“The honk mahfahs in Oxford Town?”
Her smile was gone.
“Do you remember what the honk mahfahs did to you and your friends?” “That wasn’t me,” she said. “That was another woman.” Her eyes had taken on a dull, sullen cast. He hated that look, but he also liked it just fine. It was the right look, the one that said the kindling was burning well and soon the bigger logs would start to catch.
“Yes. It was. Like it or not, it was Odetta Susannah Holmes, daugh-ter of Sarah Walker Holmes. Not you as you are, but you as you were. Remember the fire-hoses, Susannah? Remember the gold teeth, how you saw them when they used the hoses on you and your friends in Oxford? How you saw them twinkle when they laughed?” She had told them these things, and many others, over many long nights as the campfire burned low. The gunslinger hadn’t understood everything, but he had listened carefully, just the same. And remem-bered. Pain was a tool, after all. Sometimes it was the best tool.
“What’s wrong with you, Roland? Why you want to go recallin that trash in my mind?”
Now the sullen eyes glinted at him dangerously; they reminded him of Alain’s eyes when good-natured Alain was finally roused. “Yonder stones are those men,” Roland said softly. “The men who locked you in a cell and left you to foul yourself. The men with the clubs and the dogs. The men who called you a nigger cunt.”
He pointed at them, moving his finger from left to right. “There’s the one who pinched your breast and laughed. There’s the one who said he better check and see if you had something stuffed up your ass. There’s the one who called you a chimpanzee in a five-hundred-dollar dress. That’s the one that kept running his billyclub over the spokes of your wheelchair until you thought the sound would send you mad. There’s the one who called your friend Leon pinko-fag. And the one on the end, Susannah, is Jack Mort. “There. Those stones. Those men.”
She was breathing rapidly now, her bosom rising and falling in swift little jerks beneath the gunslinger’s gunbelt with its heavy freight of bul-lets. Her eyes had left him; they were looking at the mica-flecked chips of stone. Behind them and at some distance, a tree splintered and fell over. More crows called in the sky. Deep in the game which was no longer a game, neither of them noticed. “Oh yeah?” she breathed. “That so?”
“It is. Now say your lesson, Susannah Dean, and be true.” - This time the words fell from her lips like small chunks of ice. Her right hand trembled lightly on the arm of her wheelchair like an idling engine. ” ‘I do not aim with my hand; she who aims with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.
” ‘I aim with my eye.’ “
“Good.”
” ‘I do not shoot with my hand; she who shoots with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.
” ‘I shoot with my mind.’ “
“So it has ever been, Susannah Dean.”
” ‘I do not kill with my gun; she who kills with her gun has forgotten the face of her father.
” ‘I kill with my heart.’ “
“Then KILL them, for your father’s sake!” Roland shouted. “KILL THEM ALL!” Her right hand was a blur between the arm of the chair and the butt of Roland’s sixgun. It was out in a second, her left hand descending, fanning at the hammer in flutters almost as swift and delicate as the wing of a hummingbird. Six flat cracks pealed off across the valley, and five of the six chips of stone set atop the boulder blinked out of existence.
For a moment neither of them spoke—did not even breathe, it seemed—as the echoes rolled back and forth, dimming. Even the crows were silent, at least for the time being.
The gunslinger broke the silence with four toneless yet oddly emphatic words:
“It is very well.”