(3 of 3)
"Here," McMurray begins to boast, just as his listener begins to feel this will not be McMurray's last stay, "you got the air. You got exercise, weights. You got baseball." Down the way is a diamond lined with rotting bleachers brought from Ebbets Field after the Dodgers moved their bases west. Down another way, at water's edge, a gull fell like a thunderbolt and dive-bombed a crab. Canadian geese strolled about with proprietary postures, as if they paid property tax. Out on the sound, two swans snagged lunch for three cygnets. Then a backhoe coughed into business and covered Emily Nickert, 78, who lay atop Helen Aleon, 89, whose coffin rested upon someone else who had died without a dime.
Charlie Garcia drove his empty body wagon away. Tomorrow, Friday, he would bring up another load from the medical examiner's office in Manhattan. He does not haul bodies on weekends or on Mondays. Tuesday is the day for the poor dead of Queens and The Bronx. Wednesday is for Brooklyn. And Thursday, Garcia comes back to Bellevue. Staten Island buries its own.
Garcia, like everyone else one meets in the business of disposing of this city's impoverished dead, seems rarely to have given the task a reflective thought; he might just as well be hauling pulpwood. Moreover, the mood in the morgue at Bellevue could easily be the mood on the loading dock of any plant:
"Hey, Tony, I hear your wife beat you up again last night."
"Where did you hear that?"
"Your wife."
Terrence Gallagher, who has worked in the morgue for 32 years, and is now the director, says he has never been to Potter's Field, nor has he any desire to go. "It's not my end of the job," he says, then turns to his staffing problems. "It's not that I want geniuses, but could they at least send me somebody who can read and write?"
And so the day ends. The gravediggers on Hart Island repair to a black-and-white television set to watch a rerun of Bonanza. Outside, in a corner of the field, last light leaves a stone on which somebody etched, "Cry not for us for we are with the Father. No longer do we cast shadows on the ground as you do. We are at peace.''
— By Gregory Jaynes