The Waste Lands (41 page)

“Come on, Jake,” Eddie said. “Let’s lend a hand.”

“Nawp!” Aunt Talitha said briskly. “We may be old, but we don’t need comp’ny to lend a hand! Not yet, youngster!”

“Leave them be,” Roland said.

“Old fools’ll rupture themselves,” Eddie muttered, but he followed the others, leaving the old men to their chosen table.

Susannah gasped as Eddie lifted her from her chair and carried her through the back door. This wasn’t a lawn but a showplace, with beds of flowers blazing like torches in the soft green grass. She saw some she recognized—marigolds and zinnias and phlox—but many others were strange to her. As she watched, a horsefly landed on a bright blue petal . . . which at once folded over it and rolled up tight.

“Wow!” Eddie said, staring around. “Busch Gardens!”

Si said, “This is the one place we keep the way it was in the old days, before the world moved on. And we keep it hidden from those who ride through—Pubes, Grays, harriers. They’d burn it if they knew . . . and kill us for keeping such a place. They hate anything nice—all of em. It’s the one thing all those bastards have in common.”

The blind woman tugged his arm to shush him.

“No riders these days,” the old man with the wooden leg said. “Not for a long time now. They keep closer in to the city. Guess they find all they need to keep em well right there.”

The albino twins struggled out with the table. One of the old women followed them, urging them to hurry up and get the hell out of her way. She held a stoneware pitcher in each hand.

“Sit ye down, gunslinger!” Aunt Talitha cried, sweeping her hand at the grass. “Sit ye down, all!”

Susannah could smell a hundred conflicting perfumes. They made her feel dazed and unreal, as if this was a dream she was having. She could hardly believe this strange little pocket of Eden, carefully hidden behind the crumbling facade of the dead town.

Another woman came out with a tray of glasses. They were mismatched but spotless, twinkling in the sun like fine crystal. She held the tray out first to Roland, then to Aunt Talitha, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake at the last. As each took a glass, the first woman poured a dark golden liquid into it.

Roland leaned over to Jake, who was sitting tailor-fashion near an oval bed of bright green flowers with Oy at his side. He murmured: “Drink only enough to be polite, Jake, or we’ll be carrying you out of town—this is
graf
—strong apple-beer.”

Jake nodded.

Talitha, held up her glass, and when Roland followed suit, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake did the same.

“What about the others?” Eddie whispered to Roland.

“They’ll be served after the voluntary. Now be quiet.”

“Will ye set us on with a word, gunslinger?” Aunt Talitha asked.

The gunslinger got to his feet, his glass upraised in his hand. He lowered his head, as if in thought. The few remaining residents of River Crossing watched him respectfully and, Jake thought, a little fearfully. At last he raised his head again. “Will you drink to the earth, and to the days which have passed upon it?” he asked. His voice was hoarse, trembling with emotion. “Will you drink to the fullness which was, and to friends who have passed on? Will you drink to good company, well met? Will these things set us on, Old Mother?”

She was weeping, Jake saw, but her face broke into a smile of radiant happiness all the same . . . and for a moment she was almost young. Jake looked at her with wonder and sudden, dawning happiness. For the first time since Eddie had hauled him through the door, he felt the shadow of the doorkeeper truly leave his heart.

“Ay, gunslinger!” she said. “Fair spoken! They’ll set us on by the league, so they shall!” She tilted her glass up and drank it at a draught. When the glass was empty, Roland emptied his own. Eddie and Susannah also drank, although less deeply.

Jake tasted his own drink, and was surprised to find he liked it—the brew was not bitter, as he had expected, but both sweet and tart, like cider. He could feel the effects almost at once, however, and he put the glass carefully aside. Oy sniffed at it, then drew back, and dropped his muzzle on Jake’s ankle.

Around them, the little company of old people—the last residents of River Crossing—were applauding. Most, like Aunt Talitha, were weeping openly. And now other glasses—not so fine but wholly serviceable—were passed around. The party began, and a fine party it was on that long summer’s afternoon beneath the wide prairie sky.

EDDIE THOUGHT THE MEAL he ate that day was the best he had had since the mythic birthday feasts of his childhood, when his mother had made it her business to serve everything he liked—meatloaf and roasted potatoes and corn on the cob and devil’s food cake with vanilla ice cream on the side.

The sheer variety of the edibles put before them—especially after the months they had spent eating nothing but lobster meat, deer meat, and the few bitter greens which Roland pronounced safe—undoubtedly had something to do with the pleasure he took in the food, but Eddie didn’t think that was the sole answer; he noticed that the kid was packing it away by the plateful (and feeding a chunk of something to the bumbler crouched at his feet every couple of minutes), and Jake hadn’t been here a week yet.

There were bowls of stew (chunks of buffalo meat floating in a rich brown gravy loaded with vegetables), platters of fresh biscuits, crocks of sweet white butter, and bowls of leaves that looked like spinach but weren’t . . . exactly. Eddie had never been crazy about greens, but at the first taste of these, some deprived part of him awoke and cried for them. He ate well of everything, but his need for the green stuff approached greed, and he saw Susannah was also helping herself to them again and again. Among the four of them, the travellers emptied three bowls of the leaves.

The dinner dishes were swept away by the old women and the albino twins. They returned with chunks of cake piled high on two thick white plates and a bowl of whipped cream. The cake gave off a sweetly fragrant smell that made Eddie feel as if he had died and gone to heaven.

“Only buffaler cream,” Aunt Talitha said dismissively. “No more cows—last one croaked thirty year ago. Buffaler cream ain’t no prize-winner, but better’n nothin, by Daisy!”

The cake turned out to be loaded with blueberries. Eddie thought it beat by a country mile any cake he’d ever had. He finished three pieces, leaned back, and belched ringingly before he could clap a hand over his mouth. He looked around guiltily.

Mercy, the blind woman, cackled. “I heard that! Someone be thankin the cook, Auntie!”

“Ay,” Aunt Talitha said, laughing herself. “So he do.”

The two women who had served the food were returning yet again. One carried a steaming jug; the other had a number of thick ceramic cups balanced precariously on her tray.

Aunt Talitha was sitting at the head of the table with Roland by her right hand. Now he leaned over and murmured something in her ear. She listened, her smile fading a little, then nodded.

“Si, Bill, and Till,” she said. “You three stay. We are going to have us a little palaver with this gunslinger and his friends, on account of they mean to move along this very afternoon. The rest of you take your coffee in the kitchen and so cut down the babble. Mind you make your manners before you go!”

Bill and Till, the albino twins, remained sitting at the foot of the table. The others formed a line and moved slowly past the travellers. Each of them shook hands with Eddie and Susannah, then kissed Jake on the cheek. The boy accepted this with good grace, but Eddie could see he was both surprised and embarrassed.

When they reached Roland, they knelt before him and touched the sandalwood butt of the revolver which jutted from the holster he wore on his left hip. He put his hands on their shoulders and kissed their old brows. Mercy was the last; she flung her arms around Roland’s waist and baptized his cheek with a wet, ringing kiss.

“Gods bless and keep ye, gunslinger! If only I could see ye!”

“Mind your manners, Mercy!” Aunt Talitha said sharply, but Roland ignored her and bent over the blind woman.

He took her hands gently but firmly in his own, and raised them to his face. “See me with these, beauty,” he said, and closed his eyes as her fingers, wrinkled and misshapen with arthritis, patted gently over his brow, his cheeks, his lips and chin.

“Ay, gunslinger!” she breathed, lifting the sightless sockets of her eyes to his faded blue ones. “I see you very well! ’Tis a good face, but full of sadness and care. I fear for you and yours.”

“Yet we are well met, are we not?” he asked, and planted a gentle kiss on the smooth, worn skin of her forehead.

“Ay—so we are. So we are. Thank’ee for your kiss, gunslinger From my heart I thank’ee.”

“Go on, Mercy,” Aunt Talitha said in a gentler voice. “Get your coffee.”

Mercy rose to her feet. The old man with the crutch and peg leg guided her hand to the waistband of his pants. She seized it and, with a final salute to Roland and his band, allowed him to lead her away.

Eddie wiped at his eyes, which were wet. “Who blinded her?” he asked hoarsely.

“Harriers,” Aunt Talitha said. “Did it with a branding-iron, they did. Said it was because she was looking at em pert. Twenty-five years agone, that was. Drink your coffee, now, all of you! It’s nasty when it’s hot, but it ain’t nothin but roadmud once it’s cold.”

Eddie lifted the cup to his mouth and sipped experimentally. He wouldn’t have gone so far as to call it roadmud, but it wasn’t exactly Blue Mountain Blend, either.

Susannah tasted hers and looked amazed. “Why, this is chicory!”

Talitha glanced at her. “I know it not. Dockey is all I know, and dockey-coffee’s all we’ve had since I had the woman’s curse—and that curse was lifted from me long, long ago.”

“How old
are
you, ma’am?” Jake asked suddenly.

Aunt Talitha looked at him, surprised, then cackled. “In truth, lad, I disremember. I recall sitting in this same place and having a party to celebrate my eighty, but there were over fifty people settin out on this lawn that day, and Mercy still had her eyes.” Her own eyes dropped to. the bumbler lying at Jake’s feet. Oy didn’t remove his muzzle from Jake’s ankle, but he raised his gold-ringed eyes to gaze at her. “A billy-bumbler, by Daisy! It’s been long and long since I’ve seen a bumbler in company with people ... seems they have lost the memory of the days when they walked with men.”

One of the albino twins bent down to pat Oy. Oy pulled away from him.

“Once they used to herd sheep,” Bill (or perhaps it was Till) said to Jake. “Did ye know that, youngster?”

Jake shook his head.

“Do he talk?” the albino asked. “Some did, in the old days.”

“Yes, he does.” He looked down at the bumbler, who had returned his head to Jake’s ankle as soon as the strange hand left his general area. “Say your name, Oy.”

Oy only looked up at him.

“Oy!” Jake urged, but Oy was silent. Jake looked at Aunt Talitha and the twins, mildly chagrined. “Well, he does . . . but I guess he only does it when he wants to.”

“That boy doesn’t look as if he belongs here,” Aunt Talitha said to Roland. “His clothes are strange . . . and his eyes are strange, as well.”

“He hasn’t been here long.” Roland smiled at Jake, and Jake smiled uncertainly back. “In a month or two, no one will be able to see his strangeness.”

“Ay? I wonder, so I do. And where does he come from?”

“Far from here,” the gunslinger said: “Very far.”

She nodded. “And when will he go back?”

“Never,” Jake said. “This is my home now.”

“Gods pity you, then,” she said, “for the sun is going down on the world. It’s going down forever.”

At that Susannah stirred uneasily; one hand went to her belly, as if her stomach was upset.

“Suze?” Eddie asked. “You all right?”

She tried to smile, but it was a weak effort; her normal confidence and self-possession seemed to have temporarily deserted her. “Yes, of course. A goose walked over my grave, that’s all.”

Aunt Talitha gave her a long, assessing look that seemed to make Susannah uncomfortable . . . and then smiled. “ ‘A goose on my grave’—ha! I haven’t heard that one in donkey’s years.”

“My dad used to say it all the time.” Susannah smiled at Eddie—a stronger smile this time. “And anyway, whatever it was is gone now. I’m fine.”

“What do you know about the city, and the lands between here and there?” Roland asked, picking up his coffee cup and sipping. “Are there harriers? And who are these others? These Grays and Pubes?”

Aunt Talitha sighed deeply.

“YE’D HEAR MUCH, GUNSLINGER, and we know but little. One thing I do know is this: the city’s an evil place, especially for this youngster. Any youngster. Is. there any way you can steer around it as you go your. course?”

Roland looked up and observed the now familiar shape of the clouds as they flowed along the path of the Beam. In this wide plains sky, that shape, like a river in the sky, was impossible to miss.

“Perhaps,” he said at last, but his voice was oddly reluctant. “I suppose we could skirt around Lud to the southwest and pick up the Beam on the far side.”

“It’s the Beam ye follow,” she said. “Ay, I thought so.”

Eddie found his own. consideration of the city colored by the steadily strengthening hope that when and if they got there, they would find help-abandoned goodies which would aid them in their quest, or maybe even some people who could tell them a little more about the Dark Tower and what they were supposed to do when they got there. The ones called the Grays, for instance—they sounded like the sort of wise old elves he kept imagining.

The drums were creepy, true enough, reminding him of a hundred low-budget jungle epics (mostly watched on TV with Henry by his side and a bowl of popcorn between them) where the fabulous lost cities the explorers had come looking for were in ruins and the natives had degenerated into tribes of blood-thirsty cannibals, but Eddie found it impossible to believe something like that could have happened in a city that looked, at least from a distance, so much like New York. If there were not wise old elves or abandoned goodies, there would surely be books, at least; he had listened to Roland talk about how rare paper was here, but every city Eddie had ever been in was absolutely drowning in books. They might even find some working transportation; the equivalent of a Land Rover would be nice. That was probably just a silly dream, but when you had thousands of miles of unknown territory to cover, a few silly dreams were undoubtedly in order, if only to keep your spirits up. And weren’t those things at least
possible
, damn it?