The Road to The Dark Tower (22 page)

⁸
Kansas City Monarchs, Takuro Spirit and Nozz-A-La, respectively. Some of these brands will appear in future
Dark Tower
books, usually as an indication that a world is not Keystone Earth. Nozz-A-La is also featured prominently in
Kingdom Hospital,
a TV miniseries written by King that aired on ABC in 2004.

⁹
The bullets work in much the same way that Eddie’s hand-carved key blocked the ricocheting dual memories Roland had been suffering from before Jake was drawn into Mid-World. Roland and Eddie use bullets as earplugs in the Doorway Cave near Calla Bryn Sturgis to block the voices.

¹⁰
This is a hint of Roland’s repeat journeys through his past, doing things a little differently each time. After he passes through the Tower, the past rearranges itself to put Arthur Eld’s horn among his gunna.

¹¹
Mejis is a twin to Mexico. Many of the barony’s cultural traditions, including garb and vocabulary, are Mexican.

¹²
His sigul is the red eye of the Crimson King. He started as a stage-robber in Garlan and has grown to a general. His “persuasive” style of politics is rather like Greg Stillson’s from
The Dead Zone
. Like Randall Flagg, whom he may well be, he brooks no intolerance and has been known to leave cities after “state visits” with the local politicians’ heads on spikes at the town’s entrance. “Death is what John Farson is all about,” Roland tells Susan Delgado, warning her that his influence may one day extend to Mejis.

¹³
The blue coffin-shaped tattoos the Big Coffin Hunters sport on the webbing between thumb and forefinger of their right hands is also used by the low men/Regulators in
Wolves of the Calla
.

¹⁴
Addictions plague the cast of the
Dark Tower
. Eddie has drugs, Callahan has alcohol, Calvin Tower has acquisitiveness, Patrick—who lies much farther down the road—has drawing and Roland has the Tower. Rhea has the pink Wizard’s Glass.

¹⁵
Named after a victim of Ted Bundy who survived.

¹⁶
Cordelia was King Lear’s disinherited daughter in the Shakespeare play that was the source of the line “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.”

¹⁷
Thorin has a wife, but she can’t bear him children. As a “gilly,” it will be Susan’s obligation to bear Thorin’s child or children until he has an heir.

¹⁸
Cordelia is reminiscent of Bobby Garfield’s mother from “Low Men in Yellow Coats” in the way she uses her parental authority to mislead her ward into believing their financial situation is poor to justify her actions. Cordelia sold Susan to the mayor for twenty-four pieces of silver and twelve pieces of gold.

¹⁹
In Mid-World, every town has its version of a story about star-crossed lovers, a tale that often ends in a murder-suicide. The Hambry version featured lovers named Robert and Francesca.

²⁰
Literally—a meteor passes over their heads on the night they meet.

²¹
Cuthbert’s alter ego, Arthur Heath, is from Gilead, which, to the people of Mejis, is as if he were from heaven.

²²
Her father would have told her it was ka, which will “come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than my da’s barn stood before the cyclone when it came.”

²³
Olive Thorin can’t bear children, which was “what opened the door to this horrible situation in the first place.”

²⁴
Mia, who will bear Roland’s child, also calls herself daughter of none.

²⁵
Though Rhea isn’t a vampire per se, she shares some characteristics with those creatures and is, perhaps, an augury of the real vampires that will enter the series in the next book.

²⁶
Mercy, the blind woman in River Crossing, hugged Roland.

²⁷
“I think she’s part of another story,” Roland says. “But a story close to this one. . . . Next door maybe,” Eddie replies.

²⁸
The west—the direction where failed gunslingers were sent when banished—is where Flagg set up his encampment in
The Stand
.

²⁹
Roland saw shoes tumbling through the air during his trip inside the Wizard’s Glass in Gilead. The title of this section, “All God’s Chillun Got Shoes,” derives from a spiritual. In the slavery era, sons wore shoes and servants went barefoot. “When I get to heaven I’m goin’ to put on my shoes/I’m goin to walk all over God’s Heaven.”

³⁰
It’s not Roland’s first exposure to Oz. During his vision in Mejis, Roland saw Rhea saying, “I’ll get you, my pretty,” like the Wicked Witch of the West.

³¹
Roland promises to tell the others the tale of how he ultimately lost the belt, covered with his mother’s blood, that he wore for many years. It bears on his quest, but is a tale for another day, one that hasn’t yet been told.

³²
When Jack Sawyer finished his quest in
The Talisman,
rather than have him plod all the way back across America to his mother, he is conveniently driven back home in a chauffeured limousine.

³³
Peter Straub, in “The Dark Tower’s Architecture,” posted to the Penguin Web site in 1997. King pays homage to Conrad by naming a character in
Dreamcatcher
after Kurtz.

Chapter 6
WOLVES OF THE CALLA (RESISTANCE)

When gunslingers come to town, things get broken. It’s a simple fact of life.
¹

 The six-year gap between the publication of
Wizard and Glass
and
Wolves of the Calla
equals the longest pause in the story. Earlier, King had indicated that he wouldn’t write an argument summarizing the events in the previous books, saying that Book V wasn’t the place where readers should start the series. He must have had a change of heart, as “The Final Argument,” a six-page synopsis, appears at the beginning of the book.

Unlike previous
Dark Tower
books, the opening of
Wolves of the Calla
doesn’t feature Roland or any of his ka-tet. Instead, it starts in Calla
²
Bryn Sturgis, a rustic community on the banks of the River Whye—a long and busy commercial river similar to the Mississippi—at the edge of End-World. Farmer Tian Jaffords is plowing a rocky, cratered field he calls Son of a Bitch, “a thankless tract which mostly grew rocks and blisters and busted hopes.” Mules are too valuable to risk on such a hellish field, so Tian’s twin sister, Tia, drags the plow. Tia is “roont”—mentally handicapped and grown overlarge—and not good for much else.

Andy, a seven-foot messenger robot known to the Calla-folken for many generations and manufactured by North Central Positronics, arrives with grim news: The Wolves will come again in thirty days. Andy—who reminds Eddie of C3PO from
Star Wars
—doesn’t always bear bad news; he’s usually cheerful, bringing gossip, telling horoscopes or singing
songs. No one knows where he gets his information, but he’s never been wrong about the Wolves.

His announcement isn’t a complete surprise. Once during each of the past five or six generations,
³
several dozen Wolves from Thunderclap—rumored to be warriors of the Crimson King—have descended upon Calla Bryn Sturgis.

The town’s name acknowledges the classic Western
The Magnificent Seven
⁴
as part of King’s inspiration. In the movie, the people of a small Mexican village hire gunslingers to protect them from bandits who raid their village for food. They leave only enough so the people can struggle to survive and produce more food for the next raid.

The Wolves don’t steal food; they steal children, one of every set of twins in a village where single births are the exception. Ka determines which twin is taken. Tian’s great uncle was chosen because he was closer to the road than his grandfather. Tian and his wife, Zalia, have five children—the rare singleton will always be safe from the Wolves.

No one knows where the children are taken or why. After several weeks, most return on a train from the east, sunburned, covered in food and feces, and roont like Tia and Zalman, Zalia’s brother. The older children come back with some vague understanding of what was stolen from them. Some commit suicide. Childlike until puberty, they suddenly grow into giants. Family members describe hearing bones grow inside the ruined bodies, calling to mind Brown’s description of how his corn sighed and moaned after one of the desert’s rare rains. The roont children all die long before their natural span of days.

Tian is a good man to receive this news. Smarter than the average farmer and semiliterate, he knows there was a time when the Wolves didn’t raid his village. While others in the Calla accept the Wolves like drought or nightfall, Tian thinks it’s time to fight back. He sends out the opopanax feather (the word “opopanax” was used frequently throughout
Black House
) to call a meeting of the menfolk, including a delegation of the Manni, a reclusive Amish-like religious sect who live on the edge of town.
⁵
Like Stu Redman in
The Stand,
Tian is an uncomfortable leader, but his anger drives him.

The town hall meeting is reminiscent of the scene in
Storm of the Century
where the townspeople debated over the future of a single child. The Calla faces the loss of half of its children. Several ideas are proposed,
ranging from the cautious to the absurd. Leaving isn’t an option. The Wolves would destroy the Calla in their absence and might even follow their trail and take the children, anyway. The men are farmers and know no other way of life. They are ill equipped to fight. A few rusty old rifles, spears, rocks and bows are poor weapons against guns, light sabers and flying metal drones called sneetches.
⁶

Tian speaks passionately: “Each time they come and take our children, they take a little more of our hearts and our souls.” Once the richer, more influential farmers speak, though, the meeting’s momentum starts to shift. No one believes they can defeat the Wolves. They’re farmers, not fighters.

An unlikely savior comes to his rescue: the man known as the Old Fella or Pere Callahan. Father Donald Callahan, late of ’Salem’s Lot, Maine.
⁷
Tian feels like “a character in a silly festival play, saved at the last moment by some improbable supernatural intervention.” Saved by ka, in other words.

Callahan has been in the Calla for about ten years, long enough to build a church and convert half the village to his religion, but he’s still an outsider. He’s never been there when the Wolves come. He’s like the wise old man who lives on the edge of town in
The Magnificent Seven
who is consulted by the villagers, except Callahan doesn’t wait to be asked, and ignores the ritual of passing the feather. His solution is similar to that suggested by the old Mexican—go north and hire men who deal in lead
⁸
to fight the battle for them; this refers to the gunslingers Andy told him are following the Path of the Beam four days northeast of town. Andy told Tian this news, too, but the farmer had been too overwrought to absorb it.

The Mexicans offered their hired guns a pittance: $20 each for several weeks of dangerous work. The people of the Calla get a better deal. Gunslingers are forbidden to take payment. Callahan has an ace in the hole, an object buried beneath the floor of his church that a gunslinger won’t easily resist. Something that will kill Callahan if he doesn’t get rid of it soon.