It had been no big deal. No one had even commented on it. But . . . it was there. Charlton had felt what the cat wasn't. Louis killed his beer and went back for another. If Gage came back changed in such a way, that would be an obscenity.
He popped the top and drank deeply. He was drunk now, drunk for fair, and there would be a big head for him to deal with tomorrow. How I Went to My Son's Funeral with a Hangover by Louis Creed, author of How I Just Missed Him at the Crucial Moment and numerous other works.
Drunk. Sure. And he suspected now that the reason he had gotten drunk was so he could consider this crazy idea soberly.
In spite of everything, the idea had that deadly attraction, that sick luster, that glamour. Yes, that above all else--it had glamour.
Jud was back, speaking in his mind:
You do it because it gets hold of you. You do it because that burial place is a secret place, and you want to share the secret . . . you make up reasons . . . they seem like good reasons . . . mostly you do it because you want to. Or because you have to.
Jud's voice, low and drawling with Yankee intonation, Jud's voice chilling his flesh, bringing out the goosebumps, making the hackles on the back of his neck rise.
These are secret things, Louis . . . the soil of a man's heart is stonier . . . like the soil up in the old Micmac burying ground. A man grows what he can . . . and he tends it.
Louis began to go over the other things Jud had told him about the Micmac burying ground. He began to collate the data, to sort through it, to compress it--he proceeded in exactly the same way he had once readied himself for big exams.
The dog. Spot.
I could see all the places where the barbed wire had hooked him--there was no fur in any of those places, and the flesh looked dimpled in.
The bull. Another file turned over in Louis's mind.
Lester Morgan buried his prize bull up there. Black Angus bull, named Hanratty . . . Lester dragged him all the way up there on a sledge . . . shot him dead two weeks later. That bull turned mean, really mean. But he's the only animal I ever heard of that did.
He turned mean.
The soil of a man's heart is stonier.
He turned really mean.
He's the only animal I ever heard of that did.
Mostly you do it because once you've been up there, it's your place.
The flesh looked dimpled in.
Hanratty, ain't that a silly name for a bull?
A man grows what he can . . . and tends it.
They're my rats. And my birds. I bought the fuckers.
It's your place, a secret place, and it belongs to you, and you belong to it.
He turned mean, but he's the only animal I ever heard of that did.
What do you want to buy next, Louis, when the wind blows hard at night and the moon lays a white path through the woods to that place? Want to climb those stairs again? When they're watching a horror movie, everyone in the audience knows the hero or the heroine is stupid to go up those stairs, but in real life they always do--they smoke, they don't wear seat belts, they move their family in beside a busy highway where the big rigs drone back and forth all day and all night. So, Louis, what do you say? Want to climb the stairs? Would you like to keep your dead son or go for what's behind Door Number One, Door Number Two, or Door Number Three?
Hey-ho, let's go.
Turned mean . . . only animal . . . the flesh looked . . . a man . . . yours . . . his . . .
Louis dumped the rest of the beer down the sink, feeling suddenly that he was going to vomit. The room was moving around in great swinging motions.
There was a knock at the door.
For a long time--it seemed like a long time, anyway--he believed it was only in his head, a hallucination. But the knocking just went on and on, patient, implacable. And suddenly Louis found himself thinking of the story of the monkey's paw, and a cold terror slipped into him. He seemed to feel it with total physical reality--it was like a dead hand that had been kept in a refrigerator, a dead hand which had suddenly taken on its own disembodied life and slipped inside his shirt to clutch the flesh over his heart. It was a silly image, fulsome and silly, but oh, it didn't feel silly. No.
Louis went to the door on feet he could not feel and lifted the latch with nerveless fingers. And as he swung it open, he thought: It'll be Pascow. Like they said about Jim Morrison, back from the dead and bigger than ever. Pascow standing there in his jogging shorts, big as life and as mouldy as month-old bread, Pascow with his horribly ruined head, Pascow bringing the warning again: Don't go up there. What was that old song by the Animals? Baby please don't go, baby PLEASE don't go, you know I love you so, baby please don't go . . .
The door swung open and standing there on his front step in the blowing dark of this midnight, between the day of the funeral parlor visitation and the day of his son's burial, was Jud Crandall. His thin white hair blew randomly in the chilly dark.
Louis tried to laugh. Time seemed to have turned cleverly back on itself. It was Thanksgiving again. Soon they would put the stiff, unnaturally thickened body of Ellie's cat Winston Churchill into a plastic garbage bag and start off. Oh, do not ask what is it; let us go and make our visit.
"Can I come in, Louis?" Jud asked. He took a pack of Chesterfields from his shirt pocket and poked one into his mouth.
"Tell you what," Louis said. "It's late and I've been drinking a pile of beer."
"Ayuh, I could smell it," Jud said. He struck a match. The wind snuffed it. He struck another around cupped hands, but the hands trembled and betrayed the match to the wind again. He got a third match, prepared to strike it, and then looked up at Louis standing in the doorway. "I can't get this thing lit," Jud said. "Gonna let me in or not, Louis?"
Louis stepped aside and let Jud walk in.
38
They sat at the kitchen table over beers--first time we've ever tipped one in our kitchen, Louis thought, a little surprised. Halfway across the living room, Ellie had cried out in her sleep, and both of them had frozen like statues in a children's game. The cry had not been repeated.
"Okay," Louis said, "what are you doing over here at quarter past twelve on the morning my son gets buried? You're a friend, Jud, but this is stretching it."
Jud drank, wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand, and looked directly at Louis. There was something clear and positive in his eyes, and Louis at last looked down from it.
"You know why I'm here," Jud said. "You're thinking about things that are not to be thought of, Louis. Worse still, I fear you're considering them."
"I wasn't thinking about anything but going up to bed," Louis said. "I have a burying to go to tomorrow."
"I'm responsible for more pain in your heart than you should have tonight," Jud said softly. "For all I know, I may even have been responsible for the death of your son."
Louis looked up, startled. "What--? Jud, don't talk crazy!"
"You are thinking of trying to put him up there," Jud said. "Don't you deny the thought has crossed your mind, Louis."
Louis did not reply.
"How far does its influence extend?" Jud said. "Can you tell me that? No. I can't answer that question myself, and I've lived my whole life in this patch of the world. I know about the Micmacs, and that place was always considered to be a kind of holy place to them . . . but not in a good way. Stanny B. told me that. My father told me too--later on. After Spot died the second time. Now the Micmacs, the state of Maine, and the government of the United States are arguing in court about who owns that land. Who does own it? No one really knows, Louis. Not anymore. Different people laid claim to it at one time or another, but no claim ever stuck. Anson Ludlow, the great-grandson of this town's founding father, for one. His claim was maybe the best for a white man, since Joseph Ludlow the Elder had the whole shebang as a grant from Good King Georgie back when Maine was just a big province of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But even then he would have been in a hell of a court fight because there was cross-claim
s to the land by other Ludlows and by a fellow named Peter Dimmart, who claimed he could prove pretty convincingly that he was a Ludlow on the other side of the sheets. And Joseph Ludlow the Elder was money-poor but land-rich toward the end of his life, and every now and then he'd just gift somebody with two or four hundred acres when he got into his cups."
"Were none of those deeds recorded?" Louis asked, fascinated in spite of himself.
"Oh, they were regular bears for recording deeds, were our grandfathers," Jud said, lighting a new cigarette from the butt of the old one. "The original grant on your land goes like this." Jud closed his eyes and quoted, " 'From the great old maple which stands atop Quinceberry Ridge to the verge of Orrington Stream; thus runneth the tract from north until south.' " Jud grinned without much humor. "But the great old maple fell down in 1882, let's say, and was rotted to moss by the year 1900, and Orrington Stream silted up and turned to marsh in the ten years between the end of the Great War and the crash of the stock market. A nice mess it made! It ended up not mattering to old Anson, anyways. He was struck and killed by lightning in 1921, right up around where that burying ground is."
Louis stared at Jud. Jud sipped his beer.
"It don't matter. There's lots of places where the history of ownership is so tangled it never gets unraveled, only the lawyers end up makin money. Hell, Dickens knew that. I suppose the Indians will get it back in the end, and I think that's the way it should be. But that don't really matter, Louis. I came over here tonight to tell you about Timmy Baterman and his dad."
"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 Baterman, 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 had 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 bury 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?'
"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.