.

He fell silent for a moment.

“We knew it as a friend and as an enemy,” he said finally. “My brother Pete died of a burst appendix in 1912, back when Taft was President. Pete was just fourteen, and he could hit a baseball farther than any kid in town. In those days you didn’t need to take a course in college to study death, hot-spice, or whatever they call it. In those days it came into the house and said howdy and sometimes it took supper with you and sometimes you could feel it bite your ass.”

This time Norma didn’t correct him; instead she nodded silently.

Louis stood up, stretched. “I have to go,” he said. “Big day tomorrow.”

“Yes, the merry-go-round starts for you tomorrow, don’t it?” Jud said, also standing. Jud saw Norma was also trying to get up and gave her a hand. She rose with a grimace.

“Bad tonight, is it?” Louis asked.

“Not so bad,” she said.

“Put some heat on it when you go to bed.”

“I will,” Norma said. “I always do. And Louis… don’t fret about Ellie. She’ll be too busy gettin to know her new friends this fall to worry much about that old place. Maybe someday all of em’II go up and repaint some of the signs, or pull weeds, or plant flowers. Sometimes they do, when the notion takes them. And she’ll feel better about it. She’ll start to get that nodding acquaintance.”

Not if my wife has anything to say about it.

“Come on over tomorrow night and tell me how it went up at the college, if you get the chance,” Jud said. “I’ll whup you at cribbage.”

“Well, maybe I’ll get you drunk first,” Louis said. “Double-skunk you.”

“Doc,” Jud said with great sincerity, “the day I get double-skunked at cribbage would be the day I’d let a quack like you treat me.”

He left on their laughter and crossed the road to his own house in the late-summer dark.

Rachel was sleeping with the baby, curled up on her side of the bed in a fetal, protective position. He supposed she would get over it-there had been other arguments and times of coldness in their marriage, but this one was surely the worst of the lot. He felt sad and angry and unhappy all at the same time, wanting to make it up but not sure how, not even sure that the first move should come from him. It was all so pointless-only a capful of wind somehow blown up to hurricane proportions by a trick of the mind. Other fights and arguments, yes, sure, but only a few as bitter as the one over Ellie’s tears and questions. He supposed it didn’t take a great many blows like that before the marriage sustained structural damage and then one day, instead of reading about it in a note from a friend (“Well, I suppose I ought to tell you before you hear it from someone else, Lou; Maggie and I are splitting… “) or in the newspaper, it was you.

He undressed to his shorts quietly and set the alarm for 6 A. M. Then he showered, washed his hair, shaved, and crunched up a Rolaid before brushing his teeth-Norma’s iced tea had given him acid indigestion. Or maybe it was coming home and seeing Rachel way over on her side of the bed. Territory is that which defines all else, hadn’t he read that in some college history course?

Everything done, the evening put neatly away, he went to bed… but couldn’t sleep. There was something else, something that nagged at him. The last two days went around and around in his head as he listened to Rachel and Gage breathing nearly in tandem. GEN. PATTON HANNAH THE BEST DOG THAT EVER LIVED -. MARIA OUR PET RABIT… Ellie, furious. I don’t want Church to ever be dead!… He’s not God’s cat!

Let God have His own cat! Rachel, equally furious. You as a doctor should know.

… Norma Crandall saying It just seems like people want to forget it… And Jud, his voice terribly sure, terribly certain, a voice from another age: Sometimes it took supper with you and sometimes you could feel it bite your ass.

And that voice merged with the voice of his mother, who had lied to Louis Creed about sex at four but told him the truth about death at twelve, when his cousin Ruthie had been killed in a stupid car accident. She had been crushed in her father’s car by a kid who had found the keys in a Public Works Department payloader and decided to take it for a cruise and then found out he didn’t know how to stop it. The kid suffered only minor cuts and contusions; his Uncle Carl’s Fairlane was demolished. She can’t be dead, he had replied in answer to his mother’s bald statement. He had heard the words, but he couldn’t seem to get the sense of them. What do you mean, she’s dead? What are you talking about? And then, as an afterthought: Who’s going to bury her? For although Ruthie’s father, Louis’s uncle, was an undertaker, he couldn’t imagine that Uncle Carl would possibly be the one to do it. In his confusion and mounting fear, he had seized upon this as the most important question. It was a genuine conundrum, like who cut the town barber’s hair.

I imagine that Donny Donahue will do it, his mother replied. Her eyes were red-rimmed; most of all she had looked tired. His mother had looked almost ill with weariness.

He’s your uncle’s best pal in the business. Oh, but Louis.

Sweet little Ruthie… I can’t stand to think she suffered.

pray with me. will you, Louis? Pray with me for Ruthie. I need you to help me.

So they had gotten down on their knees in the kitchen, he and his mother, and they prayed, and it was the praying that finally brought it home to him; if his mother was praying for Ruthie Creed’s soul, then it meant that her body was gone. Before his closed eyes rose a terrible image of Ruthie coming to his thirteenth birthday party with her decaying eyeballs hanging on her cheeks and blue mould growing in her red hair, and this image provoked not just sickening horror but an awful doomed love.

He cried out in the greatest mental agony of his life, “She can’t be dead!

MOMMA, SHE CAN’T BE DEAD-I LOVE HER!”

And his mother’s reply, her voice flat and yet full of images: dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust: She is, my darling. I’m sorry, but she is. Ruthie is gone.

Louis shuddered, thinking, Dead is dead-what else do you need?

Suddenly Louis knew what it was he had forgotten to do, why he was still awake on this night before the first day of his new job, hashing over old griefs.

He got up, headed for the stairs, and suddenly detoured down the hall to Ellie’s room. She was sleeping peacefully, mouth open, wearing her blue baby-doll pajamas that she had really outgrown. My God, Ellie, he thought, you’re sprouting like corn. Church lay between her splayed ankles, also dead to the world. You should pardon the pun.

Downstairs there was a bulletin board on the wall by the phone with various messages, memos, and bills tacked to it. Written across the top in Rachel’s neat caps was THINGS TO PUT OFF AS LONG AS POSSIBLE. Louis got the telephone book, looked up a number, and jotted it on a blank memo sheet. Below the number he wrote: Quentin L. Jolander, D. V. M.-call for appointment re Church--if Jolander doesn’t neuter animals, he will refer.

He looked at the note, wondering if it was time, knowing that it was. Something concrete had to come out of all this bad feeling, and he had decided sometime between this morning and tonight-without even knowing he was deciding-that he didn’t want Church crossing the road anymore if he could help it.

His old feelings on the subject rose up in him, the idea that neutering would lessen the cat, would turn him into a fat old torn before his time, content to just sleep on the radiator until someone put something into his dish. He didn’t want Church like that. He liked Church the way he was, lean and mean.

Outside in the dark, a big semi droned by on Route 15, and that decided him. He tacked the memo up and went to bed.