Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we continue Stephen King’s Pet Sematary with Chapter 22. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead!
With Rachel and the kids visiting her parents, Louis spends Thanksgiving with Jud and Norma. His post-feast nap is interrupted by a phone call from Jud. Jud’s found a dead cat on his lawn, and he’s afraid it’s Church.
Louis, having searched for Church in vain, brings a garbage bag across the road: his way of admitting that the magic circle of family has failed to protect their pet. He’s so distracted that only Jud’s warning yell keeps him from walking out in front of a truck. The sun’s setting, and a cold wind’s begun to blow; bundled in his duffle coat and fur-fringed hood, Jud looks as frozen as the landscape. The old man could be anybody.
The dead cat is Church. His neck’s broken, the dribble of blood from his snarling mouth the only other sign of trauma. Louis thinks he looks like the old gunslinger again. He has a sudden inspiration to bury Church in the pet sematary and tell Ellie the cat ran away. Better for death-phobic Rachel as well.
Jud remarks that Ellie “loves that cat pretty well, doesn’t she?” Then, hearing Louis means to bury Church in the morning, he excuses himself. Alone, Louis “felt unhappy and yet oddly exhilarated and strangely whole.” “Something’s gonna happen here… Something pretty weird,” he thinks.
Jud returns with a flashlight, shovel and pick. Louis protests, but Jud insists that if Ellie loves Church and Louis loves Ellie, he’ll do the burial now.
Laden with the shovel and Church’s bagged corpse, Louis follows Jud to the sematary. There Louis admits to his unaccountable exhilaration. Jud says this place can have that effect, like an addict’s rush after shooting up. He hopes he’s doing right to bring Louis here—and to the place beyond where real power lies.
What follows reminds Louis of his somnambulistic nightmare. “Don’t go beyond,” Pascow said. “The barrier was not made to be broken.” But Jud leads him over the deadfall between the sematary and the path deeper into the woods. Follow without hesitation, without looking down, and they’ll make it fine.
They navigate the treacherous tangle of shifting branches as if it were a staircase. They walk another three miles under a star-crowded sky. The next obstacle’s what the Micmacs called Little God Swamp. There’s quicksand, all right, Jud says, maybe St. Elmo’s fire, maybe loon calls deceptively like voices. Again, follow and don’t look down. Not that there’s anything to see but a knee-high fog.
Partway through the swamp, they hear something big moving through the brush. Jud halts and shushes Louis’s questions. Is it a moose, a bear? Instead Louis imagines a creature on two legs, rising high enough to blot out the stars. Maniacal laughter breaks the silence, then subsides into “guttural chuckling” and sobs. Jud’s eyes betray his stark terror. But he says it’s “just a loon.”
They reach a stairway carved into a rock-walled rise. It ends at a mesa-like summit. Micmacs flattened the hill, Jud explains. In the shadow of ancient firs are rock cairns.
Louis must bury Church here, doing the labor by himself. The soil’s thin and stony, but he manages to dig an adequate grave. Jud rewards him with the history of the place, how the Micmacs believed this was magic ground. Other tribes believed that their burial place peopled the woods with ghosts. Eventually the Micmacs themselves abandoned it.
Louis finishes burying Church and even finds the strength to build a cairn. It looks right under the starlight. Others have fallen, their stones scattered. As they head home, Louis realizes how dangerous their trek was. He can only attribute making this crazy burial journey to confusion and upset over Church’s death.
They arrive at the Creed house around eight-thirty. Louis feels they’ve been gone much longer. He asks Jud what they did just now. They buried Ellie’s cat, nothing more. They did what seemed right in their hearts, as opposed to their heads. There’s little use in talking about what’s in a man’s heart, where the soil is stonier, like the burial ground. “A man grows what he can,” Jud concludes, “and he tends it.” As for how Jud knew about the place, it’s because someone took him there when his childhood dog died of infected barbed wire wounds.
Later, Louis remembers an earlier conversation, when Jud said that his dog died of old age and was buried in the pet sematary. He ascribes the opposing stories to age-related forgetfulness. Later still, slipping toward sleep, he hears bare feet mounting the stairs. He tells Pascow’s ghost to leave him alone, “what’s done is done and what’s dead is dead.” The footsteps cease, and Louis is never again troubled by Pascow.
The Degenerate Dutch: “Tool-bearing Indians”—as opposed to what? Do you think some Indians predated Homo habilus? Even in the ’80s, I’m pretty sure we knew that Homo sapiens had been using tools for a long, long time. We knew about the mounds in the midwest, and arrowheads everywhere, even if we were still vague on the anthropological source of northeastern food forests.
As a bonus, in the ’80s white people were very confused about Mayan pyramids. “Here Lies Ramses II, He Was Obedient” is funny, though. Small mercies: At least we’re not assuming that aliens built any of the relevant structures. (Or maybe we are—there’s that line about a “horrid cold feeling” from imagining the stars inhabited…)
Libronomicon: Louis imagines himself as “Heathcliff out on the desolate moors”, and later compares Jud’s “don’t look down” approach to Peter Pan’s happy-thought-dependent flying ability.
Weirdbuilding: Somewhere in those woods there might be a wendigo.
Anne’s Commentary
On Thanksgiving afternoon, with the turkey and pumpkin pie devoured and a well-earned nap just begun, Louis gets a phone call that turns his day into a particularly macabre Dad Joke (God the Father variety.) Why did the castrated tom too lazy to go upstairs decide to cross the road? Why, to get to the other side, only not to the other side of the road but to the other side of existence. Come on, the cat had to die following the operation that was supposed to save him from his natural tendency to roam—it was an irony too delicious for the Almighty to resist, especially after Louis let his daughter mouth off to said Almighty. Thought you could game the system with a few snips of the surgical shears, Doctor Creed? Have a second helping of Thanksgiving dessert. You must have room enough for a sliver of frozen roadkill.
Or if you don’t have room, tough rocks. Choke it down anyway. You said it yourself, Doc. You don’t make the rules, of which the overarching rule is:
Real is real. Corollary: Dead is dead.
But what about Victor Pascow?
Never mind Pascow. What about Jud Crandall, who’s become the man who should have been Louis’s father? All those evenings passed on Jud’s porch, surely he knows the man fairly well. Too well to see Jud, as he crosses the road to ID Church, as “a piece of statuary, just another dead thing in this twilight landscape where no bird sang.” Too well to feel that, because Jud’s hood hides his face, Jud “could have been anyone…anyone at all.” When his hood falls back, Jud’s looking not at Louis but at “that fading orange line of light at the horizon,” his face “thoughtful and stern…harsh, even.” Of Ellie, he asks “Loves that cat pretty well, doesn’t she?” A page later, he answers his own question, “Yes, I guess she loves it pretty well,” again using a present tense that makes Louis feel how “the whole setting… with the fading light, the cold, and the wind” is “eerie and gothic.”
When Louis first comes out after Church, he’s hit by an amorphous aloneness, “strong and persuasive… faceless,” that leaves him feeling “untouched and untouching.” It’s as if he stands bewildered in a no-man’s land between normality and a Maine where he at last feels “in his place… unhappy and yet oddly exhilarated and strangely whole.” Having crossed more than Route 15, he’s entered the space where Jud too is at home, but where I imagine neither Rachel nor Norma would follow. Conveniently, the one is in Chicago, the other at a church gathering. It’s the two men on their own, with their “stonier” men’s hearts: hearts that can keep secrets, hearts that can be lured to whatever dwells in Little God Swamp and keeps as its altar the ancient Micmac burying ground from which power leaches even as far as Ludlow, with the pet sematary as its outpost and gateway.
It’s power that draws, and power that is the reward. Jud seems to believe, or to want to believe, that the magic of the woods beyond the deadfall is neutral. He’s terrified, however, by the “Little God” that stalks among the trees and laughs, screams, chuckles and sobs. It’s just a loon, he tells Louis. Louis knows that to continue to feel exhilarated, alive, fey after hearing such sounds is “an unshakable lunacy.” Jud himself has compared the sematary’s effect to an addict’s drugged rush. In that, he’s being honest, but several times during the adventure Louis suspects that Jud is lying to him, perhaps to himself.
Clear of the zone of unreason, Louis has questions. Too many questions, Jud says. People sometimes have to do what seems right in their hearts, putting aside the head’s doubts. Accept what’s done and follow your heart, Jud insists. Burying Church in the Micmac cemetery was right, he says, though—
Though he adds, “at least, I hope to Christ it was right,” which quashes the comfort of his initial statement, doesn’t it? As does his admission that another time it could be “wrong as hell”—wrong, presumably, to bury something other than Church out there. Earlier, Jud said the Micmac burying ground may be a dangerous place, “but not for cats or dogs or pet hamsters.” I take it he means it’s not dangerous for animals in general, with the good Christian’s exception of the human animal.
I suspect Jud will have a lot of explaining to do when next he and Louis have a sit-down. Meanwhile Louis accepts enough of Jud’s philosophy to combine it with his own: He dismisses Pascow for the last time with: “Let me alone, what’s done is done and what’s dead is dead.”
What’s done is done, okay. Somehow those scattered cairn stones in the burial ground and the conflicting stories Jud has about his dog’s burial make me wonder whether Louis’s second truism will hold in the chapters ahead.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Oh. Oh. I knew there were problems behind the deadfall, but I did not guess “secret cemetery behind the sematary”. Here’s the actual Indian Burial Ground, the one so scary that even the Indians are scared of it. Jud would perhaps do better to talk Louis through “how to be honest with your family,” but the soil of this particular man’s heart is stonier and that’s not one of his fatherly skills.
But what do I know, I’ve never really seen into any man’s heart. Maybe they’d all rather commit necromancy than have an unpleasant conversation? Or talk someone else through the practicalities of necromancy rather than have the unpleasant conversation about the fact that they’re doing necromancy?
The long walk through the woods is genuinely disturbing, made moreso by Louis’s emotional reactions. Bit weird to suddenly feel a strong sense of belonging while taking advantage of someone else’s burial ground, and I don’t know that King meant it as deliberate irony. But the not-a-loon, the deadfall made of Schrodinger’s Bones, the mist and the strangely solid ground, all make for top-notch atmosphere. And the mismatch between Jud’s two stories about his dog’s death make for effective, if not exactly subtle, foreshadowing.
Gonna be real awkward if Louis decides to be honest with Rachel and Ellie before the cat comes back (the very next day?) but I’m not betting on it.
We just lost a family dog a couple of weeks ago—a sweet little potato-shaped, potato-brained beagle who’d been fighting off cancer for a year. I’m very little like Louis, but the bit that rang true for me was the strange weight of the dead body, the difficulty of carrying a creature that seems differently-massed and shaped than in life. My son helped, both with preparing her body and with comforting her person—he was mourning too, but seems to share with me the need to take reassurance from doing something. My parents always made me part of handling pet deaths, and Louis’s refusal to grant Ellie that respect was honestly the hardest part to read. Sometimes you have to tell people the horrible things, even if you’re scared of how they’ll react. I can’t much respect a masculinity (or any other ideal of adulthood) that doesn’t include that variety of courage.
Not that I’m big on gender-binary-based ideals of adulthood. But they’re thick on the ground this week—they’re thick on the ground in this book. Church regains his lost machismo in death, which I must say is a weird-ass bit of symbolism. Then there’s Jud’s insistence that real men don’t talk about things, and that this is right and good. Stony soil and all that. A woman couldn’t understand; couldn’t really see into any man’s heart. Neither can the man himself, apparently, given Louis’s previous failure to realize he loved the cat with whose genitals he so deeply identified.
I perhaps shouldn’t make fun. This stuff comes from a real and deep place. Jud’s lived through two world wars, both of which encouraged men to not discuss their traumatic experiences, and the aftermath of which encouraged everyone to not discuss their traumatic experiences. When you look at the emphasis on conformity and normality in the ’50s, there’s terror and denial underneath, something that loosened only slowly and painfully in subsequent decades. Men and women both were given roles to perform, and the price for failure—let alone refusal to pick a role—could be brutal. The effort to fill those roles didn’t leave much room for honest communication. We’re still prone to these patterns, to responding to societal-level horror by burying things deep in stony soil.
It all smacks of Lovecraft’s conviction that questioning societal delusion undermines sanity itself. Talk with your wife rather than focusing on the impossible demands of toxic masculinity, and who knows what might happen? But then, trying to fulfil those impossible demands can also be deadly. Or whatever the word is for crossing barriers that should never be crossed and denying the realities of death. Maybe King has reason for strewing gender across the text like confetti.
Talk to your beloveds, gentle readers. Talk to the kids in your life gently but honestly about hard truths. And look both ways before crossing whatever boundaries lie in your path.
Next week, Greg van Eekhout’s “Across the Street” continues the theme of being careful about crossing barriers.
