"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.
"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.