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Helen had started out more than twenty years earlier working as a secretary in the office of a company that made metal cemetery vaults. Several years later, when the owner of the vault company branched out and opened a crematorium, he trained Helen to run it. After serving a two-year apprenticeship, she took the examination to become a licensed funeral director. Although she passed the exam with flying colors, the licensing board turned her down-they’d never licensed a female funeral director, nor anyone who’d apprenticed at an independent crematorium. After two years of training, Helen wasn’t willing to take rejection lying down. She hired an attorney, who threatened to sue the licensing board for discrimination. A few weeks later, she received a letter containing her funeral director’s license.
In its first year of operation, the crematorium had burned only four bodies, leaving her plenty of time for secretarial work. This year, she said, the number would top four hundred. Business was so good, in fact, that the crematorium was beginning an enormous expansion. She raised the blinds behind her desk and pointed out the window at a fresh excavation and enormous concrete slab. Within a year, she told me, they’d be moving to a new building five times this size. It would be equipped with a chapel for services, a viewing window, and a remote-control ignition switch, so a family member could push a button to start the cremation. The old building would remain a crematorium, but it would shift from cremating humans to cremating pets, a business that was growing by leaps and bounds. She pulled out a binder filled with architectural drawings and floor plans of the new building. I noticed it would have three furnaces rather than just two; I also noticed a large room labeled COOLER, which I asked about. The cooler would be able to hold up to sixteen bodies, she told me proudly.
“Sixteen? That’s a lot of bodies,” I said. “Nearly as many as the Regional Forensic Center can hold. You’re not planning to start killing people off, are you?”
She laughed. “I don’t have to. I’ve had as many as six or seven bodies come through here in a day,” she said. “Not often, but when it happens, I need someplace to put them. Can you imagine four or five bodies stacked up in here on a day like today?” She had a point there. The small building was air-conditioned, but between the blistering sun outside and the ovens inside, the temperature was probably close to ninety. She did need a cooler, and if business was growing like she said it was, it might not be long before she’d have that cooler filled. I was impressed with the operation, and when I said so, she beamed.
“If you’d told me twenty years ago this is what I’d be doing, I wouldn’t have believed you,” she said. “But here I am, and I love what I do.”
“I’m sometimes surprised where I ended up, too,” I said, “but I wouldn’t change it. I’m never bored, I’m sometimes able to do a good deed for victims or families, and I get to meet interesting people like you.”
“Let’s go take a look,” she said. She led me through a connecting door into the crematorium’s work space, which was every bit as spartan and utilitarian as the outside had hinted it would be. This garage was a two-furnace garage, the ovens parked side by side, their stainless-steel fronts bristling with dials and knobs and lights. She pushed a button on the furnace on the left, and a thick door slid up, revealing an arched interior about eight feet long, two feet high, and three feet wide. The interior walls of the furnace were brick-a pale, soot-stained brick, similar to what I’d seen pottery kilns made of.
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.”
She tapped her finger on a small glass disk set into the door, no bigger than the security peephole in the front door of my house. “You can watch through there if you want,” she said, “but you won’t be able to see much. Mostly just flame.” She reached for a glowing green button labeled PRE-IGNITION, and I put one eye to the little window. A jet of yellow flame, roughly the size of the Olympic torch, blossomed from the hole in the roof of the furnace and flickered downward, flaring outward when it hit the lid of the box. Within moments the cardboard began to burn and the flame spread. “Okay,” I heard Helen say, “now I’m going to switch on the combustion burner.” The bloom of yellow flame suddenly turned blue and filled the entire upper portion of the chamber. I watched, mesmerized, as the cardboard collapsed, revealing the contours of the frail body. And then, for a brief moment before flame and smoke obscured my view altogether, I saw the withered flesh catch fire, and somehow it struck me as a cleansing, even a holy thing. “Ashes to
ashes, dust to dust,” I heard myself whisper. It was an impromptu benediction from an unlikely source-me, a doubt-filled scientist who dealt daily in death-given to a total stranger, a man I had never seen before, and whom no one would ever see again.
After a moment I stepped back and turned to Helen. She was watching me closely, I noticed, and she seemed slightly embarrassed when I caught her looking. It was as if she knew she’d intruded on some private exchange. “Funny thing,” I said. “I see bodies all the time-I actually burned a couple of corpses last week as a research experiment-but this was different. This was a person.” She nodded. I could see that she understood what I meant and that I’d eased her embarrassment by what I’d said.
“Do you want to see the ‘after’ version now?” She pointed at the other furnace, and I stepped four feet to the right. She opened the door, and I felt a blast of heat as the door slid down. A human skeleton was laid out in perfect anatomical order on the concrete floor. The bones were grayish white and brittle-looking, completely calcined. Except for the skull, which had rolled to one side and cracked into several large pieces, and the rib cage, which had caved in like the timbers of a shipwreck, the bones remained intact and in their original positions. “I couldn’t have laid it out better myself,” I said.
She smiled. “Most people think that when a body’s cremated, it comes out of the furnace as cremains,” she said. “They have no idea that it’s still a recognizable skeleton.” She reached in with a gloved hand, pulled out a humerus from the upper arm, and gestured with it. “I always find it fascinating to look at the skeletons,” she said. “Every one is different. This one, for example, was a very large woman. About three hundred pounds. I had to really watch the oven temperature on her.”
I thought for a moment. “Because of the fat?”
“Right. I learned my lesson on that a long time ago. About six months after I started working here, I had a huge guy come through-he weighed five hundred pounds at least and barely fit in the furnace. This was late one afternoon in December, a few days before Christmas, and it was getting dark around five o’clock. Well, about thirty minutes after I got him going, one of the guys from the place across the street came knocking on the door, asked me if I knew my exhaust stack was red hot. I went out to look, and it was glowing cherry red.”
“A five-hundred-pound body’s going to have two or three hundred pounds of fat on it,” I said. “That’s gonna make one heck of a grease fire once it melts and ignites.”
“You can say that again,” she said. “I came running back in and checked the temperature gauge. Normally these furnaces run at sixteen to eighteen hundred degrees. That guy pushed it up to nearly three thousand. I’m just lucky the roof didn’t catch fire. I sure learned my lesson from that.”
“So how do you keep that from happening again?”
“The really obese ones, I get ’em going, then throttle the gas back. Once the fat’s burning, that pretty much keeps them going for a while. Then, after about forty-five minutes-once I see the temperature drop below sixteen hundred-I relight the combustion burner for another fifteen or twenty minutes. That’s enough to bring ’em on home.”
“Speaking of obese bodies burning,” I said, “you’ll be interested in this.” There weren’t many people I could say something like that to in all seriousness. “We had a master’s student a few years ago who did a thesis on spontaneous combustion.”
She guffawed. “What did she read for research,” she hooted, “the Weekly World News?”
“Actually, it was a really good thesis,” I said. “One of the best I’ve ever read. It’s not just supermarket tabloid readers who believe in spontaneous combustion. I’ve talked to several police officers and firefighters who swear they’ve seen cases of spontaneous combustion-bodies that were thoroughly incinerated but with very little damage to the surrounding structure, or even the furniture.” Helen nodded brightly, and I could tell she was intrigued. “Anyhow, Angi-the graduate student-found that in all these cases where someone appeared to have burst into flame, the individuals were overweight, and what had occurred was a low-temperature fire. The bodies smoldered for a day or two, without ever burning hot enough to cause the fire to spread.”
“So what caused them to burn?”
“Many of them were smokers, so they probably dropped a lit cigarette onto their clothes,” I said. “One woman got her sleeve too close to the burner of a gas stove. The combustion wasn’t spontaneous; there had to be an ignition source. Alcohol was another common factor-some of them were drunk, others were asleep, so they didn’t notice or react fast enough when their clothes or their bed caught fire. They probably died of smoke inhalation pretty quickly, but the fire kept going. As their fat melted, the clothing soaked up the grease, just like the wick of a candle or a lamp.”
“You’re right,” she said, “that is interesting.”
“But I’m getting you sidetracked,” I said. “Show me what you do next.”
“It’s pretty simple,” she said. She lifted a long-handled tool from a pair of brackets attached to the side of the furnace. It was like a cross between a rake and a hoe: welded onto the handle was a wide metal flange, maybe ten inches wide by two inches tall. She maneuvered it through the mouth of the furnace, stretched it all the way to the back-down beyond the woman’s feet-and began raking the bones forward. When they reached the front of the furnace, they tumbled down into a wide hopper, which I hadn’t noticed until now. She made several passes with the rake-like tool, then switched to a shop broom, with a broad head and stiff bristles. Once she was satisfied she’d swept everything into the hopper, she bent down and removed a square metal bucket from beneath the hopper.
She carried the bucket to a workbench along one wall of the building and tipped out the contents onto a workbench there. Next she grasped a U-shaped handle, which was attached to a block of metal a few inches square. With it she began crushing the bones, almost as if she were making mashed potatoes. After reducing the bones to pieces no more than an inch or two at the biggest, she dragged the block back and forth through the bone fragments. Soon its sides and bottom bristled with industrial-strength metal staples, and I realized it was a magnet.
“Where’d all those staples come from?”
“The bottom of the shipping container,” she said. “The sides and top are cardboard, but the bottom is plywood, stapled to the cardboard.”
“Makes sense to use plywood,” I said. “You don’t want the bottom getting soggy and letting the body fall out.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Most people wouldn’t think about that, but you understand because you’ve seen what happens when bodies start to decompose.”
“Doesn’t take more than a day or two for fluids to start leaching out,” I agreed. “You fish out the staples so they don’t go back to the family?”
“That,” she said, “and so they don’t dull the blades of the processor. I’ll show you that in a minute.” She stirred around a bit more, snagging a zipper and a few buttons. “Here you go, a Cracker Jack prize,” she said. She fished out a short metal bracket drilled with four holes, a scorched screw threaded through each hole. “She must have had a plate in her arm or leg,” she said.
“Do you get a lot of orthopedic hardware?”
“More and more, seems like.”
“As the Baby Boomers start to die off,” I said, “I bet you’ll see even more. All those joggers and tennis players and downhill skiers going in for new parts. What do you do with stuff like that?”
“We bury it,” she said, “unless the family asks for it.”
“So if somebody had a pair of artificial knees and the family wanted them, you’d send ’em back?”
“Absolutely,” she said. She took a hand broom and swept the crushed bones into a small mound, then unhooked a large metal dustpan from a peg above the workbench. Bracing the bone fragments with the broom, she slid the dustpan underneath, scooping nearly everything into it with one quick, efficient push. Then
she slid it backward about a foot and carefully swept the remaining dust into it.
At the left-hand end of the workbench was a large metal pot, the size and shape of a restaurant kitchen’s stockpot. “This is the processor,” she said. “You see the blades there in the bottom?” I looked into the vessel and saw a thin, flat bar attached to a bolt at the center. The pot was roughly fifteen inches in diameter; the bar reached about halfway to the sides of the pot. Both ends of the bar had shorter bars attached to what appeared to be bearings or pivots. “If you flip that switch, you’ll see how it works.” She nodded toward a toggle on the wall just above the container. I flipped it up, and the blades jolted into motion. I caught a brief glimpse of the shorter bars flipping outward toward the rim, and then the whole whirling assembly disappeared, the way an airplane propeller disappears at full throttle. I flipped the switch off, and the blades spun down, the centrifugal force keeping the shorter bars extended until the assembly coasted to a stop.
“That blade assembly looks like what I feel when I jam my hand down into my garbage disposal to untangle the dishrag,” I said, giving an involuntary shudder. “You could sure lose a hand in there fast.” She nodded again, then tipped the dustpan into the pot. She started an exhaust fan above the processor, then switched on the blades. A plume of dust eddied upward as the blades chewed through the chunks of bone, sending a swirl of powder and small bits of bone up the sides of the vessel. After a half minute or so, she switched off the motor, and the pulverized material settled, the blades sending smaller and smaller waves spinning through the powder as they slowed. She grasped the two handles of the pot, gave a twist to release it from the central shaft that came up from the motor underneath, and hoisted the pot up to the workbench. Then she tipped it into another hopper, this one emptying into a bag of clear, heavy plastic that was cinched to its spout. She tapped the side of the hopper to coax the last bit of powder to fall, then unhooked the bag, dropped in a small metal identification tag, and sealed the bag with a twist tie.
