فصل سی و هشت

THIRTY-EIGHT

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.