July 19, 1943

July 19, 1943, marks the arrival of Timmy Baterman's body at Limestone, Maine, the first step in a sequence that would become the darkest cautionary tale in Ludlow's history. Timmy, a seventeen-year-old soldier who had died charging a machine-gun nest on the road to Rome four days earlier, was one of eighteen or twenty flag-draped coffins shipped north on what the army's Graves and Registration officer called a "mystery train." The officer, drunk on rye whiskey, told the engineer Huey Garber that he felt "like a fugging milkman" as they dropped coffins at Houlton, Passadumkeag, Bangor, Derry, and finally Ludlow, where Bill Baterman waited at the loading depot with a stony, tearless face. Timmy's body was taken to the Greenspan Funeral Home on Fern Street and buried two days later in Pleasantview Cemetery with full military honors—but that burial would not be the end of the story.

The Mystery Train and the Father's Grief

The train carrying Timmy's body had originated at Presque Isle, where a whole shipment of coffins had been flown in. The Graves and Registration officer, who never got off the train at Ludlow, had been drinking steadily throughout the journey. Huey Garber, the engineer, later recalled that the officer showed him a list of destinations and that the two of them, after the last coffin was dropped, went on a drinking spree that ended with Garber visiting a prostitute for the first time in his life and waking up with a case of crabs. Bill Baterman, meanwhile, had been a widower for ten years—his wife and a second child had both died in childbirth—and Timmy was all he had left. When the telegram arrived, the life "ran right out of him," as Jud Crandall later put it. Bill Baterman knew about the Micmac burying ground beyond the Pet Sematary, and he had already decided what he was going to do.

The Resurrection and Its Consequences

Within days of the burial, Timmy Baterman was seen walking the roads of Ludlow. The mailwoman Marjorie Washburn saw him first, "lurching up the road" in an old pair of chino pants and a faded flannel hunting shirt, his hair sticking up in spikes, his eyes "like raisins stuck in bread dough." Others saw him too: Missus Stratton, who lived in a small house where the Pedersen Road joins the Hancock Road, reported that he stood at the edge of her property, his hands dangling at his sides, his head pushed forward like a boxer about to eat canvas. When he spoke to her, asking if she still had her jazz records because he wouldn't mind "cutting a rug" with her, she retreated inside and refused to come out for most of a week. Timmy walked back and forth along the Pedersen Road, a mile east of his father's house and a mile west, all day and presumably all night, his fly unzipped, his face bearing a look that Jud Crandall described as "sly." The thing that had come back was not the nice, ordinary kid who had gone off to fight the war; it was something that knew secrets—it told Alan Purinton that his wife was sleeping with a man from the drugstore, told George Anderson that his grandson was only waiting for him to die to get his money, and told Jud Crandall about his visits to a whorehouse in Bangor. It spoke only of the bad, Jud later said, "only the bad it wanted us to remember because it was bad."

The End of the Baterman Affair

The situation escalated until the postmaster, the second selectman, and the fire chief gathered at Jud Crandall's house to decide what to do. The War Department had received anonymous letters and was sending an investigator. The men drove to the Baterman place and found Bill Baterman sitting on his back stoop with a pitcher of beer, looking "damned," while Timmy stood at the back of the yard staring at the red, bloody sun. When confronted, Bill Baterman insisted he had done nothing wrong: "They had no right to take my boy. He was only seventeen. He was all I had left of his dear mother, and it was illfuckinlegal." Two nights later, the Baterman house burned flat. The fire had been set deliberately, range oil splashed from one end of the house to the other. Timmy had been shot twice in the chest with an old Colt's pistol, and Bill Baterman had then sat down in his easy chair by the radio, flicked a match, and ate the barrel of the .45. The county medical examiner determined that Timmy Baterman had been dead for two or three weeks before the fire. Jud Crandall told Louis Creed this story on the night before Gage's burial, hoping to dissuade him from attempting the same terrible experiment.