“Norm Witherspoon told me you’d probably be calling,” she said, as soon as I gave her an opening. “I heard you lecture a few years ago at the Tennessee Association of Funeral Directors. You were showing pictures of how a body decays if the embalming job’s not good. You’re welcome to come out anytime.”
I wasn’t sure if she was extending the welcome in spite of my criticisms or because of them. Either way, I was quick to accept the invitation. “When would be a good time to visit?”
“Up to you. I’m here Monday through Friday, eight A.M. to five P.M. We’ve got three cremations scheduled today, so pretty much anytime you come, I’ll be putting somebody in, taking ’em out, or running them through the processor.”
“Sounds like they’re getting their money’s worth from you,” I said. “No wonder you sounded winded when you answered the phone.”
“There’s not a lot of downtime, that’s for sure,” she said. “I’m just finishing one now, and I thought I’d start the next one right after lunch.”
I checked my watch; I’d just eaten a sandwich at my desk, but I tended to eat early. It was not quite eleven-thirty.
“All right if I come on over in about an hour?”
“I’ll be looking for you.” She gave me directions, and after I’d gone through the morning’s mail, I headed out. The mail gave me an idea, so on the way I made a quick stop by Peggy’s. She wasn’t in, luckily, because I was pretty sure she wouldn’t have let me borrow her postage scale if she’d known what I planned to use it for.
CHAPTER 7
FROM THE STADIUM I HEADED DOWNSTREAM ALONG Neyland Drive, past the veterinary school and under the Alcoa Highway bridge. The bridge pilings were marked with horizontal lines at one-foot intervals, showing towboat pilots how much clearance they had between the waterline and the bottom of the bridge. Why are they called towboats, I wondered, when they move the barges by pushing, not pulling? Between the heat and the drought, the river was down as low as I’d ever seen it in summer. That meant there was plenty of clearance overhead—fifty-seven feet, according to the markings, which was two feet more than usual. But two feet more clearance overhead also meant two feet less water underneath. That wasn’t a worry here, where the river was narrow and the channel deep, but a few miles downstream the river spread into broad shallows, where even a fishing boat risked a mangled prop if it strayed from the center of the navigation channel. We need rain, I thought, and a hell of a cold front.
At the intersection of Neyland and Kingston Pike, I turned right, then also took the next right, onto the ramp for Alcoa Highway southbound. Crossing the high concrete bridge that I’d passed beneath only a moment before, I looked downriver, where the mansions of Sequoyah Hills lined the right-hand bank. I lived in Sequoyah, but my house—tucked into an incongruously modest little block of bungalows and ranchers—was probably worth one-tenth the price of these riverfront villas. I’d had the chance, when I first started teaching at UT, to buy one of the big houses, but the price—fifty-five thousand dollars—seemed astronomical at the time, at least on a professor’s salary. Twenty years later that house was worth at least a million, maybe more. The ones lining the waterfront were even more expensive. “Yeah, but I don’t have to worry about barge traffic washing away my yard,” I said out loud, then laughed at myself. “Okay, Brockton, not only are you talking to yourself, but what you’re saying is a total crock.”
UT Hospital and the hills behind the Body Farm reared up on my left. On my right a UT cattle farm—green pastures dotted with black-and-white Holsteins—nestled in the big bend of the river. It was the place where the Tennessee first curved southward, starting its serpentine slide toward the Gulf of Mexico, sixteen hundred meandering miles away.