Faintly, Roland heard the chime of bells - a sound so beautifully hideous it made you want to grind your teeth against it. For a moment the walls of Pere Callahan's church wavered. It was as if the thing in the box had spoken to them: Do you see how little it all matters ? How quickly and easily I can take it all away, should I choose to do so? Beware, gunslinger!Beware, shaman! The abyss is all around you. You float or fall into it at my whim .
Then thekammen were gone.
"When?" Callahan reached over the box in its hole and grasped Roland's shirt. "When ?"
"Soon," Roland said.
Too soon , his heart replied.
Chapter V: The Tale of Gray Dick
ONE
Now it's twenty-three , Roland thought that evening as he sat behind Eisenhart's Rocking B, listening to the boys shout and Oy bark. Back in Gilead, this sort of porch behind the main house, facing the barns and the fields, would have been called the work-stoop. Twenty-three days until the Wolves. And how many until Susannah foals ?
A terrible idea concerning that had begun to form in his head. Suppose Mia, the new she inside Susannah's skin, were to give birth to her monstrosity on the very day the Wolves appeared? One wouldn't think that likely, but according to Eddie, coincidence had been cancelled. Roland thought he was probably right about that. Certainly there was no way to gauge the thing's period of gestation. Even if it had been a human child, nine months might no longer be nine months. Time had grown soft.
"Boys!" Eisenhart bawled. "What in the name of the Man Jesus am I going to tell my wife if you kill yer sad selfs jumpin out of that barn?"
"We're okay!" Benny Slightman called. "Andy won't let us get hurt!" The boy, dressed in bib overalls and barefooted, was standing in the open bay of the barn, just above the carved letters which said Rocking B. "Unless... do you really want us to stop, sai?"
Eisenhart glanced toward Roland, who saw Jake standing just behind Benny, impatiently waiting his chance to risk his bones. Jake was also dressed in bib overalls - a pair of his new friend's, no doubt - and the look of them made Roland smile.
Jake wasn't the sort of boy you imagined in such clothes, somehow.
"It's nil to me, one way or the other, if that's what you want to know," Roland said.
"Garn, then!" the rancher called. Then he turned his attention to the bits and pieces of hardware spread out on the boards. "What do'ee think? Will any of em shoot?"
Eisenhart had produced all three of his guns for Roland's inspection. The best was the rifle the rancher had brought to town on the night Tian Jaffords had called the meeting. The other two were pistols of the sort Roland and his friends had called "barrel-shooters" as children, because of the oversized cylinders which had to be revolved with the side of the hand after each shot. Roland had disassembled Eisenhart's shooting irons with no initial comment. Once again he had set out gun-oil, this time in a bowl instead of a saucer.
"I said - "
"I heard you, sai," Roland said. "Your rifle is as good as I've seen this side of the great city. The barrel-shooters..." He shook his head. "That one with the nickel plating might fire. The other you might as well stick in the ground. Maybe it'll grow something better."
"Hate to hear you speak so," Eisenhart said. "These were from my Da' and his Da' before him and on back at least this many." He raised seven fingers and one thumb. "That's back to before the Wolves, ye ken. They was always kept together and passed to the likeliest son by dead-letter. When I got em instead of my elder brother, I was some pleased."
"Did you have a twin?" Roland asked.
"Aye, Verna," Eisenhart said. He smiled easily and often and did so now beneath his great graying bush of a mustache, but it was painful - the smile of a man who doesn't want you to know he's bleeding somewhere inside his clothes. "She was lovely as dawn, so she was. Passed on these ten year or more. Went painful early, as the roont ones often do."
"I'm sorry."
"Say thankya."
The sun was going down red in the southwest, turning the yard the color of blood. There was a line of rockers on the porch. Eisenhart was settled in one of them. Roland sat cross-legged on the boards, housekeeping Eisenhart's inheritance. That the pistols would probably never fire meant nothing to the gunslinger's hands, which had been trained to this work long ago and still found it soothing.
Now, with a speed that made the rancher blink, Roland put the weapons back together in a rapid series of clicks and clacks. He set them aside on a square of sheepskin, wiped his fingers on a rag, and sat in the rocker next to Eisenhart's. He guessed that on more ordinary evenings, Eisenhart and his wife sat out here side by side, watching the sun abandon the day.
Roland rummaged through his purse for his tobacco pouch, found it, and built himself a cigarette with Callahan's fresh, sweet tobacco. Rosalita had added her own present, a little stack of delicate cornshuck wraps she called "pulls." Roland thought they wrapped as good as any cigarette paper, and he paused a moment to admire the finished product before tipping the end into the match Eisenhart had popped alight with one horny thumbnail. The gunslinger dragged deep and exhaled a long plume that rose but slowly in the evening air, which was still and surprisingly muggy for summer's end. "Good," he said, and nodded.