by Stephen King
Susan took down the last one and began to page through it. This time she almost welcomed the pang that struck her as she saw her father’s familiar hand-the labored script, the steep and somehow more confident numbers.
Born of HENRIETTA, (2) foals both well
Stillborn of DELIA, a roan (MUTANT)
Born of YOLANDA, a THOROUGHBRED, a GOOD MALE COLT
And, following each, the date. So neat, he had been. So thorough. So…
She stopped suddenly, aware that she had found what she was looking for even without any clear knowledge of what she was doing in here. I he last dozen pages of her da’s final stockline book had been torn out.
Who had done it? Not her father; a largely self-taught man, he revered paper the way some people revered gods or gold.
And why had it been done?
That she thought she knew: horses, of courses. There were too many on the Drop. And the ranchers-Lengyll, Croydon, Renfrew-were lying about the threaded quality of the stockline. So was Henry Wertner, the man who had succeeded to her father’s job.
If my da was here-
But he’s not. He’s dead.
She had told Roland she couldn’t believe Fran Lengyll would lie about her father’s death… but she could believe it now.
Gods help her, she could believe it now.
“What are ye doing in here?”
She gave a little scream, dropped the book, and whirled around. Cordelia stood there in one of her rusty black dresses. The top three buttons were undone, and Susan could see her aunt’s collarbones sticking out above the plain white cotton of her shift. It was only on seeing those protruding bones that Susan realized how much weight Aunt Cord had lost over the last three months or so. She could see the red imprint of the pillow on her aunt’s left cheek, like the mark of a slap. Her eyes glittered from dark, bruised-looking hollows of flesh.
“Aunt Cord! You startled me! You-”
“What are ye doing in here?” Aunt Cord repeated.
Susan bent and picked up the book. “I came to remember my father,” she said, and put the book back on the shelf. Who had torn those pages out? Lengyll? Rimer? She doubted it. She thought it more likely that the woman standing before her right now had done it. Perhaps for as little as a single piece of red gold. Nothing asked, nothing told, so all is well, she would have thought, popping the coin into her money-box, after first biting its edge to make sure it was true.
“Remember him? It’s ask his forgiveness, ye should do. For ye’ve forgotten his face, so ye have. Most grievous have ye forgotten it, Sue.”
Susan only looked at her.
“Have ye been with him today?” Cordelia asked in a brittle, laughing voice. Her hand went to the red pillow-mark on her cheek and began rubbing it. She had been getting bad by degrees, Susan realized, but had become ever so much worse since the gossip about Jonas and Coral Thorin had started. “Have ye been with sai Dearborn? Is yer crack still dewy from his spend? Here, let me see for myself!”
Her aunt glided forward-spectral in her black dress, her bodice open, her slippered feet peeping-and Susan pushed her back. In her fright and disgust, she pushed hard. Cordelia struck the wall beside the cobwebbed window.
“Ye should ask forgiveness yerself,” Susan said. “To speak to his daughter so in this place. In this place.” She let her eyes turn to the shelf of ledgers, then return to her aunt. The look of frightened calculation she saw on Cordelia Delgado’s face told her all she wanted or needed to know. She hadn’t been a party to her brother’s murder, that Susan could not believe, but she had known something of it. Yes, something.
“Ye faithless bitch,” Cordelia whispered.
“No,” Susan said, “I have been true.”
And so, she realized, she had been. A great weight seemed to slip off her shoulders at the thought. She walked to the door of the office and turned back to her aunt. “I’ve slept my last night here,” she said. “I’ll not listen to more such as this. Nor look at ye as ye are now. It hurts my heart and steals the love I’ve kept for ye since I was little, when ye did the best ye could to be my ma.”
Cordelia clapped her hands over her face, as if looking at Susan hurt her.
“Get out, then!” she screamed. “Go back to Seafront or wherever it is thee rolls with that boy! If I never see thy trollop’s face again, I’ll count my life good!”
Susan led Pylon from the stable. When she got him into the yard, she was sobbing almost too hard to mount up. Yet mount she did, and she couldn’t deny that there was relief in her heart as well as sorrow. When she turned onto the High Street and booted Pylon into a gallop, she didn’t look back.
9
In a dark hour of the following morning, Olive Thorin crept from the room where she now slept to the one she had shared for almost forty years with her husband. The floor was cold under her bare feet and she was shivering by the time she reached the bed… but the chilly floor wasn’t the only reason she was shivering. She slid in beside the gaunt, snoring man in the nightcap, and when he turned away from her (his knees and back crackling loudly as he did), she pressed against him and hugged him tightly. There was no passion in this, but only a need to share a bit of his warmth. His chest-narrow but almost as well-known to her as her own plump one-rose and fell under her hands, and she began to quiet a little. He stirred, and she thought for a moment he would wake and find her sharing his bed for the first time in gods knew how long.
Yes, wake, she thought, do. She didn’t dare wake him of her own-all her courage had been exhausted just getting here, creeping through the dark following one of the worst dreams she had ever had in her life-but if he woke, she would take it as a sign and tell him she had dreamed of a vast bird, a cruel golden-eyed roc that flew above the Barony on wings that dripped blood.
Wherever its shadow fell, there was blood, she would tell him, and its shadow fell everywhere. The Barony ran with it, from Hambry all the way out to Eyebolt. And I swelled big fire in the wind. I ran to tell you and you were dead in your study, sitting by the hearth with your eyes gouged out and a skull in your lap.
But instead of waking, in his sleep he took her hand, as he had used to, do before he had begun to look at the young girls-even the serving-wenches-when they passed, and Olive decided she would only lie here, and be still and let him hold her hand. Let it be like the old days for a bit, when everything had been right between them.
She slept a little herself. When she woke, dawn’s first gray light was creeping in through the windows. He had dropped her hand- had, in fact, scooted away from her entirely, to his edge of the bed. It wouldn’t do for him to wake and find her here, she decided, and the urgency of her nightmare was gone. She turned back the covers, swung her feet out, then looked at him once more. His nightcap had come askew. She put it right, her hands smoothing the cloth and the bony brow beneath. He stirred again. Olive waited until he had quieted, then got up. She slipped back to her own room like a phantom.
10
The midway booths opened in Green Heart two days before Reaping-Fair, and the first folks came to try their luck at the spinning wheel and the bottle-toss and the basket-ring. There was also a pony-train-a cart filled with laughing children, pulled along a figure eight of narrow-gauge rails.
(“Was the pony named Charlie?” Eddie Dean asked Roland.
(“I think not,” Roland said. “We have a rather unpleasant word that sounds like that in the High Speech.”
(“What word?” Jake asked.
(“The one,” said the gunslinger, “that means death.”)
Roy Depape stood watching the pony plod its appointed rounds for a couple of turns, remembering with some nostalgia his own rides in such a cart as a child. Of course, most of his had been stolen.
When he had looked his fill, Depape sauntered on down to the Sheriff’s office and went in. Herk Avery, Dave, and Frank Claypool were cleaning an odd and fantastical assortment of guns. Avery nodded at Depape and went back to what he was doing. There was
something strange about the man, and after a moment or two Depape realized what it was: the Sheriff wasn’t eating. It was the first time he’d ever come in here that the Sheriff didn’t have a plate of grub close at hand.
“All ready for tomorrow?” Depape asked.
Avery gave him a half-irritated, half-smiling look. “What the hell kind of question is that?”
“One that Jonas sent me to ask,” Depape said, and at that Avery’s queer, nervy smile faltered a little.
“Aye, we’re ready.” Avery swept a meaty arm over the guns. “Don’t ye see we are?”
Depape could have quoted the old saying about how the proof of the pudding was in the eating, but what was the point? Things would work out if the three boys were as fooled as Jonas thought they were; if they weren’t fooled, they would likely carve Herk Avery’s fat butt off the top of his legs and feed it to the handiest pack of wolverines. It didn’t make much never mind to Roy Depape one way or the other.
“Jonas also ast me to remind you it’s early.”
“Aye, aye, we’ll be there early,” Avery agreed. “These two and six more good men. Fran Lengyll’s asked to go along, and he’s got a machine-gun.” Avery spoke this last with ringing pride, as if he himself had invented the machine-gun. Then he looked at Depape slyly. “What about you, coffin-hand? Want to go along? Won’t take me more’n an eyeblink to deputize ye.”
“I have another chore. Reynolds, too.” Depape smiled. “There’s plenty of work for all of us. Sheriff-after all, it’s Reaping.”
11
That afternoon, Susan and Roland met at the hut in the Bad Grass. She told him about the book with the torn-out pages, and Roland showed her what he’d left in the hut’s north corner, secreted beneath a mouldering pile of skins.
She looked first at this, then at him with wide and frightened eyes. “What’s wrong? What does thee suspect is wrong?”
He shook his head. Nothing was wrong… not that he could tell, anyway. And yet he had felt a strong need to do what he’d done, to leave what he’d left. It wasn’t the touch, nothing like it, but only intuition.
“I think everything is all right… or as right as things can be when the odds may turn out fifty of them for each of us. Susan, our only chance is to take them by surprise. You’re not going to risk that, are you? Not planning to go to Lengyll, waving your father’s stockline book around?”
She shook her head. If Lengyll had done what she now suspected, he’d get his payback two days from now. There would be reaping, all right. Reaping aplenty. But this… this frightened her, and she said so.
“Listen.” Roland took her face in his hands and looked into her eyes. “I’m only trying to be careful. If things go badly-and they could- you’re the one most likely to get away clean. You and Sheemie. If that happens, Susan, you-thee-must come here and take my guns. Take them west to Gilead. Find my father. He’ll know thee are who thee says by what thee shows. Tell him what happened here. That’s all.”
“If anything happens to thee, Roland, I won’t be able to do anything. Except die.”
His hands were still on her face. Now he used them to make her head shake slowly, from side to side. “You won’t die,” he said. There was a coldness in his voice and eyes that struck her not with fear but awe. She thought of his blood-of how old it must be, and how cold it must sometimes flow. “Not with this job undone. Promise me.”
“I… I promise, Roland. I do.”
“Tell me aloud what you promise.”
“I’ll come here. Get yer guns. Take them to yer da. Tell him what happened.”
He nodded and let go of her face. The shapes of his hands were printed faintly on her cheeks.
“Ye frightened me,” Susan said, and then shook her head. That wasn’t right. “Ye do frighten me.”
“I can’t help what I am.”
“And I wouldn’t change it.” She kissed his left cheek, his right cheek, his mouth. She put her hand inside his shirt and caressed his nipple. It grew instantly hard beneath the tip of her finger. “Bird and bear and hare and fish,” she said, now making soft butterfly kisses all over his face. “Give your love her fondest wish.”
After, they lay beneath a bearskin Roland had brought along and listened to the wind sough through the grass.
“I love that sound,” she said. “It always makes me wish I could be part of the wind… go where it goes, see what it sees.”
“This year, if ka allows, you will.”
“Aye. And with thee.” She turned to him, up on one elbow. Light fell through the ruined roof and dappled her face. “Roland, I love thee.” She kissed him… and then began to cry.
He held her, concerned. “What is it? Sue, what troubles thee?”
“I don’t know,” she said, crying harder. “All I know is that there’s a shadow on my heart.” She looked at him with tears still flowing from her eyes. “Thee’d not leave me, would ye, dear? Thee’d not go without Sue, would ye?”
“No.”
“For I’ve given all I have to ye, so I have. And my virginity’s the very least of it, thee knows.”
“I’d never leave you.” But he felt cold in spite of the bearskin, and the wind outside-so comforting a moment ago-sounded like beast’s breath. “Never, I swear.”
“I’m frightened, though. Indeed I am.”
“You needn’t be,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully… for suddenly all the wrong words wanted to come tumbling out of his mouth. We’ll leave this, Susan-not day after tomorrow, on Reaping, but now, this minute. Dress and we’ll go crosswise to the wind; it’s south we’ll ride and never look back. We’ll be-
–haunted.
That’s what they would be. Haunted by the faces of Alain and Cuthbert; haunted by the faces of all the men who might die in the Shaved Mountains, massacred by weapons torn from the armory-crypts where they should have been left. Haunted most of all by the faces of their fathers, for all the rest of their lives. Not even the South Pole would be far enough to escape those faces.
“All you need do day after tomorrow is claim indisposition at lunch.” They had gone over all this before, but now, in his sudden, pointless fright, it was all he could think of to say. “Go to your room, then leave as you did on the night we met in the graveyard. Hide up a little. Then, when it’s three o’ the clock, ride here, and look under the skins in yon comer. If my guns are gone-and they will be, I swear they will-then everything’s all right. You’ll ride to meet us. Come to the place above the canyon, the one we told you of. We’ll-”
“Aye, I know all that, but something’s wrong.” She looked at him, touched the side of his face. “I fear for thee and me, Roland, and know not why.”
“All will work out,” he said. “Ka-”
“Speak not to me of ka!” she cried. “Oh please don’t! Ka like a wind, my father said, it takes what it will and minds the plea of no man or woman. Greedy old ka, how I hate it!”
“Susan-”
“No, say no more.” She lay back and pushed the bearskin down to her knees, exposing a body that far greater men than Hart Thorin might have given away kingdoms for. Beads of sunlight ran over her bare skin like rain. She held her arms out to him. Never had she looked more beautiful to Roland than she did then, with her hair spread about her and that haunted look on her face. He would think later: She knew. Some part of her knew.
“No more talking,” she said. “Talking’s done. If you love me, then love me.”
And for the last time, Roland did. They rocked together, skin to skin and breath to breath, and outside the wind roared into the west like a tidal wave.
12
That evening, as the grinning Demon rose in the sky, Cordelia left her house and walked slowly across the lawn to her garden, detouring around the pile of leaves she had raked that afternoon. In her arms was a bundle of clothes. She dropped them in front of the pole to which her stuffy-guy was bound, then looked raptly up at the rising moon: the knowing wink of the eye, the ghoul’s gr
in; silver as bone was that moon, a white button against violet silk.
It grinned at Cordelia; Cordelia grinned back. Finally, with the air of a woman awakening from a trance, she stepped forward and pulled the stuffy-guy off its pole. His head lolled limply against her shoulder, like the head of a man who has found himself too drunk to dance. His red hands dangled.
She stripped off the guy’s clothes, uncovering a bulging, vaguely humanoid shape in a pair of her dead brother’s longhandles. She took one of the things she had brought from the house and held it up to the moonlight. A red silk riding shirt, one of Mayor Thorin’s presents to Miss Oh So Young and Pretty. One of those she wouldn’t wear. Whore’s clothes, she had called them. And what did that make Cordelia Delgado, who had taken care of her even after her bullheaded da had decided he must stand against the likes of Fran Lengyll and John Croydon? It made her a whorehouse madam, she supposed.
This thought led to an image of Eldred Jonas and Coral Thorin, naked and striving while a honky-tonk piano planked out “Red Dirt Boogie” below them, and Cordelia moaned like a dog.
She yanked the silk shirt over the stuffy’s head. Next came one of Susan’s split riding skirts. After the skirt, a pair of her slippers. And last, replacing the sombrero, one of Susan’s spring bonnets.
Presto! The stuffy-guy was now a stuffy-gal.
“And caught red-handed ye are,” she whispered. “I know. Oh yes, I know. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
She carried the stuffy from the garden to the pile of leaves on the lawn. She laid it close by the leaves, then scooped some up and pushed them into the bodice of the riding shirt, making rudimentary breasts. That done, she took a match from her pocket and struck it alight.