DIGGING UP BONES

Radic details a notorious funeral home scandal in this nonfiction work.

The setting is Robertson County, Tennessee, in the 1980s, when the place “still moved at its own pace.” As the author notes, “The land felt open, and time didn’t seem to be in a hurry.” A sordid scandal disrupted this peaceful setting in 1988, when Bobby Wilks, the gregarious and well-liked director of a local funeral home, was revealed to be defrauding his grieving customers by taking their money and then dumping the corpses of their deceased loved ones willy-nilly, sometimes wrapped in trash. The county had many other funeral homes in addition to the Barber Funeral Home, but people trusted the outgoing Wilks. (As Radic puts it, “Around here, a hill was good for three things: a church to save your soul, a place to sell your liquor, wine and spirits, and a graveyard that took them both—your soul and your money.”) The revelation of his wrongdoing required direct investigation by the affected families; the resulting trial determined that Wilks had systematically lied to his customers. “All was well,” the author writes, “until somebody wanted somebody to dig up a baby that had been ‘buried’ for six years and found out it was wrapped in a Walmart shopping bag.” Found guilty, Wilks was fined, stripped of his license, and sentenced to nearly 30 years in prison; he died while incarcerated in 2017. In these pages, Radic tells the story of the scandal, grounding the narrative in its rich regional setting and introducing another Bobby: the Reverend Bobby Flatt, who auctioned off his dead mother’s effects to pay Wilks for her funeral services, which he didn’t end up providing.

The author writes with such compassion and sheer storytelling verve that readers will eagerly turn the pages of this sordid, heartbreaking tale, despite its dark subject matter. (While Wilks expressed some regret for his actions, he never offered any motivation beyond simple greed, and he seemed to have no compunction about desecrating the trust of the people he knew and talked with every day.) The book is a model of scrupulously researched local history, full of reproductions of photos and documents and contemporaneous news accounts. As fascinating as all this documentation is, the work’s greatest strengths are Radic’s wise commentary and her utterly winning prose style. In the course of detailing Wilks’ disgusting opportunism, the author fully and colorfully describes the nature of life and death in the small-town South: “The family reaches the graveside together, shocked they survived one another, wiping tears, holding grudges, and telling everyone how ‘peaceful’ everything was.” (Death arrangements in the South, she points out, “are not for the weak.”) Radic emphasizes the sensory details of small-town life, consistently adding texture and color to the narrative; she writes that a local funeral parlor “smells like hot coffee coming from the kitchen mixed with a spray of flowers.” Readers could not ask for a more sensitive and oddly poetic account of this startling tragedy.

A history of a painful scandal that powerfully acknowledges the humanity of those involved.