The Road to The Dark Tower (20 page)

Roland suggests that Pat Delgado’s death may not have been an accident, which Susan is reluctant to accept. He helps her confront her shame by telling the story of his mother’s treachery. Susan asks if he will wait for her to complete her bargain with Thorin by bearing his child. Roland replies that he’d do anything for her except wait while she goes with another man.

Roland refuses to report the suspicious activity they’ve uncovered to his father via the carrier pigeons they use to communicate. First he wants to understand the complete plot. Alain and Cuthbert suspect that he’s reluctant to send news because it might bring an end to his developing romance with Susan. They have to respect his authority, though, because he alone is a gunslinger and the son of their leader.

Mejis has a thinny in Eyebolt Canyon, like the one that triggered Roland’s memory of this time. It appeared before Susan was born but during her father’s lifetime. She tells him that an earthquake heralded its appearance but it may have been a Beamquake instead, corresponding to one of the Breakers’ successes. The three boys explore the thinny,
evaluating its possible use. As they near the edge of the canyon, familiar voices tell Roland to jump in. Each of them hears a different person, an effect similar to the Cave of Voices outside Calla Bryn Sturgis.

Roland, Cuthbert and Alain dawdle for months, counting only what’s safe, avoiding the delicate subject of horses. They’re playing a game of Castles, where players who emerge from cover become vulnerable.

When Roland asks to meet Susan again, she refuses at first, thinking her late father would have counseled her to honor her commitment to Thorin. She reconsiders, deciding to give in to her attraction for Roland.

He tells Susan their suspicions and his real name. They explore the nineteen abandoned oil wells outside Hambry, which Susan believes have been dry for years. Here Roland uncovers the real reason behind the local conspiracy: dozens of camouflaged oil tanks ready to be sent west to Farson, who plans to process the oil into fuel to power war machines that either came from the Old People or from another dimension. If Farson can get them working without the Affiliation finding out, he could wage surprise attacks that would win him the war.

Susan asks, “Is it me you’re concerned about or yourself and yer plans?” He doesn’t answer. “This’ll have no good end,” she predicts. She asks Roland to make her break her promise to Thorin, but Roland resists, partly because they sense that someone is watching them, not realizing that it is Rhea with the Wizard’s Glass.

As the Reaping Day festival draws close—the day when her promise to Thorin is to be fulfilled—Susan argues with her aunt and rides to her secret thinking spot, where she finds Roland. He tells her to ask him again, for this time he will say yes.

King has already revealed that Susan will never see Gilead and that her destiny is a stake. She senses this deep down, but is unwilling to change what ka wants for her. After they make love, she suggests that she might already be pregnant. Her child would be the next generation of the Eld line. Roland replies, “If you carry my child, such is my good fortune.”

Rhea’s posthypnotic suggestion takes effect while Roland sleeps. Susan goes to the river and tries to shear off her long blond hair with a sharp rock. Rhea loses contact with them through the ball, so she doesn’t see Roland break the enchantment before much damage is done. She is furious when she discovers that someone has foiled her, and decides Susan
deserves to die for standing against her, but only after she’s been humiliated.

With Susan’s permission, Roland hypnotizes her but is unable to see everything that happened that night at Rhea’s house. Part of it is hidden in a cloud of pink.

The lovers have numerous clandestine meetings in the ensuing weeks. Cuthbert is jealous of Roland for winning the most beautiful girl any of them has ever seen, but he also hates her for stealing his best friend and distracting him from their mission. Roland is the weapon they count on, but now he’s like a revolver dropped into water. “God knows if it’ll ever fire again, even if it’s fished out and dried off,” Cuthbert says, a simile an older Roland would appreciate after the Western Sea wets his ammunition. Roland refuses to even argue with them.

Cordelia Delgado tells Eldred Jonas her suspicion that something is going on between her niece and Will Dearborn. Jonas is surprised by the revelation. If Roland has been able to keep that big a secret, what others might he have?

He uncovers evidence that the boys have been to the oil fields. After searching the ranch where they are staying and finding their guns, he kills their messenger pigeons and covers his tracks by pretending it is an act of vandalism. He then meets with Walter, the man in black. A hundred of Farson’s men are coming to town to escort the oil tankers west. They concoct a plan to frame the Affiliation brats as traitors to get them out of the way.

When he realizes that Roland sensed what was going to happen at the ranch, Cuthbert is ready to hit Roland. Alain holds him back, saying that they have to trust Roland or fail. Roland is a gunslinger; they’re not. Alain can’t intervene a second time, though, when Cuthbert encounters Sheemie on his way from Rhea’s house. Sheemie has a note he’s supposed to deliver to Cordelia, announcing Rhea’s knowledge of Susan’s relationship with Will Dearborn.

Cuthbert carries the message back to Roland, calls him outside and strikes him in the face, then thrusts out the note before Roland can react. “I’ve been a fool,” Roland says, and cries. His mistake, he says, is not falling in love but “thinking that love could somehow be apart from everything else.” He thought he could live two lives, one with his ka-tet
and one with Susan. He thought love could lift him above ka. Love made him blind.

Roland and Cuthbert make peace and then ride out as gunslingers to deal with Rhea, who Roland calls “daughter of none.”
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Roland doesn’t want to kill her unless he must, a decision he would come to regret. He was still a boy and the decision to kill “does not come easily or naturally to most boys.” They warn her off, but she doesn’t emerge from her house.

She wails in sorrow when Roland shoots her pet poison snake, a parallel to Arthur Eld’s victory over the great snake Saita. In that legend, Arthur Eld wore the dead snake around his neck as a trophy. In Mejis, it is Rhea who wears her dead pet around her neck until it turns into a stinking carcass.

Roland knows their time is running out. They have to destroy the oil before it leaves Mejis. He, Cuthbert and Alain meet with Susan to sketch out a general plan. They trust ka to sweep them out of the situation it has swept them into. The thinny is an integral part of their plan—they think they can drive Farson’s men into the canyon and destroy them.

Working near the thinny, with its haunting voices, puts their tempers on edge, though. Alain tells Cuthbert, “You’ll die young,” which is meant in jest but perhaps comes from Alain’s touch, for it proves true. A few years later at Jericho Hill, the ka-tet will make its last stand against Farson’s men. Alain dies under Roland’s and Cuthbert’s guns, an accidental nighttime shooting. A sniper kills Jamie DeCurrie. They are a dozen against thousands, but Roland and Cuthbert go out in a blaze of glory, fighting to the end. The arrow in the eye that fells Cuthbert comes from the bow of Randolph Filardo, aka Randall Flagg.

Roland hypnotizes Susan again when Alain questions how Rhea knew what was going on. He has grown to suspect that the witch possesses one of the Wizard’s glasses. His father thought Farson owned one because of the way he seemed to know things he shouldn’t have known. With Alain’s help, he gets Susan to reveal where the “grapefruit” is hidden.

Bolstered by her knowledge of what is going on in Mejis, Susan searches her father’s office and finds evidence to support Roland’s suggestion that he had been killed. After another fight with Cordelia, she moves out of the house. She meets Roland in a hut, where he shows her his guns. If things go badly for him, she’s to take them to Gilead and show them to his father.

After they make love for the last time, Susan expresses a sense of dread about their future, a feeling akin to ka-shume, the sense of an impending break in a ka-tet. Roland realizes later that some part of her knew what lay ahead. Like Eldred Jonas, Roland has a sudden urge to pack up and leave, but he knows that the faces of his friends and those who would die against Farson would haunt him if he doesn’t complete this mission.

The next day, the Big Coffin Hunters make the first move by murdering Mayor Thorin and his chancellor and framing Roland and his friends. During their arrest, Roland exposes Jonas as a failed gunslinger. Jonas limps because Cort’s father broke his leg with his ironwood club, then disarmed the boy and sent him into exile. Roland tells him, “The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west.”

Jonas goes to retrieve the Wizard’s Glass, only to discover that Rhea’s become little more than a walking skeleton. She believes she’s the ball’s chosen one, its mistress, and tells Jonas it will do Farson no good without her. Jonas knows about the ball’s seductive power, but rather than kill her to get it back, he agrees to take her along.

Susan decides to free Roland and his friends from jail, defying his orders to flee west and save herself. Sheemie is waiting for her in town to help her. His foreknowledge of what she would do is an indication that there’s more to the boy than meets the eye, that he has powers that will lead him to become a Breaker a thousand years down history’s long trail.

During the rescue, Susan is forced to kill both the sheriff and his deputy. For a brief time, she is a part of the ka-tet of gunslingers. Roland hides her in one of their secret meeting places with Sheemie to watch over her, and makes her promise again to go to Gilead with warnings of Farson’s plans if he doesn’t return. It’s the last time he sees her in person.

Before tackling Farson’s men, Roland, Cuthbert and Alain set the oil fields ablaze, destroying Farson’s fuel source. They know that Jonas has the Wizard’s Glass and are worried it will reveal their plans. Instead, it shows Rhea where Susan and Sheemie are hiding.

Jonas captures Susan and sends her to Coral Thorin with Reynolds. Then he takes the Wizard’s Glass and evicts Rhea from the camp. “May it damn you the way it’s damned me,” she tells him. She finds her way to Cordelia Delgado’s house, where the two bitter women plot their final revenge on Susan, whom they both blame for their downfall. Rhea replenishes her energy with Cordelia’s blood.
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Sheemie follows Susan’s trail and seeks Olive Thorin’s help in freeing Susan. Olive and Susan escape north but Clay Reynolds, told where to wait by Rhea, recaptures them.

Roland and his friends prepare to ambush Jonas and Farson’s cowboys. “Today it was Cuthbert and Alain’s turn to be tested—not in Gilead, in the traditional place of proving behind the Great Hall, but here in Mejis, on the edge of the Bad Grass, in the desert and in the canyon.” They lie in hiding, wait for the posse to pass, then attack from behind, killing a quarter of the contingent before the group realizes it’s under assault. What they lack in training they make up for with the keen eyes and reflexes of the young. Within minutes, those not dead flee in panic. Roland takes the Wizard’s Glass from Jonas before killing him.

The ball sweeps Roland away in a vision of the future, showing him disjointed images of his undeclared quest, all the way to the edge of End-World and beyond, where he sees Oy impaled on a tree branch. He sees his destiny: the Dark Tower. “[He] senses both the strength of the place and the wrongness of it; he can feel how it is spooling error across everything, softening the divisions between the worlds, how its potential for mischief is growing stronger even as disease weakens its truth and coherence, like a body afflicted with cancer; this jutting arm of dark gray stone is the world’s great mystery and last awful riddle.”

The vision is his call to adventure, a call that he never questions or refuses. Now Roland understands why his father felt that the pending civil war was comparatively unimportant. He swears to reach the Tower and conquer the wrongness within. A voice tells him he will kill everyone he loves and “still the Tower will be pent shut against you.” Roland defies the voice, drawing on the strength of every generation before him. Then he passes out.

When he comes to, he doesn’t remember much of his vision, but he knows his destiny is forever altered. He and his friends may be going back to Gilead, but not for long. If they survive the day, they will search for the Dark Tower. They will still fight Farson’s men, but only because they’re in their way and gunslinger ethics demands they forbid these thieves their prize.

Cuthbert argues that the Tower is a myth, no more real than the Holy Grail. Roland replies, “Its existence is the great secret our fathers keep;
it’s what has held them together as ka-tet across all the years of our world’s decline.”

Roland’s choice between the Tower and a full life with Susan is both difficult and easy. He knows she’s pregnant with his child and he would choose her in an instant, except the Tower is crumbling. “If it falls, everything we know will be swept away. There will be chaos beyond our imagining. . . . I choose the Tower. I must. Let her live a good life and long with someone else. . . . As for me, I choose the Tower.”

Their attack on Farson’s men goes exactly as planned. Alain blows up several of the tankers with a machine gun taken from the Big Coffin Hunters’ posse, and the rest explode on their own. The defenders get off only a single shot in return before the three boys lure them into Eyebolt Canyon, where Roland sets a fire that drives the men closer to the thinny. Those who don’t ride into it by accident are drawn by the voices emerging from it.