But of course it was Church. He was in no way mangled or disfigured; he had not been run over by one of the big tankers or semis that cruised Route 15 (just what was that Orinco truck doing out on Thanksgiving? he wondered randomly). Church’s eyes were half-open, as glazed as green marbles. A small flow of blood had come from his mouth, which was also open. Not a great deal of blood; just enough to stain the white bib on his chest.
“Yours, Louis?”
“Mine,” he agreed and sighed.
He was aware for the first time that he had loved Church-maybe not as fervently as Ellie but in his own absent way. In the weeks following his castration, Church had changed, had gotten fat and slow, had established a-routine that took him between Ellie’s bed, the couch, and his dish but rarely out of the house. Now, in death, he looked to Louis like the old Church. The mouth so small and bloody, filled with needle-sharp cat’s teeth, was frozen in a shooter’s snarl. The dead eyes seemed furious. It was as if after the short and placid stupidity of his life as a neuter, Church had rediscovered his real nature in dying.
“Yeah, it’s Church,” he said. “I’ll be damned if I know how I’m going to tell Ellie about it.”
Suddenly he had an idea. He would bury Church up in the Pet Sematary with no marker or any of that foolishness. He would say nothing to Ellie on the phone tonight about Church; tomorrow he would mention casually that he hadn’t seen Church around; the day after he would suggest that perhaps Church had wandered off. Cats did that sometimes. Ellie would be upset, sure, but there would be none of the finality . . . no reprise of Rachel’s upsetting refusal to deal with death. . . just a withering away.
Coward, part of his mind pronounced.
Yes. . . no argument. But who needs this hassle?
“Loves that cat pretty well, doesn’t she?” Jud asked.
“Yes,” Louis said absently. He moved Church’s head again. The cat had begun to stiffen, but the head still moved much more easily than it should have. Broken neck. Yeah. Given that, he thought he could reconstruct what had happened. Church had been crossing the road—for what reason God alone knew—and a car or truck had hit him, breaking his neck and throwing him aside onto Jud Crandall’s lawn. Or perhaps the cat’s neck had been broken when he struck the frozen ground. It didn’t matter. Either way the remains remained the same. Church was dead.
He glanced up at Jud, about to tell him his conclusions, but Jud was looking away toward that fading orange line of light at the horizon. His hood had fallen back halfway, and his face seemed thoughtful and stern. . . harsh, even.
Louis pulled the green garbage bag out of his pocket and unfolded it, holding it tightly to keep the wind from whipping it away. The brisk crackling sound of the bag seemed to bring Jud back to this here and now.
“Yes, I guess she loves it pretty well,” Jud said. His use of the present tense felt slightly eerie . . . the whole setting, with the fading light, the cold, and the wind, struck him as eerie and gothic.
Here’s Heathcliff out on the desolate moors, Louis thought, grimacing against the cold. Getting ready to pop the family cat into a Hefty Bag. Yowza.
He grabbed Church’s tail, spread the mouth of the bag, and lifted the cat. He pulled a disgusted, unhappy face at the sound the cat’s body made coming up—rrrriiippp as he pulled it out of the frost it had set into. The cat seemed almost unbelievably heavy, as if death
had settled into it like a physical weight. Christ, he feels like a bucket of sand.
Jud held the other side of the bag, and Louis dropped Church in, glad to be rid of that strange, unpleasant weight.
“What are you going to do with it now?” Jud asked.
“Put him in the garage, I guess,” Louis said. “Bury him in the morning.”
“In the Pet Sematary?”
Louis shrugged. “Suppose so.”
“Going to tell Ellie?”
“I. . . I’ll have to mull that one over awhile.”
Jud was quiet a moment longer, and then he seemed to reach a decision. “Wait here a minute or two, Louis.”
Jud moved away, with no apparent thought that Louis might not want to wait just a minute on this bitter night. He moved away with assurance and that lithe ease which was so strange in a man of his age. And Louis found he had nothing to say anyway. He didn’t feel much like himself. He watched Jud go, quite content to stand here.
He raised his face into the wind after the door had clicked closed, the garbage bag with Church’s body in it riffling between his feet.
Content.
Yes, he was. For the first time since they had moved to Maine, he felt that he was in his place, that he was home. Standing here by himself in the afterglow of the day, standing on the rim of winter, he felt unhappy and yet oddly exhilarated and strangely whole—
whole in a way he had not been, or could not remember feeling that he had been, since childhood.
Something gonna happen here, Bubba. Something pretty weird, I think.
He tilted his head back and saw cold winter stars in a blackening sky.
How long he stood like that he did not know, although it could not have been long in terms of seconds and minutes. Then a light flickered on Jud’s porch, bobbed, approached the porch door, and descended the steps. It was Jud behind a big four-cell flashlight. In his other hand he held what Louis at first thought was a large X. . .
and then he saw that it was a pick and shovel.
He handed the shovel to Louis, who took it in his free hand.
“Jud, what the hell are you up to? We can’t bury him tonight.”
“Yeah, we can. And we’re gonna.” Jud’s face was lost behind the glaring circle of the flashlight.
“Jud, it’s dark. It’s late. And cold—”
“Come on,” Jud said. “Let’s get it done.”
Louis shook his head and tried to begin again, but the words came hard—the words of explanation and reason. They seemed so meaningless against the low shriek of the wind, the seedling bed of stars in the black.
“It can wait till tomorrow when we can see—”
“Does she love the cat?”
“Yes, but—”
jud’s voice, soft and somehow logical: “And do you love her?”
Of course I love her, she s my dau— “Then come on.”
Louis went.
Twice—maybe three times—on the walk up to the Pet Sematary that night Louis tried to talk to Jud, but Jud didn’t answer. Louis gave up. That feeling of contentment, odd under the circumstances but a pure fact, persisted. It seemed to come from everywhere. The steady ache in his muscles from carrying Church in one hand and the shovel in the other was a part of it. The wind, deadly cold, numbing exposed skin, was a part of it; it wound steadily in the trees. Once they got into the woods, there was no snow to speak of. The bobbing light of Jud’s flash was a part of it.
He felt the pervasive, undeniable, magnetic presence of some secret. Some dark secret.
The shadows fell away and there was a feeling of space. Snow shone pallidly.
“Rest here,” Jud said, and Louis set the bag down. He wiped sweat off his forehead with his arm. Rest here? But they were here. He could see the markers in the moving, aimless sweep of Jud’s light as Jud sat down in the thin snow and put his face between his arms.
“Jud? Are you all right?”
“Fine. Need to catch my breath a bit, that’s all.”
Louis sat down next to him and deep-breathed half a dozen times.
“You know,” he said, “I feel better than I have in maybe six years.
I know that’s a crazy thing to say when you’re burying your daughter’s cat, but it’s the flat truth, Jud. I feel good.”
Jud breathed deeply once or twice himself. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “It is that way once in a while. You don’t pick your times for feeling good, any more than you do for the other. And the place has something to do with it too, but you don’t want to trust that.
Heroin makes dope addicts feel good when they’re putting it in their arms, but all the time it’s poisoning them. Poisoning their bodies and poisoning their way of thinking. This place can be like
that, Louis, and don’t you ever forget it. I hope to God I’m doing right. I think I am, but I can’t be sure. Sometimes my head gets muddled. It’s senility coming, I think.”