This was a quick and refreshing break from the saga to come that will have all but one beloved character dead at the end. And yet I still found myself crying in the shower this morning as I unpacked its thematic content.

There are three layers to this story. The first is an interlude between the formative events of the Dark Tower ka-tet and their journey into End World that comprises the last three novels. The second is a portrait of Roland’s development into a full-fledged gunslinger. The third is a fairy tale that ties the Roland of youth and Roland as adult together. The first layer takes up only 10% of the narrative, but becomes fundamental to the reader’s understanding of Roland as dinh of his ka-tet, and why his companions will sacrifice themselves for the quest at large when the time comes.

The second layer sees Roland, still a teenager, grieving his role in his mother’s death and sent to the outskirts of Gilead to deal with a Skin Man, a murdering shapeshifter. Here he meets a priestess who knew his mother in the context of healing from her indiscretions and recovering her mental health, someone who knew her as a woman and not in her societal role. While this encounter feels tangential to the arc of the Skin Man narrative, it is pivotal to Roland’s character development as a whole.

The third layer is introduced as Roland comforts a young boy who has lost his father to the skin man, now an orphan. He tells the story of the Wind Through the Keyhole, how the boy Tim was lured into the Endless Forest to save his mother’s sight. The themes of this story revolve around spousal abuse, but for Roland I think it is really being told as a way to reclaim his childhood innocence, returning to a time when his own mother would tell him bedtime stories, before life got complicated and tragic. Tim survives the challenges of the wilderness, retrieves his magical elixir and his mothers sight, enabling her to kill his stepfather with her dead husband’s axe. Figuratively, for Roland, Mother and Son are reunited against the patriarchal model of the society they must exist within.

Roland finishes his fairy tale and returns to the plot of the skin man. He is flushed out of hiding and dealt with in the gunslingers way. There is probably a theme to explore here in the context of shapeshifting and violence, but these are not resonating with me this go round. In the aftermath of the tale, Roland approaches the priestess to see about taking in the orphaned boy. She agrees but also hands Roland a letter from his mother. In this letter, she confesses to ending her recovery prematurely, to returning to Gilead under dark influences, and to knowing the outcome of this decision: death at the hand of her only son. It is a foretelling that Roland receives only after the deeds are done. He takes the news in with the appropriate grief and tears, alluding to the last lines of her letter that he spent years and years tracing over before he came to terms with them.

The story returns to its first layer, adult Roland and ka-tet passing the time with a tale while waiting out a storm. Here we learn those last lines of the letter, asked privately by Susannah, herself in the early stages of pregnancy (though as yet unaware of it). We discover that despite knowing her demise, Gabrielle Deschain stepped onto the wheel of ka and allowed events to take their course. In the distortion and confusion of much larger circumstances, her son ended her life and proceeded along his own path of inner suffering. Within all this knowledge, she asks,

“I forgive you everything, do you forgive me?”

Only through and after the countless years of turmoil, resignation, and the telling of the tale, Roland finds he does, and this brings him great joy.

This Atonement with the Mother, is a theme I’ve not seen anywhere else, at least not in the fantasy and fiction I’ve read over the years. In most story-telling, the Mother is the source of safety and shelter, or inverted into the object to be restored. She is not the source of suffering but its salve. The Father tends to be the cause of conflict and object of atonement, as Joseph Campbell argues in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It’s another example of King’s ability to iterate over familiar themes through his willingness to take on the darkness of the human heart. Mothers can also cause harm, however unintentional or driven by subconscious processes. This was my childhood experience. This story, as stories are meant to do, revealed to me that my mom and I have walked the path of forgiveness and formed an enviable adult relationship.