by Stephen King
“Hush,” the Covenant Man said. “When I want to hear a story, I like it to begin with ‘Once upon a bye.’”
Kells began to say something else—perhaps only to cry pardon—and thought better of it. The Covenant Man leaned an arm on the horn of his saddle and stared at him. “I understand you sold your house to Rupert Anderson, sai Kells.”
“Yar, and he cozened me, but I—”
The visitor overrode him. “The tax is nine knuckles of silver or one of rhodite, which I know you don’t have in these parts, but I’m bound to tell you, as it’s in the original Covenant. One knuck for the transaction, and eight for the house where you now sit your ass at sundown and no doubt hide your tallywhacker after moonrise.”
“Nine?” Big Kells gasped. “Nine? That’s—”
“It’s what?” the Covenant Man said in his rough, crooning voice. “Be careful how you answer, Bern Kells, son of Mathias, grandson of Limping Peter. Be ever so careful, because, although your neck is thick, I believe it would stretch thin. Aye, so I do.”
Big Kells turned pale . . . although not as pale as the Barony Covenanter. “It’s very fair. That’s all I meant to say. I’ll get it.”
He went into the house and came back with a deerskin purse. It was Big Ross’s moneysack, the one over which Tim’s mother had been crying on a day early on in Full Earth. A day when life had seemed fairer, even though Big Ross was dead. Kells handed the sack to Nell and let her count the precious knuckles of silver into his cupped hands.
All during this, the visitor sat silent on his tall black horse, but when Big Kells made to come down the steps and hand him the tax—almost all they had, even with Tim’s little bit of wages added into the common pot—the Covenant Man shook his head.
“Keep your place. I’d have the boy bring it to me, for he’s fair, and in his countenance I see his father’s face. Aye, I see it very well.”
Tim took the double handful of knucks—so heavy!—from Big Kells, barely hearing the whisper in his ear: “Have a care and don’t drop em, ye gormless boy.”
Tim walked down the porch steps like a boy in a dream. He held up his cupped hands, and before he knew what was happening, the Covenant Man had seized him by the wrists and hauled him up onto his horse. Tim saw that bow and pommel were decorated with a cascade of silver runes: moons and stars and comets and cups pouring cold fire. At the same time, he realized his double handful of knucks was gone. The Covenant Man had taken them, although Tim couldn’t remember exactly when it had happened.
Nell screamed and ran forward.
“Catch her and hold her!” the Covenant Man thundered, so close by Tim’s ear that he was near deafened on that side.
Kells grabbed his wife by the shoulders and jerked her roughly backwards. She tripped and tumbled to the porch boards, long skirts flying up around her ankles.
“Mama!” Tim shouted. He tried to jump from the saddle, but the Covenant Man restrained him easily. He smelled of campfire meat and old cold sweat. “Sit easy, young Tim Ross, she’s not hurt a mite. See how spry she rises.” Then, to Nell—who had indeed regained her feet: “Be not fashed, sai, I’d only have a word with him. Would I harm a future taxpayer of the realm?”
“If you harm him, I’ll kill you, you devil,” said she.
Kells raised a fist to her. “Shut yer stupid mouth, woman!” Nell did not shrink from the fist. She had eyes only for Tim, sitting on the high black horse in front of the Covenant Man, whose arms were banded across her son’s chest.
The Covenant Man smiled down at the two on the porch, one with his fist still upraised to strike, the other with tears coursing down her cheeks. “Nell and Kells!” he proclaimed. “The happy couple!”
He kneed his mount in a circle and slow-walked it as far as the gate, his arms still firmly around Tim’s chest, his rank breath puffing against Tim’s cheek. At the gate he squeezed his knees again and the horse halted. In Tim’s ear—which was still ringing—he whispered: “How does thee like thy new steppa, young Tim? Speak the truth, but speak it low. This is our palaver, and they have no part in it.”
Tim didn’t want to turn, didn’t want the Covenant Man’s pallid face any closer than it already was, but he had a secret that had been poisoning him. So he did turn, and in the tax-man’s ear he whispered, “When he’s in drink, he beats my ma.”
“Does he, now? Ah, well, does that surprise me? For did not his da’ beat his own ma? And what we learn as children sets as a habit, so it does.”
A gloved hand threw one wing of the heavy black cloak over them like a blanket, and Tim felt the other gloved hand slither something small and hard into his pants pocket. “A gift for you, young Tim. It’s a key. Does thee know what makes it special?”
Tim shook his head.
“’Tis a magic key. It will open anything, but only a single time. After that, ’tis as useless as dirt, so be careful how you use it!” He laughed as if this were the funniest joke he’d ever heard. His breath made Tim’s stomach churn.
“I . . .” He swallowed. “I have nothing to open. There’s no locks in Tree, ’cept at the redeye and the jail.”
“Oh, I think thee knows of another. Does thee not?”
Tim looked into the Covenant Man’s blackly merry eyes and said nothing. That worthy nodded, however, as if he had.
“What are you telling my son?” Nell screamed from the porch. “Pour not poison in his ears, devil!”
“Pay her no mind, young Tim, she’ll know soon enough. She’ll know much but see little.” He snickered. His teeth were very large and very white. “A riddle for you! Can you solve it? No? Never mind, the answer will come in time.”
“Sometimes he opens it,” Tim said, speaking in the slow voice of one who talks in his sleep. “He takes out his honing bar. For the blade of his ax. But then he locks it again. At night he sits on it to smoke, like it was a chair.”
The Covenant Man didn’t ask what it was. “And does he touch it each time he passes by, young Tim? As a man would touch a favorite old dog?”
He did, of course, but Tim didn’t say so. He didn’t need to say so. He felt there wasn’t a secret he could keep from the mind ticking away behind that long white face. Not one.
He’s playing with me, Tim thought. I’m just a bit of amusement on a dreary day in a dreary town he’ll soon leave behind. But he breaks his toys. You only have to look at his smile to know that.
“I’ll camp a wheel or two down the Ironwood Trail the next night or two,” the Covenant Man said in his rusty, tuneless voice. “It’s been a long ride, and I’m weary of all the quack I have to listen to. There are vurts and wervels and snakes in the forest, but they don’t quack.”
You’re never weary, Tim thought. Not you.
“Come and see me if you care to.” No snicker this time; this time he tittered like a naughty girl. “And if you dare to, of course. But come at night, for this jilly’s son likes to sleep in the day when he gets the chance. Or stay here if you’re timid. It’s naught to me. Hup!”
This was to the horse, which paced slowly back to the porch steps, where Nell stood wringing her hands and Big Kells stood glowering beside her. The Covenant Man’s thin strong fingers closed over Tim’s wrists again—like handcuffs—and lifted him. A moment later he was on the ground, staring up at the white face and smiling red lips. The key burned in the depths of his pocket. From above the house came a peal of thunder, and it began to rain.
“The Barony thanks you,” the Covenant Man said, touching one gloved finger to the side of his wide-brimmed hat. Then he wheeled his black horse around and was gone into the rain. The last thing Tim saw was passing odd: when the heavy black cloak belled out, he spied a large metal object tied to the top of the Covenant Man’s gunna. It looked like a washbasin.
Big Kells came striding down the steps, seized Tim by the shoulders, and commenced shaking him. Rain matted Kells’s thinning hair to the sides of his face and streamed from his beard. Black when he had slipped into the silk
rope with Nell, that beard was now heavily streaked with gray.
“What did he tell’ee? Was it about me? What lies did’ee speak? Tell!”
Tim could tell him nothing. His head snapped back and forth hard enough to make his teeth clack together.
Nell rushed down the steps. “Stop it! Let him alone! You promised you’d never—”
“Get out of what don’t concern you, woman,” he said, and struck her with the side of his fist. Tim’s mama fell into the mud, where the teeming rain was now filling the tracks left by the Covenant Man’s horse.
“You bastard!” Tim screamed. “You can’t hit my mama, you can’t ever!”
He felt no immediate pain when Kells dealt him a similar sidehand blow, but white light sheared across his vision. When it lifted, he found himself lying in the mud next to his mother. He was dazed, his ears were ringing, and still the key burned in his pocket like a live coal.
“Nis take both of you,” Kells said, and strode away into the rain. Beyond the gate he turned right, in the direction of Tree’s little length of high street. Headed for Gitty’s, Tim had no doubt. He had stayed away from drink all of that Wide Earth—as far as Tim knew, anyway—but he would not stay away from it this night. Tim saw from his mother’s sorrowful face—wet with rain, her hair hanging limp against her reddening muck-splattered cheek—that she knew it, too.
Tim put his arm around her waist, she put hers about his shoulders. They made their way slowly up the steps and into the house.
She didn’t so much sit in her chair at the kitchen table as collapse into it. Tim poured water from the jug into the basin, wetted a cloth, and put it gently on the side of her face, which had begun to swell. She held it there for a bit, then extended it wordlessly to him. To please her, he took it and put it on his own face. It was cool and good against the throbbing heat.
“This is a pretty business, wouldn’t you say?” she asked, with an attempt at brightness. “Woman beaten, boy slugged, new husband off t’boozer.”
Tim had no idea what to say to this, so said nothing.
Nell lowered her head to the heel of her hand and stared at the table. “I’ve made such a mess of things. I was frightened and at my wits’ end, but that’s no excuse. We would have been better on the land, I think.”
Turned off the place? Away from the plot? Wasn’t it enough that his da’s ax and lucky coin were gone? She was right about one thing, though; it was a mess.
But I have a key, Tim thought, and his fingers stole down to his pants to feel the shape of it.
“Where has he gone?” Nell asked, and Tim knew it wasn’t Bern Kells she was speaking of.
A wheel or two down the Ironwood. Where he’ll wait for me.
“I don’t know, Mama.” So far as he could remember, it was the first time he had ever lied to her.
“But we know where Bern’s gone, don’t we?” She laughed, then winced because it hurt her face. “He promised Milly Redhouse he was done with the drink, and he promised me, but he’s weak. Or . . . is it me? Did I drive him to it, do you think?”
“No, Mama.” But Tim wondered if it might not be true. Not in the way she meant—by being a nag, or keeping a dirty house, or refusing him what men and women did in bed after dark—but in some other way. There was a mystery here, and he wondered if the key in his pocket might solve it. To keep from touching it again, he got up and went to the pantry. “What would you like to eat? Eggs? I’ll scramble them, if you do.”
She smiled wanly. “Thankee, son, but I’m not hungry. I think I’ll lie down.” She rose a bit shakily.
Tim helped her into the bedroom. There he pretended to look at interesting things out the window while she took off her mud-stained day dress and put on her nightgown. When Tim turned around again, she was under the covers. She patted the place beside her, as she had sometimes done when he was sma’. In those days his da’ might have been in bed beside her, wearing his long woodsman’s underwear and smoking one of his roll-ups.
“I can’t turn him out,” she said. “I would if I could, but now that the rope’s slipped, the place is more his than mine. The law can be cruel to a woman. I never had cause to think about that before, but now . . . now . . .” Her eyes had gone glassy and distant. She would sleep soon, and that was probably a good thing.
He kissed her unbruised cheek and made to get up, but she stayed him. “What did the Covenant Man say to thee?”
“Asked me how I liked my new step-da’. I can’t remember how I answered him. I was scared.”
“When he covered thee with his cloak, I was, too. I thought he meant to ride away with thee, like the Red King in the old story.” She closed her eyes, then opened them again, very slowly. There was something in them now that could have been horror. “I remember him coming to my da’s when I was but a wee girl not long out of clouts—the black horse, the black gloves and cape, the saddle with the silver siguls on it. His white face gave me nightmares—it’s so long. And do you know what, Tim?”
He shook his head slowly from side to side.
“He even carries the same silver basin roped on behind, for I saw it then, too. That’s twenty years a-gone—aye, twenty and a doubleton-deucy more—but he looks the same. He hasn’t aged a day.”
Her eyes closed again. This time they didn’t reopen, and Tim stole from the room.
When he was sure his mother was asleep, Tim went down the little bit of back hall to where Big Kells’s trunk, a squarish shape under an old remnant of blanket, stood just outside the mudroom. When he’d told the Covenant Man he knew of only two locks in Tree, the Covenant Man had replied, Oh, I think thee knows of another.
He stripped off the blanket and looked at his step-da’s trunk. The trunk he sometimes caressed like a well-loved pet and often sat upon at night, puffing at his pipe with the back door cracked open to let out the smoke.
Tim hurried back to the front of the house—in his stocking feet, so as not to risk waking his mother—and peered out the front window. The yard was empty, and there was no sign of Big Kells on the rainy road. Tim had expected nothing else. Kells would be at Gitty’s by now, getting through as much of what he had left as he could before falling down unconscious.
I hope somebody beats him up and gives him a taste of his own medicine. I’d do it myself, were I big enough.
He went back to the trunk, padding noiselessly in his stockings, knelt in front of it, and took the key from his pocket. It was a tiny silver thing the size of half a knuck, and strangely warm in his fingers, as if it were alive. The keyhole in the brass facing on the front of the trunk was much bigger. The key he gave me will never work in that, Tim thought. Then he remembered the Covenant Man saying ’Tis a magic key. It will open anything, but only a single time.
Tim put the key in the lock, where it clicked smoothly home, as if it had been meant for just that place all along. When he applied pressure, it turned smoothly, but the warmth left it as soon as it did. Now there was nothing between his fingers but cold dead metal.
“After that, ’tis as useless as dirt,” Tim whispered, then looked around, half convinced he’d see Big Kells standing there with a scowl on his face and his hands rolled into fists. There was no one, so he unbuckled the straps and raised the lid. He cringed at the screak of the hinges and looked over his shoulder again. His heart was beating hard, and although that rainy evening was chilly, he could feel a dew of sweat on his forehead.
There were shirts and pants on top, stuffed in any whichway, most of them ragged. Tim thought (with a bitter resentment that was entirely new to him), It’s my Mama who’ll wash them and mend them and fold them neat when he tells her to. And will he thank her with a blow to the arm or a punch to her neck or face?
He pulled the clothes out, and beneath them found what made the trunk heavy. Kells’s father had been a carpenter, and here were his tools. Tim didn’t need a grownup to tell him they were valuable, for they were of made metal. He could have sold these to pay the tax, he never uses them
nor even knows how, I warrant. He could have sold them to someone who does—Haggerty the Nail, for instance—and paid the tax with a good sum left over.
There was a word for that sort of behavior, and thanks to the Widow Smack’s teaching, Tim knew it. The word was miser.
He tried to lift the toolbox out, and at first couldn’t. It was too heavy for him. Tim laid the hammers and screwdrivers and honing bar aside on the clothes. Then he could manage. Beneath were five ax-heads that would have made Big Ross slap his forehead in disgusted amazement. The precious steel was speckled with rust, and Tim didn’t have to test with his thumb to see that the blades were dull. Nell’s new husband occasionally honed his current ax, but hadn’t bothered with these spare heads for a long time. By the time he needed them, they would probably be useless.
Tucked into one corner of the trunk were a small deerskin bag and an object wrapped in fine chamois cloth. Tim took this latter up, unwrapped it, and beheld the likeness of a woman with a sweetly smiling face. Masses of dark hair tumbled over her shoulders. Tim didn’t remember Millicent Kells—he would have been no more than three or four when she passed into the clearing where we must all eventually gather—but he knew it was she.
He rewrapped it, replaced it, and picked up the little bag. From the feel there was only a single object inside, small but quite heavy. Tim pulled the drawstring with his fingers and tipped the bag. More thunder boomed, Tim jerked with surprise, and the object which had been hidden at the very bottom of Kells’s trunk fell out into Tim’s hand.
It was his father’s lucky coin.
Tim put everything but his father’s property back into the trunk, loading the toolbox in, returning the tools he’d removed to lighten it, and then piling in the clothes. He refastened the straps. All well enough, but when he tried the silver key, it turned without engaging the tumblers.
Useless as dirt.
Tim gave up and covered the trunk with the old piece of blanket again, fussing with it until it looked more or less as it had. It might serve. He’d often seen his new steppa pat the trunk and sit on the trunk, but only infrequently did he open the trunk, and then just to get his honing bar. Tim’s burglary might go undiscovered for a little while, but he knew better than to believe it would go undiscovered forever. There would come a day—maybe not until next month, but more likely next week (or even tomorrow!), when Big Kells would decide to get his bar, or remember that he had more clothes than the ones he’d brought in his kick-bag. He would discover the trunk was unlocked, he’d dive for the deerskin bag, and find the coin it had contained was gone. And then? Then his new wife and new stepson would take a beating. Probably a fearsome one.
