He had now reached the snowbank marking the spot where Tower Road ended… or where it began, depending on your point of view and the direction you were traveling, Susannah supposed. He looked up at them, one eye bright as a bird’s, the other looking off into the white wastes with dull fascination.
“Long days and pleasant nights, yar, so say I, and anyone who’d say different, they ain’t here anyway, so who gives a good goddam what they say?” From his pocket he took what could only be a gumdrop and tossed it up. Oy grabbed it out of the air easily: Snap! and gone.
At this both Roland and Susannah laughed. It felt strange to laugh, but it was a good feeling, like finding something of value long after you were sure it was lost forever. Even Oy appeared to be grinning, and if the horse bothered him (it trumpeted again as they looked down on sai Collins from their snowbank perch), it didn’t show.
“I got a million questions for yer,” Collins said, “but I’ll start with just one: how in the hell are yers gonna get down offa that snowbank?”
Four
As it turned out, Susannah slid down, using their travois as a sled. She chose the place where the northwestern end of Odd’s Lane disappeared beneath the snow, because the embankment was a little shallower there. Her trip was short but not smooth. She hit a large and crusted snow-boulder three quarters of the way down, fell off the travois, and made the rest of her descent in a pair of gaudy somersaults, laughing wildly as she fell. The travois turned over—turned turtle, may it do ya—and spilled their gunna every whichway and hell to breakfast.
Roland and Oy came leaping down behind. Roland bent over her at once, clearly concerned, and Oy sniffed anxiously at her face, but Susannah was still laughing. So was the codger. Daddy Mose would have called his laughter “gay as old Dad’s hatband.”
“I’m fine, Roland—took worse tumbles off my Flexible Flyer when I was a kid, tell ya true.”
“All’s well that ends well,” Joe Collins agreed. He gave her a look with his good eye to make sure she was indeed all right, then began to pick up some of the scattered goods, leaning laboriously over on his stick, his fine white hair blowing around his rosy face.
“Nah, nah,” Roland said, reaching out to grasp his arm. “I’ll do that, thee’ll fall on thy thiddles.”
At this the old man roared with laughter, and Roland joined him willingly enough. From behind the cottage, the horse gave another loud whinny, as if protesting all this good humor.
“ ‘Fall on thy thiddles’! Man, that’s a good one! I don’t have the veriest clue under heaven what my thiddles are, yet it’s a good one! Ain’t it just!” He brushed the snow off Susannah’s hide coat while Roland quickly picked up the spilled goods and stacked them back on their makeshift sled. Oy helped, bringing several wrapped packages of meat in his jaws and dropping them on the back of the travois.
“That’s a smart little beastie!” Joe Collins said admiringly.
“He’s been a good trailmate,” Susannah agreed. She was now very glad they had stopped; would not have deprived herself of this good-natured old man’s acquaintance for worlds. She offered him her clumsily clad right hand. “I’m Susannah Dean—Susannah of New York. Daughter of Dan.”
He took her hand and shook it. His own hand was ungloved, and although the fingers were gnarled with arthritis, his grip was strong. “New York, is it! Why, I once hailed from there, myself. Also Akron, Omaha, and San Francisco. Son of Henry and Flora, if it matters to you.”
“You’re from America-side?” Susannah asked.
“Oh God yes, but long ago and long,” he said. “What’chee might call delah.” His good eye sparkled; his bad eye went on regarding the snowy wastes with that same dead lack of interest. He turned to Roland. “And who might you be, my friend? For I’ll call you my friend same as I would anyone, unless they prove different, in which case I’d belt em with Bessie, which is what I call my stick.”
Roland was grinning. Was helpless not to, Susannah thought. “Roland Deschain, of Gilead. Son of Steven.”
“Gilead! Gilead!” Collins’s good eye went round with amazement. “There’s a name out of the past, ain’t it? One for the books! Holy Pete, you must be older’n God!”
“Some would say so,” Roland agreed, now only smiling… but warmly.
“And the little fella?” he asked, bending forward. From his pocket, Collins produced two more gumdrops, one red and one green. Christmas colors, and Susannah felt a faint touch of déjà vu. It brushed her mind like a wing and then was gone. “What’s your name, little fella? What do they holler when they want you to come home?”
“He doesn’t—”
—talk anymore, although he did once was how Susannah meant to finish, but before she could, the bumbler said: “Oy!” And he said it as brightly and firmly as ever in his time with Jake.
“Good fella!” Collins said, and tumbled the gumdrops into Oy’s mouth. Then he reached out with that same gnarled hand, and Oy raised his paw to meet it. They shook, well-met near the intersection of Odd’s Lane and Tower Road.
“I’ll be damned,” Roland said mildly.
“So won’t we all in the end, I reckon, Beam or no Beam,” Joe Collins remarked, letting go of Oy’s paw. “But not today. Now what I say is that we ort to get in where it’s warm and we can palaver over a cup of coffee—for I have some, so I do—or a pot of ale. I even have sumpin I call eggnog, if it does ya. It does me pretty fine, especially with a teensy piss o’ rum in it, but who knows? I ain’t really tasted nuffink in five years or more. Air outta the Discordia’s done for my taste-buds and for my nose, too. Anyro’, what do you say?” He regarded them brightly.
“I’d say that sounds pretty damned fine,” Susannah told him. Rarely had she said anything she meant more.
He slapped her companionably on the shoulder. “A good woman is a pearl beyond price! Don’t know if that’s Shakespeare, the Bible, or a combination of the t—
“Arrr, Lippy, goddam what used to be yer eyes, where do you think you’re going? Did yer want to meet these folks, was that it?”
His voice had fallen into the outrageous croon that seems the exclusive property of people who live alone except for a pet or two. His horse had blundered its way to them and Collins grabbed her around the neck, petting her with rough affection, but Susannah thought the beast was the ugliest quadruped she’d seen in her whole life. Some of her good cheer melted away at the sight of the thing. Lippy was blind—not in one eye but in both—and scrawny as a scarecrow. As she walked, the rack of her bones shifted back and forth so clearly beneath her mangy coat that Susannah almost expected some of them to poke through. For a moment she remembered the black corridor under Castle Discordia with a kind of nightmarish total recalclass="underline" the slithering sound of the thing that had followed them, and the bones. All those bones.
Collins might have seen some of this on her face, for when he spoke again he sounded almost defensive. “Her an ugly old thing, I know, but when you get as old as she is, I don’t reckon you’ll be winnin many beauty contests yourself!” He patted the horse’s chafed and sore-looking neck, then seized her scant mane as if to pull the hair out by the roots (although Lippy showed no pain) and turned her in the road so she was facing the cottage again. As he did this, the first flakes of the coming storm skirled down.
“Come on, Lippy, y’old ki’-box and gammer-gurt, ye sway-back nag and lost four-legged leper! Can’t ye smell the snow in the air? Because I can, and my nose went south years ago!”
He turned back to Roland and Susannah and said, “I hope y’prove partial to my cookin, so I do, because I think this is gonna be a three-day blow. Aye, three at least before Demon Moon shows er face again! But we’re well-met, so we are, and I set my watch and warrant on it! Ye just don’t want to judge my hospitality by my horse-pitality! Hee!”