Matthew—if he decided to drop by the Saturday night bean supper and tell them stories of
how it was, traipsing around the Sea of Galilee with Jesus the Carpenter.
The ritual which had ended the meal was now repeated, only this time everyone left in
River Crossing participated. They shuffled forward in a line, shaking hands with Eddie and
Susannah, kissing Jake on the cheek or forehead, then kneeling in front of Roland for his
touch and his blessing. Mercy threw her arms about him and pressed her blind face against
his stomach. Roland hugged her back and thanked her for her news.
“Will ye not stay the night with us, gunslinger? Sunset comes on apace, and it’s been long
since you and yours spent the night beneath a roof, I’ll warrant.”
“It has been, but it’s best we go on. Thankee-sai.”
“Will ye come again if ye may, gunslinger?”
“Yes,” Roland said, but Eddie did not need to look into his strange friend’s face to know the chances were small. “If we can.”
“Ay.” She Imaged him a final time, then passed on with her hand resting on Si’s sunburned shoulder. “Fare ye well.”
Aunt Talitha came last. When she began to kneel, Roland caught her by the shoulders. “No,
sai. You shall not do.” And before Eddie’s amazed eyes, Roland knelt before her in the dust of the town square. “Will you bless me, Old Mother? Will you bless all of us as we go our
course?”
“Ay,” she said. There was no surprise in her voice, no tears in her eyes, but her voice throbbed with deep feeling, all the same. “I see your heart is true, gunslinger, and that you hold to the old ways of your kind; ay, you hold to them very well. I bless you and yours and
will pray that no harm will come to you. Now take this, if you will.” She reached into the
bodice of her faded dress and removed a silver cross at the end of a fine-link silver chain.
She took it off
Now it was Roland’s turn to be surprised. “Are you sure? I did not come to take what
belongs to you and yours, Old Mother.”
“I’m sure as sure can be. I’ve worn this day and night for over a hundred years, gunslinger.
Now you shall wear it, and lay it at the foot of the Dark Tower, and speak the name of
Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth.” She slipped the chain over his head. The cross
dropped into the open neck of his deerskin shirt as if it belonged there. “Go now. We have
broken bread, we have held palaver, we have your blessing, and you have ours. Go your
course in safety. Stand and be true.” Her voice trembled and broke on the last word.
Roland rose to his feet, then bowed and tapped his throat three times. “Thankee-sai.”
She bowed back, but did not speak. Now there were tears coursing down her cheeks.
“Ready?” Roland asked.
Eddie nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.
“All right,” Roland said. “Let’s go.”
They walked down what remained of the town’s high street, Jake pushing Susannah’s
wheelchair. As they passed the last building (TRADE & CHANGE, the faded sign read),
he looked back. The old people were still gathered about the stone marker, a forlorn cluster
of humanity in the middle of this wide, empty plain. Jake raised his hand. Up to this point
he had managed to hold himself in, but when several of the old folks—Si, Bill, and Till
among them—raised their own hands in return, Jake burst into tears himself.
Eddie put an arm around his shoulders. “Just keep walking, sport,” he said in an uneasy voice. “That’s the only way to do it.”
“They’re so old!” Jake sobbed. “How can we just leave them like this? It’s not right!”
“It’s ka,” Eddie said without thinking.
“Is it? Well ka suh-suh-sucks!”
“Yeah, hard,” Eddie agreed . . . but he kept walking. So did Jake, and he didn’t look back again. He was afraid they would still be there, standing at the center of their forgotten town,
watching until Roland and his friends were out of view. And he would have been right.
14
THEY HAD MADE LESS than seven miles before the sky began to darken and sunset
colored the western horizon blaze orange. There was a grove of Susannah’s eucalyptus
trees nearby; Jake and Eddie foraged there for wood.
“I just don’t see why we didn’t stay,” Jake said. “The blind lady invited us, and we didn’t get very far, anyway. I’m still so full I’m practi- cally waddling.”
Eddie smiled. “Me, too. And I can tell you something else: your good friend Edward
Cantor Dean is looking forward to a long and lei- surely squat in this grove of trees first
thing tomorrow morning. You wouldn’t believe how tired I am of eating deermeat and
crapping rabbit-turds. If you’d told me a year ago that a good dump would be the high point
of my day, I would have laughed in your face.”
“Is your middle name really Cantor?”
“Yes, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread it around.”
“I won’t. Why didn’t we stay, Eddie?”
Eddie sighed. “Because we would have found out they needed firewood.”
“Huh?”
“And after we got the firewood, we would’ve found they also needed fresh meat, because
they served us the last of what they had. And we’d be real creeps not to replace what we ate,
right? Especially when we’re packing guns and the best they can probably do is a bunch of
bows and arrows fifty or a hundred years old. So we would have gone hunting for them. By
then it would be night again, and when we got up the next day, Susannah would be saying
we ought to at least make a few repairs before we moved on—oh, not to the front of the
town, that’d be danger- ous, but maybe in the hotel or wherever it is they live. Only a few
days, and what’s a few days, right?”
Roland materialized out of the gloom. He moved as quietly as ever, but he looked tired and
preoccupied. “I thought maybe you two fell into a quickpit,” he said.
“Nope. I’ve just been telling Jake the facts as I see them.”
“So what would have been wrong with that?” Jake- asked. “This Dark Tower thingy has been wherever it is for a long time, right? It’s not going anywhere, is it?”
“A few days, then a few more, then a few more.” Eddie looked at the branch he had just picked up and threw it aside disgustedly. I’m starting to sound just like him, he thought.
And yet he knew that he was only speaking the truth. “Maybe we’d see that their spring is
getting silted up, and it wouldn’t be polite to go until we’d dug it out for them. But why stop
there when we could take another couple of weeks and build a jackleg waterwheel, right?
They’re old, and have no more foot.” He glanced at Roland, and his voice was tinged with
reproach. “I tell you what—when I think of Bill and Till there stalking a herd of wild
buffalo, I get the shivers.”
“They’ve been doing it a long time,” Roland said, “and I imagine they could show us a thing or two. They’ll manage. Meantime, let’s get that wood—it’s going to be a chilly
night.”
But Jake wasn’t done with it yet. He was looking closely—almost sternly—at Eddie.
“You’re saying we could never do enough for them, aren’t you?”
Eddie stuck out his lower lip and blew hair off his forehead. “Not exactly. I’m saving it
would never be any easier to leave than it was today. Harder, maybe, but no easier.”
“It still doesn’t seem right.”
They reached the place that would become, once the fire was lit, just another campsite on
the road to the Dark Tower. Susannah had eased herself out of her chair and was lying on
her back with her hands behind her head, looking up at the stars. Now she sat up and began
to arrange the wood in the way Roland had shown her months ago.
“Right is what all this is about,” Roland said. “But if you look too long at the small rights, Jake—the ones that lie close at hand— it’s easy to lose sight of the big ones that stand
farther off. Things are out of joint—going wrong and getting worse. We see it all around us,
but the answers are still ahead. While we were helping the twenty or thirty people left in
River Crossing, twenty or thirty thousand more might be suffering or dying somewhere
else. And if there is any place in the universe where these things can be set right, it’s at the Dark Tower.”
“Why? How?” Jake asked. “What is this Tower, anyway?”