The dark shapes were cairns of stones.
“Micmacs sanded off the top of the hill here,” Jud said. “No one knows how, no more than anyone knows how the Mayans built their pyramids. And the Micmacs have forgot themselves, just like the Mayans have.”
“Why? Why did they do it?”
“This was their burying ground,” Jud said. “I brought you here so you could bury Ellie’s cat here. The Micmacs didn’t discriminate, you know. They buried their pets right alongside their owners.”
This made Louis think of the Egyptians, who had gone that one better: they had slaughtered the pets of royalty so that the souls of the pets might go along to whatever afterlife there might be with the souls of their masters. He remembered reading about the slaughter of more than ten thousand domestic animals following the decease of one pharaoh’s daughter—included in the tally had been six hundred pigs and two thousand peacocks. The pigs had been scented with attar of roses, the dead lady’s favorite perfume, before their throats were cut.
And they built pyramids too. No one knows for sure what the Mayan pyramids are for—navigation and chronography, some say, like Stonehenge—but we know damn well what the Egyptian pyramids were and are . . . great monuments to death, the world’s biggest gravestones. Here Lies Ramses II, He Was Obedient, Louis thought and uttered a wild, helpless cackle.
Jud looked at him, unsurprised.
“Go on and bury your animal,” he said. “I’m gonna have a smoke.
I’d help you, but you got to do it yourself. Each buries his own.
That’s the way it was done then.”
“Jud, what’s this all about? Why did you bring me here?”
“Because you saved Norma’s life,” Jud said, and although he sounded sincere—and Louis was positive he believed himself sincere—he had a sudden, overpowering sense that the man was lying. . . or that he was being lied to and then passing the lie on to Louis. He remembered that look he had seen, or thought he had seen, in Jud’s eye.
But up here none of that seemed to matter. The wind mattered more, pushing freely around him in that steady river, lifting his hair from his brow and off his ears.
Jud sat down with his back against one of the trees, cupped his hands around a match, and lit a Chesterfield. “You want to rest a bit before you start?”
“No, I’m okay,” Louis said. He could have pursued the questions, but he found he didn’t really care to. This felt wrong but it also felt right, and he decided to let that be enough. . . for now. There was really only one thing he needed to know. “Will I really be able to dig him a grave? The soil looks thin.” Louis nodded toward the place where the rock pushed out of the ground at the edge of the steps.
Jud nodded slowly. “Ayuh,” he said. “Soil’s thin, all right. But soil deep enough to grow grass is generally deep enough to bury in, Louis. And people have been burying here for a long, long time.
You won’t find it any too easy, though.”
Nor did he. The ground was stony and hard, and very quickly he saw that he was going to need the pick to dig the grave deep enough to hold Church. So he began to alternate, first using the pick to loosen the hard earth and stones, then the shovel to dig out
what he had loosened. His hands began to hurt. His body began to warm up again. He felt a strong, unquestionable need to do a good job. He began to hum under his breath, something he sometimes did when suturing a wound. Sometimes the pick would strike a rock hard enough to flash sparks, and the shiver would travel up the wooden haft to vibrate in his hands. He could feel blisters forming on his palms and didn’t care, although he was, like most doctors, usually careful of his hands. Above and around him, the wind sang and sang, playing a tree-note melody.
Counterpointing this he heard the soft drop and chunk of rock. He looked over his shoulder and saw Jud, hunkered down and pulling out the bigger rocks he had dug up, making a heap of them.
“For your cairn,” he said when he saw Louis looking.
“Oh,” Louis said and went back to work.
He made the grave about two feet wide and three feet long—a Cadillac of a grave for a damn cat, he thought—and when it was perhaps thirty inches deep and the pick was flashing sparks up from almost every stroke, he tossed it and the shovel aside and asked Jud if it was okay.
Jud got up and took a cursory look. “Seems fine to me,” he said.
“Anyway, it’s what you think that counts.”
“Will you tell me now what this is about?”
Jud smiled a little. “The Micmacs believed this hill was a magic place,” he said. “Believed this whole forest, from the swamp on north and east, was magic. They made this place, and they buried their dead here, away from everything else. Other tribes steered clear of it—the Penobscots said these woods were full of ghosts.
Later on, the fur trappers started saying pretty much the same thing. I suppose some of them saw the foo-fire in Little God Swamp and thought they were seeing ghosts.”
Jud smiled, and Louis thought: That isn’t what you think at all.
“Later on, not even the Micmacs themselves would come here.
One of them claimed he saw a Wendigo here and that the ground had gone sour. They had a big powwow about it . . or so I heard the tale in my green years, Louis, but I heard it from that old tosspot Stanny B.—which is what we all called Stanley Bouchard—and what Stanny B. didn’t know, he’d make up.”
Louis, who knew only that the Wendigo was supposed to be a spirit of the north country, said, “Do you think the ground’s gone sour?”
Jud smiled—or at least his lips slanted. “I think it’s a dangerous place,” he said softly, “but not for cats or dogs or pet hamsters. Go on and bury your animal, Louis.”
Louis lowered the Hefty Bag into the hole and slowly shoveled the dirt back in. He was cold now and tired. The patter of the earth on the plastic was a depressing sound, and while he did not regret coming up here, that sense of exhilaration was fading, and he had begun to wish the adventure over. It was a long walk back home.
The pattering sound muffled, then stopped—there was only the whump of dirt on more dirt. He scraped the last bit into the hole with the blade of his shovel (there’s never enough, he thought, recalling something his undertaker uncle had said to him at least a thousand years ago, never enough to fill the hole up again) arid then turned to Jud.
“Your cairn,” Jud said.
“Look, Jud, I’m pretty tired and—”
“It’s Ellie’s cat,” Jud said, and his voice, although soft, was implacable. “She’d want you to do it right.”
Louis sighed. “I suppose she would,” he said.
It took another ten minutes to pile up the rocks Jud handed him, one by one. When it was done, there was a low, conical pile of stones on Church’s grave, and Louis did indeed feel a small, tired pleasure. It looked right, somehow, rising with the others in the starlight. He supposed Ellie would never see it—the thought of taking her through that patch of swamp where there was quicksand would make Rachel’s hair turn white—but he had seen it, and it was good.
“Most of these have fallen over,” he said to Jud, standing and brushing at the knees of his pants. He was seeing more clearly now, and in several places he could clearly make out scattered strews of loose stones. But Jud had seen to it that he built his own cairn only from stones taken from the grave he himself had dug.
“Ayuh,” Jud said. “Told you: the place is old.”
“Are we done now?”
“Ayuh.” He clapped Louis on the shoulder. “You did good, Louis.
I knew you would. Let’s go home.”
“Jud—” he began again, but Jud only grabbed the pick and walked off toward the steps. Louis got the shovel, had to trot to catch up, and then saved his breath for walking. He looked back once, but the cairn marking the grave of his daughter’s cat Winston Churchill had melted into the shadows, and he could not pick it out.
We just ran the film backward, Louis thought tiredly as they emerged from the woods and into the field overlooking his own house some time later. He did not know how much later; he had taken off his watch when he had lain down to doze that afternoon, and it would still be there on the windowsill by his bed. He only knew that he was beat, used up, done in. He could not remember feeling so kicked-dog weary since his first day on Chicago’s