Pet Sematary (7 page)

Ellie dismissed these simply enough. “Elephants and sea turtles aren't
pets. Pets
don't live very long
at all.
Michael Burns says that every year a dog lives, it's like nine of our years.”

“Seven,” Louis corrected automatically. “I see what you're getting at, honey, and there's some truth to it. A dog who lives to be twelve is an old dog. See, there's
this thing called
metabolism,
and what metabolism seems to do is tell time. Oh, it does other stuff too—some people can eat a lot and stay thin because of their metabolism, like your mother. Other people—me, for instance—just can't eat as much without getting fat. Our metabolisms are different, that's all. But what metabolism seems to do most of all is to serve living things as a body clock. Dogs have a fairly rapid metabolism. The metabolism of human beings is much slower. We live to be about seventy-two, most of us. And believe me, seventy-two years is a very long time.”

Because Ellie looked really worried, he hoped he sounded more sincere than he actually felt. He was thirty-five, and it seemed to him that those years had passed as quickly and ephemerally as a momentary draft under a door. “Sea turtles, now, have an even slower metabo—”

“What about cats?” Ellie asked and looked at Church again.

“Well, cats live as long as dogs,” he said, “mostly, anyway.” This was a lie, and he knew it. Cats lived violent lives and often died bloody deaths, always just below the usual range of human sight. Here was Church, dozing in the sun (or appearing to), Church who slept peacefully on his daughter's bed every night, Church who had been so cute as a kitten, all tangled up in a ball of string. And yet Louis had seen him stalk a bird with a broken wing, his green eyes sparkling with curiosity and—yes, Louis would have sworn it—cold delight. He rarely killed what he stalked, but
there had been one notable exception—a large rat, probably caught in the alley between their apartment house and the next. Church had really put the blocks to
that
baby. It had been so bloody and gore-flecked that Rachel, then in her sixth month with Gage, had had to run into the bathroom and vomit. Violent lives, violent deaths. A dog got them and ripped them open instead of just chasing them like the bumbling, easily fooled dogs in the TV cartoons, or another tom got them, or a poisoned bait, or a passing car. Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.

But those were maybe not things to tell your five-year-old daughter, who was for the first time examining the facts of death.

“I mean,” he said, “Church is only three now, and you're five. He might still be alive when you're fifteen, a sophomore in high school. And that's a long time away.”

“It doesn't seem long to me,” Ellie said, and now her voice trembled. “Not long at
all.”

Lois gave up the pretense of working on his model and gestured for her to come. She sat on his lap, and he was again struck by her beauty, which was emphasized now by her emotional upset. She was dark-skinned, almost Levantine. Tony Benton, one of the doctors he had worked with in Chicago, used to call her the Indian Princess.

“Honey,” he said, “if it was up to me, I'd let Church live to be a hundred. But I don't make the rules.”

“Who does?” she asked, and then, with infinite scorn: “God, I suppose.”

Louis stifled the urge to laugh. It was too serious.

“God or Somebody,” he said. “Clocks run down—that's all I know. There are no guarantees, babe.”

“I don't want Church to be like all those dead pets!” she burst out, suddenly tearful and furious. “I don't want Church to ever be dead! He's my cat! He's not God's cat! Let God have His own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is
mine!”

There were footsteps across the kitchen, and Rachel looked in, startled. Ellie was now weeping against Louis's chest. The horror had been articulated; it was out; its face had been drawn and could be regarded. Now, even if it could not be changed, it could at least be wept over.

“Ellie,” he said, rocking her, “Ellie, Ellie, Church isn't dead; he's right over there, sleeping.”

“But he
could
be,” she wept. “He
could
be, any time.”

He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl's tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability; and that she wept because of the human being's wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were either fine and noble or blackly terrifying. If all those animals had died and been buried, then Church could die

(any time!)

and be buried; and if that could happen to Church, it could happen to her mother, her father, her baby brother. To herself. Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real. In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child's hands could feel.

It would be easy to lie at this point, the way he had lied earlier about the life expectancy of tomcats. But a lie would be remembered later and perhaps finally totted up on the report card all children hand in to themselves on their parents. His own mother had told him such a lie, an innocuous one about women finding babies in the dewy grass when they really wanted them, and as innocuous as the lie had been, Louis had never forgiven his mother for telling it—or himself for believing it.

“Honey,” he said, “it happens. It's a part of life.”

“It's a
bad
part!” she cried. “It's a really
bad
part!”

There was no answer for this. She wept. Eventually her tears would stop. It was a necessary first step on the way to making an uneasy peace with a truth that was never going to go away.

He held his daughter and listened to churchbells on Sunday morning, floating across the September fields; and it was some time after her tears had stopped before he realized that, like Church, she had gone to sleep.

*  *  *

He put her up in her bed and then came downstairs to the kitchen, where Rachel was beating cake batter too hard. He mentioned his surprise that Ellie should just cork off like that in the middle of the morning; it wasn't like her.

“No,” Rachel said, setting the bowl down on the counter with a decisive thump. “It isn't, but I think she was awake most of the night. I heard her tossing around, and Church cried to go out around three. He only does that when she's restless.”

“Why would she . . . ?”

“Oh, you know why!” Rachel said angrily. “That damned pet cemetery is why! It really upset her, Lou. It was the first cemetery of
any
kind for her, and it just . . . upset her. I don't think I'll write your friend Jud Crandall any thank-you notes for
that
little hike.”

All at once he's my friend,
Louis thought, bemused and distressed at the same time.

“Rachel—”

“And I don't want her going up there again.”

“Rachel, what Jud said about the path is true.”

“It's not the
path
and you know it,” Rachel said. She picked up the bowl again and began beating the cake batter even faster. “It's that damned
place.
It's unhealthy. Kids going up there and tending the graves, keeping the path . . . fucking
morbid
is what it is. Whatever disease the kids in this town have got, I don't want Ellie to catch it.”

Louis stared at her, nonplussed. He more than half suspected that one of the things which had kept their marriage together when it seemed as if each year brought the news that two or three of their friends' marriages had collapsed was their respect of the mystery—the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there was no such
thing
as marriage,
no such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery. And no matter how well you thought you knew your partner, you occasionally ran into blank walls or fell into pits. And sometimes (rarely, thank God) you ran into a full-fledged pocket of alien strangeness, something like the clear-air turbulence that can buffet an airliner for no reason at all. An attitude or belief which you had never suspected, one so peculiar (at least to you) that it seemed nearly psychotic. And then you trod lightly, if you valued your marriage and your peace of mind; you tried to remember that anger at such a discovery was the province of fools who really believed it was possible for one mind to know another.

“Honey, it's just a pet cemetery,” he said.

“The way she was crying in there just now,” Rachel said, gesturing toward the door to his office with a batter-covered spoon, “do you think it's just a pet cemetery to
her?
It's going to leave a scar, Lou. No. She's not going up there anymore. It's not the path, it's the
place.
Here she is already thinking Church is going to die.”

For a moment Louis had the crazy impression that he was still talking to Ellie; she had simply donned stilts, one of her mother's dresses, and a very clever, very realistic Rachel mask. Even the expression was the same—set and a bit sullen on top, but wounded beneath.

He groped, because suddenly the issue seemed large to him, not a thing to be simply passed over in deference to that mystery . . . or that aloneness. He groped
because it seemed to him that she was missing something so large it nearly filled the landscape, and you couldn't do that unless you were deliberately closing your eyes to it.

“Rachel,” he said, “Church
is
going to die.”

She stared at him angrily. “That is hardly the point,” she said, enunciating each word carefully, speaking as one might speak to a backward child. “Church is not going to die today, or tomorrow—”

“I tried to tell her that—”

“Or the day after
that,
or probably for
years—”

“Honey, we can't be sure of th—”

“Of course we
can!”
she shouted. “We take good care of him, he's not going to
die,
no one is going to
die
around here, and so why do you want to go and get a little girl all upset about something she can't understand until she's much older?”

“Rachel, listen.”

But Rachel had no intention of listening. She was blazing. “It's bad enough to try and cope with a death—a pet or a friend or a relative—when it happens, without turning it into a . . . a goddam tourist attraction . . . a F-F-Forest Lawn for a-animals . . .” Tears were running down her cheeks.

“Rachel,” he said and tried to put his hands on her shoulders. She shrugged them off in a quick, hard gesture.

“Never mind,” she said. “You don't have the slightest idea what I'm talking about.”

He sighed. “I feel like I fell through a hidden trapdoor and into a giant Mixmaster,” he said, hoping for a
smile. He got none; only her eyes, locked on his, black and blazing. She was furious, he realized; not just angry, but absolutely furious. “Rachel,” he said suddenly, not fully sure what he was going to say until it was out, “how did
you
sleep last night?”

“Oh boy,” she said scornfully, turning away—but not before he had seen a wounded flicker in her eyes. “That's really intelligent.
Really
intelligent. You never change, Louis. When something isn't going right, blame Rachel, right? Rachel's just having one of her weird emotional reactions.”

“That's not fair.”

“No?” She took the bowl of cake batter over to the far counter by the stove and set it down with another bang. She began to grease a cake tin, her lips pressed tightly together.

He said patiently, “There's nothing wrong with a child finding out something about death, Rachel. In fact, I'd call it a necessary thing. Ellie's reaction—her crying—that seemed perfectly natural to me. It—”

“Oh, it
sounded
natural,” Rachel said, whirling on him again. “It sounded
very
natural to hear her weeping her heart out over her cat which is perfectly fine—”

“Stop it,” he said. “You're not making any sense.”

“I don't want to discuss it anymore.”

“Yes, but we're going to,” he said, angry himself now. “You had your at-bats—how about giving me mine?”

“She's not going up there anymore. And as far as I'm concerned, the subject is closed.”

“Ellie has known where babies come from since last year,” Louis said deliberately. “We got her the Myers book and talked to her about it, do you remember that? We both agreed that children ought to know where they come from.”

“That has nothing to do with—”

“It does, though!” he said roughly. “When I was talking to her in my office, about Church, I got thinking about my mother and how she spun me that old cabbage-leaf story when I asked her where women got babies. I've never forgotten that lie. I don't think children ever forget the lies their parents tell them.”

“Where babies come from has nothing to do with a goddam pet cemetery!” Rachel cried at him, and what her eyes said to him was
Talk about the parallels all night and all day, if you want to, Louis; talk until you turn blue, but I won't accept it.

Still, he tried.

“She knows about babies; that place up in the woods just made her want to know something about the other end of things. It's perfectly natural. In fact, I think it's the most natural thing in the w—”

“Will you stop saying that!”
she screamed suddenly—really screamed—and Louis recoiled, startled. His elbow struck the open bag of flour on the counter. It tumbled off the edge and struck the floor, splitting open. Flour puffed up in a dry white cloud.