Death Pans Out

by Ashna Graves

  Her hands shook as she opened a can of milk. The smell of coffee made her stomach cramp. She should eat something solid but there was no time. Instead, she drank half the can of milk, then divided the rest between two large mugs, added plenty of sugar for energy even though she usually detested sweet coffee, and poured in the lovely, steaming brew. She drank and caffeine power spread through her like magic.

  It was nearly as pleasurable watching Gene’s expression when she handed him a cup. Despite the heat, he gulped half the coffee down without stopping, and then looked at her with wide-open eyes. “Damn me. I’ll never take it black again.”

  Neva transferred two bottles of water from the porch to the car, then went back inside for a last look around. She would return, but only to collect the rest of her things. The summer at Billie Creek Mine was little more than half over but it was finished for her.

  She was securing the padlock on the kitchen door when she heard a vehicle on the lane, and turned to run to Gene. As she pulled him toward the car a large pickup bounced down the road and skidded to a stop next to the woodshed. Reese was the first out, though Lance was right behind.

  Striding toward them, Reese called out, “For Jesus sake, woman, where’ve you been? What in hell’s the matter with you two? You look like the walking dead.”

  Speechless with shock and revulsion, Neva clutched Gene’s arm. She had liked Reese in an almost maternal way, and had believed that there was some current of sympathy between them. Now he was not only a killer, he was making jokes about the horrors in the tunnel.

  “What’s got into you?” He sounded almost angry. “I haven’t seen you since I got out. I’ve been up here three or four times now. You look like you’ve had a run-in with a cougar. What happened to his head? And your head, for that matter.”

  “We were just heading for the doctor in Elkhorn,” Neva said in little more than a whisper. Reese was not making sense, but nothing had made sense for days.

  “Well, shit, why didn’t you say so. I’ll move the truck.”

  Reese turned and that’s when they saw Lance. He stood near the truck gripping a rifle, his feet planted wide, his face expressionless under the Wallowa Tractor and Irrigation cap.

  “What the fuck,” said Reese.

  “They can’t go.”

  “Says who?”

  Lance’s reply was to lower the barrel so it pointed at Neva.

  “Put that thing up, you dumb shit!” Reese barked, then added in a quieter voice, “Anyway, it’s her gun. What’s the deal, Lance?”

  “We just have to wait is all.”

  Speaking for the first time, Gene said, “It appears your brother is mixed up in a very bad business, Reese. We thought you were in it, too, but I’m not so sure now.”

  “What bad business? What have you been up to? Put that stupid rifle down and tell me what’s going on here.”

  Lance looked at them in silence, holding the rifle steady, and when Reese started toward him, he said, “Don’t.”

  “You’re going to shoot me, are you?” Reese sounded amused. He continued to walk slowly toward his brother, talking in a low voice. Lance stepped back and shifted the rifle barrel to point at his brother’s stomach.

  “Don’t, Lance,” Neva cried. “He’s your brother.”

  “Lance,” Gene said. “Lance, I’m alive and so’s Neva. Roy’s dead, but the others were already dead when they went into the mine. That’s nothing like shooting your own brother.”

  “What are you talking about? What do you mean about Roy? Lance didn’t have nothing to do with that.” Reese stopped and turned to look back at Gene, then faced his brother again. “Did you, Lance? Well, did you?”

  Lance opened his mouth, shut it, and said nothing.

  Reese, also, was silent. Neva saw the smooth brown skin of his bare shoulder and upper arm tense. He started forward again, walking with determined steps toward the level rifle barrel. Her eyes shut. She would not be able to bear this.

  “Jesus,” Gene said under his breath. And then, “He did it.”

  Neva opened her eyes. Reese and Lance stood face-to-face about a foot apart, the rifle dangling at the end of Lance’s arm with the barrel down. Reese set a hand on Lance’s shoulder and bowed his head.

  Chapter Thirty

  From the Elkhorn Times-Standard

  July 23, 2006

  Illegal Trade in Bodies Horrifies Loved Ones

  Grisly Practice Highly Lucrative, Potential Health Threat

  When Josephine Lord died at 68 after a long bout with skin cancer, her children were advised against an open coffin because of the disfigurement.

  “They said, ‘You know your mother wouldn’t want anyone to see her looking like that,’” recalled Agnes Lord, wiping away angry tears. “I’ll never forget the disappointment. But we didn’t feel we could argue with the professionals.”

  The “professionals” were long-time Elkhorn residents and funeral owners Lloyd and Darrell Guptill. The Lord family was just one of hundreds in the area that suffered shock and grief at the recent exposure of the truth: their loved ones were not in the graves that family members visited and graced with flowers. They had been dismembered and sold piece by piece, and what was left was dehydrated and hidden in a mining tunnel in the Blue Mountains east of Angus.

  As this newspaper has reported in a series of stories over the past week, the Guptills, father and son, have for decades supplied knees, elbows, heads, toes, skin, and bone to a medical parts distributor based in San Francisco, often at a profit of thousands of dollars per body. For the first few years, the Guptills ran a proper funeral business, but when the ground under the new cemetery addition turned out to be solid bedrock, they looked for other ways to dispose of the remains.

  The revelations have shaken this small community to its roots, but Elkhorn is not alone in its pain. Trafficking in body parts illegally harvested from the dead is a lucrative, underground business driven by growing demand for human bones and tissue. Over the past 19 years, more than 16,800 families have been represented in lawsuits claiming loved ones’ body parts were stolen for profit. During that period, profits from the sales of thousands of suspected stolen bodies are believed to have topped $6 million (a figure based on estimates from federal and local investigators, lawsuits and public organizations such as medical universities).

  Funeral home employees, crematorium operators and others with access to the recently deceased have secretly dismembered corpses, taking non-organ body parts such as knees, spines, bone and skin without the knowledge or consent of family members.

  While federal law prohibits most sales of body parts, it is legal to charge fees for handling, procuring, storing and processing human tissue. Thus an entire body, parceled out and delivered to the highest bidder, can fetch from $5,000 to tens of thousands of dollars in so-called processing fees, creating a powerful incentive for illegal sales.

  Tissue banks or others that “buy” material such as skin and bones from these body brokers often don’t know the parts are stolen. They then provide the purloined tissue for research—or for implantation in living patients. But it’s a risky business: Stolen body parts that are implanted in humans can potentially expose recipients to HIV, hepatitis and syphilis, according to the FDA, although the risk of a recipient contracting these diseases is small.

  To hide the thefts from families, perpetrators may replace bones with PVC piping and sew up the bodies before funerals. The Guptill operation was unusual in that they made no attempt to restore the bodies, relying, instead, on avoiding open coffins during funeral services.

  “Folks around here trusted Lloyd,” Sheriff Tug McCarty said during an interview immediately following the arrests of the funeral home operators. “If he advised against viewing, few folks would argue. And if they did, there was still enough room in the old cemetery to do a proper burial. Like everybody else around here, I’m in shock. There are some things in this life that you just don’t want to believe.”

  Agnes
Lord and other members of her family want only to put the nightmare behind them. The parts of their mother that were not sold have been identified through DNA testing, along with the identities of about half of the other remains in the old Calypso Mine.

  “Bodies of loved ones are important,” said Lord. “This has been worse than I could ever imagine. I am a nurse and accustomed to death and bodies, even amputated limbs, but this is different. This is desecration. I just hope my family and everyone else can reach a place where we can let it go.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  “Reunited in death,” Father Bernard intoned. “Brother and sister laid to rest at last in the land he loved…”

  The words slipped through Neva’s conscious mind, continuous and unsegmented, full of meaning that had little to do with language. It all felt right. Uncle Matthew’s bones had been retrieved from the tunnel and there had been no question that they should be reburied at the mine. It had been just as clear that her mother’s ashes should be buried with them. The brother and sister belonged here, together again at last, in the spot that Matthew had loved for thirty years and that had given Neva new energy to live.

  The decision was the easy part. Making it legal had taken a lot more doing.

  Skipper had urged her to bury the bones and ashes quietly, with no permission from anyone. He had returned to the creek when he heard the news story, gruffly apologetic for his fit of temper and subsequent desertion, and tried to make up for it by helping with all that followed. “You could bury them anywhere you want out here,” he argued. “Nobody cares, and nobody has to know.”

  But she had wanted certain important people to be present, and such an event could not be kept secret. She had begun her search for the proper procedure with a visit to the Forest Service office in Elkhorn, where the desk clerk had appeared intrigued by the question.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s check our list of frequently asked questions.” Turning to her computer keyboard she pulled up a screen, scrolled down and read, “The disposal of human ashes in national forests is not regulated in any way, but the disposal of human remains is prohibited.”

  Surprised that the answer had been found so easily—was it now trendy to scatter ashes in the national forest?—Neva had asked the clerk to read the rule again. After a moment’s reflection, she said, “So I could scatter ashes but not bury bones?”

  “That’s correct, according to what it says here.”

  “What about very old bones?”

  “No difference, I mean bones are bones, don’t you think?”

  “How about private property? Is it the same rule there?”

  “I expect the laws for private property are different, but you’ll have to check with the state on that.”

  Neva had called the state health and forestry departments with no success, but a funeral home assistant in La Grande had the answers as ready as though the question came up every day: “In Oregon you can bury human remains on private land but only if you go through the proper procedure to have the land declared a cemetery.”

  Relating this to Darla in the kitchen over lemonade, Neva had been ready to give up.

  “How do you get to be a cemetery?” the rancher had asked, and on hearing that it was a matter of filing the right papers with the right offices, she had said without hesitation, “Then that’s what we’ll do. Maybe I’ll be buried there myself someday. We didn’t go through any such fuss for Gran, but then we didn’t ask anybody for permission.”

  After considering various possible sites, they had chosen a grassy flat that Darla owned upstream from the mine. At this point the sheriff had weighed in, pulling strings to whisk Darla’s cemetery request through in record time. He had already returned Neva’s shoebox with apologies, not only for the “borrowing of it,” as he put it, but for shanghaiing her in the bar. “I was so damn sure you’d been sucked into something and were headed for trouble,” he said. “I told the boys to collect anything that might tell us what you and the Cotters were up to. When I saw what was actually in the box, well, I felt bad, let’s just say that.”

  The hole that Neva and Gene had spent half a day digging with pick and shovel was smaller than a normal grave, just big enough for the simple wood box that held both her mother’s ashes and her uncle’s clustered bones. The funeral gathering, like the grave, was small but the right people were here—Enid, Darla, Gene, Skipper, McCarty, and Reese Cotter. Al Fleck also had joined them, at Darla’s offhand request. “He wants to be part of the community, you know. Good for business, I guess.” Neva had not been fooled, and wasn’t surprised when the rancher and café owner arrived together.

  She hadn’t been sure Reese would show up but he had pulled in at the last minute, snatching off the blue cap and tucking in his wrinkled white shirt as he climbed out of the pickup, with Angie bounding along behind. Neva had moved over to stand next to him as Father Bernard started the service.

  The service was Catholic enough for Uncle Matthew but simple and poetic enough for her atheist mother. The priest put in understanding words even for Lance and the Guptills, suggesting that clemency was to be hoped for. “As the holy Father Pachomius said, ‘For it happens when good is done to a bad man he may come to some perception of the good. This is God’s love, to have compassion for each other.’”

  When it was done Reese faced her with a grim look that turned sad as he spoke. “That was all very nice and everything but it won’t keep Lance out of prison. Or worse. The dumb-shit kid. We could have quit mining in a few years and started something better with the gold.”

  “In the cigar box?” The incredulous words popped out before she could think.

  The pain cleared from Reese’s face and he said with satisfaction, “Hell, that box was just my play pieces. I’ve been putting gold away for years in safe deposit. You think we’re all dumb shits in my family? Whatever happens, he’ll get his share when he gets out. If he gets out. I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you I’ve decided to go traveling for a while, and that gets me to a big favor I want to ask.”

  His glance down at the dog was enough of a prompt for Neva. She said, “I’d be glad to keep Angie while you’re gone.”

  “I’ll be back before long. I can’t stay away from working. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a beer or three.”

  He sauntered toward the plank table spread with food and drink and fell instantly into conversation with Sheriff McCarty, all anger and suspicion between the two men apparently forgotten. Al was just beyond them helping himself to a roasted vegetable kabob. Gene and Enid sat on a log happily renewing old acquaintance, Enid in her pink overalls as Neva had requested and Gene with a bald spot around his stitches. Darla and Skipper were deep into a conversation that made Darla laugh heartily while Skipper nodded as though to say, “It’s as true as I’m standing here.” The rancher had honored the occasion with a new cowboy hat and crisp red bandanna. Skipper’s hair was tied in a ponytail with blue cord and he wore a dark blue cotton blazer over the usual white T-shirt.

  Beyond Darla and Skipper, Father Bernard stood holding a heaped plate and listening to Ethan, who gestured so broadly as he spoke that Neva expected to see the contents of his plate go flying. She had overheard them before the ceremony discussing medieval cartography—Ethan lamenting that individually crafted maps were a thing of the past, and speculating that he might have been a cartographer in an earlier era rather than a geologist—and was tempted to join them now, to stand next to her earnest son.

  She was not ready to talk with anyone yet, however, and continued to watch the others. Finding her uncle’s remains had at last brought doubt to an end, though it had also finished her small hope that a living ancestor survived somewhere on earth. As a family, their survival rate was not impressive.

  But I have risen from the dead.

  She had beaten cancer, depression, and a midnight plummet off a creek bank that could have broken her neck, but these paled next to escaping an ac
tual grave. Buried deep in the earth and left for dead, she had refused the offer. Now here she was among friends in the sunlight, the vital blood coursing through her, the high ridges calling her to an evening hike. Resurrection, a near escape, a reprieve from Fate, whatever it might be called, it added up to something beyond mere survival.

  Maybe I’ve turned the family luck. Maybe Ethan will live to be ninety and I’ll have twelve grandchildren.

  Tears arrived so suddenly that Neva ducked her head and turned away. She walked downstream a short distance and stood next to a small pool while the tears ran their course. When they were done, she wiped her eyes on her shirt. Not far away a frog sat on a limb half sunk in the water. A kingfisher swooped off a branch and streaked away toward the pond. Yellow quartz gleamed, gemlike, in the shallows. It was all gold, everything out here at Billie Creek was gold…but it was best not to describe it like this to anyone else. The funeral home scandal and her part in its conclusion had been reported all over the country, and she had already received several urgent letters from her editor demanding a personal account for the Willamette Current—ASAP! There was no getting out of writing an eye-witness story, but one thing she would not do is use gold as a metaphor. The mine had given her personal riches beyond all hope or expectations, but this aspect of the story was her own private stash. She would keep it tucked in her cigar box.

  A shadow fell across the frog, which leaped into the water with a musical plop as Skipper came up beside her. “Well, W.T., you know how to throw a good funeral, I will say that. You should go into the body business. I hear there’s a real good opening over at Elkhorn. I never knew there was so much money in not burying folks.”