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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmOrrington Stream; thus runneth the tract from north until south.” Jud grinned without much humor. “Butthe great old maple fell down in 1882, let’s say, and was rotted to moss by the year 1900, and OrringtonStream silted up and turned to marsh in the ten years between the end of the Great War and the crash ofthe stock market. A nice mess it made! It ended up not mattering to old Anson, any-ways. He was struckand killed by lightning in 1921, right up around where that burying ground is.”Louis stared at Jud. Jud sipped his beer.“It don’t matter. There’s lots of places where the history of ownership is so tangled it never getsunraveled, only the lawyers end up makin money. Hell, Dickens knew that. I suppose the Indians willget it back in the end, and I think that’s the way it should be. But that don’t really matter, Louis. I cameover here tonight to tell you about Timmy Baterman and his dad.”“Who’s Timmy Baterman?”“Timmy Baterman was one of the twenty or so boys from Ludlow that went overseas to fight Hitler. Heleft in 1942. He come back in a box with a flag on the top of it in 1943. He died in Italy. His daddy, BillBatennan, lived his whole life in this town. He about went crazy when he got the telegram. . . and thenhe quieted right down. He knew about the Micmac burying ground. you see. And he’d decided what hewanted to do.”The chill was back. Louis stared at Jud for a long time, trying to read the lie in the old man’s eyes. It wasnot there. But the fact of this story surfacing just now was damned convenient.“Why didn’t you tell me this that other night?” he said finally. “After we. . . after we did the cat? When Iasked you if anyone had ever buried a person up there, you said no one ever had.”“Because you didn’t need to know,” Jud said. “Now you do.”Louis was silent for a long time. “Was he the only one?”“The only one I know of personally,” Jud said gravely. “The only one to ever try it? I doubt that, Louis. Idoubt it very much. I’m kind of like the preacher in Clesiastes—I don’t believe that there’s anythingnew under the sun. Oh, sometimes the glitter they sprinkle over the top of a thing changes, but that’s all.What’s been tried once has been tried once before . . . and before. . . and before.”He looked down at his liver-spotted hands. In the living room, the clock softly chimed twelve-thirty.“I decided that a man in your profession is used to looking at symptoms and seeing the diseasesunderneath. . . and I decided I had to talk straight to you when Mortonson down at the funeral home toldme you’d ordered a grave liner instead of a sealing vault.”file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (207 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM