Wolves of the Calla (33 page)

“So it is,” Eddie said. “Cry your pardon.”

“No need.” Telford smiled. It was a handsome Pa Cartwright smile, and in it Eddie saw one thing clear: this man would never come over to their side. Not, that was, until and unless every Wolf out of Thunderclap lay dead for the town’s inspection in this very Pavilion. And if that happened, he would claim to have been with them from the very first.

The dancing went on until moonrise, and that night the moon showed clear. Eddie took his turn with several ladies of the town. Twice he waltzed with Susannah in his arms, and when they danced the squares, she turned and crossed—allemande left, allemande right—in her wheelchair with pretty precision. By the ever-changing light of the torches, her face was damp and delighted. Roland also danced, gracefully but (Eddie thought) with no real enjoyment or flair for it. Certainly there was nothing in it to prepare them for what ended the evening. Jake and Benny Slightman had wandered off on their own, but once Eddie saw them kneeling beneath a tree and playing a game that looked suspiciously like mumblety-peg.

When the dancing was done, there was singing. This began with the band itself—a mournful love-ballad and then an up-tempo number so deep in the Calla’s patois that Eddie couldn’t follow the lyric. He didn’t have to in order to know it was at least mildly ribald; there were shouts and laughter from the men and screams of glee from the ladies. Some of the older ones covered their ears.

After these first two tunes, several people from the Calla mounted the bandstand to sing. Eddie didn’t think any of them would have gotten very far on
Star Search,
but each was greeted warmly as they stepped to the front of the band and were cheered lustily (and in the case of one pretty young matron, lust
fully
) as they stepped down. Two girls of about nine, obviously identical twins, sang a ballad called “Streets of Campara” in perfect,
aching harmony, accompanied by just a single guitar which one of them played. Eddie was struck by the rapt silence in which the
folken
listened. Although most of the men were now deep in drink, not a single one of these broke the attentive quiet. No baby-bangers went off. A good many (the one named Haycox among them) listened with tears streaming down their faces. If asked earlier, Eddie would have said of course he understood the emotional weight beneath which this town was laboring. He hadn’t. He knew that now.

When the song about the kidnapped woman and the dying cowboy ended, there was a moment of utter silence—not even the nightbirds cried. It was followed by wild applause. Eddie thought,
If they showed hands on what to do about the Wolves right now, not even Pa Cartwright would dare vote to stand aside.

The girls curtsied and leaped nimbly down to the grass. Eddie thought that would be it for the night, but then, to his surprise, Callahan climbed on stage.

He said, “Here’s an even sadder song my mother taught me” and then launched into a cheerful Irish ditty called “Buy Me Another Round You Booger You.” It was at least as dirty as the one the band had played earlier, but this time Eddie could understand most of the words. He and the rest of the town gleefully joined in on the last line of every verse:
Before y’ez put me in the ground, buy me another round, you booger you!

Susannah rolled her wheelchair over to the
gazebo and was helped up during the round of applause that followed the Old Fella’s song. She spoke briefly to the three guitarists and showed them something on the neck of one of the instruments. They all nodded. Eddie guessed they either knew the song or a version of it.

The crowd waited expectantly, none more so than the lady’s husband. He was delighted but not entirely surprised when she voyaged upon “Maid of Constant Sorrow,” which she had sometimes sung on the trail. Susannah was no Joan Baez, but her voice was true, full of emotion. And why not? It was the song of a woman who has left her home for a strange place. When she finished, there was no silence, as after the little girls’ duet, but a round of honest, enthusiastic applause. There were cries of
Yar!
and
Again!
and
More staves!
Susannah offered no more staves (for she’d sung all the ones she knew) but gave them a deep curtsy, instead. Eddie clapped until his hands hurt, then stuck his fingers in the corners of his mouth and whistled.

And then—the wonders of this evening would never end, it seemed—Roland himself was climbing up as Susannah was handed carefully down.

Jake and his new pal were at Eddie’s side. Benny Slightman was carrying Oy. Until tonight Eddie would have said the bumbler would have bitten anyone not of Jake’s ka-tet who tried that.

“Can he sing?” Jake asked.

“News to me if he can, kiddo,” Eddie said. “Let’s see.” He had no idea what to expect, and was a little amused at how hard his heart was thumping.

Roland removed his holstered gun and cartridge belt. He handed them down to Susannah, who took them and strapped on the belt high at the waist. The cloth of her shirt pulled tight when she did it, and for a moment Eddie thought her breasts looked bigger. Then he dismissed it as a trick of the light.

The torches were orange. Roland stood in their light, gunless and as slim-hipped as a boy. For a moment he only looked out over the silent, watching faces, and Eddie felt Jake’s hand, cold and small, creep into his own. There was no need for the boy to say what he was thinking, because Eddie was thinking it himself. Never had he seen a man who looked so lonely, so far from the run of human life with its fellowship and warmth. To see him here, in this place of fiesta (for it was a fiesta, no matter how desperate the business that lay behind it might be), only underlined the truth of him: he was the last. There was no other. If Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy were of his line, they were only a distant shoot, far from the trunk. Afterthoughts, almost. Roland, however . . . Roland . . .

Hush,
Eddie thought.
You don’t want to think about such things. Not tonight.

Slowly, Roland crossed his arms over his chest, narrow and tight, so he could lay the palm of his right hand on his left cheek and the palm of his left hand on his right cheek. This meant zilch to Eddie, but the reaction from the seven hundred or so Calla-folk was immediate: a jubilant, approving roar
that went far beyond mere applause. Eddie remembered a Rolling Stones concert he’d been to. The crowd had made that same sound when the Stones’ drummer, Charlie Watts, began to tap his cowbell in a syncopated rhythm that could only mean “Honky Tonk Woman.”

Roland stood as he was, arms crossed, palms on cheeks, until they quieted. “We are well-met in the Calla,” he said. “Hear me, I beg.”

“We say thankee!”
they roared. And
“Hear you very well!”

Roland nodded and smiled. “But I and my friends have been far and we have much yet to do and see. Now while we bide, will you open to us if we open to you?”

Eddie felt a chill. He felt Jake’s hand tighten on his own.
It’s the first of the questions,
he thought.

Before the thought was completed, they had roared their answer:
“Aye, and thankee!”

“Do you see us for what we are, and accept what we do?”

There goes the second one,
Eddie thought, and now it was him squeezing Jake’s hand. He saw Telford and the one named Diego Adams exchange a dismayed, knowing look. The look of men suddenly realizing that the deal is going down right in front of them and they are helpless to do anything about it.
Too late, boys,
Eddie thought.

“Gunslingers!” someone shouted. “Gunslingers fair and true, say thankee! Say thankee in God’s name!”

Roars of approval. A thunder of shouts and applause. Cries of
thankee
and
aye
and even
yer-bugger
.

As they quieted, Eddie waited for him to ask the
last question, the most important one: Do you seek aid and succor?

Roland didn’t ask it. He said merely, “We’d go our way for tonight, and put down our heads, for we’re tired. But I’d give’ee one final song and a little step-toe before we leave, so I would, for I believe you know both.”

A jubilant roar of agreement met this. They knew it, all right.

“I know it myself, and love it,” said Roland of Gilead. “I know it of old, and never expected to hear ‘The Rice Song’ again from any lips, least of all from my own. I am older now, so I am, and not so limber as I once was. Cry your pardon for the steps I get wrong—”

“Gunslinger, we say thankee!” a woman called. “Such joy we feel, aye!”

“And do I not feel the same?” the gunslinger asked gently. “Do I not give you joy from my joy, and water I carried with the strength of my arm and my heart?”

“Give you to eat of the green-crop,”
they chanted as one, and Eddie felt his back prickle and his eyes tear up.

“Oh my God,” Jake sighed. “He knows so
much
. . . ”

“Give you joy of the rice,” Roland said.

He stood for a moment longer in the orange glow, as if gathering his strength, and then he began to dance something that was caught between a jig and a tap routine. It was slow at first, very slow, heel and toe, heel and toe. Again and again his bootheels made that fist-on-coffintop sound, but now it had rhythm.
Just
rhythm at first, and then, as the gunslinger’s feet began to pick up speed, it was
more than rhythm: it became a kind of jive. That was the only word Eddie could think of, the only one that seemed to fit.

Susannah rolled up to them. Her eyes were huge, her smile amazed. She clasped her hands tightly between her breasts. “Oh, Eddie!” she breathed. “Did you know he could do this? Did you have any slightest idea?”

“No,” Eddie said. “No idea.”

Faster moved the gunslinger’s feet in their battered and broken old boots. Then faster still. The rhythm becoming clearer and clearer, and Jake suddenly realized he
knew
that beat. Knew it from the first time he’d gone todash in New York. Before meeting Eddie, a young black man with Walkman earphones on his head had strolled past him, bopping his sandaled feet and going “Cha-da-ba, cha-da-
bow
!” under his breath. And that was the rhythm Roland was beating out on the bandstand, each
Bow!
accomplished by a forward kick of the leg and a hard skip of the heel on wood.

Around them, people began to clap. Not on the beat, but on the off-beat. They were starting to sway. Those women wearing skirts held them out and swirled them. The expression Jake saw on all the faces, oldest to youngest, was the same: pure joy.
Not just that,
he thought, and remembered a phrase his English teacher had used about how some books make us feel:
the ecstasy of perfect recognition
.

Sweat began to gleam on Roland’s face. He lowered his crossed arms and started clapping. When he did, the Calla-
folken
began to chant one word
over and over on the beat:
“Come!
. . .
Come!
. . .
Come!
. . .
Come!”
It occurred to Jake that this was the word some kids used for jizz, and he suddenly doubted if that was mere coincidence.

Of course it’s not. Like the black guy bopping to that same beat. It’s all the Beam, and it’s all nineteen
.

“Come!
. . .
Come!
. . .
Come!”

Eddie and Susannah had joined in. Benny had joined in. Jake abandoned thought and did the same.

In the end, Eddie had no real idea what the words to “The Rice Song” might have been. Not because of the dialect, not in Roland’s case, but because they spilled out too fast to follow. Once, on TV, he’d heard a tobacco auctioneer in South Carolina. This was like that. There were hard rhymes, soft rhymes, off-rhymes, even rape-rhymes—words that didn’t rhyme at all but were forced to for a moment within the borders of the song. It
wasn’t
a song, not really; it was like a chant, or some delirious streetcorner hip-hop. That was the closest Eddie could come. And all the while, Roland’s feet pounded out their entrancing rhythm on the boards; all the while the crowd clapped and chanted
Come, come, come, come
.

What Eddie
could
pick out went like this:

Come-come-commala

Rice come a-falla

I-sissa ’ay a-bralla

Dey come a-folla

Down come a-rivva

Or-i-za we kivva

Rice be a green-o

See all we seen-o

Seen-o the green-o

Come-come-commala!

Come-come-commala

Rice come a-falla

Deep inna walla

Grass come-commala

Under the sky-o

Grass green n high-o

Girl n her fella

Lie down togetha

They slippy ’ay slide-o

Under ’ay sky-o

Come-come-commala

Rice come a-falla!

At least three more verses followed these two. By then Eddie had lost track of the words, but he was pretty sure he got the idea: a young man and woman, planting both rice and children in the spring of the year. The song’s tempo, suicidally speedy to begin with, sped up and up until the words were nothing but a jargon-spew and the crowd was clapping so rapidly their hands were a blur. And the heels of Roland’s boots had disappeared entirely. Eddie would have said it was impossible for anyone to dance at that speed, especially after having consumed a heavy meal.

Slow down, Roland,
he thought.
It’s not like we can call 911 if you vapor-lock.

Then, on some signal neither Eddie, Susannah,
nor Jake understood, Roland and the Calla-
folken
stopped in mid-career, threw their hands to the sky, and thrust their hips forward, as if in coitus.
“COMMALA!”
they shouted, and that was the end.