Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  She sank from my clutches. I became frustrated, first at her, then at myself. I muttered bad words she would have cuffed me for when she was living, and followed them with solemn apologies. I turned my face to the stars and cursed the Incorruptibles, those so-called saints who had so greedily soaked up all the miracles for themselves. If anyone had been a saint, it had been my mother, yet here she was, as grossly moldered as the worst of sinners.

  I tucked her in. I put my lips to her tumescent ear and whispered good-night. For a few minutes I fell asleep at her side. Yet morning beckoned. My fingers found the long, cold length of a leg bone among the PVC piping and I plucked it from the coffin and used it to help myself to the surface. I set it safely aside and took up the Root.

  That night I was a Filler, not a Digger. All that I had excavated from myself since my mother’s death I would now fill with expertise beyond that of the Resurrectionist or Lionel or any Digger who had ever lived. I would raise bodies like a hard rain sucks worms to the surface. I would become hero to a few; to everyone else I would be the whip of flame flickering through feverish nightmares. I would become the Son, and I’d take the name in her honor, not his.

  The Son’s first act was to fix what Harnett had broken. I repaired her mangled grave as the mortician had repaired her body. The Root was my scalpel, the dirt her muscle fiber, the grass her skin, the graveyard her body.

  17.

  ALMOST OVERNIGHT THE CABIN lapsed into squalor. The whiskey bottle that Crying John had left was polished off within seconds of our return. I curled on my bedsheets, my mother’s stolen leg bone tucked beneath my pillow, and divorced myself from the man who now shambled about the room, kicking things and belching liquor. There were still some things I could learn from the bastard, and I would learn them, but I would not allow Ken Harnett to destroy another Crouch.

  Trapped within the bolts and bars of his self-made prison, he rumbled about accepting disgraceful deals from disinterested pawnbrokers, then drank away the disappointment, as well as the measly profits, in a single sitting. He slept at unusual, random hours. I would hear the crick-crick of the rocking chair and the weak sizzle of the fire in the middle of the night and try to block it out with convoluted melodies I used to play in band; conversations I’d had with Boris; imagined dialogue from his new friend, the trombonist Mac Hill. The very word trombone dazzled me, and I fantasized how I might splice the leg bone beneath my pillow with my trumpet in time for Ted’s next lesson. I would fall back asleep with these bizarre delusions swirling through my brain, confident that the soul, if it existed at all, was located in the skeleton—after all, that was the part that persevered, long after the rest dissolved to dust.

  What happened next was probably inevitable. It seemed like lifetimes ago when we had both huddled next to the crypt in Lancet County waiting for the Woman in Black to end her vigil, and Harnett had condemned “Bad Jobs.” His description of digs-for-hire had haunted me ever since: Any Digger who starts down that path, he’s pretty well near the end, he had said. You can’t do those kinds of jobs and live with yourself.

  It was the nearest thing there was to suicide, he had suggested, and because he was the proudest Digger with the purest of standards, none could have predicted his rapid slide toward such work—none except me; I had seen all hope and reason leave his eyes the night he beheld my mother’s corpse.

  Once the first Bad Job was completed, a second was waiting. Harnett retained enough of his faculties to forbid me to go along, yet derived a self-loathing pleasure from supplying me with posthumous details. Example: a family of religious fanatics in Maine wished to enact what they referred to as a “miracle resurrection” of the clan patriarch. The entire dynasty gathered at their large country estate to luxuriate in the charade, praying over a giant feast before retreating to their guest bedrooms while Harnett watched through binoculars from the nearest field. While they slept, Harnett took care of business. He removed the dead patriarch, returned the dirt so that it looked untouched, then arranged the body in prayer formation against the headstone. The envelope of cash waiting as promised beneath the back steps of the house was labeled Miracle Money.

  Another example: an anonymous party desired access to an Aurora, Texas, grave that supposedly housed the remains of the pilot of a UFO that had exploded against Judge Proctor’s windmill in 1897. As explained by newspaper accounts of the time, local residents helped Proctor toss the refuse down a well—from which subsequent residents drank and grew terribly deformed—before burying the humanoid beneath an innocuous stone in the local graveyard. Though the stone itself had been stolen in the 1970s, Harnett used old photographs to triangulate the location. When he returned from the trip he headed straight to bed despite my interrogation. His eyes were haunted and he said only one thing: “Never ask me about it again.”

  For a while he resisted the worst jobs of all. While it was true that the original body snatchers had stolen cadavers for medical use, the nabbing of bodies had become a Digger taboo. I tried not to think about the leg bone beneath my pillow. That had been a one-time occurrence. I was sure of it.

  Harnett, on the other hand, at first excused himself with quasi-humanitarian reasoning. Most medical skeletons were shipped from India, he said, where young people were kidnapped and murdered to meet the demand. By stealing bones for profit, he was simply helping to counter that atrocity, he claimed. We turned away from each other at the blatant lie. Plastic skeletons had been adopted a long time ago. Even Gottschalk had one.

  That was just the beginning. At the request of museums or private collectors he dug up carcasses of the hideously deformed, sufferers of rare and fabulous diseases. He sliced slabs from fresh remains for someone who desired to make candles out of body fat. He nabbed a selection of hands, feet, and genitals for a famous experimental artist in Brooklyn. He stole the skull of a supposed saint that a church wanted as a holy relic. When this last group refused to pay, Harnett cackled mirthlessly and resorted to something he called the Brookes Method—piling a stack of bones on the doorstep of a defaulting client. A book in Harnett’s library suggested to me that the grisly technique was named after Joshua Brookes (1761–1833), a surgeon who refused to pay his resurrection men five guineas, only to wake up one morning to find bones piled at each intersection bordering his college. The scare tactic still worked. Harnett might have lost everything else, but he got his money.

  While he jetted across the country, I proved his theory. Specifying allowed me to refill graves with an accuracy possibly unrivaled in history. The dead, witness to my successes, became my friends, teachers, and confidants. The more I handled dead flesh, the more my own felt alive. Where once there had been no growth, I grew thicker, stronger, hairier, as if I were soaking up remnant life forces still swirling within each carcass. My broader shoulders required a new coat; I found one to my liking just an hour away from Bloughton beneath a Polaroid. My old shoes were flimsy jokes; I found a pair of boots six feet under a small memorial park just north. I didn’t need a brimmed hat but took one anyway off a body I dug up east of town; I thought it made me look mysterious and maybe even a little dashing. All of these clothes I chose with Foley in the back of my mind. Though they reeked, they were about as heavy metal as it gets.

  One balmy late-April evening I found myself back in Lancet County. After resurfacing from a new belly with three thick bracelets of glittering gemstones, I ambled over to pay a visit to Nathaniel Merriman. There I found a fresher grave to Nathaniel’s left: ROSE MERRIMAN, LOYAL DAUGHTER. Here lay the Woman in Black. Guiding her from her father’s grave was the first act that had gained me notoriety among the Diggers, and I felt a twinge of sadness. I sat between the two plots and brushed my hands through the grass. Soon the remains of father and daughter would mingle. I envied them. On my way out of town I stopped by Floyd and Eileen’s bar for some beef jerky, just for old time’s sake.

  It was the first day of May when Harnett dug up the body of a teenager and plotted to ransom it to the fam
ily. I was appalled. He tried to assure me that the family had done something evil enough to deserve it, but I wouldn’t listen. He had become a monster; the fact that eighteen hours later he changed his mind and returned the body to the grave did nothing to convince me otherwise. He mumbled about the almost-successful 1876 plot to steal Abraham Lincoln’s body in hopes of exchanging it for the release of a prisoner, about how sometimes you had to do bad things for virtuous ends. I told him to get his shit, we had work to do.

  “We” was a generous way to put it. His inebriated fingers no longer functioned properly. He made a mess of the sod. His tarps weren’t level and dirt ran like rainwater. Repeatedly I saved us from imminent disaster, often having to wrench some crappy shovel from his blundering hands. I was usually the one to crowbar the casket, and when I found Polaroids I did my best to keep them to myself.

  His humiliation became suffocating. He had gone through maybe two dozen shovels since the New Year. He acted out perilously, digging in broad daylight or during the traffic peaks of Memorial Day and Mother’s Day. I called him stupid. He called me a chicken. It was after one of these fights that I returned from school to find him sprawled across the hearth. He had shit his pants. I dragged him to the bathroom, stripped him of his soiled clothes, and shoved him beneath the freezing shower. Moments like these shucked him of all leverage. He agreed to any deal I offered. Yes, he’d sign that F-filled report card or write a note fabricating an excuse for my continued absences—anything I wanted, as long as I did not speak of what he had become.

  In mid-May, as I cased a memorial park two hours down the interstate from Bloughton, I came upon a funeral in progress. One of the mourners was Claire, the caseworker who had prepared me as best she could for life in Bloughton. To get a better look, I edged within twenty feet of her. In her simple black dress and dark lipstick she looked even prettier than I remembered. I thought about saying hello. Maybe I would look to her like a man now, maybe we could go out for coffee. Mere Reality was swept away with the breeze. Then the last invocation was spoken and the crowd broke apart and for a moment she looked right at me. There was no recognition. She looped her arm through that of a man who was probably her husband and walked away. I forced myself to laugh. Such warm, live flesh was not for me.

  18.

  TED POINTED AT THE bar for the third time. Beyond his manicured nails the dots and lines made weeds and thorns. I blew but my lungs withheld, knowing better than my brain they would need all their strength for the evening’s dig. My fingers, too, reserved their strength. The notes that I emitted dribbled like blood.

  I yawned behind the mouthpiece and glanced at the clock. It was nearly six, time to get home and suit up for work. Ted frowned and stood up straight. He reached over and shut the sheet music. I was grateful. I rubbed the notes from where they had embedded into my eyes.

  When I looked again, he was still standing there staring. I waited for Next lesson, then. It didn’t come. I cleared my throat. I set the trumpet in my lap. For whatever reason, dismissal still seemed compulsory.

  “We have an understanding,” he said finally. “I know that. But I would like permission to speak freely.”

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  He crossed his arms. “Why do you keep coming?”

  I shrugged again. “I don’t know.”

  “Classes, you don’t attend. Trumpet lessons, though, you come all the way here for. Why is that?”

  “Like I said.”

  “You can’t continue this way,” he said. “Eventually they’ll flunk you. You already know that. One day soon you won’t be a student here anymore.”

  “All right.” I pulled off the mouthpiece.

  “And I’m going to tell you something else. I don’t care. Flunk out. You don’t like something, stop it. You don’t like going to school, stop going. But don’t you stop these lessons. Whatever you do. We’ll meet somewhere else if necessary. We’ll play outside, on weekends if it comes to that. But one thing we’ll not ever do is stop. Am I making myself clear?”

  I stared at my lap, incapacitated with a feeling of inevitable abandonment.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because it’s all you have.” He said it with such confidence that I recoiled. “Someday when it’s over, whatever it is that’s got you, we’ll play together, you on trumpet, me on clarinet. I’ll lend you albums to listen to that will inspire you. You can lend me some, too. Just think of that. Picture it. Imagine it as often as possible and one day it will happen. We’ll go to an opera. You ever been to the opera? I go every year. Faust is my favorite. They play it at the Metropolitan all the time. You know what it’s about? It’s about a man who makes a pact with Lucifer in exchange for knowledge. Imagine seeing that. Picture it. Just keep picturing it and one day we’ll be there, both of us at the Met. Just don’t stop the lessons. Don’t stop. Do you understand?”

  I nodded and tears fell from my chin.

  “Okay,” he said. He flattened his mustache with his finger and thumb. “Well. Next lesson, then.”

  19.

  THE EXACT DAY OF the accident is lost to me. After hours of sullen invectives, I had relented and allowed Harnett to join me on a dig. Just forty-five minutes from the cabin, I knew it would be a job so easy even he couldn’t derail it.

  But he was drunk, not stupid. He was offended by the simplicity of the dig and griped at me the entire way there. I kept my mouth shut and drove. Once we were at the location, he snatched the Root from me. I sighed and watched him murder the earth, trying to keep track of what went where so I could put it all back together again when he was through.

  “You’re so eager to get rid of me,” he spat between strikes. “One of these days you’ll get your wish. I’ll be dead and you’ll finally be happy.”

  “I’ll never be happy,” I said. “Keep digging.”

  “Don’t do me like Lionel. That’s all I ask. Don’t stick me in a box and shove me down a hole. At least have that much respect for your old man.”

  I pictured Lionel’s plot, perched so magisterially above the Atlantic. “You’d be lucky to have what he has.”

  “Hell with that. You burn me. Incinerate me. Toss me around so I’m scattered in the wind.”

  “Strewn,” I said, remembering a fact from one of Harnett’s books. “The church prefers strewn.”

  “Think I give a damn what the church prefers?”

  A thunking noise—he was at the casket already. Graceless as he was, his strength and speed were undeniable.

  He muttered from below. “Even better: excarnation. Will you do me the kindness?”

  The term was familiar, but I couldn’t immediately define it. Harnett, desperate for ways to trump me, pounced.

  “It’s Tibetan tradition. Celestial burial, sky burial, excarnation. Same thing. It’s perfect. It’s beautiful. It’s more than I deserve, but maybe you’ll take pity and give it to me anyway.”

  I heard the skipping thumps of the crowbar slipping from his hands. Reluctantly I moved forward and peeked down the hole.

  “Three days.” He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants. “You let me sit for three days. Don’t bury me, don’t do nothing. Just let me ripen for three goddamn days. Then take my clothes off, take me out to the country. If that’s too much of a goddamn hassle for you, sit me out in the backyard, I don’t give a damn.”

  I kneeled down at the edge. “Let me help you.”

  “You want to help me? Then dismember me first, if you got the stomach for it. It’s Tibetan tradition.” His lips curled in resentment as he tried again to pry the lid. “Forget it. You don’t have the stomach. Just toss me out in the grass.”

  Part of the problem was that the Root was down there with him, getting in his way. “The Root,” I said. “Hand her up.”

  “Not a lot of vultures in Iowa,” he said. “But plenty of birds. They’ll come in, one or two of them at first, and pick at me. You just stay back and let them. Pretty soon they’ll be there by the dozens. They’ll
eat me, part of me, every one, and they’ll carry me into the sky. And then when they shit, I’ll be everywhere. It’s goddamn beautiful and more than I deserve, but maybe, just maybe, you’ll do your father the kindness.”

  He was visibly wobbling and slumped to the dirt wall for balance.

  “Get out.” I tried to be firm. I held out a hand. “You’re going to hurt yourself. Get out.”

  “Don’t forget to bring a sledgehammer,” he slurred. “When the birds are done, you gotta shatter my bones to bits. Tibetan tradition.”

  “You’re wasting time. Get out.”

  There was a pause and then he moved with alarming speed, snatching the crowbar and the Root in either hand and clambering up the hole. I remained crouched at the edge, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of cringing. At the top he tripped and fell on his face.

  “Sooner than you think,” he fumed, hauling himself to unsteady feet. “Sooner than you think I’ll be gone, and then you can dig these goddamn holes however you goddamn like and toss me down one of them like a dog.” He snarled. “You can go to hell.”

  With that he drove the Root into the ground. She made a meaty slicing sound as she impaled the earth. Even wasted, Harnett knew the sound wasn’t normal. I became aware of a tingling coolness.

  I raised my right hand. The top halves of my index, middle, and ring fingers were gone. Together we looked at the Root and saw three white nubs nestled to one side of the blade. In unison our eyes moved again to my outstretched hand. An eternity passed. At last blood as black as oil began slurping from the holes.