I took a piece of alder branch, stripped it of leaves and then went over to the lower half of the body. I needed to lift up the skirt and see whether the—well, whether the bottom half went with the top—and it did—with no underwear, either.
Who could have done this to him? I looked around, and nary a weed or daisy stem nearby had been bent or bloodied. There was no evidence that the cutting and splattering had occurred on location. Even to a twelve-year-old, it was pretty obvious the body had been dumped. I stood there in the heat, suddenly thirsty. I remember that it was the corpse’s makeup that confused me more than the body, or even the skirt.
I am not a callous person, and have never been. I imagine most people might have vomited or looked away, but I simply didn’t. That’s how coroners must feel. I can only imagine that one is, or is not, born with squeamishness. Surgery scenes on TV? I’m in. To be blunt, finding the body seemed to affect me about as much as an uncooked roast.
And also—and this is something I didn’t pinpoint until years later—being that close to something so totally dead made me feel … infinite—immortal.
I was standing there immobile for maybe five minutes before I heard a train off in the distance, coming from the north, from Squamish. It was the Royal Hudson, an old-fashioned steam train refurbished and converted into a tourist attraction, chugging down the Howe Sound fjord. I stood beside the body amid the fireweed, chamomile and dandelions to await the train’s approach. I kept looking between the body and the bend in the track around which the train would come, as the steaming and chugging came closer and closer.
Finally, the Royal Hudson huffed around the bend. I stood in the middle of the tracks, the scent of creosote from the trestles burning my nostrils, and waved my arms. The conductor later said he almost popped a blood vessel seeing me there. He clamped on the brakes, and the squealing was unlike any noise I’d heard until then. It was so shrill it collapsed time and space. I think that was the moment I stopped being a child. Not the corpse, but the noise.
The engine stopped a few cars past the body and me. The conductor, whose name was Ben, and his partner jumped down, cursing me for pulling such a prank. I simply pointed at the severed body.
“What the—? Barry. Come over here.” Ben looked at me. “Kid, get away from this thing.”
“No.”
“Look, kiddo, I said—”
I just stared at him.
Barry came over, took a look and promptly vomited. Ben came closer, and he dealt with the corpse simply by not looking at it. Meanwhile, I couldn’t look at it enough. He said, “Jesus, kid—are you some sort of freak?”
“I found him. He’s mine.”
Barry radioed the authorities from the engine. Of course, the tourists were gawking from the train’s windows, snapping away. I suppose these days photos would be posted on the Internet within hours, but back then there was only the local papers, none of which were allowed to publish either news or photos of the body until the next of kin had been found and notified. And so, while the passengers tried to hop out of the cars to check out the action, Barry was able to feel useful screaming at them to get back in. By the time the authorities arrived, he had the cheese-grater voice of an aged starlet.
The police asked me questions. Had I moved anything? Had I seen anyone? I kept my peeled alder switch a secret. But other than having found the body, my role was limited. I just watched it all. The one question they didn’t ask was, Why would my parents allow me to pick blackberries so far away from home all by myself? Again, it was the 1970s.
The police complimented me on my coolness, and once the scene calmed down a bit, Ben offered me a ride in the engine back to the PGE station in North Vancouver. The police wanted to drive me home, but I pleaded my case and was able to ride the train. I have yet to equal the sense of mastery over my destiny I had during that experience. Me at the helm of this million-pound chunk of fate, pounding along an iron track—God help whoever stood in my way. It was supreme. I was alive! I was not a corpse!
Nobody was home to witness my enigmatic arrival in a strange man’s car. It wasn’t until I had to jump up to reach for the house key in its hiding spot on the top brick that I realized I’d clutched my Tupperware container of blackberries perfectly level for over four hours, with not a single berry spilled.
When I told my story at the dinner table, everybody just rolled their eyes and assumed I was being morbid. Mother said, “You need to be around people your own age more.”
“I don’t like people my own age.”
“Of course you do. You simply don’t know it yet.”
“All the girls my own age do is shoplift and smoke.”
Dad said, “No more dead body stories, dear.”
“It’s not made up.”
Leslie said, “Tanya wants to be a stewardess after school ends.”
“The body is real.” I went to the phone and dialed the police station. How many fifth-grade students know the phone number of the local police station by heart? I asked for Officer Nairne to confirm my tale.
Father took the phone. “Whoever this is, I’m sorry, but Liz—What? Oh. Really? Well I’ll be darned.” I had newly found respect.
Father hung up the phone and sat back down. “It seems our Liz is on the money.”
William and Leslie wanted gory details. “How far gone was he, Lizzie?”
“Blue cheese gone?”
“William!” Mother was being genteel. “Not at the dinner table.”
“It actually looked like the roast pork we’re eating here.”
Mother said, “Liz, stop right now!”
Father added, “And you weren’t going to eat those blackberries, were you? I saw them in the fridge. The railways spray the worst sorts of herbicides along the right-of-ways. You’ll get cancer from them.”
There was a charged silence. “Come on, everybody, I found a body today. Why can’t we just talk about it?”
William asked, “Was he bloated?”
“No. He’d only been there overnight. But he was wearing a skirt.”
Mother said, “Liz! We can discuss this afterwards, but not, I repeat not, at the dinner table.” Father said, “I think you’re overreac—”
“Leslie, how was swim class?”
So there was my big moment, gone. But as of that night I began to believe I had second sight that allowed me to see corpses wherever they lay buried. I saw bodies everywhere: hidden in blackberry thickets, beneath lawns, off the sides of trails in parks—the world was one big corpse factory. Visiting the cemetery in Vancouver for my grandmother’s funeral a year later was almost like a drug. I could not only see the thousands of dead, but I began to be able to see who was fresh and who wasn’t. The fresh bodies still had a glow about them while the older ones, well, their owners had gone wherever it was they were headed. For me, looking at a cemetery was like looking at a giant stack of empties waiting to be handed in for a refund.
