by Stephen King
“Yes,” Rosa said. “Yes, all right. Come on, Zee.” She reached out and took Zalia’s hand. “Help me be the bearer of glad tidings.”
Seventeen
The two women crossed the road, making a wide berth around the tumbled, bloody remains of the poor Slightman lad. Zalia thought that most of what was left of him was only held together by his clothes, and shivered to think of the father’s grief.
The young man’s shor’leg lady-sai was at the far north end of the ditch, examining the bodies of the Wolves scattered there. She found one where the little revolving thing hadn’t been entirely shot off, and was still trying to turn. The Wolf’s green-gloved hands shivered uncontrollably in the dust, as if with palsy. While Rosa and Zalia watched, Susannah picked up a largish chunk of rock and, cool as a night in Wide Earth, brought it down on the remains of the thinking-cap. The Wolf stilled immediately. The low hum that had been coming from it stopped.
“We go to tell the others, Susannah,” Rosa said. “But first we want to tell thee well-done. How we do love thee, say true!”
Zalia nodded. “We say thankya, Susannah of New York. We say thankya more big-big than could ever be told.”
“Yar, say true,” Rosa agreed.
The lady-sai looked up at them and smiled sweetly. For a moment Rosalita looked a little doubtful, as if maybe she saw something in that dark-brown face that she shouldn’t. Saw that Susannah Dean was no longer here, for instance. Then the expression of doubt was gone. “We go with good news, Susannah,” said she.
“Wish you joy of it,” said Mia, daughter of none. “Bring them back as you will. Tell them the danger here’s over, and let those who don’t believe count the dead.”
“The legs of your pants are wet, do ya,” Zalia said.
Mia nodded gravely. Another contraction had turned her belly to a stone, but she gave no sign. “ ’Tis blood, I’m afraid.” She nodded toward the headless body of the big rancher’s wife. “Hers.”
The women started down through the corn, hand-in-hand. Mia watched Roland, Eddie, and Jake cross the road toward her. This would be the dangerous time, right here. Yet perhaps not too dangerous, after all; Susannah’s friends looked dazed in the aftermath of the battle. If she seemed a little off her feed, perhaps they would think the same of her.
She thought mostly it would be a matter of waiting her opportunity. Waiting…and then slipping away. In the meantime, she rode the contraction of her belly like a boat riding a high wave.
They’ll know where you went, a voice whispered. It wasn’t a head-voice but a belly-voice. The voice of the chap. And that voice spoke true.
Take the ball with you, the voice told her. Take it with you when you go. Leave them no door to follow you through.
Aye.
Eighteen
The Ruger cracked out a single shot and a horse died.
From below the road, from the rice, came a rising roar of joy that was not quite disbelieving. Zalia and Rosa had given their good news. Then a shrill cry of grief cut through the mingled voices of happiness. They had given the bad, as well.
Jake Chambers sat on the wheel of the overturned waggon. He had unharnessed the three horses that were okay. The fourth had been lying with two broken legs, foaming helplessly through its teeth and looking to the boy for help. The boy had given it. Now he sat staring at his dead friend. Benny’s blood was soaking into the road. The hand on the end of Benny’s arm lay palm-up, as if the dead boy wanted to shake hands with God. What God? According to current rumor, the top of the Dark Tower was empty.
From Lady Oriza’s rice came a second scream of grief. Which had been Slightman, which Vaughn Eisenhart? At a distance, Jake thought, you couldn’t tell the rancher from the foreman, the employer from the employee. Was there a lesson there, or was it what Ms. Avery, back at good old Piper, would have called FEAR, false evidence appearing real?
The palm pointing up to the brightening sky, that was certainly real.
Now the folken began to sing. Jake recognized the song. It was a new version of the one Roland had sung on their first night in Calla Bryn Sturgis.
“Come-come-commala
Rice come a-falla
I-sissa ’ay a-bralla
Dey come a-folla
We went to a-rivva
’Riza did us kivva…”
The rice swayed with the passage of the singing folken, swayed as if it were dancing for their joy, as Roland had danced for them that torchlit night. Some came with babbies in their arms, and even so burdened, they swayed from side to side. We all danced this morning, Jake thought. He didn’t know what he meant, only that it was a true thought. The dance we do. The only one we know. Benny Slightman? Died dancing. Sai Eisenhart, too.
Roland and Eddie came over to him; Susannah, too, but she hung back a bit, as if deciding that, at least for the time being, the boys should be with the boys. Roland was smoking, and Jake nodded at it.
“Roll me one of those, would you?”
Roland turned in Susannah’s direction, eyebrows raised. She shrugged, then nodded. Roland rolled Jake a cigarette, gave it to him, then scratched a match on the seat of his pants and lit it. Jake sat on the waggon wheel, taking the smoke in occasional puffs, holding it in his mouth, then letting it out. His mouth filled up with spit. He didn’t mind. Unlike some things, spit could be got rid of. He made no attempt to inhale.
Roland looked down the hill, where the first of the two running men was just entering the corn. “That’s Slightman,” he said. “Good.”
“Why good, Roland?” Eddie asked.
“Because sai Slightman will have accusations to make,” Roland said. “In his grief, he isn’t going to care who hears them, or what his extraordinary knowledge might say about his part in this morning’s work.”
“Dance,” Jake said.
They turned to look at him. He sat pale and thoughtful on the waggon-wheel, holding his cigarette. “This morning’s dance,” he said.
Roland appeared to consider this, then nodded. “His part in this morning’s dance. If he gets here soon enough, we may be able to quiet him. If not, his son’s death is only going to be the start of Ben Slightman’s commala.”
Nineteen
Slightman was almost fifteen years younger than the rancher, and arrived at the site of the battle well before the other. For a moment he only stood on the far edge of the hide, considering the shattered body lying in the road. There was not so much blood, now—the oggan had drunk it greedily—but the severed arm still lay where it had been, and the severed arm told all. Roland would no more have moved it before Slightman got here than he would have opened his flies and pissed on the boy’s corpse. Slightman the Younger had reached the clearing at the end of his path. His father, as next of kin, had a right to see where and how it had happened.
The man stood quiet for perhaps five seconds, then pulled in a deep breath and let it out in a shriek. It chilled Eddie’s blood. He looked around for Susannah and saw she was no longer there. He didn’t blame her for ducking out. This was a bad scene. The worst.
Slightman looked left, looked right, then looked straight ahead and saw Roland, standing beside the overturned waggon with his arms crossed. Beside him, Jake still sat on the wheel, smoking his first cigarette.
“YOU!” Slightman screamed. He was carrying his bah; now he unslung it. “YOU DID THIS! YOU!”
Eddie plucked the weapon deftly from Slightman’s hands. “No, you don’t, partner,” he murmured. “You don’t need this right now, why don’t you let me keep it for you.”
Slightman seemed not to notice. Incredibly, his right hand still made circular motions in the air, as if winding the bah for a shot.
“YOU KILLED MY SON! TO PAY ME BACK! YOU BASTARD! MURDERING BAS—”
Moving with the eerie, spooky speed that Eddie could still not completely believe, Roland seized Slightman around the neck in the crook of one arm, then yanked him forward. The move simultaneo
usly cut off the flow of the man’s accusations and drew him close.
“Listen to me,” Roland said, “and listen well. I care nothing for your life or honor, one’s been misspent and the other’s long gone, but your son is dead and about his honor I care very much. If you don’t shut up this second, you worm of creation, I’ll shut you up myself. So what would you? It’s nothing to me, either way. I’ll tell em you ran mad at the sight of him, stole my gun out of its holster, and put a bullet in your own head to join him. What would you have? Decide.”
Eisenhart was badly blown but still lurching and weaving his way up through the corn, hoarsely calling his wife’s name: “Margaret! Margaret! Answer me, dear! Gi’ me a word, I beg ya, do!”
Roland let go of Slightman and looked at him sternly. Slightman turned his awful eyes to Jake. “Did your dinh kill my boy in order to be revenged on me? Tell me the truth, soh.”
Jake took a final puff on his cigarette and cast it away. The butt lay smoldering in the dirt next to the dead horse. “Did you even look at him?” he asked Benny’s Da’. “No bullet ever made could do that. Sai Eisenhart’s head fell almost on top of him and Benny crawled out of the ditch from the…the horror of it.” It was a word, he realized, that he had never used out loud. Had never needed to use out loud. “They threw two of their sneetches at him. I got one, but…” He swallowed. There was a click in his throat. “The other…I would have, you ken…I tried, but…” His face was working. His voice was breaking apart. Yet his eyes were dry. And somehow as terrible as Slightman’s. “I never had a chance at the other’n,” he finished, then lowered his head and began to sob.
Roland looked at Slightman, his eyebrows raised.
“All right,” Slightman said. “I see how ’twas. Yar. Tell me, were he brave until then? Tell me, I beg.”
“He and Jake brought back one of that pair,” Eddie said, gesturing to the Tavery twins. “The boy half. He got his foot caught in a hole. Jake and Benny pulled him out, then carried him. Nothing but guts, your boy. Side to side and all the way through the middle.”
Slightman nodded. He took the spectacles off his face and looked at them as if he had never seen them before. He held them so, before his eyes, for a second or two, then dropped them onto the road and crushed them beneath one bootheel. He looked at Roland and Jake almost apologetically. “I believe I’ve seen all I need to,” he said, and then went to his son.
Vaughn Eisenhart emerged from the corn. He saw his wife and gave a bellow. Then he tore open his shirt and began pounding his right fist above his flabby left breast, crying her name each time he did it.
“Oh, man,” Eddie said. “Roland, you ought to stop that.”
“Not I,” said the gunslinger.
Slightman took his son’s severed arm and planted a kiss in the palm with a tenderness Eddie found nearly unbearable. He put the arm on the boy’s chest, then walked back toward them. Without the glasses, his face looked naked and somehow unformed. “Jake, would you help me find a blanket?”
Jake got off the waggon wheel to help him find what he needed. In the uncovered trench that had been the hide, Eisenhart was cradling his wife’s burnt head to his chest, rocking it. From the corn, approaching, came the children and their minders, singing “The Rice Song.” At first Eddie thought that what he was hearing from town must be an echo of that singing, and then he realized it was the rest of the Calla. They knew. They had heard the singing, and they knew. They were coming.
Pere Callahan stepped out of the field with Lia Jaffords cradled in his arms. In spite of the noise, the little girl was asleep. Callahan looked at the heaps of dead Wolves, took one hand from beneath the little girl’s bottom, and drew a slow, trembling cross in the air.
“God be thanked,” he said.
Roland went to him and took the hand that had made the cross. “Put one on me,” he said.
Callahan looked at him, uncomprehending.
Roland nodded to Vaughn Eisenhart. “That one promised I’d leave town with his curse on me if harm came to his wife.”
He could have said more, but there was no need. Callahan understood, and signed the cross on Roland’s brow. The fingernail trailed a warmth behind it that Roland felt a long time. And although Eisenhart never kept his promise, the gunslinger was never sorry that he’d asked the Pere for that extra bit of protection.
Twenty
What followed was a confused jubilee there on the East Road, mingled with grief for the two who had fallen. Yet even the grief had a joyful light shining through it. No one seemed to feel that the losses were in any way equal to the gains. And Eddie supposed that was true. If it wasn’t your wife or your son who had fallen, that was.
The singing from town drew closer. Now they could see rising dust. In the road, men and women embraced. Someone tried to take Margaret Eisenhart’s head away from her husband, who for the time being refused to let it go.
Eddie drifted over to Jake.
“Never saw Star Wars, did you?” he asked.
“No, told you. I was going to, but—”
“You left too soon. I know. Those things they were swinging—Jake, they were from that movie.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. And the Wolves…Jake, the Wolves themselves…”
Jake was nodding, very slowly. Now they could see the people from town. The newcomers saw the children—all the children, still here and still safe—and raised a cheer. Those in the forefront began to run. “I know.”
“Do you?” Eddie asked. His eyes were almost pleading. “Do you really? Because…man, it’s so crazy—”
Jake looked at the heaped Wolves. The green hoods. The gray leggings. The black boots. The snarling, decomposing faces. Eddie had already pulled one of those rotting metal faces away and looked at what was beneath it. Nothing but smooth metal, plus lenses that served as eyes, a round mesh grille that doubtless served as a nose, two sprouted microphones at the temples for ears. No, all the personality these things had was in the masks and clothing they wore.
“Crazy or not, I know what they are, Eddie. Or where they come from, at least. Marvel Comics.”
A look of sublime relief filled Eddie’s face. He bent and kissed Jake on the cheek. A ghost of a smile touched the boy’s mouth. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
“The Spider-Man books,” Eddie said. “When I was a kid I couldn’t get enough of those things.”
“I didn’t buy em myself,” Jake said, “but Timmy Mucci down at Mid-Town Lanes used to have a terrible jones for the Marvel mags. Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America, all of em. These guys…”
“They look like Dr. Doom,” Eddie said.
“Yeah,” Jake said. “It’s not exact, I’m sure the masks were modified to make them look a little more like wolves, but otherwise…same green hoods, same green cloaks. Yeah, Dr. Doom.”
“And the sneetches,” Eddie said. “Have you ever heard of Harry Potter?”
“I don’t think so. Have you?”
“No, and I’ll tell you why. Because the sneetches are from the future. Maybe from some Marvel comic book that’ll come out in 1990 or 1995. Do you see what I’m saying?”
Jake nodded.
“It’s all nineteen, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Nineteen, ninety-nine, and nineteen-ninety-nine.”
Eddie glanced around. “Where’s Suze?”
“Probably went after her chair,” Jake said. But before either of them could explore the question of Susannah Dean’s where-abouts any further (and by then it was probably too late, anyway), the first of the folken from town arrived. Eddie and Jake were swept into a wild, impromptu celebration—hugged, kissed, shaken by the hand, laughed over, wept over, thanked and thanked and thanked.
Twenty-One
Ten minutes after the main body of the townsfolk arrived, Rosalita reluctantly approached Roland. The gunslinger was extremely glad to see her. Eben Too
k had taken him by the arms and was telling him—over and over again, endlessly, it seemed—how wrong he and Telford had been, how utterly and completely wrong, and how when Roland and his ka-tet were ready to move on, Eben Took would outfit them from stem to stern and not a penny would they pay.
“Roland!” Rosa said.
Roland excused himself and took her by the arm, leading her a little way up the road. The Wolves had been scattered everywhere and were now being mercilessly looted of their possessions by the laughing, deliriously happy folken. Stragglers were arriving every minute.
“Rosa, what is it?”
“It’s your lady,” Rosa said. “Susannah.”
“What of her?” Roland asked. Frowning, he looked around. He didn’t see Susannah, couldn’t remember when he had last seen her. When he’d given Jake the cigarette? That long ago? He thought so. “Where is she?”
“That’s just it,” Rosa said. “I don’t know. So I peeked into the waggon she came in, thinking that perhaps she’d gone in there to rest. That perhaps she felt faint or gut-sick, do ya. But she’s not there. And Roland…her chair is gone.”
“Gods!” Roland snarled, and slammed his fist against his leg. “Oh, gods!”
Rosalita took a step back from him, alarmed.
“Where’s Eddie?” Roland asked.
She pointed. Eddie was so deep in a cluster of admiring men and women that Roland didn’t think he would have seen him, but for the child riding on his shoulders; it was Heddon Jaffords, an enormous grin on his face.
“Are you sure you want to disturb him?” Rosa asked timidly. “May be she’s just gone off a bit, to pull herself back together.”
Gone off a bit, Roland thought. He could feel a blackness filling his heart. His sinking heart. She’d gone off a bit, all right. And he knew who had stepped in to take her place. Their attention had wandered in the aftermath of the fight…Jake’s grief…the congratulations of the folken…the confusion and the joy and the singing…but that was no excuse.
“Gunslingers!” he roared, and the jubilant crowd quieted at once. Had he cared to look, he could have seen the fear that lay just beneath their relief and adulation. It would not have been new to him; they were always afraid of those who came wearing the hard calibers. What they wanted of such when the shooting was done was to give them a final meal, perhaps a final gratitude-fuck, then send them on their way and pick up their own peaceful farming-tools once more.