corner of the smile and popped a match with his thumbnail. “You remember the path there that your little girl commented on?”
For a moment Louis didn’t; Ellie had commented on a whole catalogue of things before finally collapsing for the night. Then he did remember. That wide mown patch winding up through the copse of trees and over the hill.
“Yes, I do. You promised to tell her about it sometime.”
“I did, and I will,” Crandall said. “That path goes up into the woods about a mile and a half. The local kids around Route 15 and Middle Drive keep it nice because they use it. Kids come and go… there’s a lot more moving around than there used to be when I was a boy; then you picked a place out and stuck to it. But they seem to tell each other, and every spring a bunch of them mows that path. They keep it nice all the summer long. Not all of the adults in town know it’s there-a lot of them do, of course, but not all, not by a long chalk-but all of the kids do. I’d bet on it.”
“Know what’s there?”
“The pet cemetery,” Crandall said.
“Pet cemetery,” Louis repeated, bemused.
“It’s not as odd as it prob’ly sounds,” Crandall said, smoking and rocking.
“It’s the road. It uses up a lot of animals, that road does. Dogs and cats, mostly, but that ain’t all. One of those big Orinco trucks run down the pet raccoon the Ryder -children used to keep. That was back-Christ, must have been in ‘73, maybe earlier. Before the state made keeping a coon or even a denatured skunk illegal, anyway.”
“Why did they do that?”
“Rabies,” Crandall said. “Lot of rabies in Maine now. There was a big old St.
Bernard went rabid downstate a couple of years ago and killed four people. That was a hell of a thing. Dog hadn’t had his shots. If those foolish people had seen that dog had had its shots, it never would have happened. But a coon or a skunk, you can vaccinate it twice a year and still it don’t always take. But that coon the Ryder boys had, that was what the oldtimers used to call a ‘sweet coon. ’ It’d waddle right up to you-gorry, wa’n’t he fat!-and lick your face like a dog. Their dad even paid a vet to spay him and declaw him. That must have cost him a country fortune!
“Ryder, he worked for IBM in Bangor. They went out to Colorado five years ago.
… or maybe it was six. Funny to think of those two almost old enough to drive.
Were they broken up over that coon? I guess they were. Matty Ryder cried so long his mom got scared and wanted to take him to the doctor. I spose he’s over it now, but they never forget. When a good animal gets run down in the road, a kid never forgets.”
Louis’s mind turned to Ellie as he had last seen her tonight, fast asleep with Church purring rustily on the foot of the mattress.
“My daughter’s got a cat,” he said. “Winston Churchill. We call him Church for short.”
“Do they climb when he walks?”
“I beg your pardon?” Louis had no idea what he was talking about.
“He still got his balls or has he been fixed?”
“No,” Louis said. “No, he hasn’t been fixed.”
In fact there had been some trouble over that back in Chicago. Rachel had wanted to get Church spayed, had even made the appointment with the vet. Louis canceled it. Even now he wasn’t really sure why. it wasn’t anything as simple or as stupid as equating his masculinity with that of his daughter’s tom, nor even his resentment at the idea that Church would have to be castrated so the fat housewife next door wouldn’t need to be troubled with twisting down the lids of her plastic garbage cans-those things had been part of it, but most of it had been a vague but strong feeling that it Would destroy something in Church that he himself valued-that it would put out the go-to-hell look in the cat’s green eyes. Finally he had pointed out to Rachel that they were moving to the country, and it shouldn’t be a problem. Now here was Judson Crandall, pointing out that part of country living in Ludlow consisted of dealing with Route 15, and asked him if the cat was fixed. Try a little irony, Dr. Creed-it’s good for your blood.
“I’d get him fixed,” Crandall said, crushing his smoke between his thumb and forefinger. “A fixed cat don’t tend to wander as much. But if it’s all the time crossing back and forth, its luck will run out, and it’ll end up there with the Ryder kids’ coon and little Timmy Dessler’s cocker spaniel and Missus Bradleigh’s parakeet. Not that the parakeet got run over in the road, you understand. It just went feet up one day.”
“I’ll take it under advisement,” Louis said.
“You do that,” Crandall said and stood up. “How’s that beer doing? I believe I’ll go in for a slice of old Mr. Rat after all.”
“Beer’s gone,” Louis said, also standing, “and I ought to go, too. Big day tomorrow.”
“Starting in at the university?”
Louis nodded. “The kids don’t come back for two weeks, but by then I ought to know what I’m doing, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, if you don’t know where the pills are, I guess you’ll have trouble.”
Crandall offered his hand and Louis shook it, mindful again of the fact that old bones pained easily. “Come on over any evening,” he said. “Want you to meet my Norma. Think she’d enjoy you.”
“I’ll do that,” Louis said. “Nice to meet you, Jud.”
“Same goes both ways. You’ll settle in. May even stay awhile.”
“I hope we do.”
Louis walked down the crazy-paved path to the shoulder of the road and had to pause while yet another-truck, this one followed by a line of five cars headed in the direction of Bucksport, passed by. Then, raising his hand in a short salute, he crossed the street (road, he reminded himself again) and let himself into his new house.
It was quiet with the sounds of sleep. Ellie appeared not to have moved at all, and Gage was still in his crib, sleeping in typical Gage fashion, spread-eagled on his back, a bottle within easy reach. Louis paused there looking in at his son, his heart abruptly filling with a love for the boy so strong that it seemed almost dangerous. He supposed part of it was simply homesickness for all the familiar Chicago places and Chicago faces that were now gone, erased so efficiently by the miles that they might never have been at all. There’s a lot more moving around than there used to be… used to be you picked a place out and stuck to it. There was some truth in that.
He went to his son, and because there was no one there to see him do it, not even Rachel, he kissed his fingers and then pressed them lightly and briefly to Gage’s cheek through the bars of the crib.
Gage clucked and turned over on his side.
“Sleep well, baby,” Louis said.
He undressed quietly and slipped into his half of the bed that was for now just two single mattresses pushed together on the floor. He felt the strain of the day beginning to pass. Rachel didn’t stir. Unpacked boxes bulked ghostly in the mom.
Just before sleep, Louis hiked himself up on one elbow and looked out the window. Their room was at the front of the house, and he could look across the road at the Crandall place. It was too dark to see shapes-on a moonlit night it would not have been-but be could see the cigarette ember over there. Still up, he thought. He’ll maybe be up for a long rime. The old sleep poorly. Perhaps they stand watch.
Against what?
Louis was thinking about that when he slipped into sleep. He dreamed he was in Disney World, driving a bright white van with a red cross on the side. Gage was beside him, and in the dream Gage was at least ten years old. Church was on the white van’s dashboard, looking at Louis with his bright green eyes, and out on Main Street by the l890s train station, Mickey Mouse was shaking hands with the children clustered around him, his big white cartoon gloves swallowing their small, trusting hands.
7
The next two weeks were busy ones for the family. Little by little Louis’s new job began to shake down for him (how it would be when ten thousand students, many of them drug and liquor abusers, some afflicted with social diseases, some anxious about grades or depressed about leaving home for the first time, a dozen of them-girls, mostly-anorexic… how it would be when all of them converged on the campus at once would be something else again). And while Louis began getting a handle on his job as head of University Medical Services, Rachel began to get a handle on the house.
Gage was busy taking the bumps and spills that went with getting used to his new environment, and for a while his nighttime schedule was badly out of whack, but by the middle of their second week in Ludlow, he had begun to sleep through again. Only Ellie, with the prospect of beginning kindergarten in a new place before her, seemed always overexcited and on a hair-trigger. She was apt to go into prolonged giggling fits or periods of almost menopausal depression or temper tantrums at the drop of a word. Rachel said Ellie would get over it when she saw that school was not the great red devil she had made it out to be in her own mind, and Louis thought Rachel was right. Most of the time, Ellie was what she had always been-a dear.
His evening beer or two with Jud Crandall became something of a habit. Around the time Gage began sleeping through again, Louis began bringing his own six-pack over every second or third night. He met Norma Crandall, a sweetly pleasant woman who had rheumatoid arthritis-filthy old rheurnatoid arthritis, which kills so much of what could be good in the old ages of men and women who are otherwise healthy-but her attitude was good. She would not surrender to the pain; there would be no white flags. Let it take her if it could. Louis thought she might have another five to seven productive if not terribly comfortable years ahead of her.
Going completely against his own established customs, he examined her at his own instigation, inventoried the prescriptions her own doctor had given her, and found them to be completely in order. He felt a nagging disappointment that there was nothing else he could do or suggest for her, but her Dr. Weybridge had things as under control as they were ever going to be for Norma Crandall-barring some sudden breakthrough, which was possible but not to be counted upon. You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.
Rachel liked her, and they had sealed their friendship by exchanging recipes the way small boys trade baseball cards, beginning with Norma Crandall’s deep-dish apple pie for Rachel’s beef stroganoff. Norma was taken with both of the Creed children-particularly with Ellie, who, she said, was going to be “an old-time beauty.” At least, Louis told Rachel that night in bed, Norma hadn’t said Ellie was going to grow into a real sweet coon. Rachel laughed so hard she broke explosive wind, and then both of them laughed so long and loudly that they woke up Gage in the next room.
The first day of kindergarten arrived. Louis, who felt pretty well in control of the infirmary and the medical-support facilities now, took the day off.
(Besides, the infirmary was currently dead empty; the last patient, a summer student who had broken her leg on the Student Union steps, had been discharged a week before.) He stood on the lawn beside Rachel with Gage in his arms, as the big yellow bus made the turn from Middle Drive and lumbered to a stop in front of their house. The doors at the front folded open; the babble and squawk of many children drifted out on the mild September air.
Ellie cast a strange, vulnerable glance back over her shoulder, as if to ask them if there might not yet be time to abort this inevitable process, and perhaps what she saw on the faces of her parents convinced her that the time was gone, and everything which would follow this first day was simply inevitable-like the progress of Norma Crandall’s arthritis. She turned away from them and mounted the steps of the bus. The doors folded shut with a gasp of dragon’s breath. The bus pulled away. Rachel burst into tears.
“Don’t, for Christ’s sake,” Louis said. He wasn’t crying. Only damn near. “It’s only half a day.”
