She made her way slowly down the table, talking to herself in many voices, creating a kind of lunatic chitchat. How they hangin, honey ?
Oh they hanging just fine, thank you so much for asking, Mia. Do you really believe that Oswald was working alone when he shot Kennedy?
Never in a million years, darling— that was a CIA job the whole way. Them, or those honky millionaires from the Alabama steel crescent. Bombingham, Alabama, honey, ain’t it the truth ? Have you heard the new Joan Baez record ? My God, yes, doesn’t she sing like an angel? I hear that she and Bob Dylan are going to get themselves married…
And on and on, chitter and chatter. Roland heard Odetta’s cultured voice and Detta’s rough but colorful profanity. He heard Susannah’s voice, and many others, as well. How many women in her head? How many personalities, formed and half-formed? He watched her reach over the empty plates that weren’t there and empty glasses (also not there), eating directly from the serving platters, chewing everything with the same hungry relish, her face gradually picking up the shine of grease, the bodice of her gown (which he did not see but sensed) darkening as she wiped her fingers there again and again, squeezing the cloth, matting it against her breasts—these motions were too clear to mistake. And at each stop, before moving on, she would seize the empty air in front of her and throw a plate he could not see either on the floor at her feet or across the table at a wall that must exist in her dream.
” There!” she’d scream in the defiant voice of Detta Walker. ” There, you nasty old Blue Lady, I done broke it again! I broke yo’ fuckin plate, and how do you like it? How do you like it now?”
Then, stepping to the next place, she might utter a pleasant but restrained little trill of laughter and ask so-
and-so how their boy so-and-so was coming along down there at Morehouse, and wasn’t it wonderful to have such a fine school for people of color, just the most wonderful!… thing! And how is your Mamma, dear? Oh I am so sorry to hear it, we’ll all be praying for her recovery.
Reaching across another of those make-believe plates as she spoke. Grabbing up a great tureen filled with glistening black roe and lemon rinds. Lowering her face into it like a hog dropping its face into the trough.
Gobbling. Raising her face again, smiling delicately and demurely in the glow of the electric torches, the fish eggs standing out like black sweat on her brown skin, dotting her cheeks and her brow, nestling around her nostrils like clots of old blood— Oh yes, I think we are making wonderful progress, folks like that Bull Connor are living in the sunset years now, and the best revenge on them is that they know it—and then she would throw the tureen backward over her head like a crazed volleyball player, some of the roe raining down in her hair (Roland could almost see it), and when the tureen smashed against the stone, her polite isn’t-this-a-wonderful-party face would cramp into a ghoulish Detta Walker snarl and she might scream, ” Dere, you nasty old Blue Lady, how dat feel? You want to stick some of dat caviar up yo dry-ass cunt, you go on and do it! You go right on! Dat be fine, sho!”
And then she would move on to the next place. And the next. And the next. Feeding herself in the great banquet hall. Feeding herself and feeding her chap. Never turning to see Roland at all. Never realizing that this place did not, strictly speaking, even exist.
FOUR
Eddie and Jake had been far from Roland’s mind and concerns as the four of them (five, if Oy was counted) bedded down after feasting on the fried muffin-balls. He had been focused on Susannah. The gunslinger was quite sure she would go wandering again tonight, and again he would follow after her when she did. Not to see what she was up to; he knew what it would be in advance.
No, his chief purpose had been protection. Early that afternoon, around the time Jake had returned with his armload of food, Susannah had begun to show signs Roland knew: speech that was clipped and short, movements that were a little too jerky to be graceful, an absent tendency to rub at her temple or above her left eyebrow, as if there was a pain there. Did Eddie not see those signs? Roland wondered. Eddie had been a dull observer indeed when Roland first met him, but he had changed greatly since then, and…
And he loved her. Loved her. How could he and not see what Roland saw? The signs weren’t quite as obvious as they had been on the beach at the edge of the Western Sea, when Detta was preparing to leap forward and wrest control from Odetta, but they were there, all right, and not so different, at that.
On the other hand, Roland’s mother had had a saying, Love stumbles. It could be that Eddie was simply too close to her to see. Or doesn’t want to, Roland thought. Doesn’t want to face the idea that we might have to go through that whole business again. The business of making her face herself and her divided nature.
Except this time it wasn’t about her. Roland had suspected this for a long time—since before their palaver with the people of River Crossing, in fact—and now he knew. No, it wasn’t about her.
And so he’d lain there, listening to their breathing lengthen as they dropped off one by one: Oy, then Jake, then Susannah. Eddie last.
Well… not quite last. Faintly, very faintly, Roland could hear a murmur of conversation from the folk on the
other side of yonder south hill, the ones who were trailing them and watching them. Nerving themselves to step forward and make themselves known, very likely. Roland’s ears were sharp, but not quite sharp enough to pick out what they were saying. There were perhaps half a dozen murmured exchanges before someone uttered a loud shushing hiss. Then there was silence, except for the low, intermittent snuffling of the wind in the treetops. Roland lay still, looking up into the darkness where no stars shone, waiting for Susannah to rise.
Eventually she did.
But before that, Jake, Eddie, and Oy went todash.
FIVE
Roland and his mates had learned about todash (what there was to learn) from Vannay, the tutor of court in the long-ago when they had been young. They had been a quintet to begin with: Roland, Alain, Cuthbert, Jamie, and Wallace, Vannay’s son. Wallace, fiercely intelligent but ever sickly, had died of the falling sickness, sometimes called king’s evil. Then they had been four, and under the umbrella of true ka-tet.
Vannay had known it as well, and that knowing was surely part of his sorrow. Cort taught them to navigate by the sun and stars; Vannay showed them compass and quadrant and sextant and taught them the mathematics necessary to use them. Cort taught them to fight. With history, logic problems, and tutorials on what he called “the universal truths,” Vannay taught them how they could sometimes avoid having to do so.
Cort taught them to kill if they had to. Vannay, with his limp and his sweet but distracted smile, taught them that violence worsened problems far more often than it solved them. He called it the hollow chamber, where all true sounds became distorted by echoes.
He taught them physics—what physics there was. He taught them chemistry—what chemistry was left. He taught them to finish such sentences as “That tree is like a” and “When I’m running I feel as happy as a” and
“We couldn’t help laughing because.” Roland hated these exercises, but Vannay wouldn’t let him slip away from them. “Your imagination is a poor thing, Roland,” the tutor told him once—Roland might have been eleven at the time. “I will not let you feed it short rations and make it poorer still.”
He had taught them the Seven Dials of Magic, refusing to say if he believed in any of them, and Roland thought it was tangential to one of these lessons that Vannay had mentioned todash. Or perhaps you capitalized it, perhaps it was Todash. Roland didn’t know for sure. He knew that Vannay had spoken of the Manni sect, people who were far travelers. And hadn’t he also mentioned the Wizard’s Rainbow?
Roland thought yes, but he had twice had the pink bend o’ the rainbow in his own possession, once as a boy and once as a man, and although he had traveled in it both times—with his friends on the second occasion—
it had never taken him todash.
Ah, but how would you know? he asked himself. How would you know, Roland, when you were inside it?