Pet Sematary(102)

Jud drank, wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand, and looked directly at Louis. There was something clear and positive in his eyes, and Louis at last looked down from it.

"You know why I'm here," Jud said. "You're thinking about things that are not to be thought of, Louis. Worse still, I fear you're considering them."

"I wasn't thinking about anything but going up to bed," Louis said. "I have a burying to go to tomorrow."

"I'm responsible for more pain in your heart than you should have tonight," Jud said softly. "For all I know, I may even have been responsible for the death of your son."

Louis looked up, startled. "What-? Jud, don't talk crazy!"

"You are thinking of trying to put him up there," Jud said. "Don't you deny the thought has crossed your mind, Louis."

Louis did not reply.

"How far does its influence extend?" Jud said. "Can you tell me that? No. I can't answer that question myself, and I've lived my whole life in this patch of the world. I know about the Micmacs, and that place was always considered to be a kind of holy place to them... but not in a good way. Stanny B. told me that.

My father told me too-later on. After Spot died the second time. Now the Micmacs, the state of Maine, and the government of the United States are arguing in court about who owns that land. Who does own it? No one really knows, Louis.

Not anymore. Different people laid claim to it at one time or another, but no claim ever stuck. Anson Ludlow, the great-grandson of this town's founding father, for one. His claim was maybe the best for a white man, since Joseph Ludlow the Elder had the whole shebang as a grant from Good King Georgie back when Maine was just a big province of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But even then he would have been in a hell of a court fight because there was cross-claims to the land by other Ludlows and by a fellow named Peter Dimmart, who claimed he could prove pretty convincingly that he was a Ludlow on the other side of the sheets. And Joseph Ludlow the Elder was money-poor but land-rich toward the end of his life, and every now and then he'd just gift somebody with two or four hundred acres when he got into his cups."

"Were none of those deeds recorded?" Louis asked, fascinated in spite of himself.

"Oh, they were regular bears for recording deeds, were our grandfathers," Jud said, lighting a new cigarette from the butt of the old one. "The original grant on your land goes like this." Jud closed his eyes and quoted, "From the great old maple which stands atop Quinceberry Ridge to the verge of Orrington Stream; thus runneth the tract from north until south." Jud grinned without much humor.

"But the great old maple fell down in 1882, let's say, and was rotted to moss by the year 1900, and Orrington Stream silted up and turned to marsh in the ten years between the end of the Great War and the crash of the stock market. A nice mess it made! It ended up not mattering to old Anson, any-ways. He was struck and killed by lightning in 1921, right up around where that burying ground is."

Louis stared at Jud. Jud sipped his beer.

"It don't matter. There's lots of places where the history of ownership is so tangled it never gets unraveled, only the lawyers end up makin money. Hell, Dickens knew that. I suppose the Indians will get it back in the end, and I think that's the way it should be. But that don't really matter, Louis. I came over here tonight to tell you about Timmy Baterman and his dad."

"Who's Timmy Baterman?"
Chapter 3

"Timmy Baterman was one of the twenty or so boys from Ludlow that went overseas to fight Hitler. He left in 1942. He come back in a box with a flag on the top of it in 1943. He died in Italy. His daddy, Bill Batennan, lived his whole life in this town. He about went crazy when he got the telegram... and then he quieted right down. He knew about the Micmac burying ground. you see. And he'd decided what he wanted to do."

The chill was back. Louis stared at Jud for a long time, trying to read the lie in the old man's eyes. It was not there. But the fact of this story surfacing just now was damned convenient.

"Why didn't you tell me this that other night?" he said finally. "After we...

after we did the cat? When I asked you if anyone had ever buried a person up there, you said no one ever had."

"Because you didn't need to know," Jud said. "Now you do."

Louis was silent for a long time. "Was he the only one?"

"The only one I know of personally," Jud said gravely. "The only one to ever try it? I doubt that, Louis. I doubt it very much. I'm kind of like the preacher in Clesiastes-I don't believe that there's anything new under the sun. Oh, sometimes the glitter they sprinkle over the top of a thing changes, but that's all. What's been tried once has been tried once before... and before... and before."

He looked down at his liver-spotted hands. In the living room, the clock softly chimed twelve-thirty.

"I decided that a man in your profession is used to looking at symptoms and seeing the diseases underneath... and I decided I had to talk straight to you when Mortonson down at the funeral home told me you'd ordered a grave liner instead of a sealing vault."

Louis looked at Jud for a long time, saying nothing. Jud flushed deeply but didn't look away.

Finally Louis said: "Sounds like maybe you did a little snooping, Jud. I am sorry because of it."