narrating the horrors in excruciating medical detail. Bloat, he said, had already plundered the woman’s torso; her gut, having fed on itself for too long, had ruptured right through her clothing. Brown mud leaked from the mouth and ears. Brain, my father said stoically, an early victim to putrefaction. It was with great fear that I looked into the eyes that I had taken for alive, and in a sickening moment I realized that they were alive, in a manner of speaking—each socket was a writhing mess of maggots.
I began specifying—
—the dress bunching around the shriveled bags that used to be breasts—
—tongue and lips inflated by bacteria into grotesque purple fruit—
—but no, please, not here, not now. I concentrated on my father. He was dealing with another ring that wouldn’t dislodge from its puffy finger. He let the hand drop and it smacked into two inches of black slime. We call that coffin liquor, my father said as he reached for his wire cutter, and it’s the result of bacteria in the casket’s vacuum turning the corpse to mud. I watched him take the woman’s left hand. Most of the skin sloughed off in a single sheet like a translucent glove—slip skin, my father assured me, nothing more. He let the skin dissolve into the coffin liquor and regripped the moist green hand. I noted with dull astonishment that the woman’s nails were painted candy pink.
With a brittle crack the finger was severed and my father removed the ring and placed it in his pocket. From his shirt he removed a tiny spool of wire and set about cinching the finger back onto the woman’s hand. The campground rule, he said, twisting tight the wire-ends with needle-nose pliers: leave them in no worse shape than you found them.
To finish the repair he turned the arm over. On the woman’s wrist, a surprise: a gash, beaded with more maggots. It was a suicide wound; now the need to specify pounded at my skull. This boiling pile of meat that used to be a woman was not the result of natural causes but had come to be out of a belief that the world beneath the dirt was better than that beneath the sun. Not true, not true. I wished that Two-Fingered Jesus would hold me again with his ivory arms.
I was ready to throw up. My father heard the choking and commanded me to count the stars. I felt the grass on my back and saw glimmers above but I had forgotten all of my numbers. Monks in the Middle Ages, explained my father, those who were said to have miraculous powers, could allegedly take the graves of saints and bishops and transport them from the subterranean to the celestial, and those stars you are counting are their bodies. I asked what this magic was called. Translation, my father responded, as he did something that caused the corpse to slosh noisily in its puddle. Eventually the term lost its meaning, he continued, and became just another word for what we’re doing right now. Translation.
Why did she kill herself? I found myself asking the question aloud. There was no answer, of course, but my father’s voice was at least soothing. Long ago, he said, suicides were buried outside of town at a crossroads, so that when the tortured soul awoke there was a three-in-four chance she would choose the wrong path home. Even now, my father continued, there are suicide corners in cemeteries, ugly and unkempt areas with bad drainage. Then his tone sharpened. Shakespeare, he said, condemned his characters to death by suicide thirteen times in his plays, and if it was good enough for him, and good enough for your Jesus, then it’s hardly worth getting so riled up about, is it? I searched for Two-Fingered Jesus and wondered if his crucifixion had indeed been a suicide, and if my presence at this open grave was a suicide, too, the self-killing of something important inside of me.
She’s beautiful, said my father. In general suicides are unusually beautiful or unusually ugly—come closer and see. I pressed shut my eyelids. How he could find beauty through the squirming disorder of her face confounded me—but it also humbled me, just a little. I peeked at him and he was waiting with an outstretched hand.
I would not have believed there was room enough for both of us, but somehow my father spidered his body to the woman’s right while I squatted to her left.