Brockton
I WAS PROBING THE carpeting in the dean’s outer office with the toe of a shoe—a clean, pig-shit-free shoe—and trying to estimate the thickness of the pile: an inch? inch and a half? I wasn’t delighted to be cooling my heels here; he’d delayed and then canceled our meeting the prior week, so I was feeling low on the dean’s priority list. Would he stand me up again today? Glancing up, I noticed Carissa, the dean’s secretary, watching me, the phone in her hand, amusement on her face. “He’s ready to see you now, Dr. Brockton.”
I stood up and headed for the dean’s doorway. My left toe snagged in the divot I’d pressed into the plush pile, and I stumbled briefly. Carissa worked to stifle a laugh, and I shrugged sheepishly. “Smooth,” I said. “Do I know how to make an entrance, or what?” She smiled and to my surprise blushed. Hmm, I thought as I entered the dean’s inner sanctum.
He stood behind his desk—a big walnut desk in a big walnut-paneled office—and reached across to shake my hand. “Good to see you, Bill,” he said. “I was just looking at the fall class enrollments. Looks like Anthropology’s booming.”
“We’re holding our own,” I said, trying to sound modest, but betrayed by a proud grin. Our numbers had doubled during each of my three years at UT; my 1991 session of Anthropology 101—the intro course—had moved from a classroom to a small lecture hall. This fall’s section of Human Origins was meeting in a three-hundred-seat auditorium, and all three hundred seats were taken.
“What can I do for you? Wait, let me guess—you want to put a dome over the stadium and move your Intro class into the grandstands?”
“Hmm. Now that you mention it, that sounds like a great idea,” I said. “Extend my office across the hall, punch a hole through the wall, and build me a little balcony over the south end zone. I could be like the pope, talking to his flock down in Saint Peter’s Square.”
“The Pope of Neyland Stadium. I like it. I’ll need to run it by the Athletic Department—probably Religion, too—but I can’t see why they’d object, can you?” His eyes flicked to a spot over my right shoulder—to the spot on the back wall where a clock ticked loudly—and I knew the banter was over. “So what brings you here today? Usually I only see you when I have to haul you in and slap your wrist for telling off-color jokes that make the freshman girls blush. I don’t think I’ve had a complaint so far this fall. Of course, we’re not far into the semester.”
“I need some land,” I said. “To put dead bodies on.”
“I already gave you some land,” he said. “Up at the Holston farm. Land, and a barn, too.”
“You did, and I appreciate it. Really. We’ve got a good start on the skeletal collection—we’re up to a dozen already—and the medical examiner in Johnson City just sent me another body the other day. Thing is, the location’s a problem.”
“How so?”
“Well, it’d be fine if all I wanted to do was store bodies while they skeletonized.”
“But?”
“But I want us to start a research program.” I pointed a finger at him, in what I hoped he would see as a good-natured manner. “You want us to start a research program, remember?” He nodded slightly; noncommittally. “And now I’ve got a plan.”
“What kind of plan?”
“To study human decomposition in the extended postmortem interval. What happens to bodies after death? When does it happen? How do variables affect the process—variables like temperature, humidity, placement of the body, grave depth, insect activity, all sorts of things?”
“How is that anthropology?”
“It’s forensic anthropology,” I said. “Every time the police call me out to look at a decaying body, they want to know how long the person has been dead. It helps focus their search. Helps narrow the field of suspects. Helps confirm or refute alibis. Thing is, I usually can’t tell them how long somebody’s been dead. Nobody can tell them. Not with any scientific confidence.”
His eyes narrowed a bit. “Is this about that Civil War colonel? The one you thought had been dead only a year? Are you still smarting about that?”
“Yes and no,” I said. “Do I hate having my nose rubbed in that when I’m on the witness stand in another case? Sure. But I’m a scientist. The takeaway message, besides the reminder that I’m not infallible, is that we need to do more research. A lot more research. And to do that, we need land close to campus.”