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 sprouting 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 Puriton 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."
Silence, ticking out.
Jud got up. "I wasn't exaggerating when I said I might have killed your boy, Louis, or had a hand in it. The Micmacs knew that place, but that doesn't necessarily mean they made it what it was. The Micmacs weren't always here. They came maybe from Canada, maybe from Russia, maybe from Asia way back in the beginning. They stayed here in Maine for a thousand years, or maybe it was two thousand--it's hard to tell, because they did not leave their mark deep on the land. And now they are gone again . . . same way we'll be gone, someday, although I guess our mark will go deeper, for better or worse. But the place will stay no matter who's here, Louis. It isn't as though someone owned it and could take its secret when they moved on. It's an evil, curdled place, and I had no business taking you up there to bury that cat. I know that now. It has a power you'll beware of if you know what's good for your family and what's good for you. I wasn't strong enough to fight it. You saved Norma's life, and I wanted to do something for you, and that place turned my good wish to its own evil purpose. It has a power . . . and I think that power goes through phases, same as the moon. It's been full of power before, and I'm ascared it's coming around to full again. I'm ascared it used me to get at you through your son. Do you see, Louis, what I'm getting at?" His eyes pleaded with Louis.
"You're saying the place knew Gage was going to die, I think," Louis said.
"No, I am saying the place might have made Gage die because I introduced you to the power in the place. I am saying I may have murdered your son with good intentions, Louis."
"I don't believe it," Louis said at last, shakily. Didn't; wouldn't. Couldn't.
He held Jud's hand tightly. "We're burying Gage tomorrow. In Bangor. And in Bangor he will stay. I don't plan to go up there to the Pet Sematary or beyond it ever again."
"Promise me!" Jud said harshly. "Promise."
"I promise," Louis said.
But in the back of his mind, contemplation remained--a dancing flicker of promise that would not quite go away.
40
But none of those things happened.
All of them--the droning Orinco truck, the fingers that just touched the back of Gage's jumper and then slid off, Rachel preparing to go to the viewing in her housecoat, Ellie carrying Gage's picture and putting his chair next to her bed, Steve Masterton's tears, the fight with Irwin Goldman, Jud Crandall's terrible story of Timmy Baterman--all of them existed only in Louis Creed's mind during the few seconds that passed while he raced his laughing son to the road. Behind him, Rachel screamed again--Gage, come back, don't RUN!--but Louis did not waste his breath. It was going to be close, very close, and yes, one of those things really happened: from somewhere up the road he could hear the drone of the oncoming truck and somewhere inside a memory circuit opened and he could hear Jud Crandall speaking to Rachel on that very first day in Ludlow: You want to watch em around the road, Missus Creed. It's a bad road for kids and pets.
Now Gage was running down the gentle slope of lawn that merged with the soft shoulder of Route 15, his husky little legs pumping, and by all the rights of the world he should have fallen over sprawling but he just kept going and now the sound of the truck was very loud indeed, it was that low, snoring sound that Louis sometimes heard from his bed as he floated just beyond the rim of sleep. Then it seemed a comforting sound, but now it terrified him.
Oh my dear God oh my dear Jesus let me catch him don't let him get into the road!
Louis put on a final burst of speed and leaped, throwing himself out straight and parallel to the ground like a football player about to make a tackle; he could see his shadow tracking along on the grass below him in the lowest periphery of his vision, and he thought of the kite, the Vulture, printing its shadow all the way across Mrs. Vinton's field, and just as Gage's forward motion carried him into the road, Louis's fingers brushed the back of his jacket . . . and then snagged it.
He yanked Gage backward and landed on the ground at the same instant, crashing his face into the rough gravel of the shoulder, giving himself a bloody nose. His balls signaled a much more serious flash of pain--Ohhh, if I'd'a known I was gonna be playing football. I woulda worn my jock--but both the pain in his nose and the driving agony in his testes were lost in the swelling relief of hearing Gage's wail of pain and outrage as his bottom landed on the shoulder and he fell over backward onto the edge of the lawn, thumping his head. A moment later his wails were drowned by the roar of the passing truck and the almost regal blat of its air horn.
Louis managed to get up in spite of the lead ball sitting in his lower stomach and cradled his son in his arms. A moment later Rachel joined them, also weeping, crying out to Gage, "Never run in the road, Gage! Never, never, never! The road is bad! Bad!" And Gage was so astonished at this tearful lecture that he left off crying and goggled up at his mother.
"Louis, your nose is bleeding," she said and then hugged him so suddenly and
strongly that for a moment he could barely breathe.
"That isn't the worst of it," he said. "I think I'm sterile, Rachel. Oh boy, the pain."
And she laughed so hysterically that for a few moments he was frightened for her, and the thought crossed his mind: If Gage really had been killed, I believe it would have driven her crazy.
But Gage was not killed; all of that had only been a hellishly detailed moment of imagination as Louis outraced his son's death across a green lawn on a sunshiny May afternoon.
Gage went to grammar school, and at the age of seven he began going to camp, where he showed a wonderful and surprising aptitude for swimming. He also gave his parents a rather glum surprise by proving himself able to handle a month's separation with no noticeable psychic trauma. By the time he was ten, he was spending the entire summer away at Camp Agawam in Raymond, and at eleven he won two blue ribbons and a red one at the Four Camps Swimathon that ended the summer's activities. He grew tall, and yet through it all he was the same Gage, sweet and rather surprised at the things the world held out . . . and for Gage, the fruit was somehow never bitter or rotten.
He was an honors student in high school and a member of the swimming team at John Bapst, the parochial school he had insisted on attending because of its swimming facilities. Rachel was upset, but Louis was not particularly surprised when, at seventeen, Gage announced his intention to convert to Catholicism. Rachel believed that all of it was because of the girl Gage was going out with, she saw marriage in his immediate future ("if that little slut with the St. Christopher's medal isn't balling him, I'll eat your shorts, Louis," she said), the wreckage of his college plans and his Olympic hopes, and nine or ten little Catholics running around by the time Gage was forty. By then he would be (according to Rachel, anyway) a cigar-smoking truck driver with a beer belly, Our-Fathering and Hail-Marying his way into pre-cardiac oblivion.
Louis suspected his son's motives were rather more pure, and although Gage converted (and on the day he actually did the deed, Louis sent an unabashedly nasty postcard to Irwin Goldman; it read, Perhaps you'll have a Jesuit grandson yet. Your goy son-in-law, Louis), he did not marry the rather nice (and decidedly unslutty) girl he had dated through most of his senior year.
He went on to Johns Hopkins, made the Olympic swimming team, and on one long, dazzling, and incredibly proud afternoon sixteen years after Louis had raced an Orinco truck for his son's life, he and Rachel--who had now gone almost entirely gray, although she covered it with a rinse--watched their son win a gold medal for the U.S.A. When the NBC cameras moved in for a close-up of him, standing with his dripping, seal-sleek head back, his eyes open and calm and fixed on the flag as the national anthem played, the ribbon around his neck, and the gold lying against the smooth skin of his chest, Louis wept. He and Rachel both wept.
"I guess this caps everything," he said huskily and turned to embrace his wife. But she was looking at him with dawning horror, her face seeming to age before his eyes as if whipped by days and months and years of evil time; the sound of the national anthem faded and when Louis looked back at the TV he saw a different boy there, a black boy with a head of tight curls in which gems of water still gleamed.
This caps everything.
His cap.
His cap is . . .
. . .oh dear God, his cap is full of blood.
*
Louis woke up in the cold dead light of a rainy seven o'clock, clutching his pillow in his arms. His head thumped monstrously with his heartbeat; the ache swelled and faded, swelled and faded. He burped acid that tasted like old beer, and his stomach heaved miserably. He had been weeping; the pillow was wet with his tears, as if he had somehow stumbled in and then out of one of those hokey country-and-western laments in his sleep. Even in the dream, he thought, some part of him had known the truth and had cried for it.
He got up and stumbled to the bathroom, heart racing threadily in his chest, consciousness itself fragmented by the fierceness of his hangover. He reached the toilet bowl barely in time and threw up a glut of last night's beer.
He kneeled on the floor, eyes closed, until he felt capable of actually making it to his feet. He groped for the handle and flushed the john. He went to the mirror to see how badly bloodshot his eyes were, but the glass had been covered with a square of sheeting. Then he recalled. Drawing almost randomly on a past she professed to barely remember, Rachel had covered all the mirrors in the house, and she took off her shoes before entering through the door.
No Olympic swimming team, Louis thought dully as he walked back to his bed and sat down on it. The sour taste of beer coated his mouth and throat, and he swore to himself (not for the first time or the last) that he would never touch that poison again. No Olympic swimming team, no 3.0 in college, no little Catholic girlfriend or conversion, no Camp Agawam, no nothing. His sneakers had been torn off; his jumper turned inside out; his sweet little boy's body, so tough and sturdy, nearly dismembered. His cap had been full of blood.
Now, sitting on his bed in the grip of this numbing hangover, rainwater spilling its lazy courses down the window beside him, his grief came for him fully, like some gray matron from Ward Nine in purgatory. It came and dissolved him, unmanned him, took away whatever defenses remained, and he put his face in his hands and cried, rocking back and forth on his bed, thinking he would do anything to have a second chance, anything at all.
41
Gage was buried at two o'clock that afternoon. By then the rain had stopped. Tattered clouds still moved overhead, and most of the mourners arrived carrying black umbrellas provided by the undertaker.
At Rachel's request, the funeral director, who officiated at the short, nonsectarian graveside service, read the passage from Matthew which begins "Suffer the little children to come unto Me." Louis, standing on one side of the grave, looked across at his father-in-law. For a moment Goldman looked back at him, and then he dropped his eyes. There was no fight left in him today. The pouches under his eyes now resembled mailbags, and around his black silk skullcap, hair as fine and white as tattered spiderwebs flew randomly in the breeze. With his grayish-black beard scragging his cheeks, he looked more like a wino than ever. He gave Louis the impression of a man who did not really know where he was. Louis tried but could still find no pity in his heart for him.
Gage's small white coffin, its latch presumably repaired, sat on a pair of chromed runners over the grave liner. The verges of the grave had been carpeted with Astroturf so violently green it hurt Louis's eyes. Several baskets of flowers had been set on top of this artificial and strangely gay surface. Louis's eyes looked over the funeral director's shoulder. Here was a low hill, covered with graves, family plots, one Romanesque monument with the name PHIPPS engraved on it. Just above the sloping roof of PHIPPS, he could see a sliver of yellow. Louis looked at this, pondering it. He continued to look at it even after the funeral director said, "Let us bow our heads for a moment of silent prayer." It took Louis a few minutes, but he got it. It was a payloader. A payloader parked over the hill where the mourners wouldn't have to look at it. And, when the funeral was over, Oz would crush his cigarette on the heel of his tewwible workboot, put it in whatever container he carried around with him (in a cemetery sextons caught depositing their butts on the ground were almost always summarily fired--it looked bad; too many of the clientele had died of lung cancer), jump in the payloader, fire that sucker up, and cut his son off from the sun forever . . . or at least until the day of the Resurrection.
Resurrection . . . ah, there's a word
(that you should put right the fuck out of your mind and you know it).
When the funeral director said "Amen," Louis took Rachel's arm and guided her away. Rachel murmured some protest--she wanted to stay a bit longer, please, Louis--but Louis was firm. They approached the cars. He saw the funeral director taking umbrellas with the home's name discreetly printed on the handles from the mourners who passed and handing them to an assistant. The assistant put them in an umbrella
stand which looked surreal, standing there on the dewy turf. He held Rachel's arm with his right hand and Ellie's white-gloved hand with his left. Ellie was wearing the same dress she had worn to Norma Crandall's funeral.
Jud came over as Louis handed his ladies into the car. Jud also looked as if he'd had a hard night.
"You okay, Louis?"
Louis nodded.
Jud bent to look into the car. "How are you, Rachel?" he asked.
"I'm all right, Jud," she whispered.
Jud touched her shoulder gently and then looked at Ellie. "How about you, dear one?"
"I'm fine," Ellie said and produced a hideous smile of sharklike proportions to show him how fine she was.
"What's that picture you got there?"
For a moment Louis thought she would hold it, refuse to show him, and then with a painful shyness she passed it to Jud. He held it in his big fingers, fingers that were so splayed and somehow clumsy-looking, fingers that looked fit mostly for grappling with the transmissions of big road machines or making couplings on the B & M Line--but they were also the fingers that had pulled a bee stinger from Gage's neck with all the offhand skill of a magician . . . or a surgeon.
"Why, that's real nice," Jud said. "You pullin him on a sled. Bet he liked that, didn't he, Ellie?"
Beginning to weep, Ellie nodded.
Rachel began to say something, but Louis squeezed her arm--be still awhile.
"I used to pull im a lot," Ellie said, weeping, "and he'd laugh and laugh. Then we'd go in and Mommy would fix us cocoa and say, 'Put your boots away,' and Gage would grab them all up and scream 'Boots! Boots!' so loud it hurt your ears. Remember that, Mom?"
Rachel nodded.
"Yeah, I bet that was a good time, all right," Jud said, handing the picture back. "And he may be dead now, Ellie, but you can keep your memories of him."