Perpetua Holdings Inc.

I wanted to stop writing about the South,but then the mother possum and her babies skitteredout of the casket lined with shredded satin, its glass lid heavy

and still unbroken—Emmett's first casket left rottingin a shed by some gravediggers and their office managerwho'd pocketed the funds donated for its preservation.

(Mamie Till in her final days planned a grand mausoleumfor Emmett's body, exhumed in 1995 for further study,maybe a DNA lead, then reburied in a fresh pine casket.)

When will they let his body rest, his cousin askedas the detective's crane lifted the heavy evidenceonto a flat bed truck. And it all comes back—

the black and white photograph of his faceseen against the pleated waves of satin, 1963.His mother wanted the world to see

what had been done to her son—beaten,the body drowned. There was no way I could describewhat was in that box, she said.

During this investigation, it was also discoveredthat the employees of Burr Oak Cemeteryin suburban Chicago were reselling caskets,

recycling burial plots, two groundskeepers digging upand discarding lots of unhistoric grief, too—stacks of skulls and tiny skeletons

from the Babyland section hiddenin the tall summer weeds. Authorities talkedto "countless women who could not find

their children." In the news it was unclear who evenowned the cemetery now—its absentee trustees—Perpetua Holdings Inc. owned by Pacesetter Capital,

P.O. Box listed in Richardson, Texas.The office manager and her lackeys caughtburning the oldest burial records.

Only after this second desecrationdid Till's casket rate acceptance into the collectionof the Smithsonian. And then I realized

I was sick of trying to write about the South—its tired pathos, how easily everything plantedin the ground would grow.

I almost admired the way the crooksditched his coffin, that worthless wooden artifact,out of what we might call greed, or in any case

the higher needs of the living. If you ever madea donation to the Emmett Till Mausoleum Fundcall this 800 number the sheriff set up

but there will be no recompense. I followed the storyabout the Chicago cemetery in California;the South found its way into every cranny

of the country. As in a horror filmI keep climbing in and out of a casketof pine or mahogany or western madrone,

its strips of bark peeling off like skin.I wanted a shovel to paddle myself anywhereupriver, but the current of the story capsized me.

The South did and didn't matter anymore.Either way it would never end.The mother possum and her babies

simply moved on after the Till casketwas removed from the shed;they weren't poetic. They would live

like animals in any rotten wood.Like them, I could claw my way in,claw my way out just as dim-eyed.