Tarpaulin

The tarpaulin first appears as a practical item in Louis Creed's preparations for the grave robbing that will set the novel's final tragedy in motion. At the hardware store in Brewer, Louis buys "a canvas tarpaulin, maybe eight by eight" along with a pick, shovel, and other tools, telling the clerk he has "a septic tank to dig up" . This lie masks his true purpose: to exhume his son Gage's body from Pleasantview Cemetery and carry it to the Micmac burying ground beyond the Pet Sematary.

Wrapping the Dead

After Louis wrestles Gage's body from the coffin, he lays the corpse on the tarpaulin and wraps it up, cinching the bundle with long strips of strapping tape and then cutting a length of rope in two to tie off the ends neatly . The tarpaulin transforms the broken, stitched body into a manageable, anonymous roll — "once more he might have had a rolled-up rug, no more" — allowing Louis to carry his son through the night without the horror of direct contact. Later, after the resurrected Gage has murdered Rachel, Louis returns to the house and takes a sheet from the bed to wrap his wife's body . The tarpaulin itself is not used for Rachel, but the sheet serves the same function: a shroud that both conceals and preserves the dead for the journey back to the burying ground.

A Shroud Between Worlds

The tarpaulin's role is not merely practical; it becomes a symbol of the liminal space between death and the unnatural return Louis seeks. When he carries the wrapped bundle through Little God Swamp, the canvas makes "stutter gunshot sounds like a lifted sail" in the wind , a noise that marks his passage into the supernatural territory of the Wendigo. The tarpaulin is the barrier that keeps the decay and horror of the corpse at a distance, yet it also enables the blasphemous act of transporting the dead to a place where they might rise again. In the end, after Louis has killed the resurrected Gage and set fire to Jud's house, he takes Rachel's body — wrapped in a sheet, not the tarpaulin — and walks into the woods, carrying her toward the same burial ground . The tarpaulin, like the sheet, is a shroud that cannot hold the dead; it is a temporary covering for bodies that the Micmac ground will soon reclaim and corrupt.