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 27-29. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead!
Louis figures out that Church has been getting into the house through a broken basement window, and has it fixed. Gage recovers from his virus, then he and Ellie and Rachel all catch bronchitis. Gradually Ellie gets used to the new Church, though she still won’t let him sleep with her. Rachel will push Church away, perhaps without even realizing she does it. Louis tolerates Church better now, though he still misses his living grace.
Christmas Eve passes pleasantly for Louis and Rachel as they assemble toys and arrange presents under the tree. Louis gives Rachel her first piece of “serious” jewelry: a sapphire pendant from Tiffany’s. She’s moved and thrilled. As she goes upstairs, Louis puts Church out, only to discover a Christmas present of mutilated crow. Louis kicks Church hard, then cleans up the mess.
After he and Rachel make love, he lies awake. He imagines Church reminding him of the burial ground and its consequences. Church was alive, then dead, then alive again, come back with his purr-box broken and a taste for the hunt. Louis must remember: Church is now part of what his stony heart must grow, along with his family.
Louis must “remember the secret and tend [his] garden well.”
* * *
On New Year’s Eve, Jud and Norma join the Creeds. Louis can’t help mentally examining Norma. His grandmother would have said she’s “beginning to fail.” Her arthritic hands are swollen and liver-spotted. Her hair looks thinner. She and Jud leave the get-together early.
Louis is glad to get back to the infirmary, where a flu outbreak keeps him working overtime. Then Rachel calls, crying. She manages to tell him that Norma Crandall has died. Jud came looking for Louis. He looked so lost, dazed, old. Though shocked for the Crandalls, it’s Rachel Louis thinks about, and her conviction that death is “a secret, a terror…to be kept from the children.” She asks him to come home—his friend Jud needs him.
Louis and Jud are more than friends, considering what they’ve done together. In spite of Church’s weirdness, Louis thinks, Jud’s decision to take Louis to the burial ground was mostly right—or at least compassionate.
* * *
Louis finds Jud looking all his eighty-three years. It was a cerebral accident that killed Norma, Louis learns, not another heart attack. After a brief struggle, Jud breaks down. Louis embraces him, cries with him, drinks with him, listens to him. He’s thinking about married people who die soon after their spouse’s death, as if anxious to follow, but Jud’s calm and orderly handling of funeral arrangements reassures Louis that he’s in no immediate danger. Louis feels great admiration for Jud, and yes, his heart confirms, love.
Rachel won’t talk about Norma’s death. Ellie, however, comes to Louis to ask if Norma will go to heaven. With Rachel a nonpracticing Jew and Louis a lapsed Methodist, Ellie’s ideas about the afterlife must be vague. He explains that people have many beliefs. A shadow on the dining room wall tells him Rachel is furtively listening, but he goes on. Ultimately, either a person’s soul survives death and moves on, or it doesn’t. Ellie asks what Louis believes. Louis used to hold that “dead’s dead,” but after Church…
He says he thinks people go on, but he doesn’t know to where. Do animals go on, Ellie asks. Yes, Louis says, almost adding especially cats. Ellie says she’s sorry she got upset thinking Church might die. Now she could take it.
Later, in bed, Rachel admits she eavesdropped. She’s not upset about what Louis told Ellie. It’s just that she gets scared. She tells him finally about her sister, Zelda, who died at ten of spinal meningitis. The family cared for Zelda at home. Her decline was an agonizing process, shriveling her beyond recognition. In her suffering, she became demanding, “hateful.” Rachel began hoping Zelda would die, a reaction Louis assures her was normal. The end came when Rachel’s parents were visiting friends for Passover, leaving eight-year-old Rachel alone with Zelda. Rachel witnessed her sister choking, but didn’t know what to do. When it was over, Rachel ran from the house, crying—or was she laughing, with relief? No wonder she long imagined Zelda coming back, a twisted ghost bent on revenge.
Louis comforts Rachel, even through the rage he feels at her parents for leaving her alone with her dying sister. A Valium calms Rachel. She feels as if she’s “sicked up something that’s poisoned part of [her] for years.” Even so, she can’t go to Norma’s funeral. But she concedes that, if Louis thinks it best, Ellie can attend.
What’s Cyclopean: Church playing with the dead crow makes a “tenebrous rustling sound”.
The Degenerate Dutch: Rachel offers Louis an “early present” on Christmas Eve, to which he responds jokingly, “that is mine by right.” This is less funny given that it would remain legally true in Maine until 1985.
Libronomicon: Rachel’s sister Zelda has a picture of Oz the Great and Terrible on her wall while she’s dying, because it was her favorite book. What’s behind the curtain?
Madness Takes Its Toll: Louis guesses that Zelda was “probably clinically insane” by the time their parents left her alone with Rachel. And Rachel spent a while afterward convinced that Zelda gave her spinal meningitis as revenge for her death—a terror that the attending doctor treats as a “childish play for attention” rather than trauma.
Anne’s Commentary
Reading fiction, I often venture into the teeming gut-biome of the internet to fact-check anything from major plot points to tiny details. Perhaps the most shameful waste of time was my quest to figure out what kind of snake Voldemort’s Nagini was, anyway. A la David Byrne, I may ask myself, “What is this niggling compulsion?” And I may say to myself, “Nobody’s paying me to edit this.” Oh well, same as it ever was, might as well take a brief peek at my search results…
This week I was moved to ask whether Rachel’s sister Zelda could have died from spinal meningitis over weeks, maybe months, instead of the days or even hours in which an untreated case of bacterial meningitis might run its course. There’s also viral meningitis, the most common form of the disease but evidently the least dangerous, tending to resolve on its own. Other causative pathogens include fungi and parasites. Fungal meningitis can be fatal; even with treatment, it can recur. Parasitic meningitis can be caused by tapeworms, Plasmodium (malarial) species, and freshwater amoebas, all rare infections. A culprit in chronic (long-duration) meningitis can be Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Slow-developing tuberculous meningitis can be hard to diagnose, delaying treatment and increasing the risk of fatality.
So, hmmm. Was spinal meningitis a good pick for the illness that would kill poor Zelda over a period sufficient to traumatize her family? Maybe. I don’t know. Why can’t I tell myself, Self, stop quibbling and just wince along with Louis at Rachel’s long-withheld story! What matters to the novel per se is that King’s description of Zelda’s death is so vividly unsparing that we can begin to understand Rachel’s thanatophobia.
Let’s move on before I lapse into full-blown hypochondria.
Chapter 30 marks the high point of the Creeds’ Ludlow life. They’ve gotten past those ill omens of their arrival, when Ellie cut herself and Gage took a bee sting. The new house seemed “strange and even hostile” to them then, but with the Christmas season, it “had never seemed more like home.” Church, odorous and graceless and a slayer of small things, remains to remind Louis of his post-resurrection obligations. Yet everyone in the family has learned to tolerate the cat’s weirdness, even Louis, who knows Church died on Thanksgiving Day.
Then Norma Crandall dies. Though Louis saw she was “failing,” it’s a shock, not least because he senses a coming crisis for Rachel. Jud grieves in Louis’s arms, but then tackles funeral arrangements with a competency Louis admires. Rachel called Louis with the news, distraught. By the time Louis gets home, she’s refusing to talk about Norma. It’s Ellie whose reaction leads to Rachel’s necessary breakdown/breakthrough.
Compare the conversations Louis has with Ellie and Rachel in Chapter 32 to the conversations he had with them in Chapter 9. Following the family’s pet sematary visit, Ellie has a meltdown in Louis’s office. She’s realized that, like the animals in the little graveyard, Church will someday die. Apart from glossing over the fact that tomcats often meet premature ends, Louis avoids comfortable lies—he remembers how he grew to resent the ones his mother told him. So he addresses the subject of death from a physician’s standpoint. All living things have metabolisms, internal clocks that run faster for some, slower for others. Eventually, the clocks run down and stop; while Louis would let Church live forever, he doesn’t make the rules. Ellie snaps back: Who does make the rules? God? Louis can’t speak to God. He can only speak to the Clock, as later, in his argument with Rachel, he can only insist that death is “the most natural thing in the world,” not a secret to be politely avoided by adults.
After Norma’s death, Ellie again turns to Louis for answers. Without any formal religious education, she’s still gleaned enough about the whole God thing to ask if Norma will go to heaven. After his trip through Little God Swamp to the Micmac burial ground, Louis can’t fall back on his Clock explanation. He’s achieved—or suffered—an overturning of his rationalist worldview and must allow for the supernatural, or at least occurrences beyond the natural as science understands it.
He has started to entertain the fluidity among three critical states of mind, knowledge and belief and faith. When people say they know something, he tells Ellie, they may actually believe or have faith in it. Religious people believe all kinds of things about the afterlife, but what “we” know is that one of two possibilities follow death: The “soul” survives, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, death is the end, like “having ether,” as he puts it. Pressed by Ellie about which possibility he has faith in, the once strictly “dead’s dead” Louis must say that he believes “we go on.” He just doesn’t know where to.
As for whether animals go on—that he does know. Church went on, somewhere, and came back changed. So changed that Ellie has subconsciously decided that death might not be so bad compared to an unnamed, or unnamable, alternative.
To Louis’s surprise, Rachel isn’t angry about his discussion with Ellie. She “sicks up” her trauma over Zelda. Her secrets about death and guilt are finally on the marital table, addressable, and she’ll let Louis decide whether Ellie should attend the funeral. Ironically, her disclosure leaves Louis the one with a cankering death-secret.
And it’s one that must be kept.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Louis and Rachel are acting more like grownups this week, and I’m feeling considerably more sympathetic. Rachel’s trauma makes considerable sense of not only her phobia, but her kneejerk conviction that children should be protected from death. Given the alternative she experienced… yeah, go ahead and take a dip in the Nile.
Rachel’s parents, on the other hand, earn no points. “It’s Passover” is not an excuse for leaving an 8-year-old alone with a dying adolescent. Not even in the ’60s when no one had heard of hospice care, and a sick child was a shame to be hidden in the back room.
This is a season when these themes sit heavy with me: Saturday would have been my mother’s 80th birthday, and from there through Thanksgiving is a stream of anniversaries of last times, extra yahrzeit candles marking a mournful path. Even in the 21st century, even with trauma therapy and in-home hospice and organizations that will send a nurse to help out, end-stage caregiving is a physical and emotional nightmare. It’s a nauseating balance between the knowledge that you can’t sanely do this forever, and the knowledge that you absolutely won’t be doing so. It’s exhaustion and strained muscles and breakdowns and petty exasperation and guilt.
Louis gets a lot of credit for letting Rachel know that it isn’t just her. She clearly needed, very badly, to learn that.
Jud and Norma get a relatively easy version of something that’s impossible to make easy—no slow decline, and time together with their full hearts and minds until the end. Maybe that’s what gives him the strength to deal with the surreal bureaucracy of funeral home arrangements. Maybe that’s what makes it possible for Rachel to hear Ellie get a kinder explanation than she did, and to support Jud with neighborly baked goods if not presence at the funeral.
And here’s where we see what Church’s resurrection has taught Louis. He’s gotten used to the undead cat, though he’s cruel in a way I hope he wouldn’t be to any fully-living thing. But he’s also gone through a “sea-change,” questioning everything his medical career has taught him about dying. He’s never felt a soul pass when someone dies—but this year he’s seen a soul (or something) enter a dying body, and seen the difference between a living cat and a reanimated one. He knows that death isn’t just turning off the lights, but beyond that? His lapsed Methodism doesn’t provide an answer that matches what he’s seen, nor does Rachel’s non-practicing Judaism. (In general, Judaism doesn’t offer clear answers on this topic, though I would enjoy a bonus chapter where an informed Rachel brings this whole business to the nearest rabbi.) The odds of him checking in with the local Micmac community are slim. But he’s been given an insight that most people have no chance at, and I respect that he takes it seriously as a spiritual as well as practical challenge.
Especially given that what he’s learned doesn’t exactly lend support to the rainbow bridge theory. (Apologies to everyone else who’s had to deal with that bit of glurge following a pet’s death. It sucks.) “…I’m here to tell you that you come out the other side with your purr-box broken and a taste for the hunt”. Maybe Church’s trauma comes from the resurrection process itself, from having to dig out of his own grave alone in the middle of the woods. Or from being back in a body that no longer fits, no longer connects to all the dangling soul-wires. But maybe it comes from something else: from a heaven worthy of “fear not” angels, or a hell that takes what it can grab, or the spirit that tends the burial ground for its own cannibalistic purposes.
Maybe what’s missing is what it eats.
I gotta admit, I’m not thrilled by any of these possibilities. And neither, I imagine, is Louis. Even for an experienced doctor, it seems like the sort of thing that could make death feel rather less natural.
Next week we summon up a classic: M.R. James’s “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.”
