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EIGHT

That Saturday, after Ellie had completed her first week of school and just before the college kids came back to campus, Jud Crandall came across the road and walked over to where the Creed family sat on their lawn. Ellie had gotten off her bike and was drinking a glass of iced tea. Gage was crawling in the grass, examining bugs, perhaps even eating a few; Gage was not particular where his protein came from.

‘Jud,’ Louis said, getting up. ‘Let me get you a chair.’

‘No need.’ Jud was wearing jeans, an open-throated work-shirt, and a pair of green boots. He looked at Ellie. ‘You still want 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 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 golden-rod, that late-summer gossip that 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 quintes-sential Yankee understatement.

‘It’s gorgeous,’ Rachel breathed, and then turned to Louis, almost accusingly. ‘How come you didn’t tell me about this?’ ‘Because I 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 at the 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 north-east down to Bangor and Derry. But they were south of Bangor and a bit north of Derry 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 to 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 hung suspended, moving 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 are?’ Jud asked Louis.

Louis considered and rejected answers: Ludlow, North Ludlow, behind my house, between Route 15 and Middle Drive. He shook his head.

Jud jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. ‘Plenty of stuff that way,’ he said. ‘That’s town. This way, nothing but woods for fifty miles or more. The North Ludlow Woods they call it here, but it hits a little corner of Orrington, then goes over to Rockford. Ends up going on to those state lands I told you about, the ones the Indians want back. I know it sounds funny to say your nice little house there on the main road, with its phone and electric lights and cable TV and all, is on the edge of a wilderness, but it is.’ He looked back at Ellie. ‘All I’m saying is that you don’t want to get messing around in these woods, Ellie. You might lose the path and God knows where you might end up then.’ ‘I won’t, Mr Crandall.’ Ellie was suitably impressed, even awed, but not afraid, Louis saw. Rachel, however, was looking at Jud uneasily, and Louis felt a little uneasy himself. It was, he supposed, the city-bred’s almost instinctive fear of the woods. Louis hadn’t held a compass in his hands since Boy Scouts, twenty years before, and his memories of how to find your way by things like the North Star or which side of the trees moss grew on were as vague as his memories of how to tie a sheepshank or a half-hitch.

Jud looked them over and smiled a little. ‘Now, we ain’t lost nobody in these woods since 1934,’ he said. ‘At least, nobody local. The last one was Will Jeppson. No great loss; except for Stanny Bouchard, I guess Will was the biggest tosspot this side of Bucksport.’ ‘You said nobody local,’ Rachel remarked in a voice that was not quite casual, and Louis could read her mind: We’re not local. At least, not yet.

Jud paused and then nodded. ‘We do lose one of the tourists every two or three years, because they think you can’t get lost right off the main road. But we never lost even one of them for good, Missus. Don’t you fret.’ ‘Are there moose?’ Rachel asked apprehensively, and Louis smiled. If Rachel wanted to fret, she would jolly well fret.

‘Well, you might see a moose,’ Jud said, ‘but he wouldn’t give you any trouble, Rachel. During mating season they get a little irritated, but otherwise they do no more than look. Only people they take after out of their rutting time are people from Massachusetts. I don’t know why that’s so, but it is.’ Louis thought the man was joking, but could not be sure; Jud looked utterly serious. ‘I’ve seen it time and time again. Some fella from Saugus or Milton or Weston up a tree, yelling about a herd of moose, every damn one of ‘em as big as a motor-home. Seems like moose can smell Massachusetts on a man or a woman. Or maybe it’s just all those new clothes from L. L. Bean’s they smell, I dunno. I’d like to see one of those animal husbandry students from the college do a paper on it, but I s’pose none ever will.’ ‘What’s rutting time?’ Ellie asked.

‘Never mind,’ Rachel said. ‘I don’t want you up here unless you’re with a grown-up, Ellie.’ Rachel moved a step closer to Louis.

Jud looked pained. ‘I didn’t want to scare you, Rachel. You or your daughter. No need to be scared in these woods. This is a good path; it gets a little buggy in the spring and it’s a little sloppy all the time – except for ‘55, which was the driest summer I can remember – but hell, there isn’t even any poison ivy or poison oak, which there is at the back of the schoolyard, and you want to stay away from it, Ellie, if you don’t want to spend three weeks of your life takin’ starch baths.’ Ellie covered her mouth and giggled.

‘It’s a safe path,’ Jud said earnestly to Rachel, who still didn’t look convinced. ‘Why, I bet even Gage could follow it, and the town kids come up here a lot, I already told you that. They keep it nice. Nobody tells them to; they just do it. I wouldn’t want to spoil that for Ellie.’ He bent over her and winked. ‘It’s like many other things in life, Ellie. You keep on the path and all’s well. You get off it and the next thing you know you’re lost if you’re not lucky. And then someone has to send out a searchin’ party.’ They walked on. Louis began to get a dull cramp of pain in his back from the baby-carrier. Every now and then Gage would grab a double handful of his hair and tug enthusiastically or administer a cheerful kick to Louis’s kidneys. Late mosquitoes cruised around his face and neck, making their eye-watering hum.

The path curved down, bending in and out between very old firs, and then cut widely through a brambly, tangled patch of undergrowth. The going was soupy here, and Louis’s boots squelched in mud and some standing water. At one point they stepped over a marshy bit using a pair of good-sized tussocks as stepping-stones. That was the worst of it. They started to climb again and the trees reasserted themselves. Gage seemed to have magically put on ten pounds, and the day had, with some similar magic, suddenly warmed up ten degrees. Sweat poured down Louis’s face.

‘How you doing, hon?’ Rachel asked. ‘Want me to carry him for a while?’

‘No, I’m fine,’ he said, and it was true, although his heart was larruping along at a good speed in his chest. He was more used to prescribing physical exercise than he was to doing it.

Jud was walking with Ellie by his side, her lemon-yellow slacks and red blouse bright splashes of color in the shady brown-green gloom.

‘Lou, does he really know where he’s going, do you think?’ Rachel asked in a low, slightly worried tone.

‘Sure,’ Louis said.

Jud called back cheerily over his shoulder: ‘Not much further now … You bearin’ up, Louis?’

My God, Louis thought, the man’s well past eighty but I don’t think he’s even broken a sweat.

‘I’m fine,’ he called back a little aggressively. Pride probably would have led him to say the same thing even if he had felt the onset of a coronary. He grinned, hitched the straps of the Gerrypack up a bit, and went on.

They topped the second hill, and then the path sloped through a head-high swatch of bushes and tangled underbrush. It narrowed and then, just ahead, Louis saw Ellie and Jud go under an arch made of old weatherstained boards. Written on these in faded black paint, only just legible, were the words PET SEMATARY. He and Rachel exchanged an amused glance and stepped under the arch, instinctively reaching out and grasping each other’s hand as they did so, as if they had come here to be married.

For the second time that morning Louis was surprised into wonder.

There was no carpet of needles here. Here was an almost perfect circle of mown grass, perhaps as large as forty feet in diameter. It was bounded by thickly interlaced underbrush on three sides and an old blowdown on the fourth, a jackstraw-jumble of fallen trees that looked both sinister and dangerous. A man trying to pick his way through that or climb over it would do well to put on a steel jock before making the try, Louis thought. The clearing was crowded with markers, obviously made by children from whatever materials they could beg or borrow – the slats of crates, scrapwood, pieces of beaten tin. And yet, seen against the perimeter of low bushes and straggly trees that fought for living space and sunlight here, the very fact of their clumsy manufacture seemed to emphasize what symmetry they had, and the fact that humans were responsible for what was here. The forested backdrop lent the place a crazy sort of profundity, a charm that was not Christian but pagan.

‘It’s lovely,’ Rachel said, not sounding as if she meant it.

‘Wow!’ Ellie cried.

Louis unshouldered Gage and pulled him out of the baby-carrier so he could crawl. His back sighed with relief.

Ellie ran from one monument to the next, exclaiming over each. Louis followed her while Rachel kept an eye on the baby. Jud sat down cross-legged, his back against a protruding rock, and smoked.

Louis noticed that the place did not just seem to have a sense of order, a pattern; the memorials had been arranged in rough concentric circles.

SMUCKY THE CAT, one crate-board marker proclaimed. The hand was childish but careful. HE WAS OBEDIANT. And below this: 1971–1974. A little way around the outer circle he came to a piece of natural slate with a name written on it in fading but perfectly legible red paint: BIFFER. And below this a bit of verse that made Louis grin. Biffer, Biffer, a helluva sniffer/Until he died he made us richer.

‘Biffer was the Desslers’ cocker spaniel,’ Jud said. He had dug a bald place in the earth with the heel of his shoe and was carefully tapping all his ashes into it. ‘Got run over by a dumpster last year. Ain’t that some poime?’ ‘It is,’ Louis agreed.

Some of the graves were marked with flowers, some fresh, most old, not a few almost totally decomposed. Over half of the painted and penciled inscriptions Louis tried to read had faded away to partial or total illegibility. Others bore no discernible mark at all, and Louis guessed that the writing on these might have been done with chalk or crayon.

‘Mom!’ Ellie yelled. ‘Here’s a goldfishie! Come and see!’

‘I’ll pass,’ Rachel said, and Louis glanced at her. She was standing by herself, outside the outermost circle, looking more uncomfortable than ever. Louis thought: Even here she’s upset. She never had been easy around the appearances of death (not, he supposed, that anyone really was), probably because of her sister. Rachel’s sister had died very young, and it had left a scar which Louis had learned early in their marriage not to touch. Her name had been Zelda, and it had been spinal meningitis. Her dying had probably been long and painful and ugly, and Rachel would have been at an impressionable age. If she wanted to forget it, he thought there could be no harm in that.

Louis tipped her a wink, and Rachel smiled gratefully at him.

Louis looked up. They were in a natural clearing. He supposed that explained how well the grass did; the sun could get through. Nevertheless, it would have taken watering and careful tending. That meant cans of water lugged up here, or maybe Indian pumps, even heavier than Gage in his Gerrypack, carried on small backs. He thought again that it was an odd thing for children to have kept up for so long. His own memory of childhood enthusiasms – reinforced by his dealings with Ellie – was that they tended to burn like newsprint, fast … hot … and quick to die.

But they had kept it up for a long time; Jud was right about that. It became obvious as he cut across the circle toward its approximate center. Moving inward, the pet graves became older; fewer and fewer of the inscriptions could be read, but those that could yielded a rough timeline extending into the past. Here was TRIXIE, KILT ON THE HIGHWAY SEPT 15, 1968. In the same circle was a wide flat board planted deep in the earth. Frost and thaw had warped it and canted it to one side, but Louis could still make out IN MEMORY OF MARTA OUR PET RABIT DYED MARCH 1 1965. A row further in was GEN. PATTON (OUR! GOOD! DOG!, the inscription amplified), who had died in 1958; and Polynesia (who would have been a parrot, if Louis remembered his Doctor Dolittle aright), who had squawked her last ‘Polly want a cracker’ in the summer of 1953. There was nothing readable in the next two rows, and then, still a long way in from the center, chiseled roughly on a piece of sandstone, was HANNAH THE BEST DOG THAT EVER LIVED 1929–1939. Although sandstone was relatively soft – and as a result the inscription was now little more than a ghost – Louis found it hard to conceive of the hours some child must have spent impressing those nine words on the stone. The commitment of love and grief seemed to him staggering; this was something parents did not even do for their own parents, or for their children if they died young.

‘Boy, this does go back some,’ he said to Jud, who had strolled over to join him.

Jud nodded. ‘Come here, Louis. Want to show you something.’

They walked to a row only three back from the center. Here the circular pattern, perceived as an almost haphazard coincidence in the outer rows, was very evident. Jud stopped before a small piece of slate that had fallen over. Kneeling carefully, the old man set it up again.

‘Used to be words here,’ Jud said. ‘I chiseled ‘em myself, but it’s worn away now. I buried my first dog here. Spot. He died of old age in 1914, the year the Great War began.’ Bemused by the thought that here was a graveyard that went further back than many graveyards for people, Louis walked toward the center and examined several of the markers. None of them were readable, and most had been almost reclaimed by the forest floor. The grass had almost entirely overgrown one, and when he set it back up, there was a small tearing, protesting sound from the earth. Blind beetles scurried over the section he had exposed. He felt a small chill and thought: Boot Hill for animals. I’m not sure I really like it.

‘How far do these go back?’

‘Gorry, I don’t know,’ Jud said, putting his hands deep in his pockets. ‘Place was here when Spot died, of course. I had a whole gang of friends in those days. They helped me dig the hole for Spot. Digging here ain’t that easy, either – ground’s awful stony, you know, hard to turn. And I helped them sometimes.’ He pointed here and there with a horny finger. ‘That there was Pete LaVassuer’s dog, if I remember right, and there’s three of Albion Groatley’s barncats buried right in a row there.

‘Old man Fritchie kept racing pigeons. Me and Al Groatley and Carl Hannah buried one of them that a dog got. He’s right there.’ He paused thoughtfully. ‘I’m the last of that bunch left, you know. All dead now, my gang. All gone.’ Louis said nothing, only stood looking at the pet graves with his hands in his pockets.

‘Ground’s stony,’ Jud repeated. ‘Couldn’t plant nothing here but corpses anyway, I guess.’

Across the way, Gage began to cry thinly, and Rachel brought him over, toting him on her hip. ‘He’s hungry,’ she said. ‘I think we ought to go back, Lou.’ Please, okay? her eyes asked.

‘Sure,’ he said, answering her eyes. He shouldered the Gerrypack again and turned around so Rachel could pop Gage in. ‘Ellie! Hey Ellie, where are you?’ ‘There she is,’ Rachel said, and pointed toward the blow-down. Ellie was climbing as if the blowdown was a bastard cousin to the monkeybars at school.

‘Oh, honey, you want to come down off there!’ Jud called over, alarmed. ‘You stick your foot in the wrong hole and those old trees shift, you’ll break your ankle.’ Ellie jumped down. ‘Ow!’ she cried, and came toward them, rubbing her hip. The skin wasn’t broken, but a stiff, dead branch had torn her slacks.

‘You see what I mean,’ Jud said, ruffling her hair. ‘Old blowdown like this, not even someone wise about the woods will try to climb over it if he can go around. Trees that all fall down in a pile get mean. They’ll bite you if they can.’ ‘Really?’ Ellie asked.

‘Really,’ Louis said before Jud could answer.

Jud amplified. ‘They’re piled up like straws, you see. And if you was to step on the right one, they might all come down in an avalanche.’ Ellie looked at Louis. ‘Is that true, daddy?’

‘I think so, hon.’

‘Yuck!’ She looked back at the blowdown and yelled: ‘You tore my pants, you cruddy trees!’

All three of the grown-ups laughed. The blowdown did not. It merely sat whitening in the sun as it had done for decades. To Louis it looked like the skeletal remains of some long-dead monster, something slain by a parfait good and gentil knight, perchance. A dragon’s bones, left here in a giant cairn.

It occurred to him even then that there was something too convenient about that blowdown and the way it stood between the pet cemetery and the depths of woods beyond, woods to which Jud Crandall later sometimes referred absently as ‘the Indian woods’. Its very randomness seemed too artful, too perfect, for the work of nature. It— Then Gage grabbed his ear and twisted it, crowing happily, and Louis forgot all about the blowdown in the woods beyond the pet cemetery. It was time to go home.