Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

She had spent a great deal of her life on carny midways and in smoky gin-joints, shouting out her songs in order to be heard above the voices of redfaced, unruly drunks, and while part of her loved the excitement and unpredictability of that life, part of her loved the serenity of this one, too. The peace of these walks. She wasn’t getting any younger, after all; she had a kid who had now left purt near all his babyhood behind him. On that particular Sunday she must have thought The Street almost too quiet. She walked a mile south from the meadow without seeing a soul even Kito was gone by then, having stopped off to pick berries. It was as if the whole township were deserted. She knows there’s an Eastern Star supper in Kashwakamak, of course, has even contributed a mushroom pie to it because she has made friends of some of the Eastern Star ladies. They’ll all be down there getting ready. What she doesn’t know is that today is also Dedication Day jr the new Grace Baptist Church, the first real church ever to be built on the TR. A slug of locals have gone, heathen as well as Baptist. Faintly, jqom the other side of the lake, she can hear the Methodists singing. The sound is sweet and faint and beautiful,’ distance and echo has tuned every sour voice. She isn’t aware of the men—most of them very young men, the kind who under ordinary circumstances dare only look at her from the corners of their eyes—until the oldest one among them speaks. “llnow, a black whore in a white dress and a red belt! Damn if that ain’t just a little too much colorjet lakeside.

What’s wrong with you, whore? Can’t you take a hint?” She turns toward him, ajaid but not showing it. She has lived thirty-six years on this earth, has known what a man has and where he wants to put it since she was eleven, and she understands that when men are together like this and full of redeye (she can smell it), they give up thinkingjr themselves and turn into a pack of dogs. If you show fiar they will fall on you like dogs and likely tear you apart like dogs. Also, they have been layingjr her. There can be no other explanation jr them turning up like this. “What hint is that, sugar?” she asks, standing her ground. Where is everyone? Where can they all be? God damn! Across the lake, the Methodists have moved on to”?just and Obey,” a droner if there ever was one. “That you ain’t got no business walking where the white Jblks walk,” Harry Auster says. His adolescent voice breaks into a kind of mouse-squeak on the last word and she laughs.