“Who’s Timmy Baterman?”
“Timmy Baterman was one of the twenty or so boys from Ludlow that went overseas to fight Hitler. He left in 1942. He come back in a box with a flag on the top of it in 1943. He died in Italy. His daddy, Bill Batennan, lived his whole life in this town. He about went crazy when he got the telegram. . . and then he quieted right down. He knew about the Micmac burying ground. you see. And he’d decided what he wanted to do.”
The chill was back. Louis stared at Jud for a long time, trying to read the lie in the old man’s eyes. It was not there. But the fact of this story surfacing just now was damned convenient.
“Why didn’t you tell me this that other night?” he said finally.
“After we. . . after we did the cat? When I asked you if anyone had ever buried a person up there, you said no one ever had.”
“Because you didn’t need to know,” Jud said. “Now you do.”
Louis was silent for a long time. “Was he the only one?”
“The only one I know of personally,” Jud said gravely. “The only one to ever try it? I doubt that, Louis. I doubt it very much. I’m kind of like the preacher in Clesiastes—I don’t believe that there’s anything new under the sun. Oh, sometimes the glitter they sprinkle over the top of a thing changes, but that’s all. What’s been tried once has been tried once before . . . and before. . . and before.”
He looked down at his liver-spotted hands. In the living room, the clock softly chimed twelve-thirty.
“I decided that a man in your profession is used to looking at symptoms and seeing the diseases underneath. . . and I decided I
had to talk straight to you when Mortonson down at the funeral home told me you’d ordered a grave liner instead of a sealing vault.”
Louis looked at Jud for a long time, saying nothing. Jud flushed deeply but didn’t look away.
Finally Louis said: “Sounds like maybe you did a little snooping, Jud. I am sorry because of it.”
“I didn’t ask him which you bought.”
“Not right out, maybe.”
But Jud did not reply, and although his blush had deepened even more—his complexion was approaching a plum color now
—his eyes still didn’t waver.
At last, Louis sighed. He felt unutterably tired. “Oh, fuck it. I don’t care. Maybe you’re even right. Maybe it was on my mind. If it was, it was on the downside of it. I didn’t think much about what I was ordering. I was thinking about Gage.”
“I know you were thinking about Gage. But you knew the difference. Your uncle was an undertaker.”
Yes, he had known the difference. A sealing vault was a piece of construction work, something which was meant to last a long, long time. Concrete was poured into a rectangular mould reinforced with steel rods, and then, after the graveside services were over, a crane lowered a slightly curved concrete top into place. The lid was sealed with a substance like the hot-patch highway departments used to fill potholes. Uncle Carl had told Louis that sealant—trade-named Ever-Lock—got itself a fearsome grip after all that weight had been on it for a while.
Uncle Carl, who liked to yarn as much as anyone (at least when he was with his own kind, and Louis, who had worked with him
summers for a while, qualified as a sort of apprentice undertaker), told his nephew of an exhumation order he’d gotten once from the Cook County D.A.’s office. Uncle Carl went out to Groveland to oversee the exhumation. They could be tricky things, he said—
people whose only ideas concerning disinterral came from those horror movies starring Boris Karloff as Dr. Frankenstein’s monster and Dwight Frye as Igor had an entirely wrong impression.
Opening a sealing vault was no job for two men with picks and shovels—not unless they had about six weeks to spend on the job.
This one went all right . . . at first. The grave was opened, and the crane grappled onto the top of the vault. Only the top didn’t just pull off, as it was supposed to do. The whole vault, its concrete sides already a little wet and discolored, started to rise out of the ground instead. Uncle Carl screamed for the crane operator to back off. Uncle Carl wanted to go back to the mortuary and get some stuff that would weaken the sealant’s grip a bit.
The crane operator either didn’t hear or wanted to go for the whole thing, like a little kid playing with a toy crane and junk prizes in a penny arcade. Uncle Carl said that the damned fool almost got it too. The vault was three quarters of the way out— Uncle Carl and his assistant could hear water pattering from the underside of the vault onto the floor of the grave (it had been a wet week in Chicagoland) when the crane just tipped over and went kerplunk into the grave. The crane operator crashed into the windshield and broke his nose. That day’s festivities cost Cook County roughly $3,000—$2,100 over the usual price of such gay goings-on. The real point of the story for Uncle Carl was that the crane operator had been elected president of the Chicago local of the Teamsters six years later.
Grave liners were simpler matters. Such a liner was no more than a humble concrete box, open at the top. It was set into the grave on the morning of a funeral. Following the services, the coffin was lowered into it. The sextons then brought on the top,
which was usually in two segments. These segments were lowered vertically into the ends of the grave, where they stood up like bookends. Iron rings were embedded into the concrete at the ends of each segment. The sextons would run lengths of chain through them and lower them gently onto the top of the grave liner. Each section would weigh sixty, perhaps seventy pounds— eighty, tops.
And no sealer was used.
It was easy enough for a man to open a grave liner; that’s what Jud was implying.
Easy enough for a man to disinter the body of his son and bmy it someplace else.
Shhhhh. . . shhhh. We will not speak of such things. These are secret things.
“Yes, I guess I knew the difference between a sealing vault and a grave liner,” Louis said. “But I wasn’t thinking about about what you think I was thinking about.”
“Louis—”
“It’s late,” Louis said. “It’s late, I’m drunk, and my heart aches. If you feel like you have to tell me this story, then tell me and let’s get it over with.” Maybe I should have started with martinis, he thought. Then I could have been safely passed out when he came knocking.
“All right, Louis. Thank you.”
“Just go on.”
Jud paused a moment, thinking, then began to speak.
39
“In those days—back during the war, I mean—the train still stopped in Orrington, and Bill Baterman had a funeral hack there at the loading depot to meet the freight carrying the body of his son Timmy. The coffin was unloaded by four railroad men. I was one of them. There was an army fellow on board from Graves and Registration—that was the army’s wartime version of undertakers, Louis—but he never got off the train. He was sitting drunk in a boxcar that still had twelve coffins in it.
“We put Timmy into the back of a mortuary Cadillac—in those days it still wasn’t uncommon to hear such things called ‘hurry-up wagons’ because in the old days, the major concern was to get them into the ground before they rotted. Bill Baterman stood by, his face stony and kinda . . . I dunno . . . kinda dry, I guess you’d say. He wept no tears. Huey Garber was driving the train that day, and he said that army fella had really had a tour for himself. Huey said they’d flown in a whole shitload of those coffins to Limestone in Presque Isle, at which point both the coffins and their keeper entrained for points south.
“The army fella comes walking up to Huey, and he takes a fifth of rye whiskey out of his uniform blouse, and he says in this soft, drawly Dixie voice, ‘Well, Mr. Engineer, you’re driving a mystery train today, did you know that?’
“Huey shakes his head.
“Well, you are. At least, that’s what they call a funeral train down in Alabama.’ Huey says the fella took a list out of his pocket and squinted at it. ‘We’re going to start by dropping two of those coffins off in Houlton, and then I’ve got one for Passadumkeag, two for Bangor, one for Derry, one for Ludlow, and so on. I feel like a fugging milkman. You want a drink?’