Louis,
The good wife and me are off to Bucksport to do some shopping and to look at a welsh dresser at the Emporium Galorium that Norma’s had her eye on for about a hundred years, it seems like.
Probably we’ll have a spot of lunch at McLeod’s while we’re there and come back in the late afternoon. Come on over for a beer or two tonight, if you want.
Your family is your family. I don’t want to be no “buttinsky,” but if Ellie were my daughter, I wouldn’t rush to tell her that her cat got killed on the highway—why not let her enjoy her holiday?
By the way, Louis, I wouldn’t talk about what we did last night either, not around North Ludlow. There are other people who know about that old Micmac burying ground, and there are other people in town who have buried their animals there .
you might say it’s another part of the “Pet Sematary.” Believe it or not, there is even a bull buried up there! Old Zack McGovern, who used to live out on Stack pole Road, buried his prize bull Hanratty in the Micmac burying ground back in 1967 or ‘68. Ha, ha! He told me that he and his two boys had taken that bull out there and 1
laughed until I thought 1 would rupture myself! But people around here don’t like to talk about it, and they don’t like people they consider to be “outsiders” to know about it, not be-
cause some of these old superstitions go back three hundred years or more (although they do), but because they sort of believe in those superstitions, and they think any “outsider” who knows that they do must be laughing at them. Does that make any sense? I suspect it—doesn’t, but nevertheless that’s how it is. So just do me a favor and keep shut on the subject, will you?
We will talk more about this, probably tonight, and by then you will understand more, but in the meantime I want to tell you that you did yourself proud. I knew you would.
Jud
PS—Norma doesn’t know what this note says—I told her something different—and I would just as soon keep it that way if it’s all the same to you. I’ve told Norma more than one lie in the fifty-eight years we’ve been married, and I’d guess that most men tell their wives a smart of lies, but you know, most of them could stand before God and confess them without dropping their eyes from His.
Well, drop over tonight and we’ll do a little boozing.
J.
Louis stood on the top step leading to Jud and Norma’s porch—
now bare, its comfortable rattan furniture stored to wait for another spring—frowning over this note. Don’t tell Ellie the cat had been killed—he hadn’t. Other animals buried there? Superstitions going back three hundred years?
and by then you will understand more.
He touched this line lightly with his finger, and for the first time allowed his mind to deliberately turn back to what they had done the night before. It was blurred in his memory, it had the melting, cotton-candy texture of dreams or of waking actions performed under a light haze of drugs. He could recall climbing the deadfall and the odd, brighter quality of light in the bog—that and the way it had felt ten or twenty degrees warmer there—but all of it was like the conversation you had with the anesthetist just before he or she put you out like a light.
and I’d guess most men tell their wives a smart of lies. .
Wives and daughters as well, Louis thought—but it was eerie, the way Jud seemed almost to know what had transpired this morning, both on the telephone and in his own head.
Slowly he refolded the note, which had been written on a sheet of lined paper like that in a schoolboy’s Blue Horse tablet, and put it back into the envelope. He put the envelope into his hip pocket and crossed the road again.
25
It was around one o’clock that afternoon when Church came back like the cat in the nursery rhyme. Louis was in the garage, where he had been working off and on for the last six weeks on a fairly ambitious set of shelves; he wanted to put all of the dangerous garage stuff such as bottles of windshield-wiper fluid, antifreeze, and sharp tools on these shelves, where they would be out of Gage’s reach. He was hammering in a nail when Church strolled
in, his tail high. Louis did not drop the hammer or even slam his thumb—his heart jogged in his chest but did not leap; a hot wire seemed to glow momentarily in his stomach and then cool immediately, like the filament of a light bulb that glows overbrightly for a moment and then burns out. It was as if, he told himself later, he had spent that entire sunny post-Thanksgiving Friday morning waiting for Church to come back; as if he had known in some deeper, more primitive part of his mind what their night hike up to the Micmac burying ground had meant all along.
He put the hammer down carefully, spat the nails he had been holding in his mouth back into his palm, and then dumped them into the pockets of his workman’s apron. He went to Church and picked the cat up.
Live weight, he thought with a kind of sick excitement. He weighs what he did before he was hit. This is live weight. He was heavier in the bag. He was heavier when he was dead.
His heart took a bigger jog this time—almost a leap—and for a moment the garage seemed to swim in front of his eyes.
Church laid his ears back and allowed himself to be held. Louis carried him out into the sunlight and sat down on the back steps.
The cat tried to get down then, but Louis stroked him and held him on his lap. His heart seemed to be taking regular jogs now.
He probed gently into the heavy ruff of fur at Church’s neck, remembering the sick, boneless way Church’s head had swiveled on his broken neck the night before. He felt nothing now but good muscle and tendon. He held Church up and looked at the cat’s muzzle closely. -What he saw there caused him to drop the cat onto the grass quickly and to cover his face with one hand, his eyes shut. The whole world was swimming now, and his head was full of a tottery, sick vertigo—it was the sort of feeling he could remember from the bitter end of long drunks, just before the puking started.
There was dried blood caked on Church’s muzzle, and caught in his long whiskers were two tiny shreds of green plastic. Bits of Hefty Bag.
We will talk more about this and by then you will understand more.
Oh Christ, he understood more than he wanted to right now. Give me a chance, Louis thought, and I’ll understand myself right into the nearest mental asylum.
He let Church into the house, got his blue dish, and opened a tuna-and-liver cat dinner. As he spooned the gray-brown mess out of the can, Church purred unevenly and rubbed back and forth along Louis’s ankles. The feel of the cat caused Louis to break out in gooseflesh, and he had to clench his teeth grimly to keep from kicking him away. His furry sides felt somehow too slick, too thick—in a word, loathsome. Louis found he didn’t care if he never touched Church again.
When he bent and put the dish on the floor, Church streaked past him to get it, and Louis could have sworn he smelled sour earth—
as if it had been ground into the cat’s fur.
He stood back, watching the cat eat. He could hear him smacking—had Church smacked over his food that way before?
Perhaps he had, and Louis had just never noticed. Either way, it was a disgusting sound. Gross, Ellie would have said.
Abruptly Louis turned and went upstairs. He started at a walk, but by the time he got to the upper hallway, he was almost running. He undressed, tossing all of his clothes in the laundry hamper although he had put them on fresh from the underwear out that morning. He drew himself a hot. bath, as hot as he could take it, and plopped in.
The steam rose around him, and he could feel the hot water working on his muscles, loosening them. The bath was also
working on his head, loosening that. By the time the water had begun to cool, he was feeling dozy and pretty much all right again.
The cat came back, just like the cat in the nursery rhyme, all right, so what, big deal.
It had all been a mistake. Hadn’t he thought to himself yesterday evening that Church looked remarkably whole and unmarked for an animal that had been struck by a car?