Stephen King: Cookie Jar

“It can’t hold out,” George Alderson said, puffing his pipe. There were only two boys listening to the Philco table model with him now; Pete was living nine blocks away with his new wife, and on the road most of the time, selling beer and cigarettes and stocking jukeboxes with new records. “Thank God there’s a long stretch of ocean between us and the maniac with the mustache.”

As the swastikas on the front-page map continued to spread (Britain still holding out but Russia tottering), Rhett thought often of his mother’s map. Hitler is really Black John, he thought, and he’s turning Europe into Lalanka. And one day, while Rhett was downtown shopping for Christmas presents, a shopkeeper told him that the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor.

“How old were you then?” Dale asked him.

“Sixteen. I still hadn’t kissed a girl.”

“Could you sign up to fight if you were sixteen?”

“No. I just hoped the war would last long enough for me to get in. And, unfortunately, it did.”

Moira Alderson had sometimes called her oldest the plodder of the family—slow and steady wins the race—but Pete was Speedy Alka-Seltzer after Pearl Harbor. He was at the Navy recruiting office the very next day, with a fresh haircut and wearing his best suit. His new wife encouraged him, feeling he would be safer on board a big battleship than fighting the Japs hand-to-hand in the Pacific. On the day he left for Newport News, Pete gave Jack the Bulova watch their mother had worn around her neck, with instructions to keep it safe. “Because I’ll want it back when I come home,” he said.

Jack, the artistic one, joined the USAAF in early 1942, as soon as he turned eighteen. On the day before he left for Florida, where he would learn to fly the P-47 Thunderbolt at Hillsborough Army Airfield, he gave the wristwatch to Rhett.

“What about the uke?” Rhett asked him.

“Never mind the uke, greedyguts, I’m taking that with me. You just wear the watch, and keep it wound. It won’t keep good time if you don’t.”

Rhett promised he would. They were sitting on his bed, and ate two cookies apiece from the blue jar. It was still full, and the cookies—gingerbread that night—were as tasty as ever.

Rhett enlisted in the army a year and a half later, one step ahead of the draft. There was no excitement in the thought of going to war, no thrill, only pessimism so strong it amounted to a premonition. He felt sure that he would be sent overseas, and that when the inevitable invasion happened—perhaps in 1944, perhaps not until 1945 or ’46—he would be in the first wave, and killed by enemy machine-gun fire before he could even wade out of the water. He could actually see his body rocking back and forth in the waves, face-down, arms splayed.

It was in this fatalistic frame of mind that, on his last night home, he opened the cookie jar for the last time in almost three years. He didn’t dare upend it—he had a vision of being buried in a never-ending avalanche of macaroons and shortbreads—but he began to reach in and take them out by the double handful, dropping them on his bed: sugar cookies, chocolate chippers, oatmeal raisin, ladyfingers, date-filled. When he had a hill of cookies on either side of him, he stopped and peered into the fat-bellied jar.

He had emptied it to a point more than halfway down, but the level was already rising. The cookies pushed up in the middle, then tumbled down the sides. It made him think of a high-school science lesson they’d had on volcano formation. Soon it would be full again, and what was he going to do with all of those he’d taken out of the jar? There were hundreds. He began to toss them back in, then saw something that froze him in place. He was wearing the Bulova, and as soon as his left wrist went past the rim of the jar, the second hand stopped. He snatched it back, then put it back in, just to be sure. Yes. When it was outside the jar, the second hand moved. Inside, it stood still.

Because Lalanka is real, he thought, and the cookie jar is a kind of portal. One that opens on the West Kingdoms, where time has stopped.

By then the jar was full to the brim again (pecan sandies on top that night). Rhett clapped the cover on it and stowed it under his bed. He put the leftovers in a paper sack marked for the trash the following morning—a final chore before leaving for what he assumed would be his own premature disposal. He told himself there were no West Kingdoms; he was too old to believe in such things. The cookie jar was a miracle, that much was undeniable. But miracles are scary things, and this one had been powerful enough to drive his mother out of her mind. It would do the same to him, if he let it, especially with the war about to swallow him up.

“I told myself it was some kind of magnetic field that stopped the second hand,” he told Dale, “and I told myself I just wouldn’t think about it anymore. Then I lay there wide awake until after midnight, thinking about nothing else. So I got up and took the damn thing up to the attic. Which is where it stayed until I came back from overseas.”

Pete Alderson fought his version of Big Two from a desk in Hampton Roads, Virginia, and finished as a lieutenant commander. He sent many men into combat, but never heard a shot fired in anger. Jack learned to fly, and took his mother’s ukulele to Guadalcanal with him. From there he flew dozens of sorties before his fighter was blown out from under him during the battle of Iwo Jima. A friend wrote to George Alderson, telling him that his son’s canopy had jammed so he couldn’t parachute to the water below. What he did not say (and perhaps did not have to) was that Jack, the artistic one, had burned like a torch in his cockpit before the shark-infested waters could put him out.

Rhett was indeed part of the invading force that landed at Normandy, but although men were shot to death all around him (their bodies rocked back and forth in the waves just as he had imagined), he survived that day and the booming, earth-shaking night that followed. He fought across France and into Germany, the vagabond watch that had made its way through the entire Alderson family ticking away on his wrist. He suffered from blisters and trench foot, he was gashed by blackberry brambles one afternoon when his squad happened upon a pocket of Kraut resistance holding a bridge near the German border, but he was never once wounded by enemy fire and he always kept the watch wound.

Sometimes there were cookies in their mess rations, usually hard as rocks and always stale. He ate them in bivouacs and foxholes and slit trenches, thinking of his mother’s blue cookie jar.

In April of 1945, after facing only minimal resistance, Rhett was part of the Allied force that liberated a concentration camp named for the beech forests that surrounded it. The day was damp and overcast, with a heavy ground mist that sometimes hid the heaped bodies and sometimes revealed them. Living skeletons stood at the fences and outside the crematoriums, staring at the Americans. Some were horribly burned by white phosphorous.

“What the fuck have we gotten ourselves into?” asked a soldier standing at Rhett’s elbow.

Rhett didn’t reply, because what was in his mind—what he knew—would have sounded insane: They had gotten themselves into Lalanka, of course. The trailing mist was the forza, the heaped bodies in this dank charnel house were victims of the gobbits, and somewhere—probably in Berlin—Black Adolf, now barking mad, was determined to continue the slaughter.

Two weeks after Buchenwald came Dachau. Thirty-two thousand dead, many still lying in the trenches they had been forced to dig, their emaciated bodies rotting in the rain, their hair fallen out to lie beside their heads. These were the memories Rhett Alderson brought back from Europe, only they weren’t exactly memories, because they weren’t exactly over. He had seen too much for them ever to be over, and consequently brought the West Kingdoms of Lalanka home with him. The West Kingdoms, where time had stopped just as the second hand of the Bulova watch had stopped when he dipped it below the rim of the cookie jar.