Wolves of the Calla (50 page)

“If your wife’s right, I think I need to talk to him,” Eddie said. “Need to hear his story.”

“My Granda’s got stories, all right. Half a thousand! Trouble is, most of em was lies from the start and now he gets em all mixed up together. His accent were always thick, and these last three years he’s missing his last three teeth as well. Likely you won’t be able to understand his nonsense to begin with. I wish you joy of him, Eddie of New York.”

“What the hell did he do to you, Tian?”

“ ’Twasn’t what he did to me but what he did to my Da’. That’s a long story and nothing to do with this business. Leave it.”

“No,
you
leave it,” Eddie said, coming to a stop.

Tian looked at him, startled. Eddie nodded, unsmiling: you heard me. He was twenty-five, already a year older than Cuthbert Allgood on his last day at Jericho Hill, but in this day’s failing light he could have passed for a man of fifty. One of harsh certainty.

“If he’s seen a dead Wolf, we need to debrief him.”

“I don’t kennit, Eddie.”

“Yeah, but I think you ken my
point
just fine. Whatever you’ve got against him, put it aside. If we settle up with the Wolves, you have my permission to bump him into the fireplace or push him off the goddam roof. But for now, keep your sore ass to yourself. Okay?”

Tian nodded. He stood looking out across his troublesome north field, the one he called Son of a Bitch, with his hands in his pockets. When he studied it so, his expression was one of troubled greed.

“Do you think his story about killing a Wolf is so much hot air? If you really do, I won’t waste my time.”

Grudgingly, Tian said: “I’m more apt to believe that ’un than most of the others.”

“Why?”

“Well, he were tellin it ever since I were old enough to listen, and
that
’un never changes much. Also . . . ” Tian’s next words squeezed down, as if he were speaking them through gritted teeth. “My Gran-pere never had no shortage of thorn and bark. If anyone would have had guts enough to go out on the East Road and stand against the Wolves—not to mention enough trum
to get others to go with him—I’d bet my money on Jamie Jaffords.”

“Trum?”

Tian thought about how to explain it. “If’ee was to stick your head in a rock-cat’s mouth, that’d take courage, wouldn’t it?”

It would take idiocy was what Eddie thought, but he nodded.

“If ’ee was the sort of man could convince someone
else
to stick his head in a rock-cat’s mouth, that’d make you trum. Your dinh’s trum, ain’t he?”

Eddie remembered some of the stuff Roland had gotten him to do, and nodded. Roland was trum, all right. He was trum as hell. Eddie was sure the gunslinger’s old mates would have said the same.

“Aye,” Tian said, turning his gaze back to his field. “In any case, if ye’d get something halfway sensible out of the old man, I’d wait until after supper. He brightens a bit once he’s had his rations and half a pint of graf. And make sure my wife’s sitting right beside you, where he can get an eyeful. I ’magine he’d try to have a good deal more than his eye on her, were he a younger man.” His face had darkened again.

Eddie clapped him on the shoulder. “Well, he’s not younger.
You
are. So lighten up, all right?”

“Aye.” Tian made a visible effort to do just that. “What do’ee think of my field, gunslinger? I’m going to plant it with madrigal next year. The yellow stuff ye saw out front.”

What Eddie thought was that the field looked like a heartbreak waiting to happen. He suspected that down deep Tian thought about the same; you didn’t call your only unplanted field Son of a Bitch
because you expected good things to happen there. But he knew the look on Tian’s face. It was the one Henry used to get when the two of them were setting off to score. It was always going to be the best stuff this time, the best stuff ever. China White and never mind that Mexican Brown that made your head ache and your bowels run. They’d get high for a week, the best high ever,
mellow,
and then quit the junk for good. That was Henry’s scripture, and it could have been Henry here beside him, telling Eddie what a fine cash crop madrigal was, and how the people who’d told him you couldn’t grow it this far north would be laughing on the other side of their faces come next reap. And then he’d buy Hugh Anselm’s field over on the far side of yon ridge . . . hire a couple of extra men come reap, for the land’d be gold for as far as you could see . . . why, he might even quit the rice altogether and become a madrigal monarch.

Eddie nodded toward the field, which was hardly half-turned. “Looks like slow plowing, though. You must have to be damned careful with the mules.”

Tian gave a short laugh. “I’d not risk a mule out here, Eddie.”

“Then what—?”

“I plow my sister.”

Eddie’s jaw dropped. “You’re shitting me!”

“Not at all. I’d plow Zal, too—he’s bigger, as ye saw, and even stronger—but not as bright. More trouble than it’s worth. I’ve tried.”

Eddie shook his head, feeling dazed. Their shadows ran out long over the lumpy earth, with its crop of weed and thistle. “But . . . man . . . she’s your
sister
!”

“Aye, and what else would she do all day? Sit outside the barn door and watch the chickens? Sleep more and more hours, and only get up for her taters and gravy? This is better, believe me. She don’t mind it. It’s tur’ble hard to get her to plow straight, even when there ain’t a plow-buster of a rock or a hole every eight or ten steps, but she pulls like the devil and laughs like a loon.”

What convinced Eddie was the man’s earnestness. There was no defensiveness in it, not that he could detect.

“Sides, she’ll likely be dead in another ten year, anyway. Let her help while she can, I say. And Zalia feels the same.”

“Okay, but why don’t you get Andy to do at least some of the plowing? I bet it’d go faster if you did. All you guys with the smallhold farms could share him, ever think of that? He could plow your fields, dig your wells, raise a barn roofbeam all by himself. And you’d save on taters and gravy.” He clapped Tian on the shoulder again. “That’s
got
to do ya fine.”

Tian’s mouth quirked. “It’s a lovely dream, all right.”

“Doesn’t work, huh? Or rather,
he
doesn’t work.”

“Some things he’ll do, but plowing fields and digging wells ain’t among em. You ask him, and he’ll ask
you
for your password. When you have no password to give him, he’ll ask you if you’d like to retry. And then—”

“Then he tells you you’re shit out of luck. Because of Directive Nineteen.”

“If you knew, why did you ask?”

“I knew he was that way about the Wolves,
because I asked him. I didn’t know it extended to all this other stuff.”

Tian nodded. “He’s really not much help, and he can be tiresome—if’ee don’t ken that now, ye will if’ee stay long—but he
does
tell us when the Wolves are on their way, and for that we all say thankya.”

Eddie actually had to bite off the question that came to his lips. Why did they thank him when his news was good for nothing except making them miserable? Of course this time there might be more to it; this time Andy’s news might actually lead to a change. Was that what Mr. You-Will-Meet-An-Interesting-Stranger had been angling for all along? Getting the
folken
to stand up on their hind legs and fight? Eddie recalled Andy’s decidedly smarmy smile and found such altruism hard to swallow. It wasn’t fair to judge people (or even robots, maybe) by the way they smiled or talked, and yet everybody did it.

Now that I think about it, what
about
his voice? What about that smug little I-know-and-you-don’t thing he’s got going on? Or am I imagining that, too?

The hell of it was, he didn’t know.

The sound of Susannah’s singing voice accompanied by the giggles of the children—all children great and small—drew Eddie and Tian back around to the other side of the house.

Zalman was holding one end of what looked like a stock-rope. Tia had the other. They were turning it in lazy loops with large, delighted grins on their faces while Susannah, sitting propped on the
ground, recited a skip-rope rhyme Eddie vaguely remembered. Zalia and her four older children were jumping in unison, their hair rising and falling. Baby Aaron stood by, his diaper now sagging almost to his knees. On his face was a huge, delighted grin. He made rope-twirling motions with one chubby fist.

“ ‘Pinky Pauper came a-calling! Into sin that boy be falling! I caught him creeping, one-two-three, he’s as wicked as can be!’ Faster, Zalman! Faster, Tia! Come on, make em really jump to it!”

Tia spun her end of the rope faster at once, and a moment later Zalman caught up with her. This was apparently something he could do. Laughing, Susannah chanted faster.

“ ‘Pinky Pauper took her measure! That bad boy done took her treasure! Four-five-six, we’re up to seven, that bad boy won’t go to heaven!’ Yow, Zalia, I see your knees, girl! Faster, you guys! Faster!”

The four twins jumped like shuttlecocks, Heddon tucking his fists into his armpits and doing a buck and wing. Now that they had gotten over the awe which had made them clumsy, the two younger kids jumped in limber spooky harmony. Even their hair seemed to fly up in the same clumps. Eddie found himself remembering the Tavery twins, whose very freckles had looked the same.

“ ‘Pinky . . . Pinky Pauper . . . ’ ” Then she stopped. “Shoo-fly, Eddie! I can’t remember any more!”

“Faster, you guys,” Eddie said to the giants turning the skip-rope. They did as he said, Tia hee-hawing up at the fading sky. Eddie measured the spin of the rope with his eyes, moving backward and forward
at the knees, timing it. He put his hand on the butt of Roland’s gun to make sure it wouldn’t fly free.

“Eddie Dean, you cain’t
never
!” Susannah cried, laughing.

But the next time the rope flew up he did, jumping in between Hedda and Hedda’s mother. He faced Zalia, whose face was flushed and sweating, jumping with her in perfect harmony, Eddie chanted the one verse that survived in his memory. To keep it in time, he had to go almost as fast as a county fair auctioneer. He didn’t realize until later that he had changed the bad boy’s name, giving it a twist that was pure Brooklyn.

“ ‘Piggy Pecker pick my pocket, took my baby’s silver locket, caught im sleepin eightnineten, stole that locket back again!’
Go,
you guys!
Spin
it!”

They did, twirling the rope so fast it was almost a blur. In a world that now appeared to be going up and down on an invisible pogo-stick, he saw an old man with fly-away hair and grizzled sideburns come out on the porch like a hedgehog out of its hole, thumping along on an ironwood cane.
Hello, Granpere,
he thought, then dismissed the old man for the time being. All he wanted to do right now was keep his footing and not be the one who fucked the spin. As a little kid, he’d always loved jumping rope and always hated the idea that he had to give it over to the girls once he went to Roosevelt Elementary or be damned forever as a sissy. Later, in high school phys ed, he had briefly rediscovered the joys of jump-rope. But never had there been anything like this. It was as if he had discovered (or rediscovered) some practical magic that bound his and Susannah’s
New York lives to this other life in a way that required no magic doors or magic balls, no todash state. He laughed deliriously and began to scissor his feet back and forth. A moment later Zalia Jaffords was doing the same, mimicking him step for step. It was as good as the rice-dance. Maybe better, because they were all doing it in unison.

Certainly it was magic for Susannah, and of all the wonders ahead and behind, those few moments in the Jaffordses’ dooryard always maintained their own unique luster. Not two of them jumping in tandem, not even four, but
six
of them, while the two great grinning idiots spun the rope as fast as their slab-like arms would allow.

Tian laughed and stomped his shor’boots and cried: “That beats the drum! Don’t it just! Yer-
bugger
!” And from the porch, his grandfather gave out a laugh so rusty that Susannah had to wonder how long ago he had laid that sound away in mothballs.

For another five seconds or so, the magic held. The jump-rope spun so rapidly the eye lost it and it existed as nothing but a whirring sound like a wing. The half-dozen within that whirring—from Eddie, the tallest, at Zalman’s end, to pudgy little Lyman, at Tia’s—rose and fell like pistons in a machine.

Then the rope caught on someone’s heel—Heddon’s, it looked like to Susannah, although later all would take the blame so none had to feel bad—and they sprawled in the dust, gasping and laughing. Eddie, clutching his chest, caught Susannah’s eye. “I’m havin a heart attack, sweetheart, you better call 911.”

She hoisted herself over to where he lay and put her head down so she could kiss him. “No, you’re
not,” she said, “but you’re attacking
my
heart, Eddie Dean. I love you.”

He gazed up at her seriously from the dust of the dooryard. He knew that however much she might love him, he would always love her more. And as always when he thought these things, the premonition came that ka was not their friend, that it would end badly between them.

If it’s so, then your job is to make it as good as it can be for as long as it can be. Will you do your job, Eddie?

“With greatest pleasure,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows. “Do ya?” she said, Calla-talk for
Beg pardon?

“I do,” he said, grinning. “Believe me, I do.” He put an arm around her neck, pulled her down, kissed her brow, her nose, and finally her lips. The twins laughed and clapped. The baby chortled. And on the porch, old Jamie Jaffords did the same.

All of them were hungry after their exercise, and with Susannah helping from her chair, Zalia Jaffords laid a huge meal on the long trestle table out behind the house. The view was a winner, in Eddie’s opinion. At the foot of the hill was what he took to be some especially hardy type of rice, now grown to the height of a tall man’s shoulder. Beyond it, the river glowed with sunset light.