She went down the line of sinks, trying the faucets, and from the last one got a feeble trickle of water. She rinsed her bloody hand under it until the trickle subsided. Then she walked back to the oven, wiping her hand dry on the seat of her britches. She did not see Jake, now standing just inside the kitchen doors and watching her, although he made no attempt to hide; she was totally fixated on the smell of the meat. It wasn’t enough, and not precisely what her chap needed, but it would do for the time being.
She reached in, grasped the sides of the roasting pan, then pulled back with a gasp, shaking her fingers and grinning. It was a grin of pain, yet not entirely devoid of humor. Mr. Rat had either been a trifle more immune to the heat than she was, or maybe hongrier. Although it was hard to believe anyone or anything could be hongrier than she was right now.
“I’se hongry!” she yelled, laughing, as she went down the line of drawers, opening and closing them swiftly.
“Mia’s one hongry lady, yessir! Didn’t go to Morehouse, didn’t go to no house, but I’se hongryl And my chap’s hongry, too!”
In the last drawer (wasn’t that always the way), she found the hotpads she’d been looking for. She hurried back to the oven with them in her hands, bent down, and pulled the roast out. Her laughter died in a sudden shocked gasp… and then burst out again, louder and stronger than ever. What a goose she was! What a damned silly-billy! For one instant she’d thought the roast, which had been done to a skin-crackling turn and only gnawed by Mr. Rat in one place, was the body of a child. And yes, she supposed that a roasted pig did look a little bit like a child… a baby… someone’s chap… but now that it was out and she could see the closed eyes and the charred ears and the baked apple in the open mouth, there was no question about what it was.
As she set it on the counter, she thought again about the reflection she’d seen in the foyer. But never mind that now. Her gut was a roar of famishment. She plucked a butcher’s knife out of the drawer from which she had taken the meat-fork and cut off the place where Mr. Rat had been eating the way you’d cut a wormhole out of an apple. She tossed this piece back over her shoulder, then picked up the roast entire and buried her face in it.
From the door, Jake watched her.
When the keenest edge had been taken off her hunger, Mia looked around the kitchen with an expression that wavered between calculation and despair. What was she supposed to do when the roast was gone? What was she supposed to eat the next time this sort of hunger came? And where was she supposed to find what her chap really wanted, really needed? She’d do anything to locate that stuff and secure a good supply of it, that special food or drink or vitamin or whatever it was. The pork was close (close enough to put him to sleep again, thank all the gods and the Man Jesus), but not close enough.
She banged sai Piggy back into the roasting pan for the nonce, pulled the shirt she was wearing off over her head, and turned it so she could look at the front. There was a cartoon pig, roasted bright red but seeming not to mind; it was smiling blissfully. Above it, in rustic letters made to look like barn-board, was this: THE
DIXIE PIG, LEX AND 61st. Below it: “BEST RIBS IN NEW YORK”—GOURMET MAGAZINE.
The Dixie Pig, she thought. The Dixie Pig. Where have I heard that before” ?
She didn’t know, but she believed she could find Lex if she had to. “It be right there between Third and Park,”
she said. “That’s right, ain’t it?”
The boy, who had slipped back out but left the door ajar, heard this and nodded miserably. That was where it was, all right.
Well-a-well, Mia thought. It all does fine for now, good as it can do, anyway, and like that woman in the book said, tomorrow’s another day. Worry about it then. Right ?
Right. She picked up the roast again and began to eat. The smacking sounds she made were really not much different from those made by the rat. Really not much different at all.
TWO
Tian and Zalia had tried to give Eddie and Susannah their bedroom. Convincing them that their guests really didn’t want their bedroom—that sleeping there would actually make them uncomfortable—hadn’t been easy.
It was Susannah who finally turned the trick, telling the Jaffordses in a hesitant, confiding voice that something awful had happened to them in the city of Lud, something so traumatic that neither of them could sleep easily in a house anymore. A barn, where you could see the door open to the outside world any time you wanted to take a look, was much better.
It was a good tale, and well told. Tian and Zalia listened with a sympathetic credulity that made Eddie feel guilty. A lot of bad things had happened to them in Lud, that much was true, but nothing which made either of them nervous about sleeping indoors. At least he guessed not; since leaving their own world, the two of them had only spent a single night (the previous) under the actual roof of an actual house.
Now he sat cross-legged on one of the blankets Zalia had given them to spread on the hay, the other two cast aside. He was looking out into the yard, past the porch where Gran-pere had told his tale, and toward the river. The moon flitted in and out of the clouds, first brightening the scene to silver, then darkening it. Eddie hardly saw what he was looking at. His ears were trained on the floor of the barn below him, where the stalls and pens were. She was down there somewhere, he was sure she was, but God, she was so quiet.
And by the way, who is she? Mia, Roland says, but that’s just a name. Who is she really ?
But it wasn’t just a name. It means mother in the High Speech, the gunslinger had said.
It means mother.
Yeah. But she’s not the mother of my kid. The chap is not my son.
A soft clunk from below him, followed by the creak of a board. Eddie stiffened. She was down there, all right. He’d begun to have his doubts, but she was.
He had awakened after perhaps six hours of deep and dreamless sleep to discover she was gone. He went to the barn’s bay door, which they’d left open, and looked out. There she was. Even by moonlight he’d known that wasn’t really Susannah down there in the wheelchair; not his Suze, not Odetta Holmes or Detta Walker,
either. Yet she wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. She—
You saw her in New York, only then she had legs and she knew how to use them. She had legs and she didn’t want to go too close to the rose.
She had her reasons for that, and they were good reasons, but you know what I think the real reason was ? I think she was afraid it would hurt whatever it is she’s carrying in her belly.
Yet he felt sorry for the woman below. No matter who she was or what she was carrying, she’d gotten herself into this situation while saving Jake Chambers. She’d held off the demon of the circle, trapping it inside her just long enough for Eddie to finish whittling the key he’d made.
If you’d finished it earlier— if you hadn’t been such a damned little chickenshit— she might not even be in this mess, did you ever think of that?
Eddie had pushed the thought away. There was some truth to it, of course—he had lost his confidence while whittling the key, which was why it hadn’t been finished when the time of Jake’s drawing came—but he was done with that kind of thinking. It was good for nothing but creating a truly excellent array of selfinflicted wounds.
Whoever she was, his heart had gone out to the woman he saw below him. In the sleeping silence of the night, through the alternating shutters of moonlight and dark, she pushed Susannah’s wheelchair first across the yard… then back… then across again… then left… then right. She reminded him a little of the old robots in Shardik’s clearing, the ones Roland had made him shoot. And was that so surprising? He’d drifted off to sleep thinking of those robots, and what Roland had said of them: They are creatures of great sadness, I think, in their own way. Eddie is going to put them out of their misery. And so he had, after some persuasion: the one that looked like a many-jointed snake, the one that looked like the Tonka tractor he’d once gotten as a birthday present, the ill-tempered stainless-steel rat. He’d shot them all except for the last, some sort of mechanical flying thing. Roland had gotten that one.