Pet Sematary (28 page)

“It isn't one of the kids, is it?” he asked. “Rachel?”

“No, no,” she said, crying harder. “Not one of the kids. It's Norma, Lou. Norma Crandall. She died this morning. Around eight o'clock, right after breakfast, Jud said. He came over to see if you were here and I told him you'd left half an hour ago. He . . . oh, Lou, he just seemed so lost and so dazed . . . so
old
 . . . thank God Ellie was gone
and Gage is too young to understand . . .”

Louis's brow furrowed, and in spite of this terrible news he found it was Rachel his mind was going out to, seeking, trying to find. Because here it was again. Nothing you could quite put your finger on, because it was so much an overall attitudinal fix. That death was a secret, a terror, and it was to be kept from the children, above all to be kept from the children, the way that Victorian ladies and gentlemen had believed the nasty, grotty truth about sexual relations must be kept from the children.

“Jesus,” he said. “Was it her heart?”

“I don't know,” she said. She was no longer crying, but her voice was choked hoarse. “Could you come, Louis? You're his friend, and I think he needs you.”

You're his friend.

Well I am,
Louis thought with a small touch of surprise.
I never expected to have an eighty-year-old man for a buddy, but I guess I do.
And then it occurred to him that they had better be friends, considering what was between them. And considering that, he supposed that Jud had known they were friends long before Louis had. Jud had stood by him on that one, and in spite of what had happened since, in spite of the mice, in spite of the birds, Louis felt that Jud's decision had probably been the right one . . . or, if not the right one, at least the compassionate one. He would do what he could for Jud now, and if it meant being best man at the death of his wife, he would be that.

“On my way,” he said and hung up.

It had not been a heart attack. It had been a cerebral accident, sudden and probably painless. When Louis called Steve Masterton that afternoon and told him what was going on, Steve said that he wouldn't mind going out just that way.

“Sometimes God dillies and dallies,” Steve said, “and sometimes He just points at you and tells you to hang up your jock.”

Rachel did not want to talk about it at all and would not allow Louis to talk to her of it.

Ellie was not so much upset as she was surprised and interested—it was what Louis thought a thoroughly healthy six-year-old reaction should be. She wanted to know if Mrs. Crandall had died with her eyes open or shut. Louis said he didn't know.

Jud took hold as well as could have been expected, considering the fact that the lady had been sharing bed and board with him for almost sixty years. Louis found the old man—and on this day he looked very much like an old man of eighty-three—sitting alone at the kitchen table, smoking a Chesterfield, drinking a bottle of beer, and staring blankly into the living room.

He looked up when Louis came in and said, “Well, she's gone, Louis.” He said this in such a clear and matter-of-fact way that Louis thought it must not have really cleared through all the circuits yet—hadn't hit him yet where he lived. Then Jud's mouth began to work and he covered his
eyes with one arm. Louis went to him and put an arm around him. Jud gave in and wept. It had cleared the circuits, all right. Jud understood perfectly. His wife had died.

“That's good,” Louis said. “That's good, Jud, she would want you to cry a little, I think. Probably be pissed off if you didn't.” He had started to cry a little himself. Jud hugged him tightly, and Louis hugged him back.

Jud cried for ten minutes or so, and then the storm passed. Louis listened to the things Jud said then with great care—he listened as a doctor as well as a friend. He listened for any circularity in Jud's conversation; he listened to see if Jud's grasp of
when
was clear (no need to check him on
where;
that would prove nothing because for Jud Crandall the
where
had always been Ludlow, Maine); he listened most of all for any use of Norma's name in the present tense. He found little or no sign that Jud was losing his grip. Louis was aware that it was not uncommon for two old married people to go almost hand-in-hand, a month, a week, even a day apart. The shock, he supposed, or maybe even some deep inner urge to catch up with the one gone (that was a thought he would not have had before Church; he found that many of his thoughts concerning the spiritual and the supernatural had undergone a quiet but nonetheless deep sea-change). His conclusion was that Jud was grieving hard but that he was still
compos mentis
. He sensed in Jud none of that transparent frailty that had seemed to surround Norma on New Year's Eve, when the four of them
had sat in the Creed living room, drinking eggnog.

Jud brought him a beer from the fridge, his face still red and blotchy from crying.

“A bit early in the day,” he said, “but the sun's over the yardarm somewhere in the world and under the circumstances . . .”

“Say no more,” Louis told him and opened the beer. He looked at Jud. “Shall we drink to her?”

“I guess we better,” Jud said. “You should have seen her when she was sixteen, Louis, coming back from church with her jacket unbuttoned . . . your eyes would have popped. She could have made the devil swear off drinking. Thank Christ she never asked me to do it.”

Louis nodded and raised his beer a little. “To Norma,” he said.

Jud clinked his bottle against Louis's. He was crying again but he was also smiling. He nodded. “May she have peace, and let there be no frigging arthritis wherever she is.”

“Amen,” Louis said, and they drank.

*  *  *

It was the only time Louis saw Jud progress beyond a mild tipsiness, and even so he did not become incapacitated. He reminisced; a constant stream of warm memories and anecdotes, colorful and clear and sometimes arresting, flowed from him. Yet between the stories of the past, Jud dealt with the present in a way Louis could only admire; if it had been Rachel who had simply dropped dead after her grapefruit and morning cereal, he wondered if he could
have done half so well.

Jud called the Brookings-Smith Mortuary in Bangor and made as many of the arrangements as he could by telephone; he made an appointment to come in the following day and make the rest. Yes, he would have her embalmed; he wanted her in a dress, which he would provide; yes, he would pick out underwear; no, he did not want the mortuary to supply the special shoes which laced up the back. Would they have someone wash her hair? he asked. She washed it last on Monday night, and so it had been dirty when she died. He listened, and Louis, whose uncle had been in what those in the business called “the quiet trade,” knew the undertaker was telling Jud that a final wash and set was part of the service rendered. Jud nodded and thanked the man he was talking to, then listened again. Yes, he said, he would have her cosmeticized, but it was to be a lightly applied layer. “She's dead and people know it,” he said, lighting a Chesterfield. “No need to tart her up.” The coffin would be closed during the funeral, he told the director with calm authority, but open during the visiting hours the day before. She was to be buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, where they had bought plots in 1951. He had the papers in hand and gave the mortician the plot number so that the preparations could begin out there: H-101. He himself had H-102, he told Louis later on.

He hung up, looked at Louis, and said, “Prettiest cemetery in the world is right here in Bangor, as far as I'm concerned. Crack yourself another beer, if you want, Louis. All of this is going to take awhile.”

Louis was about to refuse—he was feeling a little tiddly—when a grotesque image arose unbidden behind his eyes: Jud pulling Norma's corpse on a pagan litter through the woods. Toward the Micmac burying ground beyond the Pet Sematary.

It had the effect of a slap on him. Without a word, he got up and got another beer out of the fridge. Jud nodded at him and dialed the telephone again. By three that afternoon, when Louis went home for a sandwich and a bowl of soup, Jud had progressed a long way toward organizing his wife's final rites; he moved from one thing to the next like a man planning a dinner party of some importance. He called the North Ludlow Methodist Church, where the actual funeral would take place, and the Cemetery Administration Office at Mount Hope; these were both calls the undertaker at Brookings-Smith would be making, but Jud called first as a courtesy. It was a step few bereaved ever thought of . . . or if they thought of it, one they could rarely bring themselves to take. Louis admired Jud all the more for it. Later he called Norma's few surviving relatives and his own, paging through an old and tattered address book with a leather cover to find the numbers. And between calls, he drank beer and remembered the past.

Louis felt great admiration for him . . . and love?

Yes, his heart confirmed. And love.

*  *  *

When Ellie came down that night in her pajamas to be kissed, she asked Louis if Mrs. Crandall would go to heaven. She almost whispered the question to Louis, as if she understood it would
be better if they were not overheard. Rachel was in the kitchen making a chicken pie, which she intended to take over to Jud the next day.

Across the street, all the lights were on in the Crandall house. Cars were parked in Jud's driveway and up and down the shoulder of the highway on that side for a hundred feet in either direction. The official viewing hours would be tomorrow, at the mortuary, but tonight people had come to comfort Jud as well as they could, and to help him remember, and to celebrate Norma's passing—what Jud had referred to once that afternoon as “the foregoing.” Between that house and this, a frigid February wind blew. The road was patched with black ice. The coldest part of the Maine winter was now upon them.

“Well, I don't really know, honey,” Louis said, taking Ellie on his lap. On the TV, a running gunfight was in progress. A man spun and dropped, unremarked upon by either of them. Louis was aware—uncomfortably so—that Ellie probably knew a hell of a lot more about Ronald McDonald and Spiderman and the Burger King than she did about Moses, Jesus, and St. Paul. She was the daughter of a woman who was a nonpracticing Jew and a man who was a lapsed Methodist, and he supposed her ideas about the whole
spiritus mundi
were of the vaguest sort—not myths, not dreams, but dreams of dreams.
It's late for that,
he thought randomly.
She's only five, but it's late for that. Jesus, it gets late so fast.

But Ellie was looking at him, and he ought to say something.

“People believe all sorts of things about what happens to us when we die,” he said. “Some people think we go to heaven or hell. Some people believe we're born again as little children—”

“Sure, carnation. Like what happened to Audrey Rose in that movie on TV.”

“You never saw that!” Rachel, he thought, would have her own cerebral accident if she thought Ellie had seen
Audrey Rose
.

“Marie told me at school,” Ellie said. Marie was Ellie's self-proclaimed best friend, a malnourished, dirty little girl who always looked as if she might be on the edge of impetigo, or ringworm, or perhaps even scurvy. Both Louis and Rachel encouraged the friendship as well as they could, but Rachel had once confessed to Louis that after Marie left, she always felt an urge to check Ellie's head for nits and headlice. Louis had laughed and nodded.

“Marie's mommy lets her watch
all
the shows.” There was an implied criticism in this that Louis chose to ignore.

“Well, it's
re
incarnation, but I guess you've got the idea. The Catholics believe in heaven and hell, but they also believe there's a place called limbo and one called purgatory. And the Hindus and Buddhists believe in Nirvana—”

There was a shadow on the dining room wall. Rachel. Listening.

Louis went on more slowly.

“There are probably lots more too. But what it comes down to, Ellie, is this: no one knows. People
say
they know, but when
they say that, what they mean is that they believe because of faith. Do you know what faith is?”

“Well . . .”

“Here we are, sitting in my chair,” Louis said. “Do you think my chair will still be here tomorrow?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Then you have faith it will be here. As it so happens, I do, too. Faith is believing a thing will be, or is. Get it?”

“Yes,” Ellie nodded positively.

“But we don't
know
it'll be here. After all, some crazed chair burglar might break in and take it, right?”

Ellie giggled. Louis smiled.

“We just have faith that won't happen. Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don't believe that myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we
know
is this: When we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying or they don't. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of. If we don't, it's just blotto. The end.”

“Like going to sleep?”

He considered this and then said, “More like having ether, I think.”

“Which do you have faith in, Daddy?”

The shadow on the wall moved and came to rest again.

For most of his adult life—since college days, he supposed—he had believed that death was the end. He had been present at many deathbeds and had never felt a soul bullet past him on its way to . . . wherever; hadn't this very thought occurred to him upon the death of Victor Pascow? He had agreed with his Psychology I teacher that the life-after-death experiences reported in scholarly journals and then vulgarized in the popular press probably indicate a last-ditch mental stand against the onrush of death—the endlessly inventive human mind, staving off insanity to the very end by constructing a hallucination of immortality. He had likewise agreed with an acquaintance in the dorm who had said, during an all-night bull session during Louis's sophomore year at Chicago, that the Bible was suspiciously full of miracles which had ceased almost completely during the age of rationality (“totally ceased,” he had said at first but had been forced backward at least one step by others who claimed with some authority that there were still plenty of weird things going on, little pockets of perplexity in a world that had become by and large a clean, well-lighted place—there was, for instance, the Shroud of Turin, which had survived every effort to debunk it). “So Christ brought Lazarus back from the dead,” this acquaintance—who had gone on to become a highly thought-of o.b. man in Dearborn, Michigan—had said. “That's fine with me. If I have to swallow it, I will. I mean, I had to buy the concept that the fetus of one twin can sometimes swallow the fetus of the other
in utero,
like some kind of unborn cannibal, and then show
up with teeth in his testes or in his lungs twenty or thirty years later to prove that he did it, and I suppose if I can buy that I can buy anything. But I wanna see the death certificate—you dig what I'm saying? I'm not questioning that he came out of the tomb. But I wanna see the original death certificate. I'm like Thomas saying he'd only believe Jesus had risen when he could look through the nail holes and stick his hands in the guy's side. As far as I'm concerned,
he
was the real physician of the bunch, not Luke.”