by Stephen King
“Perhaps,” Alain said quietly, “but Rimer doesn’t think we’re fools- it’s in the way he looks at us when we pass. Nor does Jonas. And if they don’t think we’re fools, Roland, what do they think?”
Roland stood on the second step, the saddle-blanket hanging forgotten over his arm. For once they actually seemed to have his attention, Cuthbert thought. Glory be and will wonders never cease.
“They think we’re avoiding the Drop because we already know what’s there,” Roland said. “And if they don’t think it, they soon will.”
“Cuthbert has a plan.”
Roland’s gaze-mild, interested, already starting to be not there again-shifted to Cuthbert. Cuthbert the joker. Cuthbert the 'prentice, who had in no way earned the gun he’d carried east to the Outer Crescent. Cuthbert the virgin and eternal second. Gods, I don’t want to hate him. I don’t, but now it’s so easy.
“We two should go and see Sheriff Avery tomorrow,” Cuthbert said. “We will present it as a courtesy visit. We have already established ourselves as three courteous, if slightly stupid, young fellows, have we not?”
“To a fault,” Roland agreed, smiling.
“We’ll say that we’ve finally finished with the seacoast side of Hambry, and we hope to be every bit as meticulous on the farm and cowboy side. But we certainly don’t want to cause trouble or be in anyone’s way. It is, after all, the busiest time of year-for ranchers as well as farmers- and even citified fools such as ourselves will be aware of that. So we’ll give the good Sheriff a list-”
Roland’s eyes lit up. He tossed the blanket over the porch rail, grabbed Cuthbert around the shoulders, and gave him a rough hug. Cuthbert could smell a lilac scent around Roland’s collar and felt an insane but powerful urge to clamp his hands around Roland’s throat and try to strangle him. Instead, he gave him a perfunctory clap on the back in return.
Roland drew away, grinning widely. “A list of the ranches we’ll be visiting,” he said. “Aye! And with forewarning, they can move any stock they’d like us not to see on to the next ranch, or the last one. The same for tack, feed, equipment… it’s masterful, Cuthbert! You’re a genius!”
“Far from that,” Cuthbert said. “I’ve just spared a little time to think about a problem that concerns us all. That concerns the entire Affiliation, mayhap. We need to think. Wouldn’t you say?”
Alain winced, but Roland didn’t seem to notice. He was still grinning. Even at fourteen, such an expression on his face was troubling. The truth was that when Roland grinned, he looked slightly mad. “Do you know, they may even move in a fair number of muties for us to look at, just so we’ll continue to believe the lies they’ve already told about the impurity of their stocklines.” He paused, seeming to think, and then said: “Why don’t you and Alain go and see the Sheriff, Bert? That would do very well, I think.”
At this point Cuthbert nearly threw himself at Roland, wanting to scream Yes, why not? Then you could spend tomorrow morning pronging her as well as tomorrow afternoon! You idiot! You thoughtless lovestruck idiot!
It was Al who saved him-saved them all, perhaps.
“Don’t be a fool,” he said sharply, and Roland wheeled toward him, looking surprised. He wasn’t used to sharpness from that quarter. “You’re our leader, Roland-seen that way by Thorin, by Avery, by the townsfolk. Seen that way by us as well.”
“No one appointed me-”
“No one needed to!” Cuthbert shouted. “You won your guns! These folk would hardly believe it-I hardly believe it myself just lately-but you are a gunslinger. You have to go! Plain as the nose on your face! It doesn’t matter which of us accompanies you, but you have to go!” He could say more, much more, but if he did, where would it end? With their fellowship broken beyond repair, likely. So he clamped his mouth shut- no need for Alain to kick him this time-and once again waited for the explosion. Once again, none came.
“All right,” Roland said in his new way-that mild it-doesn’t-much-matter way that made Cuthbert feel like biting him to wake him up. “Tomorrow morning. You and I, Bert. Will eight suit you?”
“Down to the ground,” Cuthbert said. Now that the discussion was over and the decision made, Bert’s heart was beating wildly and the muscles in his upper thighs felt like rubber. It was the way he’d felt after their confrontation with the Big Coffin Hunters.
“We’ll be at our prettiest,” Roland said. “Nice boys from the Inners with good intentions but not many brains. Fine.” And he went inside, no longer grinning (which was a relief) but smiling gently.
Cuthbert and Alain looked at each other and let out their breath in a mutual rush. Cuthbert cocked his head toward the yard, and went down the steps. Alain followed, and the two boys stood in the center of the dirt rectangle with the bunkhouse at their backs. To the east, the rising full moon was hidden behind a scrim of clouds. '
“She’s tranced him,” Cuthbert said. “Whether she means to or not, she’ll kill us all in the end. Wait and see if she don’t.”
“You shouldn’t say such, even in jest.”
“All right, she’ll crown us with the jewels of Eld and we’ll live forever.”
“You have to stop being angry at him, Bert. You have to.”
Cuthbert looked at him bleakly. “I can’t.”
4
The great storms of autumn were still a month or more distant, but the following morning dawned drizzly and gray. Roland and Cuthbert wrapped themselves in scrapes and headed for town, leaving Alain to the few home place chores. Tucked in Roland’s belt was the schedule of farms and ranches-beginning with the three small spreads owned by the Barony-the three of them had worked out the previous evening. The pace this schedule suggested was almost ludicrously slow-it would keep them on the Drop and in the orchards almost until Year’s End Fair-but it conformed to the pace they had already set on the docks.
Now the two of them rode silently toward town, both lost in their own thoughts. Their way took them past the Delgado house. Roland looked up and saw Susan sitting in her window, a bright vision in the gray light of that fall morning. His heart leaped up and although he didn’t know it then, it was how he would remember her most clearly forever after-lovely Susan, the girl at the window. So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the comers of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.
Roland raised a hand to her. It went toward his mouth at first, wanting to send her a kiss, but that would be madness. He lifted the hand before it could touch his lips and ticked a finger off his forehead instead, offering a saucy little salute.
Susan smiled and returned it in kind. None saw Cordelia, who had gone out in the drizzle to check on the last of her squash and sharproot. That lady stood where she was, a sombrero yanked down on her head almost to the eyeline, half-hidden by the stuffy-guy guarding the pumpkin patch. She watched Roland and Cuthbert pass (Cuthbert she barely saw; her interest was in the other one). From the boy on horseback she looked up to Susan, sitting there in her window, humming as blithely as a bird in a gilded cage.
A sharp splinter of suspicion whispered its way into Cordelia’s heart. Susan’s change of temperament-from alternating bouts of sorrow and fearful anger to a kind of dazed but mainly cheerful acceptance-had been so sudden. Mayhap it wasn’t acceptance at all.
“Ye’re mad,” she whispered to herself, but her hand remained tight on the haft of the machete she held. She dropped to her knees in the muddy garden and abruptly began chopping sharproot vines, tossing the roots themselves toward the side of the house with quick, accurate throws. “There’s nothing between em. I’d know. Children of such an age have no more discretion than… than the drunks in the Rest.”
But the way the
y had smiled. The way they had smiled at each other.
“Perfectly normal,” she whispered, chopping and throwing. She cut a sharproot nearly in half, ruining it, not noticing. The whispering was a habit she’d picked up only recently, as Reap Day neared and the stresses of coping with her brother’s troublesome daughter mounted. “Folks smile at each other, that’s all.”
The same for the salute and Susan’s returning wave. Below, the handsome cavalier, acknowledging the pretty maid; above, the maid herself, pleased to be acknowledged by such as he. It was youth calling to youth, that was all. And yet…
The look in his eyes… and the look in hers.
Nonsense, of course. But-
But you saw something else.
Yes, perhaps. For a moment it had seemed to her that the young man was going to blow Susan a kiss… then had remembered himself at the last moment and turned it into a salute, instead.
Even if ye did see such a thing, it means nothing. Young cavaliers are saucy, especially when out from beneath the gaze of their fathers. And these three already have a history, as ye well know.
All true enough, but none of it removed that chilly splinter from her heart.
5
Jonas answered Roland’s knock and let the two boys into the Sheriff’s office. He was wearing a Deputy’s star on his shirt, and looked at them with expressionless eyes. “Boys,” he said. “Come in out of the wet.”
He stepped back to allow them entrance. His limp was more pronounced than Roland had ever seen it; the wet weather was playing it up, he supposed.
Roland and Cuthbert stepped in. There was a gas heater in the corner-tilled from “the candle” at Citgo, no doubt-and the big room, which had been cool on the day they had first come here, was stuporously hot. The three cells held five woeful-looking drunks, two pairs of men and a woman in the center cell by herself, sitting on the bunk with her legs spread wide, displaying a broad expanse of red drawers. Roland feared that if she got her finger any farther up her nose, she might never retrieve it. Clay Reynolds was leaning against the notice-board, picking his teeth with a broomstraw. Sitting at the rolltop desk was Deputy Dave, stroking his chin and frowning through his monocle at the board which had been set up there. Roland wasn’t at all surprised to see that he and Bert had interrupted a game of Castles.
“Well, look here, Eldred!” Reynolds said. “It’s two of the In-World boys! Do your mommies know you’re out, fellas?”
“They do,” Cuthbert said brightly. “And you’re looking very well, sai Reynolds. The wet weather’s soothed your pox, has it?”
Without looking at Bert or losing his pleasant little smile, Roland shot an elbow into his friend’s shoulder. “Pardon my friend, sai. His humor regularly transgresses the bounds of good taste; he doesn’t seem able to help it. There’s no need for us to scratch at one another-we’ve agreed to let bygones be bygones, haven’t we?”
“Aye, certainly, all a misunderstanding,” Jonas said. He limped back across to the desk and the game-board. As he sat down on his side of it, his smile turned to a sour little grimace. “I’m worse than an old dog,” he said. “Someone ought to put me down, so they should. Earth’s cold but painless, eh, boys?”
He looked back at the board and moved a man around to the side of his Hillock. He had begun to Castle, and was thus vulnerable… although not very, in this case, Roland thought; Deputy Dave didn’t look like much in the way of competition.
“I see you’re working for the Barony salt now,” Roland said, nodding at the star on Jonas’s shirt.
“Salt’s what it amounts to,” Jonas said, companionably enough. “A fellow went leg-broke. I’m helping out, that’s all.”
“And sai Reynolds? Sai Depape? Are they helping out as well?”
“Yar, I reckon,” Jonas said. “How goes your work among the fisher-folk? Slow, I hear.”
“Done at last. The work wasn’t so slow as we were. But coming here in disgrace was enough for us-we have no intention of leaving that way. Slow and steady wins the race, they say.”
“So they do,” Jonas agreed. “Whoever 'they' are.”
From somewhere deeper in the building there came the whoosh of a water-stool flushing. All the comforts of home in the Hambry Sheriff’s, Roland thought. The flush was soon followed by heavy footsteps descending a staircase, and a few moments later, Herk Avery appeared. With one hand he was buckling his belt; with the other he mopped his broad and sweaty forehead. Roland admired the man’s dexterity.
“Whew!” the Sheriff exclaimed. “Them beans I ate last night took the shortcut, I tell ye.” He looked from Roland to Cuthbert and then back to Roland. “Why, boys! Too wet for net-counting, is it?”
“Sai Dearborn was just saying that their net-counting days are at an end,” Jonas said. He combed back his long hair with the tips of his fingers. Beyond him, Clay Reynolds had resumed his slouch against the notice-board, looking at Roland and Cuthbert with open dislike.
“Aye? Well, that’s fine, that’s fine. What’s next, youngsters? And is there any way we here can help ye? For that’s what we like to do best, lend a hand where a hand’s needed. So it is.”
“Actually, you could help us,” Roland said. He reached into his belt and pulled out the list. “We have to move on to the Drop, but we don’t want to inconvenience anyone.”
Grinning hugely, Deputy Dave slid his Squire all the way around his own Hillock. Jonas Castled at once, ripping open Dave’s entire left flank. The grin faded from Dave’s face, leaving a puzzled emptiness. “How’d ye manage that?”
“Easy.” Jonas smiled, then pushed back from the desk to include the others in his regard. “You want to remember, Dave, that I play to win. I can’t help it; it’s just my nature.” He turned his full attention to Roland. His smile broadened. “Like the scorpion said to the maiden as she lay dying, 'You knowed I was poison when you picked me up.'”
6
When Susan came in from feeding the livestock, she went directly to the cold-pantry for the juice, which was her habit. She didn’t see her aunt standing in the chimney comer and watching her, and when Cordelia spoke, Susan was startled badly. It wasn’t just the unexpectedness of the voice; it was the coldness of it.
“Do ye know him?”
The juice-jug slipped in her fingers, and Susan put a steadying hand beneath it. Orange juice was too precious to waste, especially this late in the year. She turned and saw her aunt by the woodbox. Cordelia had hung her sombrero on a hook in the entryway, but she still wore her serape and muddy boots. Her cuchillo lay on top of the stacked wood, with green strands of sharproot vine still trailing from its edge. Her tone was cold, but her eyes were hot with suspicion.
A sudden clarity filled Susan’s mind and all of her senses. If you say “No,” you’re damned, she thought. If you even ask who, you may be damned. You must say-
“I know them both,” she replied in offhand fashion. “I met them at the party. So did you. Ye frightened me, Aunt.”
“Why did he salute ye so?”
“How can I know? Perhaps he just felt like it.”
Her aunt bolted forward, slipped in her muddy boots, regained her balance, and seized Susan by the arms. Now her eyes were blazing. “Be'n’t insolent with me, girl! Be'n’t haughty with me, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty, or I’ll-”
Susan pulled backward so hard that Cordelia staggered and might have fallen again, if the table had not been handy to grab. Behind her, muddy foot-tracks stood out on the clean kitchen floor like accusations. “Call me that again and I’ll… I’ll slap thee!” Susan cried. “So I will!”
Cordelia’s lips drew back from her teeth in a dry, ferocious smile. “Ye’d slap your father’s only living blood kin? Would ye be so bad?”
“Why not? Do ye not slap me, Aunt?”
Some of the heat went out of her aunt’s eyes, and the smile left her mouth. “Susan! Hardly ever! Not half a dozen times since ye were a toddler who would grab anything her hands could reach, even a po
t of boiling water on the-”
“It’s with thy mouth thee mostly hits nowadays,” Susan said. “I’ve put up with it-more fool me-but am done with it now. I’ll have no more. If I’m old enough to be sent to a man’s bed for money, I’m old enough for ye to keep a civil tongue when ye speak to me.”
Cordelia opened her mouth to defend herself-the girl’s anger had startled her, and so had her accusations-and then she realized how cleverly she was being led away from the subject of the boys. Of the boy.
“Ye only know him from the party, Susan? It’s Dearborn I mean.” As I think ye well know.
“I’ve seen him about town,” Susan said. She met her aunt’s eyes steadily, although it cost her an effort; lies would follow half-truths as dark followed dusk. “I’ve seen all three of them about town. Are ye satisfied?” No, Susan saw with mounting dismay, she was not. “Do ye swear to me, Susan-on your father’s name-that ye’ve not been meeting this boy Dearborn?”
All the rides in the late afternoon, Susan thought. All the excuses. All the care that no one should see us. And it all comes down to a careless wave on a rainy morning. That easily all’s put at risk. Did we think it could be otherwise? Were we that foolish?
Yes… and no. The truth was they had been mad. And still were. Susan kept remembering the look of her father’s eyes on the few occasions when he had caught her in a fib. That look of half-curious disappointment. The sense that her fibs, innocuous as they might be, had hurt him like the scratch of a thorn.
“I will swear to nothing,” she said. “Ye’ve no right to ask it of me.” “Swear!” Cordelia cried shrilly. She groped out for the table again and grasped it, as if for balance. “Swear it! Swear it! This is no game of jacks or tag or Johnny-jump-my-pony! Thee’s not a child any longer! Swear to me! Swear that thee’re still pure!”
“No,” Susan said, and turned to leave. Her heart was beating madly, but still that awful clarity informed the world. Roland would have known it for what it was: she was seeing with gunslinger’s eyes. There was a glass window in the kitchen, looking out toward the Drop, and in it she saw the ghostly reflection of Aunt Cord coming toward her, one arm raised, the hand at the end of it knotted into a fist. Without turning, Susan put up her own hand in a halting gesture. “Raise that not to me,” she said. “Raise it not, ye bitch.”