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 g*y 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.