The sheriff laughed mirthlessly. “I expect he’d just as soon pass on that, but thanks anyhow. I’ll holler at him and tell him to get you at noon.”
I told him how to find my private office. It was tucked deep beneath the east stands of the stadium, down near the level of the football field. Pretty close to the east end zone, in fact, but separated by layers of concrete and steel and spectators. I’d lost count of the times I’d looked up from a skull or femur to feel the entire structure shaking—another UT touchdown, I knew. Visiting teams didn’t score very often at Neyland Stadium, and when they did, there weren’t enough fans to rattle the girders. Ten, twenty thousand people couldn’t cause much vibration. Ninety thousand hometown fans at a grudge match against Georgia or Florida or ’Bama, though, could set off seismographs clear over in Nashville.
I hung up, pushed back from my battered desk, and walked through a doorway into an adjoining room filled with cardboard boxes, each measuring one foot square by three feet long. Each box contained a cleaned, disarticulated human skeleton.
There was only one way into our skeletal collection, and that was through my office. I didn’t want just anyone to have access to the skeletons—it was easy to envision drunken fraternity pranks, macabre Halloween decorations, and countless other student hijinks if word got out that there were hundreds of boxes of bones just lying around for the taking. So while we made no bones, so to speak, about having the collection—took great pride in it, in fact, since it was the world’s largest collection of modern skeletons whose age, race, and sex were known—I was careful to keep the collection room locked and to issue keys only to the forensic faculty and graduate assistants.
Threading my way among the gray metal shelves stacked with oblong boxes, I felt like a bookworm browsing in the Library of Congress. There were hundreds of stories recorded in these skeletons—tales of childhood bicycle wrecks, skullbashing barroom brawls, years of secret domestic violence, decades of gradual decline. To hear a particular story, all I had to do was slide the cardboard box off the shelf, take it to a table, flip open the top, and lift out the bones. Some tales were written in the lurid detail of fractured limbs, cut ribs, and bludgeoned or bullet-shattered skulls. Others were understated, like the sturdy bones of the nineteenth-century black man whose arms and legs and massive muscle attachment points bespoke a life of heavy labor.
I pulled two boxes from the shelves—old friends, in a way, who had helped me teach thousands of students over the years—and removed a few of their bones. Their broad surfaces were smooth as ivory from the touch of countless hands; as I grasped them, they felt familiar and comforting, these pieces of the dead. Unlatching the battered briefcase I kept in the collection room, I laid the bones on the gray foam padding inside and closed the lid. Then I ducked down the back stairs, emerging beside the tunnel that led to the end zone. Threading my way up a maze of concrete ramps and stairs, I emerged near the rear of McClung Museum, a blocky 1960s building that housed the university’s modest assortment of Native American artifacts.