Pet Sematary(74)

Chapter 14

He looked up when Louis came in and said, "Well, she's gone, Louis." He said this in such a clear and matter-of-fact way that Louis thought it must not have really cleared through all the circuits yet-hadn't hit him yet where he lived.

Then Jud's mouth began to work and he covered his eyes with one arm. Louis went to him and put an arm around him. Jud gave in and wept. It had cleared the circuits, all right. Jud understood perfectly. His wife had died.

"That's good," Louis said. "That's good, Jud, she would want you to cry a little, I think. Probably be pissed off if you didn't." He had started to cry a little himself. Jud hugged him tightly, and Louis hugged him back.

Jud cried for ten minutes or so, and then the storm passed. Louis listened to the things Jud said then with great care-he listened as a doctor as well as a friend. He listened for any circularity in Jud's conversation; he listened to see if Jud's grasp of when was clear (no need to check him on where; that would prove nothing because for Jud Crandall the where had always been Ludlow, Maine); he listened most of all for any use of Norma's name in the present tense. He found little or no sign that Jud was losing his grip. Louis was aware that it was not uncommon for two old married people to go almost hand-in-hand, a month, a week, even a day apart. The shock, he supposed, or maybe even some deep inner urge to catch up with the one gone (that was a thought he would not have had before Church; he found that many of his thoughts concerning the spiritual and the supernatural had undergone a quiet but nonetheless deep sea-change). His conclusion was that Jud was grieving hard but that he was still compos mentis.

He sensed in Jud none of that transparent frailty that had seemed to surround Norma on New Year's Eve, when the four of them had sat in the Creed living room, drinking eggnog.

Jud brought him a beer from the fridge, his face still red and blotchy from crying.

"A bit early in the day," he said, "but the sun's over the yardarm somewhere in the world and under the circumstances...

"Say no more," Louis told him and opened the beer. He looked at Jud. "Shall we drink to her?"

"I guess we better," Jud said. "You should have seen her when she was sixteen, Louis, coming back from church with her jacket unbuttoned... your eyes would have popped. She could have made the devil swear off drinking. Thank Christ she never asked me to do it."

Louis nodded and raised his beer a little. "To Norma," he said. Jud clinked his bottle against Louis's. He was crying again but he was also smiling. He nodded.

"May she have peace, and let there be no frigging arthritis wherever she is."

"Amen," Louis said, and they drank.

It was the only time Louis saw Jud progress beyond a mild tipsiness, and even so he did not become incapacitated. He reminisced; a constant stream of warm memories and anecdotes, colorful and clear and sometimes arresting, flowed from him. Yet between the stories of the past, Jud dealt with the present in a way Louis could only admire; if it had been Rachel who had simply dropped dead after her grapefruit and morning cereal, he wondered if he could have done half so well.

Jud called the Brookings-Smith Mortuary in Bangor and made as many of the arrangements as he could by telephone; he made an appointment to come in the following day and make the rest. Yes, he would have her embalmed; he wanted her in a dress, which he would provide; yes, he would pick out underwear; no, he did not want the mortuary to supply the special shoes which laced up the back. Would they have someone wash her hair? he asked. She washed it last on Monday night, and so it had been dirty when she died. He listened, and Louis, whose uncle had been in what those in the business called "the quiet trade," knew the undertaker was telling Jud that a final wash and set was part of the service rendered. Jud nodded and thanked the man he was talking to, then listened again. Yes, he said, he would have her cosmeticized, but it was to be a lightly applied layer. "She's dead and people know it," he said, lighting a Chesterfield. "No need to tart her up." The coffin would be closed during the funeral, he told the director with calm authority, but open during the visiting hours the day before. She was to be buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, where they had bought plots in 1951. He had the papers in hand and gave the mortician the plot number so that preparations could begin out there: H-101. He himself had H-102, he told Louis later on.

He hung up, looked at Louis, and said, "Prettiest cemetery in the world is right there in Bangor, as far as I'm concerned. Crack yourself another beer, if you want, Louis. All of this is going to take awhile."

Louis was about to refuse-he was feeling a little tiddly-when a grotesque image arose unbidden behind his eyes: Jud pulling Norma's corpse on a pagan litter through the woods. Toward the Micmac burying ground beyond the Pet Sematary.

It had the effect of a slap on him. Without a word, he got up and got another beer out of the fridge. Jud nodded at him and dialed the telephone again. By three that afternoon, when Louis went home for a sandwich and a bowl of soup, Jud had progressed a long way toward organizing his wife's final rites; he moved from one thing to the next like a man planning a dinner party of some importance. He called the North Ludlow Methodist Church, where the actual funeral would take place, and the Cemetery Administration Office at Mount Hope; these were both calls the undertaker at Brookings-Smith would be making, but Jud called first as a courtesy. It was a step few bereaved ever thought of... or if they thought of it, one they could rarely bring themselves to take. Louis admired Jud all the more for it. Later he called Norma's few surviving relatives and his own, paging through an old and tattered address book with a leather cover to find the numbers. And between calls, he drank beer and remembered the past.