East Point Pallbearer

The fluorescent tubes above the prep table had a tick in them, a faint arrhythmic pulse that Jeremiah Wade had learned to ignore the way you learn to ignore the planes. Every ninety seconds another one climbed out of Hartsfield, shaking the roof joists of Bell & Sons Funeral Home until the formaldehyde bottles trembled on their steel shelf. After three months on the job, Jem didn’t hear it anymore. He heard the drain instead—its slow consumptive gurgle, the sound of a building digesting.

Quarter to midnight, Thursday, August 1988. Jem was mopping. The mop was older than he was and no amount of bleach could save it, but Vernon Bell did not replace things that still technically worked.

Jem wrung it out and leaned it against the aspirator cart. He was twenty-two, built narrow through the chest, with hands his mother said were wasted on the dead. She had wanted him to play piano at church, and for a while he had—badly, stubbornly, sitting on the bench at Greater Hope every Wednesday until the choir director gently suggested he find another ministry. That failure had never fully left him. He still tapped his fingers against flat surfaces when he was thinking, playing songs only he could hear, songs that came out wrong. He had taken the apprenticeship because the dead didn’t care if you had talent. They just needed you to be steady.

He was reaching for the light switch when headlights swept the back lot.

Not a hearse. Not the boxy white van from Grady Memorial. This was a dark panel van, no markings, the kind you’d see parked outside a contractor’s warehouse on Sylvan Road. It backed up to the service entrance with its lights off and sat there, diesel engine knocking.

Then Vernon Bell’s Cadillac pulled in beside it.

Vernon never came in after hours for routine work. He came in for viewings, consultations with pastors, handshakes with insurance adjusters and county clerks. He did not come in at midnight wearing a windbreaker.

Jem heard the service door open. Vernon’s baritone, then two other voices, lower, quicker. Boots on linoleum. The plastic rustle of a body bag being shifted between hands trying not to drop it.

He stepped into the corridor. Vernon was directing two men Jem had never seen. They were white, thick-necked, dressed in dark canvas that wouldn’t show stains. One smelled like river mud and Marlboros. The other had motor oil on his forearm in a smear so fresh it caught the hall light.

They carried the bag past Jem without acknowledgment and laid it on the prep table he had just cleaned.

Vernon looked at him.

“Start prep tonight,” he said.

Jem glanced at the intake clipboard. Blank. No name, no case number, no coroner’s seal, no transport authorization.

“I don’t have paperwork on this one, Mr. Bell.”

“Paperwork’s coming.”

“From who?”

Vernon studied him for one full plane overhead.

“Prep him, Jem. No viewing. Direct disposition.”

The two men left. Their van pulled out with headlights still off, turning south toward the river. Vernon followed Jem into the prep room, glanced at the bag, nodded once, and walked out. The Cadillac started. The lot went dark.

— — —

He unzipped it slowly, with both hands, letting the teeth part in a whisper. The smell hit first: river water, sour mud, and beneath it the copper sweetness of pooled blood.

The young man inside was Black, early twenties, built strong through the shoulders the way men get who load trucks or swing sledgehammers for pay. His face might have been handsome a day ago. Now the left side was swollen from temple to jaw, a deep mottled bruise with yellow margins where the blood was already breaking down. His lips were parted. Silt had dried in the creases of his mouth.

Jem pulled on gloves.

He cataloged the way Vernon had taught him—top to bottom, anterior then posterior. But this body wasn’t whispering. It was shouting.

Ligature marks at both wrists. Deep, circumferential, the kind made by zip ties pulled tight enough to cut past dermis.

Bruises on the ribs, left side—four, five distinct impacts, boot or baton, not a fall.

Broken fingernails on the right hand. Two torn to the quick, one missing entirely. Beneath the remaining nails, dark crescents that weren’t river mud.

A small precise cut behind the left ear.

And the silt.

Jem aspirated carefully. When he pressed on the chest and tilted the head, brown water seeped from the nostrils and mouth—not surface water clinging to a dumped body, but deep water, water that had been breathed. River sediment packed into the bronchial folds. This man had inhaled the Chattahoochee. He had been alive when he went in.

Jem stepped back. He was tapping his fingers against his thigh, playing nothing, the way he did when his nerves outran his thoughts.

No wallet. No ID. But in the seam of the bag, caught in the zipper’s teeth, he found a thin brass church medallion on a broken chain. He held it under the light. St. Luke AME — East Point. On the back, scratched into the brass: Lee.

He held it for a long time. Then he put it in his pocket.

— — —

Vernon arrived at seven the next morning. He found Jem in the break room with a cup of coffee that had gone cold two hours ago.

“How far along?”

“Arterial’s done. I stopped before cavity.”

“Finish today. Cremation’s scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.”

“Mr. Bell. That body didn’t come from a hospital. There’s no death certificate, no—”

Vernon poured himself coffee. He did it slowly, a small performance of calm.

“Jeremiah. You know what city business is?”

“No sir.”

“City business is what happens when the official way of doing things doesn’t accommodate how things actually are.” He sipped. “Indigents. Confidential police matters. Family situations. You’d be surprised how many people die in ways that embarrass somebody.”

“That man was murdered.”

Vernon set his cup down. He didn’t raise his voice.

“City business keeps the lights on, Jem. Keeps the machine running. Keeps your check clearing.” He gestured vaguely at the building—casket showroom, chapel, utility meters. “You understand what I’m saying.”

“I’m not asking about how the business works. I’m asking about this one body.”

“And I’m telling you not to.”

He left. Jem sat there. A plane climbed. The building hummed. He thought about going back to the prep room and finishing the job and not thinking about it again. He thought about it for a long time. He almost convinced himself. The cavity work was straightforward. He could do it with his eyes half-closed, pack the viscera, suture, dress the body in whatever Vernon provided, and go home. Clock out. Sleep. Come back Friday and do it again with someone who had paperwork and a name and a family waiting in the front parlor. That was the shape of a life. That was what his mother meant when she said trade.

He sat there another twenty minutes before he went to find Laverne.

— — —

Laverne Goss had worked at Bell & Sons for nineteen years. She was sixty-one, thin as a hymnal, and she wore reading glasses on a beaded chain that clicked against her sternum when she walked. She knew every funeral director, every pastor, and every shortcut in Fulton County.

Jem found her in the flower room, trimming carnation stems.

“Laverne. You know a family named Booker? East Point, near St. Luke AME?”

Her shears stopped.

“Why you asking?”

“Just a name I came across.”

She looked at him over her glasses.

“Leon Booker. Played drums in the youth choir. Disappeared about a week ago.” She trimmed another stem. “His sister’s been taping flyers everywhere. Police told the family he probably ran off.”

Jem said nothing.

“Jem.” Her voice dropped. “Don’t let the dead recruit you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you got a trade. A future.” She set the shears down. “It means I’ve worked here nineteen years and I’ve kept working here nineteen years and there’s a reason for both of those facts.” She picked the shears back up. “The last apprentice who asked questions was a girl named Denise. Smart. Good hands. She asked Vernon about a body that came in wrong. Two weeks later her locker was cleaned out. Vernon said she’d moved to Augusta. Nobody I know ever heard from her again.” She cut a stem. “I’m not telling you what that means. I’m telling you what happened.”

She went back to the carnations. The conversation was over.

He found the flyer that evening at the Colony Square Laundromat on Main Street. Leon “Lee” Booker, age twenty-three, last seen August 9th. The photo showed a young man with a wide grin and a fade haircut, leaning against a chain-link fence in sunlight.

Below the photo, in handwriting that pressed hard enough to dent the paper: Please call Vanessa Booker and a phone number.

Jem stood at the payphone outside for five minutes before he dialed. The phone rang six times and he almost hung up.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice, young, stretched thin.

“Miss Booker? My name is Jem. I think I might know something about your brother.”

Silence. Then, carefully: “People have called before. One man wanted money.”

“I don’t want money. Can I meet you somewhere?”

They met the next afternoon at a diner on Cleveland Avenue. Vanessa Booker was maybe twenty, with braids pulled back tight and circles under her eyes so dark they looked drawn on. She ordered coffee and didn’t touch it. She sat with her hands flat on the table and watched Jem the way you watch someone who might be about to lie to you.

He told her part of it. He said he had reason to believe Lee might have been brought to a funeral home without proper documentation. He said it carefully, and even as he said it he heard how thin it sounded.

“Which funeral home?”

“I can’t say yet.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Both, right now.”

She studied him. Then she pulled a folded sheet of notebook paper from her purse and smoothed it on the table—a list in tight handwriting, names and dates and phone numbers, everything she’d already tried.

“Lee was working cash jobs near the river,” she said. “Connected to the airport expansion—hauling debris, running equipment. Off the books.” She tapped the paper. “He told me something was wrong out there. Trucks coming in at night that didn’t match any manifest. He said a foreman caught him paying attention and told him to forget it.”

“Did he?”

“Lee didn’t forget anything. It’s why he was a good drummer and a terrible employee.” Her voice didn’t break, but something in it compressed. “Three days later he was gone.”

“And the police?”

“A detective came to the house. Took notes. Told us Lee probably went to Alabama looking for work.” She looked at Jem. “His name was Harlan.”

— — —

Detective Royce Harlan came to Bell & Sons two days later. He didn’t call ahead. He was simply in the front parlor when Jem came out of the supply closet—already seated, leafing through a display binder of casket options as though he were shopping.

He was tall, gray at the temples, with a suit that fit just well enough. He smiled when he saw Jem and stood to shake his hand.

“You’re Vernon’s new apprentice. He tells me you’re learning fast.”

“I try.”

“Good trade. Mortuary work.” He walked along the parlor wall, looking at the framed photos of past services, community events, Vernon shaking hands with aldermen. “I was in here last spring for my aunt’s service. Vernon did a beautiful job. You could forget she’d been sick at all.” He straightened a frame that didn’t need straightening. “I come by now and then. Check on things. Neighborhood stuff.”

He sat down again, unhurried.

“How’s the apprenticeship treating you? Vernon keeping you busy?”

“Busy enough.”

“I imagine. This time of year especially.” He looked at the sympathy cards on the display rack, picked one up, read the inside, put it back. “You living with your mother still? Over on—Connally district, right?”

“Nearby.”

“Good area. I know some people over there.” He let that sit. Then he said, conversationally, “I’ve heard your name a few times this week, Jem. Laundromat. Barbershop. People say you’ve been asking around about a missing person.”

Jem said nothing.

“That’s community spirit. I appreciate that. But I want to be honest with you—these things have a way of creating confusion. Families get their hopes up. Details get distorted. And then my phone rings, and I have to spend time sorting out what’s real and what’s well-intentioned but wrong.” He crossed his legs. “You see what I mean.”

“I hear you.”

“Good.” Harlan stood, buttoned his jacket. He paused at the door and looked back. “You know, your mother’s school—Connally Elementary—that’s in my patrol area. I’m over there all the time. PTA, safety walks. It’s a good school. Small enough that everybody knows everybody.” He said it with the warmth of a man praising a neighborhood. “Give her my best.”

He left. A plane climbed. Jem stood in the empty parlor and felt all of it settle into his chest like something swallowed.

— — —

That night Jem stayed late. Vernon was at a deacons’ meeting. Laverne had gone home—but she had left the supply closet unlocked, which she never did, and on the shelf beside the Polaroid camera she had set a fresh pack of film, still in its wrapper.

Jem looked at it for a long time.

He went into Vernon’s office.

The main files were ordinary. But in the bottom drawer of the oak credenza, behind a box of blank death certificates that should not have been blank, he found a composition book. Black-and-white, its pages filled in Vernon’s hand. No full names—initials, dates, codes. J.M., 6/14/86, CD, Riverside. T.W., 11/02/87, CD, Municipal. Sixteen entries across three years.

L.B., 8/12/88, CD, Pending.

Pending. Cremation was tomorrow.

He photographed the pages with the Polaroid. The flash stuttered in the dark office. He went to the prep room and photographed Lee’s wrists, the bruises on his ribs, the cut behind the ear. Then he put the medallion and the photographs in a funeral-home envelope and wrote Vanessa Booker’s name on the outside.

He relabeled Lee’s storage tray. Where Vernon had written John Doe / CD / Direct, Jem wrote Leon Booker, 23, East Point, GA. Notify family. He taped it to the drawer and slid it shut.

It wouldn’t last. Vernon would find it by morning.

He was in the corridor when the chapel lights came on.

Vernon stood in the doorway of the chapel, still wearing his deacon’s suit, tie loosened. He didn’t look angry. He looked tired. That was worse.

“I heard the Polaroid,” Vernon said.

Jem stopped. The envelope was inside his jacket.

“Sit down, Jem.”

“I’m all right standing.”

Vernon leaned against the doorframe. He rubbed his eyes. For a moment he looked like what he was—a sixty-three-year-old man who had been burying people for forty years and had stopped seeing the difference between the various kinds of burial.

“Who are you going to give that to?” His voice was flat now, no performance in it. “Harlan has the case file. The county contracts our cremation. You going to a reporter? A lawyer?” He exhaled. “I’ve watched this before. Somebody young gets righteous. Somebody young thinks the paperwork matters more than the machinery. And then the machinery keeps going and the young person doesn’t work here anymore and nothing changes.”

“Maybe nothing changes.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

“Because his name is Leon Booker and he was twenty-three and he breathed river water and somebody in this building was going to burn him tomorrow and bill the city for it.”

Vernon stared at him. Then he said something Jem hadn’t expected.

“You think I don’t know their names?”

Silence.

“I know their names. Most of them. I know where they came from and I can guess how they got here.” He straightened up. “I’m the one who washes them. I close their mouths and button their shirts and make them look like somebody’s son again instead of what was done to them. That is not nothing.”

“It’s not enough.”

“It’s what there is.”

They stood in the hallway, ten feet apart, with the chapel cross throwing Vernon’s shadow long and thin across the linoleum. Vernon looked at the envelope in Jem’s jacket.

“You walk out with that, you don’t come back. No reference, no license, no apprenticeship. And it won’t just be me. Harlan will know by morning.”

Jem’s fingers were tapping against his thigh. He thought about his mother. He thought about the bench at Greater Hope, playing piano badly, the choir director’s kind voice suggesting he stop. He thought about how he had taken this job because the dead seemed like the one honest thing left, and how stupid that seemed now, and how it also still seemed true.

“Goodnight, Mr. Bell.”

He walked out the service door into the August air—kudzu and exhaust and the warm wet dark pressing in from all sides. He got in his mother’s borrowed Buick and drove to Washington Road.

It was almost two. The porch light was on at Mrs. Booker’s house, the one that had been burning since Lee disappeared. He put the envelope in Vanessa’s mailbox and sat in the car for a while, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, playing nothing, watching the light.

— — —

What happened after was slower and uglier than any version Jem could have narrated cleanly.

Vanessa took the photographs to a lawyer her church knew, a man who worked out of a converted duplex on Campbellton Road and primarily handled evictions. He looked at the Polaroids and the ledger pages and was quiet for a long time. She called the Atlanta Constitution. A reporter listened, took notes, said she’d look into it. Two weeks passed. Vernon had already cremated the body by then—Jem learned this from Laverne, who called him once from a payphone, spoke for forty-five seconds, and said at the end, “The film was for you. Don’t call here.”

Without the body, the photographs became assertions. The ledger pages were copies of a book that no longer existed in Vernon’s credenza. Harlan visited Vanessa once, briefly, at her home, and afterward she stopped sleeping for three days.

But Vanessa did not stop. She gave copies to a county commissioner’s aide, to a woman at the SCLC office, to anyone who would hold still long enough to look. She stood on the steps of the Fulton County courthouse with her mother on a Tuesday when nobody was watching and held a poster-sized picture of Lee’s face. A photographer from a weekly Black paper took her picture. The story ran on page six, four column inches. It was enough to make certain people uncomfortable and not enough to make them afraid.

Harlan was transferred to a desk in property crimes. Vernon’s license was “reviewed,” a word that in municipal language means the file was opened, noted, and closed. The subcontractor near the river shut down one operation and opened another under a different name.

None of it was justice. All of it was what happened instead of nothing.

Eight months later, after the lawyer had leaned on the right people long enough, Lee Booker’s death was reclassified from “undetermined” to “suspicious.” His remains—what cremation had left, which was almost nothing—were released to the family. Vanessa buried an urn at St. Luke AME cemetery under a stone that bore his full name and the words Beloved Son and Brother. It was a small stone. It was a real one.

Jem did not attend the burial. He was in Macon by then, working the stockroom at a building supply company, trying to save enough to re-enroll in mortuary school under a program that didn’t require Bell & Sons on his transcript. His mother had not lost her cafeteria job, though her hours had been cut for three months in a way that was never explained. She told him on the phone that she was proud of him and also that she wished he had done it differently, and he could hear that both things were true and that she would carry both for a long time.

He got his license eventually, in another city, under another man’s teaching. He worked in a funeral home that was smaller and poorer than Bell & Sons, a place where the roof leaked and the hearse had two hundred thousand miles on it, and where every body arrived with paperwork because the owner was a woman who had once told him, “If they come without paper, they don’t come in.”

He kept a composition book. Not Vernon’s kind—no initials, no codes. Just names. Every person who came through his prep room, written in careful ink, first and last, with the date and one word.

Teacher. Mechanic. Drummer. Mother. Child.

He didn’t know if it mattered. He didn’t know if any of it had mattered—the photographs, the flyer, the medallion, Vanessa on the courthouse steps with nobody watching. He knew that Lee Booker had a stone with his name on it in a cemetery in East Point. He knew that was not justice. He knew it was not nothing.

Some nights, finishing late, rinsing instruments under fluorescent light, he’d hear a plane overhead and stop what he was doing. He’d stand there with wet hands, tapping his fingers against the steel edge of the table, playing the same bad songs he’d always played, and he’d listen to the engine climb until it was gone.