He paused.
"Believe it or not, honey, when people get very old, death doesn't always look so bad or so scary as it seems to you. And you have years and years and years ahead of you."
Ellie cried, and then she sniffed, and then she stopped. Before they got home, she asked if she could play the radio. Louis said yes, and she found Shakin' Stevens singing "This Ole House" on WACZ. Soon she was singing along. When they got home she went to her mother and prattled about the funeral; to Rachel's credit, she listened quietly, sympathetically, and supportively . . . although Louis thought she looked pale and thoughtful.
Then Ellie asked her if she knew how to make oatmeal cookies, and Rachel put away the piece of knitting she'd been doing and rose at once, as if she had been waiting for this or something like it. "Yes," she said. "Want to make a batch?"
"Yay!" Ellie shouted. "Can we really, Mom?"
"We can if your father will watch Gage for an hour."
"I'll watch him," Louis said. "With pleasure."
*
Louis spent the evening reading and making notes on a long article in The Duquesne Medical Digest; the old controversy concerning dissolving sutures had begun again. In the small world of those relatively few humans on earth concerned with stitching minor wounds, it appeared to be as endless as that old psychological squabbling point, nature versus nurture.
He intended writing a dissenting letter this very night, proving that the writer's main contentions were specious, his case examples self-serving, his research almost criminally sloppy. In short, Louis was looking forward--with high good humor--to blowing the stupid fuck right off the map. He was hunting around in the study bookcase for his copy of Troutman's Treatment of Wounds when Rachel came halfway down the stairs.
"Coming up, Louis?"
"I'll be a while." He glanced up at her. "Everything all right?"
"They're deep asleep, both of them."
Louis looked at her closely. "Them, yeah. You're not."
"I'm fine. Been reading."
"You're okay? Really?"
"Yes," she said and smiled. "I love you, Louis."
"Love you too, babe." He glanced at the bookcase, and there was Troutman, right where he had been all along. Louis put his hand on the textbook.
"Church brought a rat into the house while you and Ellie were gone," she said and tried to smile. "Yuck, what a mess."
"Jeez, Rachel, I'm sorry." He hoped he did not sound as guilty as, at that moment, he felt. "It was bad?"
Rachel sat down on the stairs. In her pink flannel nightgown, her face cleaned of makeup and her forehead shining, her hair tied back into a short ponytail with a rubber band, she looked like a child. "I took care of it," she said, "but do you know, I had to beat that dumb cat out the door with the vacuum cleaner attachment before it would stop guarding the . . . the corpse. It growled at me. Church never growled at me before in his life. He seems different lately. Do you think he might have distemper or something, Lou?"
"No," Louis said slowly, "but I'll take him to the vet, if you want."
"I guess it's all right," she said and then looked at him nakedly. "But would you come up? I just . . . I know you're working, but . . ."
"Of course," he said, getting up as though it were nothing important at all. And, really, it wasn't--except he knew that now the letter would never be written because the parade has a way of moving on, and tomorrow would bring something new. But he had bought that rat, hadn't he? The rat that Church had brought in, surely clawed to bloody ribbons, its intestines dragging, its head perhaps gone. Yes. He had bought it. It was his rat.
"Let's go to bed," he said, turning off the lights. He and Rachel went up the stairs together. Louis put his arm around her waist and loved her the best he could . . . but even as he entered into her, hard and erect, he was listening to the winterwhine outside the front-traced windows, wondering about Church, the cat that used to belong to his daughter and now belonged to him, wondering where it was and what it was stalking or killing. The soil of a man's heart is stonier, he thought, and the wind sang its bitter black song, and not so many miles distant, Norma Crandall, who had once knitted his daughter and son matching caps, lay in her gray steel American Eternal coffin on a stone slab in a Mount Hope crypt; by now the white cotton the mortician would have used to stuff her cheeks would be turning black.
34
Ellie turned six. She came home from kindergarten on her birthday with a paper hat askew on her head, several pictures friends had drawn of her (in the best of them Ellie looked like a friendly scarecrow), and baleful stories about spankings in the schoolyard during recess. The flu epidemic passed. They had to send two students to the EMMC in Bangor, and Surrendra Hardu probably saved the life of one woefully sick freshman boy with the terrible name of Peter Humperton, who went into convulsions shortly after being admitted. Rachel developed a mild infatuation with the blond bag boy at the A & P in Brewer and rhapsodized to Louis at night about how packed his jeans looked. "It's probably just toilet paper," she added. "Squeeze it sometime," Louis suggested. "If he screams, it's probably not." Rachel had laughed until she cried. The blue, still, subzero miniseason of February passed and brought on the alternating rains and freezes of March, potholes, and those orange roadside signs which pay homage to the Great God BUMP. The immediate, personal, and most agonizing grief of Jud Crandall passed, that grief which the psychologists say begins about three days after the death of a loved one and holds hard from four to six weeks in most cases--like that period of time New Englanders sometimes call "deep winter." But time passes, and time welds one state of human feeling into another until they become something like a rainbow. Strong grief becomes a softer, more mellow grief; mellow grief becomes mourning; mourning at last becomes remembrance--a process that may take from six months to three years and still be considered normal. The day of Gage's first haircut came and passed, and when Louis saw his son's hair growing in darker, he joked about it and did his own mourning--but only in his heart.
Spring came, and it stayed awhile.
35
Louis Creed came to believe that the last really happy day of his life was March 24, 1984. The things that were to come, poised above them like a killing sashweight, were still over seven weeks in the future, but looking over those seven weeks he found nothing which stood out with the same color. He supposed that even if none of those terrible things had happened, he would have remembered the day forever. Days which seem genuinely good--good all the way through--are rare enough anyway, he thought. It might be that there was less than a month of really good ones in any natural man's life in the best of circumstances. It came to seem to Louis that God, in His infinite wisdom, seemed much more generous when it came to doling out pain.
That day was a Saturday, and he was home minding Gage in the afternoon while Rachel and Ellie went after groceries. They had gone with Jud in his old and rattling '59 IH pickup not because the station wagon wasn't running but because the old man genuinely liked their company. Rachel asked Louis if he would be okay with Gage, and he told her that of course he would. He was glad to see her get out; after a winter in Maine most of it in Ludlow, he thought that she needed all the getting out she could lay her hands on. She had been an unremittingly good sport about it, but she did seem to him to be getting a little stir crazy.
Gage got up from his nap around two o'clock, scratchy and out of sorts. He had discovered the Terrible Twos and made them his own. Louis tried several ineffectual gambits to amuse the kid, and Gage turned them all down. To make matters worse, the rotten kid had an enormous bowel movement, the artistic quality of which was not improved for Louis when he saw a blue marble sitting in the middle of it. It was one of Ellie's marbles. The kid could have choked. He decided the marbles were going to go--everything Gage got hold of went right to his mouth--but that decision, while undoubtedly laudable, didn't do a thing about keeping the kid amused until his mother got back.
Louis listened to the early spring wind gus
t around the house, sending big blinkers of light and shadow across Mrs. Vinton's field next door, and he suddenly thought of the Vulture he had bought on a whim five or six weeks before, while on his way home from the university. Had he bought twine as well? He had, by God!
"Gage!" he said. Gage had found a green Crayola under the couch and was currently scribbling in one of Ellie's favorite books--something else to feed the fires of sibling rivalry, Louis thought and grinned. If Ellie got really pissy about the scribbles Gage had managed to put in Where the Wild Things Are before Louis could get it away from him, Louis would simply mention the unique treasure he had uncovered in Gage's Pampers.
"What!" Gage responded smartly. He was talking pretty well now; Louis had decided the kid might actually be half-bright.
"You wanna go out?"
"Wanna go out!" Gage agreed excitedly. "Wanna go out. Where my neeks, Daddy?"
This sentence, if reproduced phonetically, would have looked something like this: Weh ma neeks, Dahdee? The translation was Where are my sneakers, Father? Louis was often struck by Gage's speech, not because it was cute, but because he thought that small children all sounded like immigrants learning a foreign language in some helter-skelter bur fairly amiable way. He knew that babies make all the sounds the human voice box is capable of . . . the liquid trill that proves so difficult for first-year French students, the glottal grunts and clicks of the Australian bush people, the thickened, abrupt consonants of German. They lose the capability as they learn English, and Louis wondered now (and not for the first time) if childhood was not more a period of forgetting than of learning.
Gage's neeks were finally found . . . they were also under the couch. One of Louis's other beliefs was that in families with small children, the area under living room couches begins after a while to develop a strong and mysterious electromagnetic force that eventually sucks in all sorts of litter--everything from bottles and diaper pins to green Crayolas and old issues of Sesame Street magazine with food mouldering between the pages.
Gage's jacket, however, wasn't under the couch--it was halfway down the stairs. His Red Sox cap, without which Gage refused to leave the house, was the most difficult of all to find because it was where it belonged--in the closet. That was, naturally, the last place they looked.
"Where goin, Daddy?" Gage asked companionably, giving his father his hand.
"Going over in Mrs. Vinton's field," he said. "Gonna go fly a kite, my man."
"Kiiiyte?" Gage asked doubtfully.
"You'll like it," Louis said. "Wait a minute, kiddo."
They were in the garage now. Louis found his keyring, unlocked the little storage closet, and turned on the light. He rummaged through the closet and found the Vulture, still in its store bag with the sales slip stapled to it. He had bought it in the depths of mid-February, when his soul had cried out for some hope.
"Dat?" Gage asked. This was Gage-ese for "Whatever in the world might you have there, Father?"
"It's the kite," Louis said and pulled it out of the bag. Gage watched, interested, as Louis unfurled the Vulture, which spread its wings over perhaps five feet of tough plastic. Its bulgy, bloodshot eyes stared out at them from its small head atop its scrawny, pinkly naked neck.
"Birt!" Gage yelled. " 'Birt, Daddy! Got a birt!"
"Yeah, it's a bird," Louis agreed, slipping the sticks into the pockets at the back of the kite and rummaging again for the five hundred feet of kite twine that he had bought the same day. He looked back over his shoulder and repeated to Gage: "You're gonna like it, big guy."
*
Gage liked it.
They took the kite over into Mrs. Vinton's field and Louis got it up into the blowy late-March sky first shot, although he had not flown a kite since he was . . . what? Twelve? Nineteen years ago? God, that was horrible.
Mrs. Vinton was a woman of almost Jud's age but immeasurably more frail. She lived in a brick house at the head of her field, but now she came out only rarely. Behind the house, the field ended and the woods began--the woods that led first to the Pet Sematary and then to the Micmac burying ground beyond it.
"Kite's flyne, Daddy!" Gage screamed.
"Yeah, look at it go!" Louis bellowed back, laughing and excited. He payed out kite twine so fast that the string grew hot and branded thin fire across his palm. "Look at that Vulture, Gage! She's goin to beat shit!"
"Beat-shit!" Gage cried and laughed, high and joyously. The sun sailed out from behind a fat gray spring cloud, and the temperature seemed to go up five degrees almost at once. They stood in the bright, unreliable warmth of March straining to be April in the high dead grass of Mrs. Vinton's field; above them the Vulture soared up toward the blue, higher, its plastic wings spread taut against that steady current of air, still higher, and as he had done as a child, Louis felt himself going up to it, going into it, staring down as the world took on its actual shape, the one cartographers must see in their dreams; Mrs. Vinton's field, as white and still as cobwebs following the retreat of the snow, not just a field now but a large parallelogram bounded by rock walls on two of its sides, and then the road at the bottom, a straight black seam, and the river valley--the Vulture saw it all with its soaring, bloodshot eyes. It saw the river like a cool gray band of steel, chunks of ice still floating in it; on the other side it saw Hampden, Newburgh, Winterport, with a ship at dock; perhaps it saw the St. Regis Mill at Bucksport below its steaming fume of cloud, or even land's end itself, where the Atlantic pounded the naked rock.
"Look at her go, Gage!" Louis yelled, laughing.
Gage was leaning so far back he was in danger of toppling over. A huge grin covered his face. He was waving to the kite.
Louis got some slack and told Gage to hold out one of his hands. Gage did, not even looking around. He couldn't take his eyes from the kite, which swung and danced in the wind and raced its shadow back and forth across the field.
Louis wound the kite string twice around Gage's hand and now he did look down, comically amazed at the strong tug and pull.
"What!" he said.
"You're flying it," Louis said. "You got the hammer, my man. It's your kite."
"Gage flyne it?" Gage said, as if asking not his father but himself for confirmation. He pulled the string experimentally; the kite nodded in the windy sky. Gage pulled the string harder; the kite swooped. Louis and his son laughed together. Gage reached out his free hand, groping, and Louis took it in his own. They stood together that way in the middle of Mrs. Vinton's field, looking up at the Vulture.
It was a moment with his son that Louis never forgot. As he had gone up and into the kite as a child himself, he now found himself going into Gage, his son. He felt himself shrink until he was within Gage's tiny house, looking out of the windows that were his eyes--looking out at a world that was so huge and bright, a world where Mrs. Vinton's field was nearly as big as the Bonneville Salt Flats, where the kite soared miles above him, the string drumming in his fist like a live thing as the wind blew around him, tumbling his hair.
"Kite flyne!" Gage cried out to his father, and Louis put his arm around Gage's shoulders and kissed the boy's cheek, in which the wind had bloomed a wild rose.
"I love you, Gage," he said--it was between the two of them, and that was all right.
And Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed shrilly and joyously. "Kite flyne! Kite flyne, Daddy!"
*
They were still flying the kite when Rachel and Ellie came home. He and Gage had gotten it so high that they had nearly run out the string, and the face of the Vulture had been lost; it was only a small black silhouette in the sky.
Louis was glad to see the two of them, and he roared with laughter when Ellie dropped the string momentarily and chased it through the grass, catching it just before the tumbling, unraveling core tube gave up the last of its twine. But having them around also changed things a little, and he was not terribly sorry to go in when, twenty minutes later, Rachel said she believed Gage had had enough o
f the wind. She was afraid he would get a chill.
So the kite was pulled back in, fighting for the sky at every turn of the twine, at last surrendering. Louis tucked it, black wings, buggy bloodshot eyes, and all, under his arm and imprisoned it in the storage closet again. That night Gage ate an enormous supper of hot dogs and beans, and while Rachel was dressing him in his Dr. Dentons for bed, Louis took Ellie aside and had a heart-to-heart talk with her about leaving her marbles around. Under other circumstances, he might have ended up shouting at her because Ellie could turn quite haughty--insulting, even--when accused of some mistake. It was only her way of dealing with criticism, but that did not keep it from infuriating Louis when she laid it on too thick or when he was particularly tired. But this night the kite flying had left him in a fine mood, and Ellie was inclined to be reasonable. She agreed to be more careful and then went downstairs to watch TV until 8:30, a Saturday indulgence she treasured. Okay, that's out of the way, and it might even do some good. Louis thought, not knowing that marbles were really not the problem, and chills were really not the problem, that a large Orinco truck was going to be the problem, that the road was going to be the problem . . . as Jud Crandall had warned them it might be on that first day of August.
*
He went upstairs that night about fifteen minutes after Gage had been put to bed. He found his son quiet but still awake, drinking the last of a bottle of milk and looking contemplatively up at the ceiling.
Louis took one of Gage's feet in one hand and raised it up. He kissed it, lowered it. "Goodnight, Gage," he said.
"Kite flyne, Daddy," Gage said.
"It really did fly, didn't it?" Louis said, and for no reason at all he felt tears behind his eyes. "Right up to the sky, my man."
"Kite flyne," Gage said. "Up to the kye."
He rolled over on his side, closed his eyes, and slept. Just like that.
Louis was stepping into the hall when he glanced back and saw yellowy-green, disembodied eyes staring out at him from Gage's closet. The closet door was open . . . just a crack. His heart took a lurch into his throat, and his mouth pulled back and down in a grimace.