Carved in Bone

childhood bicycle wrecks, skull-bashing barroom brawls, years of secret domestic violence, decades of gradual decline. To hear a particular story, all I had to do was slide the cardboard box off the shelf, take it to a table, flip open the top, and lift out the bones. Some tales were written in the lurid detail of fractured limbs, cut ribs, and bludgeoned or bullet-shattered skulls. Others were understated, like the sturdy bones of the nineteenth-century black man whose arms and legs and massive muscle attachment points bespoke a life of heavy labor.
    I pulled two boxes from the shelves—old friends, in a way, who had helped me teach thousands of students over the years—and removed a few of their bones. Their broad surfaces were smooth as ivory from the touch of countless hands; as I grasped them, they felt familiar and comforting, these pieces of the dead.
    Unlatching the battered briefcase I kept in the collection room, I laid the bones on the gray foam padding inside and closed the lid. Then I ducked down the back stairs, emerging beside the tunnel that led to the end zone. Threading my way up a maze of concrete ramps and stairs, I emerged near the rear of McClung Museum, a blocky 1960s building that housed the university’s modest assortment of Native American artifacts.
    Two hundred seventy faces turned my way when I strode through the door at one side of the lecture hall in McClung. My introductory class—Anthropology 101: Human Origins—was the only course in the department’s curriculum not taught in the warren of rooms beneath Neyland Stadium; there simply wasn’t room for it anywhere beneath the stands. The museum, whose handful of offices had housed the entire department back when there were only three anthropology professors, now held only the museum’s staff. McClung was quiet most of the time, attracting only a smattering of visitors, but three mornings a week, it bustled with the chatter and laughter of freshman and sophomore undergraduates.
    Most intro courses were taught by junior faculty or even teaching assistants; in fact, I was the only department chairman I knew who still taught a 101 course. I told colleagues that I thought it was important for an administrator not to lose sight of day-to-day teaching, and that was true. Also true, though, was the fact that I loved being around students as they began falling in love with a new subject. With my subject. And—maybe, by extension, just a bit—with me.
    Not romantically or sexually, of course. I’d never gotten involved with a student, though occasionally it had taken considerable willpower to resist the urge. During one unforgettable class, during a revival of the miniskirt, I had meandered over to the left side of the lecture hall to make some point or other about the structure of the pelvis. For the first time in my teaching career, I found myself rendered momentarily speechless on the topic. An attractive young coed in the front row, directly in front of me, chose that exact moment to uncross her legs and languidly drape one leg over the arm of her desk. As her skirt slid up her taut thighs and her flawless pelvic structure, it became clear that underneath, she was wearing nothing at all. Astonished, I looked up at her face; she cocked her head, raised an eyebrow, and smiled sweetly. Beating a hasty retreat to the other side of the auditorium, I struggled manfully to salvage my sentence, my lecture, and my composure. This same student appeared in my office a few days later—I’d just handed out midterm grades, and hers was an F. Her lower lip quivered as she leaned toward me across the desk in a low-cut blouse. “Oh, Dr. Brockton, I’ll do anything to pull up my grade,” she breathed.
    “Then study, ” I snapped. She dropped the class three days later, but not before turning in a quiz on the bones of the hand and arm, in which she defined humerus as “something that, like, makes you laugh.”
    Today’s class—like the day of the migrating miniskirt—also happened to focus on pelvic structure. That seemed fitting, since I’d just been examining the pelvis of the body—the woman—found in the cave in Cooke County. As a teaching aid, I’d brought to class two sets of pelvic bones, one male and the other female, from the skeletal collection I’d been building over the years. Using red dental wax as a temporary adhesive, I reattached the pubic bones to the innominates, or hip bones, and then held them up, first the male,