Snapper (19 page)

The spaniel’s owner arrived. I like pretty girls when I do not have human remains in my hand. Once in a decade or two they like me too, but the same restriction applies.

“Sorry,” she said, though there was nothing to apologize for. She had close-cropped black hair and a face so pale, broad, and symmetrical it suggested a shield, with black eyes and wide full lips emblazoned thereon to form a sort of animated coat of arms. Though not very animated, I would add.

“Charlie,” she said to the spaniel.

“Sorry, Charlie,” I said, momentarily forgetting my predicament.

“Why,” she said, flashingly earnest. “What have you done?”

“Nothing,” I said. “You know. A joke. Sorry, Charlie.”

She gave this joke the silent scorn it deserved and crouched to approach Charlie with soft clucking sounds. I realized the bone was in plain view and I felt an impulse to conceal it, but again and already I was paralyzed. It wasn’t property, stolen or otherwise; it wasn’t illicit or counterfeit or tasteless or gauche, or if it was any or all of those things it wasn’t mine—it belonged to someone else,
was
someone else, and shoving it into my sleeve or down my pants would have been kind of disrespectful. I slowly moved it behind my back and hoped it didn’t mind.

“Crap!” said the girl.

“Literally,” I said. The spaniel was leaving a small offering on the grave of one Anthony Garrett, 1868–1942.

“Do you have any plastic bags?” she said. I was accustomed to let Kia do as she pleased while I cursed the wily Wickham. I said I had none.

“I hate to just
leave
it,” she said. She looked sincerely pained.

“I shouldn’t worry,” I said. “Kia here will probably eat it.”

She didn’t give Charlie much choice after that, just marched over, leashed him, and dragged him away, though he had barely finished.

I scoured the whole cemetery once more. I chose Rose Hill over nearby parks and recreation grounds because I needed the silence. The accident impaired only one ear, which is in some ways worse than having both impaired to an equal extent. I am terrified even of bicycle bells; and though I’ve gradually learned to trust cars, because there are so many of them, I still think any city bus I can hear but not see is gunning for me personally.

I remembered that there was a gatehouse where I might
find a human being I could ask. It could have been a mausoleum itself, with just one window next to the entrance. I knocked but there was no reply. On the window a sticker showed a telephone number, though, so I memorized it and took Kia home.

Kia had the deeply irritating and mildly misguided notion that she could sing. She never seemed alarmed, or desperate for attention, and you wouldn’t have called it barking or howling either. When the mood struck, usually at about my dinnertime, she tilted her head back, flattened her ears, closed her eyes, and yodeled. I generally brought her inside at this point. My neighbors had never said anything, but I thought it best to muffle her somehow. Moreover, I had the deeply misguided and probably more irritating notion that I could play guitar. Since the accident I have been blessed with a sinewy mellifluous singing voice, though only I can hear it. So I accompanied her. Her favorite song seemed to be “Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

Apparently Ernest Hemingway once challenged his dinner guests to write a complete story in six words or fewer. He scrawled, “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn” on a napkin and held it, triumphantly I guess, aloft. Hemingway would have made a lousy country singer. Hank Williams wrote a song with the six-word title “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy.” Compare. Merle Haggard penned the sublime “Mama Tried.” Dolly Parton has been spooling these things out since she was flat-chested. That’s her joke, not mine. They all make Hemingway seem coy and lifeless, which I guess he is. Anyway, Kia and I went through a whole catalog of these tearjerkers every evening. I won’t pretend that
anyone else would have enjoyed our performances, but I do expect that Kia remembers them just as fondly as I do, if she remembers anything at all.

When we got home with that thighbone she began singing, which is why I didn’t make the phone call right then. I don’t mean that I had to accompany her, but I couldn’t shut her up, and that would have been a mighty strange conversation, with Kia warming up for Patsy Cline in the background. By the time we had finished, it was past five o’clock, and I was getting excited about an unsuspected slice of butter I found in the fridge that would sit well with salt on my macaroni. I hadn’t seen cheese in weeks. After dinner I brewed up some hot water, and I contemplated this bone on my coffee table. I was past thirty already, but that table was the only thing I owned I couldn’t lug around on my back. I found it outside a student house, abandoned at the end of the semester.

Bones on TV tell you stories. I didn’t have a TV then, but I knew that much. They’ve been nicked by flint arrowheads, or shattered in multiple places, or they indicate a diet lacking in fiber. My bone isn’t like that, or at least, I’m no forensics expert. It’s unmarked and intact, slowy browning over the years, and it’s neither small enough nor large enough to suggest a man or a woman definitively. It’s lighter than you would expect when you pick it up; on the other hand, you wouldn’t want it meeting your skull at high speed. It’s very, very smooth.

All I had was the circumstantial evidence. Bloomington has been populated by cemetery-builders for about two hundred years. I’d love to believe that I held the thigh of a great Shawnee warrior, but that seems unlikely. The earliest date I could recall from my cemetery perambulations was 1834, but I think that was a birth date. I probably do not have the
bone of some tough pioneer woman who raised thirteen children, four to adulthood, in a cabin with a fieldstone chimney and dovetailed log joints. But: Does childbirth stress the top joints of the femur? Could a TV expert help me out somehow? How do the pelvis and femur interact normally, let alone deal with childbirth? I was there years later when my son was born, and I fainted.

Would a life in the saddle show on a bone? I began to prod my own hips and knees. Had the top, outside knobs of that bone known the comforts of indoor plumbing, or the creaking misery of a winter outhouse, or both? Did this thigh know how to dance? I decided that no six-gun ever glinted menace from this hip, swaggering down Main Street at high noon. That never happened in Indiana anyway. But children might have been dandled on this knee, or later laid across it for a couple of sharp smacks on the bottom. Man or woman, some thrilling hand had surely caressed this thigh. Was it a feminine thigh that had spent its life in hiding, and might object to me making free with it? And had she shaved above the knee?

There were two other phone calls I kept postponing. I would have to ask my parents for money at some point. They would expect me to have a plan beyond idling in Bloomington and turning my nose up at bar work and temp jobs. I had no such plan, but I did have the phone number of a man in Brattleboro, Vermont, who ran a raptor rehabilitation center. He had not advertised a job, and if he had I probably wouldn’t have known it, and even if I had I wasn’t qualified—I knew nothing about rehabilitating birds. I didn’t particularly like birds of prey, either—I was
used to thinking of them as the enemy. Still, someone had heard of my predicament somehow, and said that this man was expecting my call. Why would anyone stay in Indiana? was my first question, followed by Why would anyone go to Vermont? I had read that Brattleboro was full of art galleries. It sounded like a place to retire.

It was a long shot, an upheaval, and not necessarily an improvement, but I was considering it partly because someone had gone to some trouble on my behalf. On that bourbon-drenched Tuesday afternoon, Shane had told me: “Strange lady asking for you at the library the other day.”

“Why would anyone look for me in the library? In the children’s section?”

“I know. That’s what I thought. She said she tried your phone and your e-mail and finally tracked down your parents, who suggested that I might know how to get in touch.”

“I’ve been avoiding them a little bit,” I said.

“I guessed. I told her I had no idea where you hang out these days. She said she’d like to leave you a note, and then she asked me to write it for her.”

I had to think for a moment.

“Dana?” I said. The birding gossip circuit was not very big, and my injury must have done the rounds. I was touched that she cared, and astonished and grateful that she went into action on my behalf. But she didn’t tell Shane how I could get in touch with her.

“You know some weird people,” said Shane.

“So says Exhibit A,” I said.

I woke up the next morning with Kia’s nose in my good ear. If I had had a bed I wouldn’t have let her into it, but I had an
old mattress on the floor that was naturally dog level, and I didn’t feel like explaining. I got up and she shuffled into my warm spot without thanks.

It was too early to phone the number I had found at the cemetery gatehouse, so I spent an hour or so growing exasperated with Mr. Bingley while Kia snored and drooled on the bunched-up sweater I called my pillow. I used to sleep in my clothes because I found that I could wake up faster, important if you need to catch the dawn chorus in action. Since the accident I no longer bothered, but I have never learned to sleep late.

Shortly after nine I dialed the number for Rose Hill.

“Rose Hill,” said a gruff baritone.

“Rose Hill Cemetery?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I wish to report a peculiar occurrence,” I said. Too much Austen will do that to you.

“You need to what?”

“I—well, I found a bone. In your cemetery. A human bone.”

Silence.

“Technically I didn’t find it,” I added. “My dog did.” Kia’s eyes flickered and she opened her jaws in what I took to be a smile. “Although technically it’s not my dog.”

More silence. Kia yawned and stretched. Finally the voice replied.

“You got some kind of six-foot demon dog?”

“No, a German shepherd,” I said.

“There is no way a regular human dog could unearth a bone in our cemetery.” I wouldn’t have called Kia a regular human dog but never mind.

“Nevertheless, she brought a bone from somewhere,” I said.

“Your dog know how to operate a backhoe?” said the voice. Kia approached for her morning ear scratch.

“I’m just telling you what happened,” I said.

“Your dog did not dig up a bone at Rose Hill,” he repeated. “What makes you think it’s human? Lots of things got bones.”

“Size,” I said. “Looks like a thighbone.”

“Horses got thighs. Cows got thighs.”

“It’s not that big,” I said. “And I presume you don’t bury horses and cows at Rose Hill.”

“Who is this?” said the voice. “Bedford, is that you?”

“No, no,” I said. “I just live nearby.”

“Who put you up to this?”

“Nobody put me up to it. I’m not joking. I want to know how I can return it.”

“You want to return it,” said the voice slowly.

“Yes.”

“But I told you it ain’t ours.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

“We’re a respectable cemetery, that’s how. We don’t lose bones. Did you look around?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And did you see any skeletons lying around? Was there zombies climbing out of open graves? See any mummies lurching out of the mausoleums?”

“I looked for signs of digging or erosion, and I didn’t see any.”

“Well, that surprises me,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Imagination like yours I’d expect you saw Dracula suckin’ on a red lollipop.”

“Who am I speaking to?” I said. “Do you have a manager I could talk to?”

“No,” he said. “But we got groundskeepers. Got a guy who cuts the grass once a week. I’ll be sure to tell him not to snag the mower on all the bones stickin up everywhere.” With that he hung up.

It was only after and because of that call I reflected that losing remains would constitute profound negligence on the part of any cemetery. It would be extremely bad for business and might incur some serious legal penalty. If the cemetery neglected to look into it when reported, that would be even worse. But who exactly investigates such a claim?

I leashed Kia and, leaving both bone and book at home, returned for another search.

There are neither hills nor naturally growing roses within several miles of Rose Hill. There is a detectable slope, however, with the extravagant monuments and mausoleums at the top and the simpler headstones in snaggletooth rows below. From the Reverend George Bradstreet’s gaudy marble cross near the top, dated 1898, you can see the whole cemetery. It would take you about ten minutes to walk across, or fifteen diagonally. There are several fine oaks and tulip poplars at the top, and some young sugar maples in what I suppose to be the middle-class swath. The place appears to be full except for one shadeless stretch adjacent to the wrought-iron fence by the road. I suppose that nowadays those plots fetch prices that would gall even Reverend Brad-street. Rose Hill is also not full yet in the sense that several plots have headstones already, but their occupants have not got around to moving in.

Naturally I began to wonder whether I had a rich bone or a poor bone. A preacher bone or a whore bone; a teacher
bone or a life insurance senior sales executive bone. A Union bone? A Confederate bone? I thought with relief that at least I did not have a child bone.

I let Kia go in the hope that she would lead me to the source.

Perhaps, I thought, she
should
bring me the other femur, and all the other bones, too. I can’t explain my reasoning here because it isn’t really reasoning: I think bones ought to stick together. I am not, as I said, morbid or superstitious, and in fact it says “Organ Donor” on the back of my driver’s license. Nevertheless, I dearly hope that my left femur and my right femur will never part ways, whether I know about it or not. Dismemberment, even posthumous, is obscene. That’s why those nasty English people used to quarter anybody who irked them after hanging them by the neck and dragging their innards out. That’s why they spiked heads on London Bridge. I know there are nice English people, too, like Jane Austen. But it’s also why Mexican drug lords roll severed heads onto crowded dance floors nowadays and jihadists go in for decapitation videos. Why stop at murder when you can have desecration too? Although, as I said, I’m not morbid.