Pet Sematary

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.
“Bad tonight, is it?” Louis asked.
“Not so bad,” she said.
“Put some heat on it when you go to bed.”
“I will,” Norma said. “I always do. And Louis… don’t fret about Ellie. She’ll be too busy gettin to know her new friends this fall to worry much about that old place. Maybe someday all of em’II go up and repaint some of the signs, or pull weeds, or plant flowers. Sometimes they do, when the notion takes them. And she’ll feel better about it. She’ll start to get that nodding acquaintance.”
Not if my wife has anything to say about it.
“Come on over tomorrow night and tell me how it went up at the college, if you get the chance,” Jud said. “I’ll whup you at cribbage.”
“Well, maybe I’ll get you drunk first,” Louis said. “Double-skunk you.”
“Doc,” Jud said with great sincerity, “the day I get double-skunked at cribbage would be the day I’d let a quack like you treat me.”
He left on their laughter and crossed the road to his own house in the late-summer dark.
Rachel was sleeping with the baby, curled up on her side of the bed in a fetal, protective position.