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 a—”
“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 what all.
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 come 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 goddam 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 and 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.”