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 26. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead!
At the Crandalls’, Norma stays up longer than usual. By the deftness with which she works on a sampler for the church Christmas sale, her arthritis is much improved. She’s recovered well from her heart attack; ten weeks before the cerebral accident that will kill her, Louis can see the girl she once was.
Jud and Louis finally sit alone at the kitchen table, beer glasses to hand. Louis has already drunk more than his usual limit, but tonight it seems okay, even mandatory. The cat awaits him at home. The cat who could be—anywhere at all.
Jud says it was town ragman and drunkard Stanny who told him about the Micmac burial ground. Stanny’s grandfather was the pride of their “proper Canuck” family. In the 1800s, he ran a lucrative fur trading operation, driving a rawhide-covered wagon decorated with crosses and “pagan Indian signs.” Grandpa was a Christian who’d preach on the Resurrection when drunk enough. He also believed that all Indians belonged to the lost tribe of Israel, thus Christians in “some queer, damned way.” Grandpa did good business with the Micmacs because he traded fairly. They told him about Little God Swamp and the burial ground the Wendigo had soured. Jud figures the Wendigo legend arose out of the need to justify starvation-driven cannibalism during long winters.
If the Wendigo walked through a sleeping village and touched the inhabitants, they would succumb to a taste for their own kind. Could be the Micmacs buried the bones of whomever they ate in the burial ground.
Anyhow, in 1910, Jud’s dog Spot was dying from infected wounds. His father sent the ten-year-old away while he euthanized Spot. Stanny came upon Jud sobbing and offered to help. Jud had to take Spot’s body to the Pet Sematary, but he must not bury him. At midnight, they’d go there together and work the trick.
Jud snuck out and joined a staggeringly drunk Stanny who nevertheless managed to tote a pickax and shovel to the sematary. He thought Stanny would break his neck climbing the deadfall, but Stanny sailed over, as did Jud himself, carrying Spot. They walked through woods rustling with unseen animals, Stanny as easily as the Indian Jud imagined he’d become. At Little God Swamp, Stanny warned Jud to ignore strange sounds and sights—especially don’t speak to anything that speaks to him. Jud did see something, which he won’t describe. The five times he’s gone to the burial ground since, he’s never seen it again.
Louis wants to believe he’s listening to senile maunderings, but he knows three things: Church was dead, Church is alive again, Church is fundamentally changed, and wrong. He remembers the “capering, gleeful thing” he glimpsed last night in Jud’s eyes and realizes Jud’s decision to “aid” Louis wasn’t entirely his own.
The rest happened to Jud and Spot as it did to Louis and Church: the burial ground interment and cairn-building, Spot’s return home the next morning. Jud pauses. He’s never told anyone this story. People who know about the burial ground don’t talk about it. Anyhow, Spot was changed, stiff and dulled, and he exuded the smell of sour earth no matter how often he was bathed; nevertheless, to Jud he was a good dog right up to his second death. The only dangerous revenant Jud knows of was Lester Morgan’s prize bull, which he had to shoot two weeks after its homecoming. Maybe this is why Jud took Louis to the burial ground. Maybe “kids need to know that sometimes dead is better.” That’s something he feels Ellie doesn’t know, maybe not Rachel either. If Ellie’s like Jud, she’ll still love Church, “but she’ll draw her own conclusions” about his present state and be relieved when he finally dies.
While Louis is still processing Jud’s reasoning, Jud suddenly covers his face and struggles against sobs. He repeats that he did mean to spare Ellie an abrupt trauma, but admits that wasn’t his only reason. The burial ground gets hold of anyone who’s used it. It’s a secret you want to share, so you find excuses that are good enough, “the sweetest-smelling reasons in the world.” But still. Maybe Jud was wrong. He isn’t God, but bringing back the dead is “as close to playing God as you can get, ain’t it?” Now, if Louis was to kill Church again tonight, he’d never say a word.
Louis resists the urge to fire back that he didn’t go through “all that” just to kill the cat. After Jud says he’s talked out, he does ask one more question: “Has anyone ever buried a person up there?”
Jud’s jerk knocks empty beer bottles to the floor. “No!” he says. “And who ever would? You don’t even want to talk about such things, Louis!…Some things it don’t pay to be curious about.”
For the first time, Jud looks old to Louis, even infirm. Later, at home, it will occur to him how Jud looked at the moment of his outburst.
Jud looked like he was lying.
What’s Cyclopean: Sometimes we get powerful, evocative descriptions and jewel-like language. And sometimes we get “that stage of drunkenness where you’re as wide awake as an owl with diarrhea”. Which is, you have to confess… evocative.
The Degenerate Dutch: Jud imagines that Stanny, leading him to the burial ground for the first time, is an “Indian” with a “tommyhawk” who’s going to scalp him. This is possibly related to Stanny’s grandpa being convinced that “all Indians were hellbound”, but also descended from the lost tribes of Israel. And therefore, somehow, “Christians all the same, in some queer, damned way.” Which manages to be insulting to Native Americans, Jews, and probably also Christians with more sense than Stanny’s grandpa.
Anne’s Commentary
I expected King to open Chapter 26 by shuffling Norma Crandall right off to bed; given the shopping trip she and Jud took, she might have retired even earlier than usual. A sentence or two would have cleared the stage for the “menfolks” to get down to their post-resurrection debriefing. Instead, King gives us a longish paragraph about how Norma sits up with Jud and Louis “for quite a while.” It doesn’t seem like she suspects them of nocturnal sacrilege. In “some queer, damned way,” to borrow Jud’s turn of phrase, she looks and acts reinvigorated, revived, but in a good way, unlike Church. Her arthritic fingers nimbly work a sampler. She looks “less haggard and actually younger,” so that Louis “could see the girl she had been.”
But have a look at her embroidery. It features the sun sinking behind a country meeting house and casting its rooftop cross into black silhouette. What’s the homey message this sampler will bring to the church Christmas sale: that night conquers faith, darkness light? Perhaps in her last flare of vitality, Norma knows what’s coming. If the reader doesn’t, King follows the good news about her heart attack recovery with some abrupt and clinical foreshadowing: In less than ten weeks, a “cerebral accident” will finish Norma off.
Ouch, did I need to know that? I guess so. In the midst of life we are in death.
If there’s a convenient Micmac burial ground nearby, in the midst of death you could be back in life, or a simulacrum thereof. Only if you’re a nonhuman animal, though. Nobody would ever, ever, ever try to call a dead person from the grave. Not even in the wildest fiction has such a thing happened. Nope. Christ on His throne, just ask Jud!
There’s only one problem about Jud. Sometimes Jud lies, and not just to the womenfolk, as he confessed back in Chapter 24.
In life and fiction both, if something can be done, someone will do it, or at least try. That applies to magic as well as technology and plain old physiological limits. The only unthinkable act is something no one’s thought of yet. This is why, in order to live in groups of more than one, we need systems of morality, rules, laws, religion. This is why we need taboos. Taboos such as: Don’t eat others of your own species.
Or if you do do the (socially) undoable, something for which you can’t bear to blame yourself, make sure you have some other entity to blame it on, the more supernaturally irresistible the better. The Devil makes many people do bad things. Ditto the Wendigo, that insatiably hungry monster-god of the north country. Jud nails it when he says, “[The Wendigo] was a story [the Native Americans] had to have, the same way I guess we have to have some of our Christian stories.”
Does that last statement mean Jud doesn’t believe in the Wendigo? Louis would like to think so. He’d also like to think that he himself doesn’t believe in cannibal demons and raising the dead. Too bad Church prevents him from doing so, as Spot did Jud—Spot and whatever other pets Jud has ushered to the burial ground. He admits to going there five more times since Spot. He confesses that saving Ellie grief, and in some convoluted way teaching her that “sometimes dead is better,” isn’t the reason he took Louis beyond the deadfall. That was one of those “sweetest-smelling reasons” to justify yielding to the lure of the burial ground, to letting in whatever Louis saw as a “capering, gleeful thing” in Jud’s eyes.
It’s damn scary to think that a possessing spirit lurks in the deep Maine woods. It’s terrifying to go a step further and posit that what capers gleefully in one’s eyes on the way to the secret place is not its monster-genius but the human thing that responds to its call, some monstrous part of oneself.
The monstrous part that, to hell with all constraints, does want to play God.
Heavy stuff for Louis to digest, no matter how many supernumerary beers he puts down. And all the while—the most shuddersome bit of this chapter—
Back at home, the undead cat awaits.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Okay, okay, I take back what I said about Jud. Most of it, anyway. You can’t blame a guy for what he says while under the sway of a wendigo spirit. Or whatever it is about the burial ground that turns users into pushers.
I still don’t think “most guys lie to their wives” was the wendigo speaking. Then again, who am I to speculate about the marital dynamics of anthropophagic spirits?
So we’ve got a sacred burial ground, turned sour by some sort of taboo-breaking and therefore abandoned by its original users. The taboo violation may or may not have involved actual cannibalism (insert separate rant here), but left the place watched over by something unpleasant—something that gives monkey’s-paw gifts, in exchange for the opportunity to give more such gifts later. For Reasons, this cycle of white elephant regifting is currently being passed among the descendants of the area’s colonizers. Presumably the Micmac have more sense and/or better advance debriefings.
Actually, you know what, let’s talk about cannibalism. This is a thing that actually happens, both to individuals in extremis and in occasional cultures for a range of ritual purposes. IANAA (I Am Not An Anthropologist)—but I do know that cannibalism shows up way more often in the fiction and rumor of European-descended white folks than in real life. It’s the thing that Those People Do Over There Until We Stop Them. It’s the thing that will happen if Society Breaks Down; what’s a post-apocalyptic wasteland without a cannibalistic biker gang? Its prevention justifies empire and massacre. It’s how you recognize barbarism, a clear line in the sand between inclusion in humanity and exile into the monstrous.
In this case, it’s Jud’s assumption that what happened to the burial ground was the Micmac’s’ fault. Even now that the sin is being passed from white guy to white guy, the bad magic comes from Those People Over There profaning the sacred. I feel like there’s a more straightforward explanation for the destructive alien force that came in and broke the sacred land. But that would involve responsibility that none of these people are ready to take. And a tougher backstory than cannibalism.
It fits better though, doesn’t it? There’s no reason for a wendigo to resurrect the dead. But white people come and take over the land that was sacred, use it for profit and convenience, turn it from something you can have a deep relationship with to something purely material—or at least they try. And now if you go to the burial ground with something you loved, something possessed of an ineffable spark, you get your beloved bet back with that spark missing. The sacred depth is gone, at a scale even settlers can notice. But they can no more stop making that tradeoff than they can stop trading the land.
I don’t think King had all this in mind, to be clear. Not consciously at least.
But that deep cultural fear, alongside the obvious denial of death and desire for control, is one of the things I see here. There’s a moral failure bigger than any individual, something the descendants and beneficiaries of settlers can no more get away from than mortality. And deny the power of the land as you will, it’ll reach out and grab you and have its way even decades later.
That’s the thing that’s gripping me, even amid all the gender and sexual baggage: the dangers of denial, and the universality of denying our worst fears anyway. Before Pascow dies, we know that a nightmare is beginning and can’t be avoided. Now, we know that Norma—whose life Louis just saved—will be dead in ten weeks. And there will be worse, we can suspect. Why else the question about using the burial ground for humans? Why else Jud’s frightened, false insistence that no one would ever do such a thing?
Death is inevitable. And so, on King’s stolen hillside, is a lesson that even adults have trouble learning.
Next week, we visit a different sort of tainted land in Nika Murphy’s “The Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl.”
