“No. I’d have to put it in the ninetieth percentile, at least. But how could they know that Callahan…” Eddie trailed off, considered, then shook his head decisively. “Nah, I’m not even gonna get into it tonight. Next thing we’ll be discussing the Kennedy assassination, and I’m tired.”

“We’re all tired,” Roland said, “and we have much to do in the days ahead. Yet the Pere’s story has left me in a strangely disturbed frame of mind. I can’t tell if it answers more questions than it raises, or if it’s the other way around.”

None of them responded to this.

“We are ka-tet, and now we sit together an-tet,” Roland said. “In council. Late as it is, is there anything else we need to discuss before we part from one another? If so, you must say.” When there was no response, Roland pushed back his chair. “All right, then I wish you all—”

“Wait.”

It was Susannah. It had been so long since she’d spoken that they had nearly forgotten her. And she spoke in a small voice not much like her usual one. Certainly it didn’t seem to belong to the woman who had told Eben Took that if he called her brownie again, she’d pull the tongue out of his head and wipe his ass with it.

“There might be something.”

That same small voice.

“Something else.”

And smaller still.

“I—”

She looked at them, each in turn, and when she came to the gunslinger he saw sorrow in those eyes, and reproach, and weariness. He saw no anger. If she’d been angry, he thought later, I might not have felt quite so ashamed.

“I think I might have a little problem,” she said. “I don’t see how it can be…how it can possibly be…but boys, I think I might be a little bit in the family way.”

Having said that, Susannah Dean/Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker/Mia daughter of none put her hands over her face and began to cry.

Part Three

The Wolves

Chapter I

Secrets

One

Behind the cottage of Rosalita Munoz was a tall privy painted sky-blue. Jutting from the wall to the left as the gunslinger entered, late on the morning after Pere Callahan had finished his story, was a plain iron band with a small disc of steel set eight inches or so beneath. Within this skeletal vase was a double sprig of saucy susan. Its lemony, faintly astringent smell was the privy’s only aroma. On the wall above the seat of ease, in a frame and beneath glass, was a picture of the Man Jesus with his praying hands held just below his chin, his reddish locks spilling over his shoulders, and his eyes turned up to His Father. Roland had heard there were tribes of slow mutants who referred to the Father of Jesus as Big Sky Daddy.