there!” Jud called over, alarmed. “You stick your foot in the wrong hole and those old trees shift, you’ll break your ankle.”
Ellie jumped down. “Ow!” she cried and came toward them, rubbing her hip. The skin wasn’t broken, but a stiff dead branch had torn her slacks.
“You see what I mean,” Jud said, ruffling her hair. “Old blowdown like this, even someone wise about the woods won’t try to climb over it if he can go around. Trees that all fall down in a pile get mean. They’ll bite you if they can.”
“Really?” Ellie asked. “Really. They’re piled up like straws, you see. And if you was to step on the right one, they might all come down in an avalanche.”
Ellie looked at Louis. “Is that true, Daddy?”-“I think so, hon.”
“Yuck!” She looked back at the blowdown and yelled: “You tore my pants, you cruddy trees!”
All three of the grown-ups laughed. The blowdown did not. It merely sat whitening in the sun as it had done for decades. To Louis it looked like the skeletal remains of some long-dead monster, something slain by a parfait good and gentil knight, perchance. A dragon’s bones, left here in a giant cairn.
It occurred to him even then that there was something too Convenient about that blowdown and the way it stood between the pet cemetery and the depths of woods beyond, woods which Jud Crandall later sometimes referred to absently as “the Indian woods.” Its very randomness seemed too artful, too perfect for a work of nature. It-Then Gage grabbed one of his ears and twisted it, crowing happily, and Louis forgot all about the blowdown in the. woods beyond the pet cemetery. It was time to go home.
9
Ellie came to him the next day, looking troubled. Louis was working on a model in his study. This one was a 1917 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost-680 pieces, over 50 moving parts. It was nearly done, and be could almost imagine the liveried chauffeur, direct descendant of eighteenthand nineteenth-century English coachmen, sitting imperially behind the wheel.
He had been model-crazy since his tenth year. He had begun with a World War I Sped that his Uncle Carl had bought him, had worked his way through most of the Revell airplanes, and had moved on to bigger and better things in his teens and twenties. There had been a boats-in-bottles phase and a war-machines phase and even a phase in which he had built guns so realistic it was hard to believe they wouldn’t fire when you pulled the trigger-Colts and Winchesters and Lugers, even a Buntline Special. Over the last five years or so, it had been the big cruise ships. A model of the Lusitania and one of the Titanic sat on his shelves at his university office, and the Andrea Doria, completed just before they left Chicago, was currently cruising the mantel-piece in their living room. Now he had moved on to classic cars, and if previous patterns held true, he supposed it would be four or five years before the urge to do something new struck him.
Rachel looked on this, his only real hobby, with a wifely indulgence that held, he supposed, some elements of contempt; even after ten years of marriage she probably thought he would grow out of it. Perhaps some of this attitude came from her father, who believed just as much now as at the time Louis and Rachel had married that he had gotten an asshole for a son-in-law.
Maybe, he thought, Rachel is right. Maybe I’ll just wake up one morning at the age of thirty-seven, put all these models up in the attic, and take up hang gliding.
Meanwhile Ellie looked serious.
Far away, drifting in the clear air, he could hear that perfect Sunday morning sound of churchbells calling worshippers.
“Hi, Dad,” she said.
“Hello, pumpkin. Wass happenin?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said, but her face said differently; her face said that plenty was up, and-none of it was so hot, thank you very much. Her hair was fleshly washed and fell loose to her shoulders. In this light it was still more blond than the brown it was inevitably becoming. She was wearing a dress, and it occurred to Louis that his daughter almost always put on a dress on Sundays, although they did not attend church. “What are you building?”
Carefully gluing on a mudguard, he told her. “Look at this,” he said, carefully banding her a hubcap. “See those linked R’s? That’s a nice detail, huh? If we fly back to Shytown for Thanksgiving and we get on an L-10l 1, you look Out at the jet engines and you’ll see those same R’s.”
“Hubcap, big deal.”She handed it back.
“Please,” he said. “If you own a Rolls-Royce, you call that a wheel covering. If you’re rich enough to own a Rolls, you can strut a little. When I make my second million, I’m going to buy myself one. Rolls-Royce Comiche. Then when Gage gets carsick, he can throw up into real leather.” And just by the way, Ellie, what’s on your mind? But it didn’t work that way with Ellie. You didn’t ask things right out. She was wary of giving too much of herself away. It was a trait Louis admired.
“Are we rich, Daddy?”
“No,” he said, “but we’re not going away to starve either.”
“Michael Burns at school says all doctors are rich.”
“Well, you tell Michael Burns at school that lots of doctors get rich, but it takes twenty years… and you don’t get rich running a university infirmary. You get rich being a specialist. A gynecologist or an orthopedist or a neurologist.
They get rich quicker. For utility infielders like me, it takes longer.”
“Then why don’t you be a specialist, Daddy?”
Louis thought of his models again and of-the way he had one day just not wanted to build any more warplanes, the way he had likewise gotten tired of Tiger tanks and gun emplacements, the way he had come to believe (almost overnight, it seemed in retrospect) that building boats in bottles was pretty dumb; and then he thought of what it would be like to spend your whole life inspecting children’s feet for hammertoe or putting on the thin Latex gloves so you could grope along some woman’s vaginal canal with one educated finger, feeling for bumps or lesions.
“I just wouldn’t like it,” he said.
Church came into the office, paused, inspected the situation with his bright green eyes. He leaped silently onto the windowsill and appeared to go to sleep.
Ellie glanced at him and frowned, which struck Louis as exceedingly odd. Usually Ellie looked at Church with an expression of love so sappy it was almost painful. She began to walk around the office, looking at various models, and in a voice that was nearly casual, she said, “Boy, there were a lot of graves up in the Pet Sematary, weren’t there?”
Ah, here’s the nub, Louis thought but did not look around; after examining his instructions, he began putting the carriage lamps on the Rolls.
“There were,” he said. “Better than a hundred, I’d say.”
“Daddy, why don’t pets live as long as people?”
“Well, some animals do live about as long,” he said, “and some live much longer.
Elephants live a very long time, and there are some sea turtles so old that people really don’t know how old they are… or maybe they do, and they just can’t believe it.”
Ellie dismissed these simply enough. “Elephants and sea turtles aren’t pets.
Pets don’t live very long at all. Michael Burns says that every year a dog lives, it’s like nine of our years.”
“Seven,” Louis corrected automatically. “I see what you’re getting at, honey, and there’ amp; some truth to it. A dog who lives to be twelve is an old dog. See, there’s this thing called metabolism, and what metabolism seems to do is tell time. Oh, it does other stuff too-some people can eat a lot and stay thin because of their metabolism, like your mother. Other people-me, for instance-just can’t eat as much without getting fat. Our metabolisms are different, that’s all. But what metabolism seems to do most of all is to serve living things as a body clock. Dogs have a fairly rapid metabolism. The metabolism of human beings is much slower. We live to be about seventy-two, most of us. And believe me, seventy-two years is a very long time.”
Because Ellie looked really worried, he hoped he sounded more sincere than he actually felt. He was thirty-five, and it seemed to him that those years had passed as quickly and ephemerally as a momentary draft under a door. “Sea turtles, now, have an even slower metabo-”
“What about cats?” Ellie asked and looked at Church again.
“Well, cats live as long as dogs,” he said, “mostly, anyway.” This was a lie, and he knew it. Cats lived violent lives and often died bloody deaths, always just below the usual range of human sight. Here was Church, dozing in the sun (or appearing to), Church who slept peacefully on his daughter’s bed every night, Church who had been so cute as a kitten, all tangled up in a ball of string. And yet Louis had seen him stalk a bird with a broken wing, his green eyes sparkling with curiosity and-yes, Louis would have sworn it-cold delight.
He rarely killed what he stalked, but there had been one notable exception-a large rat, probably caught in the alley between their apartment house and the next. Church had really put the blocks to that baby. It had been so bloody and gore-flecked that Rachel, then in her sixth month with Gage, had had to run into the bathroom and vomit. Violent lives, violent deaths. A dog got them and ripped them open instead of just chasing them like the bumbling, easily fooled dogs in the TV cartoons, or another torn got them, or a poisoned bait, or a passing car.
Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.
But those were maybe not things to tell your five-year-old daughter, who was for the first time examining the facts of death.
“I mean,” he said, “Church is only three now, and you’re five. He might still be alive when you’re fifteen, a sophomore in high school. And that’s a long time away.”
“It doesn’t seem long to me,” Ellie said, and now her voice trembled. “Not long at all.”-Louis gave up the pretense of working on his model and gestured for her to come.
She sat on his lap, and he was again struck by her beauty, which was emphasized now by her emotional upset. She was dark-skinned, almost Levantine. Tony Benton, one of the doctors he had worked with in Chicago, used to call her the Indian Princess.
“Honey,” he said, “if it was up to me, I’d let Church live to be a hundred. But I don’t make the rules.”
“Who does?” she asked, and then, with infinite scorn: “God, I suppose.”
Louis stifled the urge to laugh. It was too serious. “God or Somebody,” he said.
“Clocks run down-that’s all I know. There are no guarantees, babe.”
“I don’t want Church to be like all those dead pets!” she burst out, suddenly tearful and furious. “I don’t want Church to ever be dead! He’s my cat! He’s not God’s cat! Let God have His own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!”
There were footsteps across the kitchen, and Rachel looked in, startled. Ellie was now weeping against Louis’s chest. The horror had been articulated; it was out; its face had been drawn and could be regarded. Now, even if it could not be changed, it could at least be wept over.
“Ellie,” he said, rocking her, “Ellie, Ellie, Church isn’t dead; he’s right over there, sleeping.”
“But he could be,” she wept. “He could be, any time.” He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl’s tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability; and that she wept because of the human being’s wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were either fine and noble or blackly terrifying. If all those animals had died and been buried, then Church could die (any time!) and beburied; and if that could happen to Church, it could happen to her mother, her father, her baby brother. To herself. Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real.
In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child’s hands could feel.
It would be easy to lie at this point, the way he had lied earlier about the life expectancy of tomcats. But a lie would be remembered later and perhaps finally totted up on the report card all children hand in to themselves on their parents. His own mother had told him such a lie, an innocuous one about women finding babies in the dewy grass when they really wanted them, and as innocuous as the lie had been, Louis had never forgiven his mother for telling it-or himself for believing it.
“Honey,” he said, “it happens. It’s a part of life.”
