Song of Susannah Read Online Free PDF Page A

the right side of the road, was a vast hill of uprooted corn-plants where no hill had been the day before. It was a funerary heap, Roland saw,one which had been constructed without any degree of respect. He hadn’t lost any time or wasted any effort wondering how the folken had spent the previous afternoon—before beginning the party they were now undoubtedly sleeping off—but now he saw their work before him. Had they been afraid the Wolves might come back to life? he wondered, and knew that, on some level, that was exactly what they’d feared. And so they’d dragged the heavy, inert bodies (gray horses as well as gray-clad Wolves) off into the corn, stacked them willy-rully, then covered them with uprooted corn-plants. Today they’d turn this bier into a pyre. And if the seminon winds came? Roland guessed they’d light it up anyway, and chance a possible conflagration in the fertile land between road and river. Why not? The growing season was over for the year, and there was nothing like fire for fertilizer, so the old folks did say; besides, the folken would not really rest easy until that hill was burned. And even then few of them would like to come out here.
    “Roland, look,” Eddie said in a voice that trembled somewhere between sorrow and rage. “Ah, goddammit, look. ”
    Near the end of the path, where Jake, Benny Slight-man, and the Tavery twins had waited before making their final dash for safety across the road, stood a scratched and battered wheelchair, its chrome winking brilliantly in the sun, its seat streaked with dust and blood. The left wheel was bent severely out of true.
    “Why do’ee speak in anger?” Henchick inquired. He had been joined by Cantab and half a dozenelders of what Eddie sometimes referred to as the Cloak Folk. Two of these elders looked a good deal older than Henchick himself, and Roland thought of what Rosalita had said last night: Many of them nigh as old as Henchick, trying to climb that path after dark. Well, it wasn’t dark, but he didn’t know if some of these would be able to walk as far as the upsy part of the path to Doorway Cave, let alone the rest of the way to the top.
    “They brought your woman’s rolling chair back here to honor her. And you. So why do’ee speak in anger?”
    “Because it’s not supposed to be all banged up, and she’s supposed to be in it,” Eddie told the old man. “Do you ken that, Henchick?”
    “Anger is the most useless emotion,” Henchick intoned, “destructive to the mind and hurtful of the heart.”
    Eddie’s lips thinned to no more than a white scar below his nose, but he managed to hold in a retort. He walked over to Susannah’s scarred chair—it had rolled hundreds of miles since they’d found it in Topeka, but its rolling days were done—and looked down at it moodily. When Callahan approached him, Eddie waved the Pere back.
    Jake was looking at the place on the road where Benny had been struck and killed. The boy’s body was gone, of course, and someone had covered his spilled blood with a fresh layer of the oggan, but Jake found he could see the dark splotches, anyway. And Benny’s severed arm, lying palm-up. Jake remembered how his friend’s Da’ had staggered out of the corn and seen his son lying there. For five secondsor so he had been capable of no sound whatever, and Jake supposed that was time enough for someone to have told sai Slightman they’d gotten off incredibly light: one dead boy, one dead rancher’s wife, another boy with a broken ankle. Piece of cake, really. But no one had and then Slight-man the Elder had shrieked. Jake thought he would never forget the sound of that shriek, just as he would always see Benny lying here in the dark and bloody dirt with his arm off.
    Beside the place where Benny had fallen was something else which had been covered with dirt. Jake could see just a small wink of metal. He dropped to one knee and excavated one of the Wolves’ death-balls, things called sneetches.