The Bone Yard (Body Farm 6)

“I’d better head on home to Knoxville,” I said. “But thanks for the offer. Can I have a rain check?”

“Anytime.”

Chapter 30

Three miles south of a sleepy panhandle crossroads — a place that someone with high hopes or a strong streak of irony had named Panacea — I turned right at a blinking caution light, at the foot of a mile-long bridge across the wide mouth of the Ochlockonee River.

I had waved good-bye and driven away from Stu and Angie with every intention of heading north to Tennessee, but then I’d done a quick mental inventory of the things I needed to get back to, and I’d started to wonder how urgent those things were, really. They were important things, sure: I had a job I loved, truly, and a son and daughter-in-law and grandsons I adored; I had colleagues I liked and respected. But they weren’t urgent things; they’d still be waiting for me a few days from now. Making a quick U-turn in the parking garage of Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, I’d rolled down the window and tooted the horn to catch Stu’s attention as he walked toward his car. “On second thought, Stu,” I said, “a couple days in a fishing shack on the Ochlockonee sounds really nice.”

And so it was that I’d headed south instead of north. Thirty miles south of Tallahassee, three miles south of Panacea, and two miles west of the turnoff at the Ochlockonee bridge — two miles along the back road to Sopchoppy, a town whose name I found myself repeating out loud, just for the fun of saying it — I turned left onto Surf Road, a sandy dirt lane that led to the shore of the bay, then doglegged to the right, along the water. After a handful of houses and a hundred yards, the road dwindled to a pair of tire tracks, and in another hundred yards the tracks dwindled to furrows of bent grass, and in another fifty the furrows ended in front of a cottage tucked amid the pines, palms, and fern-laden live oaks. The board-and-batten siding was a faded pink, trimmed with turquoise shutters and a rusty tin roof. A screened-in porch stretched across the entire front of the house. Inside the screen, a woven hammock angled invitingly across one corner of the porch. The door at the center of the porch bore a sign that appeared to be a hot dog surfing on breaking waves. WELCOME TO THE SEA SAUSAGE, read a sign over the door.

At the base of the weathered wooden front steps was a broken concrete sidewalk. It stretched toward the water for perhaps twenty feet and then ended, or, rather, seemed to dissolve into the sandy grass, and something about that fading away of pavement and order appealed to me, so I parked there in the transition, between the end of the sidewalk and the start of the dock.

It was late afternoon when I arrived. As I opened the door and climbed from my truck — gingerly, so as not to pull the fresh, fragile scabs from my skin — a wind off the water ruffled my hair, just as it ruffled and sang through the fronds of the palms.

The lawn had been recently mowed; close to the shore, the clipped grass gave way to tall sea oats, their slender stalks widely spaced in the pale gray sand. A fresh line of flotsam from a recent storm surge — pine straw and palm fronds and grass stalks — marked the boundary between lawn and shore, between the cultivated realm and the natural world. Turning back toward the house, I noticed a high-water mark that rose halfway to the window sills: a souvenir of Hurricane Floyd, Vickery had told me. Floyd had flooded the Sea Sausage with knee-high water, but in the arbitrary, offhand way of nature, it had utterly demolished an identical house next door.

The dock looked newer than the house, though the decking was sun-blasted and weathering, and the ends of some of the boards were beginning to curl upward and pull free of the joists. As I stepped onto the dock, I shucked off my shoes, then my socks, and let the soles of my feet settle onto the roughness of the gray, grainy boards. I had scarcely stepped away from my shoes when I saw a pair of small fiddler crabs scuttle over the sides and into the toes.

The far end of the dock widened into a platform ten or twelve feet square, with a broad, sturdy railing all around. Leaning over a corner, leaning into the breeze, I watched the shards of afternoon sun dance across the shimmering, undulant water. The bay’s surface was smooth and glossy, but not uniform or even flat: there were gradations of sheen, pools and pockets and whorls. As I studied a long string of whorls, I realized they were spooling downriver toward the bridge and toward the Gulf, against the flow of the incoming tide. I looked closer, and one of the whorls seemed to gather mass, coalesce, and mound itself slightly above the surrounding water. I heard a huffing sound and the mounded whorl receded, and I imagined that I had imagined the sight and sound — fallen prey to some trick of light and tide and tiredness — until it happened again, in two places, then three, and then I glimpsed the soft bulk of manatees. I watched them — a herd of six, I decided by counting the subtle eddies they created, these momentous things swirling around me in the current, sensed but not fully seen, just below the surface.

I scanned the neighboring docks and nearby waters; the manatees and I had the entire bay to ourselves. I shucked off my shirt, eased down my pants, and began climbing down the wooden ladder. On the last step, I hesitated — the water looked brown, muddier than I’d have expected from the undeveloped forest and marshland bordering the bay — but I decided to trust Vickery’s assurance that the salt would be good for my wounds. As my feet and legs descended into the water, I saw that the water was not muddy at all; rather, it was clean but deeply tinted by tannin. It was the rich color of strong tea. Step by step, deeper and deeper, I immersed myself in the briny, bracing, healing water. As I did, my pale and wounded skin took on an orange glow, then a deep coppery hue that rendered me unrecognizable to myself.

As I took a breath and sank beneath the surface in the company of manatees, it looked and felt as if my immersion in these Florida waters, my baptism in the Ochlockonee, was transforming me into someone else, something else. Something wilder and more exotic than I had been before.

I feared that transformation — almost as much as I longed for it.

I stayed beneath the water for what seemed an eternity, then rose toward the coppery light and breached, huffing like a manatee and drinking deep drafts of the briny, bracing, resurrecting air.

Author’s Note: Fact and Fiction

Novelist Michael Chabon has described his fiction as occurring in a parallel universe, one that resembles the “real” universe closely, though not exactly. That description seems fitting for this book. The Bone Yard is a novel, a work of fiction… but it’s fiction that is deeply rooted in the soil of grim realities. Some of those realities have been adapted, expanded, and dramatized here; others appear in these pages without alteration.

The main story here was inspired by events and stories from an actual north Florida reform school, one that — unlike our fictional school — still exists. Opened in 1900 as the Florida State Reform School, the institution has gone by several other names during its history, including the Florida School for Boys, the Florida Industrial School for Boys, and the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys.

Whatever the name, the school has been plagued by deaths and scandals down through the decades. Just three years after it opened, a state senate committee found boys “in irons, like common criminals.” In 1911, a special legislative committee investigated reports of severe beatings with a leather strap — beatings that, the legislators were assured, had ceased with the firing of the superintendent who had sanctioned them. In 1914, a fire at the school killed two employees and eight boys. A grand jury investigation of the fire found that the boys’ dormitory was locked while three guards and the superintendent visited the nearby town of Marianna “upon some pleasure bent.”

In 1958, a U.S. Senate committee investigation heard testimony about brutal conditions at Dozier… including severe beatings with a heavy leather strap. In 1967, a U.S. Department of Health official called the school a “monstrosity.” A few months later, Florida’s then-governor, Claude Kirk, visited the school and described it as a training ground for a life of crime. Kirk also called the school’s conditions “absolutely deplorable”

and said, “If one of your kids were kept in such circumstances, you’d be up there with rifles.” As late as the 1980s, boys at the school were still being hog-tied, with their arms and legs fastened together beind their backs.

Several years ago, a handful of the school’s former students banded together in an informal organization called “The White House Boys,” named for the small, whitewashed concrete building in which the beatings were administered regularly on Saturdays. Their Web site, www.WhiteHouseBoys.org, shares numerous accounts of beatings and sexual abuse in the White House and in the basementlike “rape room” under the school’s dining hall.

In an unusual and poignant ceremony, Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice officially “sealed” the White House in October 2008. Former students were invited to speak at the sealing ceremony, and several talked of the abuses they’d suffered within the building’s walls. A plaque affixed to the building bears these words: In memory of the children who passed these doors, we acknowledge their tribulations and offer our hope that they have found some measure of peace. May this building stand as a reminder of the need to remain vigilant in protecting our children as we help them seek a brighter future.

The White House is one grim emblem of the reform school’s troubled past. Another is a small cemetery, tucked away in what was once the “colored” part of the school’s grounds. The cemetery, whose revelation made headlines in 2009, contains thirty-one crosses, made of welded metal pipes. At the request of then-Governor Charlie Crist, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigated the cemetery, eventually concluding that the number of crosses corresponded with records identifying thirty-one individuals who had died and been buried at the school (including one student murdered by four others, who feared the boy was about to reveal their plan to escape). FDLE did not excavate or map the cemetery; consequently, there was no attempt to match graves with the number and location of the crosses, or any attempt to confirm the identity of individual human remains. The agency reported to Governor Crist that it found “no evidence that the school or the staff caused, or contributed to, any of these deaths” and “no evidence that the school or its staff made any attempts to conceal the deaths of any students at the school.”

And perhaps that is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But accounts by former students — including members of the White House Boys — hint at additional, unmarked graves on the property. And even the FDLE investigation found evidence that another fifty boys had died at the school over the years, but that their remains were unaccounted for.

Several Florida newspapers have kept the school in the headlines during the past half century. The Miami News ran scathing articles in 1958 and 1969, including a detailed description of the leather-strap beatings. “The belt falls between eight and 100 times,” the paper reported, quoting a letter from a former school employee. “After about the tenth stroke, the seams of the sturdiest blue jeans begin to separate and numerous times the boys’ skin is broken to the extent that stitches are required.” The St. Petersburg Times carried a long, searing article titled “Hell’s 1400 acres” in 1968. In 2008, the Miami Herald broke the story of the White House Boys and shared their accounts of brutal abuse. And in 2009, the St. Petersburg Times took another hard look at the school; the paper’s two-part series—“For Their Own Good” (www.tampabay.com/specials/2009/reports/marianna) — became a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in local reporting.

Corporal punishment at Florida state institutions was banned more than forty years ago, but another grim reality — the death of fourteen-year-old Martin Lee Anderson, who was suffocated by guards just two hours after he arrived at a “boot camp” in 2006—suggests that banning physical abuse of juveniles isn’t necessarily the same as ending physical abuse of juveniles. And if the past is any guide to the future, there’s a century of data to suggest that the recurring pattern — the vicious cycle — is this: scandal and bad publicity, followed by expressions of outrage and pledges of reform… followed, months or years later, by another round of scandal and outrage.

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it,” said British statesman Edmund Burke. He also said, “All that’s necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.” Burke said those things more than two hundred years ago, and “civilized” societies continue to prove him right. If this book can do anything to raise awareness or vigilance — can do anything to help keep vulnerable boys from being abused by the very people and institutions entrusted with their care — we’ll have done good work. “Light a candle but keep cursing the darkness,” urges an idealistic character in this story. Amen, and pass the matches.

Finally, less grimly, a note on the blurry boundary between anthropological fact and fiction in this story. At the low-tech end of the spectrum, dowsing or “witching”—seeking hidden graves with coat hanger wires or forked sticks — remains a technique that is occasionally used, is roundly dismissed by many scientists, but is ardently defended by some advocates. At the high-tech end of the spectrum, ground-penetrating radar likewise has both devoted fans and dubious detractors.

And then there’s earthmoving machinery. Half a century ago, as the rising waters of new reservoirs along the Missouri River were on the verge of inundating the sites of long-abandoned Arikara Indian villages, an up-and-coming young physical anthropologist named Bill Bass pioneered the use of road scrapers to uncover graves — thus allowing Bass and his teams of students to find and excavate ten times as many graves in a summer as they’d been able to do when digging only by hand.

Native American remains are no longer considered artifacts for museum collections, so the days of using earthmoving machines to uncover Indian graves with speed and efficiency are over.

Except, perhaps, in the parallel universe of fiction.