The bones rumbled angrily in their massive steel vat, boiling in the recirculating cleaning fluid overnight. While the propane jets sucked air to keep up their constant roar, he slept in the belly of a whale carcass stranded next to an old wooden fishing vessel on the deserted beach. The giant ribs above him formed an archway framed in their enamel white. As the big waves rolled in, his animal bed rocked side to side like a child’s cradle. He always slept profoundly with—or within—bones, and this night was no exception. Who could blame him, bones were the architecture of life.
When he woke, still dressed and lying in his military-surplus cot with a ragged, wool blanket, the dream’s idyllic scenery of a vast decomposing whale faded away. He took a deep, nourishing breath and slowly, stiffly, sat up to put his feet on the chilly floor. He welcomed the warm blast of the giant propane burner next to the cot.
Without so many years experience he could never have gotten the bones mended and prepared so quickly, and in such handsome condition. But it had to be done. It was supposed to be a slow, painstaking process—a labor of love from which he gleaned the greatest satisfaction. But this time was different.
Taken as a whole, the enterprise of acquiring, cleaning, and articulating the bones was a form of therapy for him. To understand why this was, you had to know one thing: it was the only activity he’d ever found in his life that restored his ability to breathe.
No doctors were ever involved, but as a child he was thought to have an illness. For years he believed the same. Asthma was one name given to it; there were others. The sense of a waterless drowning was the essence of the experience. The terror of it could consume him at anytime, and it cycled upon itself interminably. Instead of feeling the replenishment from a breath of fresh air, his body would fill with a suffocating apprehension. This only made matters worse. What followed was a dizzying spiral of fear and breathlessness, threatening a madness from which he was sure there would be no return.
People didn’t understand the distress of having nowhere to run. For them, breathing was natural and automatic, such a basic habit of life that no other means of accomplishing it were ever considered. Of course, later as a child he didn’t think in such objective terms. The problem came to be experienced as an external, spiritual matter—as a form of visitation.
To be haunted by demons was to run from them, to escape them, as when a boy fled under his mother’s bed-covers to escape the invaders of a nightmare. But what did a boy do when the persecuting demon came and sat squarely on his chest, staring him down, threatening to extinguish the life from him at any moment? Where did he run? He hardly dared to move.
The notion of a visitation from evil was put in his mind by something he’d read in the school library—in the 14th edition Encyclopedia Britannica, dated 1948. Curious about his own exhausting nightmares, he looked up the subject for a school report. Focus on what you know, the teacher had said. He found the word ‘night-mare’ derived from the Old-English mara, a haunting spirit that snuck into one’s room late at night. What most caught his attention, and what was the germ of all that followed, was the imagery of the mara visiting upon the victim’s body and incapacitating him, threatening suffocation. A person experiencing such a demonic attack, he read, would experience heavy downward pressure on their body, a sensation of choking, and the inescapable feeling of a dark presence. The demon’s hell.
All this sounded so much like his own experience he had to abandon the project immediately and try to shake the imagery from his mind. That never happened.
Things only got worse.
Breathe, come on breathe! And he would breathe, of course he would, but then he would pass out. Not always but often. A clever escape, like a disappearing act, except for one obvious problem: as with escape via sleep, the demon was always there waiting when he woke up. Not that sleeping was much of a picnic. While prosaic dreams were a rarity, nightmares in which his chronic fears were replayed over and over were a regular occurrence.
Naturally, he wasn’t the only one to see himself as somehow possessed.
Distraction was the first form of escape he learned. Forgetting the demon existed meant freedom, but as effective as running from the devil could be, distraction required a constant, exhausting vigilance that wasn’t always possible. Lying in bed at night or sitting erect in a boring classroom were perfect opportunities for the mara to sneak upon his chest, creep into his consciousness, and steal his breath away. Then it would watch him squirm, curl up into a ball and, if he was lucky, pass out.
Then one day he discovered a natural cure, odd though it was. Committed to perpetual distraction lead to many different pursuits, few destined to make him wealthy or wise. But anything was better than drowning in a panic of self-consciousness. The problem was that none of these pursuits provided any lasting reprieve of their own. They kept the mara at bay the way the light keeps away the darkness. Turn it off and instantly the darkness returns. Imagine the relief then, when something was stumbled upon that cast away the suffocating demon, if not forever, then at least for a time.
It happened one Montana afternoon on the last day of school. Alone as always, moving through the fields beyond the school yard on the edge of town, he came across a grackle—with its dark bill and iridescent head—lying still on its side. Farmers hated them because they savaged the crops, but he hated them for a different reason. For as long as he could remember they’d always been aggressive towards him, swooping down on him in angry pairs to cower him to the ground. But this was a mixed kind of hatred and fear because each time they’d successfully prostrated him to the ground, he experienced a temporary reprieve. It was as if the grackles weren’t attacking him, but rather the mara that travelled alongside him.
With the mara driven off, for the first time in memory he could sit idle and fully quench his breath. The exhilaration was beyond anything he could imagine. It gave him a wondrous feeling of release, especially the first time. Afterwards the duration of the experience diminished as the expectation grew of the mara’s return, because it always returned.
On that early summer afternoon, he knelt down to check for signs of life by prodding the grackle with a stick, anticipating the imminent attack of all nearby relations. Instead of anxiety, quite a different sensation came over him. Again the demon seemed to have gone. The bird, although clearly dead, seemed to have the same repelling effect as when alive and hostile. This felt to him like a huge discovery. But what exactly had been discovered? Why the mara should be affected by the dead was not clear. But then again, ‘why’ was not his cross to bear.
He could hardly keep the dead bird with him everywhere he went, although the thought of somehow wearing it as a kind of talisman crossed his mind. It would rot and decompose and become disgusting. Yet he knew that somehow the exorcising effect had to be found and preserved. So on that day he rummaged around the area until he found a torn piece of black plastic, hot to the touch from the afternoon sun. Still he felt an unusual calm. He flipped the bird over onto the plastic, amazed by its weightlessness. He would conduct an investigation, he told himself. He would keep the bird close to him at all times and see how long it kept the mara at bay.
As expected, the grackle rotted and decomposed and became disgusting. For two weeks he managed it though, each morning waking to probe the demon’s absence by sucking in deeply, replenishing his breath. As his chest lifted, a special door seemed to open inside him to let the air pour in, feeding him in cool release. He had been a prisoner. Now he’d been released.
Soon what was left of the grackle was just cartilage and bones, which fell apart into a heap. He organized and cleaned the bones hoping it would preserve their efficacy—and for a time it did. Then, feeling the demon approaching, he buried the bones in a crude pagan ritual. If he stayed close to the grave, that worked for a time as well. But nothing would slow the dread that was overtaking him: a month free from fear was ending. The prison awaited.
The thought of the mara making a triumphant return sent him on a desperate hunt for another grackle carcass to ward it off. He removed the bones from their burial site and hung them off his belt in a pouch. By making it his singular obsession he managed to find them. He also began sleeping in the old barn because his mother couldn’t take the smell of it anymore. Soon he learned that most any animal carcass, if intact, held some power over the mara. Not the fur of an animal or it’s life force, just the bones seemed to matter. Once when being thoroughly hounded by the demon, dizzy with suffocation, he found a dog carcass rotting in a culvert next to the main road about a mile from the house, probably hit at night by a supply truck. He slept with it like an invalid with an oxygen tank until, breathing restored, he could take it away. Take it away methodically strip it down and preserve it. With its maggot-infested carcass, he was swarmed by flies, none of which he paid much attention. Just as an addict comes to love the needle, he warmed to all facets of decomposing life, breathing it all in.
Eventually he dropped out of school to focus on his peculiar habits. He had come to learn the curious potency of a whole animal skeleton versus the disarticulated pile of bones, or what he called—in a moment of private humor—lazy bones. His father was long gone but his uncle on his mother’s side lived not far away and dabbled in taxidermy. He knew the basics and that was enough to get the boy started. By mail he acquired flesh-eating beetles and other means of processing carcasses. He learned the fine skills of articulation, using fabrics, glues, rods, pins, and wires to rebuild accurate skeletons. And while the passage of time seemed to drain all his dead protectors of their efficacy against the mara eventually, some power was returned when these whole, impotent animals were buried alongside one another. He envisaged the construction of a mass burial site on which he would breathe easy and live free of fear.
Two things happened then to change the course of his bizarre but innocent practice. His mother, pleased with anything that kept her ‘big boy’ from his fits of hyperventilation, told a neighboring farmer of his growing obsession with carcasses. Word spread and before long he was earning money doing removals of dead livestock, horses, and roadkill. While some took exception to his disheveled appearance and asocial personality, all were impressed by his skill in handling the dead animals, not to mention his total immunity to the rot and stench of animal remains.
He had become the knackerman.
He knew it in his bones, though, that a good turn meant a bad one was coming. The mara was always there, waiting for him to stumble. He was dumbfounded to have fallen into paid work that served his solitary needs, but he could no longer ignore the feeling overtaking him. While all carcasses in his care had some power over the demon spirit, it was equally true that over the years, this power was steadily diminishing. Large livestock and big game, when handled correctly, offered the most efficacious release, but as things were, no animal offered protection for more than a mere several days. Once again he felt chased, hounded, and robbed of his breath. He couldn’t go back to how things were. He’d rather kill himself and rob the mara of its host than go back to a life of constant chase and fear. Then the second thing happened.
He was at a farm driving the used 1950 International Harvester flatbed he’d borrowed from his uncle for his work. All was packed up and ready when the knackerman thought he’d heard something as he reversed to turn around. There was no impact he was aware of, but he thought he’d heard someone cry out. He stopped and got out. When he reached the back of the truck he saw a body crumpled on the ground—it was the land owner who’d called his mother about the job.
Later, in hindsight, he remembered that moment as a strange, spiritual premonition. Seeing the emaciated old man lying there on his side reminded him exactly of the first dead grackle he’d discovered. He couldn’t make sense of how it’d happened. He’d seen no one and the old man had walked off after their brief discussion more than an hour ago. There was no blood but he was sure the old man was dead. Such things he knew. His next thought came from a realization that left him stone cold: he might be taken away. Even if it was just for questioning, he couldn’t bare the uncertainty of being held, perhaps even jailed overnight, or longer. He had no license to drive and he was certain the old man, lying there like a bird full of buckshot, was dead. It was an accident, but did that matter?
As far as he knew the retired rancher lived alone. Hadn’t he said something to that effect? He picked up the man like a scarecrow and carried him towards the house, all the while wondering where to put him. It was an accident and he had to find some other suitable explanation for it. He decided to take the man into the barn. He laid him down on some hay to check him. His body was already cold but the knackerman couldn’t find any sign of injury. He knew bones and no major bones were broken. There was extensive bruising on his hip, however, so he picked the rancher back up and climbed the wooden ladder to the hay loft. From three-quarters of way up, he let him fall. Even he knew it wasn’t ideal but he felt panicked about being caught. He had to get out of there and he did.
He drove back to his mother’s and dealt with the trauma by getting straight to work on the diseased cow he’d winched up onto the flatbed earlier. This preoccupied his mind while keeping the ever-lurking mara at bay.
A week passed and there’d been no visitors and no questioning calls to his mother. Partly because there was a second animal at the ranch still to be dealt with and partly because the knackerman feared for what might be happening beyond the boundaries of his tiny world, he was uncertain as to what to do. He’d been reminded that week of just how much he’d brought his life under control, but he also learned how easily it could all fall apart—or be taken away. Feeling the need to maintain control, he nervously drove back to the ranch. Once there, early in the morn, he parked out of sight from the road and had a look around. He found the place as he’d left it, as though he’d left and returned the same hour. Except for the rancher. The man hadn’t been discovered and he remained where the knackerman had dropped him. He was, however, already moving into an advanced state of decay.
The knackerman wasn’t like other people. A decomposing human body was neither disgusting nor disturbing. To the contrary, it was a great curiosity—a great prize even. It was his first. As he approached he knew this was the real reason for his ill-considered return: to claim the unclaimed body. Somehow he felt beforehand that a human protector would be special, but it went far beyond that. Very soon he came to realize it wasn’t like any of the previous dead he’d handled. It wasn’t just another spiritual force to keep his demonic oppressor at bay; it was his salvation.
The death of the old rancher was more than forty years ago. Polishing the bones of his latest creation, the knackerman was still at it. Yes, it was painstaking work, but from it he gleaned the greatest satisfaction.
Carefully he folded the bones over themselves like a fetus returning to the womb. This took most of an hour, adjusting the wire and removing pins as necessary to form and then to secure the unique shape. Then he carefully hung the human skeleton down in the basket-like ribcage of the second skeleton. The horse’s frame, suspended upside down in a long, narrow canvas sling, was held by a hoist winch fastened a portable, overhead gantry.
He stood back to appreciate the effect. It was a beautiful home for the late deputy and probably the closest thing to an actual work of art the knackerman had ever achieved. He cared nothing about art in any intellectual sense, of course, or in any social sense. His work was for no one else. But it was an aesthetic achievement to be proud of nevertheless. A solitary work of beauty, hand-crafted, and, he was sure, an unassailable force against the demon spirit.
Without any awareness, he took in his hand the tiny dinosaur skull that had long-hung from his neck and stroked its worn surface. He smiled and took a deep, quenching breath.