John had filled two pages with notes in his looping scrawl.
Now he paged back and forth between them, nodding to himself a couple of times. Then he grunted and returned the pad to his hip pocket. He may be a country cousin, but he's a long way from stupid, Eddie thought. And meeting him was a long way from just luck; that was ka having a very good day.
"Go to New York," John said. "Find this fella Aaron Deepneau.
Keep his buddy out of it. Convince Deepneau that takin care of the rose in that vacant lot is just about the most important job in the world."
"You can cut the just-about," Eddie said.
John nodded as if that went without saying. He picked up the piece of notepaper with the cartoon beaver on top and tucked it into his voluminous wallet. Passing the bill of sale to him had been one of the harder things Eddie Dean had had to do since being sucked through the unfound door and into East Stoneham, and he came close to snatching it back before it could disappear into the caretaker's battered old Lord Buxton.
He thought he understood much better now about how Calvin Tower had felt.
"Because you boys now own the lot, you own the rose," John said.
"The Tet Corporation now owns the rose," Eddie said. "A corporation of which you're about to become executive vicepresident."
John Cullum looked unimpressed with his putative new title. He said, "Deepneau's supposed to draw up articles of incorporation and make sure Tet's legal. Then we go to see this fella Moses Carver and make sure he gets on board. That's apt to be the hard part-" Haa-aad paa-aat "-but we'll give it our best go."
"Put Auntie's cross around your neck," Roland said, "and when you meet with sai Carver, show it to him. It may go a long way toward convincing him you're on the straight. But first you must blow on it, like this."
On their ride from Bridgton, Roland had asked Eddie if he could think of any secret-no matter how trivial or great-which Susannah and her godfather might have shared in common.
As a matter of fact Eddie did know such a secret, and he was now astounded to hear Susannah speak it from the cross which lay on Dick Beckhardt's pine table.
"We buried Pimsy under the apple tree, where he could watch the blossoms fall in the spring," her voice said. "And Daddy Mose told me not to cry anymore, because God thinks to mourn a pet too long..."
Here the words faded away, first to a mutter and then to nothing at all. But Eddie remembered the rest and repeated it now: "'... to mourn a pet too long's a sin.' She said Daddy Mose told her she could go to Pimsy's grave once in awhile and whisper 'Be happy in heaven' but never to tell anyone else, because preachers don't hold much with the idea of animals going to heaven. And she kept the secret. I was the only one she ever told." Eddie, perhaps remembering that post-coital confidence in the dark of night, was smiling painfully.
John Cullum looked at the cross, then up at Roland, wideeyed.
"What is it? Some kind of tape recorder? It ain't, is it?"
"It's a sigul," Roland said patiently. "One that may help you with this fellow Carver, if he turns out to be what Eddie calls "a hardass.'" The gunslinger smiled a litde. Hardass was a term he liked. One he understood. "Put it on."
But Cullum didn't, at least not at once. For the first time since the old fellow had come into their acquaintance-including that period when they'd been under fire in the General Store-he looked genuinely discomposed. "Is it magic?" he asked.
Roland shrugged impatiently, as if to tell John that the word had no useful meaning in this context, and merely repeated: "Put it on."
Gingerly, as if he thought Aunt Talitha's cross might glow redhot at any moment and give him a serious burn, John Cullum did as bid. He bent his head to look down at it (momentarily giving his long Yankee face an amusing burgher's double chin), then tucked it into his shirt.
"Gorry," he said again, very softly.
SIX
Aware that he was speaking now as once he'd been spoken to,
Eddie Dean said: "Tell the rest of your lesson, John of East Stoneham, and be true."
Cullum had gotten out of bed that morning no more than a country caretaker, one of the world's unknown and unseen.
He'd go to bed tonight with the potential of becoming one of the world's most important people, a true prince of the Earth.
If he was afraid of the idea, it didn't show. Perhaps he hadn't grasped it yet.
But Eddie didn't believe that. This was the man ka had put in their road, and he was both trig and brave. If Eddie had been Walter at this moment (or Flagg, as Walter sometimes called himself), he believed he would have trembled.
"Well," John said, "it don't mind a mite to ya who runs the company, but you want Tet to swallow up Holmes, because from now on the job doesn't have anything to do with makin toothpaste and cappin teeth, although it may go on lookin that way yet awhile."
"And what's-"