by Stephen King
“He demanded to, but I refused and sent him hence. At first he declined to go, but I showed him my knife and told him there were other weapons in Serenity, aye, and women who knew how to use them. One, I said, was a gun. I reminded him he was deep inside the haci, and suggested that, unless he could fly, he had better take heed. He did, but before he went he cursed me, and he cursed this place.” She hesitated, stroked the cat, then looked up at me. “There was a time when I thought perhaps the skin-man was his work.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Nor I, but neither of us will ever be entirely sure, will we?” The cat tried to climb into the vast playground of her lap, and Everlynne shooed it away. “Of one thing I am sure: he spoke to her anyway, although whether through the window of her cell late at night or only in her troubled dreams, no one will ever know. That secret she took with her into the clearing, poor woman.”
To this I did not reply. When one is amazed and heartsick, it’s usually best to say nothing, for in that state, any word will be the wrong word.
“Your lady-mother quit her retirement with us shortly after we turned this Broadcloak fellow around. She said she had a duty to perform, and much to atone for. She said her son would come here. I asked her how she knew and she said, ‘Because ka is a wheel and it always turns.’ She left this for you.”
Everlynne opened one of the many drawers of her desk and removed an envelope. Written on the front was my name, in a hand I knew well. Only my father would have known it better. That hand had once turned the pages of a fine old book as she read me “The Wind Through the Keyhole.” Aye, and many others. I loved all the stories held in the pages that hand turned, but never so much as I loved the hand itself. Even more, I loved the sound of the voice that told them as the wind blew outside. Those were the days before she was mazed and fell into the sad bitchery that brought her under a gun in another hand. My gun, my hand.
Everlynne rose, smoothing her large apron. “I must go and see how things are advancing in other parts of my little kingdom. I’ll bid you goodbye now, Roland, son of Gabrielle, only asking that you pull the door shut when you go. It will lock itself.”
“You trust me with your things?” I asked.
She laughed, came around the desk, and kissed me again. “Gunslinger, I’d trust you with my life,” said she, and left. She was so tall she had to duck her head when she went through the door.
* * *
I sat looking at Gabrielle Deschain’s last missive for a long time. My heart was full of hate and love and regret—all those things that have haunted me ever since. I considered burning it, unread, but at last I tore the envelope open. Inside was a single sheet of paper. The lines were uneven, and the pigeon-ink in which they had been written was blotted in many places. I believe the woman who wrote those lines was struggling to hold onto a few last shreds of sanity. I’m not sure many would have understood her words, but I did. I’m sure my father would have, as well, but I never showed it to him or told him of it.
The feast I ate was rotten
what I thought was a palace was a dungeon
how it burns Roland
I thought of Wegg, dying of snakebite.
If I go back and tell what I know
what I overheard
Gilead may yet be saved a few years
you may be saved a few years
your father little that he ever cared for me
The words “little that he ever cared for me” had been crossed out with a series of heavy lines, but I could read them anyway.
he says I dare not
he says “Bide at Serenity until death finds you.”
he says “If you go back death will find you early.”
he says “Your death will destroy the only one in the world
for whom you care.”
he says “Would you die at your brat’s hand and see
every goodness
every kindness
every loving thought
poured out of him like water from a dipper?
for Gilead that cared for you little
and will die anyway?”
But I must go back. I have prayed on it
and meditated on it
and the voice I hear always speaks the same words:
THIS IS WHAT KA DEMANDS
There was a little more, words I traced over and over during my wandering years after the disastrous battle at Jericho Hill and the fall of Gilead. I traced them until the paper fell apart and I let the wind take it—the wind that blows through time’s keyhole, ye ken. In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn’t it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.
I stayed in Everlynne’s office until I had myself under control. Then I put my mother’s last word—her dead-letter—in my purse and left, making sure the door locked behind me. I found Jamie and we rode to town. That night there were lights and music and dancing; many good things to eat and plenty of liquor to wash it down with. There were women, too, and that night Silent Jamie left his virginity behind him. The next morning . . .
STORM’S OVER
1
“That night,” Roland said, “there were lights and music and dancing; many good things to eat and plenty of liquor to wash it down with.”
“Booze,” Eddie said, and heaved a seriocomic sigh. “I remember it well.”
It was the first thing any of them had said in a very long time, and it broke the spell that had held them through that long and windy night. They stirred like people awaking from a deep dream. All except Oy, who still lay on his back in front of the fireplace with his short paws splayed and the tip of his tongue lolling comically from the side of his mouth.
Roland nodded. “There were women, too, and that night Silent Jamie left his virginity behind him. The next morning we reboarded Sma’ Toot, and made our way back to Gilead. And so it happened, once upon a bye.”
“Long before my grandfather’s grandfather was born,” Jake said in a low voice.
“Of that I can’t say,” Roland said with a slight smile, and then took a long drink of water. His throat was very dry.
For a moment there was silence among them. Then Eddie said, “Thank you, Roland. That was boss.”
The gunslinger raised an eyebrow.
“He means it was wonderful,” Jake said. “It was, too.”
“I see light around the boards we put over the windows,” Susannah said. “Just a little, but it’s there. You talked down the dark, Roland. I guess you’re not the strong silent Gary Cooper type after all, are you?”
“I don’t know who that is.”
She took his hand and gave it a brief hard squeeze. “Ne’mine, sugar.”
“Wind’s dropped, but it’s still blowing pretty hard,” Jake observed.
“We’ll build up the fire, then sleep,” the gunslinger said. “This afternoon it should be warm enough for us to go out and gather more wood. And tomorrowday . . .”
“Back on the road,” Eddie finished.
“As you say, Eddie.”
Roland put the last of their fuel on the guttering fire, watched as it sprang up again, then lay down and closed his eyes. Seconds later, he was asleep.
Eddie gathered Susannah into his arms, then looked over her shoulder at Jake, who was sitting cross-legged and looking into the fire. “Time to catch forty winks, little trailhand.”
“Don’t call me that. You know I hate it.”
“Okay, buckaroo.”
Jake gave him the finger. Eddie smiled and closed his eyes.
The boy gathered his blanket around him. My shaddie, he thought, and smiled. Beyond the walls, the wind still moaned—a voice without a body. Jake thought, It’s on the other side of the keyhole. And over there, where the wind comes from? All of eternity. And the Dark Tower.
He thought of the boy Roland Deschain had been an unknown number of years ago, lying in a circular bedroom at the top of a stone tower.
Tucked up cozy and listening to his mother read the old tales while the wind blew across the dark land. As he drifted, Jake saw the woman’s face and thought it kind as well as beautiful. His own mother had never read him stories. In his plot and place, that had been the housekeeper’s job.
He closed his eyes and saw billy-bumblers on their hind legs, dancing in the moonlight.
He slept.
2
When Roland woke in the early afternoon, the wind was down to a whisper and the room was much brighter. Eddie and Jake were still deeply asleep, but Susannah had awakened, boosted herself into her wheelchair, and removed the boards blocking one of the windows. Now she sat there with her chin propped on her hand, looking out. Roland went to her and put his own hand on her shoulder. Susannah reached up and patted it without turning around.
“Storm’s over, sugar.”
“Yes. Let’s hope we never see another like it.”
“And if we do, let’s hope there’s a shelter as good as this one close by. As for the rest of Gook village . . .” She shook her head.
Roland bent a little to look out. What he saw didn’t surprise him, but it was what Eddie would have called awesome. The high street was still there, but it was full of branches and shattered trees. The buildings that had lined it were gone. Only the stone meeting hall remained.
“We were lucky, weren’t we?”
“Luck’s the word those with poor hearts use for ka, Susannah of New York.”
She considered this without speaking. The last breezes of the dying starkblast came through the hole where the window had been and stirred the tight cap of her hair, as if some invisible hand were stroking it. Then she turned to him. “She left Serenity and went back to Gilead—your lady-mother.”
“Yes.”
“Even though the sonofabitch told her she’d die at her own son’s hand?”
“I doubt if he put it just that way, but . . . yes.”
“It’s no wonder she was half-crazy when she wrote that letter.”
Roland was silent, looking out the window at the destruction the storm had brought. Yet they had found shelter. Good shelter from the storm.
She took his three-fingered right hand in both of hers. “What did she say at the end? What were the words you traced over and over until her letter fell apart? Can you tell me?”
He didn’t answer for a long time. Just when she was sure he wouldn’t, he did. In his voice—almost undetectable, but most certainly there—was a tremor Susannah had never heard before. “She wrote in the low speech until the last line. That she wrote in the High, each character beautifully drawn: I forgive you everything. And: Can you forgive me?”
Susannah felt a single tear, warm and perfectly human, run down her cheek. “And could you, Roland? Did you?”
Still looking out the window, Roland of Gilead—son of Steven and Gabrielle, she of Arten that was—smiled. It broke upon his face like the first glow of sunrise on a rocky landscape. He spoke a single world before going back to his gunna to build them an afternoon breakfast.
The word was yes.
3
They spent one more night in the meeting hall. There was fellowship and palaver, but no stories. The following morning they gathered their gunna and continued along the Path of the Beam—to Calla Bryn Sturgis, and the borderlands, and Thunderclap, and the Dark Tower beyond. These are things that happened, once upon a bye.
AFTERWORD
In the High Speech, Gabrielle Deschain’s final message to her son looks like this:
The two most beautiful words in any language are : I forgive.
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