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 saymay . 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, vest, 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 havedéjà vuin 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 saysI DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!
Jake is wearing one that saysI DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!
Both have cups of hot chocolate, the perfect kindmit schlagon 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
Eleven
“Time to get up, Susannah,” Roland said. “It’s your watch.”
She sat up, looking around. The campfire had burned low.
“I heard him moving out there,” Roland said, “but that was some time ago. Susannah, are
you all right? Were you dreaming?”
“Yes,” she said. “There was only one hat in this dream, and I was wearing it.”
“I don’t understand you.”
Nor did she understand herself. The dream was already fading, as dreams do. All she knew
for sure was that the name on Eddie’s lips just before he faded away for good had been that
of Patrick Danville.
Chapter V:
Joe Collins of Odd’s Lane
One
Three weeks after the dream of one hat, three figures (two large, one small) emerged from
a tract of upland forest and began to move slowly across a great open field toward more
woods below. One of the large figures was pulling the other on a contraption that was more
sled than travois.
Oy raced back and forth between Roland and Susannah, as if keeping a constant watch.
His fur was thick and sleek from cold weather and a constant diet of deermeat. The land the
three of them were currently covering might have been a meadow in the warmer seasons,
but now the ground was buried under five feet of snow. The pulling was easier, because