فصل بیست و شش

TWENTY-SIX

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.

‘It was Stanley Bouchard who told me about the old Micmac burying ground,’ he repeated to Louis.

They were in Jud’s kitchen. 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 had 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 some ten weeks before a second heart attack 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 quarter to ten she had 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, 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 the 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 had the whole Bible by heart, and the Micmacs liked to hear him speak the words the blackrobes had spoken to them before.’ He fell silent. Louis waited.

‘The Micmacs told Stanny B.’s grandda about the burying ground which they didn’t use any more because the Wendigo had soured the ground, and about Little God Swamp, and the steps, and all the rest. The Wendigo story, now, that is something you could hear in those days all over the north country. It was a story they had to have, the same way I guess we have to have some of our Christian stories. Norma would damn me for a profaner if she heard me say that, but Louis, it’s true. Sometimes, if the winter was long and hard and the food was short, there were north country Indians who would finally get down to the bad place where it was starve or … or do something else.’ ‘Cannibalism?’ Louis asked.

Jud shrugged. ‘Maybe. Maybe they’d pick out someone who was old and used up, and then there would be stew for a while. And the story they worked out would be that the Wendigo had walked through their village or encampment while they were sleepin’ and touched them. And the Wendigo was supposed to give those it touched a taste for the flesh of their own kind.’ Louis nodded. ‘Getting around the taboo by saying in effect that the devil made them do it.’

‘Sure. I guess. My own guess is that the Micmacs round here had to do it at some point and buried the bones of whoever they ate – one or two or maybe even ten or a dozen – up there in their burying ground.’ ‘And then decided the ground had gone sour,’ Louis muttered.

‘So here’s Stanny B., come out in the back of the livery to get his jug, I guess,’ Jud said, ‘already half-crocked, he was. His grandfather was worth maybe a million dollars when he died – or so people said – and Stanny B. was nothing but the local rag-man. He asked me what was wrong, and I told him. He saw I’d been bawling, and he told me there was a way it could be fixed up, if I was brave and sure I wanted it fixed up.

‘I said I’d give anything to have Spot well again, and I asked him if he knew a vet that could do it. “Don’t know no vet, me,” Stanny said, “but I know how to fix your dog, boy. You go home now and tell your dad to put that dog in a grain-sack, him, but you ain’t gonna bury him, no! You gonna drag him up to the Pet Sematary and you gonna put him in the shade by that big deadfall. Then you gonna come back and say it’s done.” ‘I asked him what good that would do, and Stanny told me to stay awake that night and come out when he threw a stone against my window. “And it be midnight, boy, so if you forget Stanny B. and go to sleep, Stanny B. gonna forget you, and it’s goodbye dog, him, let him go straight to Hell!”’ Jud looked at Louis and lit another cigarette.

‘It went just the way Stanny set it up. When I got back, my dad said he’d put a bullet in Spot’s head to spare him any more suffering. I didn’t even have to say anything about the Pet Sematary; my dad asked me if I didn’t think Spot would want me to bury him up there, and I said I guessed he would. So off I went, dragging my dog in a grain-sack. My dad asked me if I wanted help and I said no, because I remembered what Stanny B. said.

‘I laid awake that night, for ever; seemed like. You know how time is for kids. It would seem to me I must have stayed awake right around until morning and then the clock would only chime ten, or eleven. A couple of times I almost nodded off, but each time I snapped wide awake again. It was almost as if someone had shaken me and said, Wake up, Jud! Wake up! Like something wanted to make sure I stayed awake.’ Louis raised his eyebrows at that and Jud shrugged, as if to say he knew it was crazy, all right.

‘When the clock in the downstairs hall chimed twelve, I got right up and sat there dressed on my bed with the moon shinin’ in the window. Next I know, the clock is chimin’ the half-hour, then one o’clock, and still no Stanny B. He’s forgot all about me, that dumb Frenchman, I think to myself, and I’m gettin’ ready to take my clothes off again, when these two pebbles whap off the window, damn near hard enough to break the glass. One of them did put a crack in a pane, but I never noticed it until the next morning, and my mother didn’t see it until the next winter, and by then she thought the frost done it. Lucky for me.

‘I just about flew across to that window and heaved it up. It grated and rumbled against the frame, the way they only seem to do when you’re a kid and you want to get out after midnight—’ Louis laughed even though he could not remember ever having wanted to get out of the house at some dark hour after midnight when he was a boy of ten. Still, if he had wanted to, he was sure that windows which had never creaked in the daytime would creak then.

‘I figured my folks must have figured burglars were trying to break in, but when my heart quieted down I could hear my dad still sawing wood in the bedroom on the first floor. I looked out and there was Stanny B., standing in our driveway and looking up, swaying like there was a high wind when there wasn’t so much as a puff of breeze. I don’t think he ever would have come, Louis, except that he’d gotten to that stage of drunkenness where you’re as wide awake as an owl with diarrhea and you just don’t give a care about anything. And he sort of yells up at me – only I guess he thought he was whispering, “You comin’ down, boy, or am I comin’ up to get you?” ‘“Shh,” I says, scared to death now that my dad will wake up and give me the whopping of my young life. “What’d you say?” Stanny says, even louder than before. If my parents had been around on the road side of this house, Louis, where we are now, I would have been a goner. But they had the bedroom that belongs to Norma and me now, with the river view.’ ‘I bet you got down those stairs in one hell of a hurry,’ Louis said. ‘Have you got another beer, Jud?’ He was already two past his usual limit, but tonight that seemed okay. Tonight that seemed almost mandatory.

‘I do, and you know where they’re kept,’ Jud said, and lit a fresh smoke. He waited until Louis was seated again. ‘No, I wouldn’t have dared to try the stairs. They went past my parents’ bedroom. I went down the ivy trellis, hand over hand just as quick as I could. I was some scared, I can tell you, but I think I was more scared of my dad just then than I was of going up to the Pet Sematary with Stanny B.’ He crushed out his smoke.

‘We went up there, the two of us, and I guess Stanny B. must have fallen down half a dozen times if he fell down once. He was really far gone; smelled like he’d fallen into a vat of corn. One time he damn near put a stick through his throat. But he had a pick and shovel with him. When we got to the Pet Sematary, I kind of expected he’d sling me the pick and shovel and just pass out while I dug the hole.

‘Instead, he seemed to sober up a little. He told me we was goin’ on, up over the deadfall and deeper into the woods, where there was another burial place. I looked at Stanny, who was so drunk he could barely keep his feet, and I looked at that deadfall, and I said, “You can’t climb that, Stanny B., you’ll break your neck.” ‘And he said, “I ain’t gonna break my neck, me, and neither are you. I can walk and you can lug your dog.” And he was right. He sailed up over that deadfall just as smooth as silk, never even looking down, and I lugged Spot all the way up there, although he must have weighed thirty-five pounds or so and I only went about ninety myself. I want to tell you, though, Louis, I was some sore and sprung the next day. How do you feel today?’ Louis didn’t answer; only nodded. The beer was working on him and he was glad for it.

‘We walked and we walked,’ Jud said. ‘It seemed to me like we was gonna walk for ever. The woods were spookier in those days. More birds calling from the trees, and you didn’t know what any of them was. Animals moving around out there. Deer, most likely, but back then there were moose, too, and bears, and catamounts. I dragged Spot. After a while I started to get the funny idea that old Stanny B. was gone and I was following an Indian and somewhere further along he’d turn around, all grinning and black-eyed, his face streaked up with that stinking paint they made from bear-fat, that he’d have a tommyhawk made out of a wedge of slate and a hake of ashwood all tied together with rawhide, and he’d grab me by the back of the neck and whack off my hair – along with the top of my skull. Stanny wasn’t staggerin’ or fallin’ any more, he just walked straight and easy, with his head up, and that sort of helped to feed the idea. But when we got to the edge of the Little God Swamp and he turned around to talk to me, I seen it was Stanny, all right, and the reason he wasn’t staggerin’ or fallin’ any more was because he was scared. Scairt himself sober, he did.

‘He told me the same things I told you last night, about the loons, and the St Elmo’s fire, and how I wasn’t to take any notice of anything I saw or heard. Most of all, he said, don’t speak to anything if it should speak to you. Then we started across the swamp. And I did see something. I ain’t going to tell you what, only that I’ve been up there maybe five times since that time when I was ten, and I’ve never seen anything like it again. Nor will I, Louis, because my trip to the Micmac burial place last night was my last trip.’ I’m not sitting here believing all of this, am I? Louis asked himself almost conversationally – the three beers helped him to sound conversational, at least to his own mind’s ear. I am not sitting here believing this story of old Frenchmen and Indian burying grounds and something called the Wendigo and pets that come back to life, am I? For Christ’s sake, the cat was stunned, that’s all, a car hit it and stunned it, no big deal. This is a senile old man’s maunderings.

Except that it wasn’t, and Louis knew it wasn’t, and three beers were not going to cure that knowing, and thirty-three beers wouldn’t.

Church had been dead, that was one thing; he was alive now and that was another; there was something fundamentally different, fundamentally wrong about him, and that was a third. Something had happened. Jud had repaid what he saw as a favor … but the medicine available at the Micmac burying ground was perhaps not such good medicine, and Louis now saw something in Jud’s eyes that told him the old man knew it. Louis thought of what he had seen – or thought he had seen – in Jud’s eyes the night before. That capering, gleeful thing. He remembered thinking that Jud’s decision to take Louis and Ellie’s cat on that particular night journey had not entirely been Jud’s own.

If not his, then whose? his mind asked. And because he had no answer, Louis swept the uncomfortable question away.

‘I buried Spot and built the cairn,’ Jud went on flatly, ‘and by the time I was done, Stanny B. was fast asleep. I had to shake the hell out of him to get him going again, but by the time we got down those forty-four stairs—’ ‘Forty-five,’ Louis murmured.

Jud nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s right, ain’t it? Forty-five. By the time we got down those forty-five stairs, he was walking as steady as if he was sober again. We went back through the swamp and the woods and over the deadfall and finally we crossed the road and we was at my house again. It seemed to me like ten hours must have gone past, but it was still full dark.

“What happens now?” I ask Stanny B. “Now you wait and see what may happen,” Stanny says, and off he walks, staggering and lurching again. I imagine he slept out in the back of the livery that night, and as things turned out, my dog Spot outlived Stanny B. by two years. His liver went bad and poisoned him, and two little kids found him out the back of the livery on July Fourth, 1912, stiff as a poker.

‘But me, that night, I just climbed back up the ivy and got into bed and fell asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.’ ‘Next morning I didn’t get up until almost nine o’clock, and then my mother was calling me. My dad worked on the railroad, and he would have been gone since six.’ Jud paused, thinking. ‘My mother wasn’t just calling me, Louis. She was screaming for me.’ Jud went to the fridge, got himself a Miller’s, and opened it on the drawer-handle below the breadbox and toaster. His face looked yellow in the overhead light, the color of nicotine. He drained half his beer, uttered a belch like a gunshot, and then glanced down the hall toward the room where Norma slept. He looked back at Louis.

‘This is hard for me to talk about,’ he said. ‘I have turned it over in my mind, years and years, but I’ve never told anyone about it. Others knew what had happened, but they never talked to me about it. The way it is about sex, I guess. I’m telling you, Louis, because you’ve got a different kind of pet now. Not necessarily a dangerous one, but … different. Do you find that’s true?’ Louis thought of Church jumping awkwardly off the toilet seat, his haunches thudding against the side of the tub; he thought of those muddy eyes that were almost but not quite stupid staring into his own.

At last he nodded.

‘When I got downstairs, my mother was backed into a corner in the pantry between our icebox and one of the counters. There was a bunch of white stuff on the floor – curtains she’d been meaning to hang. Standing in the doorway of the pantry was Spot, my dog. There was dirt all over him, and mud splashed clear up his legs. The fur on his belly was filthy, all knotted and snarled. He was just standing there – not growling or nothing – just standing there, but it was pretty clear that he had backed her into a corner, whether he meant to or not. She was in terror, Louis. I don’t know how you felt about your parents, but I know how I felt about mine: I loved them both dearly. Knowing I’d done something to put my own mother in terror kind of took away any joy I might have felt when I saw Spot standing there. I didn’t even seem to feel surprised that he was there.’ ‘I know the feeling,’ Louis said. ‘When I saw Church this morning, I just … it seemed like something that was—’ He paused a moment. Perfectly natural? Those were the words that came immediately to mind, but they were not the right words. ‘—Like something that was meant.’ ‘Yes,’ Jud said. He lit a fresh cigarette. His hands were shaking the smallest bit. ‘And my mother seen me there, still in my underwear, and she screams at me, “Feed your dog, Jud, your dog needs to be fed, get him out of here before he messes the curtains!” ‘So I found him some scraps and called him, and at first he didn’t come, at first it was like he didn’t know his own name, and I almost thought, Well, this ain’t Spot at all, it’s some stray that looks like Spot, that’s all—’ ‘Yes!’ Louis exclaimed so abruptly that he startled himself.

Jud nodded. ‘But the second or third time I called him, he came. He sort of jerked toward me, and when I led him out on to the porch, damned if he didn’t run right into the side of the door and just about fall over. He ate the scraps, though; just wolfed them down. By then I was over my first fright, and was starting to get an idea of what had happened. I got on my knees and hugged him, I was so glad to see him. For just one second it scared me to be hugging him, and – I think I must have imagined this, but – I thought he growled. For just a second. Then he licked my face, and …’ Jud shuddered and finished his beer.

‘Louis, his tongue was cold. Being licked by Spot was like getting rubbed up the side of your face with a dead carp.’

For a moment neither of them spoke and then Louis said, ‘Go on.’

‘He ate and when he was done, I got an old tub we kept for him out from under the back porch and I gave him a bath. Spot always hated to have a bath, usually it took both me and my dad to do it, and we’d end up with our shirts off and our pants soaked, my dad cussing and Spot looking sort of ashamed, the way dogs do. And more likely than not he’d roll around in the dirt right after and then go over by my mother’s clothesline to shake off and put dirt all over the sheets she had hung and she’d scream at both of us that she was going to shoot that dog for a stranger before she got much older.

‘But that day Spot just sat in the tub and let me wash him. He never moved at all. I didn’t like it. It was like … like washing meat. I got an old piece of towel after I gave him his bath and dried him all off. I could see all the places where the barbed wire had hooked him – there was no fur in any of those places, and the flesh looked dimpled in. It is the way an old wound looks after it’s been healed five years and more, if you’ve ever seen one of those.’ Louis nodded. In his line of work, he had seen such things from time to time. The wound never seemed to fill in completely, and that made him think of graves and his days as an undertaker’s apprentice, and how there was never enough dirt to fill them in again.

‘Then I saw his head. There was another of those dimples there, but the fur had grown back white in a little circle. It was near his ear.’ ‘Where your father shot him,’ Louis said.

Jud nodded and said, ‘Ayuh.’

‘Shooting a man or an animal in the head isn’t as sure-fire as it sounds, Jud. There are would-be suicides in vegetable wards getting fed through tubes or walking around today right as rain who didn’t know that a bullet can strike the skull-plate and travel right around it in a semi-circle, exiting the other side without ever penetrating the brain. I personally saw one case where a fellow shot himself above the right ear and died because the bullet went around his head and tore open his jugular vein on the other side … in his neck. That bullet-path looked like a county road-map.’ Jud smiled and nodded. ‘I remember reading somethin’ like that in one of Norma’s newspapers, the Star or the Enquirer, one of those. But if my pop said Spot was gone, Louis, he was gone.’ ‘All right,’ Louis said.

‘Was your daughter’s cat gone?’

‘I sure thought he was,’ Louis said.

‘You got to do better than that. You’re a doctor.’

‘You make it sound like “You got to do better than that, Louis, you’re God.” I’m not God. It was dark—’

‘Sure, it was dark, and his head swivelled on his neck like it was full of ball bearings, and when you moved him, he pulled out of the frost, Louis – sounded like a piece of stickytape comin’ off a letter. Live things don’t do that. You only stop meltin’ the frost under where you’re layin’ when you’re dead.’ In the other room, the clock struck ten-thirty.

‘What did your father say when he came home and saw the dog?’ Louis asked curiously.

‘I was out in the driveway, shooting marbles in the dirt, more or less waitin’ for him. I felt like I always felt when I’d done something wrong and knew I was probably gonna get a spankin’. He come in through the gateposts about eight o’clock, wearin’ his bib overalls and his pillow-tick cap … you ever seen one of those?’ Louis nodded, then stifled a yawn with the back of his hand.

‘Yeah, gettin’ late,’ Jud said. ‘Got to finish this up.’

‘It’s not that late,’ Louis said. ‘I’m just a few beers ahead of my usual pace. Go on, Jud. Take your time. I want to hear this.’ ‘My dad had an old lard-tin he kept his dinner in,’ Jud said, ‘and he come in through the gate swingin’ it, empty, by the handle, you know. Whistlin’ somethin’. It was gettin’ dark but he seen me there in the gloom and he says, “Hi there, Judkins!” like he would do, and then “Where’s your—” ‘He got that far and then here comes Spot out of the dark, not runnin’ like he usually did, ready to jump all over him he was so glad to see him, but just walkin’, waggin’ his tail, and my dad dropped that lard-bucket and stepped back. I don’t know b’what he would have turned tail and run except his back hit the picket fence and then he just stood there, looking at the dog. And when Spot did jump up, dad just caught his paws and held them, like you might hold a lady’s hands you was gettin’ ready to dance with. He looked at the dog for a long time and then he looked at me, and he said, “He needs a bath, Jud. He stinks of the ground you buried him in.” And then he went in the house.’ ‘What did you do?’ Louis asked.

‘Gave him another bath. He just sat there in the tub and took it again. And when I went in the house my mother had gone to bed, even though it wasn’t even nine o’clock. My dad said, “We got to talk, Judkins.” And I sat down across from him and he talked to me like a man for the first time in my life, with the smell of the honeysuckle coming across the road from what’s your house now and the smell of the wild roses from our own house.’ Jud Crandall sighed. ‘I had always thought it would be good to have him talk to me that way, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t a bit good. All this tonight, Louis – it’s like when you look into a mirror that’s been set up right across from another mirror and you can see yourself going down a whole hall of mirrors. How many times has this story been passed along, I wonder? A story that’s just the same, except for the names? And that’s like the sex-thing too, isn’t it?’ ‘Your dad knew all about it?’

‘Ayuh. “Who took you up there, Jud?” he asked me, and I told him. He just nodded like it was what he would have expected. I guess it prob’ly was, although I found out later that there were six or eight people in Ludlow at that time that could have taken me up there. I guess he knew that Stanny B. was the only one crazy enough to have told me.’ ‘Did you ask him why he didn’t take you, Jud?’

‘I did,’ Jud said. ‘Somewhere during that long talk I did ask him that. And he said it was a bad place, by and large, and that it didn’t often do anything good for people who had lost their animals or for the animals themselves. He asked me if I liked Spot the way he was, and do you know, Louis, I had the hardest time answering that … and it’s important that I tell you my feelings on that, because sooner or later you’re going to ask me why I led you up there with your daughter’s cat if it was a bad thing to do. Isn’t that so?’ Louis nodded. What was Ellie going to think about Church when she got back? That had been much on his mind while he and Steve Masterton had been playing racquetball that afternoon.

‘Maybe I did it because kids need to know that sometimes death is better,’ Jud said with some difficulty. ‘That’s somethin’ your Ellie don’t know, and I got a feelin’ that maybe she don’t know because your wife don’t know. Now, you go ahead and tell me if I’m wrong, and we’ll leave it.’ Louis opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Jud went on, now speaking very slowly, appearing to move from word to word as they had moved from hummock to hummock in Little God Swamp the night before.

‘I’ve seen it happen over the years,’ he said. ‘I guess I told you that Lester Morgan buried his prize bull up there. Black Angus bull named Hanratty. Ain’t that a silly name for a bull? Died of some sort of ulcer inside and Lester dragged him all the way up there on a sledge. How he did it – how he got over the deadfall there I dunno – but it’s said that what you want to do, you can. And at least as far as that burying ground goes, I’d say it’s true.

‘Well, Hanratty came back, but Lester shot him dead two weeks later. That bull turned mean, really mean. But he’s the only animal I ever heard of that did. Most of them just seem … a little stupid … a little slow … a little …’ ‘A little dead?’

‘Yeah,’ Jud said. ‘A little dead. A little strange. Like they had been … somewhere … and came back … but not all the way. Now, your daughter isn’t going to know that, Louis. Not that her cat was hit by a car, and killed, and came back. So you could say you can’t teach a child a lesson unless the child knows there’s a lesson to be learned. Except …’ ‘Except sometimes you can,’ Louis said, more to himself than to Jud.

‘Yes,’ Jud agreed. ‘Sometimes you can. She’s going to know that something is wrong and that Church was better before. Maybe she’ll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life, but the end of pain. You don’t tell her those things; she will figure them out on her own.

‘And if she’s anything like me, she’ll go on loving her pet. It won’t turn vicious, or bite, or anything like that. She’ll go on loving it … but she’ll draw her own conclusions … and she’ll breathe a sigh of relief when it finally dies.’ ‘That’s why you took me up there,’ Louis said. He felt better now. He had an explanation. It was a little diffuse, and it relied more upon the logic of the nerve-endings than the logic of the rational mind, but under the circumstances, he found he could accept that. And it meant he could forget the expression he thought he had seen on Jud’s face briefly last night – that dark, capering glee. ‘Okay, that’s—’ Abruptly, almost shockingly, Jud covered his face with both hands. For one moment Louis thought he had been struck by a sudden pain and he half-rose, concerned, until he saw the convulsive heave of the chest and he realized that the old man was struggling not to cry.

‘That’s why, but it ain’t why,’ he said in a strangled, choked voice. ‘I did it for the same reason Stanny B. did it, and for the same reason Lester Morgan did it. Lester took Linda Lavesque up there after her dog got run over in the road. He took her up there even though he had to put his goddam bull out of its misery for chasing kids through its pasture like it was mad. He did it anyway, he did it anyway, Louis,’ Jud almost moaned, ‘and what the Christ do you make of that!’ ‘Jud, what are you talking about?’ Louis asked, alarmed.

‘Lester did it and Stanny did it for the same reason I did it. You do it because it gets hold of you. You do it because that burial place is a secret place and you want to share the secret and when you find a reason that seems good enough, why …’ Jud took his hands away from his face and looked at Louis with eyes that seemed incredibly ancient, incredibly haggard. ‘Why then you just go ahead and do it. You make up reasons … they seem like good reasons … but mostly you do it because you want to. Or because you have to. My dad, he didn’t take me up there because he’d heard about it but he’d never been. Stanny B. had been up there … and he took me … and seventy years go by … and then … all at once …’ Jud shook his head and coughed dryly into the palm of his hand.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Listen, Louis. Lester’s bull was the only damn animal I ever knew of that turned really mean. I b’lieve that Missus Lavesque’s little chow might have bit the postman once, after, and I heard a few other things … animals that got a little nasty … but Spot was always a good dog. He always smelled like dirt, it didn’t matter how many times you washed him, he always smelled like dirt, but he was a good dog. My mother would never touch him afterwards, but he was a good dog just the same. But Louis, if you was to take your cat out tonight and kill it, I would never say a word.

‘That place … all at once it gets hold of you … and you make up the sweetest-smelling reasons in the world … but I could have been wrong, Louis. That’s all I’m saying. Lester could have been wrong. Stanny B. could have been wrong. Hell, I ain’t God, either. But bringing the dead back to life … that’s about as close to playing God as you can get, ain’t it?’ Louis opened his mouth again, then closed it again. What would have come out would have sounded wrong, wrong and cruel: Jud, I didn’t go through all of that just to kill the damn cat again.

Jud drained his beer and then put it carefully aside with the other empties. ‘I guess that’s it,’ he said. ‘I am talked out.’ ‘Can I ask you one other question?’ Louis asked.

‘I guess so,’ Jud said.

Louis said: ‘Has anyone ever buried a person up there?’

Jud’s arm jerked convulsively; two of the beer-bottles fell off the table, and one of them shattered.

‘Christ on His throne,’ he said to Louis. ‘No! And who ever would? You don’t even want to talk about such things, Louis!’ ‘I was just curious,’ Louis said uneasily.

‘Some things it don’t pay to be curious about,’ Jud Crandall said, and for the first time he looked really old and infirm to Louis Creed; standing somewhere in the neighborhood of his own freshly prepared grave.

And later, at home, something else occurred to him about how Jud had looked at that moment.

He had looked like he was lying.