Ben buries Jimmy and the Petrie family

Ben Mears buries Jimmy Cody and the Petrie family after the destruction of Jerusalem’s Lot, transforming a practical recovery of bodies into the last clear act of human responsibility in the abandoned town. The burial follows the destruction of Kurt Barlow and the collapse of the community’s ordinary social order. It also marks Ben’s movement from fighting to preserve the town toward accepting that the town can no longer be saved.

Bodies Left Behind

Ben first returns to the cellar to retrieve Jimmy’s body. The trip is especially difficult because Jimmy’s coffin is empty except for the stake and the remains of Kurt Barlow: Barlow’s teeth, which twist in Ben’s hand “like tiny white animals,” are all that remain of the vampire. Ben scatters them in disgust, but the discovery does not bring uncomplicated relief. His plea that this be “the end of him” reveals how thoroughly the struggle has exhausted him and how uncertain any victory over evil still feels.

Ben then manages to remove Jimmy from the cellar. Jimmy is still bundled in Eva Miller’s drapes, an improvised covering that emphasizes both the urgency of the escape and the absence of any functioning civic or religious funeral structure. The body is not carried into a church, hospital, or formal morgue. It is transported in Jimmy’s Buick, while the pick and shovel rest beside Jimmy’s black medical bag, so that the instruments of care and the instruments of burial travel together.

The Grave Beside Taggart Stream

Ben drives to the Petrie house and chooses a wooded clearing behind it, close to the babble of Taggart Stream. There he digs a grave four feet deep. Into it he places Jimmy’s body and the Petries, who remain wrapped in the sofa dustcover. The setting is secluded rather than ceremonial, but it is not arbitrary: the grave lies near the home from which the Petrie family has been torn and beside moving water that supplies the scene with a subdued continuity beyond the ruined town.

The physical labor is prolonged and exacting. Ben spends the rest of the morning and half the afternoon digging a wide grave, then begins filling it at two-thirty as the light drains from the cloudy sky. He shovels faster and faster, and sweat gathers on his skin from exertion and from the emotional pressure of the task. The grave is filled by four o’clock, and Ben tamps down the sods as well as he can. This hurried burial cannot restore the dead or reproduce a normal funeral, but its depth, labor, and deliberate covering prevent the bodies from being abandoned to the vampire-haunted landscape.

A Failed Return to Ordinary Life

After finishing the grave, Ben drives back toward town with the earth-clotted pick and shovel in the trunk of Jimmy’s car. He parks in front of the Excellent Café and leaves the keys in the ignition, an action that quietly abandons the vehicle and signals the collapse of ownership, business, and civic routine. The town’s familiar landmarks remain, but their meanings have emptied out. The deserted business buildings seem to lean over the street; the Municipal Building has its shades drawn; and a “Be back soon” sign in Larry Crockett’s office has become hollow rather than reassuring.

The little park where Ben met Susan Norton is empty and forlorn. That detail links the burial to the life Ben had hoped to recover in Jerusalem’s Lot: the town was once a place of meetings, courtship, conversation, and remembered community, but the place now preserves only the shells of those activities. Rain falls softly, “as if in mourning,” while Ben walks toward Railroad Street with his heels clicking on the sidewalk. The sounds are small and exposed against the silence, making his passage resemble a farewell procession without mourners.

Recognition and Departure

At Eva Miller’s, Ben pauses beside his car and looks around for the last time. Nothing moves. Only then does he know with certainty that the town is dead, just as he had known Miranda was dead when he saw her shoe lying in the road. The comparison makes the town’s condition personal and bodily: Jerusalem’s Lot is not merely damaged, evacuated, or temporarily silent, but experienced as a dead presence whose remaining structures cannot conceal its finality.

Ben begins to cry and is still crying when he drives past the Elks sign announcing, “You are now leaving Jerusalem’s Lot, a nice little town. Come again!” The sign’s cheerful civic language becomes an ironic epitaph. His departure follows directly from the burial: after granting Jimmy and the Petries a grave, Ben can no longer pretend that the town remains a recoverable home. The act therefore closes two processes at once—the care of the dead and Ben’s severance from the place that produced the catastrophe.

Meaning Within the Town’s History

The burial gains additional force from Jerusalem’s Lot’s long habit of preserving violence through fragments, rumor, and incomplete knowledge. The town was incorporated in 1765 and celebrated its bicentennial with fireworks and a pageant, yet its history also contains older and darker absences. The Marsten House’s scandal and violence have been transmitted from generation to generation, and records of four children disappearing between 1928 and 1939 leave the town with mysteries that were never resolved. Local people know portions of old crimes, but not their causes or hidden circumstances.

That pattern reaches its most intimate form in the burial. Ben knows exactly whom he is burying and why they died, yet he cannot give them a public ceremony or restore the social world that would have received them. He can only assemble bodies, dig earth, and cover them before nightfall. His action opposes the town’s older concealments: instead of leaving the dead as rumors, missing persons, or unmarked remnants, he names the loss through physical labor. The grave is modest and hurried, but it is an assertion that the victims were people rather than material for the town’s next legend.

The scene also reverses Jerusalem’s Lot’s earlier confidence that nothing truly terrible could happen there. The town had treated national wars, deaths, and crises as distant information, while time seemed to move according to a safer local schedule. By the end, the familiar roads and civic signs remain in place, but the community has become an emptied landscape. Ben’s burial is the final humane gesture within that landscape, and his tears acknowledge both the deaths of individuals and the death of the town itself.