by Stephen King
Maybe I’m only making that up, he thought.
“I don’t know,” he said again. “A rope that’s slipped in church can’t be unslipped.”
Nell laughed nervously. “Where in Full Earth did thee hear that?”
“From you,” Tim said.
She smiled. “Yar, p’raps thee did, for my mouth’s hung in the middle and runs at both ends. We’ll sleep on it, and see clearer in the morning.”
But neither of them slept much. Tim lay wondering what it would be like to have Big Kells as a steppa. Would he be good to them? Would he take Tim into the forest with him to begin learning the woodsman’s life? That would be fine, he thought, but would his mother want him going into the line of work that had killed her husband? Or would she want him to stay south of the Endless Forest? To be a farmer?
I like Destry well enough, he thought, but I’d never in life be a farmer. Not with the Endless Forest so close, and so much of the world to see.
Nell lay a wall away, with her own uncomfortable thoughts. Mostly she wondered what their lives would be like if she refused Kells’s offer and they were turned out on the land, away from the only place they’d ever known. What their lives would be like if the Barony Covenanter rode up on his tall black horse and they had nothing to give him.
The next day was even hotter, but Big Kells came wearing the same broadcloth coat. His face was red and shining. Nell told herself she didn’t smell graf on his breath, and if she did, what of it? ’Twas only hard cider, and any man might take a drink or two before going to hear a woman’s decision. Besides, her mind was made up. Or almost.
Before he could ask his question, she spoke boldly. As boldly as she was able, anyhap. “My boy reminds me that a rope slipped in church can’t be unslipped.”
Big Kells frowned, although whether it was the mention of the boy or the marriage-loop that fashed him, she could not tell. “Aye, and what of that?”
“Only will you be good to Tim and me?”
“Aye, good as I can be.” His frown deepened. She couldn’t tell if it was anger or puzzlement. She hoped for puzzlement. Men who could cut and chop and dare beasts in the deep wood often found themselves lost in affairs like this, she knew, and at the thought of Big Kells lost, her heart opened to him.
“Set your word on it?” she asked.
The frown eased. White flashed in his neatly trimmed black beard as he smiled. “Aye, by watch and by warrant.”
“Then I say yes.”
And so they were wed. That is where many stories end; it’s where this one—sad to say—really begins.
There was graf at the wedding reception, and for a man who no longer drank spirits, Big Kells tossed a goodly amount down his gullet. Tim viewed this with unease, but his mother appeared not to notice. Another thing that made Tim uneasy was how few of the other woodsmen showed up, although it was Ethday. If he had been a girl instead of a boy, he might have noticed something else. Several of the women whom Nell counted among her friends were looking at her with expressions of guarded pity.
That night, long after midnight, he was awakened by a thump and a cry that might have been part of a dream, but it seemed to come through the wall from the room his mother now shared (true, but not yet possible to believe) with Big Kells. Tim lay listening, and had almost dropped off to sleep again when he heard quiet weeping. This was followed by the voice of his new steppa, low and gruff: “Shut it, can’t you? You ain’t a bit hurt, there’s no blood, and I have to be up with the birdies.”
The sounds of crying stopped. Tim listened, but there was no more talk. Shortly after Big Kells’s snores began, he fell asleep. The next morning, while she was at the stove frying eggs, Tim saw a bruise on his mother’s arm above the inside of her elbow.
“It’s nothing,” Nell said when she saw him looking. “I had to get up in the night to do the necessary, and bumped it on the bedpost. I’ll have to get used to finding my way in the dark again, now that I’m not alone.”
Tim thought, Yar—that’s what I’m afraid of.
When the second Ethday of his married life came round, Big Kells took Tim with him to the house that now belonged to Baldy Anderson, Tree’s other big farmer. They went in Kells’s wood-wagon. The mules stepped lightly with no rounds or strakes of ironwood to haul; today there were only a few little piles of sawdust in the back of the wagon. And that lingering sweet-sour smell, of course, the smell of the deep woods. Kells’s old place looked sad and abandoned with its shutters closed and the tall, unscythed grass growing up to the splintery porch slats.
“Once I get my gunna out’n it, let Baldy take it all for kindling, do it please ’im,” Kells grunted. “Fine wi’ me.”
As it turned out, there were only two things he wanted from the house—a dirty old footrest and a large leather trunk with straps and a brass lock. This was in the bedroom, and Kells stroked it as if it were a pet. “Can’t leave this,” he said. “Never this. ’Twas my father’s.”
Tim helped him get it outside, but Kells had to do most of the work. The trunk was very heavy. When it was in the wagonbed, Big Kells leaned over with his hands on the knees of his newly (and neatly) mended trousers. At last, when the purple patches began to fade from his cheeks, he stroked the trunk again, and with a gentleness Tim had as yet not seen applied to his mother. “All I own stowed in one trunk. As for the house, did Baldy pay the price I should have had?” He looked at Tim challengingly, as if expecting an argument on this subject.
“I don’t know,” Tim said cautiously. “Folk say sai Anderson’s close.”
Kells laughed harshly. “Close? Close? Tight as a virgin’s cootchie is what he is. Nar, nar, I got crumbs instead of a slice, for he knew I couldn’t afford to wait. Help me tie up this tailboard, boy, and be not sluggardly.”
Tim was not sluggardly. He had his side of the tailboard roped tight before Kells had finished tying his in a sloppy ollie-knot that would have made his father laugh. When he was finally done, Big Kells gave his trunk another of those queerly affectionate caresses.
“All in here now, all I have. Baldy knew I had to have silver before Wide Earth, didn’t he? Old You Know Who is coming, and he’ll have his hand out.” He spat between his old scuffed boots. “This is all your ma’s fault.”
“Ma’s fault? Why? Didn’t you want to marry her?”
“Watch your mouth, boy.” Kells looked down, seemed surprised to see a fist where his hand had been, and opened his fingers. “You’re too young to understand. When you’re older, you’ll find out how women can get the good of a man. Let’s go on back.”
Halfway to the driving seat, he stopped and looked across the stowed trunk at the boy. “I love yer ma, and that’s enough for you to be going on with.”
And as the mules trotted up the village high street, Big Kells sighed and added, “I loved yer da’, too, and how I miss ’im. ’Tain’t the same wi’out him beside me in the woods, or seein Misty and Bitsy up the trail ahead of me.”
At this Tim’s heart opened a little to the big, slump-shouldered man with the reins in his hands—in spite of himself, really—but before the feeling had any chance to grow, Big Kells spoke again.
“Ye’ve had enough of books and numbers and that weirdy Smack woman. She with her veils and shakes—how she manages to wipe her arse after she shits is more than I’ll ever know.”
Tim’s heart seemed to clap shut in his chest. He loved learning things, and he loved the Widow Smack—veil, shakes, and all. It dismayed him to hear her spoken of with such crude cruelty. “What would I do, then? Go into the woods with you?” He could see himself on Da’s wagon, behind Misty and Bitsy. That would not be so bad. No, not so bad at all.
Kells barked a laugh. “You? In the woods? And not yet twelve?”
“I’ll be twelve next m—”
“You won’t be big enough to lumber on the Ironwood Trail at twice that age, for’ee take after yer ma’s side of things, and will be Sma’ Ross all yer life.” That bark of laughter a
gain. Tim felt his face grow hot at the sound of it. “No, lad, I’ve spoke a place for’ee at the sawmill. You ain’t too sma’ to stack boards. Ye’ll start after harvest’s done, and before first snow.”
“What does Mama say?” Tim tried to keep the dismay out of his voice and failed.
“She don’t get aye, no, or maybe in the matter. I’m her husband, and that makes me the one to decide.” He snapped the reins across the backs of the plodding mules. “Hup!”
Tim went down to Tree Sawmill three days later, with one of the Destry boys—Straw Willem, so called for his nearly colorless hair. Both were hired on to stack, but they would not be needed for yet awhile, and only part-time, at least to begin with. Tim had brought his father’s mules, which needed the exercise, and the boys rode back side by side.
“Thought you said your new step-poppa didn’t drink,” Willem said, as they passed Gitty’s—which at midday was shuttered tight, its barrelhouse piano silent.
“He doesn’t,” Tim said, but he remembered the wedding reception.
“Do you say so? I guess the fella my big brother seed rollin out of yonder redeye last night must’ve been some other orphing-boy’s steppa, because Randy said he was as sloshed as a shindybug and heavin up over the hitchin-rail.” Having said this, Willem snapped his suspenders, as he always did when he felt he’d gotten off a good one.
Should have let you walk back to town, you stupid git, Tim thought.
That night, his mother woke him again. Tim sat bolt upright in bed and swung his feet out onto the floor, then froze. Kells’s voice was soft, but the wall between the two rooms was thin.
“Shut it, woman. If you wake the boy and get him in here, I’ll give you double.”
Her crying ceased.
“It was a slip, is all—a mistake. I went in with Mellon just to have a ginger-beer and hear about his new stake, and someone put a glass of jackaroe in front of me. It was down my throat before I knew what I was drinking, and then I was off. ’Twon’t happen again. Ye have my word on it.”
Tim lay back down again, hoping that was true.
He looked up at a ceiling he could not see, and listened to an owl, and waited for either sleep or the first light of morning. It seemed to him that if the wrong man stepped into the marriage-loop with a woman, it was a noose instead of a ring. He prayed that wasn’t the case here. He already knew he couldn’t like his mother’s new husband, let alone love him, but perhaps his mother could do both. Women were different. They had larger hearts.
Tim was still thinking these long thoughts as dawn tinted the sky and he finally fell asleep. That day there were bruises on both of his mother’s arms. The bedpost in the room she now shared with Big Kells had grown very lively, it seemed.
Full Earth gave way to Wide Earth, as it always must. Tim and Straw Willem went to work stacking at the sawmill, but only three days a week. The foreman, a decent sai named Rupert Venn, told them they might get more time if that season’s snowfall was light and the winter haul was good—meaning the ironwood rounds that cutters such as Kells brought back from the forest.
Nell’s bruises faded and her smile came back. Tim thought it a more cautious smile than before, but it was better than no smile at all. Kells hitched his mules and went down the Ironwood Trail, and although the stakes he and Big Ross had claimed were good ones, he still had no one to partner him. He consequently brought back less haul, but ironwood was ironwood, and ironwood always sold for a good price, one paid in shards of silver rather than scrip.
Sometimes Tim wondered—usually as he was wheeling boards into one of the sawmill’s long covered sheds—if life might be better were his new step-poppa to fall afoul a snake or a wervel. Perhaps even a vurt, those nasty flying things sometimes known as bullet-birds. One such had done for Bern Kells’s father, boring a hole right through him with its stony beak.
Tim pushed these thoughts away with horror, amazed to find that some room in his heart—some black room—could hold such things. His father, Tim was sure, would be ashamed. Perhaps was ashamed, for some said that those in the clearing at the end of the path knew all the secrets the living kept from each other.
At least he no longer smelled graf on his stepfather’s breath, and there were no more stories—from Straw Willem or anyone else—of Big Kells reeling out of the redeye when Old Gitty shut and locked the doors.
He promised and he’s keeping his promise, Tim thought. And the bedpost has stopped moving around in Mama’s room, because she doesn’t have those bruises. Life’s begun to come right. That’s the thing to remember.
When he got home from the sawmill on the days he had work, his mother would have supper on the stove. Big Kells would come in later, first stopping to wash the sawdust from his hands, arms, and neck at the spring between the house and the barn, then gobbling his own supper. He ate prodigious amounts, calling for seconds and thirds that Nell brought promptly. She didn’t speak when she did this; if she did, her new husband would only growl a response. Afterward, he would go into the back hall, sit on his trunk, and smoke.
Sometimes Tim would look up from his slate, where he was working the mathmatica problems the Widow Smack still gave him, and see Kells staring at him through his pipe-smoke. There was something disconcerting about that gaze, and Tim began to take his slate outside, even though it was growing chilly in Tree, and dark came earlier each day.
Once his mother came out, sat beside him on the porch step, and put her arm around his shoulders. “You’ll be back to school with sai Smack next year, Tim. It’s a promise. I’ll bring him round.”
Tim smiled at her and said thankee, but he knew better. Next year he’d still be at the sawmill, only by then he’d be big enough to carry boards as well as stack them, and there would be less time to do problems, because he’d have work five days a week instead of three. Mayhap even six. The year after that, he’d be planing as well as carrying, then using the swing-saw like a man. In a few more years he’d be a man, coming home too tired to think about reading the Widow Smack’s books even if she still wanted to lend them out, the orderly ways of the mathmatica fading in his mind. That grown Tim Ross might want no more than to fall into bed after meat and bread. He would begin to smoke a pipe and perhaps get a taste for graf or beer. He would watch his mother’s smile grow pale; he would watch her eyes lose their sparkle.
And for these things he would have Bern Kells to thank.
Reaping was gone by; Huntress Moon grew pale, waxed again, and pulled her bow; the first gales of Wide Earth came howling in from the west. And just when it seemed he might not come after all, the Barony Covenanter blew into the village of Tree on one of those cold winds, astride his tall black horse and as thin as Tom Scrawny Death. His heavy black cloak flapped around him like a batwing. Beneath his wide hat (as black as his cloak), the pale lamp of his face turned ceaselessly from side to side, marking a new fence here, a cow or three added to a herd there. The villagers would grumble but pay, and if they couldn’t pay, their land would be taken in the name of Gilead. Perhaps even then, in those olden days, some were whispering it wasn’t fair, the taxes were too much, that Arthur Eld was long dead (if he had ever existed at all), and the Covenant had been paid a dozen times over, in blood as well as silver. Perhaps some of them were already waiting for a Good Man to appear, and make them strong enough to say No more, enough’s enough, the world has moved on.
Perhaps, but not that year, and not for many and many-a to come.
Late in the afternoon, while the swag-bellied clouds tumbled across the sky and the yellow cornstalks clattered in Nell’s garden-like teeth in a loose jaw, sai Covenanter nudged his tall black horse between gateposts Big Ross had set up himself (with Tim looking on and helping when asked). The horse paced slowly and solemnly up to the front steps. There it halted, nodding and blowing. Big Kells stood on the porch and still had to look up to see the visitor’s pallid face. Kells held his hat crushed to his breast. His thinning black hair (now showing the first streaks of
gray, for he was nearing forty and would soon be old) flew around his head. Behind him in the doorway stood Nell and Tim. She had an arm around her boy’s shoulders and was clutching him tightly, as if afraid (maybe ’twas a mother’s intuition) that the Covenant Man might steal him away.
For a moment there was silence save for the flapping of the unwelcome visitor’s cloak, and the wind, which sang an eerie tune beneath the eaves. Then the Barony Covenanter bent forward, regarding Kells with wide dark eyes that did not seem to blink. His lips, Tim saw, were as red as a woman’s when she paints them with fresh madder. From somewhere inside his cloak he produced not a book of slates but a roll of real parchment paper, and pulled it down so ’twas long. He studied it, made it short again, and replaced it in whatever inner pocket it had come from. Then he returned his gaze to Big Kells, who flinched and looked at his feet.
“Kells, isn’t it?” He had a rough, husky voice that made Tim’s skin pucker into hard points of gooseflesh. He had seen the Covenant Man before, but only from a distance; his da’ had made shift to keep Tim away from the house when the barony’s tax-man came calling on his annual rounds. Now Tim understood why. He thought he would have bad dreams tonight.
“Kells, aye.” His step-poppa’s voice was shakily cheerful. He managed to raise his eyes again. “Welcome, sai. Long days and pleasant—”
“Yar, all that, all that,” the Covenant Man said with a dismissive wave of one hand. His dark eyes were now looking over Kells’s shoulder. “And . . . Ross, isn’t it? Now two instead of three, they tell me, Big Ross having fallen to unfortunate happenstance.” His voice was low, little more than a monotone. Like listening to a deaf man try to sing a lullabye, Tim thought.
“Just so,” Big Kells said. He swallowed hard enough for Tim to hear the gulping sound, then began to babble. “He n me were in the forest, ye ken, in one of our little stakes off the Ironwood Path—we have four or five, all marked proper wi’ our names, so they are, and I haven’t changed em, because in my mind he’s still my partner and always will be—and we got separated a bit. Then I heard a hissin. You know that sound when you hear it, there’s no sound on earth like the hiss of a bitch dragon drawrin in breath before she—”
