ebEpvI

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmDid any of this really matter, or was it only the voice of cowardice? Did he believe these things couldnot be dealt With? That Rachel would greet her dead son with anything but tears of joy?Yes, he supposed there was a real possibility that Gage might return . . . well . . . diminished. But wouldthat change the quality of his love? Parents loved children who were born blind, children born asSiamese twins, children who were born with their guts abysmally rearranged. Parents pled for judicialmercy or executive clemency on behalf of children who had grown up to commit rape and murder andthe torture of the innocent.Did he believe it would be impossible for him to love Gage even if Gage had to go on wearing diapersuntil he was eight? Ifhe did not master the first-grade primer until he was twelve? If he never mastered it at all? Could hesimply dismiss his son as a.a sort of divine abortion, when there was another recourse?But, Louis, my God, you don’t live in a vacuum! People will say— He cut that thought off with rude,angry force. Of all the things not to consider now, public notice was probably the greatest of them.Louis glanced down at the raked dirt of Gage’s grave and felt a wave of awe and horror course throughhim. Unknowing, moving by themselves, his fingers had drawn a pattern in the dirt—he had drawn aspiral.He swept the fingers of both hands through the dirt, rubbing the pattern out. Then he left Pleasantview,hurrying, feeling very much a trespasser now, believing that he would be seen, stopped, questioned atevery turn of the path.He was late collecting his pizza, and although it had been left on top of one of the big ovens, it wassemicold and greasy and every bit as tasty as cooked clay. Louis ate one piece and then tossed the restout the window, box and all, as he headed back to Ludlow. He wasn’t a litterbug by nature, but he didnot want Rachel to see a mostly uneaten pizza at home in the wastebasket. It might raise a surmise in hermind—that a pizza wasn’t really what he’d had in mind when he went to Bangor.Louis now began to think about the time and circumstance.Time. Time might be of extreme, even crucial, importance. Timmy Baterman had been dead a goodwhile before his father could get him up to the Micmac burying ground. Timmy was shot thenineteenth . . . Timmy was buried—don’t hold me to this, but I think it was July twenty-second. It wasfour or five days later that Marjorie Washburn. . . saw Timmy walking up the road.All right, say that Bill Baterman had done it four days after his son’s original interral. . . no. If he wasfile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (231 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM