Jud paused and then nodded. “We do lose one of the tourists every two or three years because they think you can’t get lost right off the main road. But we never lost even one of them for good, missus. Don’t you fret.”
“Are there moose?” Rachel asked apprehensively, and Louis smiled. If Rachel wanted to fret, she would jolly well fret.
“Well, you might see a moose,” Jud said, “but he wouldn’t give you any trouble, Rachel. During mating season they get a little irritated, but otherwise they do no more than look. Only people they take after out of their rutting time are people from Massachusetts. I don’t know why that’s so, but it is.” Louis thought the man was joking but could not be sure; Jud looked utterly serious. “I’ve seen it time and time again. Some fella from Saugus or Milton or Weston up a tree, yelling about a herd of moose, every damn one of em as big as a motorhome. Seems like moose can smell Massachusetts on a man or a woman. Or maybe it’s just all those new clothes from L. L. Bean’s they smell—I dunno. I’d like to see one of those animal husbandry students from the college do a paper on it, but I s’pose none ever will.”
“What’s rutting time?” Ellie asked.
“Never mind,” Rachel said. “I don’t want you up here unless you’re with a grown-up, Ellie.” Rachel moved a step closer to Louis.
Jud looked pained. “I didn’t want to scare you, Rachel-you or your daughter. No need to be scared in these woods. This is a good path; it gets a little buggy in the spring and it’s a little sloppy all the time—except for ‘55, which was the driest summer I can remember—but hell, there-isn’t even any poison ivy or poison oak, which there is at the back of the schoolyard, and you want to stay away from it, Ellie, if you don’t want to spend three weeks of your life takin starch baths.”
Ellie covered her mouth and giggled.
“It’s a safe path,” Jud said earnestly to Rachel, who still didn’t look convinced. “Why, I bet even Gage could follow it, and the town kids come up here a lot, I already told you that. They keep it nice. Nobody tells them to; they just do it. I wouldn’t want to spoil that for Ellie.” He bent over her and winked. “It’s like many other things in life, Ellie. You keep on the path and all’s well. You get off it and the next thing you know you’re lost if you’re not lucky.
And then someone has to send out a searchin party.”
They walked on. Louis began to get a dull cramp of pain in his back ,from the baby carrier. Every now and then Gage would grab a double handful of his hair and tug enthusiastically or administer a cheerful kick to Louis’s kidneys. Late mosquitoes cruised around his face and neck, making their eye-watering hum.
The path curved down, bending in and out between very old firs, and then cut widely through a brambly, tangled patch of undergrowth. The going was soupy here, and Louis’s boots squelched in mud and some standing water. At one point they stepped over a marshy spot using a pair of good-sized tussocks as stepping stones. That was the worst of it. They started to climb again and the trees reasserted themselves. Gage seemed to have
magically put on ten pounds, and the day had, with some similar magic, warmed up ten degrees. Sweat poured down Louis’s face.
“How you doing, hon?” Rachel asked. “Want me to carry him for a while?”
“No, I’m fine,” he said, and it was true, although his heart was larruping along at a good speed in his chest. He was more used to prescribing physical exercise than he was to doing it.
Jud was walking with Ellie by his side; her lemon-yellow slacks and red blouse were bright splashes of color in the shady brown-green gloom.
“Lou, does he really know where he’s going, do you think?”
Rachel asked in a low, slightly worried tone.
“Sure,” Louis said.
Jud called back cheerily over his shoulder: “Not much farther now.
. . you bearin up, Louis?”
My God, Louis thought, the man’s well past eighty, but I don’t think he’s even broken a sweat.
“I’m fine,” he called back a little aggressively. Pride probably would have led him to say the same thing even if he had felt the onset of a coronary. He grinned, hitched the straps of the Gerrypack up a bit, and went on.
They topped the second hill, and then the path sloped through a head-high swatch of bushes and tangled underbrush. It narrowed and then, just ahead, Louis saw Ellie and Jud go under an arch made of old weather stained boards. Written on these in faded black paint, only just legible, were the words PET SEMATARY.
He and Rachel exchanged an amused glance and stepped under the arch, instinctively reaching out and grasping each other’s hands as they did so, as if they had come here to be married.
For the second time that morning Louis was surprised into wonder.-
There was no carpet of needles here. Here was an almost perfect circle of mown grass, perhaps as large as forty feet in diameter. It was bounded by thickly interlaced underbrush on three sides and an old blowdown on the fourth, a jackstraw jumble of fallen trees that looked both sinister and dangerous. A man trying so pick his way through that or to climb over it would do well to put on a steel jock, Louis thought. The clearing was crowded with markers, obviously made by children from whatever materials they could beg or borrow—the slats of crates, scrapwood, pieces of beaten –
tin. And yet, seen against the perimeter of low bushes and straggly trees that fought for living space and sunlight here, the very fact of their clumsy manufacture, and the fact that humans were responsible for what was here, seemed to emphasize what symmetry they had. The forested backdrop lent the place a crazy sort of profundity, a charm that was not Christian but pagan.
“It’s lovely,” Rachel said, not sounding as if she meant it.
“Wow!” Ellie cried.
Louis unshouldered Gage and pulled him out of the baby carrier so he could crawl. Louis’s back sighed with relief.
Ellie ran from one monument to the next, exclaiming over each. Louis followed her while Rachel kept an eye on the baby.
Jud sat down cross-legged, his back against a protruding rock, and smoked.
Louis noticed that the place did not just seem to have a sense of order, a pattern; the memorials had arranged in rough concentric circles.
SMUCKY THE CAT, one crate-board marker proclaimed. The hand was childish but careful. HE WAS OBEDIANT. And below this: 1971—1974. A little way around the outer circle he came to a piece of natural slate with a name written on it in fading but perfectly legible red paint: BIFFER. And below this a bit of verse: BIFFER, BIFFER. A HELLUVA SNIFFER / UNTIL HE
DIED HE MADE US RICHER.
“Buffer was the Desslers’ cocker spaniel,” Jud said. He had dug a bald place in the earth with the heel of his shoe and was carefully tapping all his ashes into it. “Got run over by a dumpster last year.
Ain’t that some poime?”
“It is,” Louis agreed.
Some of the graves were marked with flowers, some fresh, most old, not a few almost totally decomposed. Over half of the painted and penciled inscriptions that Louis tried to read had faded away to partial or total illegibility. Others bore no discernible mark at all, and Louis guessed that the writing on these might have been done with chalk or crayon.
“Mom!” Ellie yelled. “Here’s a goldfishie! Come and see!”
“I’ll pass,” Rachel said, and Louis glanced at her. She was standing by herself, outside the outermost circle, looking more uncomfortable than ever. Louis thought: Even here she’s upset.
She never had been easy around the appearances of death (not, he supposed, that anyone really was), probably because of her sister.
Rachel’s sister had died very young, and it had left a scar which Louis had learned early in their marriage not to touch. Her name had been Zelda, and her death had been from spinal meningitis.
Her mortal Illness had probably been long and painful and ugly,
and Rachel would have been at an impressionable age. If she Wanted to forget it, he thought there could be no harm in that.
Louis tipped her a wink, and Rachel smiled gratefully at him.
Louis looked up. They were in a natural clearing. He supposed that explained how well the grass did; the sun could get through.
Nevertheless it would have taken watering and careful tending.
That meant cans of water lugged up here or maybe Indian pumps even heavier than Gage in his Gerrypack carried on small backs.