Jud stopped. His chest moved up and down rapidly.
"Jud," Louis said. "The thing this Timmy Baterman told you was it truer' "It was true," Jud muttered. "Christ! It was true. I used to go to a whorehouse in Bangor betimes. Nothing many a man hasn't done, although I s'pose there are plenty that walk the straight and narrow. I just would get the urge-the compulsion, maybe-to sink it into strange flesh now and then. Or pay some woman to do the things a man can't bring himself to ask his wife to do. Men keep their gardens too, Louis. It wasn't a terrible thing, what I done, and all of that has been behind me for the last eight or nine years, and Norma would not have left me if she had known. But something in her would have died forever. Something dear and sweet."
Jud's eyes were red and swollen and bleary. The tears of the old are singularly unlovely, Louis thought. But when Jud groped across the table for Louis's hand, Louis took it firmly.
"He told us only the bad," he said after a moment. "Only the bad. God knows there is enough of that in any human being's life, isn't there? Two or three days later, Laurine Purinton left Ludlow for good, and folks in town who saw her before she got on the train said she was sporting two shiners and had cotton stuffed up both bores of her pump. Alan, he would never talk about it. George died in 1950, and if he left anything to that grandson and granddaughter of his, I never heard about it. Hannibal got kicked out of office because of something that was just like what Timmy Baterman accused him of. I won't tell you exactly what it was-you don't need to know-but misappropriation of town funds for his own use comes close enough to cover it, I reckon. There was even talk of trying him on embezzlement charges, but it never came to much. Losing the post was enough punishment for him anyway; his whole life was playing the big cheese.
"But there was good in those men too. That's what I mean; that's what folks always find it so hard to remember. It was Hannibal got the fund started for the Eastern General Hospital, right before the war. Alan Purinton was one of the most generous, open-handed men I ever knew. And old George Anderson only wanted to go on running the post office forever.
"It was only the bad it wanted to talk about though. It was only the bad it wanted us to remember because it was bad... and because it knew we meant danger for it. The Timmy Baterman that went off to fight the war was a nice, ordinary kid, Louis, maybe a little dull but goodhearted. The thing we saw that night, lookin up into that red sun... that was a monster. Maybe it was a zombie or a dybbuk or a demon. Maybe there's no name for such a thing as that, but the Micmacs would have known what it was, name or no."
"What?" Louis said numbly.
"Something that had been touched by the Wendigo," Jud said evenly. He took a deep breath, held it for a moment, let it out, and looked at his watch.
"Welladay. The hour's late, Louis. I've talked nine times as much as I meant to."
"I doubt that," Louis said. "You've been very eloquent. Tell me how it came out."
"There was a fire at the Baterman place two nights later," Jud said. "The house burned flat. Alan Purinton said there was no doubt about the fire being set.
Range oil had been splashed from one end of that little house to the other. You could smell the reek of it for three days after the fire was out."
"So they both burned up."
"Oh, ayuh, they burned. But they was dead beforehand. Timmy was shot twice in the chest with a pistol Bill Baterman kept handy, an old Colt's. They found it in Bill's hand. What he'd done, or so it looked like, was to kill his boy, lay him on the bed, and then spill out that range oil. Then he sat down in his easy chair by the radio, flicked a match, and ate the barrel of that Colt. 45."
"Jesus," Louis said.
"They were pretty well charred, but the county medical examiner said it looked to him like Timmy Baterman had been dead two or three weeks."