buttocks, brimming over with the crawling, pallid, bean-shaped maggots above the disproportionately short legs that were kicked out in opposite directions. A solid block of flies, hundreds of them, circled protectively. The back of the head was completely swathed in white worms, which must have numbered in the thousands rather than hundreds.
Nell kicked away the wasps' nest and stuffed the judge into the wheelbarrow. She half wheeled and half dragged his naked body through the meadows, over the garden, through the halls, and into his study. Throwing the body on a mound of legal papers, Nell pulled Judge Healey's head into her lap. Handfuls of maggots rained down from his nose and ears and slack mouth. She began tearing out the luminescent maggots from the back of his head. The wormy pellets were moist and hot. She also grabbed some of the fire-eyed flies that had trailed her inside, smashing them with the palm of her hand, pulling them apart by the wings, flinging them, one after another, across the room in empty vengeance. What was heard and seen next made her produce a roar loud enough to ring straight through New England.
Two grooms from the stable next door found Nell crawling away from the study on her hands and knees, crying insensibly.
"But what is it, Nellie, what is it? By Jesus, you ain't hurt now?"
It was later, when Nell Ranney told Ednah Healey that Judge Healey had groaned before dying in her arms, that the widow ran out and threw a vase at the chief of police. That her husband might have been conscious for those four days, even remotely aware, was too much to ask her to permit.
Mrs. Healey's professed knowledge of her husband's killer turned out to be rather imprecise. "It was Boston that killed him," she revealed later that day to Chief Kurtz, after she had stopped shaking. "This entire hideous city. It ate him alive."
She insisted Kurtz bring her to the body. It had taken the coroner's deputies three hours to slice out the quarter-inch spiraled maggots from their places inside the corpse; the tiny horny mouths had to be pried off. The pockets of devoured flesh left in their wake spanned all open areas; the terrible swelling at the back of the head still seemed to pulse with maggots even after their removal. The nostrils were now barely divided and the armpits eaten away. With the false teeth gone the face sagged low and loose like a dead accordion. Most humiliating, most pitiable, was not the broken condition, not even the fact that the body had been so maggot-ridden and layered in flies and wasps, but the simple fact of the nakedness. Sometimes a corpse, it is said, looks for all the world like a forked radish with a head fantastically carved upon it. Judge Healey had one of those bodies never meant to be seen naked by anyone except his wife.
In the stale chill of the coroner's rooms Ednah Healey took in this view, and knew in that instant what it meant to be a widow, what an ungodly jealousy it produced. With a sudden jerk of her arm, she swiped the coroner's razor-edged shears from a shelf. Kurtz, remembering the vase, stumbled backward into the confused, cursing coroner.
Ednah kneeled down and tenderly snipped a clump from the judge's wild crown of hair. Crumpling to her knees, her voluminous skirts spreading to every corner of the small room, a tiny woman unfolded across a cold, purple body, with one gauze-gloved hand clenching the blades and the other caressing the plundered tuft, thick and dry as horsehair.
* * *
"Well, I've never seen a man so cleaned out by worms," Kurtz said with a tenuous voice at the deadhouse after two of Kurtz's men escorted Ednah Healey home.
Barnicoat, the coroner, had a shapeless and small head cruelly punctured by lobster eyes. His nostrils were stuffed to double capacity with cotton balls.
"Maggots," Barnicoat said, grinning. He picked up one of the wriggling white beans that had fallen to the floor. It struggled against his meaty palm before he flung it into the incinerator, where it fizzled black and then popped into smoke. "Bodies aren't as a practice left to rot out in a field. Still, it is true that the winged mob our Judge Healey attracted is more common to sheep or goat carcasses left outdoors." The truth was that the sheer number of maggots that had bred inside Healey for the four days he was