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 33-35. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead!
Louis and Ellie attend Norma’s funeral. In a sober navy blue dress bought for the occasion, Ellie seems awed to uncharacteristic silence. Only when Louis joins the pallbearers, promising to meet her outside, does a bit of the old Ellie break through. “Don’t drop her,” she whispers.
His task done, Louis joins Jud in watching the morticians settle Norma’s coffin in the hearse. He thinks about how for the two younger pallbearers, distant relations, Norma is probably a dim memory of duty visits to the Crandalls. For them, Jud’s branch of the family must be “like an eroded planetoid drifting away from the main mass.” The past.
God save the past, he thinks, and shivers. One day, should Ellie and Gage give him descendants, he’ll be equally unfamiliar to them.
On the ride home, Ellie finally cries: Why do people have to be dead? Louis admits he doesn’t know. Perhaps to make room for new people like her and Gage. Ellie promptly declares she’s never going to have kids. Louis tries to explain that for old people, death doesn’t look so bad and can bring an end to suffering. By the time they get home, Ellie has stopped crying.
When the kids are asleep for the night, Rachel comes to Louis’s study and tells him how Church brought a dead rat into the house while he and Ellie were gone. She had to beat the cat outside with a vacuum attachment, and he growled at her. Does Louis think he might have distemper?
No. Louis knows exactly what’s wrong with Church, and his responsibility. He puts aside work to go upstairs with Rachel and “love her the best he could.”
* * *
The “blue, still, subzero miniseason of February” passes. Ellie celebrates her sixth birthday. Jud’s most agonizing grief passes into mellower phases. Gage gets his first haircut. Louis jokes about his new, darker hair, but mourns in his heart.
Spring comes, and stays awhile.
* * *
Louis will later realize that the last really happy day of his life was March 24, 1984. Terrible things were still seven weeks in the future, but even so, God doles out much more pain than genuine happiness.
With Rachel and Ellie gone to the grocery store with Jud, Louis is left to entertain a Gage who’s recently entered his Terrible Twos. All the usual gambits fail to amuse the toddler-tyrant. Then Louis thinks of the Vulture he bought on a whim a few weeks before. He assembles the kite, with its five-foot wingspan and bloodshot eyes, and takes Gage to a neighbor’s field to fly it.
In the “bright, unreliable warmth of March straining to be April,” Louis easily coaxes the Vulture aloft. He feels like he did as a child, that he enters into the kite’s high-altitude perspective of the countryside. When he lets Gage hold the kite string, he feels that he enters Gage’s point-of-view: he shrinks “until he was within Gage’s tiny house, looking out of the windows that were his eyes” at a world so much bigger than it is to an adult, so purely delightful. He tells Gage he loves him. And “Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed, ‘Kite flyne, Daddy!’”
Rachel and Ellie come home and join the fun, but their presence changes things. Louis isn’t sorry to go back inside. Later, he goes to say goodnight to Gage. After he falls asleep, Louis leaves the room, but a backward glance chills him. Through the cracked door of Gage’s closet peer “yellowy-green, disembodied eyes.” He goes to investigate, wildly thinking of dead Zelda with her black tongue. The door opens on—Church, hissing and baring needle-sharp teeth. Its refusal to get out infuriates him, and he pegs Gage’s toy train at the cat. The cat runs off, but Louis is left sweating, as if he saw a snake menacing the boy.
And he imagined Zelda, and Oz the Gweat and Tewwible…
He latches the closet door, then returns to Gage’s crib and stands there for a long time, watching his son.
What’s Cyclopean: The exhilaration of kite flying comes through in how imagines its perspective, the world “cartographers must see in their dreams,” and then Gage’s view of a world “so huge and bright”.
Libronomicon: Louis looks up Troutman’s Treatment of Wounds for an article in The Duquesne Medical Digest, his part in a vigorous and vicious debate over dissolving sutures. Gage, meanwhile, scribbles in Where the Wild Things Are.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
One of the less popular superpowers is death sight. That is, some aura or image floats in your vision over those soon to die. It might even be a precise countdown. There’s nothing you can do to change the fates thus revealed—and worse, you know that. Not only is death inevitable, but at some point a specific death, at a specific time, becomes inevitable.
King’s pulling a nasty trick, giving that superpower to the reader.
It’s particularly nasty this week. Norma was one thing: sad, but not a true surprise. Her age and health made the inevitability, if not the timing, logical. But Gage? He’s two. He’s just learning to talk in sentences, delighted by kites and rare alone time with Daddy. Mortality, let alone inevitability, should be a long way off. How unfair—how horrifying—that a toddler should be so marked two months in advance.
Humans are very bad at living in the moment, when we’re forced to think too hard about the future. Louis can experience his last happy day only because he doesn’t know that it’s his last such day, or why. The reader, though, can only watch with cold dread. There are things man was not meant to know, and for my money your kid’s deathday is much higher on that list than the specifics of Cthulhu’s naptime.
Rachel’s parents, of course, experienced something all too close to that, no supernatural vision required. Perhaps that’s why Louis keeps thinking of Zelda, flashing on her Oz poster or imagining her haunting Gage’s closet in place of Church. Cat and sister both play the role of the malicious dead, banshee heralds at best and breath-sucking demons at worst. Perhaps that’s also why Louis has a flash of Ellie as an adult. It’s a familiar experience for any parent, hopeful and disconcerting all at once. Adulthood is the goal: we want our kids to grow and learn and become independent people in their own right. But to grow is also to die. And to grow is to push your parents ahead of you into time, or back into the past, to become sort-of-interesting people in old photos. “Why can’t you stay this age forever?” can be a treacly sentiment, torn to tissue paper when you’re forcibly reminded that said age involves a lot of tantrums—except that it also reflects the grim awareness that time equals death. Ellie’s not completely off base, to deny death’s power by threatening never to give birth.
God save the past, Louis thinks. But the past is at war with the future.
Ellie is willing, at least, to work with Rachel to continue Norma’s tradition of oatmeal cookies. On the one hand this is a very childlike way to approach mourning. There’s a particular great-aunt whom I remember mostly for her stash of Andes Candies—I was probably about Ellie’s age when she died. At the same time, we carry the memory of the dead through their recipes, and keep some part of them alive by baking in their honor. I wouldn’t dream of making a chocolate chip banana bread other than my mother’s, or holding Thanksgiving without her creamed onions. They’re delicious, but they’re also hers, and I can be her at least a little when I make them.
This book is so strange. One chapter I can be rolling my eyes at Louis’s unthinking sexism and almost-gently toxic masculinity, the next I can tear up over the all-too-adult emotions associated with parenting, laugh over the truth of couch-bottom magnetism, and beg Louis to more regularly tell his son he loves him. You can do that in front of your wife and daughter! I don’t care if it’s 1984, get over the limits of your upbringing and do it now!
Because you never know how much time you have left to tell someone you love them. That knowledge, worst of secrets, is reserved for we poor readers.
Anne’s Commentary
In The Hobbit’s famous game of riddles in the dark, the last one Gollum asks Bilbo almost defeats our hero:
This thing all things devours;
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats mountain down.
Bilbo gets the answer accidentally, by calling for the thing he needs most at that moment: Time. As Louis Creed is learning, Time is the thing all mortals need most. During his first conversation with Ellie about death, he describes Gollum’s Devourer as befits a scientist and clinician, objectively, even fatalistically. Death is the end result of metabolism, a biological clock that must eventually run down. Driving home after Norma’s funeral, Ellie again asks why people have to die, and Louis has to admit that, scientist and clinician though he is, he doesn’t really know. He falls back on the classic reply, that Nature’s solution to overpopulation is for the old to die and so make room for the young. Louis doesn’t mention Nature’s other dictum, that some creatures have to die to feed other creatures. Circle of Life, kid, remember the song from The Lion King? Wait, that movie’s still ten years in the future.
Never mind Mufasa and Simba. In 1984, Oz the Gweat and Tewwible has been around for a long time, and Louis has begun to adopt Rachel’s embodiment of death as that dreadful wizard—pre Oz’s exposure as a conman, of course. He’s also adopting her death-bogeyman, Zelda of the black tongue. Rachel’s thanatophobia doesn’t seem so irrational to Louis now. Not after Church has knocked the foundation out from under his core certainties.
For Louis, time begins to look like what Bilbo first considers after Gollum’s riddle:
“Poor Bilbo sat in the dark thinking of all the horrible names of all the giants and ogres he had ever heard of in tales, but not one of them had done all these things [Gollum had listed.]”
As Louis oscillates between seeing time as a neutral fact and seeing time as a monster, he grows anxious at signs of its passage. At the funeral, sitting by Ellie in her new navy blue, he’s no longer blinded to complacency by his love for her; instead he sees her slipping from “the first great developmental stage” of “almost pure curiosity” (should we read innocence?) Watching her leave the church in a “swirl” of that navy blue, he’s “uneasily struck by how adult she looked.” Jud’s “husky young cousins or nephews” aren’t merely welcome additions to the labor of pallbearing: They give Louis occasion to ponder how the present slides inexorably into the past and to conclude that one day, like Jud and Norma, he’ll be dusty history to his descendants.
“God save the past,” Louis thinks. That is, his own past, and so he shivers. The next chapter, Thirty-Four, is all about time passing. Ellie turns six. The flu epidemic ebbs. “Blue, still, subzero” February yields to March, still rough but “straining to be April.” Jud’s grief mellows at a gradual, healthy pace. Gage gets his first haircut. All these passages are positive things. But they are passages, steps taken from the Creeds’ generally comfortable and now immutable past into a changing present and uncertain future. I won’t stop to wait on your convenience, Time says. It’s Death that will stop for you, maybe kindly as in Emily Dickinson’s poem, maybe not so kindly. Want to know something else? Death itself may be only another realm of Time, where you’ll see things you can’t unsee, things that will change you, not necessarily for the good.
Consider Church. What can the cat have witnessed to turn its eyes that yellowy-green that makes you believe for a heart-lurching moment it’s Zelda in Gage’s closet? Not that Church is a comfortable housemate any longer, and there the damn thing is, staring at Gage on this most joy-filled day of his life, and possibly of Louis’s as well.
Gollum was right, Louis. Time is the Devourer.
God save the past. That was Louis’s cri de coeur at the funeral. In the past, Louis will always be a boy flying his first kite and imagining himself soaring with it and “staring down as the world took on its actual shape.” In the past, he will always enter into Gage’s “tiny house” of a body and share Gage’s exultation at “flyne” that Vulture as “the wind…bloomed a wild rose” in his cheek.
March 24, 1984. It’s the day in the novel when Gage finally takes center stage and becomes for the reader a “real” person, vital and infinitely dear. It’s also what Louis will believe “the last really happy day of his life.” King hits us with this foreshadowing in the first line of Chapter Thirty-Five. In the next sentence, we learn that the “things that were to come, poised above [the Creeds] like a killing sashweight” are only “seven weeks in the future.” That Louis has picked a kite in the shape of a vulture is in itself a blatant ill omen. What was he thinking? My idea is that in Louis’s subconscious, controlling a vulture kite is figuratively mastering Death, if only by changing it from an object of dread to one of joy.
At the peak of this father-and-son moment, King drops his final bomb:
“And Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed shrilly and joyously. ‘Kite flyne! Kite flyne, Daddy!’”
If that paragraph doesn’t kick you in the gut, I don’t know what to say. But I won’t accuse you of having no heart. Maybe King’s three outright statements of coming doom strike you as too much, and yeah, I do remember, he dropped a similar one prior to Norma Crandall’s death. That criticism I can understand. Especially given the chapter-closing omen of Church lurking in Gage’s closet, avatar of Death that the cat’s become.
Is King using good technique here? On the whole, I think so.
On the whole, I think his foreshadowing throws the kind of shade some random cloud may cast over you on an otherwise sunny day, all the blacker for the brilliance everywhere else.
Next week, E.F. Benson’s “The Outcast” gives us another tale of burials gone wrong.
