by Stephen King
Dragons, for instance.
So it was that in his eleventh year, Tim Ross lost his da’. Now there was no ax and no lucky coin hanging around Big Ross’s burly neck on its fine silver chain. Soon there might be no plot in the village or place in the world, either. For in those days, when the time of Wide Earth came around, the Barony Covenanter came with it. He carried a scroll of parchment paper, and the name of every family in Tree was writ upon it, along with a number. That number was the amount of tax. If you could pay it—four or six or eight silver knucks, even a gold one for the largest of the freeholds—all was well. If you couldn’t, the Barony took your plot and you were turned out on the land. There was no appeal.
Tim went half-days to the cottage of the Widow Smack, who kept school and was paid in food—usually vegetables, sometimes a bit of meat. Long ago, before the bloodsores had come on her and eaten off half her face (so the children whispered, although none had actually seen it), she had been a great lady in the barony estates far away (or so the children’s elders claimed, although none actually knew). Now she wore a veil and taught likely lads, and even a few lassies, how to read and practice the slightly questionable art known as mathmatica.
She was a fearsomely smart woman who took no guff, and most days she was tireless. Her pupils usually came to love her in spite of her veil, and the horrors they imagined might lie beneath it. But on occasion she would begin to tremble all over, and cry that her poor head was splitting, and that she must lie down. On these days she would send the children home, sometimes commanding them to tell their parents that she regretted nothing, least of all her beautiful prince.
Sai Smack had one of her fugues about a month after the dragon burned Big Ross to ashes, and when Tim came back to his cottage, which was called Goodview, he looked in the kitchen window and saw his mother crying with her head on the table.
He dropped the slate with his mathmatica problems on it (long division, which he had feared but turned out to be only backwards multiplication) and rushed to her side. She looked up at him and tried to smile. The contrast between her upturned lips and her streaming eyes made Tim feel like crying himself. It was the look of a woman at the end of her tether.
“What is it, Mama? What’s wrong?”
“Just thinking of your father. Sometimes I miss him so. Why are you home early?”
He began to tell her, but stopped when he saw the leather purse with the drawstring top. She had put one of her arms over it, as if to hide it from him, and when she saw him looking, she swept it off the table and into her lap.
Now Tim was far from a stupid boy, so he made tea before saying anything else. When she had drunk some—with sugar, which he insisted she take, although there was little enough left in the pot—and had calmed, he asked her what else was wrong.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Why were you counting our money?”
“What little there is to count,” said she. “Covenant Man will be here once Reaptide’s gone—aye, while the embers of the bonfire are still hot, if I know his ways—and what then? He’ll want six silver knuckles this year, p’raps as many as eight, for taxes have gone up, so they do say, probably another of their stupid wars somewhere far from here, soldiers with their banners flying, aye, very fine.”
“How much do we have?”
“Four and a scrap of a fifth. We have no livestock to sell, nor a single round of ironwood since your father died. What shall we do?” She began to cry again. “What shall we do?”
Tim was as frightened as she was, but since there was no man to comfort her, he held his own tears back and put his arms around her and soothed her as best he could.
“If we had his ax and his coin, I’d sell them to Destry,” she said at last.
Tim was horrified even though the ax and lucky coin were gone, burned in the same fiery blast that had taken their cheerful, goodhearted owner. “You never would!”
“Aye. To keep his plot and his place, I would. Those were the things he truly cared about, and thee, and me. Could he speak he’d say ‘Do it, Nell, and welcome,’ for Destry has hard coin.” She sighed. “But then would come old Barony Covenant Man next year . . . and the year after that . . .” She put her hands over her face. “Oh, Tim, we shall be turned out on the land, and there’s not one thing I can think to change it. Can you?”
Tim would have given everything he owned (which was very little) to be able to give her an answer, but he could not. He could only ask how long it would be before the Covenant Man would appear in Tree on his tall black horse, sitting astride a saddle worth more than Big Ross had made in twenty-five years of risking his life on that narrow track known as the Ironwood Trail.
She held up four fingers. “This many weeks if the weather is fair.” She held up four more. “This many if it’s foul, and he’s held up in the farming villages of the Middles. Eight is the most we can hope for, I think. And then . . .”
“Something will happen before he comes,” Tim said. “Da’ always said that the forest gives to them that love it.”
“All I’ve ever seen it do is take,” said Nell, and covered her face again. When he tried to put an arm around her, she shook her head.
Tim trudged out to get his slate. He had never felt so sad and frightened. Something will happen to change it, he thought. Please let something happen to change it.
The worst thing about wishes is that sometimes they come true.
That was a rich Full Earth in Tree; even Nell knew it, although the ripe land was bitter in her eye. The following year she and Tim might be following the crops with burlap rucksacks on their backs, farther and farther from the Endless Forest, and that made summer’s beauty hard to look at. The forest was a terrible place, and it had taken her man, but it was the only place she had ever known. At night, when the wind blew from the north, it stole to her bed through her open window like a lover, bringing its own special smell, one both bitter and sweet, like blood and strawberries. Sometimes when she slept, she dreamed of its deep tilts and secret corridors, and of sunshine so diffuse that it glowed like old green brass.
The smell of the forest when the wind’s out of the north brings visions, the old folken said. Nell didn’t know if this was true or just chimneycorner blather, but she knew the smell of the Endless Forest was the smell of life as well as death. And she knew that Tim loved it as his father had. As she herself had (although often against her will).
She had secretly feared the day when the boy would grow tall enough and strong enough to go down that dangerous trail with his da’, but now she found herself sorry that day would never come. Sai Smack and her mathmatica were all very well, but Nell knew what her son truly wanted, and she hated the dragon that had stolen it from him. Probably it had been a she-dragon, and only protecting her egg, but Nell hated it just the same. She hoped the plated yellow-eyed bitch would swallow her own fire, as the old stories said they sometimes did, and explode.
One day not so many after Tim had arrived home early and found her in tears, Big Kells came calling on Nell. Tim had gotten two weeks’ work helping farmer Destry with the hay-cutting, so she was by her onesome in her garden, weeding on her knees. When she saw her late husband’s friend and partner, she got to her feet and wiped her dirty hands on the burlap apron she called her weddiken.
A single look at his clean hands and carefully trimmed beard was enough to tell her why he’d come. Once upon a bye, Nell Robertson, Jack Ross, and Bern Kells had been children together, and great pals. Littermates from different litters, people of the village sometimes said when they saw the three together; in those days they were inseparable.
When they grew to young manhood, both boys fancied her. And while she loved them both, it was Big Ross she burned for, Big Ross she’d wed and taken to bed (although whether that was the order of it no one knew, nor really cared). Big Kells had taken it as well as any man can. He stood beside Ross at the wedding, and slipped the silk around them for their walk back down the ais
le when the preacher was done. When Kells took it off them at the door (although it never really comes off, so they do say), he kissed them both and wished them a lifetime of long days and pleasant nights.
Although the afternoon Kells came to her in the garden was hot, he was wearing a broadcloth jacket. From the pocket he took a loosely knotted length of silk rope, as she knew he would. A woman knows. Even if she’s long married, a woman knows, and Kells’s heart had never changed.
“Will’ee?” he asked. “If’ee will, I’ll sell my place to Old Destry—he wants it, for it sits next to his east field—and keep this’un. Covenant Man’s coming, Nellie, and he’ll have his hand out. With no man, how’ll’ee fill it?”
“I cannot, as thee knows,” said she.
“Then tell me—shall we slip the rope?”
She wiped her hands nervously on her weddiken, although they were already as clean as they’d be without water from the creek. “I . . . I need to think about it.”
“What’s to think about?” He took his bandanna—neatly folded in his pocket instead of tied loosely, woodsman-style, around his neck—and mopped his forehead with it. “Either’ee do and we go on in Tree as we always have—I’ll find the boy something to work at that’ll bring in a little, although he’s far too wee for the woods—or ye and he’ll go on the land. I can share, but I can’t give, much as I might like to. I have only one place to sell, kennit.”
She thought, He’s trying to buy me to fill the empty side of the bed that Millicent left behind. But that seemed an unworthy thought for a man she’d known long before he was a man, and one who had worked for years by her beloved husband’s side in the dark and dangerous trees near the end of the Ironwood Trail. One to watch and one to work, the oldtimers said. Pull together and never apart. Now that Jack Ross was gone, Bern Kells was asking her to pull with him. It was natural.
Yet she hesitated.
“Come tomorrow at this same time, if you still have a mind,” Nell told him. “I’ll give thee an answer then.”
He didn’t like it; she saw he didn’t like it; she saw something in his eyes that she had occasionally glimpsed when she had been a green girl sparked by two likely lads and the envy of all her friends. That look was what caused her to hesitate, even though he had appeared like an angel, offering her—and Tim, of course—a way out of the terrible dilemma that had come with Big Ross’s death.
Perhaps he saw her seeing it, for he dropped his gaze. He studied his feet for a bit, and when he looked up again, he was smiling. It made him almost as handsome as he’d been as a youth . . . but never so handsome as Jack Ross.
“Tomorrow, then. But no longer. They have a saying in the West’rds, my dear. ‘Look not long at what’s offered, for every precious thing has wings and may fly away.’”
She washed at the edge of the creek, stood smelling the sweet-sour aroma of the forest for a bit, then went inside and lay down upon her bed. It was unheard of for Nell Ross to be horizontal while the sun was still in the sky, but she had much to think of and much to remember from those days when two young woodsmen had vied for her kisses.
Even if her blood had called toward Bern Kells (not yet Big Kells in those days, although his father was dead, slain in the woods by a vurt or some such nightmare) instead of Jack Ross, she wasn’t sure she would have slipped the rope with him. Kells was good-humored and laughing when he was sober, and as steady as sand through a glass, but he could be angry and quick with his fists when he was drunk. And he was drunk often in those days. His binges grew longer and more frequent after Ross and Nell were wed, and on many occasions he woke up in jail.
Jack had borne it awhile, but after a binge where Kells had destroyed most of the furniture in the saloon before passing out, Nell told her husband something had to be done. Big Ross reluctantly agreed. He got his partner and old friend out of jail—as he had many times before—but this time he spoke to him frankly instead of just telling Kells to go jump in the creek and stay there until his head was clear.
“Listen to me, Bern, and with both ears. You’ve been my friend since I could toddle, and my pard since we were old enough to go past the blossie and into the ironwood on our own. You’ve watched my back and I’ve watched yours. There’s not a man I trust more, when you’re sober. But once you pour the redeye down your throat, you’re no more reliable than quickmud. I can’t go into the forest alone, and everything I have—everything we both have—is at risk if I can’t depend on’ee. I’d hate to cast about for a new pard, but fair warning: I have a wife and a kiddy on the way, and I’ll do what I have to do.”
Kells continued his drinking, brawling, and bawding for a few more months, as if to spite his old friend (and his old friend’s new wife). Big Ross was on the verge of severing their partnership when the miracle happened. It was a small miracle, hardly more than five feet from toes to crown, and her name was Millicent Redhouse. What Bern Kells would not do for Big Ross, he did for Milly. When she died in childbirth six seasons later (and the babby soon after—even before the flush of labor had faded from the poor woman’s dead cheek, the midwife confided to Nell), Ross was gloomy.
“He’ll go back for the drink now, and gods know what will become of him.”
But Big Kells stayed sober, and when his business happened to bring him into the vicinity of Gitty’s Saloon, he crossed to the other side of the street. He said it had been Milly’s dying request, and to do otherwise would be an insult to her memory. “I’ll die before I take another drink,” he said.
He had kept this promise . . . but Nell sometimes felt his eyes upon her. Often, even. He had never touched her in a way that could be called intimate, or even forward, had never stolen so much as a Reaptide kiss, but she felt his eyes. Not as a man looks at a friend, or at a friend’s wife, but as a man looks at a woman.
Tim came home an hour before sunset with hay stuck to every visible inch of his sweaty skin, but happy. Farmer Destry had paid him in scrip for the town store, a fairish sum, and his goodwife had added a sack of her sweet peppers and busturd tomatoes. Nell took the scrip and the sack, thanked him, kissed him, gave him a well-stuffed popkin, and sent him down to the spring to bathe.
Ahead of him, as he stood in the cold water, ran the dreaming, mist-banded fields toward the Inners and Gilead. To his left bulked the forest, which began less than a wheel away. In there it was twilight even at noonday, his father had said. At the thought of his father, his happiness at being paid a man’s wages (or almost) for a day’s work ran out of him like grain from a sack with a hole in it. This sorrow came often, but it always surprised him. He sat for a while on a big rock with his knees drawn up to his chest and his head cradled in his arms. To be taken by a dragon so close to the edge of the forest was unlikely and terribly unfair, but it had happened before. His father wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last.
His mother’s voice came floating to him over the fields, calling him to come in and have some real supper. Tim called cheerily back to her, then knelt on the rock to splash cold water on his eyes, which felt swollen, although he had shed no tears. He dressed quickly and trotted up the slope. His mother had lit the lamps, for the gloaming had come, and they cast long rectangles of light across her neat little garden. Tired but happy again—for boys turn like weathercocks, so they do—Tim hurried into the welcoming glow of home.
When the meal was done and the few dishes ridded between them, Nell said: “I’d talk to you mother to son, Tim . . . and a bit more. You’re old enough to work a little now, you’ll soon be leaving your childhood behind—sooner than I’d like—and you deserve a say in what happens.”
“Is it about the Covenant Man, Mama?”
“In a way, but I . . . I think more than that.” She came close to saying I fear instead of I think, but why would she? There was a hard decision to be made, an important decision, but what was there to fear?
She led the way into their sitting room—so cozy Big Ross had almost been able to touch the opposing walls w
hen he stood in the middle with his arms outstretched—and there, as they sat before the cold hearth (for it was a warm Full Earth night), she told him all that had passed between Big Kells and herself. Tim listened with surprise and mounting unease.
“So,” Nell said when she had finished. “What does thee think?” But before he could answer—perhaps she saw in his face the worry she felt in her own heart—she rushed on. “He’s a good man, and was more brother than mate to your da’. I believe he cares for me, and cares for thee.”
No, thought Tim, I’m just what comes in the same saddlebag. He never even looks at me. Unless I happened to be with Da’, that is. Or with you.
“Mama, I don’t know.” The thought of Big Kells in the house—lying next to Mama in his da’s place—made him feel light in his stomach, as if his supper had not set well. In truth, it no longer was sitting well.
“He’s quit the drink,” she said. Now she seemed to be talking to herself instead of to him. “Years ago. He could be wild as a youth, but your da’ tamed him. And Millicent, of course.”
“Maybe, but neither of them is here anymore,” Tim pointed out. “And Ma, he hasn’t found anyone yet to partner him on the Ironwood. He goes a-cutting on his own, and that’s dead risky.”
“It’s early days yet,” she said. “He’ll find someone to partner up with, for he’s strong and he knows where the good stands are. Your father showed him how to find them when they were both fresh to the work, and they have fine stakeouts near the place where the trail ends.”
Tim knew this was so, but was less sure Kells would find someone to partner with. He thought the other woodcutters kept clear of him. They seemed to do it without knowing they were doing it, the way a seasoned woodsman would detour around a poisonthorn bush, even if he only saw it from the corner of his eye.
