The Road to The Dark Tower (46 page)

Good bumblers are supposed to be good luck. They were once very tame but not useful for much other than amusing children and hunting
rats. They are faithful, but not as loyal as dogs. In the wild, they are scavengers. “Not dangerous, but a pain in the ass.”

Oy displays emotion and can follow complex commands, such as waking Jake when the moon rises. He emulates some human gestures, like shrugging, but cannot master winking. Jake thinks that Oy can sometimes read his mind. Oy cries when he thinks he’s going to be left behind in the Doorway Cave when the others go through the
UNFOUND
door.

Some bumblers can add, and Oy can count, as he demonstrates outside Tick-Tock Man’s lair. He’s also capable of independent thought. For example, he knows Jake will be interested to see Ben Slightman and Andy skulking around late at night and brings it to his friend’s attention.

He’s a true member of the tet and proves his courage on several occasions. In the Dixie Pig, he tackles the scuttling black bugs under the table. Callahan believes Oy was bred for this, like a terrier. Susannah, who calls him an idiot savant, says he would have been worthy of the title gunslinger had he but a gun to sling and a hand to sling it with. He switches minds with Jake to get past the mind trap, though he has to struggle to maintain Jake’s body’s balance.

After Roland buries Jake, he leaves it up to Oy to either stay at Jake’s graveside and die of starvation or continue the quest. His work with Roland and Susannah isn’t finished; he returns to Roland’s side after a brief period of mourning. Jake gave him instructions just before he died, and Oy abides by his friend’s deathbed wish. He tries to repeat the message to Roland but words fail him. Roland can hear Jake’s voice, though, when he performs a ritual reminiscent of a Vulcan mind meld.

After they pass through the tunnels leading out of Fedic, Oy remains mute until they meet up with Dandelo. He shakes hands with Collins, says his name and eats gumdrops. Given the choice to go through the doorway with Susannah, he decides to stay with Roland. Part of the task Eddie gave him still lies ahead.

After Susannah leaves Mid-World, Oy stops eating. Roland sees an emptiness in his eyes and a kind of loss that hurts him deep inside, not unlike ka-shume. Roland chides Oy for not having gone with Susannah, hurting the bumbler’s feelings. Later Roland apologizes, but Oy doesn’t appear to forgive him. After Oy dies, Roland wonders if the bumbler had been sad because he knew it was to be his last day, and that his dying would be hard.

Oy saves Roland’s life when Mordred attacks, leaping into the spider’s grip. He could probably have gotten free if he wanted to, but instead of escaping, he extends his long neck and bites Mordred on the side. Before Oy, Roland had never seen a bumbler that would choose fight over flight, but this wasn’t the first time Oy had done so. Oy’s spine cracks in Mordred’s grip but he keeps on biting the spider’s body.

Mordred throws Oy into the air, where he is impaled on the branch of a cottonwood tree. He cries out in pain and collapses. After killing Mordred, Roland goes to the tree, where he finds that the last of his ka-tet is still alive. Though he risks being bitten—perhaps even wants to be bitten—Roland stretches out his hand. “Oy, we all say thank you. I say thank you, Oy.” Oy doesn’t bite or speak. He licks Roland’s hand a single time, then hangs his head down and dies.

Oy is Roland’s last sacrifice, but like Eddie and Jake, Oy chose to die for the quest. Patrick helps bury Oy, but it doesn’t take long; “the body was far smaller than the heart it had held.”

Donald Callahan graduated from Boston seminary in 1957. He became a problem drinker during his years at his first parish in Lowell, Massachusetts. His drinking unsettled him spiritually, so he moved to Spofford, Ohio, and was later transferred to Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine, where he became parish priest of St. Andrew’s. At that time he was fifty-three, with silvery hair, a ruddy complexion and direct, piercing blue eyes threaded with tiny snaps of red surrounded by Irish laugh wrinkles; his mouth was firm, his slightly cleft chin firmer still. He thinks he will soon look like Spencer Tracy.

He knows the golden age poets, and his calling to the priesthood enhanced his childhood interest in the occult. Priests must plumb the depths of human nature as well as aspire to its heights, he would say, but the truth is that he liked to shudder as much as anyone else. He’s been working for seven years—ever since the onset of his drinking problem—on notes for a history of the Catholic Church in New England, which he occasionally suspects he will never write.

Callahan resists the enlightened popery and believes that his church
only acknowledges true evil ritualistically, concentrating instead on social evils that arise from everyone’s collective subconscious—stupendous, but impersonal and impossible to banish. “I think it’s an abomination. It’s the Catholic Church’s way of saying that God isn’t dead, only a little senile.” This echoes Roland’s fear that he would climb to the top of the Tower only to discover that God was feebleminded or malicious.

As a priest, he seeks a challenge beyond social problems. He wants to lead an army against EVIL.
¹⁸
When the ka-tet of ’Salem’s Lot approaches him with stories of vampires and ancient evils, Callahan sees this as the opportunity he’s been waiting for. “I still believe enough in the awesome, mystical, and apotheotic power of the church which stands behind me to tremble a bit at the thought of accepting your request lightly. . . . The church is a Force . . . and one does not set a Force in motion lightly.” [SL]

He’s exhilarated and, for the first time in years, loses his craving for alcohol. He doesn’t know if he’s up to the challenge, which jeopardizes his immortal soul. The vampire Barlow understands Callahan better than he understands himself. “Your faith in the White is weak and soft. . . . Only when you speak of the bottle are you informed.” [SL]

Finally face-to-face with EVIL, Callahan tries to hide behind his plaster crucifix, a gift from his mother. When the vampire challenges him to throw his cross aside, he hesitates. He has condemned younger priests for relying on the trappings of the Church as mere icons, but now he is guilty of the same thing. His faith is tested, and found wanting. If he’d found the power to put the cross aside and stand strong in his beliefs, he would have won the battle that night.

Instead of killing Callahan, Barlow forces him to take Communion from the font of blood gushing from the vampire’s neck. Barlow’s blood marks him. He’s safe from the other vampires in ’Salem’s Lot, but his church rejects him, burning his hand in a flash of blue light when he tries to enter. He’s unclean. He casts off his priest’s vestments and takes the next bus out of town, which happens to be going to New York.
¹⁹
He wanders the streets, feeling Barlow’s blood work into him. The world smells, looks and tastes different. Eddie speculates that Father Callahan had already crossed over to another reality by this time without ever realizing it.

He has no hope of salvation, but he wants to atone. For the next nine months, he works at the Home, a wet shelter only two blocks from the vacant lot containing the rose. He falls in love with his male coworker, Lupe
Delgado, but their relationship never advances beyond a kiss on the cheek that Callahan remembers like a lovesick teenager.

His newfound stability collapses when Callahan discovers that he can see vampires. Though he does nothing at first, he is spurred to action when Lupe gets AIDS from a vampire bite. Starting in 1976, killing vampires becomes his new mission in life. Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” plays in the background, a song that will be the sound track for his adventures.

Unlike Barlow, these Type Threes can be killed as easily as swatting bugs on a wall. He starts drinking heavily again. His activities bring him to the attention of the low men, and he becomes the hunted.

Fleeing New York, he “[s]tumbles upon a great, possibly endless, confluence of worlds. They are all America, but they are all different.” He travels the road for the next five years, sometimes killing vampires, but mostly leaving them alone. When the low men catch scent of him, he hears todash chimes. His subconscious has a way of pulling him across realities to evade his pursuers.

He ends up in California, but is lured back to New York when he reads about a friend who was assaulted by a couple of local thugs called the Hitler Brothers.
²⁰
Callahan was their real target, and shortly after he gets back to the city they assault him and muscle him into the Turtle Bay Washateria. His attackers are arguing over who gets to finish carving their trademark swastika into his forehead when they are interrupted by two unlikely saviors, Calvin Tower and Aaron Deepneau. Callahan is left with a broken jaw and a cross-shaped scar that the Calla-folken believe was self-inflicted.

He sets out on the road again, drinking constantly and ignoring vampires. Jailed in Topeka for assaulting a police officer, he hits bottom when he suffers seizures and refractures his jaw. He reflects that the two men saved his life in New York and he has been squandering their gift. Callahan vows to kill himself if he hasn’t given up drinking in a year. Of all the venal sins, the one that Callahan seems least constrained by is suicide, promising to kill himself once and actually doing it twice.

In Detroit he finds work at a shelter.
²¹
He no longer sees vampires or low men, which he takes as a good sign without realizing it is because they have gotten cleverer. In 1983, he’s lured to a meeting at the offices of Sombra Corporation, the business arm of North Central Positronics in
Keystone Earth, by an offer of a $1 million grant to support the shelter, another trap. He ends up in a room full of vampires and low men led by Richard P. Sayre. They don’t intend to kill him, just put him out of action by giving him AIDS.

Callahan won’t let vampires taint him again. He calls on God for the first time since his encounter with Barlow, and decides to kill himself by jumping through the window. He’s afraid the glass won’t break, but it shatters all around him.
²²
His last thought is “This is the last thought I’ll ever have. This is goodbye.”

He ends up in the way station shortly after Roland and Jake left it. Walter is waiting for him; Callahan is to be another of Walter’s traps. He transports the former priest through a doorway to the Calla, sending Black Thirteen with him.

He arrives in the Calla, where the Manni tend him back to full strength and he starts making a living working in the fields. Eventually, he begins to preach again and the people of the Calla build him a church, which he calls Our Lady of Serenity. He hides Black Thirteen beneath the church’s floor, trusting the building’s sanctity to contain the ball’s awesome power.

He converts more than half of the residents of Calla Bryn Sturgis to his way of spiritual thinking, but when Black Thirteen wakes Callahan thinks it is driving God out of his church. It speaks to him, tempting him to use it. The ball sent him todash twice; once to Mexico in the mid-1990s for Ben Mears’s
²³
funeral and once to the castle of the Crimson King.

When Tian Jaffords’s anger-fueled enthusiasm to fight the Wolves threatens to be shouted down by the rich farmers of the Calla, Callahan steps in to help. He has read a book that explains the moral code of gunslingers and believes the group traveling nearby can help. His motives aren’t entirely pure—he’s looking for someone to take Black Thirteen off his hands.

The people of the Calla call him the Old Fella. They know he is from some other world, but he never speaks of it. Calla Bryn Sturgis is his home. He no longer considers himself a priest, but rather a man of God. “Perhaps one day again, with the blessing, but not now.” He still wears a cross around his neck and he can once again dip his fingers in holy water. “God has taken me back . . . although I think only on what might be called ‘a trial basis,’ ” he tells Roland.

He retains his fundamental Catholic beliefs, threatening to raise
everyone in the Calla against Roland if the gunslinger allows Susannah to abort her demon child or even suggests it to her. Eddie comments, “For a guy who doesn’t want to be called Father, you have taken some very Fatherly stands just lately.”

Callahan feels like a full member of Roland’s ka-tet when he sees the rose in New York. The foundations of his reality are rocked when Roland discovers a copy of
’Salem’s Lot
among Calvin Tower’s books. He has been downgraded from a human being to a character in a novel. He is in a universe where the town of ’Salem’s Lot no longer exists on any map.

The failed priest is given another chance to confront EVIL when he and Jake follow Susannah’s trail to the Dixie Pig in New York. He accepts the challenge, knowing he probably won’t survive. He makes a stand similar to the one in the Petrie house in now-fictional ’Salem’s Lot. When a vampire dares him to throw away his cross, Callahan says he needn’t stake his faith on the challenge of such a creature, and he’d never throw away such an old friend, but he will
put
it away—and returns it to its resting place inside his shirt.

His faith is greater than any talisman—the power of God and the White radiates through him. Callahan’s attackers include more than vampires, though, and the low men and taheen are beyond God’s power. They fall upon him and bite into his neck, and the smell of blood draws the vampires to him.

God answers his call for strength, and he kills two of the low creatures. Rather than allow himself to be despoiled by the vampires, Callahan uses Jake’s Ruger to kill himself again. The last thing he hears is a salute from Roland: “Hile, gunslinger!”