Injuries Consistent With

I want to tell you about the sound but I need to tell you about the smell first, because the smell came before the sound, and I am a man who believes in sequence. Temporal sequence. Causative sequence. The body does not lie about sequence — lividity settles in the direction of gravity, rigor begins in the small muscles of the face and moves outward, decomposition follows a schedule that varies with temperature and moisture but never with the feelings of the living. I have relied on sequence for eleven years in this office.

The smell is red clay and standing water and pine straw gone to rot. If you have been in a particular kind of Alabama ravine in August you know this smell. It is vegetal, mineral, patient. I first encountered it when I was twenty-two, at the bottom of such a ravine off County Road 9, in Hale County, in the dark, with what I later determined was a hairline fracture of my left fibula and a contusion of the occipital region that cost me four hours of memory I have never recovered. I was found the next morning by a pulpwood crew. I was taken to the hospital in Greensboro. I was treated. I survived. The official record states that I fell.

The official record does not state why I was on County Road 9 at eleven o’clock on a Friday night, or who was with me, or whether the verb fell is accurate or whether was pushed or jumped would be closer to what happened, because I do not remember and the two people who were reportedly present did not come forward and were never asked to come forward because no one filed a report. I was twenty-two. I was a Black man in Hale County with a head injury and a fractured leg who had been found in a ravine, and the attending physician at the Greensboro hospital wrote fall on the intake form, and that word became the truth, and I healed, and I left, and I went to medical school, and I became the coroner of this county, which is the next county over from Hale, close enough that I can smell the same red clay when the wind is right.

I could not smell it in my office until this year. I want to be precise about the timing. The smell arrived on September 14th. I know this because I keep a logbook — not a personal journal, a logbook, the kind a ship’s officer keeps, entries dated and timed and limited to observable phenomena. On September 14th at approximately 2:15 PM, while completing paperwork unrelated to any active case, I became aware of red clay, standing water, and decomposing pine straw. The office window was closed. The ventilation system was functioning normally. The smell persisted for eleven minutes, then dissipated. I noted it. I did not investigate further. There was nothing to investigate.

September 14th was six days after I signed the death certificate for Jimmie Oates.

I need to tell you about Jimmie Oates and I need to tell it to you the way I would tell it to a medical examiner reviewing my work, because if I tell it to you any other way the telling will get away from me.

Jimmie Ray Oates, age thirty-four, was found at the bottom of the ravine off County Road 9 — the same ravine, yes, I am aware, I was aware when the call came in at 4:47 AM on September 8th, and I noted this fact to myself with the same clinical detachment I am noting it to you now, and I decided it was irrelevant, and I am telling you about it anyway because irrelevance is a ruling, and I have learned recently that my rulings are not as final as I once believed.

The body presented with multiple contusions of the face and torso, a depressed fracture of the right temporal bone, and abrasions of the hands and forearms. These injuries were consistent with a fall from the road surface to the bottom of the ravine, a drop of approximately twenty-two feet over uneven ground with exposed limestone and root structures. They were also consistent with a beating followed by a fall, or a beating at the bottom of the ravine, or a fall followed by a beating. Consistent with. That phrase. I have written it perhaps four thousand times and it has always meant the evidence supports this conclusion among others, and I have always chosen the conclusion that requires the fewest additional questions, which is to say the conclusion that allows the file to close.

I ruled the death accidental. I noted the ambiguity of the bruising pattern. I documented every injury with measurements and photographs. My report was exactly the kind of report that has sustained me in this office for eleven years — never challenged, never returned by the state medical examiner’s office, never questioned by anyone with the authority to require a different answer.

The Oates family questioned it. Diane Oates, the mother, came to the county annex three times in the first two weeks. She did not raise her voice. She brought a folder. Inside the folder were photographs of her son’s face taken at the funeral home that she said showed bruising inconsistent with a single fall. The bruising was consistent with a single fall. The bruising was also consistent with what she was claiming. I told her that consistent with allows for multiple interpretations, and that my interpretation was based on the totality of the physical evidence, and she looked at me with an expression I will not attempt to describe, and she left, and she came back, and she left again, and then the letters started.

The first letter arrived on September 22nd. No return address. Postmarked Greensboro, which is in Hale County, which is where I am from, which is where County Road 9 is.

The letter was typed. One paragraph. I will reproduce it from memory because I have read it enough times that the memory is precise:

The body presented with contusions of the face and torso. The bruising pattern was noted as ambiguous. No further investigation was recommended. The file was closed. The file is always closed. You understand that the closing of the file is not the closing of the event. You have understood this for longer than eleven years.

My language. My phrasing. The body presented. The bruising pattern was noted. These are not phrases a civilian uses. Someone had taken my clinical vocabulary and folded it into an accusation. The letter did not say I was wrong. The letter said I already knew.

I did not contact the police. A coroner who receives anonymous letters about a case he has already ruled on and brings those letters to the sheriff’s office is a coroner who is reopening his own work. Who is, in the vocabulary of this county, making trouble, and I have survived eleven years in this office by not making trouble, by being the man whose reports are clean, whose findings require no follow-up, whose presence in a position of authority is justified by the absence of controversy. I filed the letter in my desk. Not in the case file. In my desk.

The second letter arrived October 3rd. Same postmark. Same typeface. Shorter.

Injuries consistent with a fall. Also consistent with what you already know. Also consistent with what you smelled in your office on September 14th at 2:15 PM. The ravine smells the same whether you are twenty-two or fifty-three.

I read that letter four times. I locked my office door before the third reading, though there was no one in the building. The letter knew the date. The letter knew the time. The letter knew about the smell. I had told no one about the smell. I had written it in my logbook and my logbook was in the locked bottom drawer of my desk and I checked the lock and the lock was intact.

The smell came back while I was holding the letter. Stronger this time. Not eleven minutes — the rest of the afternoon. I opened the window. The October air came in and the smell did not leave. I closed the window. I sat at my desk and I breathed red clay and standing water and rotting pine straw for three hours and I completed two unrelated death certificates during that time because the work does not stop, the work has never stopped, and my hands were steady.

My hands were steady.

The sound began on October 19th.

I will describe it precisely. It is a low, irregular rhythm from beneath the floor of the evidence room, which is adjacent to my office and shares a wall. The evidence room is on the ground floor. Beneath the ground floor is a crawl space, perhaps three feet, with a concrete slab and clay soil. I reviewed the building’s architectural plans after the sound began.

The sound is not a heartbeat. It does not have the regularity of a cardiac rhythm, the lub-dub alternation. It is more like someone shifting weight. Someone lying on a hard surface trying to find a position that does not hurt and failing. Someone down there, beneath the concrete, unable to get comfortable.

It is louder when I am in the evidence room. It is quieter but present when I am in my office. It is absent when I leave the building, which I have tested repeatedly, standing in the parking lot at midnight with my ear turned toward the wall, hearing nothing, and then walking back inside and hearing it before I have closed the door.

I had the crawl space inspected. I told the maintenance supervisor I was concerned about a water line. He sent a plumber. The plumber found nothing. No leak, no animal, no structural anomaly. The plumber was in the crawl space for forty-five minutes and reported hearing no sound, and I stood in the evidence room while he was down there and I heard it continuing while a man lay in the space it was coming from and heard nothing. I thanked the plumber and signed the work order.

The third letter arrived November 7th.

You hear it. You will not say you hear it because saying so would require you to explain what you hear and the explanation would require you to revisit the ravine and the ravine would require you to revisit yourself at twenty-two at the bottom in the dark with a fractured leg and four hours missing. The sound is not Jimmie Oates. The sound is older than Jimmie Oates. The sound is what the county sounds like when you hold still long enough to hear it.

I read the letter standing up. I was in the evidence room because I had been listening. I read it and the sound shifted — not louder, not softer, but the rhythm changed, as though whatever was down there had heard the letter too, had adjusted its weight in response to the words, and I set the letter on the evidence table and I pressed my palms flat against the surface and I breathed and the smell was there, the red clay, the standing water, and I understood something that I am going to tell you now and I need you to understand that understanding something is not the same as accepting it.

The sound was not coming from the crawl space. The sound was coming from the same place the smell was coming from. Not a location. A time. A Friday night thirty-one years ago when I was at the bottom of a ravine in the dark, twenty-two years old, with four hours I could not account for, and something happened that I either chose to forget or was unable to remember, and the distinction between those two things is the same distinction as the one between fell and was pushed.

In December the state medical examiner’s office sent an auditor. This was routine. The office conducts periodic reviews of county coroner findings, and the timing was coincidental, and I do not believe the letters and the audit were connected.

Her name was Dr. Anwar. She arrived on a Tuesday with a rolling briefcase and a manner I recognized because it was my manner. She requested access to forty randomly selected files from the past three years. I provided them. She sat at the table in the evidence room and reviewed them one at a time, making notes on a tablet, asking occasional questions.

The sound was there the whole time.

I watched her face the way Diane Oates watched mine. Dr. Anwar did not flicker. She made her notes. She asked about the Oates file — it was among the forty — and I walked her through the findings, and she nodded, and she made a note, and she did not look at the floor.

She did not look at the floor. But at one point she paused. Mid-sentence. She had been asking about the histology results on an unrelated case and she stopped and her pen stopped and she was still for perhaps two seconds and then she continued as though nothing had happened. Two seconds. In the silence the sound was — I want to say louder but that is not right. The sound was nearer. As though whatever was shifting beneath us had pressed itself against the underside of the floor.

I said nothing. She said nothing. She completed her assessment and told me my records were exemplary and she shook my hand and left and I stood in the evidence room alone and the sound was everywhere, not beneath the floor anymore but in the walls, the filing cabinets, the pipes, the fluorescent tubes.

January. I am writing this in January, which makes it four months since the sound began. I am writing this on a blank death certificate because that is what I have.

I know that Jimmie Oates did not fall. I know it the way Diane Oates knows it — without evidence that would survive a legal challenge, without the kind of knowledge that translates into language I can put on a form. The bruising on his forearms was defensive. I noted it as abrasions consistent with contact against rough surfaces during descent. This was accurate. It was also incomplete. The abrasions were also consistent with a man raising his arms against someone. I chose the reading that closed the file.

I did not fall into that ravine thirty-one years ago. I have known this for thirty-one years the way you know the thing you decided not to know. Two men whose names I remember pushed me off the edge of County Road 9 because I was twenty-two and Black and walking on a road at night in Hale County, and I fell twenty-two feet and fractured my leg and hit my head and lay in the dark in the red clay and the standing water and the rotting pine straw and I said something. I said something into the dark while I thought I was dying and I have never been able to remember what it was. The four missing hours contain it.

I am writing this on the certificate. In the space where the name goes I have written Jimmie Ray Oates. In the space where the cause goes I have written injuries consistent with assault, and the pen is steady. This is a correction that will sit in my desk drawer because I cannot file it — filing it would require reopening the case, which would require explaining what changed, which would require me to say I hear a sound beneath the floor of the evidence room and no one else hears it or everyone hears it and no one speaks of it, and that sentence does not appear in any field on any form I have access to.

The certificate is in the drawer now. Beside the letters. I can hear the original certificate in the filing cabinet and I can hear this one in the desk and they are at different pitches, a dissonance, and between them — in the space between the two sounds, the filed lie and the unfiled truth — there is a third sound that I am only now beginning to make out.

It is a voice. My voice. Young. Twenty-two. At the bottom of a ravine in the dark with a broken leg, saying something to no one, and the words are almost — I can almost —

The smell is very strong tonight. The window is closed. The building is empty. The evidence room hums. The crawl space holds its weight.

I am going to sit here and I am going to listen until I can make out the words. I believe they are close now.

The sound continues. I am listening. The words are almost.

I am making a note of the time. I am noting the temperature. The pen is in my hand and the form is in front of me and the form has a line for everything except what is happening, and the sound, the sound is

I can almost hear it now. I think it has always been

The logbook is open. I am writing this entry at 11:52 PM. Conditions: overcast, 41 degrees, barometric pressure 30.12. Sound: present. Smell: present. I note for the record that both phenomena persist. I note for the record that the certificate in the drawer has not been filed. I note for the record that the certificate in the cabinet has not been amended.

The record does not mention what is beneath it. The record has never mentioned what is beneath it. I am the only one in the building, and I am listening, and my hand