Pet Sematary - Stephen King [117]
Finally Louis said: Sounds like maybe you did a little snooping, Jud. I am sorry because of it.
I didnt ask him which you bought.
Not right out, maybe.
But Jud did not reply, and although his blush had deepened even more-his complexion was approaching a plum color now
-his eyes still didnt waver.
At last, Louis sighed. He felt unutterably tired. Oh, fuck it. I dont care. Maybe youre even right. Maybe it was on my mind. If it was, it was on the downside of it. I didnt think much about what I was ordering. I was thinking about Gage.
I know you were thinking about Gage. But you knew the difference. Your uncle was an undertaker.
Yes, he had known the difference. A sealing vault was a piece of construction work, something which was meant to last a long, long time. Concrete was poured into a rectangular mould reinforced with steel rods, and then, after the graveside services were over, a crane lowered a slightly curved concrete top into place. The lid was sealed with a substance like the hot-patch highway departments used to fill potholes. Uncle Carl had told Louis that sealant-trade-named Ever-Lock-got itself a fearsome grip after all that weight had been on it for a while.
Uncle Carl, who liked to yarn as much as anyone (at least when he was with his own kind, and Louis, who had worked with him summers for a while, qualified as a sort of apprentice undertaker), told his nephew of an exhumation order hed gotten once from the Cook County D.A.s office. Uncle Carl went out to Groveland to oversee the exhumation. They could be tricky things, he said-people whose only ideas concerning disinterral came from those horror movies starring Boris Karloff as Dr. Frankensteins monster and Dwight Frye as Igor had an entirely wrong impression. Opening a sealing vault was no job for two men with picks and shovels-not unless they had about six weeks to spend on the job. This one went all right at first. The grave was opened, and the crane grappled onto the top of the vault. Only the top didnt just pull off, as it was supposed to do. The whole vault, its concrete sides already a little wet and discolored, started to rise out of the ground instead. Uncle Carl screamed for the crane operator to back off. Uncle Carl wanted to go back to the mortuary and get some stuff that would weaken the sealants grip a bit.
The crane operator either didnt hear or wanted to go for the whole thing, like a little kid playing with a toy crane and junk prizes in a penny arcade. Uncle Carl said that the damned fool almost got it too. The vault was three quarters of the way out- Uncle Carl and his assistant could hear water pattering from the underside of the vault onto the floor of the grave (it had been a wet week in Chicagoland) when the crane just tipped over and went kerplunk into the grave. The crane operator crashed into the windshield and broke his nose. That days festivities cost Cook County roughly $3,000-$2,100 over the usual price of such gay goings-on. The real point of the story for Uncle Carl was that the crane operator had been elected president of the Chicago local of the Teamsters six years later.
Grave liners were simpler matters. Such a liner was no more than a humble concrete box, open at the top. It was set into the
grave on the morning of a funeral. Following the services, the coffin was lowered into it. The sextons then brought on the top, which was usually in two segments. These segments were lowered vertically into the ends of the grave, where they stood up like bookends. Iron rings were embedded into the concrete at the ends of each segment. The sextons would run lengths of chain through them and lower them gently onto the top of the grave liner. Each section would weigh sixty, perhaps seventy pounds- eighty, tops. And no sealer was used.
It was easy enough for a man to open a grave liner; thats what Jud was implying.
Easy enough for a man to disinter the body of his son and bmy it someplace else.
Shhhhh shhhh. We will not speak of such things. These are secret things.
Yes, I