Pet Sematary

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?”
“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.”
“I didn’t ask him which you bought.”
“Not right out, maybe.”
But Jud did not reply, and although his blush had deepened even more-his complexion was approaching a plum color now-his eyes still didn’t waver.
At last, Louis sighed. He felt unutterably tired. “Oh, fuck it. I don’t care.
Maybe you’re even right. Maybe it was on my mind. If it was, it was on the downside of it. I didn’t think much about what I was ordering. I was thinking about Gage.”
“I know you were thinking about Gage. But you knew the difference. Your uncle was an undertaker.”