Pick and shovel

The pick and shovel are the instruments through which Louis Creed's grief transforms into action, the mundane tools that bridge the ordinary world and the unspeakable. Purchased at Watson's Hardware in Brewer on the day after his son's funeral, they are the concrete equipment of a planned desecration. Louis buys a short-handled shovel and a long-handled spade alongside a pick, a heavy flashlight, work gloves, rope, and a canvas tarpaulin, telling the clerk he needs them to dig up a septic tank in violation of zoning ordinances. The lie is thin, but the clerk accepts it, and Louis carries the tools out in a single bundle, already committed to the night's wild work.

The Exhumation

At Pleasantview Cemetery, the shovel proves essential for the first stage of the labor. The ground of Gage's freshly filled grave is soft, and Louis digs with a steady, desperate rhythm, throwing the dirt to the left of the hole. The spade's blade grits across the concrete of the grave liner, and Louis uses the pick only as a contingency, finding the earth forgiving enough without it. He threads a rope through the iron rings of the segmented grave-liner top and hauls the concrete slab upright, then bends to lift the second half himself. When he opens the coffin, the smell of decay and embalming fluid hits him, and he vomits. But he does not stop. He uses the spade not to dig further but to smash the coffin's latch, swinging it in a blind fury until the wood splinters and the blade is bent and scarred. The shovel becomes a weapon against the coffin itself, an expression of rage against the box that holds his son.

The Reburial

After wrapping Gage's body in the tarpaulin, Louis carries the tools and the body out of the cemetery, climbing the wrought-iron fence and crossing to his car. He drives to Ludlow and begins the long walk up the path to the Pet Sematary and beyond, the pick and shovel slung over his back in a rope sling. At the Micmac burying ground, the soil is thin and stony, exactly as Jud Crandall had warned. Here the pick becomes the primary tool. Louis swings it again and again, each blow sending sparks from the rocks, the vibration traveling up the wooden haft into his blistered hands. He alternates between the pick to loosen the hard earth and the shovel to scoop it out, building a grave deep enough to hold his son. The work is brutal and slow, and by the time he finishes, his hands are bloody and his body is wrecked with exhaustion. He uses the shovel to scrape the last of the dirt back into the hole, then piles rocks into a cairn with his bare hands, the tools now silent witnesses to the completed obscenity.

The Final Journey

After Gage returns as a murderous thing and Louis kills him again, after Rachel is also dead, Louis takes up the pick and shovel one last time. He carries his wife's body, wrapped in a sheet, up the same path, through the Pet Sematary, and over the deadfall. Steve Masterton sees him from a distance, his hair turned white, and calls out. Louis turns back and asks for help, saying the soil up there is very stony and he will have to dig with his bare hands. He does not mention the pick and shovel, but they are with him, the tools of his damnation, as he disappears into the deep woods to bury Rachel in the same cursed ground where he buried his son.