Jefferson Bass
Jordan's Stormy Banks
Dedication
To all the brave men and women who have stood, and have marched, and have strived — and who still strive — for justice and equality.
Epigraph
“Civilization… has spread a veneer over the surface of the soft-shelled animal known as man. It is a very thin veneer; but so wonderfully is man constituted that he squirms on his bit of achievement and believes he is garbed in armor-plate. Yet man today is the same man that drank from his enemy’s skull in the dark German forests, that sacked cities, and stole his women from neighboring clans like any howling aborigine… Starve him, let him miss six meals, and see gape through the veneer the hungry maw of the animal beneath. Get between him and the female of his kind upon whom his mating instinct is bent, and see his eyes blaze like an angry cat’s, hear in his throat the scream of wild stallions, and watch his fists clench like an orangutan’s… It requires a slightly different stick to scrape [the veneer] off. The raw animals beneath are identical.”
Perimortem, Part I
perimortem (adjective): at or around the time of death
The flames flared within the darkness, swirling red and orange and oily black, as the cross caught fire on the courthouse lawn. Lit and shadowed by the fiery undulations, as if in a nightmare, I saw angry faces, oiled guns, and the tight, heavy coils of a noose.
But it was no nightmare. I was wide-awake, it was Christmas Eve, and it was not entirely clear to me who would be found swaying from the noose by the light of Christmas morning: the black man huddled inside the Morgan County jail, or the meddlesome scientist standing on the building’s steps, his back—my back — pressed tight against the wooden door.
How had it come to this? Was I wrong about the century I inhabited? Had I somehow been transported back in time a hundred years, from 1990 to 1890? How had matters come to this — for the man behind bars, and especially for me? Had I spoken out of turn, or rushed in where angels fear to tread? Maybe I should have stayed in Kansas instead of taking the job in Tennessee.
Or maybe it was all just because of the memo. That damned memo…
1
Antemortem
antemortem (adjective): occurring before the time of death
I stared at the stinky, sodden mess on the stainless-steel gurney, my eyes watering and my brain reeling. “What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked the man who’d just delivered the mess, which was a corpse he’d pulled from the back of a hearse and wheeled into the basement of Neyland Stadium. Above our heads reared the stadium itself, the University of Tennessee’s massive shrine to college football. Around us — in the dingy basement room I’d grandly named the Osteology Laboratory — clustered a few government-surplus lab tables and a few thousand boxes of Indian bones, so recently arrived and unloaded that they’d not even been shelved yet.
The hearse driver, who worked for a funeral home in Crossville, seventy miles west of Knoxville, shrugged. He pulled a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and glanced at the wording. “I guess you’re supposed to do whatever the Chief M.E. says you’ll do,” he said. He handed the page to me. “Welcome to Tennessee,” he said, then spun on his heel and scuttled away in the hearse before I could stop him.
I read the memo with a mixture of puzzlement and rising alarm.
Date: July 1, 1990
To: Tennessee Medical Examiners
From: Dr. Gerald Francis, M.D., Chief Medical Examiner
Subject: Dr. Bill Brockton, State Forensic Anthropologist
I am pleased to announce that I have appointed Dr. Bill Brockton to the newly created position of Tennessee State Forensic Anthropologist, effective immediately.
Dr. Brockton has just been hired as chairman of the Anthropology Department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He comes to UT after ten years on the faculty at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, as well as ten summers of field work in South Dakota, where he and his students excavated thousands of eighteenth and nineteenth century Arikara Indian skeletons. Dr. Brockton received his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania; his mentor, Dr. Wilton Krogman, was one of the nation’s foremost physical anthropologists, sometimes called “the Sherlock Holmes of bones.”
As State Forensic Anthropologist, Dr. Brockton is available to examine any unidentified remains found in your county, as well as identified corpses that have, or might have, skeletal trauma. I am confident that Dr. Brockton will be a strong and valuable addition to our staff, and I trust that you will all extend him a warm Tennessee welcome.
Cc: Tennessee District Attorneys General
Tennessee Sheriffs
Dr. Bill Brockton, Ph.D.
I reread the memo. Three times. “Crap, Gerry,” I muttered, as if Gerry — Chief Medical Examiner Gerald Francis — could hear me, despite the fact that he was 180 miles away, in Nashville. “Why didn’t you run that past me before you sent it out all over the damn state?” Thanks to the memo, every M.E. and D.A. and sheriff, in however-the-hell-many counties my new home state had, had gotten the wrong idea about me.
The appointment itself was no surprise — I’d agreed to take the post — and it wasn’t the memo’s description of my education and experience that had me fretting. When it came to analyzing skeletal remains and skeletal trauma, I felt competent and even confident; I had, after all, studied some ten thousand skeletons over the past dozen years, half of them in the dusty collections of the Smithsonian Institution, half of them in the fine-grained soil of the Great Plains, where I’d found and excavated them just ahead of rising waters, on rivers newly dammed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “The legions of the dammed,” one of my waggish students had dubbed the five thousand or so Indian skeletons I’d saved from watery graves.
No, what troubled me about the memo was its promise of what I could do — what I would do — for the state’s far-flung M.E.’s: “examine any unidentified remains,” as well as “identified corpses that have, or might have, skeletal trauma.”
I’d consulted with law enforcement investigators for years in Kansas, before moving to Tennessee; that consulting work, in fact, was how Gerry Francis knew me — from a case I’d described at a forensic conference a few years before. My collaborations with law enforcement had begun by accident, or, more accurately, by happenstance: One summer early in my teaching career at Kansas, as my students and I were pulling Indian bones from the shoreline, a South Dakota sheriff’s deputy had jounced to a stop at the dig site and asked if I’d be willing to examine a skeleton a rancher had found in a dry wash on his property and tell him whatever I could about it. “A skeleton’s a skeleton,” I’d told the deputy. “Sure, let’s go.”