Pet Sematary(17)

"Yes!" Norma said, as excited as if it had happened yesterday... and perhaps in her mind, it seemed that way. "It was a Bowie! Alan or Burt-"

"Or maybe it was Kendall," Jud agreed. "Anyways, I remember they had a pretty good argument about who was going to be pallbearers. The dog wasn't very big, and so there wasn't room but for two. The Hall boys said they ought to be the ones to do it since they made the coffin, and also because they were twins-sort of a matched set, y'see. Billy said they didn't know Bowser-that was the dog-well enough to be the pallbearers. 'My dad says only close friends get to be pallbearers,' was his argument, 'not jest any carpenter. ' Jud and Norma both laughed at this, and Louis grinned.

"They was just about ready to fight over it when Mandy Holloway, Billy's sister, fetched out the fourth volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica," Jud said. "Her dad, Stephen Holloway, was the only doctor this side of Bangor and that side of Bucksport in those days, Louis, and they was the only family in Ludlow that could afford a set of encyclopedia."

"They were also the first to have electric lights," Norma broke in.

"Anyway," Jud resumed, "Mandy come out all aflukin, head up and tail over a splashboard, all of eight years old, petticoats flyin, that big book in her arms. Billy and the Bowie kid-I think it must have been Kendall, him that crashed and burned up in Pensacola where they was trainin fighter pilots in early 1942-they was gettin ready to take on the Hall twins over the privilege of toting that poor old poisoned mutt up to the boneyard."

Louis started giggling. Soon he was laughing out loud. He could feel the days-old residue of tension left from the bitter argument with Rachel beginning to loosen.

"So she says, 'Wait! Wait! Looka this!' And they all stop and look. And goddam if she ain't-"

"Jud," Norma said warningly.

"Sorry, dear; I get carried away yarning, you know that."

"I guess you do," she said.

"And darned if she ain't got that book open to FUNERALS, and there's a picture of Queen Victoria getting her final sendoff and bon voyage, and there are about forty-eleven people on each side of her coffin, some sweatin and strainin to lift the bugger, some just standin around in their funeral coats and ruffled collars like they was waitin for someone to call post time at the racetrack. And Mandy says, 'When it's a ceremonial funeral of state, you can have as many as you want! The book says so!' "That solved it?" Louis asked.

"That did the trick. They ended up with about twenty kids, and damn if they didn't look just like the picture Mandy had found, except maybe for the ruffles and tall hats. Mandy took charge, she did. Got em lined up and gave each of em a wildflower-a dandelion or a lady's slipper or a daisy-and off they went., By the gee, I always thought the country missed a bet when Mandy Holloway never got voted to the U. S. Congress." He laughed and shook his head. "Anyway, that was the end of Billy's bad dreams about the Pet Sematary. He mourned his dog and finished his mourning and got on. Which is what we all do, I guess."

Louis thought again of Rachel's near-hysteria.

"Your Ellie will get over it," Norma said and shifted position. "You must be thinking that death is all we talk about around here, Louis. Jud and I are getting on, but I hope neither of us has gotten to the gore-crow stage yet-"

"No, of course not, don't be silly," Louis said.

"-But it's not such a bad idea to be on nodding acquaintance with it. These days... I don't know... no one wants to talk about it or think about it, it seems. They took it off the TV because they thought it might hurt the children some way hurt their minds... and people want closed coffins so they don't have to look at the remains or say goodbye... it just seems like people want to forget it."

"And at the same time they brought in the cable TV with all those movies showing people"-Jud looked at Norma and cleared his throat-"showing people doing what people usually do with their shades pulled down," he finished. "Queer how things change from one generation to the next, isn't it?"

"Yes," Louis said. "I suppose it is."

"Well, we come from a different time," Jud said, sounding almost apologetic "We was on closer terms with death. We saw the flu epidemic after the Great War, and mothers dying with child, and children dying of infection and fevers that it seems like doctors just wave a magic wand over these days. In the time when me and Norma was young, if you got cancer, why, that was your death warrant, right there. No radiation treatments back in the 1920s! Two wars, murders, suicides.

.

He fell silent for a moment.

"We knew it as a friend and as an enemy," he said finally. "My brother Pete died of a burst appendix in 1912, back when Taft was President. Pete was just fourteen, and he could hit a baseball farther than any kid in town. In those days you didn't need to take a course in college to study death, hot-spice, or whatever they call it. In those days it came into the house and said howdy and sometimes it took supper with you and sometimes you could feel it bite your ass."

This time Norma didn't correct him; instead she nodded silently.

Louis stood up, stretched. "I have to go," he said. "Big day tomorrow."

"Yes, the merry-go-round starts for you tomorrow, don't it?" Jud said, also standing. Jud saw Norma was also trying to get up and gave her a hand. She rose with a grimace.