A Long Day at the End of the World by Brent Hendricks

Author:Brent Hendricks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

16

WITH THE NEWS that her box contained no sign of her husband, my mother was in bad shape. Sometimes crying. Sometimes waxing philosophical. Sometimes yelling loudly into the receiver.

“It’s the Shit Fairy again,” she complained with conviction. Now that she lived in Santa Fe, she always wore at least five turquoise rings and one Southwestern Indian necklace around town. Yet my mother was tough underneath all that style—a worthy adversary even for the Shit Fairy. She remained clearheaded about finding my father’s body.

She stayed closely in touch with the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, which worked in tandem with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the state medical examiner’s office to identify the bodies. Over the next few days, from conversations with the people on the ground as well as our own online investigations, we learned that we had a potential problem—actually several looming difficulties—in locating my father’s body.

The main problem stemmed from the fact that my father had been embalmed and buried twelve years before. The embalming process eradicates some genetic markers, thereby reducing the chances of matching DNA from family members. Not that it would be impossible to identify an embalmed body through DNA, simply less likely.

Exposure to the elements also diminished the possibility of a DNA match. Not only had my father been embalmed and buried for seven years, but he had been raised from the dead and discarded at Tri-State for another five.

Finally, we understood that it might be harder to identify those bodies whose remains had been commingled in pits and vaults. At this point, we knew that several metal vaults had been found in the bushes, piled high with bodies, and that more pits had been discovered stuffed with many more corpses. Over the years, the putrefaction may have transferred DNA from one body to another, contaminating and possibly precluding a genetic identification of a particular corpse. It was a gruesome image, flesh melting into flesh. And if my father lay underwater in such a vault, the prospects of a match diminished even further.

As the author of our ill fortune, and our tormentor by way of overwrought biblical allusions, would the Shit Fairy pass up these opportunities? Could the Shit Fairy forgo another shot at Lazarus, Job, and the Flood?

Shit Fairy or not, we had to face up to the fact that the authorities would not retrieve viable DNA samples from all the bodies scattered and abandoned at Tri-State. We had to hope it didn’t go that far. We had to hope that some identifying physical or circumstantial evidence—which the medical examiner’s office now asked for—would lead to his discovery.

At this basic level of inquiry, however, we had factors going both ways. My father had no broken bones, no prosthetic devices that might distinguish him. On the other hand, he had died nearly twelve years before, theoretically making his state of decay more advanced than the newly deposited bodies at Tri-State. Generally, it takes nature about twelve years to transform an unembalmed body six feet under into a skeleton, depending on the climate and soil composition.

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