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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmtook care of it,” she said, “but do you know, I had to beat that dumb cat out the door with the vacuumcleaner attachment before it would stop guarding the . . . the corpse? It growled at me. Church nevergrowled at me before in his life. He seems different lately. Do you think he might have distemper orsomething, Louis?”“No,” Louis said slowly, “but I’ll take him to the vet, if you want.”“I guess it’s all right,” she said and then looked at him nakedly. “But would you come up? I just . . . Iknow you’re working, but.. .““Of course,” he said, getting up as though it were nothing important at all. And, really, it wasn’t—excepthe knew that now the letter would never be written because the parade has a way of moving on, andtomorrow would bring something new. But he had bought that rat, hadn’t he? The rat that Church hadbrought in, surely clawed to bloody ribbons, its intestines dragging, its head perhaps gone. Yes. He hadbought it. It was his rat.“Let’s go to bed,” he said, turning off the lights. He and Rachel went up the stairs together. Louis put hisarm around her waist and loved her the best he could. . . but even as he entered into her, hard and erect,he was listening to the winter whine outside the frost-traced windows, wondering about Church, the catthat used to belong to his daughter and now belonged to him, wondering where it was and what it wasstalking or killing. The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, he thought, and the wind sang its bitter blacksong, and not so many miles distant, Norma Crandall, who had once knitted his daughter and sonmatching caps, lay in her gray steel American Eternal coffin on a stone slab in a Mount Hope crypt; bynow the white cotton the mortician would have used to stuff her cheeks would be turning black.34Ellie turned six. She came home from kindergarten on her birthday with a paper hat askew on her head,several pictures friends had drawn of her (in the best of them Ellie looked like a friendly scarecrow), andbaleful stories about spankings in the schoolyard during recess. The flu epidemic passed. They had tosend two students to the EMMC in Bangor, and Surrendra Hardu probably saved the life of one woefullysick freshman boy with the terrible name of Peter Humperton, who went into convulsions shortly afterbeing admitted. Rachel developed a mild infatuation with the blond bag boy at the A & P in Brewer andrhapsodized to Louis at night about how packed his jeans looked. “It’s probably just toilet paper,” sheadded. “Squeeze it sometime,” Louis suggested. “If he screams, it’s probably not.” Rachel had laugheduntil she cried. The blue, still, subzero miniseason of February passed and brought on the alternatingrains and freezes of March, potholes, and those orange roadside signs which pay homage to the GreatGod BUMP. The immediate, personal, and most agonizing grief of Jud Crandall passed, that grief whichthe psychologists say begins about three days after the death of a loved one and holds hard from four tosix weeks in most cases— like that period of time New Englanders sometimes call “deep winter.” Buttime passes, and time welds one state of human feeling into another until they become something like arainbow. Strong grief becomes a softer, more mellow grief; mellow grief becomes mourning; mourningfile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (174 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM