he said. "Everyone in Ludlow-round Bucksport and Prospect and Orrington too, I guess-just called him Stanny B. That year my dog Spot died-1910 I mean, the first time he died-Stanny was already an old man and more than a little crazy.
There was others around these parts that knew the Micmac burying ground was there, but it was Stanny B. I heard it from, and he knew about it from his father and his father before him. A whole family of proper Canucks, they were."
Jud laughed and sipped his beer.
"I can still hear him talking in that broken English of his. He found me sitting behind the livery stable that used to stand on Route 15-except it was just the Bangor-Bucksport Road back then-right about where the Orinco plant is now. Spot wasn't dead but he was going, and my dad sent me away to check on some chickenfeed, which old Yorky sold back then. We didn't need chickenfeed any more than a cow needs a blackboard, and I knew well enough why he sent me down there."
"He was going to kill the dog?"
"He knew how tenderly I felt about Spot, so he sent me away while he did it. I saw about the chickenfeed, and while old Yorky set it out for me I went around back and sat down on the old grindstone that used to be there and just bawled."
Jud shook his head slowly and gently, still smiling a little.
"And along comes old Stanny B.," he said. "Half the people in town thought he was soft, and the other half thought he might be dangerous. His grandfather was a big fur trapper and trader in the early 1800s. Stanny's grandda would go all the way from the Maritimes to Bangor and Derry, sometimes as far south as Skowhegan to buy pelts, or so I've heard. He drove a big wagon covered with rawhide strips like something out of a medicine show. He had crosses all over it, for he was a proper Christian and would preach on the Resurrection when he was drunk enough-this is what Stanny said, he loved to talk about his grandda-but he had pagan Indian signs all over it as well because he believed that all Indians, no matter what the tribe, belonged to one big tribe-that lost one of Israel the Bible talks about. He said he believed all Indians were hellbound, but that their magic worked because they were Christians all the same, in some queer, damned way.
"Stanny's grandda bought from the Micmacs and did a good business with them long after most of the other trappers and traders had given up or gone west because he traded with them at a fair price and because, Stanny said, he knew the whole Bible by heart, and the Micmacs liked to hear him speak the words the blackrobes had spoken to them in the years before the buckskin men and woodsmen came."
He fell silent. Louis waited.
"The Micmacs told Stanny B. 's grandda about the burying ground which they didn't use anymore because the Wendigo had soured the ground, and about Little God Swamp, and the steps, and all the rest.
"The Wendigo story, now, that was something you could hear in those days all over the north country. It was a story they had to have, the same way I guess we have to have some of our Christian stories. Norma would damn me for a profaner if she heard me say that, but Louis, it's true. Sometimes, if the winter was long and hard and the food was short, there were north country Indians who would finally get down to the bad place where it was starve or... or do something else."
"Cannibalism?"
Jud shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe they'd pick out someone who was old and used up, and then there would be stew for a while. And the story they worked out would be that the Wendigo had walked through their village or encampment while they were sleepin and touched them. And the Wendigo was supposed to give those it touched a taste for the flesh of their own kind."
Louis nodded. "Saying the devil made them do it."
"Sure. My own guess is that the Micmacs around here had to do it at some point and that they buried the bones of whoever they ate-one or two, maybe even ten or a dozen-up there in their burying ground."
"And then decided the ground had gone sour," Louis muttered.
"So here's Stanny B., come out in back of the livery to get his jug, I guess,"
Jud said, "already half-crocked, he was. His grandfather was worth maybe a million dollars when he died-or so people said-and Stanny B. was nothing but the local ragman. He asked me what was wrong, and I told him. He saw I'd been bawling, and he told me there was a way it could be fixed up, if I was brave and sure I wanted it fixed up.
"I said I'd give anything to have Spot well again, and I asked him if he knew a vet that could do it. 'Don't know no vet, me,' Stanny said, 'but I know how to fix your dog, boy. You go home now and tell your dad to put that dog in a grain sack, but you ain't gonna bury him, no! You gonna drag him up to the Pet Sematary and you gonna put him in the shade by that big deadfall. Then you gonna come back and say it's done. ' "I asked him what good that would do, and Stanny told me to stay awake that night and come out when he threw a stone against my window. 'And it be midnight, boy, so if you forget Stanny B. and go to sleep, Stanny B. gonna forget you, and it's goodbye dog, let him go straight to Hell!"