Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7)

by Stephen King

  Before beginning his wood-gathering chore, Roland inspected the bank of the icy stream and dug out a piece of rock. He handed it to her, and Susannah rubbed a thumb over its milky, water-smoothed surface. “Quartz?” she asked, but she didn’t think it was. Not quite.

  “I don’t know that word, Susannah. We call it chert. It makes tools that are primitive but plenty useful: axe-heads, knives, skewers, scrapers. It’s scrapers we’ll want. Also at least one hand-hammer.”

  “I know what we’re going to scrape, but what are we going to hammer?”

  “I’ll show you, but first will you join me here for a moment?” Roland got down on his knees and took her cold hand in one of his. Together they faced the deer’s head.

  “We thank you for what we are about to receive,” Roland told the head, and Susannah shivered. It was exactly how her father began when he was giving the grace before a big meal, one where all the family was gathered.

  Our own family is broken, she thought, but did not say; done was done. The response she gave was the one she had been taught as a young girl: “Father, we thank thee.”

  “Guide our hands and guide our hearts as we take life from death,” Roland said. Then he looked at her, eyebrows raised, asking without speaking a word if she had more to say.

  Susannah found that she did. “Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallow’d be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation; deliver us from evil; Thou art the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, now and forever.”

  “That’s a lovely prayer,” he said.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I didn’t say it just right—it’s been a long time—but it’s still the best prayer. Now let’s do our business, while I can still feel my hands.”

  Roland gave her an amen.

  SIX

  Roland took the severed head of the yearling deer (the antler-nubs made lifting it easy), set it in front of him, then swung the fist-sized chunk of rock against the skull. There was a muffled cracking sound that made Susannah’s stomach cringe. Roland gripped the antlers and pulled, first left and then right. When Susannah saw the way the broken skull wiggled under the hide, her stomach did more than cringe; it did a slow loop-the-loop.

  Roland hit twice more, wielding the piece of chert with near-surgical precision. Then he used his knife to cut a circle in the head-hide, which he pulled off like a cap. This revealed the cracked skull beneath. He worked the blade of his knife into the widest crack and used it as a lever. When the deer’s brain was exposed, he took it out, set it carefully aside, and looked at Susannah. “We’ll want the brains of every deer we killed, and that’s what we need a hammer for.”

  “Oh,” she said in a choked voice. “Brains.”

  “To make a tanning slurry. But there’s more use for chert than that. Look.” He showed her how to bang two chunks together until one or both shattered, leaving large, nearly even pieces instead of jagged lumps. She knew that metamorphic rocks broke that way, but schists and such were generally too weak to make good tools. This stuff was strong.

  “When you get chunks that break thick enough to hold on one side but thin to an edge on the other,” Roland said, “lay them by. Those will be our scrapers. If we had more time we could make handles, but we don’t. Our hands will be plenty sore by bedtime.”

  “How long do you think it will take to get enough scrapers?”

  “Not so long,” Roland said. “Chert breaks lucky, or so I used to hear.”

  While Roland dragged deadwood for a fire into a copse of mixed willows and alders by the edge of the frozen stream, Susannah inspected her way along the embankments, looking for chert. By the time she’d found a dozen large chunks, she had also located a granite boulder rising from the ground in a smooth, weather-worn curve. She thought it would make a fine anvil.

  The chert did indeed break lucky, and she had thirty potential scrapers by the time Roland was bringing back his third large load of firewood. He made a little pile of kindling which Susannah shielded with her hands. By then it was sleeting, and although they were working beneath a fairly dense clump of trees, she thought it wouldn’t be long before both of them were soaked.

  When the fire was lit, Roland went a few steps away, once more fell on his knees, and folded his hands.

  “Praying again?” she asked, amused.

  “What we learn in our childhood has a way of sticking,” he said. He closed his eyes for a few moments, then brought his clasped hands to his mouth and kissed them. The only word she heard him say was Gan. Then he opened his eyes and lifted his hands, spreading them and making a pretty gesture that looked to her like birds flying away. When he spoke again, his voice was dry and matter-of-fact: Mr. Taking-Care-of-Business. “That’s very well, then,” he said. “Let’s go to work.”

  SEVEN

  They made twine from grass, just as Mordred had done, and hung the first deer—the one already headless—by its back legs from the low branch of a willow. Roland used his knife to cut its belly open, then reached into the guts, rummaged, and removed two dripping red organs that she thought were kidneys.

  “These for fever and cough,” he said, and bit into the first one as if it were an apple. Susannah made a gurking noise and turned away to consider the stream until he was finished. When he was, she turned back and watched him cut circles around the hanging legs close to where they joined the body.

  “Are you any better?” she asked him uneasily.

  “I will be,” he said. “Now help me take the hide off this fellow. We’ll want the first one with the hair still on it—we need to make a bowl for our slurry. Now watch.”

  He worked his fingers into the place where the deer’s hide still clung to the body by the thin layer of fat and muscle beneath, then pulled. The hide tore easily to a point halfway down the deer’s midsection. “Now do your side, Susannah.”

  Getting her fingers underneath was the only hard part. This time they pulled together, and when they had the hide all the way down to the dangling forelegs, it vaguely resembled a shirt. Roland used his knife to cut it off, then began to dig in the ground a little way from the roaring fire but still beneath the shelter of the trees. She helped him, relishing the way the sweat rolled down her face and body. When they had a shallow bowl-shaped depression two feet across and eighteen inches deep, Roland lined it with the hide.

  All that afternoon they took turns skinning the eight other deer they had killed. It was important to do it as quickly as possible, for when the underlying layer of fat and muscle dried up, the work would become slower and harder. The gunslinger kept the fire burning high and hot, every now and then leaving her to rake ashes out onto the ground. When they had cooled enough so they would not burn holes in their bowl-liner, he pushed them into the hole they’d made. Susannah’s back and arms were aching fiercely by five o’clock, but she kept at it. Roland’s face, neck, and hands were comically smeared with ash.

  “You look like a fella in a minstrel show,” she said at one point. “Rastus Coon.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Nobody but the white folks’ fool,” she said. “Do you suppose Mordred’s out there, watching us work?” All day she’d kept an eye peeled for him.

  “No,” he said, pausing to rest. He brushed his hair back from his forehead, leaving a fresh smear and now making her think of penitents on Ash Wednesday. “I think he’s gone off to make his own kill.”

  “Mordred’s a-hungry,” she said. And then: “You can touch him a little, can’t you? At least enough to know if he’s here or if he’s gone.”

  Roland considered this, then said simply: “I’m his father.”

  EIGHT

  By dark, they had a large heap of deerskins and a pile of skinned, headless carcasses that surely would have been black with flies in warmer weather. They ate another huge meal of sizzling venison steaks, utterly delicious, and Susannah spared another tho
ught for Mordred, somewhere out in the dark, probably eating his own supper raw. He might have matches, but he wasn’t stupid; if they saw another fire in all this darkness, they would rush down upon it. And him. Then, bang-bang-bang, goodbye Spider-Boy. She felt a surprising amount of sympathy for him and told herself to beware of it. Certainly he would have felt none for either her or Roland, had the shoe been on the other foot.

  When they were done eating, Roland wiped his greasy fingers on his shirt and said, “That tasted fine.”

  “You got that right.”

  “Now let’s get the brains out. Then we’ll sleep.”

  “One at a time?” Susannah asked.

  “Yes — so far as I know, brains only come one to a customer.”

  For a moment she was too surprised at hearing Eddie’s phrase

  (one to a customer)

  coming from Roland’s mouth to realize he’d made a joke. Lame, yes, but a bona fide joke. Then she managed a token laugh. “Very funny, Roland. You know what I meant.”

  Roland nodded. “We’ll sleep one at a time and stand a watch, yes. I think that would be best.”

  Time and repetition had done its work; she’d now seen too many tumbling guts to feel squeamish about a few brains. They cracked heads, used Roland’s knife (its edge now dull) to pry open skulls, and removed the brains of their kill. These they put carefully aside, like a clutch of large gray eggs. By the time the last deer was debrained, Susannah’s fingers were so sore and swollen she could hardly bend them.

  “Lie over,” Roland said. “Sleep. I’ll take the first watch.”

  She didn’t argue. Given her full belly and the heat of the fire, she knew sleep would come quickly. She also knew that when she woke up tomorrow, she was going to be so stiff that even sitting up would be difficult and painful. Now, though, she didn’t care. A feeling of vast contentment filled her. Some of it was having eaten hot food, but by no means all. The greater part of her well-being stemmed from a day of hard work, no more or less than that. The sense that they were not just floating along but doing for themselves.

  Jesus, she thought, I think I’m becoming a Republican in my old age.

  Something else occurred to her then: how quiet it was. No sounds but the sough of the wind, the whispering sleet (now starting to abate), and the crackle of the blessed fire.

  “Roland?”

  He looked at her from his place by the fire, eyebrows raised.

  “You’ve stopped coughing.”

  He smiled and nodded. She took his smile down into sleep, but it was Eddie she dreamed of.

  NINE

  They stayed three days in the camp by the stream, and during that time Susannah learned more about making hide garments than she would ever have believed (and much more than she really wanted to know).

  By casting a mile or so in either direction along the stream they found a couple of logs, one for each of them. While they looked, they used their makeshift pot to soak their hides in a dark soup of ash and water. They set their logs at an angle against the trunks of two willow trees (close, so they could work side by side) and used chert scrapers to dehair the hides. This took one day. When it was done, they bailed out the “pot,” turned the hide liner over and filled it up again, this time with a mixture of water and mashed brains. This “cold-weather hiding” was new to her. They put the hides in this slurry to soak overnight and, while Susannah began to make thread from strings of gristle and sinew, Roland re-sharpened his knife, then used it to whittle half a dozen bone needles. When he was done, all of his fingers were bleeding from dozens of shallow cuts. He coated them with wood-ash soak and slept with them that way, his hands looking as if they were covered with large and clumsy gray-black gloves. When he washed them off in a stream the following day, Susannah was amazed to see the cuts already well on their way to healing. She tried dabbing some of the wood-ash stuff on the persistent sore beside her mouth, but it stung horribly and she washed it away in a hurry.

  “I want you to whop this goddam thing off,” she said.

  Roland shook his head. “We’ll give it a little longer to heal on its own.”

  “Why?”

  “Cutting on a sore’s a bad idea unless you absolutely have to do it. Especially out here, in what Jake would have called ‘the boondogs.’”

  She agreed (without bothering to correct his pronunciation), but unpleasant images crept into her head when she lay down: visions of the pimple beginning to spread, erasing her face inch by inch, turning her entire head into a black, crusted, bleeding tumor. In the dark, such visions had a horrible persuasiveness, but luckily she was too tired for them to keep her awake long.

  On their second day in what Susannah was coming to think of as the Hide Camp, Roland built a large and rickety frame over a new fire, one that was low and slow. They smoked the hides two by two and then laid them aside. The smell of the finished product was surprisingly pleasant. It smells like leather, she thought, holding one to her face, and then had to laugh. That was, after all, exactly what it was.

  The third day they spent “making,” and here Susannah finally outdid the gunslinger. Roland sewed a wide and barely serviceable stitch. She thought that the vests and leggings he made would hold together for a month, two at the most, then begin to pull apart. She was far more adept. Sewing was a skill she’d learned from her mother and both grandmothers. At first she found Roland’s bone needles maddeningly clumsy, and she paused long enough to cover both the thumb and forefinger of her right hand with little deerskin caps which she tied in place. After that it went faster, and by mid-afternoon of making-day she was taking garments from Roland’s pile and oversewing his stitches with her own, which were finer and closer. She thought he might object to this—men were proud—but he didn’t, which was probably wise. It quite likely would have been Detta who replied to any whines and queasies.

  By the time their third night in Hide Camp had come, they each had a vest, a pair of leggings, and a coat. They also had a pair of mittens each. These were large and laughable, but would keep their hands warm. And, speaking of hands, Susannah was once more barely able to bend hers. She looked doubtfully at the remaining hides and asked Roland if they would spend another making-day here.

  He considered the idea, then shook his head. “We’ll load the ones that are left into the Ho Fat Tack-see, I think, along with some of the meat and chunks of ice from the stream to keep it cool and good.”

  “The Taxi won’t be any good when we come to the snow, will it?”

  “No,” he admitted, “but by then the rest of the hides will be clothing and the meat will be eaten.”

  “You just can’t stay here any longer, that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? You hear it calling. The Tower.”

  Roland looked into the snapping fire and said nothing. Nor had to.

  “What’ll we do about hauling our gunna when we come to the white lands?”

  “Make a travois. And there’ll be plenty of game.”

  She nodded and started to lie down. He took her shoulders and turned her toward the fire, instead. His face came close to hers, and for a moment Susannah thought he meant to kiss her goodnight. He looked long and hard at the crusted sore beside her mouth, instead.

  “Well?” she finally asked. She could have said more, but he would have heard the tremor in her voice.

  “I think it’s a little smaller. Once we leave the Badlands behind, it may heal on its own.”

  “Do you really say so?”

  The gunslinger shook his head at once. “I say may. Now lie over, Susannah. Take your rest.”

  “All right, but don’t you let me sleep late this time. I want to watch my share.”

  “Yes. Now lie over.”

  She did as he said, and was asleep even before her eyes closed.

  TEN

  She’s in Central Park and it’s cold enough to see her breath. The sky overhead is white from side to side, a snow-sky, but she’s not cold. No, not in her new deerskin coat, leggings, v
est, and funny deerskin mittens. There’s something on her head, too, pulled down over her ears and keeping them as toasty as the rest of her. She takes the cap off, curious, and sees it’s not deerskin like the rest of her new clothing, but a red-and-green stocking cap. Written across the front is MERRY CHRISTMAS.

  She looks at it, startled. Can you have déjà vu in a dream? Apparently so. She looks around and there are Eddie and Jake, grinning at her. Their heads are bare and she realizes she has in her hands a combination of the caps they were wearing in some other dream. She feels a great, soaring burst of joy, as if she has just solved some supposedly insoluble problem: squaring the circle, let us say, or finding the Ultimate Prime Number (take that,Blaine, may it bust ya brain, ya crazy choochoo train).

  Eddie is wearing a sweatshirt that says I DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!

  Jake is wearing one that says I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!

  Both have cups of hot chocolate, the perfect kind mit schlag on top and little sprinkles of nutmeg dotting the cream.

  “What world is this?” she asks them, and realizes that somewhere nearby carolers are singing “What Child Is This.”

  “You must let him go his course alone,” says Eddie.

  “Yar, and you must beware of Dandelo,” says Jake.

  “I don’t understand,” Susannah says, and holds out her stocking cap to them. “Wasn’t this yours? Didn’t you share it?”

  “It could be your hat, if you want it,” says Eddie, and then holds out his cup. “Here, I brought you hot chocolate.”

  “No more twins,” says Jake. “There’s only one hat, do ya not see.”

  Before she can reply, a voice speaks out of the air and the dream begins to unravel.“NINETEEN,” says the voice.“This is NINETEEN, this is CHASSIT.”

  With each word the world becomes more unreal. She can see through Eddie and Jake. The good smell of hot chocolate is fading, being replaced by the smell of ash

  (wednesday)

  and leather. She sees Eddie’s lips moving and she thinks he’s saying a name, and then