The Skull

This isn’t one of my stories. It’s one of my father’s. But it’s just too good to be lost to time without writing it down here and sharing it.

In my father’s first semester of medical school at McGill University in Montreal he was told it was every student’s responsibility to acquire, by whatever means possible, a human skull by the start of second term. Today there are polymer-cast skulls that are every bit as good as the real thing for learning skull anatomy, but then, in 1939, there were no suitable alternatives.

My father rode his Indian Chief motorcycle back to Seattle for the Christmas break (It was a warm, dry winter, or I would have thought that an achievement in and of itself!), and fretted over his failure to come up with an idea for how to get his hands on a human skull. A few days before he would have to leave to make it back to Montreal for start of classes his phone rang. It was a Seattle friend who was going to medical school nearby. He said, “Curt, I’m in trouble! I left something for you in your garage, but I’ve got to skip town and lay low for a while. Bye!”

Well, of course, my father went out to the garage. First, he was aware of a horrible stench, then he saw a bucket in the corner closest to the door, covered with a burlap sack. He removed the sack and was confronted with a human face staring back at him. There was a head in the bucket!

Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, (yes, I know there are probably many variations on that metaphor that would bring a grittier flavor to this moment), he saw a solution to his dilemma being handed to him on a silver platter, or in reality, in a tin bucket. I’m in metaphor hell here.

He cleaned as much flesh from the head as he could, sawed off the top, and removed the brain. Then he wrapped the skull in newspaper, tied it to the back of his motorcycle seat, and set off for Montreal. When he arrived at the border, the Canadian customs agent asked him what was wrapped up in the paper? He answered, “A human head. Wanna see?” The agent laughed and waved him through.

When he returned to Seattle for summer break he found a friend of a friend who was able to put him in touch with the friend who had left the head in his garage. Over a beer he heard the details of how the head had ended up in his hands.

It turns out his friend had taken a Christmas break job in a funeral home with a crematorium for the explicit purpose of stealing a head, and for the same reason my father needed one: it was a medical school requirement. He asked for and was given the job of pushing the coffins into the crematorium and firing up the furnace. He was alone with each coffin for a few minutes before he was signaled to begin the cremation while family and loved ones sat on the other side of a wall with a small window into the furnace chamber where, if they wished, they could peek in and see the coffin burn. No one ever peeked.

As the break came to an end, he was ready with a saw and a bucket. When he thought the time was right and he was alone with a body about to be cremated, he opened up the coffin, sawed off the head, dropped it in the bucket, closed the top, and when signaled, slid the coffin into the furnace and turned up the heat.

He felt confident everything had gone well until he heard loud and continuous screaming from the other side of the wall. It seemed the wife of the deceased has been the one-in-a-hundred who has decided to watch the cremation through the little window, and when the sides of the coffin fell away, she saw her husband’s head was missing and let out a shriek. My father’s friend high-tailed it out the back door and, well, I’ve told you the rest.

The skull stayed with my father through medical school and after the war it rested on a shelf in his office until he retired. He attached a brass hinge to the skull flap and springs to keep the jaw in place. Just another piece of our family history.