Pet Sematary(50)

It was Steve Masterton, checking back about racket ball, and Louis agreed to meet him at the Memorial Gym in an hour. He could not really afford the time, and racket ball was the last thing in the world he felt like right now, but he had to get out. He wanted to get away from the cat, that weird cat which had no business being here at all.

He hurried, tucking in his shirt quickly, stuffing a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, and a towel into his zipper bag, and trotting down the stairs.

Church was lying on the fourth riser from the bottom. Louis tripped over the cat and almost fell. He managed to grab the bannister and barely save himself from what could have been a nasty fall.

He stood at the bottom of the stairs, breathing in snatches, his heart racing, the adrenaline whipping unpleasantly through his body.

Church stood up, stretched... and seemed to grin at him.

Louis left. He should have put the cat out, he knew that, but he didn't. At that particular moment he didn't think he could bring himself to touch it.

26

Jud lit a cigarette with a wooden kitchen match, shook it out, and tossed the stub into a tin ashtray with a barely readable Jim Beam advertisement painted on its bottom.

"Ayuh, it was Stanley Bouchard who told me about the place." He paused, thinking.

Barely touched glasses of beer stood before them on the checked oilcloth that covered the kitchen table. Behind them, the barrel of range oil clamped to the wall gurgled three times, deliberately, and was still. Louis had caught a pick-up supper with Steve-submarine sandwiches in the mostly deserted Bear's Den. He had found out early that if you asked for a hoagie or a grinder or a gyro in Maine, they didn't know what you were talking about. Ask for a sub or a Wop-burger, and you were in business. With some food in him, Louis began to feel better about Church's return, felt that he had things more in perspective, but he was still not anxious to return to his dark, empty house where the cat could be-let's face it, gang-anywhere at all.

Norma sat with them for quite a while, watching TV and working on a sampler that showed the sun going down behind a small county meeting house. The cross on the roof tree was silhouetted black against the setting sun. Something to sell, she said, at the church sale the week before Christmas. Always a big event. Her fingers moved well, pushing the needle through the cloth, pulling it up through the steel circle. Her arthritis was barely noticeable tonight. Louis supposed it might be the weather, which had been cold but very dry. She had recovered nicely from her heart attack, and on that evening less than ten weeks before a cerebral accident would kill her, he thought that she looked less haggard and actually younger. On that evening he could see the girl she had been.

At a quarter to ten she said goodnight, and now he sat here with Jud, who had ceased speaking and seemed only to be following his cigarette smoke up and up, like a kid watching a barber pole to see where the stripes go.

"Stanny B.," Louis prompted gently.

Jud blinked and seemed to come back to himself. "Oh, ayuh,"

he said. "Everyone in Ludlow-round Bucksport and Prospect and Orrington too, I guess-just called him Stanny B. That year my dog Spot died-1910 I mean, the first time he died-Stanny was already an old man and more than a little crazy.

There was others around these parts that knew the Micmac burying ground was there, but it was Stanny B. I heard it from, and he knew about it from his father and his father before him. A whole family of proper Canucks, they were."

Jud laughed and sipped his beer.

"I can still hear him talking in that broken English of his. He found me sitting behind the livery stable that used to stand on Route 15-except it was just the Bangor-Bucksport Road back then-right about where the Orinco plant is now. Spot wasn't dead but he was going, and my dad sent me away to check on some chickenfeed, which old Yorky sold back then. We didn't need chickenfeed any more than a cow needs a blackboard, and I knew well enough why he sent me down there."

"He was going to kill the dog?"

"He knew how tenderly I felt about Spot, so he sent me away while he did it. I saw about the chickenfeed, and while old Yorky set it out for me I went around back and sat down on the old grindstone that used to be there and just bawled."

Jud shook his head slowly and gently, still smiling a little.

"And along comes old Stanny B.," he said. "Half the people in town thought he was soft, and the other half thought he might be dangerous. His grandfather was a big fur trapper and trader in the early 1800s. Stanny's grandda would go all the way from the Maritimes to Bangor and Derry, sometimes as far south as Skowhegan to buy pelts, or so I've heard. He drove a big wagon covered with rawhide strips like something out of a medicine show. He had crosses all over it, for he was a proper Christian and would preach on the Resurrection when he was drunk enough-this is what Stanny said, he loved to talk about his grandda-but he had pagan Indian signs all over it as well because he believed that all Indians, no matter what the tribe, belonged to one big tribe-that lost one of Israel the Bible talks about. He said he believed all Indians were hellbound, but that their magic worked because they were Christians all the same, in some queer, damned way.

"Stanny's grandda bought from the Micmacs and did a good business with them long after most of the other trappers and traders had given up or gone west because he traded with them at a fair price and because, Stanny said, he knew the whole Bible by heart, and the Micmacs liked to hear him speak the words the blackrobes had spoken to them in the years before the buckskin men and woodsmen came."