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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmat last becomes remembrance—a process that may take from six months to three years and still beconsidered normal. The day of Gage’s first haircut came and passed, and when Louis saw his son’s hairgrowing in darker, he joked about it and did his own mourning—but only in his heart.Spring came, and it stayed awhile.35Louis Creed came to believe that the last really happy day of his life was March 24, 1984. The thingsthat were to come, poised above them like a killing sashweight, were still over seven weeks in the future,but looking over those seven weeks he found nothing which stood out with the same color. He supposedthat even if none of those terrible things had happened, he would have remembered the day forever.Days which seem genuinely good— good all the way through—are rare enough anyway, he thought. Itmight be that there was less than a month of really good ones in any natural man’s life in the best ofcircumstances. It came to seem to Louis that God, in His infinite wisdom, seemed much more generouswhen it came to doling out pain.That day was a Saturday, and he was home minding Gage in the afternoon while Rachel and Ellie wentafter groceries. They had gone with Jud in his old and rattling ‘59 IH pickup not because the stationwagon wasn’t running but because the old man genuinely liked their company. Rachel asked Louis if hewould be okay with Gage, and he told her that of course he would. He was glad to see her get out; after awinter in Maine, most of it in Ludlow, he thought that she needed all the getting out she could lay herhands on. She had been an unremittingly good sport about it, but she did seem to him to be getting alittle stir crazy.Gage got up from his nap around two o’clock, scratchy and out of sorts. He had discovered the TerribleTwos and made them his own. Louis tried several ineffectual gambits to amuse the kid, and Gage turnedthem all down. To make matters worse, the rotten kid had an enormous bowel movement, the artisticquality of which was not improved for Louis when he saw a blue marble sitting in the middle of it. Itwas one of Ellie’s marbles. The kid could have choked. He decided the marbles were going to go—everything Gage got hold of went right to his mouth—but that decision, while undoubtedly laudable,didn’t do a thing about keeping the kid amused until his mother got back.Louis listened to the early spring wind gust around the house, sending big blinkers of light and shadowacross Mrs. Vinton’s field next door, and he suddenly thought of the Vulture he hadbought on a whim five or six weeks before, while on his way home from the university. Had he boughttwine as well? He had, by God!“Gage!” he said. Gage had found a green Crayola under the couch and was currently scribbling in one ofEllie’s favorite books—something else to feed the fires of sibling rivalry, Louis thought and grinned. IfEllie got really pissy about the scribbles Gage had managed to put in Where the Wild Things Are beforefile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (175 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM