“Three, but he may have relations with only one at a time,” Callahan said absently. “It depends on the stars, or something. They nursed me well. I began to walk around the town; in those days they called me the Walking Old Fella. I couldn’t quite get the sense of where I was, but in a way my previous wanderings had prepared me for what had happened. Had toughened me mentally. I had days, God knows, when I thought all of this was happening in the second or two it would take me to fall from the window I’d broken through down to Michigan Avenue—that the mind prepares itself for death by offering some wonderful final hallucination, the actual semblance of an entire life. And I had days when I decided that I had finally become what we all dreaded most at both Home and Lighthouse: a wet brain. I thought maybe I’d been socked away in a moldy institution somewhere, and was imagining the whole thing. But mostly, I just accepted it. And was glad to have finished up in a good place, real or imagined.

“When I got my strength back, I reverted to making a living the way I had during my years on the road. There was no Manpower or Brawny Man office in Calla Bryn Sturgis, but those were good years and there was plenty of work for a man who wanted to work—they were big-rice years, as they do say, although stockline and the rest of the crops also did fine. Eventually I began to preach again. There was no conscious decision to do so—it wasn’t anything I prayed over, God knows—and when I did, I discovered these people knew all about the Man Jesus.” He laughed. “Along with The Over, and Oriza, and Buffalo Star…do you know Buffalo Star, Roland?”

“Oh yes,” the gunslinger said, remembering a preacher of the Buff whom he had once been forced to kill.

“But they listened,” Callahan said. “A lot did, anyway, and when they offered to build me a church, I said thankya. And that’s the Old Fella’s story. As you see, you were in it…two of you, anyway. Jake, was that after you died?”

Jake lowered his head. Oy, sensing his distress, whined uneasily. But when Jake answered, his voice was steady enough. “After the first death. Before the second.”

Callahan looked visibly startled, and he crossed himself. “You mean it can happen more than once? Mary save us!”

Rosalita had left them. Now she came back, holding a ’sener high. Those which had been placed on the table had almost burned down, and the porch was cast in a dim and failing glow that was both eerie and a little sinister.

“Beds is ready,” she said. “Tonight the boy sleeps with Pere. Eddie and Susannah, as you were night before last.”

“And Roland?” asked Callahan, his bushy brows raising.