hear the palaver from where he was, just over the first rise. The bluebacks' questions were clear and calm, Smith's answers litde more than mumbles.
Roland saw no reason to stop working. If the blues came back here and found him, he would deal with them. Just incapacitate them, unless they made that impossible; gods knew there had been enough killing. But he would bury his dead, one way or another.
He would bury his dead.
The lovely green-gold light of the clearing deepened. Mosquitoes found him but he did not stop what he was doing in order to slap them, merely let them drink their fill and then lumber off, heavy with dieir freight of blood. He heard engines starting as he finished hand-digging the grave, die smooth roar of two cars and the more uneven sound of Smith's vanmobile.
He had heard the voices of only two peace officers, which meant that, unless there had been a third blueback with nothing to say, they were allowing Smith to drive away by himself.
Roland thought this rather odd, but-like the question of whether or not King was paralyzed-it was none of his matter or mind. All diat mattered was diis; all diat mattered was seeing to his own.
He made three trips to collect stones, because a grave dug by hand must necessarily be a shallow one and animals, even in such a tame world as this, are always hungry. He stacked the stones at the head of the hole, a scar lined with earth so rich it could have been black satin. Oy lay by Jake's head, watching die gunslinger come and go, saying nothing. He'd always been different from his kind as they were since the world had moved on; Roland had even speculated that it was Oy's extraordinary chattiness that had caused the others in his tet to expel him, and not gently, either. When they'd come upon this fellow, not too far from the town of River Crossing, he'd been scrawny to the point of starvation, and with a half-healed bite-mark on one flank. The bumbler had loved Jake from the first: "That's as clear as Earth needs," Cort might have said (or Roland's own father, for that matter). And it was to Jake the bumbler had talked the most. Roland had an idea that Oy might fall mostly silent now that the boy was dead, and this thought was another way of defining what was lost.
He remembered the boy standing before the people of Calla Bryn Sturgis in the torchlight, his face young and fair, as if he would live forever. / am Jake Chambers, son of Elmer, the Line of Eld, the ka-tet of the Ninety and Nine, he had said, and oh, aye, for here he was in the Ninety and Nine, with his grave all dug, clean and ready for him.
Roland began to weep again. He put his hands over his face and rocked back and forth on his knees, smelling the sweet aromatic needles and wishing he had cried off before ka, that old and patient demon, had taught him the real price of his quest.
He would have given anything to change what had happened, anything to close this hole with nothing in it, but this was the world where time ran just one way.
TEN
When he had gained control of himself again, he wrapped Jake carefully in the blue tarpaulin, fashioning a kind of hood around the still, pale face. He would close that face away for good before refilling the grave, but not until.
"Oy?" he asked. "Will you say goodbye?"
Oy looked at Roland, and for a moment the gunslinger wasn't sure he understood. Then the bumbler extended his neck and caressed the boy's cheek a last time with his tongue. "I,
Ake," he said: Bye, Jake or I ache, it came to the same.
The gunslinger gathered the boy up (how light he was, this boy who had jumped from the barn loft with Benny Slightman, and stood against the vampires with Pere Callahan, how curiously light; as if the growing weight of him had departed with his life) and lowered him into the hole. A crumble of dirt spilled down one cheek and Roland wiped it away. That done, he closed his eyes again and diought. Then, at last-haltingly-he began. He knew that any translation into the language of this place would be clumsy, but he did the best he could. If Jake's spirit-man lingered near, it was this language that he would understand.