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 Chapters 38-39. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead! Content warning for child death.
Louis and Jud sit at the Creeds’ kitchen table to drink and talk. It’s stretching their friendship, Louis says, for Jud to arrive after midnight on the day Gage will be buried, but Jud’s unfazed. Louis knows why he’s here. Louis is thinking things better left unthought, a bad situation for which Jud feels responsible. In fact, having introduced Louis to the Micmac burial ground, Jud may have been responsible for Gage’s death. How far the place’s influence spreads, Jud doesn’t know. What he does know is what happened to Timmy Baterman and his dad. Timmy died during WWII, in Italy. Bill Baterman about went crazy when he got the news. But Bill also knew about the burial ground, and he decided to use it.
Louis asks why, after Church, Jud insisted no one had ever buried a person up there. Jud’s reply: Louis didn’t need to know then. Now he does. Jud’s learned from the funeral director that Louis ordered a grave liner for Gage’s coffin instead of a sealing vault. Louis must know from his undertaker uncle that a sealing vault’s just that, sealed, impossible to open expeditiously, while a grave liner’s topped by concrete slabs which one man could lower—or raise— unaided. But—
Shhh, Louis thinks. “We will not speak of such things. These are secret things.” But he surrenders to hearing his story.
* *. *
Bill Baterman’s wife died in child-birth along with their second child, leaving Bill alone to meet the train carrying the war dead. The Army official in charge of delivering the coffins said that down south, they called such a transport a “mystery train.”
Bill buried Timmy in Pleasantview Cemetery. Two days later, the Ludlow postwoman saw Timmy walking up the road. She told her boss she’d gotten the fright of her life and went home sick. She wouldn’t describe what she’d seen until she lay dying: how Timmy had been pale, lurching, with “eyes… like raisins stuck in bread dough.” Lots of people saw him in the following days, shambling up and down the road like a zombie but with something monstrous behind his eyes, as if “a radio signal… was comin from somewhere else into him.”
The War Department, tipped off to Timmy’s “liveliness,” threatened to investigate. Some town officials met on the Crandalls’ porch. One suggested that Bill “has been up to dickens in that woods north of Route 15.” The ad hoc committee finally decided to go to the Baterman place to deal with what Norma called an “abomination.” She also whispered to Jud to “hump right out of there if anything happens.”
They confronted the Batermans behind their house. Timmy stared up into the setting sun with a face that looked flayed. Bill was drinking beer on the stoop, his eyes sunken like “little animals in a pair of caves” and his mouth tic-twitching, a “damned” man. Asked how a dead Timmy could be standing there grinning, Bill declared that Timmy was shell-shocked, not killed. He was “a little strange now,” but he’d “come around.” As for whether Bill had been “foolin around up in the woods,” he didn’t have to explain himself to anyone. The Army had had no right to take his boy. He’d gotten Timmy back. Nothing more to say.
Before the townsmen could retreat, Timmy shuffled over, crablike, hands dangling. His face bore scars from the German machine gun blast, and he stank of the grave. He was dead. But he was alive, too, and he knew things. He told one man his wife was committing adultery, another that his “loving” grandson was just waiting to grab his inheritance, and wouldn’t that grandson “shit” when he learned his dupe was broke. Bill screamed for Timmy to shut up, but Timmy screeched and laughed. He called Jud a whoremaster who cheated on Norma with prostitutes when he got the itch to “sink it into strange flesh.” Yes, that was true. All his accusations were true, but he told only the bad about people who’d also done good things. Timmy had been a nice kid; this thing was a monster. The Micmac would have known him as something touched by the Wendigo.
It ended when Bill shot Timmy, soaked his house with range oil, dropped a match, then shot himself. As for the burial ground, it goes way back before the Micmacs. It’s “an evil, curdled place” Jud wasn’t strong enough to resist, and it turned his wish to repay Louis for saving Norma to its own purpose. Its power apparently goes through phases, and Jud’s scared it’s coming to full potency again, scared it used him to get at Louis through his son. Not that it knew Gage was going to die but that it made him die. Jud may have murdered Gage through good intentions.
Louis promises that when Gage is buried tomorrow, he’ll stay buried. Louis will never go back to the Pet Sematary, or beyond it.
But in the back of Louis’s mind, there remains “a dancing flicker of promise that would not quite go away.”
The Degenerate Dutch: Jud admits that the Micmac are in fact the rightful owners of the burial ground land. He also says they never left a mark on the land, which was a vaguely reasonable thing to say in the 80s but laughable now that we know where the northeastern woods came from.
Weirdbuilding: Digging up the dead is not as easy as it looks for Dr. Frankenstein. At least not these days. Plan your gravesite amenities accordingly.
Madness Takes Its Toll: “Shell shock” can explain almost anything—at least to a guy who really wants to believe the explanation.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
I’m beginning to think that finding a father figure is not perhaps the best thing that ever happened to Louis. Then again, “the man who should have been his father” is an interesting turn of phrase, isn’t it? It’s not, actually, the same thing. Or at least, it’s not the same thing as a good father figure, let alone a good father. Louis wants guidance, but he also wants explanations—and excuses. Jud’s a ready source of all three.
In addition to this week’s public miseries I am recovering from the flu, so my temptation is to un-generously write an entire commentary consisting of GENDER ROLES ARE BAD AND MAKE EVERYONE FEEL BAD. But most of you come here for something a little more nuanced, so I’m trying to lean away from grouching and toward reparative reading.
Stereotypically and “traditionally” (insert rant about the ahistoricity of the nuclear family), a parent’s special role with children of matched gender is to model that gender’s expected contributions, and provide guidance into the mysteries and physical specificities of that gender. This is for many people a real need, and indeed if your children don’t match any of the available parental genders, they will happily demonstrate its importance with any appropriate role models you can find.
Unfortunately, in many cases both gender expectations and actual available parents are as much sources of messy toxicity as initiation into the mysteries. King knows this well, and it shows up across his stories. In my childhood fave Carrie, the titular teen ends up destroying town and self because her mother is a purity-obsessed abuser who doesn’t tell her about menstruation. Louis gets what might be charitably called an average mix of initiation and toxicity—but given the particular flavor of initiation available in Ludlow, the Bad Idea needle still swings way over to the right. Elsewhere, “most men lie to their wives and go to prostitutes to handle their Obviously Too Scary For Wife kinks” would not be the top grade of wisdom, but would probably involve fewer undead wendigo puppets.
So the book seems to pretty coherently support the theme of Toxic Masculinity Will Break Your Family. I’m willing to posit that at least some part of King is in on this theme. The book isn’t exactly examining its gender assumptions, but I suspect his id knows whereof it speaks. Louis starts with a fair dose of toxic masculinity, from being patronizing to Rachel to holding back on expressing love to his kids, but Jud reinforces it. He tells Louis not only that he’s right to do these things, but that his heart is inherently full of “stonier soil”. That he must be cautious of emotion and expressive with his actions. And that there are some hard-but-meaningful actions available right over this hill. At that point “…actions which you should not take” is unpersuasive. What else could Louis do? Hug his wife?
“The man who should have been his father,” perhaps, means “the man who, as his father, would have produced him as he is now only more so.”
And the problem is, of course, generational. Jud received both guidance on manhood and initiation into the burial ground from previous generations—and from that point the burial ground itself has a fair amount of influence. Jud fears that it may have killed Gage through its connection to Louis, passed through Jud himself. Presumably he has reason to think the ground’s spirit capable of this kind of odds-tweaking. Traditions passed down through generations with inextricable horror and trauma, never heard that one before.
And but so anyway. We now have all the dominoes set up to support an extremely bad decision—how is it going to play out? Louis is trying to resist, but he’s going to spend the coming days exhausted and frequently drunk, and the burying ground has its hooks in him. The other possibility, though—Louis and Jud had their manly heart-to-heart all alone in the kitchen. I’m sure they were checking very carefully for eavesdroppers, and that the rest of the household was sleeping soundly the night before Gage’s burial.
Anne’s Commentary
Early in King’s The Shining, Danny meets Dick Hallorran, the Overlook Hotel’s chef. Hallorran tells Danny that “he shines the hardest” of anyone Hallorran’s ever met. “Shining” is his name for ESP ranging from enhanced empathy to clairvoyance and telepathy to, maybe even, precognition. Many folks have a little shine without knowing it. Very few actually know they shine.
Elly may be among the shiners largely unconscious of their ability. She dreamed about Church’s death the night it happened. Following Gage’s death, she tells Louis she’s going to pray for God to bring him back to life, and she knows God can do it. In Sunday school, they heard the story of Lazarus. What’s more, the teacher said Jesus could have raised everybody in the graveyard if he’d wanted to. Quod erat demonstrandum, Daddy.
Why shouldn’t Elly latch onto a story, especially one from the purportedly all-true Bible, because it says what she wants to believe? Many adults do the same. I think there’s more going on with her conviction that God could resurrect Gage whole and ready to use that chair she’s keeping warm for him. Elly may sense the waxing glamor of the burial ground, either through her own perceptivity or through empathy with Louis, its chief target. There is a god who can raise the dead. Louis knows this for a fact, one that brings him reminders of how ugly death can be and that observes him with eyes more than feline.
It’s just that this god is not He of the Bible. Elly may sense that, too. Sibyl-like, she cries out in her sleep as Louis and Jud head to the kitchen; hearing her, they freeze in their tracks. There’s power behind the cry. A warning, perhaps, that Louis had better listen to what Jud’s come to say.
The warning may be DANGER, LISTEN AND AVOID THE UNHOLY PLACE. Or it may be: LISTEN BUT REALIZE—JUD’S TALE PROVES THAT HUMAN DEAD CAN ALSO RETURN.
Exactly what Louis takes from the revelation depends on which god or God is projecting that “dancing flicker of promise” to the back of his mind.
Jud knows which deity is tempting Louis. The Micmac called it Wendigo, the One whose touch makes the dead its vessels. Whatever uncanny presence Louis sensed pre-Church, as on the stairs with Gage one sunny day, it’s Jud who led him to the local heart of the Wendigo’s power. First Jud took him to the Pet Sematary. Then he took him beyond it. I had good intentions, Jud again claims in today’s chapters, but, a naturally honest man, he can’t deny his culpability in Louis’s current dilemma.
Louis is thinking of secret things that should be unthinkable, but which Jud’s now honor-bound to address. He has what should be a tactical nuclear bomb in his arsenal. If the tragedy of Bill and Timmy Baterman doesn’t deter Louis from reviving Gage, Louis is a hopeless case. No. Louis is a good man; moreover, as a physician, he must have the diagnostic chops to recognize his own symptoms and realize he’s slipping toward madness. The Baterman tale should also remind him he isn’t like Bill, already bereft of a wife and surviving children when Timmy dies. Louis has Rachel and Elly: treasures, and responsibilities. What’s due to the living must outweigh any delusion of duty to the dead.
Only, revival of the dead isn’t a delusion. Timmy Baterman came back, and maybe Bill was right, his son was just shell-shocked. Death will do that, but the Wendigo-touched can get better. Physically, Timmy was a walking horror. Psychically, he was a secret-spilling terror to all around him. Still, time and care might have lessened or cured these unfortunate manifestations. What if Bill had waited a few days longer before despairing? What if he’d had the guts to do that?
Jud does his best to convince Louis to resist temptation. He repeatedly admits he could have been an unintentional accomplice to Gage’s death. He knew better than to take Louis to the burial ground. He didn’t have the strength to fight the place’s allure. Louis must be stronger.
Louis tells Jud he doesn’t believe he had a hand in Gage’s death. He “didn’t; wouldn’t. Couldn’t” believe it. The string of auxiliary verbs is significant. “Didn’t” states simple disbelief in Jud’s culpability. “Wouldn’t” adds a willful component, a turning away from the possibility that Jud (or anyone) could be influenced to evil by the burial ground. “Couldn’t” puts belief in Jud beyond Louis’s control. It couldn’t be right to resist the “glamor,” making resistance a matter of strength in which Jud failed and Louis must succeed.
To believe that would be to kill the “flicker of promise” Louis clings to. His creed used to be “Dead is dead.” Now he knows this isn’t true for people who know about an unGodlike god who grants revival to offerings on its altar.
Louis can have his son again. What remains to contemplate is what price he’s willing to pay. According to Jud, a horrific price was exacted for Timmy Baterman. Louis already knows what price he’s paying for Church, the murderer-of-small-things.
Could there be a price too high for Gage?
If only the Wendigo gave estimates on the final cost of its services.
Next week, fighting abominations can challenge relationships in Aimee Picchi’s “The Only Writing Advice You’ll Ever Need to Survive Eldritch Horrors”.
