"Say no more," Louis told him and opened the beer. He looked at Jud. "Shall we drink to her?"
"I guess we better," Jud said. "You should have seen her when she was sixteen, Louis, coming back from church with her jacket unbuttoned... your eyes would have popped. She could have made the devil swear off drinking. Thank Christ she never asked me to do it."
Louis nodded and raised his beer a little. "To Norma," he said. Jud clinked his bottle against Louis's. He was crying again but he was also smiling. He nodded.
"May she have peace, and let there be no frigging arthritis wherever she is."
"Amen," Louis said, and they drank.
It was the only time Louis saw Jud progress beyond a mild tipsiness, and even so he did not become incapacitated. He reminisced; a constant stream of warm memories and anecdotes, colorful and clear and sometimes arresting, flowed from him. Yet between the stories of the past, Jud dealt with the present in a way Louis could only admire; if it had been Rachel who had simply dropped dead after her grapefruit and morning cereal, he wondered if he could have done half so well.
Jud called the Brookings-Smith Mortuary in Bangor and made as many of the arrangements as he could by telephone; he made an appointment to come in the following day and make the rest. Yes, he would have her embalmed; he wanted her in a dress, which he would provide; yes, he would pick out underwear; no, he did not want the mortuary to supply the special shoes which laced up the back. Would they have someone wash her hair? he asked. She washed it last on Monday night, and so it had been dirty when she died. He listened, and Louis, whose uncle had been in what those in the business called "the quiet trade," knew the undertaker was telling Jud that a final wash and set was part of the service rendered. Jud nodded and thanked the man he was talking to, then listened again. Yes, he said, he would have her cosmeticized, but it was to be a lightly applied layer. "She's dead and people know it," he said, lighting a Chesterfield. "No need to tart her up." The coffin would be closed during the funeral, he told the director with calm authority, but open during the visiting hours the day before. She was to be buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, where they had bought plots in 1951. He had the papers in hand and gave the mortician the plot number so that preparations could begin out there: H-101. He himself had H-102, he told Louis later on.
He hung up, looked at Louis, and said, "Prettiest cemetery in the world is right there in Bangor, as far as I'm concerned. Crack yourself another beer, if you want, Louis. All of this is going to take awhile."
Louis was about to refuse-he was feeling a little tiddly-when a grotesque image arose unbidden behind his eyes: Jud pulling Norma's corpse on a pagan litter through the woods. Toward the Micmac burying ground beyond the Pet Sematary.
It had the effect of a slap on him. Without a word, he got up and got another beer out of the fridge. Jud nodded at him and dialed the telephone again. By three that afternoon, when Louis went home for a sandwich and a bowl of soup, Jud had progressed a long way toward organizing his wife's final rites; he moved from one thing to the next like a man planning a dinner party of some importance. He called the North Ludlow Methodist Church, where the actual funeral would take place, and the Cemetery Administration Office at Mount Hope; these were both calls the undertaker at Brookings-Smith would be making, but Jud called first as a courtesy. It was a step few bereaved ever thought of... or if they thought of it, one they could rarely bring themselves to take. Louis admired Jud all the more for it. Later he called Norma's few surviving relatives and his own, paging through an old and tattered address book with a leather cover to find the numbers. And between calls, he drank beer and remembered the past.
Louis felt great admiration for him... and love?
Yes, his heart confirmed. And love.
When Ellie came down that night in her pajamas to be kissed, she asked Louis if Mrs. Crandall would go to heaven. She almost whispered the question to Louis, as if she understood it would be better if they were not overheard. Rachel was in the kitchen making a chicken pie, which she intended to take over to Jud the next day.