"Let me go," she nearly hissed. The anger in her voice, however, was overmatched by the hurt and bewildered terror in her eyes--I don't want to talk about this, Louis, and you can't make me, that look said. "Let me go, I want to get Gage before he falls out of his cr--"
"Because maybe you ought to be the one," he said. "You can tell her we don't talk about it, nice people don't talk about it, they just bury it--oops! but don't say 'buried,' you'll give her a complex."
"I hate you!" Rachel sobbed and tore away from him.
Then he was of course sorry, and it was of course too late.
"Rachel--"
She pushed by him roughly, crying harder. "Leave me alone. You've done enough." She paused in the kitchen doorway, turning toward him, the tears coursing down her cheeks. "I don't want this discussed in front of Ellie anymore, Lou. I mean it. There's nothing natural about death. Nothing. You as a doctor should know that."
She whirled and was gone, leaving Louis in the empty kitchen, which still vibrated with their voices. At last he went to the pantry to get the broom. As he swept, he reflected on the last thing she had said and on the enormity of this difference of opinion, which had gone undiscovered for so long. Because, as a doctor, he knew that death was, except perhaps for childbirth, the most natural thing in the world. Taxes were not so sure; human conflicts were not; the conflicts of society were not; boom and bust were not. In the end there was only the clock, and the markers, which became eroded and nameless in the passage of time. Even sea turtles and the giant sequoias had to buy out someday.
"Zelda," he said aloud. "Christ, that must have been bad for her."
The question was should he just let it ride or should he try to do something about it?
He tilted the dustpan over the wastebasket, and flour slid out with a soft foom, powdering the cast-out cartons and used-up cans.
10
"Hope Ellie didn't take it too hard," Jud Crandall said. Not for the first time Louis thought that the man had a peculiar--and rather uncomfortable--ability to put his finger gently on whatever the sore spot was.
He and Jud and Norma Crandall now sat on the Crandalls' porch in the cool of the evening, drinking iced tea instead of beer. On 15, going-home-after-the-weekend traffic was fairly heavy--people recognized that every good late-summer weekend now might be the last one, Louis supposed. Tomorrow he took up his full duties at the University of Maine infirmary. All day yesterday and today students had been arriving, filling apartments in Orono and dorms on campus, making beds, renewing acquaintances, and no doubt groaning over another year of eight o'clock classes and commons food. Rachel had been cool to him all day--no, freezing was more like it--and when he went back across the road tonight, he knew that she would already be in bed, Gage sleeping with her more than likely, the two of them so far over to her side that the baby would be in danger of falling off. His half of the bed would have grown to three quarters, all of it looking like a big, sterile desert.
"I said I hoped--"
"Sorry," Louis said. "Woolgathering. She was a little upset, yeah. How did you guess that?"
"Seen em come and go, like I said." Jud took his wife's hand gently and grinned at her. "Haven't we, dear?"
"Packs and packs of them," Norma Crandall said. "We love the children."
"Sometimes that pet cemetery is their first eyeball-to-eyeball with death," Jud said. "They see people die on TV, but they know that's pretend, like the old Westerns they used to have at the movies on Saturday afternoons. On TV and in the Western movies, they just hold their stomachs or their chests and fall over. Place up on that hill seems a lot more real to most of em than all those movies and TV shows put together, don't you know."
Louis nodded, thinking: Tell my wife that, why don't you?
"Some kids it don't affect at all, at least not so you can see it, although I'd guess most of em kinda . . . kinda take it home in their pockets to look over later, like all the other stuff they collect. Most of em are fine. But some . . . you remember the little Holloway boy, Norma?"
She nodded. Ice chattered softly in the glass she held. Her glasses hung on her chest, and the headlights of a passing car illuminated the chain briefly. "He had such nightmares," she said. "Dreams about corpses coming out of the ground and I don't know whatall. Then his dog died--ate some poisoned bait was all anyone in town could figure, wasn't it, Jud?"
"Poisoned bait," Jud said, nodding. "That's what most people thought, ayuh. That was 1925. Billy Holloway was maybe ten then. Went on to become a state senator. Ran for the U.S. House of Representatives later on, but he lost. That was just before Korea."
"He and some of his friends had a funeral for the dog," Norma remembered. "It was just a mongrel, but he loved it well. I remember his parents were a little against the burying, because of the bad dreams and all, but it went off fine. Two of the bigger boys made a coffin, didn't they, Jud?"
Jud nodded and drained his iced tea. "Dean and Dana Hall," he said. "Them and that other kid Billy chummed with--I can't remember his first name, but I'm sure he was one of the Bowie kids. You remember the Bowies that used to live up on Middle Drive in the old Brochette house, Norma?"
"Yes!" Norma said, as excited as if it had happened yesterday . . . and perhaps in her mind, it seemed that way. "It was a Bowie! Alan or Burt--"
"Or maybe it was Kendall," Jud agreed. "Anyways, I remember they had a pretty good argument about who was going to be pallbearers. The dog wasn't very big, and so there wasn't room but for two. The Hall boys said they ought to be the ones to do it since they made the coffin, and also because they were twins--sort of a matched set, y'see. Billy said they didn't know Bowser--that was the dog--well enough to be the pallbearers. 'My dad says only close friends get to be pallbearers,' was his argument, 'not jest any carpenter.' " Jud and Norma both laughed at this, and Louis grinned.
"They was just about ready to fight over it when Mandy Holloway, Billy's sister, fetched out the fourth volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica," Jud said. "Her dad, Stephen Holloway, was the only doctor this side of Bangor and that side of Bucksport in those days, Louis, and they was the only family in Ludlow that could afford a set of encyclopedia."
"They were also the first to have electric lights," Norma broke in.
"Anyway," Jud resumed, "Mandy came out all aflukin, head up and tail over a splashboard, all of eight years old, petticoats flyin, that big book in her arms. Billy and the Bowie kid--I think it must have been Kendall, him that crashed and burned up in Pensacola where they was trainin fighter pilots in early 1942--they was gettin ready to take on the Hall twins over the privilege of toting that poor old poisoned mutt up to the boneyard."
Louis started giggling. Soon he was laughing out loud. He could feel the days-old residue of tension left from the bitter argument with Rachel beginning to loosen.
"So she says, 'Wait! Wait! Looka this!' And they all stop and look. And goddamn if she ain't--"
"Jud," Norma said warningly.
"Sorry, dear; I get carried away yarning, you know that."
"I guess you do," she said.
"And darned if she ain't got that book open to FUNERALS, and there's a picture of Queen Victoria getting her final sendoff and bon voyage, and there are about forty-eleven people on each side of her coffin, some sweatin and strainin to lift the bugger, some just standin around in their funeral coats and ruffled collars like they was waitin for someone to call post time at the racetrack. And Mandy says, 'When it's a ceremonial funeral of state, you can have as many as you want! The book says so!' "
"That solved it?" Louis asked.
"That did the trick. They ended up with about twenty kids, and damn if they didn't look just like the picture Mandy had found, except maybe for the ruffles and tall hats. Mandy took charge, she did. Got em lined up and gave each of em a wildflower--a dandelion or a lady's slipper or a daisy--and off they went. By the gee, I always thought the country missed a bet when Mandy Holloway never got voted to the U.S. Congress." He laughed an
d shook his head. "Anyway, that was the end of Billy's bad dreams about the Pet Sematary. He mourned his dog and finished his mourning and got on. Which is what we all do, I guess."
Louis thought again of Rachel's near-hysteria.
"Your Ellie will get over it," Norma said and shifted position. "You must be thinking that death is all we talk about around here, Louis. Jud and I are getting on, but I hope neither of us has gotten to the gore-crow stage yet--"
"No, of course not, don't be silly," Louis said.
"--But it's not such a bad idea to be on nodding acquaintance with it. These days . . . I don't know . . . no one wants to talk about it or think about it, it seems. They took it off the TV because they thought it might hurt the children some way . . . hurt their minds . . . and people want closed coffins so they don't have to look at the remains or say goodbye . . . it just seems like people want to forget it."
"And at the same time they brought in the cable TV with all those movies showing people"--Jud looked at Norma and cleared his throat--"showing people doing what people usually do with their shades pulled down," he finished. "Queer how things change from one generation to the next, isn't it?"
"Yes," Louis said. "I suppose it is."
"Well, we come from a different time," Jud said, sounding almost apologetic. "We was on closer terms with death. We saw the flu epidemic after the Great War, and mothers dying with child, and children dying of infection and fevers that it seems like doctors just wave a magic wand over these days. In the time when me and Norma was young, if you got cancer, why, that was your death warrant, right there. No radiation treatments back in the 1920s! Two wars, murders, suicides . . ."
He fell silent for a moment.
"We knew it as a friend and as an enemy," he said finally. "My brother Pete died of a burst appendix in 1912, back when Taft was President. Pete was just fourteen, and he could hit a baseball farther than any kid in town. In those days you didn't need to take a course in college to study death, hot-spice, or whatever they call it. In those days it came into the house and said howdy and sometimes it took supper with you and sometimes you could feel it bite your ass."
This time Norma didn't correct him; instead she nodded silently.
Louis stood up, stretched. "I have to go," he said. "Big day tomorrow."
"Yes, the merry-go-round starts for you tomorrow, don't it?" Jud said, also standing. Jud saw Norma was also trying to get up and gave her a hand. She rose with a grimace.
"Bad tonight, is it?" Louis asked.
"Not so bad," she said.
"Put some heat on it when you go to bed."
"I will," Norma said. "I always do. And Louis . . . don't fret about Ellie. She'll be too busy getting to know her new friends this fall to worry much about that old place. Maybe someday all of em'll go up and repaint some of the signs, or pull weeds, or plant flowers. Sometimes they do, when the notion takes them. And she'll feel better about it. She'll start to get that nodding acquaintance."
Not if my wife has anything to say about it.
"Come on over tomorrow night and tell me how it went up at the college, if you get the chance," Jud said. "I'll whup you at cribbage."
"Well, maybe I'll get you drunk first," Louis said. "Double-skunk you."
"Doc," Jud said with great sincerity, "the day I get double-skunked at cribbage would be the day I'd let a quack like you treat me."
He left on their laughter and crossed the road to his own house in the late-summer dark.
*
Rachel was sleeping with the baby, curled up on her side of the bed in a fetal, protective position. He supposed she would get over it--there had been other arguments and times of coldness in their marriage, but this one was surely the worst of the lot. He felt sad and angry and unhappy all at the same time, wanting to make it up but not sure how, not even sure that the first move should come from him. It was all so pointless--only a capful of wind somehow blown up to hurricane proportions by a trick of the mind. Other fights and arguments, yes, sure, but only a few as bitter as the one over Ellie's tears and questions. He supposed it didn't take a great many blows like that before the marriage sustained structural damage . . . and then one day, instead of reading about it in a note from a friend ("Well, I suppose I ought to tell you before you hear it from someone else, Lou; Maggie and I are splitting . . .") or in the newspaper, it was you.
He undressed to his shorts quietly and set the alarm for 6 A.M. Then he showered, washed his hair, shaved, and crunched up a Rolaid before brushing his teeth--Norma's iced tea had given him acid indigestion. Or maybe it was coming home and seeing Rachel all the way over on her side of the bed. Territory is that which defines all else, hadn't he read that in some college history course?
Everything done, the evening put neatly away, he went to bed . . . but couldn't sleep. There was something else, something that nagged at him. The last two days went around and around in his head as he listened to Rachel and Gage breathing nearly in tandem. GEN. PATTON . . . HANNAH THE BEST DOG THAT EVER LIVED . . . MARTA OUR PET RABIT . . . Ellie, furious. I don't want Church to ever be dead! . . . He's not God's cat! Let God have His own cat! Rachel, equally furious. You as a doctor should know . . . Norma Crandall saying It just seems like people want to forget it . . . And Jud, his voice terribly sure, terribly certain, a voice from another age: Sometimes it took supper with you and sometimes you could feel it bite your ass.
And that voice merged with the voice of his mother, who had lied to Louis Creed about sex at four but told him the truth about death at twelve, when his cousin Ruthie had been killed in a stupid car accident. She had been crushed in her father's car by a kid who had found the keys in a Public Works Department payloader and decided to take it for a cruise and then found out he didn't know how to stop it. The kid suffered only minor cuts and contusions; his Uncle Carl's Fairlane was demolished. She can't be dead, he had replied in answer to his mother's bald statement. He had heard the words, but he couldn't seem to get the sense of them. What do you mean, she's dead? What are you talking about? And then, as an afterthought: Who's going to bury her? For although Ruthie's father, Louis's uncle, was an undertaker, he couldn't imagine that Uncle Carl would possibly be the one to do it. In his confusion and mounting fear, he had seized upon this as the most important question. It was a genuine conundrum, like who cut the town barber's hair.
I imagine that Donny Donahue will do it, his mother replied. Her eyes were red-rimmed; most of all she had looked tired. His mother had looked almost ill with weariness. He's your uncle's best pal in the business. Oh, but Louis . . . sweet little Ruthie . . . I can't stand to think she suffered . . . pray with me, will you, Louis? Pray with me for Ruthie. I need you to help me.
So they had gotten down on their knees in the kitchen, he and his mother, and they prayed, and it was the praying that finally brought it home to him; if his mother was praying for Ruthie Creed's soul, then it meant that her body was gone. Before his closed eyes rose a terrible image of Ruthie coming to his thirteenth birthday party with her decaying eyeballs hanging on her cheeks and blue mould growing in her red hair, and this image provoked not just sickening horror but an awful doomed love.
He cried out in the greatest mental agony of his life, "She can't be dead! MOMMA, SHE CAN'T BE DEAD--I LOVE HER!"
And his mother's reply, her voice flat and yet full of images: dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust:
She is, my darling. I'm sorry, but she is. Ruthie is gone.
Louis shuddered, thinking, Dead is dead--what else do you need?
Suddenly Louis knew what it was he had forgotten to do, why he was still awake on this night before the first day of his new job, hashing over old griefs.
He got up, headed for the stairs, and suddenly detoured down the hall to Ellie's room. She was sleeping peacefully, mouth open, wearing her blue baby-doll pajamas that she had really outgrown. My God, Ellie, he
thought, you're sprouting like corn. Church lay between her splayed ankles, also dead to the world. You should pardon the pun.
Downstairs there was a bulletin board on the wall by the phone with various messages, memos, and bills tacked to it. Written across the top in Rachel's neat caps was THINGS TO PUT OFF AS LONG AS POSSIBLE. Louis got the telephone book, looked up a number, and jotted it on a blank memo sheet. Below the number he wrote: Quentin L. Jolander, D.V.M.--call for appointment re Church--if Jolander doesn't neuter animals, he will refer.
He looked at the note, wondering if it was time, knowing that it was. Something concrete had to come out of all this bad feeling, and he had decided sometime between this morning and tonight--without even knowing he was deciding--that he didn't want Church crossing the road anymore if he could help it.
His old feelings on the subject rose up in him, the idea that neutering would lessen the cat, would turn him into a fat old tom before his time, content to just sleep on the radiator until someone put something into his dish. He didn't want Church like that. He liked Church the way he was, lean and mean.
Outside in the dark, a big semi droned by on Route 15, and that decided him. He tacked the memo up and went to bed.
11
The next morning at breakfast, Ellie saw the new memo on the bulletin board and asked him what it meant.
"It means he's going to have a very small operation," Louis said. "He'll probably have to stay over at the vet's for one night afterward. And when he comes home, he'll stay in our yard and not want to roam around so much."
"Or cross the road?" Ellie asked.
She may be only five, Louis thought, but she's sure no slouch. "Or cross the road," he agreed.
"Yay!" Ellie said, and that was the end of the subject.
Louis, who had been prepared for a bitter and perhaps hysterical argument about Church being out of the house for even one night, was mildly stunned by the ease with which she had acquiesced. And he realized how worried she must have been. Perhaps Rachel had not been entirely wrong about the effect the Pet Sematary had had on her.