I edged up for a closer look. “You mind if I stick my head in?”
“Not at all,” she said. “Just let me fasten this safety latch first—I’d hate for that door to fall and decapitate you.” The door was six inches thick, its steel cladding insulated with a layer of firebrick; it probably weighed at least a hundred pounds. She fitted a stout, L-shaped cotter pin into a slot beneath the lower edge of the door, the guillotine’s equivalent of the safety on a gun.
The firebrick—refractory brick, she called it—was tan and fine-grained, with several paler spots where small chips had flaked off. I reached up and rubbed a finger over one. A few grains, somewhere between sand and ceramic in texture, flaked off in my hands. “Does this just naturally flake away over time?”
She nodded. “They have to be relined about every two years.”
The floor and the roof of the combustion chamber were made of concrete; a spiderweb of cracks zigzagged through the roof. “Are these cracks a problem? Can you just patch them, or do you have to chip out the whole top when you reline it?”
“Actually, those are normal,” she said. “The very first time you fire up a brand-new cremation furnace, you get that cracking—the heat’s so intense.”
As I leaned in farther, an image from Hansel and Gretel popped into my head. “You’re not going to shove me in,” I said, “and turn me into gingerbread?”
“Not hardly.” She laughed. “If I turn this burner on, you won’t come out looking anything like a gingerbread man. Here, let me show you the ‘before’ version, and then I’ll show you ‘after.’ It’s quite a contrast.” A metal gurney was parked along one wall of the building. It held a cardboard box the size and shape of a coffin. She tugged at the lid and raised it enough to give me a look.
An ancient man—not a day less than ninety, I guessed—lay within, slightly to one side of the centerline. He was thin and shriveled and had clearly been shriveling for years. There was room enough in the container for him and two more bodies his size. The man’s face was collapsing into his mouth, and I knew without pulling down a lip that the jaws were toothless. The root sockets were probably long gone, smoothed out over the past ten or twenty years, as the bone resorbed and filled them in.
“Looks like he had a long life,” I said.
“His son had a long life,” she replied.
I stepped away, and Helen wiggled the lid back into place, then wheeled the gurney to the gaping maw of the furnace. “Here,” I said, “let me give you a hand with that.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she said. “I do this five or six times a day. It’s not that hard. The gurney has rollers built into the top.” She gave a shove to the end of the box, and it slid easily until it was halfway off the gurney and tipped down onto the floor of the furnace. She shoved a little harder, and I heard the bottom of the box scraping along the concrete.
Once the box was all the way in, she removed the cotter pin and pressed the button that lowered the furnace door. She pushed a glowing red button labeled AFTERBURNER, and I heard a low whoosh, like a gas fireplace lighting up. “I knew fighter planes had afterburners,” I said. “I didn’t know cremation furnaces had ’em, too. Is it faster than the speed of sound?”
She rolled her eyes at the joke.
“Seriously, though, why do you turn on the afterburner first?”
“This is a secondary burner, just before the exhaust flue,” she explained. “Makes sure everything’s burned before the gases go out the stack. If TVA’s power plants burned coal this cleanly, you wouldn’t see all that haze between downtown Knoxville and the mountains.”