Pet Sematary

to see where yon path goes, Ellie?”
“Yes!” Ellie said, getting up immediately. Her eyes sparkled. “George Buck at school told me it was the pet cemetery, and I told Mommy, but she said to wait for you because you knew where it was.”
“I do, too,” Jud said. “If it’s okay with your folks, we’ll take us a stroll up there. You’ll want a pair of boots though. Ground’s a bit squishy in places.”
Ellie rushed into the house.
Jud looked after her with amused affection. “Maybe you’d like to come too, Louis.”
“I would,” Louis said. He looked at Rachel. “You want to come, honey?”
“What about Gage? I thought it was a mile.”
“I’ll put him in the Gerrypack.”
Rachel laughed. “Okay… but it’s your back, mister.”
They started off ten minutes later, all of them but Gage wearing boots. Gage was sitting up in the Gerrypack and looking at everything over Louis’s shoulder, goggle-eyed. Ellie ranged ahead constantly, chasing butterflies and picking flowers.
The grass in the back field was almost waist high, and now there was goldenrod, that late-summer gossip which comes to tattle on autumn every year. But there was no autumn in the air today; today the sun was still all August, although calendar August was almost two weeks gone. By the time they had reached the top of the first hill, walking strung out along the mown path, there were big patches of sweat under Louis’s arms.
Jud paused. At first Louis thought it might be because the old man was winded-then he saw the view that had opened Out behind them.
“Pretty up here,” Jud said, putting a piece of timothy grass between his teeth.
Louis thought he had just heard the quintessential Yankee understatement.
“It’s gorgeous,” Rachel breathed and then turned to Louis, almost accusingly.
“How come you didn’t tell me about this?”
“Because! didn’t know it was here,” Louis said, and was a little ashamed. They were still on their own property; he had just never found time to climb the hill in back of the house until today.
Ellie had been a good way ahead. Now she came back also gazing with frank wonder. Church padded at her heels.
The hill was not a high one, but it did not need to be. To the east, heavy woods blocked any view, but looking this way, west, the land fell away in a golden and dozy late summer dream. Everything was still, hazed, silent. There was not even an Orinco tanker on the highway to break the quiet.
It was the river valley they were looking into, of course; the Penobscot, where loggers had once floated their timber from the northeast down to Bangor and Derry. But they were south of Bangor and a bit north of Deny here. The river flowed wide and peacefully, as if in its own deep dream. Louis could make out Hampden and Winterport on the far side, and over here he fancied he could trace the black, river-paralleling snake of Route 15 nearly all the way Bucksport. They looked over the river, its lush hem of trees, the roads, the fields. The spire of the North Ludlow Baptist Church. poked through one canopy of old elms, and to the right he could see the square brick sturdiness of Ellie’s school.
Overhead, white clouds moved slowly toward a horizon the color of faded denim.
And everywhere were the late-summer fields, used up at the end of the cycle, dormant but not dead, an incredible tawny color.
“Gorgeous is the right word,” Louis said finally.
“They used to call it Prospect Hill back in the old days,” Jud said. He put a cigarette in the corner of his mouth but did not light it. “There’s a few that still do, but now that younger people have moved into town, it’s mostly been forgot. I don’t think there’s very many people that even come up here. It don’t look like you could see much because the hill’s not very high. But you can see-”
He gestured with one hand and fell silent.
“You can see everything,” Rachel said in a low, awed voice. She turned to Louis.
“Honey, do we own this?”
And before Louis could answer, Jud said: “It’s part of the property, oh yes.”
Which wasn’t, Louis thought, quite the same thing.
It was cooler in the woods, perhaps by as much as eight or ten degrees. The path, still wide and occasionally marked with flowers in pots or in coffee cans (most of them wilted), was now floored with dry pine needles. They had gone about a quarter of a mile, moving downhill now, when Jud called Ellie back.
“This is a good walk for a little girl,” Jud said kindly, “but I want you to promise your mom and dad that if you come up here, you’ll always stay on the path.”
“I promise,” Ellie said promptly “Why?”
He glanced at Louis, who had stopped to. rest. Toting Gage, even in the shade of these old pines and spruces, was heavy work. “Do you know where you