“Don’t ever stop you, though, do it?”
Roland didn’t reply. He looked at Eddie, who lay with his cheek pressed against Susannah’s thigh and his eyes tightly shut. His face was a study in misery. Roland fought away the dragging weariness that made him want to leave the rest of this charming discussion for another day. If Eddie was right, there was no other day. Jake was almost ready to make his move. Eddie had been chosen to midwife the boy into this world. If he wasn’t prepared to do that, Jake would die at the point of entry, as surely as an infant must strangle if the mother-root is tangled about its neck when the contractions begin, “Stand up, Eddie.”
For a moment he thought Eddie would simply go on crouching there and hiding his face against the woman’s leg. If so, everything was lost . . . and that was ka, too. Then, slowly, Eddie got to his feet. He stood there with everything—hands, shoulders, head, hair—hanging, not good, but he was up, and that was a start. “Look at me.”
Susannah stirred uneasily, but this time she said nothing. Slowly, Eddie raised his head and brushed the hair out of his eyes with a trembling hand.
“This is for you. I was wrong to take it at all, no matter how deep my pain.” Roland curled his hand around the rawhide strip and yanked, snapping it. He held the key out to Eddie. Eddie reached for it like a man in a dream, but Roland did not immediately open his hand. “Will you try to do what needs to be done?” “Yes.” His voice was almost inaudible.
“Do you have something to tell me?”
“I’m sorry I’m afraid.” There was something terrible in Eddie’s voice, something which hurt Roland’s heart, and he supposed, he knew what it was: here was the last of Eddie’s childhood, expiring painfully among the three of them. It could not be seen, but Roland could hear its weakening cries. He tried to make himself deaf to them.
Something else I’ve done in the name of the Tower. My score grows ever longer, and the day when it will all have to be totted up, like a long-time drunkard’s bill in an alehouse, draws ever nearer. How will I ever pay? “I don’t want your apology, least of all for being afraid,” he said. “Without fear, what would we be? Mad dogs with foam on our muzzles and shit drying on our hocks.”
“What do you want, then?” Eddie cried. “You’ve taken everything else — everything I have to give! No, not even that, because in the end, I gave it to you! So what else do you want from me?”
Roland held the key which was their half of Jake Chambers’s salva-tion locked in his fist and said nothing. His eyes held Eddie’s, and the sun shone on the green expanse of plain and the blue-gray reach of the Send River, and somewhere in the distance the crow hailed again across the golden leagues of this fading summer afternoon.
After a while, understanding began to dawn in Eddie Dean’s eyes. Roland nodded.
“I have forgotten the face . . .” Eddie paused. Dipped his head. Swallowed. Looked up at the gunslinger once more. The thing which had been dying among them had moved on now — Roland knew it. That thing was gone. Just like that. Here, on this sunny wind-swept ridge at the edge of everything, it had gone forever. “I have forgotten the face of my father, gunslinger . . . and I cry your pardon.” Roland opened his hand and returned the small burden of the key to him who ka had decreed must carry it. “Speak not so, gunslinger,” he said in the High Speech. “Your father sees you very well . . . loves you very well . . . and so do I.”
Eddie closed his own hand over the key and turned away with his tears still drying on his face. “Let’s go,” he said, and they began to move down the long hill toward the plain which stretched beyond.
JAKE WALKED SLOWLY ALONG Castle Avenue, past pizza shops and bars and bodegas where old women with suspicious faces poked the potatoes and squeezed the tomatoes. The straps of his pack had chafed the skin beneath his arms, and his feet hurt. He passed beneath a digital ther-mometer which announced it was eighty-five. It felt more like a hundred and five to Jake. Up ahead, a police car turned onto the Avenue. Jake at once became extremely interested in a display of gardening supplies in the window of a hardware store. He watched the reflection of the blue-and-white pass in the window and didn’t move until it was gone.