“You were unconscious when we found you, Marcus. We didn’t know if you were going to make it.”
“But I didn’t get to see him.”
“You can still do that. The remains are at Johnson’s funeral home. I’ll take you over when we get you discharged.”
“But I’ll never see the way he was when—”
“They took lots of in situ photographs before anything got touched or moved. Charlie Coggins had the presence of mind to secure the site. You can look at the photographs. And the bones will be laid out in their anatomical order.”
“Why is he at the funeral home?”
“The forensic team finished their work on him there. It was relatively quick. Dates and times matched. They concluded he was hiding in that enclosure, probably from the hurricane, and then the fire started, perhaps from his cigarette dropped on the porch, and he died from asphyxiation while waiting out the hurricane. When the cousin arrives, she will be the one to decide where the remains go.”
“What cousin?” I couldn’t believe the unfairness of it all. I was the one who found him and then they went ahead and did everything without telling me!
“Well, she’s that cousin of Mr. Dace, very old now, the one who settled out of court with the Barbours fifty years ago. The Barbour family was able to provide her old address and it turned out she was still living there. Her DNA matched up with the remains and now Charlie Coggins is flying her in from Louisville at his expense.”
“Why is he doing that?”
“She says she won’t be at peace till she sees the boy. Or what is left of him.”
“Lachicotte, I need to see him. This is important. Can’t you get that surgeon to discharge me?”
“It’s not the surgeon who’s keeping you here, Marcus. They need to make sure you’re not a danger to yourself before they sign you out. If you had swallowed a few more of those tablets, we would be making arrangements for your burial, too.”
So again I was trapped in my old situation. The wheels of the law had to turn first. Nevertheless, I felt robbed, betrayed. This was far worse than missing out on the hatchlings’ boil. Unfairly, I measured Lachicotte against William, my ad litem, who had immediately understood I needed to see my mom’s body before it went to the undertaker.
“Can you at least tell me how we looked when you found us?”
“How you looked?”
“How we looked. After the firemen had knocked down the wall, and you first saw me and him. What did you see?”
“I saw only you, Marcus.”
“But what about him?”
“You were as much as I could take in. We didn’t know if you were going to make it.”
“I can’t believe nobody bothered to tell me.”
“Well, I do have some good news. Your friend Coral Upchurch, who’s on the floor below you, is recovering. She’s going home tomorrow, weak but on the mend.”
***
It was the kind of human interest story everybody loves. Long ago mystery solved—and on the fiftieth anniversary of Hurricane Hazel, when the mystery had begun. A local boy falling on top of a skeleton boy who had been sitting cramped in a forgotten closet in an abandoned cottage built two hundred years ago. It had all the elements. It had “legs,” as the newspeople say. It had staying power. Today I can tap in “Johnny Dace” and see those in situ images photographed by the forensics team. There are his bones huddled upright in a corner of a forgotten closet, waiting to be found. I was identified as the boy who discovered him. Marcus Harshaw, age eleven, a resident of the island.
We buried him in the cemetery of Lachicotte’s church. Coral Upchurch was present in her wheelchair, attended by Roberta Dumas. The DNA cousin, in her eighties, took the spotlight—for a while. Her life had clearly been lived at the other end of the spectrum from Coral Upchurch’s and she had not held up as well. But she could still walk and talk and had some faded Polaroid snapshots of Johnny Dace in her purse. She blossomed under the attention of the newspeople until the discrepancies in her narrative piled too high and toppled. The Polaroids were of a much younger Johnny, a frowning child who was too much for his parents to handle; they had sent him off several times to a facility for wayward youth, but kept bringing him home to try again. In a later version of the cousin’s, he was a smart, sweet boy if you knew how to handle him and had been like a son to her. Finally, in her toppling version, Elvis himself had passed through Louisville and told Johnny Dace, “You could pass as my double.” But the problem was that Elvis had only begun his career the year Johnny Dace went missing in the hurricane.
That was when Charlie Coggins murmured to her that there was just enough time before her departing flight for him to show her the cottage where her only remaining kin had spent the last fifty years. Refusing the realtor’s offer to pay for transferring the remains back to Kentucky, she signed papers releasing him to be buried on the island on the condition that she would not be liable for any of the funeral and burial expenses.
Before Johnny’s burial, Lachicotte took me to the funeral home to see his remains. He was five-feet-eight-and-a-half, had bow legs, and large hands. I had hoped to check out the broken and badly repaired nose, but the nose was gone. They allowed me to run my hand along the long tibia bones.
We ordered his stone from the monument place Lachicotte’s family always used. It was down the coast, near Georgetown, and we drove there in a 1936 Bentley Derby touring car Lachicotte had just taken on. We had the top down, or rather Lachicotte was having a new top made, and my hair whipped in the coastal wind the way Pickett’s did when he was arriving in Ed’s Jeep to destroy my evening. The steering was on the right side of the Bentley and we’d moved the passenger seat back all the way to accommodate my straight-leg cast.
At the monument place, a very tan young woman in shorts and a T-shirt was at work outdoors chiseling a stone for a monk who had died in 1904. After Hurricane Floyd had flooded the monastery in 1999, she explained, all the monks’ remains had to be dug up and relocated to a new cemetery built on higher ground. New stones were needed because marble crumbled when you tried to move it. “This is the longest order we’ve ever taken on. Eighty-one stones! We’ve been working on them for almost five years. We have to do it between other jobs, but the abbot said that was fine, because monks were taught to live in a different kind of time anyway.”
Lachicotte was fascinated, and so she took us around to the back where some finished stones were stacked on wooden trays, waiting for delivery to the monastery. All the stones were the same modest rectangular size and carved exactly alike. IHS at the top, then underneath the monk’s name, below that, his dates of birth, profession, and death.
“What’s IHS?” I asked.