A HOST OF ANGELS crowded at the base of the arched monument. They looked ceramic, or maybe plastic, although I was too afraid to touch them to make sure. One clasped her upraised palms together, and her blue dress appeared homemade, like a doll’s dress with tiny beads. Another was painted and her hands were outstretched, deep folds flowing through her windblown blond hair and gown. A third angel, which looked suspiciously like a red Christmas tree ornament, played a dirty violin.
At first glance only the open greenness on all sides suggested that the granite monument marked something other than a single grave site. Sandblasted Gothic letters told the rest of the story.
GARDEN OF PEACE
This section of Tennessee-Georgia Memorial Park is dedicated to those loved ones who were discovered at Tri-State Crematory on February 15, 2002 and laid to rest in, March 2004. May they and their families have everlasting peace and consolation.
On the hillside of the large cemetery, roses and lilies lay bunched and scattered beneath headstones. Carnations and gladiolus glowed upon the graves. And below I could see the unknown dead huddled in the depths where everything was black, including the iron-red dirt. I could see the bodies lined up in a row, bones shifting only occasionally with the tectonic rumblings of the Ridge and Valley.
I sat down on the grass and pulled at the dirt.
I knew I’d never come here again.
And I wanted to give these dead a few roadside flowers as a final offering, a pretty link to their last entry in the historical record. But I’d come empty-handed. Instead I fumbled in my back pocket for a frayed map of Georgia and laid it next to the red angel. Now if Jesus happened to summon these unclaimed dead on a fateful day—blowing the doors off their matching vaults—they’d know the name of the ground they rose from. And if he didn’t, well, at least someone had told them they were still in Georgia, resting on a big hill called Missionary Ridge.
When I stood to go, the midmorning light had blanched the headstones mostly white, and they seemed to float in air against the slope of the hill. I thought they resembled the little flags of apocalypse I’d seen outside Tuscaloosa the day before: white sheets of copy paper nailed to pines and oaks. These gentle admonitions had asked that I Please do God’s will today and Please do God’s work as he wants you to.
Earlier I’d wondered what my own sheets hammered to wood might say, whether they’d always remain blank or whether they’d display the blurred image of the Tri-State field I carried with me in my car. I’d hoped the grail of disturbed ground would adorn my flags.
And then I knew what I’d have on my sheets. It was the first ritual of coming home—of making the darkness visible and pulling my eyes back here.
In black letters I’d have just names—pages of single entries torn from my Book of the Dead and fluttering in whatever wind there was. The flags that harkened the close of this world for me were just words, little headstones marking more doom. In a moment I imagined but did not see the whole Ridge and Valley papered with names, collapsing time as they glittered in light. In a land with no future every name should rise. And in my last act of rapture, suggesting nothing but the End, the ghosts gleamed all around me in that lush place full of trees.
Epilogue
AFTER THE EXHORTATION FOR THE MESSIAH to “come quickly,” after the last “amen,” the King James Bible concludes with the words THE END.
Followed by a period.
But my version of the King James Bible continues on long after that period. In the Topical Reference Bible that I own, a number of educational tools follow Revelation, the last chapter, including Comprehensive Bible Helps; the Whole Bible Arranged in Subjects; Alphabetical Index of Subjects; and finally, that most obsessive of scholarly endeavors, Cruden’s Concordance to the Bible. And the continuation occurs because at the close of Revelation, the vision of apocalypse remains just that: a dream, a hallucination.
Therefore—even for someone with the A gene, for whom the beginning of the End had already commenced—I still felt some space for commentary, for further education and illumination. I decided to tie up smaller, less all-encompassing ends. The most important of these was to meet with Greg Ramey, the agent in charge of Tri-State for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
By the time I caught up with him on a cold fall day years after the case was closed, he worked out of an unmarked office near Rome, in what appeared to be an abandoned storefront in an isolated strip mall. A tough guy but kind, wearing his heavy gun with a natural grace, he showed a genuine interest in my inquiry and asked how my family—especially my mother—had dealt with the desecration. Also, in an effect both comforting and dislocating, he kept calling my father’s body “your dad.” He said we found “your dad” just a little ways into the woods, we found “your dad” after that first week, we found “your dad” in his casket. And without prodding he quickly laid out a clear picture of the crematory grounds and outbuildings, adding to the landscape I’d carried around so long in my head. He was, moreover, from the northwest corner of Georgia himself and was acquainted with all the actors in this backwoods morality play. He even knew about my father, he said. He had a few things for me.
My father’s file was first. He handed it over. “Take as long as you’d like,” he said, returning to the paperwork strewn across his desk.
As I paged through, I read that my dad was “mummified” and “partially skeletalized”—not surprising, I supposed, but it was different to see the words written down, different to think of someone standing over his rotten body, taking notes. I read that my father’s teeth were in “good repair.” I saw the word “possibly” scribbled next to a box checked “Caucasoid.” And in a stark declaration as to the extent of decay, I found the “indeterminate” box checked rather than the “male” or “female.”
With chart after chart itemizing bones and skin and hair, I began to feel disembodied as I sat in Agent Ramey’s office or, more accurately, I began to feel the pull of my father’s wasted body drawing me away from myself.
It was a relief, then, when I finally turned to the more familiar territory of the “Recovered Clothing Form.” There I found a detailed description of my father’s plaid shirt, brown jacket, Eddie Bauer chinos, Hanes briefs, and, of course, his custom-made cowboy boots. I must have mentioned something aloud about the boots, because Agent Ramey said he had a story about them. He gave me a small plastic bag, which I held up to the light.
My father’s name floated before me—“Ron Hendricks”—with the last letters more faded than the first. Instinctively I lifted the bag farther from my eyes. Cut into two pieces, the tan leather barely looked worn and the stitching barely frayed. It was a miracle, I thought, considering the burial and abandonment, a miracle my father’s bootheel still offered its letters.
The other leather scrap had some writing, too:
Handmade By
Gallegos-Mendez
Santa Fe., N. Mex.
10188943-10
B10
The B10, I guessed, was my father’s boot size, as he had unusually narrow feet (B) and always had trouble finding a comfortable fit. But I couldn’t decipher the longer code above, probably a serial number of some sort with his size after the dash. The thought crossed my mind that the number had some incantatory purpose tied to the long life and preservation of leather. The quality of both cowhide and letters lent itself to such magical thinking.
“Go ahead and open it,” Ramey said, meaning the bag. I did. I held my father’s old bootheel in my hand, the piece with his name. In the open air the leather felt brittle, like a communion wafer, hard and dry. As the act wasn’t something I’d ever contemplated, I didn’t know what to do. I just kept turning the piece over and over in my hand. After a while it was too much, really, the weight of it all, so I put the bootheel back in its sleeve and listened to Agent Ramey’s story.
As it happened, his experience in leading the Tri-State investigation had made him something of a celebrity in mass-crime circles. He was a
sked to give presentations to law enforcement groups and forensic specialists. The Tri-State crime scene, with its hundreds of bodies desecrated over time, presented different challenges from, say, an airplane crash with immediate carnage. And so, in developing his presentation, Agent Ramey prominently featured my father’s body—“your dad” as he kept saying—and the story of the boots. In fact, he’d created a slide show that pictured not only my father’s body in his grave clothes but also close-ups of the bootheel. He said the one with my father’s name always brought down the house.
Understandably, I noticed the coincidence that my father, the consummate amateur photographer, had himself become the star of a traveling slide show in death. But I didn’t have much time to dwell on that—or consider its connection to my apocalyptic envisionings—as Agent Ramey asked if I wanted copies of the photographs. He explained that some were pretty graphic. He said it was up to me.
In the end, I turned down the ones that showed my father’s face. I couldn’t do it. After all those years of imagining him dead, and of gazing at death from inside his eyes, I couldn’t look into his dark sockets. Nightmare, I knew, lay just behind that stare. Any glimpse by me might stir the thing awake. I was relieved, then, when Agent Ramey advised against it, too.
In the photograph I did take from him, my father’s skull lies outside the frame, and the rest of his body sprawls top to bottom. The grave clothes have all taken on a sepia tone against a white sheet, and the individual components—pants, shirt, jacket—look blended together in the loose fit and deep folds of a mythical range rider. His bare hand is recognizable to me, the curve of fingers and harmony of bone. The size and shape of the wrist looks right. In fact the whole line of his body seems familiar, imprinted in memory by a child’s long study of form and detail. I thought how different this was from the last time I saw him alive, barely breathing in that high hospital room, when he didn’t look like my father at all. How I couldn’t feel anything as his body descended into the dark hole, a mound of dirt piled up nearby. Now I could sense his approach across the years. I wasn’t afraid.
And there’s a fluidity to the image as if the wind is blowing, blowing straight and hard from an unknown direction, until at the bottom of the photograph my father’s socks protrude—enlarged by perspective and stiff as concrete. The most compelling piece of evidence lies draped across his legs. Cutting a diagonal that divides movement and stillness, arranged for documentation, rest those beautiful boots.
Yet even with this, Agent Ramey’s performance wasn’t over. At every juncture, he remained calm and steadying. He allowed me to collect myself. When he rose and walked into the next room, filled with computers and equipment, I followed.
The climax would be a video.
Again, he kindly inquired if I wanted to participate. “Sure you’re ready for this?” he asked.
The video, he said, showed the nighttime raid on the crematory, in which a stunned Brent Marsh leads GBI agents through one of the buildings. I’m not sure which one, probably the large metal storage shed. It’s dark inside, and the agents are using high-beam flashlights. And for the first time I hear Brent Marsh’s voice—deep and soft. He’s trying to explain why there are bodies lying all over the floor, trying to help the agents identify them. Maybe he’s thinking if he can tell their names, then he might be okay. He might get away with it. Or maybe he’s actually trying to help out—it’s hard to say. There’s an old woman’s decaying body in the corner and some discussion about who she is. He fumbles with a ledger—like the gatekeeper, I thought—but it’s pretty clear he doesn’t know. After a while, he just goes quiet. His face is never shown.
Of all my experiences with Agent Ramey, the video remains most entwined with my dreams, my waking dreams of Tri-State. But my brain was pretty shot. After scanning my father’s file and holding his bootheel, after tracing his hand and heavy socks, the images onscreen began to blur. Soon, I asked Agent Ramey just to turn the machine off. I thanked him and said goodbye.
Outside the wind was blowing. I didn’t have a coat, and I shivered. Half an hour north lay Tri-State and a few minutes north of that sprawled the Chickamauga National Military Park—site of the last major Confederate victory of the Civil War. For a moment I thought of stopping by the park, of taking the driving tour through the stone monuments and regiment markers where thousands had fallen not so long ago, where pieces of bone lay locked in the ground. But it seemed too late for all that.
I started the car, turned on the heat. A blast of cold air blew across my face.
With a little luck, my flag and I might make it home before evening.
Acknowledgments
In addition to the Original King James Version of the Bible (Dugan, 1984), as well as The HarperCollins Study Bible, revised edition (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), the following books were indispensable in writing about my experiences: Giorgio Agamben’s The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, translated by Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) (Agamben makes the following translation of 1 Corinthians 7: 29–31: But this I say brethren, time contracted itself … For passing away is the figure of this world; he also links photography with apocalypse in his short essay “Judgment Day” from Profanations, translated by Jeff Fort [New York: Zone, 2007], a connection I seem to have arrived at independently); Gilles Deleuze’s Spinoza: A Practical Philosophy, translated by Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988); Charles Hudson’s Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Bart D. Ehrman’s Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, 25th anniversary edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); William G. McLoughlin’s Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789–1839 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); Stephen Sizer’s Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004); Stephen Mitchell’s The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Vintage, 1989); John M. Coski’s The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Dawnie Wolfe Steadman, Kris Sperry, Frederick Snow, Laura Fulginiti, and Emily Craig’s chapter, “Anthropological Investigations of the Tri-State Crematorium Incident” in Bradley J. Adams and John E. Byrd, eds., Recovery, Analysis, and Identification of Commingled Human Remains (New York: Humana Press, 2008) (it is this scholarly article, written by the forensic investigators at Tri-State years after the incident, that provides the final number of desecrated bodies at Tri-State as 339 rather than 334, the total sometimes named in earlier newspaper accounts; the article also places the number of unidentified bodies at 114 rather than the earlier reported figure of 108).
Equally indispensable was the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the newspaper I grew up reading. I thank it and particularly Norman Arey for his brilliant reporting on the Tri-State Crematory Incident.
I also personally thank Agent Greg Ramey of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. In his forthcoming approach to the available information, Agent Ramey showed himself to be a kind and honorable public servant.
Donna Tartt, a native Mississippian, helped me navigate some of the regional issues in an early version of the book, and her editorial work proved invaluable. Thank you, Donna. And thank you, Joy Williams and Kathryn Davis, for being such generous spirits.
My appreciation also goes out to my agent, Zoë Pagnamenta, whose unflagging efforts carried the project to fruition. And I am forever indebted to my terrific editors at FSG—Paul Elie, Sean McDonald, and Emily Bell—as well as the many others there who labored to bring the book forward.
Much gratitude to my mother and sister for their understanding and for the hard work in putting together our collective history. And finally, I thank my daughter, Xia, who reminds me daily what it’s like to be a kid, and my wife, Kate Bernheimer, who sustains me with
her faith and love.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2013 by Brent Hendricks
All rights reserved
First edition, 2013
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lyrics from “Personal Jesus,” words and music by Martin Gore © 1989 Grabbing Hands Music Ltd. All rights in the U.S. and Canada controlled and administered by EMI Blackwood Music Inc. All rights reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hendricks, Brent R., 1958–
A long day at the end of the world / Brent Hendricks. — 1st ed.
p. cm
ISBN 978-0-374-14686-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Hendricks, Brent, 1958—Family. 2. Authors, American—21st century—Family relationships. 3. Crematoriums—Georgia. 4. Death care industry—Corrupt practices—Georgia. I. Title
PS3608.E529Z46 2013
813'.6—dc23
2012028923
www.fsgbooks.com
www.twitter.com/fsgbooks • www.facebook.com/fsgbooks
eISBN 9780374708856
A Long Day at the End of the World Page 13
