The Skeleton Crew (10 page)

To Lori and her siblings, Tent Girl was a scary thing that their dad had found. Todd didn't believe they ever absorbed the tale the way he did: they saw her more as a mystery and he saw her more as a person. Todd knew that even though he was a kid, he was closer than most to the netherworld
of the dead. As a child, he had overheard doctors, in hushed tones, warn his parents he might not survive childhood. Todd didn't find the notion of death particularly alarming. “The way I saw it, I could live here”—he gestured around him—“or there”—in the cemetery with his siblings. He sensed this outlook made him a bit of a freak.

But he couldn't hide his excitement at a magazine article that suggested he might know a dead girl. He did know dead people. He was related to them.

One April day, Todd Matthews and I set out from Livingston in my rented car. In the rural South, it's not uncommon to drive past privately owned cemeteries without ever realizing they're there. Over time, as families move away or die out, vegetation swallows grave markers and blurs the edges of plots. As Todd put it, nature consumes us in more ways than one.

Although Todd isn't crazy about power tools, he swears that as long as he's alive he'll maintain his Tennessee ancestors' plots, where his siblings lie under spare rectangular stones and his beloved grandfather Thomas Clark “Papa” Vaughn, who lived to nearly eighty, shares a stone carved with entwined wedding bands with his first bride, Della Mae.

The cemetery is located squarely in the Bible Belt but the plaque of Della Mae's daddy, Todd's great-grandfather Willie Joe Pryor, is enigmatically engraved with a Star of David. The Conner-Pryor cemetery of Todd's mother's ancestors is tucked into the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains in an area called, depending on whom you ask, Taylors Crossroads or Barnes Ridge, that straddles the border between Overton and Pickett counties.

In the genealogy room of the Overton County Public Library,
a compact, graying man introduced himself as Elmo C. Garrett.
Five decades ago, Garrett's grandparents and Todd's great-grandparents lived less than a mile apart. Everyone was acquainted with—and very likely related to—­everyone else. Garrett recalled men with names like Willis “Scissors” Clark, Herman “Terrapin” Holt, “Ticky Joe,” and “Bigun” Johnson who'd gather at the general store, spit tobacco juice into a can, play checkers, whittle,
trade knives, and wager on whose glass Coca-Cola bottle was stamped by the most distant manufacturing plant. Women came in to buy dry goods, sacks of dried beans, and cured hams; they supplied Livingston markets with locally picked strawberries and wild blackberries. Almost everybody grew and sold tobacco.

Some New Yorkers, like me, head outside city limits and immediately envision ax murderers lurking behind trees and secreting themselves in bushes. Todd reinforced my urban anxieties by describing middle Tennesee's car-swallowing sinkholes that unexpectedly open up in the pavement, tornadoes with deadly winds and flying debris, and venomous copperheads and cottonmouths that slither underfoot and lurk in caves. Poisonous hemlocks grow taller than a man. Todd called it the land of the lost.

We pulled over next to a farm gate of tubular metal struts latched to wood posts. An adjacent field had been recently mowed, the brown hay neatly rolled like enormous rugs. Strands of barbed wire encircled a half acre where the descendants of John William Pryor, Armitage Conner, and others are buried beneath small granite and limestone slabs. Native American graves scattered helter-skelter were marked only with flat rocks, mossy and lichen-covered, that looked like a garden stepping-stone path. I glanced over at Todd, picking out traces of Cherokee in his mocha-brown eyes, his prominent cheekbones.

There were limestone, shale, and sandstone markers buffed blank by decades of rain and wind and positioned like a drunken game of dominoes—an attempt, Todd suspected, to point them east, the direction from which Jesus is predicted to return. The cemetery was located on an old piece of hallowed ground where Todd's mother's family had always been buried, and where he expected to be buried.

During Todd's childhood, on Sundays after church the whole family headed to the cemetery. While his father maneuvered an old-fashioned push lawn mower around the stones, Todd and his cousins played tic-tac-toe with broken shards of yellow sandstone. If they were lucky, they found shiny hunks of quartz that could pass as precious diamonds, or tiny woodpecker eggs in a nest in a hollowed-out fence post.

Now, among the manicured grass plots, Todd stopped before two small stones of polished granite set flat in the earth next to a few stems
of iris in a Mason jar. An angel, hands clasped and bordered by flowers, is carved on one of the rectangles along with “Baby Sue Ann Matthews B&D April 17, 1972” and beneath that: “Pray the Lord my soul to keep.” The stone next to it says only
GREGORY KENNETH MATTHEWS NOV. 21, 1979, NOV. 22, 1979
in bold capital letters outlined with a thin black rule. If someone asked Todd how many brothers and sisters he has, in his head he says two brothers and a sister. Out loud, he says one brother.

In contrast to Todd's lovingly maintained family plot are the nation's enormous, anonymous potter's fields where the unidentified are often interred. The New Testament named the first potter's field. Judas, to make amends, surrendered to the chief priests the thirty pieces of silver he had collected for betraying Jesus. They bought a plot of land in the valley of Hinnom near Jerusalem where potters once scraped up clay. The land was useless for farming. Strangers and foreigners got buried in the red soil also known as Aceldama, Aramaic for “field of blood.”

It was only from the early modern period onward that we began to shield ourselves from death. Bodies started to be masked, shrouded, hidden in coffins, and buried deep in the earth. It wasn't until the nineteenth century that coming into contact with decomposition was recognized as a public health risk. A physical and symbolic separation ensued between the living and the dead.

Potter's fields of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were slivers of existing church graveyards or community burial grounds designated for paupers, foreigners, slaves, prisoners, and the unidentified. By the 1800s, every major city—San Francisco, Philadelphia, Memphis, Cincinnati, Omaha, New York—had its own separate cemeteries devoted to the unidentified dead. Two men are listed in Tombstone, Arizona's Boot Hill cemetery as “Hung Mexicans,” with no date or details.

Section H of the Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery
contains seventy-eight people identified as “unknown” or “Unknown German Man.” The paupers' section includes three mass graves with the remains of 355 people whose bodies were used for research by the Univer
sity of Minnesota Medical School in the early 1900s. More than 10 percent of the total number of burials are in that single section adorned with only a couple dozen markers. Some potter's fields, such as Chicago City Cemetery, were once the targets of grave-robbing medical students seeking cadavers to dissect or to sell to body traders.

Around the turn of the twentieth century a number of the unidentified dead were known as “boxcar Willies.” Today they're called the homeless and indigent. In 1911 in Prescott, Arkansas,
a man known only as Old Mike
hawked pens, paper, and thread out of a leather satchel to homes and businesses near the railroad tracks in the center of town. He arrived on the southbound three o'clock and pushed on the next day. One day he was found dead under a tree in a city park. Local morticians with a questionable sense of humor and a deficient sense of respect embalmed Old Mike and propped him upright in a wide-open pine box.

For more than sixty years he was displayed behind a curtain in a funeral home, dressed up in a suit, white shirt, and a tie weighted down by a silver dollar. One of his skeletal hands was positioned near a pull string for a lightbulb. Skin blackened with age and rot, glass eyes staring, mouth frozen in an
O
, Old Mike became a popular tourist attraction. Kids dared each other to touch the “petrified man.” Wise-guy fathers urged their little girls to dance with him. Because Old Mike lacked an identity, embalmers turned him into an object of curiosity akin to a freak in a carnival sideshow. He wasn't buried until 1975.

I never imagined mass graves underneath American city streets, but they exist in Philly and New York. A Philadelphia public square near Independence Hall was once known as the strangers' burial ground and “Negroes' ground” where dead inmates from the nearby Walnut Street prison, yellow fever victims, Revolutionary War soldiers, and free and enslaved African Americans were stowed until the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

I'll bet not many of the college kids, dope dealers, and tourists who wander through Greenwich Village know that thousands of New York's indigent—some sources say 20,000, some say 100,000—are buried underneath Washington Square Park.
The iconic arch framed a gallows
for public executions from 1797 to the 1820s.

Remains were then shuttled uptown to Fifth Avenue and Fortieth Street, later to another site on Fiftieth Street, and still later shipped across the East River and deposited on seventy-five acres in Wards Island, which now contains parks and recreation areas but once was the dumping ground for all sorts of New York City detritus.

In New York City today,
few know of the existence of Hart Island,
a ghost town of abandoned missile silos, asylums, an old church, and shuttered dormitories among meadows, woodlands, and dunes. You can get to the island only by ferry. Inmates from nearby Rikers Island, one of New York's most notorious prisons, volunteer for the grim duty of burying more than a hundred dead every week in communal plots three deep and ten across. Around one-tenth of the million-plus buried there are unidentified; most are unclaimed.

Once, Todd Matthews accompanied a woman to a neglected public cemetery in Texas where, she had learned, her son had been buried as a UID. Scandalized by the sight of grave markers sinking under tire ruts and overgrown grass, Todd had a brainstorm: he would open the world's first private potter's field in his backyard. “What if I bought an acre of ground in Tennessee? I could bury them in lots with numbers. All you need is a two-foot plot with a headstone and a little concrete vault to place an urn in. Whoever wants to can send them here,” he said.

I couldn't help picturing Lori's reaction as caskets and pots of ashes started showing up on the doorstep. But I knew Todd was serious. “I might get two or I might get two thousand,” he continued earnestly. “All you need is a shovel and determination.”

In 1988, in his future father-in-law's living room, eighteen-year-old Todd couldn't take his eyes off the lurid cover of
Master Detective
. When he asked to borrow it, Riddle was loath to let it out of his sight. He finally agreed to let Todd take it to the library to make a photocopy.

While still in high school, Todd drove three hundred miles to Georgetown, Kentucky, with a friend named Donny and a pile of awkwardly folded maps in his father's green and tan Chevy pickup. The
visit was the first of dozens for Todd. They found the cemetery where Tent Girl was buried, just down Route 25 from where Riddle found her. They parked on a narrow asphalt road that snakes among the plots and spotted her gravestone off by itself in a grassy section in front of a fence.

Todd got out of the truck alone. It felt surreal to finally gaze at her headstone. In Georgetown, Todd learned, Tent Girl was a local legend. Like Lori, children told ghost stories about her on Halloween. College students were dared to visit her grave at midnight. Young women traveled from all over Kentucky and Ohio to leave flowers at her grave.

In the days after Tent Girl's body was found, she was too decomposed to be embalmed. Following the autopsy, the body was interred in the county-­owned section of the cemetery marked only “No. 90,” near the grave of a young man found dead outside Georgetown thirty years earlier. Townspeople had bought him a grave marker that read: “Someone's boy. About 19.” By the time Todd went in search of Tent Girl, the owner of a local funeral home—who would later serve as county coroner and lobby to have Tent Girl exhumed—had paid to replace the “No. 90” rock with a much grander headstone.

Unlike Sue Ann Matthews's stone, it had no angels or flowers. Instead, Musser's pencil sketch of a young woman's smiling face—round, with a short bobbed haircut and a gap between two front teeth—was carved into the red granite intended to match her reddish-brown hair. The words underneath were cold, clipped, official—a police report, not an epitaph.

The gravestone read:

TENT GIRL

FOUND MAY 17 1968

ON U.S. HIGHWAY 25, N.

DIED ABOUT APRIL 26 – MAY 3 1968

AGE ABOUT 16 – 19 YEARS

HEIGHT 5 FEET 1 INCH WEIGHT 110 TO 115 LBS.

REDDISH BROWN HAIR

UNIDENTIFIED

It's all too easy to put the dead out of your mind and declare them gone, Todd told me later. A year after he underwent open-heart surgery at age eight, his brother Greg was born. He recalls the call about his brother's death: “The sound of the phone, my dad's voice talking to the hospital, the smell of breakfast my granny had made for supper . . . I can sit quietly, shut my eyes, and relive that moment in vivid details.” Greg lived two days. As painful as the memory is, Todd fears that one day it might vanish. Todd remembers his mother flinging herself on the new grave and clawing at the red clay earth. Later, Todd accompanied his mother to the family plot. She clutched his hand. Together they arranged a few stems of roses or irises in a jar and pushed back the grass that crept around the edges of the stones. The graves somehow made his brother and sister real to Todd; Tent Girl's grave now accomplished the same thing for the nameless girl. She had been a human being, not a monster crammed into a bag. She was about his and Lori's age, and he felt that he was beginning to know her. He had a strong urge to put her back where she belonged.