once my greatest joy—become my greatest sorrow? Kathleen had nearly died to give me Jeff, yet here I was treating him like a curse instead of a gift. She would be heartbroken if she could see it, I knew, but despite my shame, I seemed incapable of opening my heart to our son.
After Kathleen’s death, some well-meaning friend had given me a copy of The Prophet, a book of essays by Kahlil Gibran. I had never opened it. Now, for the first time, I pried it out of the bookcase and opened it to a chapter marked by a purple ribbon. It was headed “On Joy and Sorrow.”
Trembling, I read: “When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight…. They are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”
I thought of Jeff, and the difficulty we’d had conceiving him, and our gratitude when he, too, survived the difficult birth. He and she—both, together—had been my delight, and I hadn’t found a way to separate him from the sorrow that slammed into me when she died.
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain,”
read another line.
If that’s true, I thought, I must be making room for one hell of a lot of joy.
CHAPTER 15
I WAS HALF AN HOUR early for Billy Ray Ledbetter’s exhumation, even though the cemetery, in Morgan County, lay forty two-lane miles northwest of Knoxville, perched on the edge of the Cumberland Mountains. People in Cooke County tapped the Appalachians for ginseng and moonshine and marijuana. People in the Cumberlands—including the county seat, the unfortunately named Wartburg—ripped open the mountains themselves, raking low-grade coal from strip mines and bench mines, leaving the ridgetops mutilated and the streams choked with debris and acid.
Billy Ray had worked a wildcat mine—an illegal, unlicensed one—until the Office of Surface Mining had found it and shut it down. After that, he mined food stamps and disability checks for whatever he could, spending most of what he got in the county’s windowless cinder-block roadhouses. It was in one of them that he and his friend Eddie Meacham had squared off against half a dozen badass bikers. Unfortunately for Meacham, Billy Ray survived his stomping for eighteen days—until the day, in fact, Billy Ray hitched a ride into Knoxville to ask Eddie to take him to a hospital. He never made it there alive, according to Eddie, because upon staggering into Meacham’s apartment, he promptly keeled over, crashed into a glass-topped coffee table, and expired. That, at least, was the story Meacham was telling, and that was the story Burt DeVriess hoped the exhumation and examination would corroborate.
A freshly waxed black hearse idled at the cemetery entrance, its tinted windows pulsing with rock music cranked up loud enough to wake the dead. Parked beside it was a Caterpillar backhoe in a two-tone color scheme of yellow and rust. From the backhoe’s cab, Tammy Wynette pleaded with me to stand by my man. I wondered if anyone had ever stood by the poor bastard whose eternal rest we were about to interrupt so rudely.
Native Americans and New Agers alike say it’s wrong to dig up a body after it’s been laid to rest—it disturbs the spirit of the departed, they say—and I’m inclined to agree. Unfortunately, sometimes the alternative is even worse: letting a killer go scot-free…or sending an innocent person to life behind bars. It was the latter misfortune I hoped to avert by disturbing the spirit of the late Billy Ray.
The morning was gray and chilly as half a dozen of us clustered around a sad little grave outside Wartburg. The cemetery was wedged onto a narrow strip of Cumberland ridgetop, shared by a tiny white clapboard church. The crowd that gathered was quiet and grim. Two uniformed Morgan County sheriff’s deputies stood guard, as if someone might be interested in making off with a plywood coffin and pauper’s corpse that had been deteriorating in the ground for nine months. Knox County prosecutor Bob Roper, still hoping to salvage his murder case against Meacham, stood alongside a Louisiana forensic anthropologist he’d brought in to try to refute my testimony about the impossible wound path. I found myself in the unenviable position of standing next to Burt DeVriess, my nemesis-turned-employer—an arrangement I hoped would prove brief and never to be repeated.