The Removers: A Memoir - Hardcover

Meredith, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1476761213 ISBN 13: 9781476761213

Verlag: Scribner, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

A dark, poignant, and emotionally brave coming-of-age memoir: the story of a young man who, by handling the dead, makes peace with the living.

For almost twenty years I mistook my father’s downfall as my own. But it wasn’t. It was not my sister’s either, nor my mother’s.

A literature professor at La Salle University, Andrew Meredith’s father was fired after unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct. It’s a transgression Andrew cannot forgive, for it brought about long-lasting familial despair. In the wake of the scandal, Andrew’s parents limp along, trapped in an unhappy marriage. Meanwhile, Andrew treads water, stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence—falling in and out of school, moving blindly from one half-hearted relationship to the next, slowly killing the nights drinking beer and listening to music with his childhood friends.

Broke, Andrew moves back home to his childhood neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia and takes a job alongside his father as a “remover,” the name for those unseen, unsung workers who take away the bodies of those who die at home. He describes, as only a professional can do, the intimate, horrific, poignant, and occasionally morbidly comedic aspects of handling the dead. Just how do you carry a 500-pound corpse down winding stairs? What actually happens to pacemakers, tooth fillings, surgical screws, artificial hips, and anything else that the deceased has within his or her body? Andrew begins to see his father not through the lens of a wronged and resentful child, but as a sympathetic, imperfect man who loves his family despite his flaws. Eventually the chip on his shoulder starts to lose its weight.

Poetic without being florid, and with the literary ability to transform the naturally grotesque into the exquisite, The Removers is a searing story of a young man who finds in death a redemptive path toward the forgiveness of the living, including himself.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrew Meredith has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo and from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He received an MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro. The Removers is his first book.

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The Removers

1

Dad parks the hearse at the curb under a pink-petaled dogwood, in the glory of that first balmy April Saturday afternoon. We’re on Castor Avenue in front of a tan brick apartment building, treeless courtyard, three stories high, a block long but invisible, a place that marks the edge of our Philadelphia neighborhood and the next, a structure populated by pensioner bachelor mailmen and mothers and toddlers learning English together. At the rec center baseball diamond across the street, screams of “Go!” follow an aluminum plink. At the corner, tulips in yellow, red, violet, planted to partition the sidewalk from a tiny row house lawn, salute a crew-cut man in a tank top, gold crucifix swinging as he soapy-sponges his four-wheeled stereo. The fried onions from the grill at the steak shop a block away whisper that the cold and dark have passed and we’ve been delivered somewhere better, and yet inside our little brick houses these last six months a secret part of us wondered: is this the year winter doesn’t end? A girthy old woman in her sleeveless summer housedress, sunlight warming her arms for the first time this year, hoses the dirt under her rosebush. She looks like a Helen. She might be a Carol. An ambulance lines up at the red light like all the other cars, in repose, maybe coming back from an oil change.

Dad and I leave the car and walk into the courtyard where a man in a fishing hat and a yellowed V-neck T-shirt, maybe sixty-five, sucking a cigarette, raises a hand. “I’m the brother-in-law,” he says. It’s sunny, humid. Dad is fifty years old, solidly built, clean-shaven, glasses, gray hair shiny and wavy like a trial lawyer’s. He cuts his own hair in the bathroom mirror because he knows he can do better than any barber left in our neighborhood. I am a head taller than he, gangly, a day past clean-shaven, with glasses, and, though not balding or a mental patient, I keep my hair in a self-inflicted buzz mostly because I assume I would screw up a scissor cut. If the brother-in-law had met us in different circumstances, when he wasn’t in shock, he might’ve noticed the same long nose on both of these removers. Or at least he would’ve noticed the sweat beading on our foreheads. Or my polyester suit: a fledgling. Or how sharp Dad looks—suit of lightweight wool, loafers polished and tassled, white pocket square, as if he’d slid dressed like this out of the womb. But the brother-in-law doesn’t really see us. He says hello, of course, and thanks us for coming, but the living parts of him have retreated far away behind the corneas. I recognize this kind of distance. Besides, the brother-in-law has never seen us before and will never want to again, these who’ve shown up on what I guess is the worst day he’s had in a while. Maybe ever. We are nobodies. Strangers. We aren’t the funeral director who perches every Sunday in the front pew at mass. We are men made to be forgotten, here to take away the shell of his brother-in-law. He’ll never think on us again. I feel right away a rush from this. We’re paid to be invisible. And yet there’s another part of me—reasonable, accountable, button-down—that likes how useful this work makes me. The brother-in-law says, “Carl lived alone. We hadn’t heard from him for a few weeks, which wasn’t strange, but the neighbors called the cops today about a smell.” He opens his eyes a little wider and shakes his head. “He’s been in there awhile.”

Just as I had dismissed my dad’s assurances on my first removal, I brush aside the brother-in-law’s warning. He’s not used to these things the way we are, I think. I assume I’ve seen and touched and smelled the limits of the job’s gruesomeness. By the time we’ve walked the few paces to Carl’s front door, I know I’m wrong again. His windows and the door are shut, but what awaits us seeps out. At the first whiff my heart feels like it might come bursting through my armpit. Dad looks at me and says, “We’ll be okay.” When he opens Carl’s front door I have never smelled anything worse—imagine being waterboarded on the hottest day of summer with the maggoty brine dripping from the back of a garbage truck—and we’re still fifteen feet from the closed bedroom. We move to the back of the apartment, wheeling the stretcher, breathing through our jacket sleeves. We stop just outside his room. Dad and I don’t speak, but share a look. I know, in my eyes at least, there’s terror. How bad will it be in there? What will this guy look like? But there’s also an element of disbelief: Have our lives really brought us here? Is Dad the guy with a book of poems? Am I the kid who won a full ride to college a few years ago? A split second where the job’s simple awfulness brings into focus the downward trajectory of our circumstance.

When I was old enough to know the kind of place we lived in—blocks and blocks of brick row houses dotted occasionally with a brick factory or a stone church, and cut through by train tracks and highways—one of my favorite things Dad would do was drive the two of us along Snake Road, a stretch he called “the country in the city.” Only a mile from our house, Snake Road runs through woods, the only such break in our part of town. Every few months in these first years of my awareness of the world, he would wind us through the trees. Every time, as we came back into the grid of the neighborhood, it felt to me for a finger snap of a moment that we belonged to that wilderness more than we did to our house, and belonged to each other more than we did to my mother and sister inside it.

It’s time to open the bedroom door. Never before have I felt anything as dreadful as what hits us when we enter. The windows are closed—his last night, probably at least a week before, must have been a cold one—so the stench surges at us like a crashing wave, coating our faces and rushing into our nostrils and mouths. My stomach closes like a fist, shoulders jump toward ears. My scalp tingles. The odor is an exponentially more putrid relative of late afternoon low tide, when the summer sun has spent a full day cooking the rotten gunk on the bay floor. But that is an inadequate comparison. In the context of a stale, dilapidated apartment building, Carl’s stink screams an urgent and violent disharmony. We smell death.

Lying on his back, Carl looks like any napping retiree, except he’s purple. And gravity has pulled almost all the liquid in his body into his lower hemisphere—his back and ass and the backs of his legs—which makes him a head to toe bedsore, a seeping blister ready to gush. As awful as it is to look at Carl and smell him, being that close to him somehow shoos away any fear or hesitation. Pity fills the void. He’s just a poor soul who happens to be rotting in his bed. And it’s difficult, I’m finding, to handle an older man’s corpse with your father—a man, odds say, you will one day bury—and avoid thinking of your father’s death. And when the older man you’re removing lives alone in your neighborhood, and your father and your mother don’t get along, and you expect they could be living separately any day now, it’s hard not to imagine your father dying like this, in an anonymous building in Frankford, going rotten like a pack of chicken breasts forgotten in the trunk, and you playing...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Scribner
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1476761213
• ISBN 13: 9781476761213
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: SCRIBNER; https://www.simonandschusterpublishing.com/scribner/; ; 1230 Avenue of the Americas; New York; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar