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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htma good bed of cinders over the slippery path of tamped snow. At the curb a Cadillac hearse idled whiteexhaust into the winter air. The funeral director and his husky son stood beside it, watching them, readyto lend a hand if anyone (her brother, perhaps) should slip or flag.Jud stood beside him and watched as they slid the coffin inside. “Goodbye, Norma,” he said and lit acigarette. “I’ll see you in a while, old girl.”Louis slipped an arm around Jud’s shoulders, and Norma’s brother stood close by on his other side,crowding the mortician and his son into the background. The burly nephews (or second cousins, orwhatever they were) had already done a fade, the simple job of lifting and carrying done. They hadgrown distant from this part of the family; they had known the woman’s face from photographs and afew duty visits perhaps—long afternoons spent in the parlor eating Norma’s cookies and drinking Jud’sbeer, perhaps not really minding the old stories of times they had not lived through and people they hadnot known, but aware of things they could have been doing all the same (a car that could have beenwashed and Turtle-waxed, a league bowling practice, maybe just sitting around the TV and watching aboxing match with some friends), and glad to be away when the duty was done.Jud’s part of the family was in the past now, as far as they were concerned; it was like an erodedplanetoid drifting away from the main mass, dwindling, little more than a speck. The past. Pictures in analbum. Old stories told in rooms that perhaps seemed too hot to them—they were not old; there was noarthritis in their joints; their blood had not thinned. The past was runners to be gripped and hefted andlater let go. After all, if the human body was an envelope to hold the human soul—God’s letters to theuniverse—as most churches taught, then the American Eternal coffin was an envelope to hold the humanbody, and to these husky young cousins or nephews or whatever they were, the past was just a deadletter to be filed away.God save the past, Louis thought and shivered for no good reason other than that the day would comewhen he would be every bit unfamiliar to his own blood—his own grandchildren if Ellie or Gageproduced kids and he lived to see them. The focusshifted. Family lines degenerated. Young faces looking out of old photographs.God save the past, he thought again and tightened his grip around the old man’s shoulders.The ushers put the flowers into the back of the hearse. The electric rear window rose and thumped homein its socket. Louis went back to where his daughter was, and they walked to the station wagon together,Louis holding Ellie’s arm so she wouldn’t slip in her good shoes with the leather soles. Car engines werestarting up.“Why are they putting on their lights, Daddy?” Ellie asked with mild wonder. “Why are they putting ontheir lights in the middle of the day?”file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (171 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM