"Is that all we did?"
"Nothing but that," Jud said. "You're a good man, Louis, but you ask too many questions. Sometimes people have to do things that just seem right. That seem right in their hearts, I mean. And if they do those things and then end up not feeling right, full of questions and sort of like they got indigestion, only inside their heads instead of in their guts, they think they made a mistake. Do you know what I mean?"
"Yes," touis said, thinking that Jud must have been reading his mind as the two of them walked downhill through the field and toward the house lights.
"What they don't think is that maybe they should be questioning those feelings of doubt before they question their own hearts," Jud said, looking at him closely. "What do you think, Louis?"
"I think," Louis said slowly, "that you might be right."
"And the things that are in a man's heart-it don't do him much good to talk about those things, does it?"
"Well-"
"No," Jud said, as if Louis had simply agreed. "It don't." And in his calm voice that was so sure and so implacable, in that voice which somehow put the chill through Louis, he said: "They are secret things. Women are supposed to be the ones good at keeping secrets, and I guess they do keep a few, but any woman who knows anything at all would tell you she's never really seen into any man's heart. The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis-like the soil up there in the old Micmac burying ground. Bedrock's close. A man grows what he can... and he tends it."
Jud-"Don't question, Louis. Accept what's done and follow your heart."
"But-"
"But nothing. Accept what's done, Louis, and follow your heart. We did what was right this time... at least, I hope to Christ it was right. Another time it could be wrong-wrong as hell."
"Will you at least answer one question?"
"Well, let's hear what it is, and then we'll see."
"How did you know about that place?" This question had also occurred to Louis on the way back, along with the suspicion that Jud himself might be part Micmac-although he did not look like it; he looked as if every one of his ancestors had been one hundred percent card-carrying Anglos.
"Why, from Stanny B.," he said, looking surprised.
"He just told you?"
"No," Jud said. "It isn't the kind of place you just tell somebody about. I buried my dog Spot up there when I was ten. He was chasing a rabbit, and he run on some rusty barbed wire. The wounds infected and it killed him."
There was something wrong about that, something that didn't fit with something Louis had been previously told, but he was too tired to puzzle out the discontinuity. Jud said no more; only looked at him from his inscrutable old man's eyes.
"Goodnight, Jud," Louis said.
"Goodnight."
The old man crossed the road, carrying his pick and shovel.
"Thanks!" Louis called impulsively.
Jud didn't turn; he only raised one hand to indicate he had heard.
And in the house, suddenly, the telephone began to ring.
Louis ran, wincing at the aches that flared in his upper thighs and lower back, but by the time he had gotten into the warm kitchen, the phone had already rung six or seven times. It stopped ringing just as he put his hand on it. He picked it up anyway and said hello, but there was only the open hum.
That was Rachel, he thought. I'll call her back.
But suddenly it seemed like too much work to dial the number, to dance clumsily with her mother-or worse, her checkbook-brandishing father-to be passed on to Rachel... and then to Ellie. Ellie would still be up of course; it was an hour earlier in Chicago. Ellie would ask him how Church was doing.
Great, he's fine. Got hit by an Orinco truck. Somehow I'm absolutely positive it was an Orinco truck. Anything else would lack dramatic unity, if you know what I mean. You don't? Well, never mind. The truck killed him but didn't mark him up hardly at all. Jud and I planted him up in the old Micmac burying ground-sort of an annex to the Pet Sematary, if you know what I mean. Amazing walk, punkin.
I'll take you up there sometime and we'll put flowers by his marker-excuse me, his cairn. After the quicksand's frozen over, that is, and the bears go to sleep for the winter.
He rehung the telephone, crossed to the sink, and filled it with hot water. He removed his shirt and washed. He had been sweating like a pig in spite of the cold, and a pig was exactly what he smelled like.