WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY
It takes the county two days.
Kastner does what he can do, which is not much and does not take long. There is no question about who. There is no question about how. What there is, is a statutory requirement that a determination be made and documented, and so material is collected in containers, and photographs are taken, and a determination is made, and it is documented.
Manner: accident. Cause: mechanical trauma, non-survivable.
Three words on a line, and the third one is the only one on that page that is doing any work.
The report that goes with it is Lemke's, and it is four pages, and in the section where it asks what the operator observed, there is a word Emmett gave three men in his own field on Tuesday afternoon.
Stone.
It is in the county file now. Files are like that. A thing said once out loud in a field becomes a thing typed, and a thing typed becomes a thing a man reads in October before he has ever met anybody involved.
Then there is the other thing.
Nobody has a procedure for the other thing.
Emmett learns this in pieces over Wednesday and Thursday, mostly by being in rooms where people talk carefully.
Nobody is unkind to him. That should be said, because it would be an easier two days if somebody were. Every person who comes out here is doing their level best with a thing that has no form to fill out, and the effort of it is visible on all of them, and Emmett spends most of Wednesday managing other people's faces.
The wagon is still down in the field the whole time, under the tarp, with the corners weighted. There is a different deputy at the head of the field road every eight hours and none of them come up to the house.
The sheriff's department has no procedure. The medical examiner's office has a procedure for remains, and this is, in the useful sense, not remains, and also is. The county's lawyer comes out from the courthouse — a woman about forty in a raincoat and good boots, and she is kind and she is careful and she has clearly read something on the drive out — and at one point she says the words agricultural byproduct and stops in the middle of them and apologizes so completely that Emmett ends up telling her it's all right.
He tells a county lawyer it's all right. He stands in his own yard on the second day and does that.
The load is six tons and change.
That is a number he has in his head without wanting it, because a full wagon is eight and that one was three-quarters, and there is no part of that arithmetic he had to work out, and there is no part of it he can stop doing.
The suggestions come gently, and in descending order of how long anybody can stand to say them out loud.
The rendering plant over west.
The landfill, with a variance.
Incineration, which nobody in this part of the state is equipped for at that tonnage, and which the lawyer says anyway, because she has three and it feels worse to only offer two.
Marianne is in the kitchen when the last of it is being discussed in the yard, and the window is open because it is September, and she comes out onto the step and says, "No."
She says, "He's not going to be silage."
Nobody argues with her.
There is nothing to argue with. The county lawyer takes her notebook back out.
What it turns out you can do — and it takes most of Thursday to establish, with two phone calls to Madison — is bury it.
On your own ground, with the town's sign-off, at the required setbacks, provided the site is surveyed and recorded with the register of deeds.
The town's sign-off is a form. The Town of Rehm keeps its records in a back room off the fire hall, and the clerk has been the clerk since before Dell was born, and she has the form found and filled and signed inside of forty minutes on a Thursday, and she does not charge the fee, and there is no line on the form where a person could write down that she didn't.
It is legal because it has always been legal. People have been burying people on their own farms in this state since before it was a state, and nobody has ever gotten around to making them stop, and every so often that turns out to be worth something to somebody.
Kastner brings the paper out himself on Thursday afternoon.
He does not send it. He drives out and comes into the kitchen with his hat off and sits down without being asked, which is a thing you can do when you have known a family for forty years, and he puts it on the table and turns it around so it faces them.
It is one page.
There is a line for the decedent and a line for the next of kin and a line for the county and a line for the disposition, and under disposition somebody at the courthouse has typed:
THE CONTENTS OF ONE (1) FORAGE WAGON.
Kastner says, "I want you to know that I fought about that sentence for an hour and a half and that this is what we came up with."
"It's all right, Verlyn."
"It is not all right."
"No."
Marianne signs it. Then Emmett signs it.
Kastner puts it in a folder and does not look at either of them for a second and then does.
"Where do you want him."
Marianne says, "I'll show you tomorrow."