On the Drop, the horses gallop wildly, as if understanding (very likely they do)
that their time of freedom is coming to an end. They swoop and then stand with their faces pointing west when the wind gusts, showing their asses to winter. On the ranches, porch-nets are taken down and shutters rehung. In the huge ranch kitchens and smaller farmhouse kitchens, no one is stealing Reap-kisses, and no one is even thinking about sex. This is the time of putting up and laying by, and the kitchens fume with steam and pulse with heat from before dawn until long after dark. There is the smell of apples and beets and beans and sharproot and curing strips of meat. Women work ceaselessly all day and then sleepwalk to bed, where they lie like corpses until the next dark morning calls them back to their kitchens.
Leaves are burned in town yards, and as the week goes on and Old Demon’s face shows ever more clearly, red-handed stuffy-guys are thrown on the pyres more and more frequently. In the fields, cornshucks flare like torches, and often stuffies bum with them, their red hands and white-cross eyes rippling in the heat. Men stand around these fires, not speaking, their faces solemn. No one will say what terrible old ways and unspeakable old gods are being propitiated by the burning of the stuffy-guys, but they all know well enough. From time to time one of these men will whisper two words under his breath: charyou tree.
They are closing, closing, closing the year.
The streets rattle with firecrackers-—and sometimes with a heftier “big-hang” that makes even placid carthorses rear in their traces—and echo with the laughter of children. On the porch of the mercantile and across the street at the Travellers’
Rest, kisses—sometimes humidly open and with much sweet lashing of tongues—are exchanged, but Coral Thorin’s whores (“cotton-gillies” is what the airy-fairy ones like Gert Moggins like to call themselves) are bored. They will have little custom this week.
This is not Year’s End, when the winterlogs will bum and Mejis will be bam
dances from one end to the other . . . and yet it is. This is the real year’s end, charyou tree, and everyone, from Stanley Ruiz standing at the bar beneath The Romp to the farthest of Fran Lengyll’s vaqueros out on the edge of the Bad Grass, knows it. There is a kind of echo in the bright air, a yearning for other places in the blood, a loneliness in the heart that sings like the wind.
But this year there’s something else, as well: a sense of wrongness that no one can quite voice. Folks who never had a nightmare in their lives will awake screaming
with them during the week of fin de ano; men who consider themselves peaceful will find themselves not only in fist-fights but instigating them; discontented boys who would only have dreamed of running away in other years will this year actually do it, and most will not come back after the first night spent sleeping raw.
There is a sense—inarticulate but very much there—that things have gone amiss this season. It is the closing of the year; it is also the closing of the peace. For it is here, in the sleepy Out-World Barony of Mejis, that Mid-World’s last great conflict will shortly begin; it is from here that the blood will begin to flow. In two years, no more, the world as it has been will be swept away. It starts here. From its field of roses, the Dark Tower cries out in its beast’s voice. Time is a face on the water.
2
Coral Thorin was coming down the High Street from the Bayview Hotel when she spied Sheemie, leading Caprichoso and heading in the opposite direction. The boy was singing “Careless Love” in a voice both high and sweet. His progress was slow; the barrels slung over Capi’s back were half again as large as the ones he had carried up to the Coos not long before.
Coral hailed her boy-of-all-work cheerily enough. She had reason to be cheery; Eldred Jonas had no use for fin de ano abstinence. And for a man with a bad leg, he could be very inventive.
“Sheemie!” she called. “Where go ye? Seafront?”
“Aye,” Sheemie said. “I’ve got the graf them asked for. All parties come Reaping Fair, aye, tons of em. Dance a lot, get hot a lot, drink graf to cool off a lot! How pretty you look, sai Thorin, cheeks all pinky-pink, so they are.”
“Oh, law! How kind of you to say, Sheemie!” She favored him with a dazzling smile. “Go on, now, you flatterer—don’t linger.”
“Noey-no, off I go.”
Coral stood watching after him and smiling. Dance a lot, get hot a lot, Sheemie had said. About the dancing Coral didn’t know, but she was sure this year’s Reaping would be hot, all right. Very hot indeed.
3
Miguel met Sheemie at Seafront’s archway, gave him the look of lofty contempt he reserved for the lower orders, then pulled the cork from first one barrel and then the other. With the first, he only sniffed from the bung; at the second, he stuck his thumb in and then sucked it thoughtfully. With his wrinkled cheeks hollowed inward and his toothless old mouth working, he looked like an ancient bearded baby.
“Tasty, ain’t it?” Sheemie asked. “Tasty as a pasty, ain’t it, good old Miguel, been here a thousand years?”
Miguel, still sucking his thumb, favored Sheemie with a sour look. “Andale.
Andale, simplon. ”
Sheemie led his mule around the house to the kitchen. Here the breeze off the ocean was sharp and shiversome. He waved to the women in the kitchen, but not a one waved back; likely they didn’t even see him. A pot boiled on every trink of the enormous stove, and the women— working in loose long-sleeved cotton garments like shifts and wearing their hair tied up in brightly colored clouts—moved about like phantoms glimpsed in fog.
Sheemie took first one barrel from Capi’s back, then the other. Grunting, he carried them to the huge oak tank by the back door. He opened the tank’s lid, bent over it, and then backed away from the eye-wateringly strong smell of elderly graf.
“Whew!” he said, hoisting the first barrel. “Ye could get drunk just on the smell o’ that lot!”
He emptied in the fresh graf, careful not to spill. When he was finished, the tank was pretty well topped up. That was good, for on Reaping Night, apple-beer would flow out of the kitchen taps like water.
He slipped the empty barrels into their carriers, looked into the kitchen once more to be sure he wasn’t being observed (he wasn’t; Coral’s simple-minded tavern-boy was the last thing on anyone’s minds that morning), and then led Capi not back the way they’d come but along a path which led to Seafront’s storage sheds.
There were three of them in a row, each with its own red-handed stuffy-guy sitting in front. The guys appeared to be watching Sheemie, and that gave him the shivers. Then he remembered his trip to crazy old bitch-lady Rhea’s house. She had been scary. These were just old duds stuffed full of straw.
“Susan?” he called, low. “Are ye here?”
The door of the center shed was ajar. Now it trundled open a little. “Come in!” she called, also low. “Bring the mule! Hurry!”
He led Capi into a shed which smelled of straw and beans and tack … and something else. Something sharper. Fireworks, he thought. Shooting-powder, too.
Susan, who had spent the morning enduring final fittings, was dressed in a thin silk wrapper and large leather boots. Her hair was done up in curling papers of bright blue and red.
Sheemie tittered. “You look quite amusing, Susan, daughter of Pat. Quite a chuckle for me, I think.”
“Yes, I’m a picture for an artist to paint, all right,” Susan said, looking distracted.
“We have to hurry. I have twenty minutes before I’m missed. I’ll be missed before, if that randy old goat is looking for me …let’s be quick!”
They lifted the barrels from Capi’s back. Susan took a broken horse-bit from the pocket of her wrapper and used the sharp end to pry off one of the tops. She tossed the bit to Sheemie, who pried off the other. The apple-tart smell of graf filled the shed.
“Here!” She tossed Sheemie a soft cloth. “Dry it out as well as you can. Doesn’t have to be perfect, they’re wrapped, but it’s best to be safe.”
They wiped the insides of the barrels, Susan stealing nervous glances at the door every few seconds. “All right,” she said. “Good. Now … there’s two kinds. I’m sure they won’t be missed; there’s enough stuff back there to blow up half the world.”
She hurried back into the dimness of the shed, holding the hem of her wrapper up with one hand, her boots clomping. When she came back, her arms were full of wrapped packages.