The Witch of Hebron

by James Howard Kunstler

  She roamed the streets of town until the growing chill made her shiver, and then she went home to the rectory beside the Congregational church where she lived with Loren. Approaching it from way down Salem Street, she saw candles glow in several windows on the first floor. Loren would be going back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, where he liked to keep his work at hand—an elegy, a community calendar, or a manual on pickling meat, now that it was the season for slaughtering animals.

  Loren enjoyed cooking, and fall was the great season for cookery; it was harvest time, when there was plenty of everything, so much that it often felt like the old times. Back then you merely nipped into the supermarket after the workday and picked up anything you wanted: short ribs, lamb shanks, duck breasts, mangoes from the faraway tropics, artichokes from California, aged vinegars from Sicily, Mexican chipotles, Belgian chocolate, French lentils, black pepper, curry powders, English Stilton cheeses, and delicious coffee—Kona from Hawaii, Jamaican Blue Mountain, Brazil arabica, Sumatra, Kenya. All gone, all gone.

  Jane Ann first met Loren at a drug-saturated fraternity rave at Middlebury College, back in the previous century. She had transferred there after a disappointing stint as an art major at nearby Bennington, which was run like a seedy carnival. Middlebury was a step up—a compact, erudite, outdoorsy little college for rich kids who didn’t get into Harvard, Yale, or Brown. In those days, Loren was quite the party animal, as well as captain of the lacrosse team. He was a big, handsome, shambling fraternity boy with taped-up loafers, a goofy smile, and an interest in poetry. After the rave, they went at it in his choice fourth-floor turret room of the rattletrap fraternity house. Five, six times before morning. The room was painted Chinese red. Loren had a beautiful silk Oriental dressing gown that he let her wear to the bathroom down the hall. He also had a hookah the size of a double bassoon and a Jeep with a ragtop. Soon she was his girl. The popular drug Ecstasy was what led Loren into theological studies and eventually the Congregational ministry. His first assignment was Glens Falls, where they spent eleven years, but they eventually came to Union Grove, twenty miles to the southeast, when the position opened. It was a sweet, quiet corner of the upper Hudson Valley, at the time a bedroom community for people who drove to well-paid jobs as far off as Albany, the state capital. Here they’d raised their son, Evan, who had gone off with Robert Earle’s boy, Daniel, two years ago to see what happened to the rest of the United States after the tribulations. The two young men hadn’t been heard from since.

  Loren was sautéing chanterelle mushrooms at the big wood-fired cookstove when Jane Ann finally came inside. Fall was also the great season of wild mushrooms and Loren had many a woody glade scoped out where they came up reliably after a rain. He appeared to be well into a bottle of Jane Ann’s own wine. It was made from the local wild grapes that grew rampant over fences and around the roadsides. She flavored it with sweet woodruff to cut the foxy edge.

  “Where have you been?” Loren asked, not irritably. “I was worried about you.”

  “I made some calls,” she said, and this was true, for in her capacity as the minister’s wife, she often stopped in to see the sick or the bereaved or just to visit with friends. Most townspeople were members of the congregation since all the other structures of socialization had fallen away. “You?”

  “Me? Gathering wilds. Before that, down at the old U-W Mill, with Robert and that engineer from the Kool-Aid gang,” Loren said, referring to the New Faithers. “This new laundry will be the greatest project the town has ever seen. I know, you don’t think it’s any great shakes, but it will accomplish a couple of very important things. It’ll free up people’s time and it’ll give folks confidence to go forward and make other improvements, maybe start other businesses.”

  “But nobody has any money,” Jane Ann said.

  “Laundry is the housework people hate most,” Loren replied obliquely. “Did you know that?”

  “Not scrubbing floors?”

  “No,” Loren said. “Laundry.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I read it somewhere,” Loren said.

  “On the Internet?”

  “Ha ha,” Loren said. The Internet had unraveled years before the electricity flickered out altogether in the summer. “Facetiousness is often hostility in disguise,” he observed. “Are you angry at me?”

  “No,” she said. Shame was now added to her cargo of regret. “You know how I get sometimes.”

  “I know,” he said. “And I know you know I know.”

  “I apologize for inflicting it on you,” she said.

  “That’s what I’m here for. But okay, apology accepted.” Loren put great store in apologies and in the resolution of disagreements. “You look very beautiful in candlelight. Do you know that?”

  “Thank you for the compliment.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Jane Ann got a stemmed wineglass from a cabinet and emptied the remains of the bottle into it.

  Later that evening, after a supper of mushroom and kale omelets and fried potatoes and what would be some of the last of their fall lettuce dressed in buttermilk, honey, and cider vinegar, and the last of a three-day-old rye bread with plenty of sweet butter from the Schmidt farm, Jane Ann and Loren retired to read in their bedroom. His bedside book, as opposed to his downstairs reading, was a biography of Theodore Roosevelt. He loved the period of the early twentieth century, before the World Wars, modernity with all its hopes intact, its visions of the coming industrial Golden Age, the benevolent New World machine empire of muscular virtue! And he loved the confident, buoyant figure of TR, who seemed to embody all of that so well. Jane Ann had been working on To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf for more than a month without getting past page 50. It had more value for her as a soporific than as literature.

  Jane Ann wore a faded silk nightgown that had long ago been canary yellow. Loren wore a plain cotton nightshirt. The room was cool. They only fired up the little parlor wood-chunk stove in the corner on the bitterest winter nights. The bedroom was just above the kitchen and its more massive cookstove. Beneath the practical ceremonies of bedtime, an insistent tension prevailed between them. Something had gone wrong with Loren’s anatomy or psychology—he really couldn’t be sure which—but try as he might, he couldn’t perform anymore. The pharmaceutical remedies for his condition, once ubiquitous, were no longer available, and Loren did not know what else to do except endure it. But his sympathy for Jane Ann was such that he’d encouraged the arrangement with his best friend, Robert Earle, for Jane Ann and Robert to discreetly spend a conjugal night together every week—with the understanding between the three of them that their household assignments would not change. The consequences of such an arrangement were not necessarily subject to mandates. They all went along with it out of a combination of sympathy, necessity, and desire, knowing it might not end well. It could have ended worse, but it had created strains between them, and within themselves, that would persist indefinitely.

  Now, as Jane returned from a trip to the bathroom, Loren put aside his book and watched her navigate in candlelight across the room, around the bed, noticing the way her breasts swayed within the nightgown, the targetlike nipples visibly shifting this way and that way. He was always moved by the sight of her, whether or not he was able to do anything in the service of it. But this evening, having consumed more wine than usual and more than a dram of applejack after dinner, Loren was stirred to attempt an act of love with his wife.

  “Would you take your nightgown off?” he said as she slipped between the sheets. She looked a bit surprised at his request.

  “I’ll be cold later,” she said. “You know how I am.”

  “You can put it back on later.”

  She pulled the garment over her head in a single deft movement and hung it on the bedpost, then slid down into the sheets, regarding him warily as she did. Loren struggled out of his nightshirt. He was a large man and had put on a good twenty pounds over th
e bountiful months of the year, but he still had the physical grace of a varsity athlete. He flung off the nightshirt, slid back under the covers, and sought out her lips. He kissed her for a very long time. Eventually, her lips and tongue responded with something like the passion of years earlier. His hands explored the once-familiar curves of her hips and bosom like a sojourner who had returned to a beloved place after a long absence. Then he slipped down below her waist and kissed her intimate places in such a way that she came to heave and arch her spine and finally gasp in a rapture that had her clawing the bed sheets.

  In the aftermath of that act, Loren maneuvered back up so as to hover over her. He pressed his cheek to the fragrant damp place where her forehead met her hairline and attempted to guide himself inside her with one hand while she drew her knees way up to become more accessible. But despite everything, he was still not functioning normally. He fumbled more than once and soon an acid pain spread through the muscles in the arm he had propped himself up with, and finally he rolled onto his back beside Jane Ann while her knees slid down and she brushed a strand of damp hair off her face.

  For a long time, neither of them spoke. Loren now fought a tumult of emotion—amazement, shame, fear, anger, self-pity. He thought in the midst of it all to curse God but then remembered that he had given up on God some time ago—that he now believed only in the divinity of the human race—so he struggled mightily to forgive himself and whatever fate had driven him to this predicament. Jane Ann observed his inarticulate torment in the candlelight. Finally, she turned toward him and buried her face close up against him and said, “I will always love you.”

  EIGHT

  Much later, when the house was still, Jasper Copeland, who had not slept a moment since his father’s visit, put on his clothes in the moonlight that streamed through his dormer window. He retrieved the backpack he had stuffed and hidden in the closet after his father left. It contained a few articles of clothing. He’d cinched a rolled-up blanket to the keeper rings at the bottom. He threaded the leather sheath of a hunting knife to his belt. It had a six-inch blade. The knife, like the fly rod, had been his father’s. Finally he jammed a pillow and a wad of clothing under the blankets on his bed and, satisfied that it resembled the shape of a sleeping boy, stealthily made his way downstairs. He knew all the creaky steps on the staircase and took extra care to tread lightly on them.

  Down in the kitchen he mixed a handful of rolled oats in a plastic bowl with a few spoons of sorghum syrup until it formed a gummy mass. Then he spooned it into a flannel rag from the box of rags his mother kept under the counter. When he’d completed that task, he collected some food items—six inches of hard sausage, some cheese, the leftover corn bread from supper—and some useful articles—a small steel saucepan, a fork and spoon, a plastic tumbler—and packed them up with his clothes. Then he exited the house through the back door and went to the old carriage house that constituted his father’s offices, lab, and the upstairs infirmary he had set up for patients too sick to be home.

  Willie’s body still lay on the examining table. Jasper was shocked all over again to see the dog and struggled to understand exactly what had gone out of him to reduce him to nothing more than a stiff, inert object. When he buried his face against the dog’s flank, he was horrified to realize how cold it was and that this was the last time they would ever be together. Though he knew could depend on his father to give Willie a proper burial, it was little consolation. He blubbered a while, then proceeded to his father’s lab behind the examination room.

  The doctor kept his supply of opium in an old cookie tin in a drawer under the counter where his microscope stood. Jasper knew exactly where to look. He easily pried off the top. Inside were several balls of raw opium gum. The doctor obtained them from farmers who grew poppies for him, more or less as a public service. The doctor prepared the tinctures of opium there in the lab, in order to have some idea of what he was dosing his patients with. In the absence of the manufactured wonder drugs of the old days, this laudanum was the only useful analgesic he had.

  Of the several balls of opium, Jasper selected one that was the size of a crabapple. He got out the rag that contained the oats mixed with sorghum syrup, pushed the opium into the center of the sticky mass, and molded it until he had something that resembled a popcorn ball. Then he rewrapped it in the rag, stuck the whole thing in his pocket, and put the tin back in the drawer. Last, he took three of his father’s beeswax candles—the ones with no tallow in them—and stashed them in his pack along with a dozen of the matches his father bought from Roger Hoad, who sold them in little bundles tied with hemp cord.

  He stroked the dog one last time on his way out of the building and took care to close the door so the latch didn’t so much as click. Then he was out under a yellow moon and a sky exploding with stars. The clouds of early evening had dissipated. The air was sharply colder now, and it boosted his confidence that he’d had the foresight to pack a wool cap and gloves. He did not know where he would be going, exactly, but he knew that the nights would only get colder in the days ahead.

  The streets of Union Grove lay perfectly still at this hour, which was just after three in the morning, though Jasper did not have a timepiece and knew only that it was very late. He passed the Allisons’ house on Van Buren Street and was sorry that Ned was not coming with him. Where Van Buren met Hill Street, Jasper made his way to the old water treatment plant, now defunct without electricity or manufactured chemicals to run it, and entered the margin of the woods there. It was both a shortcut and a way of keeping his movements concealed. The woods frightened him and he moved rapidly, at the edge of panic, until he saw the reassuring contours of the old high school ahead. The New Faith people were said to keep watchmen posted. He couldn’t see anyone at this distance, so he left the woods to traverse the same stubble field he’d run across so desperately hours earlier trying to save Willie. He felt exposed but he didn’t want to run now for fear of scaring the horses.

  He stopped at the split-rail fence, his lungs burning and his breath visible in the moonlight. The stallion, Jupiter, stood at the far end of his paddock, very still with one rear leg jacked back a little, resting on the edge of its hoof. His big head drooped. Jasper moved along the fence line until he was as close to the stallion as he could get without going inside the paddock. He clicked his tongue a few times. The stallion jerked up his head. Thinking to make sure the animal remained calm, Jasper begin humming a tune. It was “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” The stallion gave out a little whinny and dashed twenty yards toward the center of the paddock. There, he wheeled as if taking in his entire surroundings and then ran the rest of the way to the opposite perimeter. Jasper continued the song, now softly singing the lyrics. Soon the horse began making his way around the fence line at a trot, fully awake, as if challenging any interloper. He came directly toward Jasper, who continued to sing evenly. Jupitar replied with a snort, his big eyes flashing, and stepped up boldly to the fence where the boy stood on the bottom rail so that horse and boy were, for that moment, at eye level. Jupiter dipped his head as though playing a game and made another half-circuit around the perimeter, ending up again on the far side of the paddock.

  It occurred to Jasper that nothing might induce the stallion to come to him. But he was not afraid to go inside the paddock and try to go to him. He reasoned that Jupiter was used to being handled by the New Faith men. He set down his backpack against the post and climbed through the fence rails, then walked deliberately toward the horse. It sidestepped warily to the left. The boy countered, steadily clicking his tongue. Jupiter stepped back into a corner where the fence met the side of the old schoolbus barn and finally submitted to the inevitability of being approached by a human being. Jasper felt sorry, momentarily, for the stallion’s dumb domesticity. When the unwelcome notion that the stallion was a beautiful creature intruded, the boy remembered what a beautiful creature his dog Willie had been and how carelessly this stallion had stomped the life out of him.

&
nbsp; Twin clouds of steam blew out of Jupiter’s nostrils. Jasper slowly reached in his pocket and retrieved the lumpy rag from it. He carefully opened the rag, took out the sticky ball of oats, sorghum syrup, and opium, and held it out in his palm. The stallion looked at him fiercely. Jasper remained in position, motionless, arm extended, perfectly still. The stallion took a tentative step in his direction, sniffed the sweet gummy ball, snorted at it, and touched it with his prehensile lips. Then, at last, he took the whole thing delicately out of Jasper’s upturned palm. The boy watched the horse chew the sticky mass as he lowered his arm and felt the tension flow out of his muscles. Then he about-faced and hurried back to the rail fence, where he collected his backpack and made off into what remained of the night, thrilled by the horror of his prospects and by what he had done.

  NINE

  Habitually a poor sleeper, Perry Talisker lay alone on a thin mattress in his shack by the river listening to the endless tragic music of the water rushing over its own hard bed. Sometimes, Perry’s loneliness cocooned him in such a tight place that he cried out against God’s mysterious wrath, and he wondered what he had done to become the object of it.

  He missed his wife, Trish, who had left him years ago when times had just started to get hard and the Hovington Supermarket chain closed down, including the one at Union Grove Plaza, because the truckers could not make their deliveries, and no meat came in for Perry to butcher and sort, and the local farmers had not yet come to realize the necessity of raising meat for more than themselves, and the whole equation of chain retail failed. In the store’s last weeks, the electricity was still on, but the cooler and freezer shelves were bare. They’d run out of everything they needed to get the job done anyway, including foam trays, shrink wrap, and self-adhesive label blanks for the check scale.