They sat at the kitchen table over beers—first time we've ever tipped one
in our kitchen, Louis thought, a little surprised. Half-way 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 any more.
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-claims 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 towards 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 was 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 in the end. 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 unravelled and 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 the 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
'Clessiastes —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 on me, 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 DA'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 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 on to 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 and he and his assistant could hear water pattering from the underside of
the vault on to 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-ons.
The real point of the story for Uncle Carl was that the crane operator had been
elected President of the Chicago local 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 in either two or three segments. These segments
were lowered vertically into the ends of the grave, where they stood up like queer
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.
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.