The Night Listener and Others (15 page)

I wondered what to do next. Should I go to the police and tell them of my suspicions? No, for what did I have to base them on except for my own distaste toward the boy? I did resolve to watch him more closely in church and to attend next Sunday evening’s Youth Fellowship to see if I might be able to derive any clues from his behavior or his words. It is difficult for young people to keep their offenses secret from their friends, for half the joy of wicked acts (so I have read) is being able to tell others about them later.

On the verge of sleep, I began to imagine what deed Keith (if it was Keith) might perform next. He had already violated the cemetery and the church, and the crematory was unassailable, having as it did no windows and only one door with a heavy lock. That left only the parsonage then, and fear suddenly ate through me so that I sat bolt upright in my bed. It was not the fear of confrontation, for I am a large man and would have been more than a match for such a youth as Keith Holt. My fear was that of exposure. I remembered the cellar windows and their pitifully fragile catches that might easily be pushed open, leaving the cellar easy access for a body slender enough to slip through the gap. I could see him sliding down, feet first, stepping on the freezer, then on the wooden box behind it, the box breaking, the boy investigating…oh dear God…

The box. How did I come to the box? I came to the box as I came to the taking of flesh. One is dependent upon the other.

Several years ago, when I proposed to take the communion of my mother’s flesh in the way I did, I waited until one of the Tuesday evenings when Mrs. Bunn went off to visit her relatives in Baltimore. She always leaves on a Tuesday morning, and arrives back the following evening, as weekends are always too busy to permit her absence (indeed, she had never asked—she is a wise and knowing woman). Her trips come only once every two months or so, and I decided to use the solitude to perform the act that I had so looked forward to for several weeks. Every time Mrs. Bunn left the parsonage, I would go down to the cellar, open the freezer, and check to make sure that my treasure had not been disturbed. It never was.

That Tuesday evening, after the adult choir had all driven home following their weekly rehearsal, I took the foil-wrapped piece of flesh from the freezer, pulled the blinds, locked the doors of the parsonage, and unwrapped it to find that the handkerchief was clinging to it in several places. I did not want to pull it away too hastily for fear that the cloth would tear and adhere to the skin, so I rewrapped it in foil, put it in a plastic bag, boiled a pan of water, and tried to thaw it so that the handkerchief would pull away easily. After several minutes of boiling, I withdrew it from the pan and unwrapped it once again. This time the handkerchief came away easily, and the flesh lay exposed to my view.

The freezing had certainly done nothing to make it more visually appealing, as I had not wrapped the foil tightly enough to prevent ice crystals from forming, thus causing freezer burn, and (I discovered in later reading) I had done nothing to help the situation by my impatient method of thawing. Still, there it was before me, that yellow strip of flesh, and I cut from it a morsel no bigger than a dime, washed it under running water, and prepared for the service.

It was everything I had expected, and so much more, and I praised God and blessed His name for allowing me to come so near Him.

The rest of the flesh, however, was impossible to keep, although I tried. It would have done no good to refreeze it, and too much deterioration had set in to attempt drying it, if I had even known anything about drying meat at that time. So I wrapped it in foil once more and deposited it in the very bottom of the garbage, praying as I did so.

A month went by before I felt the first pangs of that spiritual hunger that had been so satisfyingly fed by the tiniest bit of flesh. I felt as though God and Christ and the Holy Spirit were somehow drifting away from me, as though their presence, and the totally fulfilling love that is the greatest part of that presence, had been withdrawn. My sermons seemed flat, my prayers lifeless. My service to my congregation, my attempts to knit together deteriorating families, to comfort the sick and bereaved, continued as strongly as ever, but I did not feel the gratification I had before, and it very slowly began to dawn on me that once you have gazed upon Heaven, it is difficult to accept life on Earth. I knew then that my communion of a month before had to be repeated, in the same way that regular attendance at worship is necessary to nourish a Christian and sustain his joy in his faith.

A simple disposition was to take place at the crematory that week. A sixty-four-year-old member of the congregation had died of a stroke. His memorial service was scheduled for Wednesday, and the cremation was to follow, with none of the family in attendance at the crematory. It would be the perfect opportunity. But this time, I confirmed, I would have planned in advance precisely how I would keep whatever flesh I was able to take, so as to avoid the spoilage that had occurred with that of my mother.

I went into the county seat and withdrew from the library a book on the preserving of meat. It dealt with several different methods such as canning, freezing, and smoking, but since I would be working with rather small portions, I found the section on dry curing to be of the most interest. Basically, all that curing does is to extract the water from meat by applying salt to it, thus enabling one to keep it without refrigeration for a long period of time. Chilling (but not freezing) the meat beforehand to slow the growth of bacteria is advised, but I could not very easily store pieces of human skin in the refrigerator, which was Mrs. Bunn’s domain, so decided that I would have to brave the risk of bacteria, hoping that ingesting such small portions over a long period of time would cause no more than a slight stomach upset.

I took the long way home, visiting a farm supply shop in the southern end of the county and there buying with cash the smallest curing box in stock, along with a bag of coarse salt. The clerk told me that I should buy some maple syrup so that the salt taste would not be so strong, but I told him I had some at home. That much was true, but I had no intention of adding it to the meat. I could bear the salt taste, for that would eventually vanish, leaving only the naturally sweet taste of what it had preserved.

When I arrived home, I discovered that Mrs. Bunn was out, so I was able to take the box and the salt down into the cellar and store them behind some unused furniture, where Mrs. Bunn would never look. She made no secret of disliking the cellar, for it was poorly lit, rather damp, and claustrophobic, what with its only six-and-a-half-foot-high ceiling. She went down there only when she needed to fetch something from the freezer.

On Wednesday, following the memorial service, I accompanied Jim Meinhart to the crematory, and asked (partly out of curiosity, for this was the first cremation I had observed except for my mother’s, and partly from the desire to get further on the man’s good side) if he might show me the operation of the machinery when the time came. He smiled as broadly as was possible for him, and said of course, he would be happy to.

The body was carried in, the assistant dismissed, and I turned to Jim. “Jim,” I said, for we were on a first name basis, having shared a dozen funerals since my tenure began, “when my mother passed on, it meant a great deal to me to be alone here with her before her body was cremated. I think I pray more deeply when I’m by myself.” Then I chuckled. “Terrible thing for a pastor to say, isn’t it?”

Jim shook his massive head. “Not at all, Brandon. I know what you mean— I say things when I’m praying by myself that I’d never think of when I’m in church. Say no more. Let me know when you’re ready.” And he walked out, leaving me alone.

I could scarcely believe my good fortune. I had not even had to finish the little speech I had so carefully prepared. He had not even questioned my desire to be alone with the quiet dead. And why should he after all? I was— and am—a minister of God, a man in whom my congregation can put their trust. And that is the truth, despite what follows, and because of what will come.

I knew I had little time, so I removed from my inner coat pocket a small matte knife whose razor sharp blade slid out and locked with a flick of my thumb. In another instant I had the wooden box open and the body of Mr. Collins rolled over on its side. I pulled up the gown to the top of the old man’s back, cut a square roughly eight inches long on each side, and peeled back the piece of flesh. The edges were purple where, I suppose, some blood had settled, but there was no puddling of liquid after I made my incisions. I pressed the inner surface of the piece of skin against the gown to blot up any exudations of fat or other moisture, then rolled the section of flesh into a cylinder scarcely an inch thick, worked it into a plastic bag I had brought for the purpose, and placed it into my inner pocket, along with the matte knife whose blade I had wiped clean on the gown. Then I pulled down the gown, rolled the body onto its back, quietly lowered the lid, and said a deeply felt prayer for Mr. Collin’s soul, while at the same time adding my own thanks to God for His gifts and His grace. Then, making sure that I had no telltale stains upon my hands or clothing, I opened the door and invited Jim Meinhart back in, the roll of flesh hot against my chest.

He opened the door to the control room, and I followed him inside. There was barely enough room for both of us to stand. I prayed that the flesh would give off no odor that Jim would notice, and tried to concentrate on the panel with several buttons and switches mounted on one of the narrow walls.

“Procedure’s fairly simple,” he said. “This switch turns on the mechanism that opens the doors, and this button slides the casket into the combustion chamber. That light goes on when it’s inside. Then you close the doors behind it.” He then proceeded to push the proper buttons and throw the proper switches. I heard the sound of gears like the rushing of deep and secret waters, then the closing of the door of the furnace. “The equipment’s pretty old,” Jim said. “That door closing is one reason why we try to discourage relatives from staying.”

I remarked that the sound did have a certain degree of finality to it, and Jim nodded. “There’s only one switch that turns on the furnace,” he said. “This one here. On and off.” He flicked the switch and I heard a dull whoosh. “Once it begins, it can be stopped any time, but it takes an hour and a half for the remains to be completely reduced to…” He paused.

“To ash?” I said.

“Well, we don’t like to call it ash, although that’s what it is.
Cremains
is the proper word, though I’ve never used it. I generally just say the remains and let it go at that.”

“There’s really very little remains left,” I said, remembering the pile of fine gray powder that I had peered at in my mother’s urn, before it was placed in the columbarium at Peace Haven, where my father was buried in an earth grave.

Jim nodded. “It’s oxidation. The water in the body evaporates, and whatever has carbon in it, like the soft tissues…say, I hope I’m not getting too graphic for you, Brandon.”

“No no,” I said quickly. ‘The body is simply the shell of the soul, that’s all, something to be discarded.” I smiled gently. “With all due respect to your profession, of course.”

“Well, the soft tissues are incinerated, and all that’s left is the inorganic ash of the bone structure. The pulverizer reduces that to powder.”

“Pulverizer?” I said.

He gestured out the door. I left the tiny room and he followed, closing the door behind him. We sat together on one of the narrow pews. “Not many crematories have them in the U.S., but most of them do in England—you can thank Pastor Fletcher for ours. From all accounts he was a strong believer in strewing the remains. But they’re a bit hard to strew when you have bone fragments in them. That’s what the pulverizer’s for.”

I invited Jim to the parsonage then for a cup of coffee, but he declined, as I had hoped he would. “I’ve got to stay here until it’s finished. Legalities. But you go ahead. It can get pretty oppressive here.” He left it unfinished, but I could hear his thoughts—”knowing what’s happening a few feet away.”

I told him I would be back just before the cremation was complete, and went to the parsonage. Mrs. Bunn was away, and I went directly to the kitchen, took the piece of Mr. Collins’s flesh from my pocket, and set it on the sink top. Then I ran downstairs, got the curing box and the bag of salt, and began the operation that I had read of.

I took the salt (foreswearing sugar, maple syrup, or spices, all of which were suggested by my book) and rubbed it thoroughly on both sides of the skin. Then I poured more salt over the bottom of the box, covering it. On that layer I put one of the two wooden racks that had come with the box, poured more salt over that, then put in the flesh (skin-side down, as directed). More salt went over it then, all the way to the top, and I closed the lid. I carried it downstairs and put it behind the freezer on top of the second rack, being careful not to block any of the drainage holes in the bottom of the box. I did not truly expect the salt to draw much fluid out of the flesh, but neither did I want to take my chances, so I put newspaper under the rack as well.

There was nothing to do with the flesh now but wait, so I went back upstairs, washed my hands, and went out to the crematory, for I had found the process of cremation to be quite interesting, and had had no chance to learn anything about it during the only other one I had attended, that of my mother. It would also be prudent, since the crematory was to be my source of communion material, to learn as much as possible about its workings.

So Jim and I resumed our conversation, and he told me a bit about the history of cremation, and the initial efforts of the funeral industry in this country to thwart it. “I’ve never had a problem with it myself,” he said, “except for the fact that it doesn’t give me much of a chance to do what I’ve been trained for. Still, it seems a respectful way to…dispose of the dead.”

Finally Jim looked at his watch. “Long enough,” he said, and we went back into the small room, where he threw the switch to stop the flames.