Read The Removers: A Memoir for Free Online Page A

like Alvin if he’d borrowed Simon’s glasses, a kid Father Kibbie calls Mr. Gazz because he can’t pronounce Gansawnkaja. Gazz just smiles at me, still holding his hollowed-out Bic pen, not even trying to feign innocence.
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    The morning after Orville, I went into the kitchen while Dad, in a T-shirt, sweatpants, and moccasins, stood over a frying pan.
    “You want scrapple, buddy?” he said.
    Wondrous earthy perfume, frying scrapple. To eat it—a pressed loaf of cornmeal and the slaughterhouse oddments of pig: tail, skin, stomach, snout—is to want not.
    “A guy moaned at me last night,” I said. I pulled the ketchup from the fridge and put it on the table. I sat down.
    “What do you mean?”
    “The body I picked up. It was talking. Like, ‘Aaaaaaaaah.’”
    “Ooh, boy.” He set in front of me a plate of scrambled eggs bordered by four piping brown slices of the stuff, each a third of an inch thick and as wide and long as a playing card.
    “Yeah, I’ve had that happen to me once,” he said.
    “Really?”
    He sat down and doused the contents of his plate with the ketchup. He slid the bottle to me, and I did the same. Forking into a properly prepared slice of scrapple is like cracking into crème brûlée: a thin, brittle, slightly scorched shell gives way to custard.
    “You think he was totally dead, right?” I said. Never more than when I ate scrapple in these early days of removals did it occur to me that I was becoming the creature I feared most: the possum. I left the house at night, skulking around in shadow to clear away a dead thing. Now here I was eating the swept-up scraps off the abattoir floor, the breakfast equivalent of roadkill, feeling more myself with every bite.
    “Yeah, it’s just gas leaving the body,” he said. “Passes over the vocal cords.” These had become the kinds of things we talked about, now that we were coworkers, over breakfast.
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    An October Monday, 1990. I was fourteen, a sophomore at Northeast Catholic High School. My sister was in the seventhgrade at St. Joachim’s. We got home around the same time that day and noticed that Dad was already home. This was strange, him home before five. I thought he must’ve had a class canceled. We didn’t see him, but his school bag was where he always put it when he got in, on the dining room chair at the end of the buffet, and we saw the cellar light on, so assumed he was down there working in his office. “Dad?” I called down the stairs. “I’ll be up,” he said.
    I poured the first of several bowls of Acme-brand Cheerios and took my spot at the kitchen table, my head in the Inquirer sports page as usual, reading the bits I hadn’t gotten to before school, items like golf, boxing, high school soccer capsules. Eventually Mom came home from work. “Dad’s home,” I said to her and kept reading. She went down the cellar steps, and neither of them surfaced for a long time. Mom came up first. I was reading and the cellar door was behind my seat, so I didn’t see her before she disappeared upstairs to their bedroom. Dad came up a few minutes later, and I turned to look at him when he did. His eyes were red. He wiped his nose with his handkerchief. He was out of his work clothes—usually a suit—and had changed into a green sweatshirt and jeans. Weird to see him dressed casually on a weekday afternoon. He said, “Hi, buddy,” to me in a whisper. He didn’t linger. He went right upstairs, too, and I could hear him close the bedroom door.
    The closing of the door resonated in me as powerfully as, was as rare as, somehow more unusual than, my father emerging from the cellar on a Monday afternoon crying. My parents’bedroom door was never closed. They changed with it open, my mother using the angle of wall and in-let door like a dressing screen. They slept with it open. They wanted to hear what was going on in the house. They eschewed a window air conditioner even on the hottest summer night; the room’s closed