“Well, Huey declines the drink on the grounds that the Bangor and Aroostook is pretty fussy on the subject of train drivers with rye on their breaths, and the fella from Graves and Registration don’t hold
it against Huey, any more than Huey holds the fact of the army fella’s drunkenness against him. They even shook on her, Huey said.
“So off they go, dropping those flag-covered coffins every other stop or two. Eighteen or twenty of em in all. Huey said it went on all the way to Boston, and there was weeping and wailing relatives at every stop except Ludlow . . . and at Ludlow he was treated to the sight of Bill Baterman, who, he said, looked like he was dead inside and just waiting for his soul to stink. When he got off that train, he said he woke up that army fella, and they hit some spots—
fifteen or twenty—and Huey got drunker than he had ever been and went to a whore, which he’d never done in his whole life, and woke up with a set of crabs so big and mean they gave him the shivers, and he said that if that was what they called a mystery train, he never wanted to drive no mystery train again.
“Timmy’s body was taken up to the Greenspan Funeral Home on Fern Street—it used to be across from where the New Franklin Laundry stands now—and two days later he was buried in Pleasantview Cemetery with full military honors.
“Well, I tell you, Louis: Missus Baterman was dead ten years then, along with the second child she tried to bring into the world, and that had a lot to do with what happened. A second child might have helped to ease the pain, don’t you think? A second child might have reminded old Bill that there’s others that feel the pain and have to be helped through. I guess in that way, you’re luckier—
having another child and all, I mean. A child and a wife who are both alive and well.
“According to the letter Bill got from the lieutenant in charge of his boy’s platoon, Timmy was shot down on the road to Rome on July 15, 1943. His body was shipped home two days later, and it got to Limestone on the nineteenth. It was put aboard Huey Garber’s mystery train the very next day. Most of the GIs who got killed in Europe were buried in Europe, but all of the boys who
went home on that train were special—Timmy had died charging a machine-gun nest, and he had won the Silver Star posthumously.
“Timmy was buried—don’t hold me to this, but I think it was on July 22. It was four or five days later that Marjorie Washburn, who was the mailwoman in those days, saw Timmy walking up the road toward York’s Livery Stable. Well, Margie damn near drove right off the road, and you can understand why. She went back to the post office, tossed her leather bag with all her undelivered mail still in it on George Anderson’s desk, and told him she was going home and to bed right then.
“Margie, are you sick?’ George asks. ‘You are just as white as a gull’s wing.’
“I’ve had the fright of my life, and I don’t want to talk to you about it,’ Margie Washburn says. ‘I ain’t going to talk to Brian about it, or my mom, or anybody. When I get up to heaven, if Jesus asks me to talk to Him about it, maybe I will. But I don’t believe it.’ And out she goes.
“Everybody knew Timmy was dead; there was his bituary in the Bangor Daily News and the Ellsworth American just the week before, picture and all, and half the town turned out for his funeral up to the city. And here Margie seen him, walking up the road—lurching up the road, she finally told old George Anderson
—only this was twenty years later, and she was dying, and George told me it seemed to him like she wanted to tell somebody what she’d seen. George said it seemed to him like it preyed on her mind, you know.
“Pale he was, she said, and dressed in an old pair of chino pants and a faded flannel hunting shirt, although it must have been ninety degrees in the shade that day. Margie said all his hair was sticking up in the back. ‘His eyes were like raisins stuck in bread dough. I
saw a ghost that day, George. That’s what scared me so. I never thought I’d see such a thing, but there it was.’
“Well, word got around. Pretty soon some other people saw Timmy, too. Missus Stratton—well, we called her ‘missus,’ but so far as anyone knew she could have been single or divorced or grass-widowed; she had a little two-room house down where the Pedersen Road joins the Hancock Road, and she had a lot of jazz records, and sometimes she’d be willing to throw you a little party if you had a ten-dollar bill that wasn’t working too hard. Well, she saw him from her porch, and she said he walked right up to the edge of the road and stopped there.
“He just stood there, she said, his hands dangling at his sides and his head pushed forward, lookin like a boxer who’s ready to eat him some canvas. She said she stood there on her porch, heart goin like sixty, too scared to move. Then she said he turned around, and it was like watching a drunk man try to do an about-face. One leg went way out and the other foot turned, and he just about fell over.
She said he looked right at her and all the strength just run out of her hands and she dropped the basket of washing she had, and the clothes fell out and got smutty all over again.
“She said his eyes . . . she said they looked as dead and dusty as marbles, Louis. But he saw her. . . and he grinned . . . and she said he talked to her. Asked her if she still had those records because he wouldn’t mind cutting a rug with her. Maybe that very night. And Missus Stratton went back inside, and she wouldn’t come out for most of a week, and by then it was over anyway.
“Lot of people saw Timmy Baterman. Many of them are dead now—Missus Stratton is, for one, and others have moved on, but there are a few old crocks like me left around who’ll tell you. if you ask em right.
“We saw him, I tell you, walking back and forth along the Pedersen Road, a mile east of his daddy’s house and a mile west.
Back and forth he went, back and forth all day, and for all anyone knew, all night. Shirt untucked, pale face, hair all stuck up in spikes, fly unzipped sometimes, and this look on his face. . . this look. . .“
Jud paused to light a cigarette, then shook the match out, and looked at Louis through the haze of drifting blue smoke. And although the story was, of course, utterly mad, there was no lie in Jud’s eyes.
“You know, they have these stories and these movies—I don’t know if they’re true—about zombies down in Haiti. In the movies they just sort of shamble along, with their dead eyes starin straight ahead, real slow and sort of clumsy. Timmy Baterman was like that, Louis, like a zombie in a movie, but he wasn’t. There was somethin more. There was somethin goin on behind his eyes, and sometimes you could see it and sometimes you couldn’t see it.
Somethin behind his eyes, Louis. I don’t think that thinkin is what I want to call it. I don’t know what in the hell I want to call it.
“It was sly, that was one thing. Like him tellin Missus Stratton he wanted to cut a rug with her. There was somethin goin on in there, Louis, but I don’t think it was thinkin and I don’t think it had much—maybe nothing at all—to do with Timmy Baterman. It was more like a . . . a radio signal that was comin from somewhere else.
You looked at him and you thought, ‘If he touches me, I’m gonna scream.’ Like that.
“Back and forth he went, up and down the road, and one day after I got home from work—this must have been, oh, I’m going to say it was July 30 or so—here is George Anderson, the postmaster, don’t you know, sitting on my back porch, drinking iced tea with Hannibal Benson, who was then our second selectman, and Alan Purinton, who was fire chief. Norma sat there too but never said a thing.
“George kept rubbing the stump at the top of his right leg. Lost most of that leg working on the railroad, he did, and the stump used to bother him something fierce on those hot and muggy days.