The Bone Yard

by Jefferson Bass

  But he let me keep dragging the mattress across the floor and on out the door. I had just got down the steps when he stepped outside. Wait a minute, he said. I held my breath. That things liable to attract all sorts of varmints. Buzzards and rats and what-all. Youd best burn it. You ever burned brush or trash before, boy? Yessir, I said. You ever used gasoline to do it? Yessir, I said. Alright. Heres some matches. Theres some gas over in the tractor shed by the lawn mower. Its in a gallon glass jug. Use some of that to get it started. Dont use much, just about a cup of it. Be sure you cap that jug and set it way off from the mattress before you strike that match. Strike the match and throw it while its still flaring. You dont want to be leaning over that mattress when the gasoline catches fire or youll burn up. Understand?

  Yessir, I said, Ill be careful.

  I drug the mattress down to the dump, just like I had the other one. It was heavier than that first one, because of all the blood that was in it. I laid it on top of the burn pile and went back to get the gas. The glass jug was nearly full, and it looked just like apple cider, so I unscrewed the cap to make sure it was gasoline. The smell nearly knocked me down when I took a sniff. The day was hot and I could see the fumes swirling up out of the neck of the jug and into the air, like smoke only it was clear. I took the jug down to the dump and poured gas onto the mattress, trickling it all around the edges and then pouring more onto the bloodiest spots. I didnt pour out but about a cup, on account of Cockroach had warned me not to use much.

  Then I screwed the cap on tight and set the jug way over behind a pine tree before taking the box of matches out of my pocket. I could see fumes swirling up from the mattress, making the air shimmer. I lit a match and held it while it flared, then threw it at the mattress. But it went out before it ever got there. I tried another one, and this time I threw it as soon as I drug it across the box. But I was nervous, so I didnt press hard enough, and the match just flew through the air without lighting and plopped onto the mattress and lay there. The third time I pressed harder. I heard the match scraping as I drug it across the sandpaper and flung it away from me, then I heard it sputter as it started to catch. It flared up in midair with a bright flame, and even before it hit the mattress there was a whoosh and a wall of heat hit me in the face and knocked me back. I think maybe it burned my eyebrows and eyelashes some, but I wasnt hurt, just surprised that so much heat could come from so little gasoline.

  As the mattress burned, I thought about Buck laying there bleeding to death, and it made me sad. Then I thought about Cockroach beating him, and it made me mad. I wished that Cockroach was the one on the mattress, not Buck. And thats when I got the idea. I thought about it the whole time I watched the mattress burn.

  I poked around the edges of the dump and pretty soon I found an empty bottle. Jack Daniels Tennessee Sipping Whiskey. There was a few drops left in the bottom of the bottle, and it was the same color as the gasoline, but it smelled different. Apple cider, gasoline, whiskey. Hard to tell them apart by looking. Easy by smelling.

  I wedged the empty whiskey bottle down between some big roots then brought the jug of gas over and started pouring, I had to pour real slow because the mouth of the whiskey bottle was a lot smaller than the mouth of the jug. But I didn’t spill much, and pretty soon the bottle was full up to the bottom of the neck. The gallon jug was about half empty now, I hoped Cockroach wouldnt check to see how much Id used. I capped both bottles and headed back from the dump. I started worrying about how I could hide the whiskey bottle. So I took off my t-shirt and held it in my hand so it hung down and hid the bottle. Up close, you could tell I was hiding something, but if somebody just saw me from across the yard Id probly be okay.

  Just as I got to the tractor shed, Cockroach yelled at me from across the yard. Hey, boy. I set down the jug and hid the whiskey bottle and my shirt behind a post. Let me see that jug. I held it up for him. Bring it on over here. I walked across the yard with it. Shit fire, boy, did you pour half a gallon of gasoline on that mattress after I told you not to use much?

  Nossir, I said. The jug tipped over and some of the gas spilled before I could catch it. Im sorry, sir. I didnt mean to spill any. I didnt use too much, I did just like you said. Just enough to make that mattress burn good.

  He looked at me like he was trying to decide whether to believe me. Wheres your shirt, boy? Did you burn that up?

  Nossir. It was hot with that fire, so I took it off. I just laid it down over there in the shed. Ill get it when I put this gasoline back where it goes.

  He frowned at me. You was best friends with that boy run off last night, wasn’t you?

  You mean Buck, sir? We got along okay.

  You a faggot too, boy? He licked his lips when he said it, and I felt the buzzard claw grab my stomach again.

  Nossir, Im not a faggot.

  You look like a faggot to me, boy. Maybe we need to find out if your telling me a lie.

  Nossir, I said, I wouldnt lie to you, Mr. Cochran.

  He didnt say anything for a while. Just kept looking at me. Alright, go on now. Its almost dinner time.

  Yessir, thank you sir, I said. Ill just put this back and get my shirt and go get cleaned up for dinner.

  I took the glass jug back to the shed and set it down beside the lawn mower. Cockroach had walked away, so I picked up the whiskey bottle of gasoline and covered it with my shirt again. Then I walked back to the dorm. But first I stopped at the chapel to pray. Please god, I prayed, help me kill Cockroach. Then I hid the whiskey bottle behind the radiator.

  Does god answer prayers? He never has answered any of mine before.

  Put wings to your prayer, the preacher said in chapel last Sunday. What that means, he said, is work to make them come true.

  Tonights Saturday night, and that means most of the guards will go into town, but not Cockroach. He stays here on Saturday nights and gets drunk.

  I will slip out after dinner tonight and put wings of fire to my prayer.

  “Doc?” Stu’s voice jolted me back to the present place and time. “You okay?” I looked around and was surprised to find myself in the command post, and surprised to see that the briefing room was now empty except for Vickery, Angie, and me.

  “He calls the guard Mr. Cochran,” I said. “Cockroach is the boys’ nickname for Cochran.” I pointed at the newspaper article Stevenson had dug up. “Look. According to the paper, Cochran was the guard who died in the fire.”

  Angie had been out of the room when Vickery had passed out copies of the story; now she snatched the copy from my hands, and her eyes zigzagged down the column of old print until she found it: “ ‘Also lost in the fire was guard Seth Cochran, age 31, who died a hero’s death while attempting to rescue boys from the burning building.’ ”

  “Wait a minute,” said Angie. “Cochran died trying to save boys’ lives? Are we talking about the same Cochran? Cockroach? The sadist who got off on torturing kids? I don’t buy it. It doesn’t fit.”

  I had to agree with her on that. “But our boy Skeeter, according to this final diary entry, might have set the guards’ quarters on fire that night,” I pointed out. “If that’s the case, he put wings to his prayer, and his prayer was answered. He got Cockroach.”

  “He got Cockroach, all right,” Vickery agreed. “But he got nine of his classmates, too.”

  “Or maybe he just got eight,” Angie pointed out. “Maybe Skeeter was one of the nine. We still don’t know who he was or what happened to him. Did he run away after he set the fire, or did he get caught in the flames, too? Be good to know who he was and what happened to him.”

  Suddenly I had an idea that sent a spike of adrenaline coursing through my system. I’d been puzzled about why so many boys had died in the fire, and the question had continued to tug at the sleeve of my mind even during the frenzied work of excavating the graves in the Bone Yard.

  “I need to go back to the school,” I said. “Can you spare me for an hour or so? And do you still have those old photos that Stevens
on showed us? The pictures of the buildings?”

  Vickery looked startled. “I guess I can,” he said. “And yes, I do. Want to tell me what you’re thinking?”

  I did, and thirty minutes later, I was kneeling at the edge of what had once been the boys’ dormitory, digging into the ground beneath the spot where a fifty-year-old photo showed a pair of wide wooden doors.

  A foot down, the tip of my trowel rasped against something hard and metallic, and I began teasing away the dirt to see what I’d hit. A curved piece of rusted steel emerged; as the tip of the trowel flicked lightly along its contours, it revealed a link of heavy chain. I dug beneath the link to expose it fully, and found links on either side of it, and more links connected to those. Then, curling two fingers beneath the exposed links, I lifted. The chain came from the ground like some rusted root I was pulling—a segmented, sinister version of a root—and then it curled back on itself, arching into a loop. At the center of the loop, holding it closed, was a stout, rusted padlock. And on either side of the padlock were stout, wrought-iron handles. Door handles. “Angie?” She aimed the camera at my face, looking at me through the viewfinder. “Now we know why so many boys died in the fire.”

  Angie had just finished photographing the padlocked chain and the door handles it held together when Vickery’s red Jeep Liberty stopped in the circular drive. Angie motioned him over and wordlessly pointed to the chain. He gave it a cursory glance, then looked up at her quizzically. Before she could answer his unspoken question, though, his gaze shot back down. “Son of a bitch,” he breathed. “Those poor boys were locked in. That building burned to the ground with the damn doors chained shut.” He flung the cigar away violently. “God damn whoever did this.” His face was crimson and streaming with sweat, and I knew it wasn’t just from the Florida sun. “Hatfield,” he spat. “If he knew that door was chained—and how could he not have known that door was chained?—he’s culpable for the deaths of those nine boys.” He took a deep breath. “So far, Riordan’s been reluctant to charge Hatfield for the homicides we’ve uncovered at the Bone Yard—says we can’t prove that the superintendent knew the boys had been murdered, not unless we get some corroborating testimony.”

  “The bad-apple theory?” asked Angie. “The same reasoning that charged enlisted soldiers with torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib but cleared the officers?”

  “Yeah, that same reasoning,” he said. “Maybe this chain will convince Riordan that the whole damn tree was rotten—that Hatfield had to have known and condoned all the bad things going on here.” He paused. “I wonder if they’ve ever had a ninety-year-old inmate at Starke.”

  “At the risk of raising a sore subject,” I ventured, “any luck yet finding out how Hatfield got made commissioner of corrections after the fire?”

  Vickery made a face. “Nothing for sure yet,” he said. “At the moment, my money’s on State Senator Jeremiah Judson—the dearly departed father of our friendly neighborhood sheriff. Back in the sixties and seventies, Senator Judson chaired the Criminal Justice Committee, which had oversight over the prison system. He also raised a lot of campaign funding for the governor’s reelection bid. Sounds like Hatfield’s promotion could’ve been a case of quid pro quo.”

  “What was the quo? Why would a state senator pull strings for a guy who did a bad job of running a reform school?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe Hatfield had some dirt on him. Or maybe Hatfield was bosom buddies with Deputy Darryl Judson, who was just about to run against his boss for the job of sheriff. Whatever smoky backroom deals were cut, they were cut a long damn time ago, and most of the deal makers are dust by now. I’m sending Stevenson over to Dothan to stir the dust now. Maybe something will come slithering out when he does.”

  Chapter 25

  The Bone Yard, grave number six.

  I was pedestalling the remains: excavating a deep, moatlike trench around the perimeter of the bones, then working my way in from there, creating a small platform on which I would gradually expose the skeleton, in a ghoulish version of the way Michelangelo freed captive figures from the marble that imprisoned them.

  After two hours of digging, I’d defined the skeleton’s edges and top surface, and I began digging down to finish revealing the skull, the spine, the rib cage, the legs. The body had been buried on its side, in a tucked position, much like an Arikara Indian warrior. The knees and hips were flexed to fit into the grave’s four-foot length, and the arms were folded across the chest.

  As I exposed the face, I saw that this boy had not lived in the cedar-shake dormitory, the white-boy dormitory; this boy had lived in the separate, unequal building set apart for blacks. His skull, like the one with the shattered mastoid process, bore the distinctive angled teeth and jaws of a Negroid skull, as well as the broad nasal opening and nasal guttering underneath: evolution’s way of allowing Africans to breathe in greater volumes of air—hot, oxygen-poor air—than their Caucasoid cousins in the colder climate of Europe.

  Unlike the other African American we’d found, however, this boy’s skull didn’t show obvious signs of physical trauma. Nor, as I pedestalled the remains, did his other bones. That didn’t mean he hadn’t died a violent death, of course; he might well have died of soft-tissue injuries—a ruptured spleen, a ruptured kidney, suffocation—whose telltale signs would have long since melted and slipped into the dark, silent earth.

  Here and there, shards of rotted cotton—the thickest layers of fabric and stitching—remained draped over the emerging bones: the shredded waistband of the pants; the ragged collar of the shirt; the rolled hems of the trouser legs.

  Using a large pair of tweezers, I began plucking the bits of shirt collar from around the cervical vertebrae. The fabric was denser than I’d expected—more bulk, and also more layers—and the weave seemed odd and complicated, with an odd, oblong lump of material on one side of the neck. Then a realization hit me, with such swiftness and force that I recoiled and lost my balance, falling backward against the wall of the grave.

  Lying on this earthen altar was a black boy who had a rope knotted around his neck.

  Had he taken his own life, I wondered, in a moment of despair? Or had it been taken from him?

  I did not have to wonder long. The questions were answered when I looked closely at the bones of the arms and hands, and found more shreds of rope encircling his wrists.

  Word of the find spread quickly across the site, and a spontaneous, solemn gathering took shape around the grave. People looked closely, said almost nothing, spoke only in whispers. Some of the whispers were hushed exchanges between people; others seemed to be prayers, and I saw Rodriguez make the sign of the cross as his lips moved silently. It was curious: every boy we’d found here had been murdered, yet people’s reaction to the previous five skeletons had been matter-of-fact—not blasé, exactly, but not particularly surprised or distressed. Now, as I scanned the assembled faces, I saw intense, unmasked emotions: shock, grief, fear, horror, anger.

  Vickery motioned Angie and me aside. “There was a notorious lynching in Marianna, not far from here, back in 1934,” he said quietly. “A young black man was accused of raping and murdering a white woman. The schedule for the lynching was published in the newspaper ahead of time. He was tortured, castrated, and dragged behind a car before finally being hanged. When the sheriff eventually cut down the body, people protested—not because the man had been lynched, but because the sheriff wouldn’t leave the body hanging. When he refused to string it back up, a white mob went on a rampage, beating up hundreds of local black people, including women and kids. It took the National Guard to restore order.” He shook his head sadly. “You know, it’s possible that somebody who witnessed that 1934 lynching—maybe even somebody who participated in it—had a hand in this boy’s death. The distant past isn’t always as distant as we’d like to believe.”

  For some reason—the reference to the atrocities of the past, perhaps, or the similarities between this boy, who’d been lynched decade
s before, and Martin Lee Anderson, who’d been suffocated in 2006 —I thought back to my lunch with Goldman, the FSU criminology and human rights professor. Over our lunch of oysters, I’d thought it odd and contradictory that Goldman could be so cynical about the justice system and, at the same time, so idealistic—so naive, even—about the possibility of creating a society without prisons. Now I was beginning to share his cynicism, and I wondered whether—and hoped that—I might find my way to at least some of the idealistic antidote to the cynical toxins.

  Vickery’s phone whooped. He snatched it from his belt and glared at the display, as if the phone itself were guilty of unforgivable irreverence. “Vickery. What?” His eyes darted rapidly back and forth, as if the words he was hearing were ricocheting wildly. “What? . . . When? . . . Oh, hell. Does the M.E. know? . . . Well, call him. Maybe too late, but maybe worth a try . . . Check for video cameras, visitor logs, everything . . . Okay, keep me posted . . . Damn it.”

  He closed the phone. “That was Stevenson. I sent him up to Dothan to put some heat on Hatfield, who fiddled while reform school Rome burned. Take a wild guess what Stevenson was calling to tell me.”

  Angie didn’t hesitate. “Hatfield’s dead.” Vickery nodded glumly. “So Stevenson interrogated him to death?”

  “Didn’t get the chance. Hatfield died in his sleep last night, the nursing home director says.”

  “How convenient,” she remarked, which I seemed to remember hearing her say once or twice before. “You suppose he had some help with that? A kink in his oxygen line? A pillow over his face?”

  Vickery shrugged. “We’ll see what the M.E. says, if Hatfield hasn’t already been pickled—the funeral home picked him up early this morning. Ninety-year-old with emphysema croaks, it doesn’t necessarily raise a lot of red flags in a nursing home.” He had a point there. But so did Angie. Winston Pettis had been killed as we were closing in on the Bone Yard; someone had put a venomous snake in my bathtub; and now Hatfield had died as FDLE was starting to close in on him. If the ominous buzz surrounding us were any indication, Angie had gotten her wish: we’d managed to give the bees’ nest quite a whack.