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"What's this to do with blue ankle tattoos?"
"Oh," Strother said, recalled to the initial subject. "Anyone who ever did time in Beelie had one of those put on, y'see. Although I disremember if it was for punishment or just identification in case they ran off from one o' the work gangs. All that stopped ten year ago, when the stockade closed. That's why the harriers was able to have their way with the town, you know--because the militia left and the stockade closed. Now we have to deal with all the bad element and riffraff ourselves." He eyed me up and down in the most insolent way. "We don't get much help from Gilead these days. Nawp. Apt to get more from John Farson, and there's some that'd send a parlay-party west to ask him." Perhaps he saw something in my eyes, because he sat up a little straighter in his chair and said, "Not me, accourse. Never. I believe in the straight law and the Line of Eld."
"So do we all," Pickens said, nodding vigorously.
"Would you want to guess if some of the salt-miners did time in Beelie Stockade before it was decommissioned?" I asked.
Strother appeared to consider, then said: "Oh, probably a few. Nummore'n four in every ten, I should say."
In later years I learned to control my face, but those were early times, and he must have seen my dismay. It made him smile. I doubt if he knew how close that smile brought him to suffering. I'd had a difficult two days, and the boy weighed heavily on my mind.
"Who did'ee think would take a job digging salt blocks out of a miserable hole in the ground for penny wages?" Strother asked. "Model citizens?"
It seemed that Young Bill would have to look at a few of the salties, after all. We'd just have to hope the fellow we wanted didn't know the ring tattoo was the only part of him the kid had seen.
*
When I went back to the cell, Young Bill was lying on the pallets, and I thought he'd gone to sleep, but at the sound of my bootheels he sat up. His eyes were red, his cheeks wet. Not sleeping, then, but mourning. I let myself in, sat down beside him, and put an arm around his shoulders. This didn't come naturally to me--I know what comfort and sympathy are, but I've never been much good at giving such. I knew what it was to lose a parent, though. Young Bill and Young Roland had that much in common.
"Did you finish your candy?" I asked.
"Don't want the rest," he said, and sighed.
Outside the wind boomed hard enough to shake the building, then subsided.
"I hate that sound," he said--just what Jamie DeCurry had said. It made me smile a little. "And I hate being in here. It's like I did something wrong."
"You didn't," I said.
"Maybe not, but it already seems like I've been here forever. Cooped up. And if they don't get back before nightfall, I'll have to stay longer. Won't I?"
"I'll keep you company," I said. "If those deputies have a deck of cards, we can play Jacks Pop Up."
"For babies," said he, morosely.
"Then Watch Me or poker. Can thee play those?"
He shook his head, then brushed at his cheeks. The tears were flowing again.
"I'll teach thee. We'll play for matchsticks."
"I'd rather hear the story you talked about when we stopped in the sheppie's lay-by. I don't remember the name."
"'The Wind Through the Keyhole,'" I said. "But it's a long one, Bill."
"We have time, don't we?"
I couldn't argue that. "There are scary bits in it, too. Those things are all right for a boy such as I was--sitting up in his bed with his mother beside him--but after what you've been through . . ."
"Don't care," he said. "Stories take a person away. If they're good ones, that is. It is a good one?"
"Yes. I always thought so, anyway."
"Then tell it." He smiled a little. "I'll even let you have two of the last three chockers."
"Those are yours, but I might roll a smoke." I thought about how to begin. "Do you know stories that start, 'Once upon a bye, before your grandfather's grandfather was born'?"
"They all start that way. At least, the ones my da' told me. Before he said I was too old for stories."
"A person's never too old for stories, Bill. Man and boy, girl and woman, never too old. We live for them."
"Do you say so?"
"I do."
I took out my tobacco and papers. I rolled slowly, for in those days it was a skill yet new to me. When I had a smoke just to my liking--one with the draw end tapered to a pinhole--I struck a match on the wall. Bill sat cross-legged on the straw pallets. He took one of the chockers, rolled it between his fingers much as I'd rolled my smoke, then tucked it into his cheek.
I started slowly and awkwardly, because storytelling was another thing that didn't come naturally to me in those days . . . although it was a thing I learned to do well in time. I had to. All gunslingers have to. And as I went along, I began to speak more naturally and easily. Because I began hearing my mother's voice. It began to speak through my own mouth: every rise, dip, and pause.
I could see him fall into the tale, and that pleased me--it was like hypnotizing him again, but in a better way. A more honest way. The best part, though, was hearing my mother's voice. It was like having her again, coming out from far inside me. It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, I've found. You wouldn't think it could be so, but--as the oldtimers used to say--the world's tilted, and there's an end to it.
"Once upon a bye, before your grandfather's grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim with his mother, Nell, and his father, Big Ross. For a time, the three of them lived happily enough, although they owned little. . . ."
THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE
Once upon a bye, long before your grandfather's grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim with his mother, Nell, and his father, Big Ross. For a time the three of them lived happily enough, although they owned little.
"I have only four things to pass on to you," Big Ross told his son, "but four's enough. Can you say them to me, young boy?"
Tim had said them to him many and many-a, but never tired of it. "Thy ax, thy lucky coin, thy plot, and thy place, which is as good as the place of any king or gunslinger in Mid-World." He would then pause and add, "My mama, too. That makes five."
Big Ross would laugh and kiss the boy's brow as he lay in his bed, for this catechism usually came at the end of the day. Behind them, in the doorway, Nell waited to put her kiss on top of her husband's. "Aye," Big Ross would say, "we must never forget Mama, for wi'out her, all's for naught."
So Tim would go off to sleep, knowing he was loved, and knowing he had a place in the world, and listening to the night wind slip its strange breath over the cottage: sweet with the scent of the blossiewood at the edge of the Endless Forest, and faintly sour--but still pleasant--with the smell of the ironwood trees deeper in, where only brave men dared go.
Those were good years, but as we know--from stories and from life--the good years never last long.
One day, when Tim was eleven, Big Ross and his partner, Big Kells, drove their wagons down Main Road to where the Ironwood Trail entered the forest, as they did every morning save the seventh, when all in the village of Tree rested. On this day, however, only Big Kells came back. His skin was sooty and his jerkin charred. There was a hole in the left leg of his homespun pants. Red and blistered flesh peeped through it. He slumped on the seat of his wagon, as if too weary to sit up straight.
Nell Ross came to the door of her house and cried, "Where is Big Ross? Where is my husband?"
Big Kells shook his head slowly from side to side. Ash sifted out of his hair and onto his shoulders. He spoke only a single word, but one was enough to turn Tim's knees to water. His mother began to shriek.
The word was dragon.
No one living today has ever seen the like of the Endless Forest, for the world has moved on. It was dark and full of dangers. The woodsmen of Tree Village knew
it better than anyone in Mid-World, and even they knew nothing of what might live or grow ten wheels beyond the place where the blossie groves ended and the ironwood trees--those tall, brooding sentinels--began. The great depths were a mystery filled with strange plants, stranger animals, stinking weirdmarshes, and--so 'twas said--leavings of the Old People that were often deadly.
The folken of Tree feared the Endless Forest, and rightly so; Big Ross wasn't the first woodsman who went down Ironwood Trail and did not come back. Yet they loved it, too, for 'twas ironwood fed and clothed their families. They understood (though none would have said so aloud) that the forest was alive. And, like all living things, it needed to eat.
