Pet Sematary - Stephen King [63]
Your family is your family. I dont want to be no buttinsky, but if Ellie were my daughter, I wouldnt rush to tell her that her cat got killed on the highway-why not let her enjoy her holiday?
By the way, Louis, I wouldnt 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 its 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 dont like to talk about it, and they dont 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-doesnt, but nevertheless thats 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 doesnt know what this note says-I told her something different-and I would just as soon keep it that way if its all the same to you. I've told Norma more than one lie in the fifty-eight years weve been married, and Id 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 well do a little boozing.
J.
Louis stood on the top step leading to Jud and Normas porch- now bare, its comfortable rattan furniture stored to wait for another spring-frowning over this note. Dont tell Ellie the cat had been killed-he hadnt. 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 Id 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 schoolboys 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 oclock 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 Gages 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