"We walked and we walked," Jud said. "It seemed to me we was gonna walk forever.
The woods were spookier in those days. More birds calling from the trees, and you didn't know what any of em was. Animals moving around out there. Deer, most likely, but back then there were moose too and bears and catamounts. I dragged Spot. After a while I started to get the funny idea that old Stanny B. was gone and I was following an Indian. Following an Indian and somewhere farther along he'd turn around, all grinning and black-eyed, his face streaked up with that stinking paint they made from bearfat; that he'd have a tommyhawk made out of a wedge of slate and a hake of ashwood all tied together with rawhide, and he'd grab me by the back of the neck and whack off my hair-along with the top of my skull. Stanny wasn't staggerin or fallin anymore; he just walked straight and easy, with his head up, and that sort of helped to feed the idea. But when we got to the edge of the Little God Swamp and he turned around to talk to me, I seen it was Stanny, all right, and the reason he wasn't staggerin or fallin anymore was because he was scared. Scairt himself sober, he did.
"He told me the same things I told you last night-about the loons, and the St.
Elmo's fire, and how I wasn't to take any notice of anything I saw or heard.
Most of all, he said, don't speak to anything if it should speak to you. Then we started across the swamp. And I did see something. I ain't going to tell you what, only that I've been up there maybe five times since that time when I was ten, and I've never seen anything like it again. Nor will I, Louis, because my trip to the Micmac burial place last night was my last trip."
I'm not sitting here believing all of this, am I? Louis asked himself almost conversationally-the three beers helped him to sound conversational, at least to his own mind's ear. I am not sitting here believing this story of old Frenchmen and Indian burying grounds and something called the Wendigo and pets that come back to life, am I? For Christ's sake, the cat was stunned, that's all, a car hit it and stunned it-no big deal. This is a senile old man's maunderings.
Except that it wasn't, and Louis knew it wasn't, and three beers wasn't going to cure that knowing, and thirty-three beers wouldn't.
Church had been dead, that was one thing; he was alive now and that was another; there was something fundamentally different, fundamentally wrong about him, and that was a third. Something had happened. Jud had repaid what he saw as a favor but the medicine available at the Micmac burying ground was perhaps not such good medicine, and Louis now saw something in Jud's eyes that told him the old man knew it. Louis thought of what he had seen-or thought he had seen-in Jud's eyes the night before. That capering, gleeful thing. He remembered thinking that Jud's decision to take Louis and Ellie's cat on that particular night journey had not entirely been Jud's own.
If not his, then whose? his mind asked. And because he had no answer, Louis swept the uncomfortable question away.
"I buried Spot and built the cairn," Jud went on flatly, "and by the time I was done, Stanny B. was fast asleep. I had to shake the hell out of him to get him going again, but by the time we got down those forty-four stairs-"
"Forty-five," Louis murmured.
Jud nodded. "Yeah, that's right, ain't it? Forty-five. By the time we got down those forty-five stairs, he was walking as steady as if he was sober again. We went back through the swamp and the woods and over the deadfall, and finally we crossed the road and we was at my house again. It seemed to me like ten hours must have gone past, but it was still full dark.
"What happens now?' I ask Stanny B. 'Now you wait and see what may happen,' Stanny says, and off he walks, staggering and lurching again.
I imagine he slept out in back of the livery that night, and as things turned out, my dog Spot outlived Stanny B. by two years. His liver went bad and poisoned him, and two little kids found him in the road on July 4, 1912, stiff as a poker.
"But me, that night, I just climbed back up the ivy and got into bed and fell asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.
"Next morning 1 didn't get up until almost nine o'clock, and then my mother was calling me. My dad worked on the railroad, and he would have been gone since six." Jud paused, thinking. "My mother wasn't just calling me, Louis. She was screaming for me."
Jud went to the fridge, got himself a Miller's, and opened it on the drawer handle below the breadhox and toaster. His face looked yellow in the overhead light, the color of nicotine. He drained half his beer, uttered a belch like a gunshot, and then glanced down the hail toward the room where Norma slept. He looked back at Louis.