MJ
DEATH. I’VE BEEN CLOSE TO it several times. My grandparents. My mother. Now John. But my first encounter with death was also my strangest. It was also my first tangle with the law.
I was twelve, Thomas was ten. We were in and out of the woods all the time, like the other kids were. We had our secret paths and hiding spots and remnants of forts we’d been building and tearing down since we could barely walk. The Smoky Mountains weren’t the near-holy grounds that the hikers and campers and environmentalists worshipped, but one huge playground for our games. None of their dark corners held any fear for us, and we’d laugh at the hikers laden with gear who wouldn’t go near the forest without being completely provisioned with the right hiking boots, the right jackets, the latest high-tech tents. So dumb they couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on it.
One day, Thomas came home terribly excited. He and his friend Andy dragged me into the woods to a homeless man’s camp. The poor old guy had died sitting half propped up against a tree. There was a rudimentary home, a shelter made of branches, the remains of a bonfire, some tattered odds and ends. My brother and Andy were absolutely entranced by the whole scene. They made a point of raiding the dead man’s provisions, looking at his dirty magazines, cooking a can of his beans in his fire pit, eating it using his utensils. Pretending they were outlaws, and that he was one of their gang who had been shot. I was disgusted. Among other things, it stank to high heaven, but they just wrapped cloths around their noses, and kept going, the dead body an incredibly exciting addition to their role-playing games. They kept this up for a week or so. Then, I don’t know whose idea it was, it could well have been Thomas’s, they decided to bring home an arm. Halloween was a few weeks away, and what they did with this arm you can imagine, two boys of a certain age with such a prize.
I remember most trying to stand up to Thomas when he came home with that gruesome limb, urging him to take it back to the woods, to forget about the whole business. Instead, I helped fill the huge pot that my mother used to stew squirrels my father shot, put it on the outdoor fire pit, and boiled the flesh off the arm. I even dried the bones with paper towels for them.
What does this tell me? That I was capable, even back then, of doing anything Thomas bade me do, no matter how obscene or unlawful.
When the police came by later (it was inevitable that someone would call them with Thomas and Andy waving that grotesque thing around town) I was taken to the station for questioning with the two boys. They eventually let the matter drop, but not before scaring us with talk of the legal penalties for the desecration of bodies.
Our parents grounded us for a month. Thomas obeyed for about half a day; then he was off, climbing out his window to run around town with Andy and his other friends. As usual, I dutifully kept to the terms of my punishment (even when my parents were at work and I could have done whatever I wanted). Despite the fuss, Thomas managed to save a finger from the hand, kept it in a jar on his desk. For all I know, he still has it, a grisly trophy from that early misadventure. And, as always, he came out on top whereas I paid the full price for his escapade.
28
Helen
I’M A NATURAL BRUNETTE. I’VE always been one. You might say I pride myself on the ordinariness of it, the honesty of it. Brunettes are down-to-earth. We don’t dazzle, not like blondes or redheads. And we’re not striking, not in the way truly black-haired women are.