Wolves of the Calla - Page 7/26

ONE

Susannah was able to observe a good deal on that long and interesting day, because Roland gave her the chance and because, after her morning's sickness passed off, she felt wholly herself again.

Just before Callahan and his party drew within earshot, Roland murmured to her, "Stay close to me, and not a word from you unless I prompt it. If they take you for my sh'veen, let it be so."

Under other circumstances, she might have had something pert to say about the idea of being Roland's quiet little side-wife, his nudge in the night, but there was no time this morning, and in any case, it was far from a joking matter; the seriousness in his face made that clear. Also, the part of the faithful, quiet second appealed to her. In truth, any part appealed to her. Even as a child, she had rarely been so happy as when pretending to be someone else.

Which probably explains all there is about you worth knowing, sugar , she thought.

"Susannah?" Roland asked. "Do you hear me?"

"Hear you well," she told him. "Don't you worry about me."

"If it goes as I want, they'll see you little and you'll see them much."

As a woman who'd grown up black in mid-twentieth-century America (Odetta had laughed and applauded her way through Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man , often rocking back and forth in her seat like one who has been visited by a revelation), Susannah knew exactly what he wanted. And would give it to him. There was a part of her - a spiteful Detta Walker part - that would always resent Roland's ascendancy in her heart and mind, but for the most part she recognized him for what he was: the last of his kind. Maybe even a hero.

TWO

Watching Roland make the introductions (Susannah was presented dead last, after Jake, and almost negligendy), she had time to reflect on how fine she felt now that the nagging gas-pains in her left side had departed. Hell, even the lingering headache had gone its way, and that sucker had been hanging around - sometimes in the back of her head, sometimes at one temple or the other, sometimes just above her left eye, like a migraine waiting to hatch - for a week or more. And of course there were the mornings. Every one found her feeling nauseated and with a bad case of jelly-leg for the first hour or so. She never vomited, but for that first hour she always felt on the verge of it. She wasn't stupid enough to mistake such symptoms, but had reason to know they meant nothing. She just hoped she wouldn't embarrass herself by swelling up as her Mama's friend Jessica had done, not once but twice. Two false pregnancies, and in both cases that woman had looked ready to bust out twins. Triplets, even. But of course Jessica Beasley's periods had stopped, and that made it all too easy for a woman to believe she was with child. Susannah knew she wasn't pregnant for the simplest of reasons: she was still menstruating. She had begun a period on the very day they had awakened back on the Path of the Beam, with the Green Palace twenty-five or thirty miles behind them. She'd had another since then. Both courses had been exceptionally heavy, necessitating the use of many rags to soak up the dark flow, and before then her menses had always been light, some months no more than a few of the spots her mother called "a lady's roses." Yet she didn't complain, because before her arrival in this world, her periods had usually been painful and sometimes excruciating. The two she'd had since returning to the Path of the Beam hadn't hurt at all. If not for the soaked rags she'd carefully buried to one side of their path or the other, she wouldn't have had a clue that it was her time of the month. Maybe it was the purity of the water.

Of course she knew what all this was about; it didn't take a rocket scientist, as Eddie sometimes said. The crazy, scrambled dreams she couldn't recall, the weakness and nausea in the mornings, the transient headaches, the strangely fierce gas attacks and occasional cramps all came down to the same thing: she wanted his baby. More than anything else in the world, she wanted Eddie Dean's chap growing in her belly.

What she didn't want was to puff up in a humiliating false pregnancy.

Never mind all that now , she thought as Callahan approached with the others. Right now you've got to watch. Got to see what Roland and Eddie and Jake don't see. That way nothing gets dropped . And she felt she could do that job very well.

Really, she had never felt finer in her life.

THREE

Callahan came first. Behind him were two men, one who looked about thirty and another who looked to Susannah nearly twice that. The older man had heavy cheeks that would be jowls in another five years or so, and lines carving their courses from the sides of his nose down to his chin. "I-want lines," her father would have called them (and Dan Holmes had had a pretty good set of his own). The younger man wore a battered sombrero, the older a clean white Stetson that made Susannah want to smile - it looked like the kind of hat the good guy would wear in an old black-and-white Western movie. Still, she guessed a lid like that didn't come cheap, and she thought the man wearing it had to be Wayne Overholser. "The big farmer," Roland had called him. The one that had to be convinced, according to Callahan.

But not by us , Susannah thought, which was sort of a relief. The tight mouth, the shrewd eyes, and most of all those deep-carved lines (there was another slashed vertically into his brow, just above the eyes) suggested sai Overholser would be a pain in the ass when it came to convincing.

Just behind these two - specifically behind the younger of the two - there came a tall, handsome woman, probably not black but nonetheless nearly as dark-skinned as Susannah herself. Bringing up the rear was an earnest-looking man in spectacles and farmer's clothes and a likely-looking boy probably two or three years older than Jake. The resemblance between this pair was impossible to miss; they had to be Slightman the Elder and Younger.

Boy may be older than Jake in years , she thought, but he's got a soft bok about him, all the same . True, but not necessarily a bad thing. Jake had seen far too much for a boy not yet in his teens. Done too much, as well.

Overholser looked at their guns (Roland and Eddie each wore one of the big revolvers with the sandalwood grips; the .44 Ruger from New York City hung under Jake's arm in what Roland called a docker's clutch), then at Roland. He made a perfunctory salute, his half-closed fist skimming somewhere at least close to his forehead. There was no bow. If Roland was offended by this, it didn't show on his face. Nothing showed on his face but polite interest.

"Hile, gunslinger," the man who had been walking beside Overholser said, and this one actually dropped to one knee, with his head down and his brow resting on his fist. "I am Tian Jaffords, son of Luke. This lady is my wife, Zalia."

"Hile," Roland said. "Let me be Roland to you, if it suits. May your days be long upon the earth, sai Jaffords."

"Tian. Please. And may you and your friends have twice the - "

"I'm Overholser," the man in the white Stetson broke in brusquely. "We've come to meet you - you and your friends -  at the request of Callahan and young Jaffords. I'd pass the formalities and get down to business as soon as possible, do ya take no offense, I beg."

"Ask pardon but that's not quite how it is," Jaffords said. "There was a meeting, and the men of the Calla voted - "

Overholser broke in again. He was, Susannah thought, just that kind of man. She doubted he was even aware he was doing it. "The town, yes. The Calla. I've come along with every wish to do right by my town and my neighbors, but this is a busy time for me, none busier - "

"Charyou tree," Roland said mildly, and although Susannah knew a deeper meaning for this phrase, one that made her back prickle, Overholser's eyes lit up. She had her first inkling then of how this day was going to go.

"Come reap, yessir, say thankee." Off to one side, Callahan was gazing into the woods with a kind of studied patience. Behind Overholser, Tian Jaffords and his wife exchanged an embarrassed glance. The Slightmans only waited and watched. "You understand that much, anyway."

"In Gilead we were surrounded by farms and freeholds," Roland said. "I got my share of hay and corn in barn. Aye, and sharproot, too."

Overholser was giving Roland a grin that Susannah found fairly offensive. It said, We know better than that, don't we, sail We're both men of the world, after all . "Where are you from really, sai Roland?"

"My friend, you need to see an audiologist," Eddie said.

Overholser looked at him, puzzled. "Beg-my-ear?"

Eddie made a there, you see ? gesture and nodded. "Exactly what I mean."

"Be still, Eddie," Roland said. Still as mild as milk. "Sai Overholser, we may take a moment to exchange names and speak a good wish or two, surely. For that is how civilized, kindly folk behave, is it not?" Roland paused - a brief, underlining pause -  and then said, "With harriers it may be different, but there are no harriers here."

Overholser's lips pressed together and he looked hard at Roland, ready to take offense. He saw nothing in the gunslinger's face that offered it, and relaxed again. "Thankee," he said. "Tian and Zalia Jaffords, as told - "

Zalia curtsied, spreading invisible skirts to either side of her battered corduroy pants.

" - and here are Ben Slightman the Elder and Benny the Younger."

The father raised his fist to his forehead and nodded. The son, his face a study in awe (it was mostly the guns, Susannah surmised), bowed with his right leg out stiffly in front of him and the heel planted.

"The Old Fella you already know," Overholser finished, speaking with exactly the sort of offhand contempt at which Overholser himself would have taken deep offense, had it been directed toward his valued self. Susannah supposed that when you were the big farmer, you got used to talking just about any way you wanted. She wondered how far he might push Roland before discovering that he hadn't been pushing at all. Because some men couldn't be pushed. They might go along with you for awhile, but then -

"These are my trailmates," Roland said. "Eddie Dean and Jake Chambers, of New York. And this is Susannah." He gestured at her without turning in her direction. Overholser's face took on a knowing, intensely male look Susannah had seen before. Detta Walker had had a way of wiping that look off men's faces that she didn't believe sai Overholser would care for at all.

Nonetheless, she gave Overholser and the rest of them a demure little smile and made her own invisible-skirts curtsy. She thought hers as graceful in its way as the one made by Zalia Jaffords, but of course a curtsy didn't look quite the same when you were missing your lower legs and feet. The newcomers had marked the part of her that was gone, of course, but their feelings on that score didn't interest her much. She did wonder what they thought of her wheelchair, though, the one Eddie had gotten her in Topeka, where Blaine the Mono had finished up. These folks would never have seen the like of it.

Callahan may have , she thought. Because Callahans from our side. He  -

The boy said, "Is that a bumbler?"

"Hush, do ya," Slightman said, sounding almost shocked that his son had spoken.

"That's okay," Jake said. "Yeah, he's a bumbler. Oy, go to him." He pointed at Ben the Younger. Oy trotted around the campfire to where the newcomer stood and looked up at the boy with his gold-ringed eyes.

"I never saw a tame one before," Tian said. "Have heard of em, of course, but the world has moved on."

"Mayhap not all of it has moved on," Roland said. He looked at Overholser. "Mayhap some of the old ways still hold."

"Can I pat him?" the boy asked Jake. "Will he bite?"

"You can and he won't."

As Slightman the Younger dropped on his hunkers in front of Oy, Susannah certainly hoped Jake was right. Having a billy-bumbler chomp off this kid's nose would not set them on in any style at all.

But Oy suffered himself to be stroked, even stretching his long neck up so he could sample the odor of Slightman's face. The boy laughed. "What did you say his name was?"

Before Jake could reply, the bumbler spoke for himself. "Oy!"

They all laughed. And as simply as that they were together, well-met on this road that followed the Path of the Beam. The bond was fragile, but even Overholser sensed it. And when he laughed, the big farmer looked as if he might be a good enough fellow. Maybe frightened, and pompous to be sure, but there was something there.

Susannah didn't know whether to be glad or afraid.

FOUR

"I'd have a word alone with'ee, if it does ya," Overholser said. The two boys had walked off a little distance with Oy between them, Slightman the Younger asking Jake if the bumbler could count, as he'd heard some of them could.

"I think not, Wayne," Jaffords said at once. "It was agreed we'd go back to our camp, break bread, and explain our need to these folk. And then, if they agreed to come further - "

"I have no objection to passing a word with sai Overholser." Roland said, "nor will you, sai Jaffords, I think. For is he not your dinh?" And then, before Tian could object further (or deny it): "Give these folks tea, Susannah. Eddie, step over here with us a bit, if it do ya fine."

This phrase, new to all their ears, came out of Roland's mouth sounding perfectly natural. Susannah marveled at it. If she had tried saying that, she would have sounded as if she were sucking up.

"We have food south aways," Zalia said timidly. "Food and graf and coffee. Andy - "

"We'll eat with pleasure, and drink your coffee with joy," Roland said. "But have tea first, I beg. We'll only be a moment or two, won't we, sai?"

Overholser nodded. His look of stern unease had departed. So had his stiffness of body. From the far side of the road (close to where a woman named Mia had slipped into the woods only the night before), the boys laughed as Oy did something clever - Benny with surprise, Jake with obvious pride.

Roland took Overholser's arm and led him a little piece up the road. Eddie strolled with them. Jaffords, frowning, made as if to go with them anyway. Susannah touched his shoulder. "Don't," she said in a low voice. "He knows what he's doing."

Jaffords looked at her doubtfully for a moment, then came with her. "P'raps I could build that fire up for you a bit, sai," Slightman the Elder said with a kindly look at her diminished legs. "For I see a few sparks yet, so I do."

"If you please," Susannah said, thinking how wonderful all this was. How wonderful, how strange. Potentially deadly as well, of course, but she had come to learn that also had its charms. It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.

FIVE

Up the road about forty feet from the others, the three men stood together. Overholser appeared to be doing all the talking, sometimes gesturing violently to punctuate a point. He spoke as if Roland were no more than some gunbunny hobo who happened to come drifting down the road with a few no-account friends riding drogue behind him. He explained to Roland that Tian Jaffords was a fool (albeit a well-meaning one) who did not understand the facts of life. He told Roland that Jaffords had to be restrained, cooled off, not only in his best interests but in those of the entire Calla. He insisted to Roland that if anything could be done, Wayne Overholser, son of Alan, would be first in line to do it; he'd never shirked a chore in his life, but to go against the Wolves was madness. And, he added, lowering his voice, speaking of madness, there was the Old Fella. When he kept to his church and his rituals, he was fine. In such things, a little madness made a fine sauce. This, however, was summat different. Aye, and by a long hike.

Roland listened to it all, nodding occasionally. He said almost nothing. And when Overholser was finally finished, Calla Bryn Sturgis's big farmer simply looked with a kind of fixed fascination at the gunman who stood before him. Mostly at those faded blue eyes.

"Are ye what ye say?" he asked finally. "Tell me true, sai."

"I'm Roland of Gilead," the gunslinger said.

"From the line of Eld? Ye do say it?"

"By watch and by warrant," Roland said.

"But Gilead..." Overholser paused. "Gilead's long gone."

"I," Roland said, "am not."

"Would ye kill us all, or cause us to be killed? Tell me, I beg."

"What would you , sai Overholser? Not later; not a day or a week or a moon from now, but at this minute?"

Overholser stood a long time, looking from Roland to Eddie and then back to Roland again. Here was a man not used to changing his mind; if he did so, it would hurt him like a rupture. From down the road came the laughter of the boys as Oy fetched something Benny had thrown - a stick almost as big as the bumbler was himself.

"I'd listen," Overholser said at last. "I'd do that much, gods help me, and say thankee."

"In other words he explained all the reasons why it was a fool's errand," Eddie told her later, "and then did exactly what Roland wanted him to do. It was like magic."

"Sometimes Roland is magic," she said.

SIX

The Calla's party had camped in a pleasant hilltop clearing not far south of the road but just enough off the Path of the Beam so that the clouds hung still and moveless in the sky, seemingly close enough to touch. The way there through the woods had been carefully marked; some of the blazes Susannah saw were as big as her palm. These people might be crackerjack farmers and stockmen, but it was clear the woods made them uneasy.

"May I spell ye on that chair a bit, young man?" Overholser asked Eddie as they began the final push upslope. Susannah could smell roasting meat and wondered who was tending to the cooking if the entire Callahan-Overholser party had come out to meet them. Had the woman mentioned someone named Andy? A servant, perhaps? She had. Overholser's personal? Perhaps. Surely a man who could afford a Stetson as grand as the one now tipped back on his head could afford a personal.

"Do ya," Eddie said. He didn't quite dare to add "I beg" (still sounds phony to him , Susannah thought), but he moved aside and gave over the wheelchair's push-handles to Overholser. The farmer was a big man, it was a fair slope, and now he was pushing a woman who weighed close on to a hundred and thirty pounds, but his breathing, although heavy, remained regular.

"Might I ask you a question, sai Overholser?" Eddie asked.

"Of course," Overholser replied.

"What's your middle name?"

There was a momentary slackening of forward motion; Susannah put this down to mere surprise. "That's an odd 'un, young fella; why d'ye ask?"

"Oh, it's a kind of hobby of mine," Eddie said. "In fact, I tell fortunes by em."

Careful, Eddie, careful , Susannah thought, but she was amused in spite of herself.

"Oh, aye?"

"Yes," Eddie said. "You, now. I'll bet your middle name begins with" - he seemed to calculate - "with the letter D." Only he pronounced it Deh , in the fashion of the Great Letters in the High Speech. "And I'd say it's short. Five letters? Maybe only four?"

The slackening of forward push came again. "Devil say please!" Overholser exclaimed. "How'd you know? Tell me!"

Eddie shrugged. "It's no more than counting and guessing, really. In truth, I'm wrong almost as often as I'm right."

"More often," Susannah said.

"Tell ya my middle name's Dale," Overholser said, "although if anyone ever explained me why, it's slipped my mind. I lost my folks when I was young."

"Sorry for your loss," Susannah said, happy to see that Eddie was moving away. Probably to tell Jake she'd been right about the middle name: Wayne Dale Overholser. Equals nineteen.

"Is that young man trig or a fool?" Overholser asked Susannah. "Tell me, I beg, for I canna' tell myself."

"A little of both," she said.

"No question about this push-chair, though, would you say? It's trig as a compass."

"Say thankya," she said, then gave a small inward sigh of relief. It had come out sounding all right, probably because she hadn't exactly planned on saying it.

"Where did it come from?"

"Back on our way a good distance," she said. This turn of the conversation did not please her much. She thought it was Roland's job to tell their history (or not tell it). He was their dinh. Besides, what was told by only one could not be contradicted. Still, she thought she could say a little more. "There's a thinny. We came from the other side of that, where things are much different." She craned around to look at him. His cheeks and neck had flushed, but really, she thought, he was doing very well for a man who had to be deep into his fifties. "Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"Yar," he said, hawked, and spat off to the left. "Not that I've seen or heard it myself, you understand. I never wander far; too much to do on the farm. Those of the Calla aren't woodsy people as a rule, anyway, do ya kennit."

Oh yes, I think I kennit , Susannah thought, spying another blaze roughly the size of a dinner plate. The unfortunate tree so marked would be lucky to survive the coming winter.

"Andy's told of the thinny many and many-a. Makes a sound, he says, but can't tell what it is."

"Who's Andy?"

"Ye'll meet him for y'self soon enough, sai. Are'ee from this Calla York, like yer friends?"

"Yes," she said, again on her guard. He swung her wheelchair around a hoary old ironwood. The trees were sparser now, and the smell of cooking much stronger. Meat... and coffee. Her stomach rumbled.

"And they be not gunslingers," Overholser said, nodding at Jake and Eddie. "You'll not tell me so, surely."

"You must decide that for yourself when the time comes," Susannah said.

He made no reply for a few moments. The wheelchair rumbled over a rock outcropping. Ahead of them, Oy padded along between Jake and Benny Slightman, who had made friends with boyhood's eerie speed. She wondered if it was a good idea. For the two boys were different. Time might show them how much, and to their sorrow.

"He scared me," Overholser said. He spoke in a voice almost too low to hear. As if to himself. " 'Twere his eyes, I think. Mostly his eyes."

"Would you go on as you have, then?" Susannah asked. The question was far from as idle as she hoped it sounded, but she was still starded by the fury of his response.

"Are'ee mad, woman? Course not - not if I saw a way out of the box we're in. Hear me well! That boy" - he pointed at Tian Jaffords, walking ahead of them with his wife - "that boy as much as accused me of running yella. Had to make sure they all knew I didn't have any children of the age the Wolves fancy, aye. Not like he has, kennit. But do'ee think I'm a fool that can't count the cost?"

"Not me," Susannah said, calmly.

"But do he? I halfway think so." Overholser spoke as a man does when pride and fear are fighting it out in his head. "Do I want to give the babbies to the Wolves? Babbies that're sent back roont to be a drag on the town ever after? No! But neither do I want some hardcase to lead us all to blunder wi' no way back!"

She looked over her shoulder at him and saw a fascinating thing. He now wanted to say yes. To find a reason to say yes. Roland had brought him that far, and with hardly a word. Had only... well, had only looked at him.

There was movement in the corner of her eye. "Holy Christl" Eddie cried. Susannah's hand darted for a gun that wasn't diere. She turned forward in the chair again. Coming down the slope toward them, moving with a prissy care that she couldn't help find amusing even in her startlement, was a metal man at least seven feet high.

Jake's hand had gone to the docker's clutch and the butt of the gun that hung thhere.

"Easy, Jake!" Roland said.

The metal man, eyes flashing blue, stopped in front of them. It stood perfectly still for perhaps ten seconds, plenty of time for Susannah to read what was stamped on its chest. North Central Positronics , she thought, back for another curtain call. Not to mention LaMerk Industries .

Then the robot raised one silver arm, placing a silver hand against its stainless-steel forehead. "Hile, gunslinger, come from afar," it said. "Long days and pleasant nights."

Roland raised his fingers to his own forehead. "May you have twice the number, Andy-sai."

"Thankee." Clickings from its deep and incomprehensible guts. Then it leaned forward toward Roland, blue eyes flashing brighter. Susannah saw Eddie's hand creep to the sandalwood grip of the ancient revolver he wore. Roland, however, never flinched.

"I've made a goodish meal, gunslinger. Many good things from the fullness of the earth, aye."

"Say thankee, Andy."

"May it do ya fine." The robot's guts clicked again. "In the meantime, would you perhaps care to hear your horoscope?"