“I know the feeling,” Louis said. “When I saw Church this morning, I just…

it seemed like something that was-” He paused a moment. Perfectly natural? Those were the words that came immediately to mind, but they were not the right words.

“Like something that was meant.”

“Yes,” Jud said. He lit a fresh cigarette. His hands were shaking the smallest bit. “And my mother seen me there, still in my underwear, and she screamed at me, ‘Feed your dog, Jud! Your dog needs to be fed, get him out of here before he messes the curtains!’ “So I found him some scraps and called him, and at first he didn’t come, at first it was like he didn’t know his own name, and I almost thought, well, this ain’t Spot at all, it’s some stray that looks like Spot, that’s all-”

“Yes!” Louis exclaimed.

Jud nodded. “But the second or third time I called him, he came. He sort of jerked toward me, and when I led him out onto the porch, damned if he didn’t run right into the side of the door and just about fall over. He ate the scraps though, just wolfed them down. By then I was over my first fright and was starting to get an idea of what had happened. I got on my knees and hugged him, I was so glad to see him. Then he licked my face, and… “ Jud shuddered and finished his beer.

“Louis, his tongue was cold. Being licked by Spot was like getting rubbed up the side of your face with a dead carp.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Louis said, “Go on.”

“He ate, and when he was done, I got an old tub we kept for him out from under the back porch, and I gave him a bath. Spot always hated to have a bath; usually it took both me and my dad to do it, and we’d end up with our shirts off and our pants soaked, my dad cussing and Spot looking sort of ashamed-the way dogs do.

And more likely than not he’d roll around in the dirt right after and then go over by my mother’s clothesline to shake off and put dirt all over the sheets she had hung and she’d scream at both of us that she was going to shoot that dog for a stranger before she got much older.

“But that day Spot just sat in the tub and let me wash him. He never moved at all. I didn’t like it. It was like… like washing meat. I got an old piece of towel after I gave him his bath and dried him all off. I could see the places where the barbed wire had hooked him-there was no fur in any of those places, and the flesh looked dimpled in. It is the way an old wound looks after it’s been healed five years and more.”

Louis nodded. In his line of work, he had seen such things from time to time.

The wound never seemed to fill in completely, and that made him think of graves and his days as an undertaker's apprentice, and how there was never enough dirt to fill them in again.

“Then I saw his head. There was another of those dimples there, but the fur had grown back white in a little circle. It was near his ear.”

“Where your father shot him,” Louis said.

Jud nodded.

“Shooting a man or an animal in the head isn’t as sure-fire as it sounds, Jud.

There are would-be suicides in vegetable wards or even walking around right as rain who didn’t know that a bullet can strike the skull plate and travel right around it in a semicircle, exiting the other side without ever penetrating the brain. I personally saw one case where a fellow shot himself above the right ear and died because the bullet went around his head and tore open his jugular vein on the other side of his head. That bullet path looked like a county roadmap.”

Jud smiled and nodded. “I remember reading somethin like that in one of Norma’s newspapers, the Star or the Enquirer-one of those. But if my pop said Spot was gone, Louis, he was gone.”

“All right,” Louis said. “If you say that’s how it was, that is how it was.”

“Was your daughter’s cat gone?”

“I sure thought it was,” Louis said.

“You got to do better than that. You’re a doctor.”

“You make it sound like ‘You got to do better than that, Louis, you’re God. ’ I’m not God. It was dark-”

“Sure, it was dark, and his head swiveled on his neck like it was full of ball bearings, and when you moved him, he pulled out of the frost, Louis-sounded like a piece of sticky tape comin off a letter. Live things don’t do that. You only stop meltin the frost under where you’re layin when you’re dead.”

In the other room, the clock struck ten-thirty.

“What did your father say when he came home and saw the dog?” Louis asked.

“I was out in the driveway, shooting marbles in the dirt, more or less waitin for him. I felt like I always felt when I’d done something wrong and knew I was probably gonna get a spankin. He come in through the gateposts about eight o’clock, wearin his bib overalls and his pillow-tick cap… you ever seen one of those?”

Louis nodded, then stifled a yawn with the back of his hand.

“Yeah, gettin late,” Jud said. “Got to finish this up.”

“It’s not that late,” Louis said. “I’m just a few beers ahead of my usual pace.

Go on, Jud. Take your time. I want to hear this.”

“My dad had an old lard tin he kept his dinner in,” Jud said, “and he come in through the gate swingin it, empty, by the handle, you know. Whisflin somethin.

It was gettin dark, but he seen me there in the gloom and he says, ‘Hi there, Judkins!’ like he would do, and then, ‘Where’s your-’ “He got that far, and then here comes Spot out of the dark, not runnin like he usually did, ready to jump all over him he was so glad to see him, but just walkin, waggin his tail, and my dad dropped that lard bucket and stepped back. I don’t know b’what he would have turned tail and run except his back hit the picket fence and then he just stood there, looking at the dog. And when Spot did jump up, Dad just caught his paws and held them, like you might hold a lady’s hands you was gettin ready to dance with. He looked at the dog for a long time and then he looked at me, and he said, ‘He needs a bath, Jud. He stinks of the ground you buried him in. ’ And then he went in the house.”

“What did you do?” Louis asked.

“Gave him another bath. He just sat there in the tub and took it again. And when I went in the house, my mother had gone to bed, even though it wasn’t even nine o’clock. My dad said, ‘We got to talk, Judkins. ’ And I set down across from him, and he talked to me like a man for the first time in my life with the smell of the honeysuckle coming across the road from what’s your house now and the smell of the wild roses from our own house.”

Jud Crandall sighed. “I had always thought it would be good to have him talk to me that way, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t a bit good. All this tonight, Louis-it’s like when you look into a mirror that’s been set up right across from another mirror, and you can see yourself going down a whole hail of mirrors. How many times has this story been passed along, I wonder? A story that’s just the same, except for the names? And that’s like the sex thing too, isn’t it?”

“Your dad knew all about it.”

“Ayuh. ‘Who took you up there, Jud?’ he asked me, and I told him. He just nodded like it was what he would have expected. I guess it prob’ly was, although I found out later that there were six or eight people in Ludlow at that time that could have taken me up there. I guess he knew that Stanny B. was the only one crazy enough to have actually done it.”

“Did you ask him why he didn’t take you, Jud?”

“I did,” Jud said. “Somewhere during that long talk I did ask him that. And he said it was a bad place, by and large, and that it didn’t often do anything good for people who had lost their animals or for the animals themselves. He asked me if I liked Spot the way he was, and do you know, Louis, I had the hardest time answering that… and it’s important that I tell you my feelings on that, because sooner or later you’re going to ask me why I led you up there with your daughter’s cat if it was a bad thing to do. Isn’t that so?”