Stephen King – The Waste Lands

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?”