen in armor. Mastiffs tearing flesh on the nearby shore. I said “amen” and opened my eyes. I crossed the long bridge to the other side.

  * * *

  The town of Guntersville seemed strangely civilized. Expensive houses dotted the surrounding hills. A restaurant called La Strada
apparently served high-end Italian food, and elegant antiques stores lined the main street. A couple of kids ate cones outside an old-fashioned ice cream parlor in the perfectly cool May air. A big marina floated lavish boats nearby. Actually, it reminded me a little of a New England town—quaint, but not scary quaint like I’d experienced in Jasper.

  The near-drunken sensation of my crunch-time extravaganza reminded me of how I’d felt back in Jasper, when I pointed the viewer at my flag case and ended up with a dizzying confluence of reflected images commingling me, my father, the Confederacy, and America, not to mention the discerning eye of the camera itself. And yet that earlier ricocheting of mixed symbols and people had somehow managed to retain a balanced and relatively rational structure. A complicated but coherent mirror held up to the world. An astonishingly real realism.

  Inside apocalypse things were very different. Nothing was particularly real, or even particular, for that matter. The agent of my apocalypse (my mind, I supposed) had stripped actual objects of most of their first essence. Apocalypse, for me, was an emptying out of this world. Flowers, churches, even ice-cream-slurping children—everything, it seemed, floated more and more in the service of an exclusive and final symbolism. And inside gazing out, I saw very little of the original referents to hold on to anymore, leaving nothing to make sense of except the pressing onward. In here I had direction and synchronicity (a kind of direction itself), but the hurtling toward the End and the crunching of time seemed wildly out of control, even as my own personal conjuring and crunching abilities appeared to strengthen. I wondered if my autonomy wasn’t itself an illusion, a phantom operating inside the black hole of the End.

  24

  THE STATE HAD TO DO SOMETHING with all those unknown bodies.

  The final accounting left 114 unidentified, 34 of which would not yield retrievable DNA samples due to embalming and/or the commingling of flesh in Brent Marsh’s pits and burial vaults. The other 80 simply had no relative or friend who stepped forward to claim them, their corpses as lonely in death as they most likely existed in the last days of life.

  So, after refrigerating the bodies for a couple of years, in March 2004 the state arranged for their permanent burial in a donated plot at the Tennessee-Georgia Memorial Park in nearby Rossville, Georgia. Once again the backhoe opened the red clay and lowered these well-traveled bodies into their new burial vaults, placed end to end in a fresh trench near the cemetery gate. The state provided each vault with a number and corresponding file in the improbable event that someone would later identify a particular lost body, in which case the backhoe would again be summoned and the ground divided. In the mass grave the authorities buried 133 individual vaults—114 for the intact bodies and 19 more for a collection of miscellaneous bones.

  I had trouble with these troubled dead. I had trouble because I couldn’t really think about them in their new home, though I could so easily imagine them lounging and scattered at Tri-State. And I could think about the claimed dead and the living people who claimed them. I could think about these people because they had names. But the others, the lost dead—I couldn’t think about them outside of Tri-State and my gatekeeper father. They remained abstracted, which I knew was wrong.

  From a distance, then, I watched as the gatekeeper strode through the crematory grounds in his stinking cowboy boots, his name rubbing against bone. He told these oblivion-bound dead of their predicament and placement, as well as their final destination in another trench beneath a single memorializing monument. He did what he could, scrawling their names in his Book of the Dead. Now they would not be just a number—Jane or John Doe #23, for example—tucked away in the ground and in a coroner’s cold case file. Now somewhere, someplace, a mark recorded more than an X, indecipherable as it was and lodged in a ledger filled neatly with the strangest of hieroglyphics.

  * * *

  In an effort to assuage my sin of unfeeling, and to augment the good deeds of the gatekeeper, I decided to undertake a similar role for a different set of forgotten dead. I’d strive to give names to my mysterious Cherokee ancestors who allegedly walked the Trail of Tears in 1838. I’d try to identify these people long hidden in history to soften my guilt about the unnamed dead in the present. It was both a biblical gesture—begat, begat, begat—and a strange attempt at transference in an alchemical time.

  So I undertook the task with some diligence and honor.

  I began the backward trek through time—online.

  Backward I traveled through ancestral trees created by others working to assemble the past. Backward I traveled through the various Cherokee census rolls; the ragged U.S. and state censuses of the nineteenth century; local land, marriage, and burial records; slave rolls. The goal was to find a Cherokee woman named Missouri Dukes supposedly born during the tribe’s western exodus, born on the short stretch of the trail that crossed into southern Missouri. According to family lore, it was the chance location of her birth that accounted for her spectacular name.

  But I had more than just a name. I had a dramatic folktale.

  My grandmother told of knowing her “beautiful” grandfather, who had long black hair and dressed “like an Indian.” Strikingly, the man wore a single black eye patch. As the story went, the eye patch resulted from an encounter with several other of my distant relatives, brothers who’d cornered my great-great-grandfather on a back road somewhere in Arkansas and gouged out his eye for marrying their white sister. They put out his eye because he was an Indian. It was a tale my grandmother, who died in 2003 at the age of ninety-six, adamantly maintained with precision.

  Unfortunately, my research turned up only contrary news. Missouri Dukes, for example, did not arrive uncomfortably in Missouri while her mother traveled the Trail of Tears but instead was born to white parents in Arkansas in 1826, twelve years before that tragic event. This meant that my grandmother’s grandfather, the one with the long black hair and telltale eye patch, was not part Indian unless his father was an Indian. I did find the marriage record of Missouri Dukes and a man named William H. Smith in 1842 in Lawrence, Arkansas, yet that document, in the line given for such information, failed to provide the husband’s race.

  So I worked hard to identify this William H. Smith, as he remained our only concrete link to the Cherokees. Again, I checked the rolls and censuses and birth and death records, but he wasn’t there. He apparently wasn’t born anywhere and he had no family history. He hadn’t served in any military campaign and never owned land in Arkansas. Presumably, he’d died by 1850, because I found Missouri Dukes Smith remarried on the 1852 census. But that’s all. I had a name but not a man.

  I had a dead end.

  But I did have a few things on my side.

  I had someone without any apparent history, which fit the profile of a displaced Indian.

  I had a common name, William Smith, a name someone might choose when trying to survive the onslaught of white culture, a name so common as to be plucked from thin air …

  And I had my story, whose concrete details were so vivid and specific as to preclude conjuring. Who would make up such a tale? Why? And of course the violence of the tale seemed all too real and familiar—so ordinary as to be humanly true.

  * * *

  As I climbed higher into the hills beyond Guntersville, named after a half-Cherokee trader, I noticed I drove faster now and that objects beyond me continued to slip away from their normal consequence. Before, I had focused on the tiniest flowers lingering by the road. I had consulted my field guide. Now those same flowers seemed abstract, emptied of their original significance, as my call to apocalypse drew me farther away. And words—the normally reliable signs that provided our regular meaning—had become dislodged from their things.

  It must have been the same, I thought, for Brent Marsh. For him, the bodies kept piling up in the present—year after year of corpses literally stacked on top of each other in pits and burial vaults. The bodies kept arriving from the past into the present and there was no more room. And as
they piled up, day after day and month after month, they lost their regular meaning for him. They were not bodies with names to be cared for with ritual, bodies that once belonged to people. Rather, the names fell away as he stacked them higher. He, too, was looking past this world. The bodies with names became just things.

  Tellingly, I passed a patch of orange-waving coneflowers, which just an hour before would have imprinted itself upon my brain, triggering my synapses into an indelibly brilliant photograph. But now they were just another in a series of distant images wallpapering the road: flowers, orange.

  And lacking particularity, the things themselves appeared more two-dimensional than three, like those hand-painted signs—those admonitions—hanging on trees and posts outside Tuscaloosa. Maybe the names of things helped provide dimensionality, I thought, because now the whole landscape was flatter—hanging statically in the background like a car scene in an old movie, a blank screen upon which to project history and memory, the Cherokees whose former territory I traveled through, the unknown dead of Tri-State.

  25

  I DIDN’T THINK about what I’d planned as I drove my last hour to the Tri-State Crematory.

  Not the Ridge and Valley that divided Alabama and Georgia—a thin strip of land forged from three different mountain-building episodes beginning half a billion years ago—three great heavings that folded and buckled the ground into consecutive waves of geology piling up against the old plateau to the west.