1943

1943 is the pivotal year in the backstory of the Micmac burying ground's power over human resurrection, the year the town of Ludlow learned that the place could bring back not only pets but people—and that what came back might be a monster. The events of that summer, told by Jud Crandall to Louis Creed on the night before Gage's burial, serve as the novel's most explicit warning that the burial ground's gift is a curse, and that the Wendigo's touch corrupts whatever it reanimates.

Timmy Baterman's Death and Return

Timmy Baterman, the only son of Bill Baterman, was killed on the road to Rome on July 15, 1943, while charging a machine-gun nest; he was posthumously awarded the Silver Star. His body was shipped home and arrived in Limestone, Maine, on July 19 aboard a "mystery train" carrying eighteen to twenty flag-draped coffins, accompanied by a drunken officer from Graves and Registration. The train stopped at Houlton, Passadumkeag, Bangor, Derry, and finally Ludlow, where Bill Baterman met the coffin at the Orrington loading depot. Timmy was buried in Pleasantview Cemetery with full military honors on or about July 22. Within days, however, Bill Baterman—driven half-mad by grief—had dug up his son's body and carried it to the Micmac burying ground, the same place Jud Crandall would later take Louis Creed to bury Church.

The Walking Corpse

Four or five days after the burial, the mailwoman Marjorie Washburn saw Timmy walking up the road toward York's Livery Stable. She was so frightened she drove off the road, returned to the post office, threw her undelivered mail on the desk, and went home to bed, telling the postmaster George Anderson she had seen a ghost. Other sightings followed. Missus Stratton, a woman who lived where the Pedersen Road joins the Hancock Road, saw Timmy from her porch: he stood at the edge of the road, his hands dangling, his head pushed forward like a boxer about to fall, his eyes "as dead and dusty as marbles." When he spoke to her, asking if she still had her jazz records because he wouldn't mind "cutting a rug" with her, she went inside and refused to come out for nearly a week. Many people saw Timmy walking back and forth along the Pedersen Road, dressed in old chino pants and a faded flannel shirt despite the ninety-degree heat, his hair sticking up in spikes, his fly sometimes unzipped, his face bearing a look that Jud Crandall later described as "sly." He moved like a zombie in a movie, but there was something behind his eyes—not thinking, exactly, but a kind of malevolent awareness, like a radio signal coming from somewhere else.

The Confrontation and the Fire

The situation escalated until the War Department received anonymous letters from multiple Ludlow residents, all saying the same thing: if Timothy Baterman was dead, he made a lively corpse. Lieutenant Kinsman, the officer assigned to investigate, threatened to send someone to determine whether Timmy was dead, AWOL, or whether the wrong body had been buried. On or about July 30, Jud Crandall, then a young railroad worker, joined postmaster George Anderson, selectman Hannibal Benson, and fire chief Alan Purinton in driving out to the Baterman place. They found Bill Baterman sitting on his back stoop with a pitcher of beer, looking "damned"—his eyes sunk back in their sockets, his mouth twitching. Timmy stood at the back of the yard, staring at the red setting sun, his face orange as if flayed alive. When the men tried to reason with Bill, Timmy walked over—moving like an old, old man, one foot lifted high and then brought down with a shuffle—and began to speak. He told Alan Purinton that his wife was sleeping with the man she worked with at the drugstore; he told George Anderson that his grandson and granddaughter called him "Old Wooden-Leg" behind his back and were only waiting for him to die for his money; he told Jud Crandall about his visits to a whorehouse in Bangor. Every accusation was true. The men fled in terror. Two nights later, the Baterman house burned flat. Bill Baterman had shot Timmy twice in the chest with an old Colt .45, laid him on the bed, splashed range oil from one end of the house to the other, then sat down in his easy chair, flicked a match, and ate the barrel of the Colt. The county medical examiner determined that Timmy Baterman had been dead for two or three weeks before the fire.

Significance

The 1943 incident establishes the novel's central moral lesson: the Micmac burying ground does not restore the dead as they were; it returns something that has been touched by the Wendigo, a spirit of the north country that gives those it touches a taste for the flesh of their own kind. Timmy Baterman came back knowing only the worst secrets of the living, speaking only to wound and destroy. His story is the template for what Louis Creed will later face with Gage, and it is the reason Jud Crandall, despite his affection for Louis, ultimately believes he may have murdered Gage by introducing Louis to the burial ground's power. The year 1943 is the moment the novel's supernatural threat becomes unmistakably evil, and the moment the reader understands that the resurrection of a human being is an abomination that can only end in fire and death.