“His body was shipped to the state medical school at Memphis. There in a basement room he was
preserved with formalin and wheeled forth to take his place with other deceased persons newly arrived. He was laid
out on a slab and flayed, eviscerated, dissected. His head was sawed open and the brains removed. His muscles
were stripped from his bones. His heart was taken out. His entrails were hauled forth and delineated and the four
young students who bent over him like those haruspices of old perhaps saw monsters worse to come in theirconfigurations. At the end of three months when the class was closed Ballard was scraped from the table into a
plastic bag and taken with others of his kind to a cemetery outside the city and there interred. A minister from the
school read a simple service.”
―
Cormac McCarthy,
Child of God