A Long Day at the End of the World

by Brent Hendricks

  Not the deep shadows of the heavenly Appalachians—a range once thrust higher than the Himalayas by the tectonic collision of North America and Africa three hundred million years ago.

  Not a quarter of a billion years of wind that blew shale and limestone into river valleys and left harder sandstone ridges stacked taller on both sides—valleys that later would become corridors for Native Americans to migrate along, always farther south into the land of animals, and for invading Europeans to enter the frontier and take that land away.

  Instead, driving over Lookout Mountain into the last valley of the Tri-State Crematory, where my father once lounged in his casket of mud, I left a tape recorder switched on next to the flag case reflecting bright angles in the late-afternoon light. And soon I was just talking—talking to my recorder and then talking to air, talking to the South outside my window that really was not the South anymore but snatches of disconnected pictures, words, glimpses of words, the names of things floating by and repeated more or less indiscernibly, houses that were no longer houses and farms that were no longer farms, clicking images bleary as the photograph I had of the crematory grounds now lying half hidden on my car floor.

  But from inside this view, my road was not a road and the wind was not wind. And my recorder was not a recorder but a doomsday machine, capturing small pieces of breath. And it told of words that had become just words, of sounds torn from the objects they once adorned … sounds, I thought later, resembling those of a demon or an angel but nothing in between.

  It told of Highway 337 and the alchemy of drought … of the Shit Fairy and father flowers and peppergrass and mustard seed … of glorified goldlike bodies of bones.

  It told of rats and snakes and vaults and limbs … of Noah floating on the fakest lake of all … of missiles and ghost lilies and a gatekeeper’s eyes … of bomb shelters and boots and crosses and bars.

  Not words I would later remember saying, or a landscape I remembered passing, but tellings from the farthest edge of Babel—a flood of deja view saying kudzu and concrete, X’s and flags … dead ends, de Soto, Cherokees and slaves … shutters and lenses and levers and clicks …

  And finally, when I turned onto Center Point Road and passed the Center Point Baptist Church, the voice simply said I was there.

  * * *

  Through what I guessed was Brent Marsh’s backyard, I glimpsed a black lake that quickly disappeared into leaves. A few hundred feet ahead lay the long crematory driveway. I snapped off my recorder and pulled over.

  Already the sun had fallen below the ridge to the west and I heard the distinct hiss of a mockingbird in a tree. I felt the dirt and rocks through the thin soles of my boots and smelled a strong sweetness all around. To the south stretched my field. A fence hedge of honeysuckle, its white flowers overflowing above my head, forced me to step to the field’s edge for a better view—led me to the exact position where the photographer of my ancient picture had once stood. Nearby a Southern dog wailed wildly in the woods. A clattering truck rolled by too slow.

  The field I stared at now was mostly high grass, bluestem, I thought, with the two larger trees looming in the center. Gone were the tread marks of the bulldozer, the etched dirt that looked as scarred as the moon. Gone were the black-eyed Susan, Venus’s looking glass, and sweet everlasting—those first flowers. Gone were the bodies locked in the earth or rotting on the ground. Gone were the bones except the shards of bones. Gone was my father’s body stretched out in his coffin.

  For a long time I waited in a low wind, listening to birds.

  And once more I didn’t think about what I’d expected to think after all those years. I didn’t think about my father as first resident and gatekeeper, about Brent Marsh practicing his dark magic, about the bodies accumulating in woods, vaults, and pits. I didn’t think about the fake lake I couldn’t see that lay beyond the trees. Instead, in the last light of this particular day, my pilgrimage day, I had the weird idea that the whole place would burst into flowers—the whole expanse of my photograph would fill with leaf buds of every kind, every species from my field guide leaping from the page and blossoming in the half dark. Not fleabane and chickweed and thistle but a rush beyond saying, names beyond naming. They’d bloom and press and tangle inside the four corners of my vision—flowers for the dead and the bones of the dead, flowers for the living, flowers for time piling up on itself. And when that didn’t happen—when the flowers didn’t rise and fall back to earth—I guessed I was done. I guessed my journey was over.

  I had to turn the car around, so I followed the dirt road to the left and arrived at what must have been the Marsh family church. There, in the bad light of the tiny graveyard, I could still make out the name of Brent Marsh’s father on a headstone, planted only a quarter of a mile from where my own father had waited aboveground in his boots. Again I passed the dark field fallen back to grasses. No moon. I clicked one more photograph out my window and drove the short distance to the main road.

  It was an undivided four-lane that led to Chattanooga, not much traffic, and I pointed the car northward and pulled to the side. It was finished, I thought. My father had not returned. And then suddenly I was crying and he was there in the car next to me, a shape, a presence, and I could feel him again as I had felt him as a young child. He was a vision—sprung from that flag case and from history, from the End and from the road. That’s all I can say for sure. He was there for a while and I could feel him, real as a crush of flowers. He was close by and then he was gone.

  Part Three

  26

  THAT NIGHT I did what many Americans might do after a long day at the end of the world—I went to a convenience store and bought some beer. I rented a cut-rate hotel room in LaFayette and had a little wake for my thrice-dead dad.

  In the traditional wake, the dead body lies present before the mourners who hold vigil through the dark hours. In my ritual, my father’s image still shimmered brightly, so close it had not yet receded into the hold of memory. From the car I brought the cheap flag case, his mirrored portal.

  It was clear that things had changed from that first stumble back in Tuscaloosa. Originally I traveled from here to there, from a place where I held only a photograph of a field to the actual three-dimensional field at Tri-State. A beginner, I’d embarked on a pilgrimage to an unholy place to acknowledge the dead. But apocalypse had intervened. Crunch time had arrived. And so my trip had become a pilgrimage to the End and all the overlay of biblical pronouncements that entailed. If the Apocalypse was already under way, asked my trip, didn’t someone have to be my savior? After an Armageddon of fissuring words, didn’t someone have to appear again who had appeared before? Eventually my father appeared, first intimated by a field of flowers and then as a presence breaking through the reflected glass of stars and stripes.

  Given the tangle of figuring and prefiguring, I knew it would take a while to sort out what this personal revelation really meant. The connections were as interwoven as the blossoms in that bursting field. But I also knew, gazing at my beer—a red-white-and-blue can of Pabst Blue Ribbon—what I’d known from first flash: It had something to do with feeling. Or, more correctly, it involved the connection between saving and feeling. This evening I could suddenly feel my father again, hovering close by in that seat. He was not just a name or my father or a dead guy in boots but someone who was finally right there with me. Not a memory sensed through a veil of resentment, the way I’d experienced my father since adolescence, but a creation transported by crunch time into all my father ever was, a presence who had delivered me from unfeeling, from a life without my father except an abstract father.

  All of which led back to apocalypse—my father and the world being so entwined. Maybe there was a new kind of End-Times living that would not draw me away from this world but would bring me back here. Not empty it out, as had long been my inclination, but create a change of direction that would focus my vision on this place and blue-shift things here. Find the countervailing force to all
that dark energy.

  As I finished my first beer and opened the second, I noticed that the red bar, which lay behind a blue seal with the beer’s name, resembled half of the X on the Alabama state flag (the same X that itself stood for the X on the Confederate Battle Flag). Understandably, I hadn’t considered this in consuming a thousand other PBRs. And below these emblems stretched a wreath of barley and hops, cultivated remnants of wildflowers … Smiling, I couldn’t help but consider the link to Revelation as well as the disparity of my situation, how instead of divining the seven seals from heaven, I was reduced to reading the seals of beer cans in a lousy hotel …

  And bereft as I was of any religious salvation, however much I longed for the clarity of that telling and saying, I mouthed the words to Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus”—hearing, instead of the ’80s English band’s rendition, the low voice of Johnny Cash in one of his last recordings: “Flesh and bone by the telephone / Lift up the receiver / I’ll make you a believer.” Was this my last chance? I picked up the landline from the night table but no one spoke back.

  And then after my third and final beer, I had this thought—his body fading to slow fires—I thought now, in conjuring his presence over time, maybe I’d learn to love my father again. That was my revelation, and like the best biblical one it was mostly about love.

  I scoured my can for any additional alchemical message—like the secret to the elixir of youth, of immortality—but none appeared. I put down the empty vessel and went to bed.

  27

  THE TRI-STATE CREMATORY INCIDENT would also come to a close. Judgment Day would arrive for Brent Marsh.

  First the civil case rolled around in March 2004, inciting a media extravaganza. Would Brent Marsh testify, revealing something we didn’t know about his motivations, some key to his bizarre actions?

  As it turned out, every important pretrial decision went against the defendants. (The defendants in the civil case were the Tri-State Crematory and a number of local funeral homes that had used the crematory’s “services” through the years.) The judge allowed testimony from victim family members regarding emotional distress and, most significantly, ruled that jurors could view photographs of the decayed and discarded bodies.

  Imagine a juror seeing a slide show presentation featuring my father’s twelve-years-gone body laid out in his coffin, the melted flesh of a mass grave, and the “reduced” corpses of a burial vault.

  The defendants didn’t have a chance.

  And encountering such inflammatory evidence, they settled, resulting in no new information entered into the record and no testimony by Brent Marsh.

  So our last opportunity resided with the criminal case against Brent Marsh, which finally reached the court docket in November 2004. It was a massive indictment, charging him with 122 counts of burial fraud, 47 counts of giving false statements, 179 counts of abuse of a dead body, and 439 counts of theft by taking. Again we all hoped that Brent Marsh would testify, as would an array of criminologists and psychologists. Soon the public record would be filled with information that would illuminate and clarify his motivations.

  But this was not to be. Faced with the strong possibility of several decades behind bars, Brent Marsh pled guilty on all counts of the indictment. He never took the stand. No public record of any interest developed in the case—the judge ordered no psychological evaluations, and no expert witnesses took the stand. It was as if the alchemist had cast one last veil of smoke over the entire proceedings.

  Yet we did finally hear from Brent Marsh. As part of his plea bargain—in which he was sentenced to twelve years in prison—he was required to write a letter of apology to each victim’s family. It included the following lines:

  As I have stated in court, I have not the answers that you so greatly desire. I wish I had the answers to give you ease, but I do not. Therefore, I can only offer you my deepest apology.

  It was a handwritten form letter, composed as if by a machine, the style somehow robotic. It contained the correct condolences and the words were true: On some level it seemed obvious that Brent Marsh had no conscious idea why he’d desecrated hundreds of bodies, which confirmed my original conclusion. I had always suspected no greater plan lay behind his deceit.

  In reading the letter, however, for the first time I experienced the identity of our names as a hard jolt. Certainly I’d considered the irony before, but I’d never really felt it viscerally. I saw “Brent” signed at the bottom of the page, and its inescapable connection to my name, my life, rushed forward. Suddenly the old letters were inscribed in a new way upon my brain.

  From that point on, my regular name floated on a smooth surface and, when I heard it or read it somewhere, the other Brent would always dart beneath that plane. It was not a conscious phenomenon, just as Brent Marsh’s actions were not self-evident to him, but more of a synaptic subfiring that I could never quite get rid of. It seemed that Brent Marsh traveled with me through this world, a brother of sorts who shared my name.

  And when I did think more concretely about our collective identity, it typically was not in the present but in the past. When Brent Marsh’s father called for his child across the lake—perhaps to help with the incineration of a corpse or to flip the oven’s switch—he called my name, too. And when my own father called for me across the suburban backyards pocked with bomb shelters, he likewise summoned his persecutor in death. On the one hand it wasn’t a big deal; I didn’t dwell on the connection in a particularly obsessive way. On the other hand it was always there, an imprinted guilt by association that lurked deeper down.

  Even more strange regarding the letter, Brent Marsh got my father’s name wrong: “I am very sorry for your loss of the late Mr. Robert Hendricks.” His name was Ronald, not Robert!

  How was that possible? Why my letter of all the hundreds he had to write? Did the Shit Fairy suddenly alight atop his pen, curving different symbols across the page?

  After everything having to do with names—from my father’s boots to the gatekeeper’s book—what were the chances Brent Marsh would make such an error?

  And beyond the personal coincidences, the misnaming conjured images of the unknown dead of Tri-State, those unfortunate souls who lay alongside one another in a row of graves with one memorial marker in Rossville, Georgia. Their names would never again be attached to them upon this earth. And it was all because of Brent Marsh, whose cleaving of bodies and words—of looking beyond this world toward somewhere else—left a large swath of disturbance just behind him.

  * * *

  De Soto spent the last year of his life—the year after passing through the lower edge of the New Madrid earthquake zone—wandering around what is now Arkansas. With his best translator having perished, he had difficulty gaining accurate information from his Native captives, no matter how much he tortured them. In more ceremonious exchanges, he had a hard time understanding the various chiefs. And given the new language divide, he therefore had trouble planning his next move—first swerving toward Oklahoma and then veering back down to the Mississippi River.

  By April 1542, he’d reached the eastern side of the big river, not too far from the steamboats of modern Natchez, and set up camp in a conquered town. This time he sent his emissaries south, on the chance they’d find treasure but more immediately to locate an overland route to the Gulf of Mexico. A week later he learned the bad news: no gold and no path.

  De Soto was in trouble. Having lost three hundred of approximately seven hundred men—and, more significant, 150 or so of his original 200 horses—he desperately needed to resupply. Those all-important horses, for example, had not received new iron shoes for over a year. Now, if he wanted to exit this increasingly hostile scene, he’d have to construct a small armada of seaworthy boats, and if he ever managed to arrive home, he’d have to explain himself to his investors and to the king.

  As the esteemed historian Charles Hudson suggests, “This realization must have been almost a physical blow to De Soto”—the once indomita
ble conquistador soon “became ill and took to his bed, no doubt depressed.” But I’m pretty sure it was the Shit Fairy, and the Shit Fairy was a long way from being done.

  When de Soto died a few weeks later, his handpicked successor ordered the body hidden for three days and then buried, at night, so as to perpetuate the ruse of the man’s divinity. Though we have no evidence that the local Indians believed in de Soto’s holy powers, despite his many tricks with mirrors, perhaps his followers were willing to make the extra effort at concealment under the circumstances.

  The threat of desecration also existed as a real possibility. If the Native people knew where to look, they might later dig de Soto up, slice him into parts, and then dangle some choice pieces from trees. The soldiers had witnessed this spectacle visited upon several of their comrades. And though they themselves had cut off untold numbers of hands and noses—an act of terror performed on the living just to show they meant business—de Soto’s fighters still couldn’t abide the prospect of their leader’s flesh becoming bird food. So they galloped their horses back and forth over the unmarked grave, as if in celebration of some saintly festival, to further deceive the onlookers.

  Fearing that the deception had failed, however, the Spaniards themselves dug up the body, added sand to de Soto’s winding sheets, and then re-interred him in a hollowed-out oak. They nailed a makeshift door over his face and towed the tree to the deepest trench of the Mississippi River. There, in the darkness, they sank him to the bottom. I wish I could say I could feel his body down there, the bones that may long ago have broken apart and that shifted and fell when the big earthquakes hit centuries later. But I can’t. I can’t feel anything about him. His body still lies there underwater—unidentified by human marker.

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