Pet Sematary (20 page)

“Ayuh,” Jud said. “Told you: the place is old.”

“Are we done now?”

“Ayuh.” He clapped Louis on the shoulder. “You did good, Louis. I knew you would. Let's go home.”

“Jud—” he began again, but Jud only grabbed the pick and walked off toward the steps. Louis got the shovel, had to trot to catch up, and then saved his breath for walking. He looked back once, but the cairn marking the grave of his daughter's cat Winston Churchill had melted into the shadows, and he could not pick it out.

We just ran the film backward,
Louis thought tiredly as they emerged from the woods and into the field overlooking his own house some time later. He did not know how much later; he had taken off his watch when he had lain down to doze that afternoon, and it would still be there on the windowsill by his bed. He only knew that he was beat, used up, done in. He could not remember feeling so kicked-dog weary since his first day on Chicago's rubbish-disposal crew one high-school summer sixteen or seventeen years ago.

They came back the same way they had gone, but he could remember very little about the trip. He stumbled on the deadfall, he remembered that—lurching forward and thinking absurdly of
Peter Pan—oh, Jesus, I lost my happy thoughts and down I come—
and then Jud's hand had been there, firm and hard, and a few moments later they had been trudging past the final resting places of Smucky the Cat and Trixie and Marta Our Pet Rabit and onto the path he had once walked not only with Jud but with his whole family.

It seemed that in some weary way he had pondered the dream of Victor Pascow, the one which had resulted in his somnambulistic episode, but any connection between that night walk and this had eluded him. It had also occurred to him that the whole adventure had been dangerous—not in any melodramatic Wilkie Collins sense but in a very real one. That he had outrageously blistered his hands while in a state that was
nearly
somnambulistic was really the least of it. He could have killed himself on the deadfall. Both of them could have. It was hard to square such behavior with sobriety. In his current exhaustion, he was willing to ascribe it to confusion and emotional upset over the death of a pet the whole family had loved.

And after a time, there they were, home again.

They walked toward it together, not speaking, and stopped again in Louis's driveway. The wind moaned and whined. Wordlessly, Louis handed Jud his pick.

“I'd best get across,” Jud said at last. “Louella Bisson or Ruthie Parks will be bringin Norma home and she'll wonder where the hell I am.”

“Do you have the time?” Louis asked. He was surprised that Norma wasn't home yet; in his muscles it seemed to him that midnight must have struck.

“Oh, ayuh,” Jud said. “I keep the time as long as I'm dressed and then I let her go.”

He fished a watch out of his pants pocket and flicked the scrolled cover back from its face.

“It's gone eight-thirty,” he said and snapped the cover closed again.

“Eight-thirty?” Louis repeated stupidly. “That's all?”

“How late did you think it was?” Jud asked.

“Later than that,” Louis said.

“I'll see you tomorrow, Louis,” Jud said and began to move away.

“Jud?”

He turned toward Louis, mildly questioning.

“Jud, what did we do tonight?”

“Why, we buried your daughter's cat.”

“Is that
all
we did?”

“Nothing but that,” Jud said. “You're a good man, Louis, but you ask too many questions. Sometimes people have to do things that just seem right. That seem right in their hearts, I mean. And if they do those things and then end up not feeling right, full of questions and sort of like they got indigestion, only inside their heads instead of in their guts, they think they made a mistake. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Louis said, thinking that Jud must have been reading his mind as the two of them walked downhill through the field and toward the house lights.

“What they don't think is that maybe they should be questioning those feelings of doubt before they question their own hearts,” Jud said, looking at him closely. “What do you think, Louis?”

“I think,” Louis said slowly, “that you might be right.”

“And the things that are in a man's heart—it don't do him much good to talk about those things, does it?”

“Well—”

“No,” Jud said, as if Louis had simply agreed. “It don't.” And in his calm voice that was so sure and so implacable, in that voice which somehow put the chill through Louis, he said: “They are secret things. Women are supposed to be the ones good at keeping secrets, and I guess they do keep a few, but any woman who knows anything at all would tell you she's never really seen into any man's heart. The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis—like the soil up there in the old Micmac burying ground. Bedrock's close. A man grows what he can . . . and he tends it.”

“Jud—”

“Don't question, Louis. Accept what's done and follow your heart.”

“But—”

“But nothing.
Accept what's done, Louis, and follow your heart.
We did what was right this time . . . at least, I hope to Christ it was right. Another time it could be wrong—wrong as hell.”

“Will you at least answer one question?”

“Well, let's hear what it is, and then we'll see.”

“How did you know
about that place?” This question had also occurred to Louis on the way back, along with the suspicion that Jud himself might be part Micmac—although he did not look like it; he looked as if every one of his ancestors had been one hundred percent card-carrying Anglos.

“Why, from Stanny B.,” he said, looking surprised.

“He just told you?”

“No,” Jud said. “It isn't the kind of place you just tell somebody about. I buried my dog Spot up there when I was ten. He was chasing a rabbit, and he run on some rusty barbed wire. The wounds infected and it killed him.”

There was something wrong about that, something that didn't fit with something Louis had been previously told, but he was too tired to puzzle out the discontinuity. Jud said no more; only looked at him from his inscrutable old man's eyes.

“Goodnight, Jud,” Louis said.

“Goodnight.”

The old man crossed the road, carrying his pick and shovel.

“Thanks!” Louis called impulsively.

Jud didn't turn; he only raised one hand to indicate he had heard.

And in the house, suddenly, the telephone began to ring.

*  *  *

Louis ran, wincing at the aches that flared in his upper thighs and lower back, but by the time he had gotten into the warm kitchen, the phone had already rung six or seven
times. It stopped ringing just as he put his hand on it. He picked it up anyway and said hello, but there was only the open hum.

That was Rachel,
he thought.
I'll call her back.

But suddenly it seemed like too much work to dial the number, to dance clumsily with her mother—or worse, her checkbook-brandishing father—to be passed on to Rachel . . . and then to Ellie. Ellie would still be up of course; it was an hour earlier in Chicago. Ellie would ask him how Church was doing.

Great, he's fine. Got hit by an Orinco truck. Somehow I'm absolutely positive it was an Orinco truck. Anything else would lack dramatic unity, if you know what I mean. You don't? Well, never mind. The truck killed him but didn't mark him up hardly at all. Jud and I planted him up in the old Micmac burying ground—sort of an annex to the Pet Sematary, if you know what I mean. Amazing walk, punkin. I'll take you up there sometime and we'll put flowers by his marker—excuse me, his cairn. After the quicksand's frozen over, that is, and the bears go to sleep for the winter.

He rehung the telephone, crossed to the sink, and filled it with hot water. He removed his shirt and washed. He had been sweating like a pig in spite of the cold, and a pig was exactly what he smelled like.

There was some leftover meatloaf in the refrigerator. Louis cut it into slabs, put them on a slice of Roman Meal bread, and added two thick rounds of Bermuda onion. He contemplated this for a moment before dousing it with ketchup and slamming down another slice of bread. If Rachel and Ellie had been around, they would
have wrinkled their noses in identical gestures of distaste—yuck, gross.

Well, you missed it, ladies,
Louis thought with undeniable satisfaction and gobbled his sandwich. It tasted great.
Confucius say he who smell like pig eat like wolf,
he thought and smiled. He chased the sandwich with several long swallows of milk directly from the carton—another habit Rachel frowned on strenuously—and then he went upstairs, undressed, and got into bed without even washing his teeth. His aches and pains had faded to one low throb that was almost comforting.

His watch was there where he had left it, and he looked at it. Ten minutes of nine. It really was incredible.

Louis turned off the light, turned over on his side, and slept.

He woke up sometime after three the next morning and shuffled to the bathroom. He was standing there urinating, blinking owlishly in the bright white fluorescent bathroom light, when the discrepancy suddenly showed up in his mind, and his eyes widened—it was as if two pieces of something which should have fitted together perfectly had instead thudded against one another and rebounded.

Tonight Jud had told him that his dog had died when he was ten—had died of infection after being scraped up in a snarl of rusty barbed wire. But on the late-summer day when all of them had walked up to the Pet Sematary together, Jud said that his dog had died of old age and was buried there—he had even pointed out the marker,
although the years had worn the inscription away.

Louis flushed the toilet, turned out the light, and went back to bed. Something else was wrong, as well—and in a moment he had it. Jud had been born with the century, and that day at the Pet Sematary he had told Louis his dog had died during the first year of the Great War. That would have been when Jud was fourteen, if he had meant when the war actually started in Europe. When he was seventeen, if he had meant when America entered the war.

But tonight he had said that Spot died when he, Jud, was ten.

Well, he's an old man, and old men get confused in their memories,
he thought uneasily.
He's said himself that he's noticed signs of increasing forgetfulness—groping for names and addresses that used to come to him easily, sometimes getting up in the morning and having no memory of the chores he planned to do just the night before. For a man of his age, he's getting off pretty goddamned light . . . senility's probably too strong a word for it in Jud's case; forgetfulness is actually better, more accurate. Nothing too surprising about a man forgetting when a dog died some seventy years ago. Or the circumstances in which it died, for that matter. Forget it, Louis.

But he wasn't able to fall asleep again right away; for a long while he lay awake, too conscious of the empty house and the wind that whined around the eaves outside it.

At some point he slept without even being aware that he had gone over the edge; it must have been so, because as he slipped away, it seemed to him that he heard bare feet
slowly climbing the stairs and that he thought,
Let me alone, Pascow, let me alone, what's done is done and what's dead is dead—
and the steps faded away.

And although a great many other inexplicable things happened as that year darkened, Louis was never bothered by the specter of Victor Pascow again, either waking or dreaming.

He awoke at nine the next morning. Bright sunshine streamed in the bedroom's east windows. The telephone was ringing. Louis reached up and snared it. “Hello?”

“Hi!” Rachel said. “Did I wake you up? Hope so.”

“You woke me up, you bitch,” he said, smiling.

“Ooooh, such nasty language, you bad old bear,” she said. “I tried to call you last night. Were you over at Jud's?”

He hesitated for only the tiniest fraction of a moment.

“Yes,” he said. “Had a few beers. Norma was up at some sort of Thanksgiving supper. I thought about giving you a ring, but . . . you know.”

They chatted awhile. Rachel updated him on her family, something he could have done without, although he took a small, mean satisfaction in the news that her
father's bald spot seemed to be expanding at a faster rate.

“You want to talk to Gage?” Rachel asked.

Louis grinned. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “Don't let him hang up the phone like he did the other time.”

Much rattling at the other end. Dimly he heard Rachel cajoling the kid to say hi, Daddy.

At last Gage said, “Hi, Dayee.”

“Hi, Gage,” Louis said cheerfully. “How you doing? How's your life? Did you pull over your grandda's pipe rack again? I certainly hope so. Maybe this time you can trash his stamp collection as well.”

Gage babbled on happily for thirty seconds or so, interspersing his gobbles and grunts with a few recognizable words from his growing vocabulary—
mommy, Ellie, grandda, grandma, car
(pronounced in the best Yankee tradition as
kaaa,
Louis was amused to note),
twuck,
and
shit.

At last Rachel pried the phone away from him to Gage's wail of indignation and Louis's measured relief—he loved his son and missed him like mad, but holding a conversation with a not-quite-two-year-old was like trying to play cribbage with a lunatic; the cards kept going everywhere and sometimes you found yourself pegging backwards.

“So how's everything there?” Rachel asked.

“Okay,” Louis said, with no hesitation at all this time—but he was aware he had crossed a line, back when Rachel had asked him if he had gone over to Jud's last night and he told her he had. In his mind he suddenly heard Jud Crandall saying,
The soil of a man's heart is stonier,
Louis . . . a man grows what he can . . . and he tends it.
“Well . . . a little dull, if you want to know the God's honest. Miss you.”