Free The Removers: A Memoir by Andrew Meredith

years after my father had been fired. On the first day of a religion class, the teacher, a white-haired, well-fed Christian Brother whom I’d never met, never even seen before, read everyone’s name on the roll and waited for a “Here.” When he got to the space where my name should’ve been called, he didn’t say anything, just nodded without looking up, mouthed the word “Meredith,” and made a check before calling the next name. Maybe he had liked my dad and would’ve liked me, maybe he would’ve even hooked me up with a better grade than I deserved, but I didn’t go back to his class after that first day. I wanted only to be anonymous. I wanted no association with my father, which was a stretch since I had enrolled at the school where he’d spent twenty years and was fired in a scandal. There was no voice in me that felt like a reliable advocate for my well-being. I had no ability to muster the grit and planning I needed to put myself in a better situation. And from the first day there I experienced a sensation that never left me: that I was Shaggy walking down a hallway in an episode of Scooby-Doo , with the eyes of the portraits following me. None of my classmates knew that I’d been on this campus since I wasborn, that I’d gone to nursery school here, been to my mother’s college graduation here, been to too many basketball games to count, seen the school plays, come to the open house every year, eaten on the fake Eames chairs in the cafeteria, that I knew the old women in the mail room, had played racquetball in the gym with my dad, had run up and down the hills on the quad, hills which now, to a six-foot-one seventeen-year-old, felt alarmingly small. Teachers in the English department had known me since I was born. If my dad had still taught at La Salle, untainted, and I had gone there, I would’ve dealt with the weight of being his son, too. Maybe teachers would’ve eyed me, would’ve expected me to be a certain way. But it was a unique weight, him having been fired. The teachers all knew something very private about me, they knew the red mark on my family. No one in my high school would have known about it except one friend whose sister was enrolled at La Salle at the time, and he had never said a word to me. My other friends wouldn’t have known unless I had told them, and I hadn’t. But my teachers at La Salle knew. Being there meant an extra weight, an unnecessary and stupid one.
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    Nearly every ministration involved in moving a five-hundred-pound body starts with the words “Okay. One, two, three.” We were standing alongside the stretcher, reaching across its empty width, the tops of our thighs holding it in place. Dad put both his hands on her far calf. I cupped one hand under each of her heels. Dad said, “Okay. One, two, three, pull,” thelast word trailing off in a grunt. Even with the security guard pushing from the opposite side, after a ten-second spurting of red-faced jerks we had hardly budged her. Only her feet, not even her ankles, made it over to the stretcher. Ninety-nine percent of her weight remained unmoved. We tried again.
    “One, two, three, pull,” Dad said again. Nothing. “Jesus Christ.” Then he asked the guard, “You have anybody else who could help us?”
    The guard: “Nope. I’m it.”
    Dad let his head slump to one side in outsize exasperation. A breath leaked out between his lips.
    “Maybe we could saw her in half,” I said.
    Dad said to the guard, “Can I use the phone?” He pulled out his beeper for the number and called the funeral director. “Hi, Gene. I’m at the hospital. Did the family tell you anything about the body? No? She’s a big one. She’s five hundred pounds. Yeah. Five hundred. I called my son. He’s here. And we have a guard helping. We can’t move her. You have anybody else who could come? I know it’s Saturday night. Okay. Thanks, Gene. Beep me if you need me. Thanks.” He hung up. “Gene’s sending two more