Pet Sematary (31 page)

Jud's part of the family was in the past now, as far as they were concerned; it was like an eroded planetoid drifting away from the main mass, dwindling, little more than a speck. The past. Pictures in an album. Old stories told in rooms that perhaps seemed too hot to them—
they
were not old; there was no arthritis in
their
joints;
their
blood had not thinned. The past was runners to be gripped and hefted and later let go. After all, if the human body was an envelope to hold the human soul—God's letters to the universe—as most churches taught, then the American Eternal coffin was an envelope to hold the human body, and to these husky young cousins or nephews or whatever they were, the past was just a dead letter to be filed away.

God save the past,
Louis thought and shivered for no good reason other than that the day would come when he would be every bit unfamiliar to his own blood—his own grandchildren if Ellie or Gage produced kids and he lived to see them. The focus shifted. Family lines degenerated. Young faces looking out of old photographs.

God save the past,
he thought again and tightened his grip around the old man's shoulders.

The ushers put the flowers into the back of the hearse. The electric rear window rose and thumped home in its socket. Louis went back to where his daughter was, and they walked to the station wagon together, Louis holding Ellie's arm so she wouldn't slip in her good shoes with the leather soles. Car engines were starting up.

“Why are they putting on their lights, Daddy?” Ellie asked with mild wonder. “Why are they putting on their lights in the middle of the day?”

“They do it,” Louis began and heard the thickness in his own voice, “to honor the dead, Ellie.” He pulled out the knob that turned on the wagon's headlights. “Come on.”

*  *  *

They were going home at last, the graveside ceremony over—actually it was held at the small Mount Hope Chapel; no grave would be dug for Norma until spring—when Ellie suddenly burst into tears.

Louis glanced at her, surprised but not particularly alarmed. “Ellie, what is it?”

“No more cookies,” Ellie sobbed. “She made the
best oatmeal cookies I ever ate. But she won't make them anymore because she's
dead
. Daddy, why do people have to be dead?”

“I don't really know,” Louis said. “To make room for all the new people, I guess. Little people like you and your brother Gage.”

“I'm never going to get married or do sex and have babies!” Ellie declared, crying harder than ever. “Then maybe it'll never happen to me! It's
awful!
It's
m-m-mean!”

“But it's an end to suffering,” Louis said quietly. “And as a doctor I see a lot of suffering. One of the reasons I wanted the job at the university was because I got sick of looking at it day in and day out. Young people quite often have pain . . . bad pain, even . . . but that's not quite the same as suffering.”

He paused.

“Believe it or not, honey, when people get very old, death doesn't always look so bad or so scary as it seems to you. And you have years and years and years ahead of you.”

Ellie cried, and then she sniffed, and then she stopped. Before they got home, she asked if she could play the radio. Louis said yes, and she found Shakin' Stevens singing “This Ole House” on WACZ. Soon she was singing along. When they got home she went to her mother and prattled about the funeral; to Rachel's credit, she listened quietly, sympathetically, and supportively . . . although Louis thought she looked pale and thoughtful.

Then Ellie asked her if she knew how to make oatmeal cookies, and Rachel
put away the piece of knitting she'd been doing and rose at once, as if she had been waiting for this or something like it. “Yes,” she said. “Want to make a batch?”

“Yay!” Ellie shouted. “Can we really, Mom?”

“We can if your father will watch Gage for an hour.”

“I'll watch him,” Louis said. “With pleasure.”

*  *  *

Louis spent the evening reading and making notes on a long article in
The Duquesne Medical Digest;
the old controversy concerning dissolving sutures had begun again. In the small world of those relatively few humans on earth concerned with stitching minor wounds, it appeared to be as endless as that old psychological squabbling point, nature versus nurture.

He intended writing a dissenting letter this very night, proving that the writer's main contentions were specious, his case examples self-serving, his research almost criminally sloppy. In short, Louis was looking forward—with high good humor—to blowing the stupid fuck right off the map. He was hunting around in the study bookcase for his copy of Troutman's
Treatment of Wounds
when Rachel came halfway down the stairs.

“Coming up, Louis?”

“I'll be a while.” He glanced up at her. “Everything all right?”

“They're deep asleep, both of them.”

Louis looked at her closely. “Them, yeah. You're not.”

“I'm fine. Been reading.”

“You're okay? Really?”

“Yes,” she said and smiled. “I love you, Louis.”

“Love you too, babe.” He glanced at the bookcase, and there was Troutman, right where he had been all along. Louis put his hand on the textbook.

“Church brought a rat into the house while you and Ellie were gone,” she said and tried to smile. “Yuck, what a mess.”

“Jeez, Rachel, I'm sorry.” He hoped he did not sound as guilty as, at that moment, he felt. “It was bad?”

Rachel sat down on the stairs. In her pink flannel nightgown, her face cleaned of makeup and her forehead shining, her hair tied back into a short ponytail with a rubber band, she looked like a child. “I took care of it,” she said, “but do you know, I had to beat that dumb cat out the door with the vacuum cleaner attachment before it would stop guarding the . . . the corpse. It
growled
at me. Church never growled at me before in his life. He seems different lately. Do you think he might have distemper or something, Lou?”

“No,” Louis said slowly, “but I'll take him to the vet, if you want.”

“I guess it's all right,” she said and then looked at him nakedly. “But would you come up? I just . . . I know you're working, but . . .”

“Of course,” he said, getting up as though it were nothing important at all. And, really, it wasn't—except he knew that now the letter would never be written because the parade has a way of moving on, and tomorrow would bring something new. But he had bought that rat, hadn't he? The rat that Church
had brought in, surely clawed to bloody ribbons, its intestines dragging, its head perhaps gone. Yes. He had bought it. It was his rat.

“Let's go to bed,” he said, turning off the lights. He and Rachel went up the stairs together. Louis put his arm around her waist and loved her the best he could . . . but even as he entered into her, hard and erect, he was listening to the winterwhine outside the front-traced windows, wondering about Church, the cat that used to belong to his daughter and now belonged to him, wondering where it was and what it was stalking or killing. The soil of a man's heart is stonier, he thought, and the wind sang its bitter black song, and not so many miles distant, Norma Crandall, who had once knitted his daughter and son matching caps, lay in her gray steel American Eternal coffin on a stone slab in a Mount Hope crypt; by now the white cotton the mortician would have used to stuff her cheeks would be turning black.

Ellie turned six. She came home from kindergarten on her birthday with a paper hat askew on her head, several pictures friends had drawn of her (in the best of them Ellie looked like a friendly scarecrow), and baleful stories about spankings in the schoolyard during
recess. The flu epidemic passed. They had to send two students to the EMMC in Bangor, and Surrendra Hardu probably saved the life of one woefully sick freshman boy with the terrible name of Peter Humperton, who went into convulsions shortly after being admitted. Rachel developed a mild infatuation with the blond bag boy at the A & P in Brewer and rhapsodized to Louis at night about how packed his jeans looked. “It's probably just toilet paper,” she added. “Squeeze it sometime,” Louis suggested. “If he screams, it's probably not.” Rachel had laughed until she cried. The blue, still, subzero miniseason of February passed and brought on the alternating rains and freezes of March, potholes, and those orange roadside signs which pay homage to the Great God BUMP. The immediate, personal, and most agonizing grief of Jud Crandall passed, that grief which the psychologists say begins about three days after the death of a loved one and holds hard from four to six weeks in most cases—like that period of time New Englanders sometimes call “deep winter.” But time passes, and time welds one state of human feeling into another until they become something like a rainbow. Strong grief becomes a softer, more mellow grief; mellow grief becomes mourning; mourning at last becomes remembrance—a process that may take from six months to three years and still be considered normal. The day of Gage's first haircut came and passed, and when Louis saw his son's hair growing in darker, he joked about it and did his own mourning—but only in his heart.

Spring came, and it stayed awhile.

Louis Creed came to believe that the last really happy day of his life was March 24, 1984. The things that were to come, poised above them like a killing sashweight, were still over seven weeks in the future, but looking over those seven weeks he found nothing which stood out with the same color. He supposed that even if none of those terrible things had happened, he would have remembered the day forever. Days which seem genuinely good—good all the way through—are rare enough anyway, he thought. It might be that there was less than a month of really good ones in any natural man's life in the best of circumstances. It came to seem to Louis that God, in His infinite wisdom, seemed much more generous when it came to doling out pain.

That day was a Saturday, and he was home minding Gage in the afternoon while Rachel and Ellie went after groceries. They had gone with Jud in his old and rattling '59 IH pickup not because the station wagon wasn't running but because the old man genuinely liked their company. Rachel asked Louis if he would be okay with Gage, and he told her that of course he would. He was glad to see her get out; after a winter in Maine most of it in Ludlow, he thought that she needed all the getting out she could lay her hands on. She had been an unremittingly good sport about it, but she did seem to him to be getting a little stir crazy.

Gage got up from his nap around two o'clock, scratchy and out of sorts. He had discovered the Terrible Twos and made them his own. Louis tried several ineffectual gambits to amuse the kid, and Gage turned them all down. To make matters worse, the rotten kid had an enormous bowel movement, the artistic quality of which was not improved for Louis when he saw a blue marble sitting in the middle of it. It was one of Ellie's marbles. The kid could have choked. He decided the marbles were going to go—everything Gage got hold of went right to his mouth—but that decision, while undoubtedly laudable, didn't do a thing about keeping the kid amused until his mother got back.

Louis listened to the early spring wind gust around the house, sending big blinkers of light and shadow across Mrs. Vinton's field next door, and he suddenly thought of the Vulture he had bought on a whim five or six weeks before, while on his way home from the university. Had he bought twine as well? He had, by God!

“Gage!” he said. Gage had found a green Crayola under the couch and was currently scribbling in one of Ellie's favorite books—
something else to feed the fires of sibling rivalry,
Louis thought and grinned. If Ellie got really pissy about the scribbles Gage had managed to put in
Where the Wild Things Are
before Louis could get it away from him, Louis would simply mention the unique treasure he had uncovered in Gage's Pampers.

“What!” Gage responded smartly. He was talking
pretty well now; Louis had decided the kid might actually be half-bright.

“You wanna go out?”

“Wanna go out!” Gage agreed excitedly. “Wanna go out. Where my neeks, Daddy?”

This sentence, if reproduced phonetically, would have looked something like this:
Weh ma neeks, Dahdee?
The translation was
Where are my sneakers, Father?
Louis was often struck by Gage's speech, not because it was cute, but because he thought that small children all sounded like immigrants learning a foreign language in some helter-skelter bur fairly amiable way. He knew that babies make
all
the sounds the human voice box is capable of . . . the liquid trill that proves so difficult for first-year French students, the glottal grunts and clicks of the Australian bush people, the thickened, abrupt consonants of German. They lose the capability as they learn English, and Louis wondered now (and not for the first time) if childhood was not more a period of forgetting than of learning.

Gage's neeks were finally found . . . they were also under the couch. One of Louis's other beliefs was that in families with small children, the area under living room couches begins after a while to develop a strong and mysterious electromagnetic force that eventually sucks in all sorts of litter—everything from bottles and diaper pins to green Crayolas and old issues of
Sesame Street
magazine with food mouldering between the pages.

Gage's jacket, however, wasn't under the couch—it was halfway down the stairs. His Red Sox cap, without
which Gage refused to leave the house, was the most difficult of all to find because it was where it belonged—in the closet. That was, naturally, the last place they looked.