“She was mine!” He wept. “She was mine first! Mine!”
Allie looked at him and got out of bed. She put on a wrapper, and the gunslinger felt a moment of empathy for a man who must be seeing himself coming out on the far end of what he once had. He was just a little man. And the gunslinger suddenly knew where he had seen him before. Known him before.
“It was for you,” Sheb sobbed. “It was only for you, Allie. It was you first and it was all for you. I—ah, oh God, dear God...” The words dissolved into a paroxysm of unintelligibilities, finally to tears. He rocked back and forth holding his broken wrists to his belly.
“Shhh. Shhh. Let me see.” She knelt beside him. “Broken. Sheb, you ass. How will you make your living now? Didn’t you know you were never strong?” She helped him to his feet. He tried to hold his hands to his face, but they would not obey, and he wept nakedly. “Come on over to the table and let me see what I can do.”
She led him to the table and set his wrists with slats of kindling from the fire box. He wept weakly and without volition.
“Mejis,” the gunslinger said, and the little piano player looked around, eyes wide. The gunslinger nodded, amiably enough now that Sheb was no longer trying to stick a knife in his lights.“Mejis,”he said again. “On the Clean Sea.”
“What about it?”
“You were there, weren’t you? Many and many-a, as they did say.”
“What if I was? I don’t remember you.”
“But you remember the girl, don’t you? The girl named Susan? And Reap night?” His voice took on an edge. “Were you there for the bonfire?”
The little man’s lips trembled. They were covered with spit. His eyes said he knew the truth: He was closer to dead now than when he’d come bursting in with a knife in his hand.
“Get out of here,” the gunslinger said.
Understanding dawned in Sheb’s eyes. “But you was just aboy!One of them threeboys!You come to count stock, and Eldred Jonas was there, the Coffin Hunter, and—”
“Get out while you still can,” the gunslinger said, and Sheb went, holding his broken wrists before him.
She came back to the bed. “What was that about?”
“Never mind,” he said.
“All right—then where were we?”
“Nowhere.” He rolled on his side, away from her.
She said patiently, “You knew about him and me. He did what he could, which wasn’t much, and I took what I could, because I had to. There’s nothing to be done. What else is there?” She touched his shoulder. “Except I’m glad that you are so strong.”
“Not now,” he said.
“Who was she?” And then, answering her own question: “A girl you loved.”
“Leave it, Allie.”
“I can make you strong—”
“No,” he said. “You can’t do that.”
XII
The next night the bar was closed. It was whatever passed for the Sabbath in Tull. The gunslinger went to the tiny, leaning church by the graveyard while Allie washed tables with strong disinfectant and rinsed kerosene lamp chimneys in soapy water.
An odd purple dusk had fallen, and the church, lit from the inside, looked almost like a blast furnace from the road.
“I don’t go,” Allie had said shortly. “The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go.”
He stood in the vestibule, hidden in a shadow, looking in. The pews were gone and the congregation stood (he saw Kennerly and his brood; Castner, owner of the town’s scrawny dry-goods emporium and his slat-sided wife; a few barflies; a few “town” women he had never seen before; and, surprisingly, Sheb). They were singing a hymn raggedly,a cappella.He looked curiously at the mountainous woman at the pulpit. Allie had said: “She lives alone, hardly ever sees anybody. Only comes out on Sunday to serve up the hellfire. Her name is Sylvia Pittston. She’s crazy, but she’s got the hoodoo on them. They like it that way. It suits them.”
No description could take the measure of the woman. Breasts like earthworks. A huge pillar of a neck overtopped by a pasty white moon of a face, in which blinked eyes so large and so dark that they seemed to be bottomless tarns. Her hair was a beautiful rich brown and it was piled atop her head in a haphazard sprawl, held by a hairpin almost big enough to be a meat skewer. She wore a dress that seemed to be made of burlap. The arms that held the hymnal were slabs. Her skin was creamy, unmarked, lovely. He thought that she must top three hundred pounds. He felt a sudden red lust for her that made him feel shaky, and he turned his head and looked away.
