by Bev Vincent
Maerlyn reveals that he was trapped in this form by one of the Red King’s servants, who tricked him when he was drunk. The Great One won’t be happy that the Covenant Man’s unauthorized high jinks ended up freeing Maerlyn. His days collecting taxes for Gilead are likely over. Maerlyn then tells Tim that he is destined to be a gunslinger and that he will be buried with his father’s lucky coin around his neck.
He shows Tim how to turn the magic napkin into a flying carpet that will take him home. The feather, which is from the tail of Garuda, the Guardian of the Beam of the Bird, helps him navigate. On the way, he sees the destruction caused by the starkblast. Fagonard is ruined and the dragon—which spared his life—is dead.
In Tree, the damage is minor, except for the sawmill, which has been destroyed. Tim rushes home to administer the eyedrops to his mother and give her his father’s ax. Then he discovers that Widow Smack, who sat with his mother during the storm, has been killed. Bern Kells erupts into the room in a murderous rage. The reason for Maerlyn’s instructions becomes apparent. Nell buries Jack Ross’s ax in Kells’s head, killing him.
Young Roland finishes his tale by saying that Tim carried the gun Widow Smack gave him for the next ten years and later carried bigger ones, six-shooters. When he was twenty-three, three gunslingers passed through Tree, hoping to raise a posse. Tim was the only one who joined them. They called him the “left-handed gun” because of how he drew. He eventually became one of the few gunslingers not from the proven line of Eld, though Roland admits that Arthur Eld had many children from three wives and many more illegitimate children. He eventually became known as Tim Stoutheart and took his mother to Gilead.
Tim promises himself he will go to the Dark Tower someday. He saw Maerlyn once more, when he was an old man—but that, like so many incidents Roland mentions, is a story for another day.
When Roland and his ka-tet emerge from the stone meeting hall, Gook is gone. Susannah asks Roland about the final two lines in his mother’s note—a note he carried with him until the wind carried it away, as the wind eventually takes all things. One line offered Gabrielle Deschain’s forgiveness and the other asked for Roland’s. With a rare smile on his face, Roland says that, yes, he was able to forgive his mother.
The next morning, the ka-tet returns to the Path of the Beam heading toward Calla Bryn Sturgis and the Dark Tower beyond.
Characters (in order of mention): Arthur Eld, Roland, Tick-Tock Man, Jake Chambers, Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean, Oy, Gasher, Randall Flagg, Detta Walker, Bix, Blaine the Mono, Patricia the Mono, Andy the Messenger Robot, Elmer Chambers, Jamie DeCurry, Steven Deschain, Henry the Tall, Gabrielle Deschain, Cort, John Farson, Vannay, Marten Broadcloak, Rhea, Cuthbert Allgood, Alain Johns, Hugh Peavy, Manni, Tim Stoutheart Ross, David Quick, Lord Perth, Everlynne, Ellen, Clemmie, Brianna, Fortuna, Dolores, Peter McVries, Crow Gang, Belinda Doolin, Pea Anderson, Allan “Pa” Crow, Salty Sam, Kellin Frye, Vikka Frye, Yon Curry, Great Old Ones, Bill Canfield, Travis, Snip, Arn, Young Bill Streeter, Bill Streeter, Elrod Nutter, Susan Delgado, Strother, Pickens, Nell Ross, Big Jack Ross, Big Bern Kells, Hodiak, Barony Covenanter, Ardelia “Widow” Smack, Destry, Millicent Redhouse, Baldy Anderson, Straw Willem Destry, Randy Destry, Rupert Venn, the Crimson King, Haggerty the Nail, Square Peter Cosington, Slow Ernest Marchly, Howard Tasley, Maerlyn of the Eld, Dustin Stokes, Ada Cosington, Hunter Destry, Joshua, Gan, Armaneeta, Splinter Harry, Helmsman, Headman, Deaf Rincon, Will Wegg, Puck DeLong, Man Jesus, Sam Shunt, Steg Luka, Banderly, Bobby Frane, Jake Marsh, Ollie Ang, Gary Cooper.
Places: Green Palace, Oz, Thunderclap, the Dark Tower, Took’s Outland Mercantile, Gilead, Whye River, Callas, Lud, In-World, Calla Bryn Sturgis, Great Woods, New Canaan, Gook, Cressia, Mejis, Debaria, Serenity, Mohaine Desert, Out-World, Beesford-on-Arten, Cheery Fellows Saloon & Café, Sallywood, Little Debaria, Low Pure, Ambush Arroyo, High Pure, Nis, Salt Rocks, Delightful View, Endless Forest, Racey’s Café, Salt Village, Beelie Stockade, Beelie, Tree, Ironwood Trail, North’rd Barony, Goodview, West’rd Baronies, Gitty’s Saloon, Tree Sawmill, Fagonard, Garlan, Na’ar, Tavares, Stape Brook, Waypoint Nine, North Forest Kinnock, Great Canyon, Lake Cawn, Busted Luck, Kuna.
Things: Billy-bumblers, Path of the Beam, slinkum, popkins, throcken, The Throcken and the Dragon, gunslinger burritos, sandalwood, shannies, harriers, shume, ironwood, North Central Positronics, Dogan, Magic Tales of the Eld, “The Wind Through the Keyhole,” bright, starkblast, limbits, gook, bin-rusties, ka-mate, David, dinh, clouts, jakes, moit, Maerlyn’s grapefruit, ammies, wheels, sigul, Western Line, Sma’ Toot, specie, bah, Watch Me, bill of circulation, Deep Cracks, the White, Peddler’s Moon, chary, trig, salt-houses, Efday, Ethday, Reaptide, pokie, proddie, salties, shaddie, simoom, Old Mother, Old Star, blossie, wervels, Wide Earth, vurt, Full Earth, graf, Huntress Moon, gormless, fashed, jilly, bitsy, pooky, glam, nen, chary, Wizard’s Rainbow, ka, dragons, Points, cully, hile, delah, Daria, jippa, Directive Nineteen, New Earth, North Forest Kinnock Dogan, tyger, Aslan, bull-squirter, dibbin, Garuda, Sunshine, tet-fa, ka-tet, Debaria Salt Combyne, clobbers, skiddums, snick, slowkins, ka-essen.
Continuity Errors and Mistakes: Bix mentions Andy and his horoscopes, and Roland’s story mentions Dogans, Directive Nineteen and North Central Positronics, but the ka-tet remembers none of these things when they encounter them in Calla Bryn Sturgis.
Crossovers to Other Works: The Covenant Man’s lips are as red as if they’d been colored with madder—the color that gives rise to Rose Madder in the book of the same name. The creature the miners discover at the bottom of the mine in Little Debaria is reminiscent of Tak from Desperation.
Foreshadowing and Spoilers: Bix mentions Andy the Messenger Robot, who will feature prominently in Wolves of the Calla, as will the rice farmers. Daria’s Directive Nineteen also prevents Andy from revealing certain critical information. The ka-tet will encounter other Dogans in their journeys. Susannah is still grappling with her pregnancy, which will also become increasingly important in the final books in the series. The fact that the skin-man has a pocket watch foreshadows the identity of the spy in Calla Bryn Sturgis, who is the only person in town who owns something of the old technology.
WOLVES OF THE CALLA: RESISTANCE
When they heard of King’s near-fatal accident in 1999, Dark Tower fans despaired that he would ever finish the series. King, too, worried that he might not write again, but before long he was back at it, writing in longhand during his rehabilitation. Then he and Peter Straub decided to work on a sequel to The Talisman. King eagerly accepted Straub’s suggestion that they lace the book with Dark Tower mythos.
Shortly before Black House was published in September 2001, King announced that he had returned to the land of the gunslinger and intended to publish the remaining three books all at once. He felt like if he didn’t push through to the finish then, he might never be able to. He listened to Frank Muller’s audio versions of the first four books and hired Robin Furth as a research assistant to document every important person, place and thing from the earlier books.
He toyed with different titles for the fifth book. His first idea was The Crawling Shadow, but he decided that was corny. According to Song of Susannah, he also considered calling it The Werewolves of End-World.
True to his word, he wrote the final three books back-to-back-to-back before any of them appeared. Two excerpts from Wolves of the Calla came out prior to publication. King posted the prologue on his Web site and “The Tale of Grey Dick” appeared in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, edited by Michael Chabon, in February 2003. The prologue also appeared in the Viking reprint of Wizard and Glass, a rare case of publisher cross-promotion.
Wolves of the Calla came out in November 2003. The six-year gap between the appearance of the fourth and fifth installments of the series equaled the longest interval between books. It is dedicated to audiobook narrator Frank Muller, who’d suffered a debilitating accident. King calls him the man who hears the voices in his head.
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sp; King returns to one of the influences for the Dark Tower series, The Magnificent Seven. In the John Sturges Western, a small Mexican village is raided regularly by a group of bandits led by Calvera. The citizens decide to arm themselves against their return but are instead advised to hire gunslingers to defend the village.
Wolves of the Calla uses this concept as the story’s launching point. In the film, some townspeople who disagree with the plan betray the seven gunmen, leading to their capture. The hired guns never anticipated waging a full-out war against the bandits—they believed their presence would be enough to discourage Calvera and his men. But Calvera is desperate, so a battle ensues during which many of the hired guns are killed. The townspeople take up arms in their own defense and rout the bandits. The surviving gunslingers ride off into the sunset, feeling like the town has won but they’ve lost.
The “bandits” who raid Calla Bryn Sturgis once a generation aren’t hungry, desperate men but are instead fearsome Wolves who ride in on horseback. They aren’t after crops—they’re after twins, which are the rule rather than the exception in the Callas that are spread along the Whye River, a kind of fertile crescent similar to the Mississippi region. They take one of every twin from as young as three to late adolescence.
Taking the children is torment enough. However, the stolen children are returned via train in a condition described as “roont” (ruined). Something has been extracted from them, causing a permanent mental handicap. Some can function better than others, but even the best require full-time care. Eventually they will undergo a painful growth spurt that turns them into oversized galoots, unable even to control their bodily functions. They age and die prematurely. It’s almost insult to injury—the Calla-folken might have been better off without the added burden of having to look after their roont offspring. Some come up with creative solutions. Tian Jaffords uses his sister as a mule for his plow when trying to reclaim a rocky patch of farmland.
News of the pending arrival of the Wolves is delivered by Andy the Messenger Robot, a seven-foot-tall Asimov robot built by North Central Positronics who is good for little other than casting horoscopes, singing and spreading gossip. On the subject of the Wolves, though, he is never wrong. The Calla-folken have a month to prepare for their coming.
There is dissension among the townspeople about whether to hire the gunslingers who are reportedly passing by on the Path of the Beam northeast of town—mostly among the richest citizens who have the most to lose financially if the strategy fails and the Wolves destroy the town and farms. However, they are also the ones with the least to lose in terms of children, as most of them don’t have any vulnerable twins.
Tian Jaffords is the unlikely hero of the piece. Most people in the Calla are resigned to their fate. The Wolves have been coming for five or six generations, and any attempts to fend them off have been disastrous. The Wolves are heavily armed, with light sabers and self-guided grenades (sneetches), whereas the Calla-folken have nothing more than a few rusty old guns. As in The Magnificent Seven, the idea Tian proposes at a town meeting is not to defend themselves but to enlist the aid of professionals.
He’s on the verge of losing control of the meeting when an old man steps up to support his proposal—Father Callahan, the exiled priest from ’Salem’s Lot, Maine. Callahan ended up on the borders of Thunderclap after he left the vampire-ridden town and has been in Calla Bryn Sturgis long enough to build a church and convert half the folken to his religion. He plays the part of the wise old man who lives outside town in The Magnificent Seven. He has an ulterior motive for contacting the gunslingers, though. He has a terrible object hidden beneath the floorboards of his church and he hopes they will take it off his hands.
Several people ride out to meet the travelers to see if they can offer any help. No one believes they’re gunslingers, for the line of Eld had all been dead for a thousand years.
Roland is forced to take his eyes away from his quest for the Tower, compelled by the code of the gunslingers. If people ask for his help and he deems them to be on the side of the White, he must assist. He has other problems to worry about, too. He’s suffering from arthritis that hasn’t yet afflicted his hands but might soon. Also, he knows that Susannah is pregnant and that her child is probably the product of the demon from the Speaking Circle where Jake reentered Mid-World from Dutch Hill. At night, Susannah is venturing naked into swamps and eating frogs and bugs. Roland believes a new personality has emerged, one who calls herself Mia, which is the word for “mother” in High Speech. She shares some of Detta’s memories, but Susannah has no awareness of her presence.
The ka-tet is distracted by the mystery number nineteen. They see it in everything, though Roland isn’t impressed. They have also started traveling to New York in 1977 in their dreams, a process called going todash. Some of their essence is left behind in Mid-World, and people step around them in New York as if they can sense their presence without actually seeing them. Eddie and Jake go to the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind in time to see Jake leave with Charlie the Choo-Choo and the riddle book. Then they observe what happened afterward: Enrico Balazar and two bodyguards—all familiar to Eddie Dean—show up to remind Tower that he has a signed agreement with them to keep the vacant lot at the corner of Second Avenue and 42nd Street until July 15, at which point they expect him to sell it to Sombra Corporation.
There are enough differences between this day and the one Jake remembers to indicate that this is a different version of reality. Charlie the Choo-Choo has a different author (whose name has nineteen characters) and Stephen King’s name shows up on the deli board in the bookstore window. Eddie knows that if Balazar is coming to a meeting, he means business.
Eddie tells the ka-tet that they have to protect the rose in the vacant lot, which is the Dark Tower’s representation in that universe. He wants to buy the property from Calvin Tower, but they have no money. Also, they would need to find targeted doorways to take them to Manhattan at the right times because they can’t transact business while todash. Susannah figures she has enough money from Odetta’s inheritance to buy the lot, but they’d have to go back to 1964 to acquire the funds since she’s probably been declared dead by 1977. Roland says they are taking magic doors for granted. Until the Western Sea, he’d never seen one in all his years of travel.
This is where Father Callahan steps in, believing he might have the solution to their problem. Roland guesses correctly that Father Callahan has Black Thirteen, the most dangerous of the glass balls from the Wizard’s Rainbow. Some of these glasses have the power to send people todash—Black Thirteen has done this to Callahan twice—and they may be able to wrest its power and bend it to their will.
Roland and his ka-tet do an impromptu demonstration of their abilities, sufficient to convince even the most reluctant among the group that it is worthwhile to explore the possibility of hiring the gunslingers. Roland displays his skills as a diplomat when discussing the matter with Overholser, the Calla’s biggest farmer.
Another todash trip that night takes the entire ka-tet to the vacant lot. Susannah’s new personality, Mia, is afraid to go near the rose, so she makes excuses to stay on the sidewalk. Whenever Mia asserts her presence during these todash trips, Susannah has legs—white legs—and when she steps back, Susannah loses her legs. As they are about to leave, Jake picks up a bowling bag provided by ka to contain Black Thirteen and shield the ka-tet from the worst of its powers. When they return to Mid-World, the bag goes todash with them.
The ka-tet accompanies Callahan, Overholser and the others back to Calla Bryn Sturgis, where they are treated like celebrities. The town throws a huge party to welcome them. This gives the ka-tet time to get to know some people. Jake makes friends with Benny Slightman, the son of Overholser’s foreman, and accepts an invitation to stay at their ranch. Eddie is forced to speak before the assembled audience, Susannah sings and Roland surprises his friends by dancing the commala during “The Rice Song.” In doing so, he wins over the hearts of th
e Calla-folken, and the outcome of the pending decision seems like a foregone conclusion.
Roland leaves nothing to chance, though. They have the better part of a month to gather intelligence about the Wolves and to see what local resources they might rely upon. He’s counting things again, like he did in Mejis. They talk to anyone who will spare the time, and the effort proves worthwhile. They learn that the Wolves are vulnerable. One of them was killed in the past, and when Eddie finally gets Jamie Jaffords—Tian’s grandfather—to recount that story, they discover a crucial detail that may turn the tide of the battle in their favor.
Though there are few usable guns in the Calla, there is another weapon that intrigues Roland. A number of the women throw sharpened titanium dishes called Orizas. They’re like lethal Frisbees and some of the best throwers are deadly. He sends Susannah to train with them and to identify the best markswomen among the Sisters of Oriza.
It’s not all work, though. Roland finds time to befriend Rosalita Muñoz, Father Callahan’s assistant. She has a balm that soothes his aching joints, and she takes him to bed—his first lover since Allie in Tull.
Father Callahan tells the story of how he got from Maine to Calla Bryn Sturgis. After being tainted by Barlow’s blood, he took a bus to New York, went to work at a homeless shelter and discovered that he could detect vampires. When one infects his friend Lupe Delgado with AIDS, he makes it his mission to kill the ones he encounters, which brings him to the attention of the low men, who begin to hunt him. He travels across the country to evade them and, to his surprise, travels between different versions of America where certain details are different. The name of a city, for example, or who appears on the twenty-dollar bill.