Stephen King - The wind through the keyhole

“Something will happen before he comes,” Tim said. “Da’ always said that the forest gives to them that love it.”

“All I’ve ever seen it do is take,” said Nell, and covered her face again. When he tried to put an arm around her, she shook her head.

Tim trudged out to get his slate. He had never felt so sad and frightened. Something will happen to change it, he thought. Please let something happen to change it.

The worst thing about wishes is that sometimes they come true.

That was a rich Full Earth in Tree; even Nell knew it, although the ripe land was bitter in her eye. The following year she and Tim might be following the crops with burlap rucksacks on their backs, farther and farther from the Endless Forest, and that made summer’s beauty hard to look at. The forest was a terrible place, and it had taken her man, but it was the only place she had ever known. At night, when the wind blew from the north, it stole to her bed through her open window like a lover, bringing its own special smell, one both bitter and sweet, like blood and strawberries. Sometimes when she slept, she dreamed of its deep tilts and secret corridors, and of sunshine so diffuse that it glowed like old green brass.

The smell of the forest when the wind’s out of the north brings visions, the old folken said. Nell didn’t know if this was true or just chimneycorner blather, but she knew the smell of the Endless Forest was the smell of life as well as death. And she knew that Tim loved it as his father had. As she herself had (although often against her will).

She had secretly feared the day when the boy would grow tall enough and strong enough to go down that dangerous trail with his da’, but now she found herself sorry that day would never come. Sai Smack and her mathmatica were all very well, but Nell knew what her son truly wanted, and she hated the dragon that had stolen it from him. Probably it had been a she-dragon, and only protecting her egg, but Nell hated it just the same. She hoped the plated yellow-eyed bitch would swallow her own fire, as the old stories said they sometimes did, and explode.

One day not so many after Tim had arrived home early and found her in tears, Big Kells came calling on Nell. Tim had gotten two weeks’ work helping farmer Destry with the hay-cutting, so she was by her onesome in her garden, weeding on her knees. When she saw her late husband’s friend and partner, she got to her feet and wiped her dirty hands on the burlap apron she called her weddiken.

A single look at his clean hands and carefully trimmed beard was enough to tell her why he’d come. Once upon a bye, Nell Robertson, Jack Ross, and Bern Kells had been children together, and great pals. Littermates from different litters, people of the village sometimes said when they saw the three together; in those days they were inseparable.

When they grew to young manhood, both boys fancied her. And while she loved them both, it was Big Ross she burned for, Big Ross she’d wed and taken to bed (although whether that was the order of it no one knew, nor really cared). Big Kells had taken it as well as any man can. He stood beside Ross at the wedding, and slipped the silk around them for their walk back down the aisle when the preacher was done. When Kells took it off them at the door (although it never really comes off, so they do say), he kissed them both and wished them a lifetime of long days and pleasant nights.

Although the afternoon Kells came to her in the garden was hot, he was wearing a broadcloth jacket. From the pocket he took a loosely knotted length of silk rope, as she knew he would. A woman knows. Even if she’s long married, a woman knows, and Kells’s heart had never changed.

“Will’ee?” he asked. “If’ee will, I’ll sell my place to Old Destry-he wants it, for it sits next to his east field-and keep this’un. Covenant Man’s coming, Nellie, and he’ll have his hand out. With no man, how’ll’ee fill it?”

“I cannot, as thee knows,” said she.

“Then tell me-shall we slip the rope?”

She wiped her hands nervously on her weddiken, although they were already as clean as they’d be without water from the creek. “I… I need to think about it.”

“What’s to think about?” He took his bandanna-neatly folded in his pocket instead of tied loosely, woodsman-style, around his neck-and mopped his forehead with it. “Either’ee do and we go on in Tree as we always have-I’ll find the boy something to work at that’ll bring in a little, although he’s far too wee for the woods-or ye and he’ll go on the land. I can share, but I can’t give, much as I might like to. I have only one place to sell, kennit.”

She thought, He’s trying to buy me to fill the empty side of the bed that Millicent left behind. But that seemed an unworthy thought for a man she’d known long before he was a man, and one who had worked for years by her beloved husband’s side in the dark and dangerous trees near the end of the Ironwood Trail. One to watch and one to work, the oldtimers said. Pull together and never apart. Now that Jack Ross was gone, Bern Kells was asking her to pull with him. It was natural.

Yet she hesitated.

“Come tomorrow at this same time, if you still have a mind,” Nell told him. “I’ll give thee an answer then.”

He didn’t like it; she saw he didn’t like it; she saw something in his eyes that she had occasionally glimpsed when she had been a green girl sparked by two likely lads and the envy of all her friends. That look was what caused her to hesitate, even though he had appeared like an angel, offering her-and Tim, of course-a way out of the terrible dilemma that had come with Big Ross’s death.

Perhaps he saw her seeing it, for he dropped his gaze. He studied his feet for a bit, and when he looked up again, he was smiling. It made him almost as handsome as he’d been as a youth… but never so handsome as Jack Ross.

“Tomorrow, then. But no longer. They have a saying in the West’rds, my dear. ‘Look not long at what’s offered, for every precious thing has wings and may fly away.’”

She washed at the edge of the creek, stood smelling the sweet-sour aroma of the forest for a bit, then went inside and lay down upon her bed. It was unheard of for Nell Ross to be horizontal while the sun was still in the sky, but she had much to think of and much to remember from those days when two young woodsmen had vied for her kisses.

Even if her blood had called toward Bern Kells (not yet Big Kells in those days, although his father was dead, slain in the woods by a vurt or some such nightmare) instead of Jack Ross, she wasn’t sure she would have slipped the rope with him. Kells was good-humored and laughing when he was sober, and as steady as sand through a glass, but he could be angry and quick with his fists when he was drunk. And he was drunk often in those days. His binges grew longer and more frequent after Ross and Nell were wed, and on many occasions he woke up in jail.

Jack had borne it awhile, but after a binge where Kells had destroyed most of the furniture in the saloon before passing out, Nell told her husband something had to be done. Big Ross reluctantly agreed. He got his partner and old friend out of jail-as he had many times before-but this time he spoke to him frankly instead of just telling Kells to go jump in the creek and stay there until his head was clear.

“Listen to me, Bern, and with both ears. You’ve been my friend since I could toddle, and my pard since we were old enough to go past the blossie and into the ironwood on our own. You’ve watched my back and I’ve watched yours. There’s not a man I trust more, when you’re sober. But once you pour the redeye down your throat, you’re no more reliable than quickmud. I can’t go into the forest alone, and everything I have-everything we both have-is at risk if I can’t depend on’ee. I’d hate to cast about for a new pard, but fair warning: I have a wife and a kiddy on the way, and I’ll do what I have to do.”