Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator Page 8

  When I was still a new investigator, I would observe all this behavior and think, Wow, that person is going to be a mother lode of information. But most often it turned out that they didn’t even know the deceased. Their sole aim was to get on camera for that night’s newscast. And, inevitably, a camera crew would get suckered into taping the scene.

  If you want to find the people at a public crime scene who really care, it’s the woman with the forlorn look in her eyes, bitterly weeping and totally inconsolable. This is the person with answers. She shuts everything else out and focuses only on the twisted body of the young man she once held as a baby. It was this person I never wanted to offend with thoughtless gallows humor or out-and-out disrespect.

  One such mother was there that night, surrounded by her immediate family who were attempting to soothe her. Pain enveloped her face. She sat on the ground, gently rocking back and forth, perhaps longing once again to hold her child and tell him, “It’s okay, baby. Mama’s gonna make everything all right.” But he was gone.

  As I saw the mother’s inconsolable anguish, I heard something else. Low, at first. Giggling. And soon the giggling turned into rib-splitting laughter. It was certainly not the mother laughing. I glanced over my shoulder and caught sight of the police officers gathered around the body, laughing.

  While performing my examination, I had noticed multiple gunshot wounds. One really nasty one had been just behind the kid’s right ear, and a projectile was partially protruding from the wound, surrounded by his brain matter, attempting to exit this newly formed defect, but the bullet was still lodged in the skin. So the forensic pathologist could see the bullet in place, I had put a large paper bag over the dead kid’s head and secured it at the neck with tape.

  As I approached the crowd of cops, I noticed at the center, kneeling next to the body, a newly minted crime-scene technician was supporting the head in his hands and looking up at me with glee, like a kid who had just caught his first big fish. The technician had drawn a smiley face on the outside of the bag with a large cartoon balloon coming from the mouth saying GOOD MORNING, DR. MAC! which was a salutation for the forensic pathologist who would be performing the autopsy. I pushed the technician away and shouted to the scene commander that this prick should be removed immediately from the scene. Thankfully, he never attended another one of my scenes.

  When I glanced back toward the mother, the face that had been grief-stricken now possessed a rage beyond anything I could fathom. In that instant, I ceased being an investigator and had taken on the role of perpetrator. No longer could she provide comfort to her son who, like me, had once been rocked by a loving mother. This earache had been fatal. Those who were trusted with finding answers had surrounded her baby and reduced his death to an amusement.

  All of the hatred, animus, disdain, and homicidal rage I felt from her that evening, I deserved. And more. Her son had already been slaughtered once. I had allowed him to be annihilated again by thoughtlessness and heartlessness, and that was a bell that could never be unrung.

  FORSYTHIA

  ONE OF MY MOST cherished memories is of lying in my grandmother’s bed beneath an open window, the wind blowing through the weathered screen. This is the same bed that my grandmother had shoved me beneath when I was four or five and my drunken father had come with his shotgun to kill us all. The ramshackle home had window screens that were painted black and that paint had cracked and flaked from years of exposure to the elements. As a breeze caressed me, the perfumed scent of gardenias danced about the room and throughout the house. Like many of her generation, my grandmother was not accustomed to conditioned air, but through many years of impoverished rural life, Pearl had become an aficionado of cross-ventilation. On the hottest days, she would stand on her back steps in one of her floral-print housedresses and slippers and assess the direction of the wind. Then she would announce, like some colonial town crier, the forecast of the day. It was either Warm, Hot, or Really Hot. The only pronouncement of Cold she would ever make, since she hated winter, was when it was “colder than a well-digger’s butt in Ideeho.”

  The Warm months were when Pearl was at her best. Able to pick up the slightest hint of a breeze, she would then strategically make her way through the house searching for the best locations to open a window or door. Pearl would say that you couldn’t just open all the windows and expect to catch a cross-breeze. Only the right combination of open windows would conduct the breeze properly. Inevitably, Pearl would perfectly catch the wind that would allow our family to survive a Louisiana summer.

  My grandmother’s home had been constructed shortly before World War II and it appeared as though it had fought in every major engagement. It was encased in dirty white asbestos siding, most of the tiles cracked and chipped throughout my childhood, and a leaky roof that my grandfather never seemed to be able to fix. And the dilapidated barn had a perpetually foul barnyard smell. But for all the general disrepair of their place, one thing always shined brightly: Pearl’s flowers.

  When the house had been built she had demanded gardenias and camellias be planted along both sides of the structure. Over time, the bushes grew to an enormous size. The yard also contained dogwoods, my grandmother’s favorite, and pecan and catalpa trees, which we would beat for worms that we would sell as fishing bait. But what most influenced life at the Morgan homestead were the gardenias. With the windows open in the summer, their scent would sneak in, subtly at first but ultimately hanging heavily in every room.

  I developed a particular affinity for their smell, which lingered in my mind long after I had left my grandparents’ home for Georgia. That scent always reminded me of summer—my grandfather barbequing on his homemade oil-drum grill, my grandmother’s homemade ice cream, and ice-cold watermelon picked from their garden. Anytime the scent of gardenias hit me, I felt the safety of my grandmother’s hands on my shoulders and her reassurance that God would always protect me.

  When I turned eight, my father—still mean as shit and probably even more insane, as well as fresh out of the Marine Corps—was eager to start a new life. He moved us to Georgia and away from Pearl’s gardenias. Then, shortly after that, Daddy abandoned Mama and me. In an unfamiliar place with no family support nearby, the situation went from bad to worse. We lived like mice in a rented trailer owned by a man with a fat cigar and horny designs on my young mother during the age of Helen Reddy singing “I Am Woman.” It was hell. There were no sweet aromatic breezes caressing my cheek, only a taint of hopelessness and anxiety. Yet my mother and I kept going to church and loving Jesus.

  No matter where you travel in the South, the carpenter from Nazareth is there, either in the form of tent evangelists set up alongside the road or in painted murals over the baptismal pools in churches. In Him, we were to find peace, protection, and comfort. My grandmother Pearl had always told me that. She claimed that if I kept my eyes on the cross and reflected on Christ’s suffering for me, I would never stray.

  People have asked me, when faced with a death, some of the most simplistic yet probing philosophical questions. “Why did this happen? If there is a God, why did he allow this?” I have never had an answer for them.

  After I have washed the blood of the dead from my hands, stripped off my trousers now soaked in decomp juice, and returned safely to my home with its familiar quiet, I have sat nursing a drink and asking the same unanswerable questions. In those moments, after years of facing these same chafing questions and the same unsettling death scenes, I sometimes found myself with my .357 Colt Lawman revolver. I would run the cool metal of the muzzle over my face, making small circles around my nose and my eye sockets. Death encouraged me. Death dared me. Death always nudged me on, offered me peace, offered me an easy anesthetic for the accumulation of raw feeling that chased me ever harder and faster as my career advanced.

  Had the dead done the same thing before I arrived at their death scene? To be the one trying to decipher their reasons—or Death’s reasons—was an impossible task. I could amass
the facts of a scene but I always ended up with the same questions, and I’d been asking them since I was ten years old.

  When I turned ten, I had two great revelations: my daddy was never coming back and Bruce was never going to leave.

  Within nine months of my father’s abandonment, my mother had started dating one of the managers at the cotton mill where she worked. Bruce was a highly educated man who possessed a seemingly sweet demeanor. He charmed my mama with the refinement of a Southern gentleman and me with tickets to University of Georgia football games. But what impressed us the most was his fervor for Jesus. Jesus had brought him peace, Bruce said, and had washed him clean.

  There is a telltale language that Christian believers use when speaking about the Savior of All Mankind. They find Him. He finds them. They are no longer lost. They were born again. They were reborn. They’ve been washed clean of their sins. They’ve been washed in the blood. They’ve been saved. They’ve been redeemed. They’ve been purchased with a price. Their name is now written in the lamb’s book of life. They are now bond servants of the Lord. They are now brothers with Christ. Bruce seduced my mother and me with this language of faith and promises of a better life far from the rage of my father and the squalor of the trailer park.

  In the beginning, he played ball with me in the front yard and took my mother to Red Lobster—ah, the good life! Maybe the combination of deep-fried scallops and the sight of her little boy pitching a ball was enough to convince my mama that Bruce would bring us to paradise. The promise of no more hungry nights or badly mannered landlords was easy inducement. Here he was, everything my daddy had not been: refined of speech, gentlemanly, and educated. He had a fine job, a big blue Pontiac, and a university degree, but most of all, he said he had Jesus, just like my grandmother did.

  Bruce also trumpeted a life of fidelity and stability, which in my backwoods, rough-as-a-cob life to that point were not things I was familiar with. All the males in my life so far had started and ended each sentence with the word “nigger.” No such utterance would be heard from Bruce. To him, the alpha and the omega was Jesus.

  He proposed to my mother. They gave me a chance. They wanted to know if I wanted this too. They said we would have a great life and a great home, that we would have a great family, a family ordained by God’s will.

  I wore a snug JCPenney suit in the sanctuary of a little Baptist church in the middle of nowhere at age ten, with no Daddy, and listened to the preacher’s matrimonial speech while Bruce stared at my mother in a trance-like state, a look I would eventually come to know well. The pastor may as well have been reciting a eulogy because within weeks I would understand everything a whole lot better.

  Our life with Bruce began in the rich neighborhood of Griffin, Georgia, surrounded by the old textile elite and their children. I felt like the country mouse come to the city. The three of us moved into an expansive five-bedroom ranch home with a sprawling lawn surrounded by boxwoods and rose bushes, but absent of gardenias. We lived in sudden luxury far away from my ridge-running, un-air-conditioned relatives in northern Louisiana. The fragrance of my grandmother’s love was replaced by the scent of Old English lemon oil that my mother used to clean her new hardwood floors.

  Absent Pearl’s garden, I now tried to identify the flora of my unfamiliar surroundings, most notably the extensive bushes across the street. They had long, slender branches that exploded up from the ground like a bright yellow fountain. Forsythia, I learned. I had never seen it before, but even at that age I thought the vibrant bush was remarkable. It had no smell, and it was so dense that I could have lain down within it and been completely obscured from view. After its spring bloom, the yellow petals would fall away and be replaced by tiny green leaves, equally as becoming.

  Bruce had seen it as well.

  Southerners tend to live their lives in a highly reflective manner. We have a hard time letting go of what has passed. Some would argue that the New South is not new at all but simply a new invasion of the South by the North. If Southerners had their way, all the roads would still be two lanes, Jeff Davis’ birthday would still be a state holiday, and everyone who did not attend church would be publicly chastised. My inner Rebel would not allow me to avoid this predisposition; for every trial I’ve ever encountered in my adult life, its magnitude has been measured by the one constant entity from my Southern past: Bruce.

  With great clarity I remember walking onto my first death scene in New Orleans. The body had been rotting for over a month. The carcass was lying on the floor, tensely bloated. Because there were so many maggots present, the body appeared to have been still animated. As flies touched my face and arms, I said to myself, I can do this. It ain’t Bruce.

  The body of a young man with schizophrenia, who had disemboweled himself because he believed that something dwelled within him . . . Slipping on his intestines as I examined his remains, I thought, Piece of cake. It ain’t Bruce.

  The mother who had backed her car over her three-year-old, crushing the child’s head like a grape . . . As I methodically picked the child’s brain matter from the tread of her tires, listening to her anguished screams while the EMTs injected her with a sedative, I soldiered on. This wasn’t Bruce.

  Bruce was my measure for all things bad.

  Many times I have attempted to figure out why I chose such gruesome work. There was enough of my grandmother’s Jesus in me to make me believe that I had been prepared, predestined for such an undertaking. The only way I could make sense of my experiences prior to being a death investigator was to assume that a higher power had been molding me into someone who could endure the screams, the maggots, the anguish, and the never-ending, inexplicable waste of human life. I had become an automaton who would do without question.

  The first beating came as a surprise. Perhaps I assumed that life would be ballgames and late nights spent barefoot in the cool grass catching fireflies. Up until that time I had received belt whippings from my daddy when he had been around but nothing else. On the day the first real beating happened, I quickly realized there was no longer any point to playing G.I. Joe or riding my bike. I only wanted a moment without this new fear. I wanted to be resting again in the arms of those I loved and who loved me. It never came.

  Just a few weeks into the marriage, Bruce had told me that I was going to be just like my daddy and, if he had any say-so, it would not happen under his roof. I remember asking my mother what I had done wrong, but she had no answer. Bruce and I had never shared a cross word or a display of disrespect. As a matter of fact, I had mistaken him for Jesus. For a boy with no father and nothing to eat, Bruce had appeared to be Christ incarnate, the Host come to life. Plus, Bruce claimed to walk with Jesus and have regular audience with him. So I had assumed he was Christ’s earthly representative, sent to intervene on behalf of both Mama and me.

  One day out of the blue, while standing in our carport, he very theatrically pointed to the forsythia bush across the street and told me to go get him some switches. Now, when I thought of switches, I immediately thought of the large black women at the Laundromat with insolent children who punished them with a tiny switch to the backs of their little toddler legs, then picked them up and held them tightly to their large breasts after the child had cried, saying, “Now, hush baby. You do what yo’ mama say you do.” There was none of that with Bruce.

  He gave very specific instructions. I was to come back with three or five branches from the forsythia—the number had to be odd, for some reason. Not wanting to disappoint our new savior, I retrieved five sturdy branches and handed them over. He instantly cast aside two, saying that they were not up to the task, then told me to go to my new bedroom, with its oak floors and fancy furniture, take off my pants, sit on the bed, and wait. Uneasiness crept over me. He stood stripping away the green leaves and staring blankly at what became the instrument that killed my childhood.

  After taking off my pants, I sat on the edge of my bed in my tighty whities, resting my hands on my fleshy knees. T
he feeling that I had in my stomach was the same feeling I would get years later, just before making a death notification—a numb emptiness. Bruce’s shoes clicked along the hall floor as they approached. My belly tightened.

  My bedroom door opened and I sat staring at the reality of the decision my mother had made. The three forsythia branches were no longer individual sticks but woven into a wooden flail. At the lower, thicker end of the sticks, Bruce had wound them together up the shafts for about eight inches, just enough to form a handle. The unwoven ends pointed at me accusingly.

  As he did for the next four years of my life, Bruce directed me to the end of the bed and told me to grab the footboard. The pressure of his hand rested flat against the small of my back. As the first lash stung my flesh, my toes curled in pain. Six more followed, leaving red stripes on the backs of my legs. Was this Jesus? Granny Pearl had promised that her Christ would always watch over me.

  Later that evening, Bruce called me into the den. He prayed that I would be more like Jesus. That night I lay face down on my new bed in our new fancy house and wanted the hands of Pearl to comfort me, but I was left only with my thoughts. I tried to reckon how I could avoid this happening again. My mother sat in the den of her new home, leaving me alone to pray that my grandmother’s Jesus would show up.

  Slowly and methodically my identity was taken. No longer was my mother allowed to call me Joey, the name I had been known by since birth. Now I was Joe. Bruce called me Dummy or Josephine. No longer was I permitted to call my mother Mama, now it was Mom. No longer was I allowed to hug my mother in his presence, since this was inappropriate behavior. My hair had been long and blonde, now it was cut because the Bible said that long hair on a man is a crown of shame. All of these refinements were to make me more like Jesus.