And then, as the reality of his situation rushed back at him, he remembered the woeful particulars of the life he had suddenly left behind: his beloved companion, Willie, who was now dead, the desperate scene in the paddock where Willie got hurt, then listening outside the window of his father’s office to his father bargaining with Brother Jobe, and the ghastly deed he had done to Brother Jobe’s stallion. His moral sense informed him that grave and terrible things had been set in motion that could not be undone and would change his life. He was not yet lonely for his family. If anything, he was still angry at them, especially his father. He supposed that the discovery of his foul deed would turn even them against him.
His backside was damp from sleeping on the spongy ground and his neck hurt. It occurred to him that he did not have a plan for what to do next and that it might be a good idea to come up with one. His lack of foresight frightened him, but he recognized that this moment required him to stand apart from his feelings, to simply act, and that his first order of business should be to just get going—that the act of getting himself into motion would stimulate him to begin to make a plan. So he stuffed his father’s hunting shirt into his backpack to give himself more freedom of movement and set off down the Battenville–Cambridge Road.
His footsteps warmed him up quickly, but after a little while hunger and thirst crowded out his more desperate thoughts, and he looked for a suitable place to stop and eat some of the provisions he’d brought with him. One side of the road was a set of fields and pastures belonging to farmer Ben Deaver, an airline executive in the old times. The fields were separated by hedgerows and low walls of granite stones worked up out of the ground every year in the relentless frost heaves. The corn, barley, and oat crops were reduced to stubble now that the harvest was over, and piles of fragrant manure lay up and down the rows waiting to be harrowed in. A final hay crop in one field was mowed and laid out in windrows, soon to be stacked or carted off to the barns. A substantial percentage of crop land had to be devoted to animal feeds in the new times.
The ownership of the land on the other side of the road was in limbo, since the family who had last lived and farmed there had all been taken by the Mexican flu some years earlier. What had been crop fields and pastures were now overgrown with sumac and poplar scrub. Adjoining parcels were second-growth woods from a previous era of abandonment when dairying had collapsed back in the 1980s. The casual observer might think it was mature old-growth forest. The flu and the encephalitis scourge that followed the flu had reduced the population of Washington County to less than half of what it had been at the turn of the millennium. A great deal of property now existed in legal limbo, since not only were its freeholders dead but communications had fallen off so severely that their far-flung relatives, heirs, and assigns could not be located. Nor were the courts functioning to adjudicate claims. Nor were the old computerized title records accessible. Nor were many people traveling anywhere. Houses and other buildings of all kinds stood vacant around the county. The people who ran the General Supply—inhabitants of Karptown, the former trailer park named after their fallen leader, Wayne Karp—enjoyed a lively business in the disassembly of these derelict structures and the resale of fabricated building materials that were no longer manufactured. Even old nails and screws had value. After farming, salvage was the town’s leading industry.
Farther down the road, Jasper spied a horse and cart as it came around a bend, perhaps a quarter mile ahead. He reacted quickly, slipping into the trees on the wooded side. He hid behind a blown-down locust tree and watched the rig pass by. The driver was an older man he recognized, but he could not attach a name to him. So many people came through his father’s office with their illnesses and injuries that over the years Jasper figured he’d seen everybody who was still alive in Washington County, though he never learned all their names. The driver hummed a tune to himself and the horse walked briskly, as if both were enjoying the crisp sunny weather. Jasper thought to himself that he would like a job driving a horse cart if he were ever allowed to rejoin society again after what he’d done. The sorrow attending that thought was shoved aside by his renewed awareness of hunger as he observed that the cart was filled with potatoes, freshly dug, still coated with earth. Potatoes were his favorite food, after apple pie. His mother made a kind of pan-fried cake of shredded potatoes cooked in butter in a cast-iron skillet that was about the tastiest thing he knew of. It came out of the pan upside down, all one piece, with the top brown and crispy. He was sorry that he had not brought a frying pan with him, but he knew how to roast potatoes in the coals of a wood fire, something his father had taught him on the overnight fishing and camping trips they sometimes made when the doctor needed to get away from his obligations. These memories of food sent him foraging in the pack for the corn bread, sausage, and cheese he’d brought with him. He told himself it would be smart to save some of it for a meal later in the day, but his hunger was so extreme that he couldn’t resist eating all of it.
When he was finished eating, he set forth carefully up the road in search of the field where that cart full of potatoes had come from. He didn’t have to go far to find it. From a distance, he saw half a dozen figures laboring there: hired men in rough clothes, forking up the earth and laying up the potatoes on the ground, where others came along and put them into willow baskets. Jasper stole around a hedgerow and crept up against a wall of old fieldstone, where he peered through the thicket of blackberry canes. He waited there for more than an hour, watching, sometimes slipping off to sleep from boredom until the gentle creak and clatter of the horse cart alerted him. When the cart came into the field, the laborers brought baskets of potatoes to it and dumped them in until the cart box was full again. Then the horse and cart went off down the road. The laborers gathered up their tools and departed. Jasper waited until he was sure they were gone and would not return. Down in the field, he found more than enough potatoes left for his purposes. He took enough for his supper and breakfast but not so many as to weigh down his backpack and slow his progress.
The way the sun was slanting, he knew that evening was not so far off. There were few clouds in the sky and he sensed that it would be a cold night. Feeling the urgent need to move on, he set off down the road again in a direction that he judged to be northerly, where the shadows of the trees pointed. North of here was the tiny hamlet of Hebron, where he had been a few times with his father, and farther north lay a place called Glens Falls, where he had never been but where his father had once worked in a hospital. It called itself a city. It was much larger than Union Grove. The words Glens Falls sounded musical, and he imagined it a handsome, lively place, full of bustle and enchantment, where a stranger, even a boy, could make himself useful in exchange for a warm place to sleep and regular meals. There were quite a few orphaned children in Union Grove, taken in by kind families. Hadn’t the shopkeeper, Terry Einhorn, taken in the dim-witted Buddy Haseltine, who swept the floor and stacked wooden crates and washed the windows? Or perhaps there was somebody like Stephen Bullock up there, a rich man of property who had a whole community of souls living on his plantation and was always looking for new blood. Jasper was not so keen on becoming a common laborer, like the potato diggers he had watched that day, but even at age eleven he had skills that full-grown men did not have. He had assisted his father and knew enough about illness to dispense useful advice. He had helped his father perform many routine surgeries, knew how to sew up wounds, and had once attended at the amputation of a man’s leg, hopelessly shattered by a falling barrel of flaxseed oil. It occurred to him that he could possibly find a position doctoring people.
With these thoughts in mind he made his way up the road. Not much farther he came upon the edge of an orchard. He reasoned correctly that this was the extreme corner of the property because there was not a person or a building in sight. It was planted with Northern Spy, a late-harvest apple, and he put six nice ones in his pack on top of the three that he ate then and there.
THIRTEEN<
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Brother Jobe enjoyed the gliding gait of his mount, a mule named Atlas. He was fond of telling people that a mule rode much more smoothly than a good saddle horse, and was smarter, and could stand up to heat better, and was not stubborn but rather sensible and disinclined to follow obviously foolish commands that might discommode or injure it. A mule was a superior animal, and he felt positively superior riding one, despite what others might think. And once he got his mule-breeding business up and going next spring, he was confident that folks would begin to see the advantage of mules. Of course people still wanted horses, and he aimed to keep breeding them, too, but for now he was out a perfectly good stallion.
Though it was a pleasant, crisp fall afternoon, and despite his enjoyment at being out on the road riding Atlas, Brother Jobe suffered in a personal globe of perturbation knowing, as he now did, that the doctor’s boy had poisoned his studhorse, Jupiter. He was further vexed by the knowledge that the boy had eloped from Union Grove and was on the loose somewhere in the county. He was reluctant to pursue the boy, fearful of roiling relations between his people and the townspeople if and when the boy was found. If the boy happened to come back on his own, well, that would be another matter. All politics aside, he wanted to flog the boy within an inch of his life, or maybe beyond that.
Brother Jobe was on a journey to Steven Bullock’s plantation, several thousand acres of fruitful bottomland and upland five miles outside town at the place where the Battenkill joined the Hudson River. He had business to discuss with Mr. Bullock, the grandee of the county, with his vast holdings, his many faithful servants, and his personal hydroelectric outfit. To start with, there were certain urgent matters of the law that required the attention of Mr. Bullock as Union Grove’s elected magistrate. But mostly, Brother Jobe wanted to inquire about getting a stallion to replace Jupiter. Bullock was raising big German Hanoverians for the saddle. America was dearly short of horseflesh, so rapid had been the descent out of the old times into the new. Wasn’t it odd, then, Brother Jobe mused to the soft rocking gait of Atlas the mule, that his daddy had owned the leading Ford dealership in Scott County, Virginia, back in the twentieth century?
Brother Jobe had come about halfway to his destination when, lost in musing about back home, he saw a lone figure up ahead on the road. As he drew closer, the figure began to wave its arms in a broad gesture that reminded Brother Jobe of a railroad grade-crossing signal from the old times. He instinctively reined in Atlas. The lone figure strode forward confidently. The closer he came, the more his appearance resolved from that of a grown man into something more like a gangly, overgrown boy. He was perhaps twenty, with curly yellow hair and a scraggly blond beard that, if he ever took to shaving regularly, would hardly require the razor twice a week. His cheeks were sunken as if he had not been getting regular meals. He was carrying a bulging leather shoulder sack, which he now took off and tossed aside to the edge of the road.
“What’s up, stranger?” Brother Jobe said.
“And good afternoon, to you, too, sir.”
“A fine day to be rambling.”
“I’m a rambler and a gambler—you’ve got that right.”
“That so? Are you knowing the Lord, son?”
The young man dipped his whole upper body in a guffaw. “Not yet,” he said.
“Would you like to?”
“I hope not to meet up with him for some time yet. I like it here on earth, rambling and gambling as I do.”
“You can be born again in this world and know the Lord.”
“I’ve had enough of birthing, sir. I’m enjoying my prime. Would you like to hear some of my song?”
“Your song… ?”
“Yessir, the ‘Ballad of Billy Bones.’”
“That’d be you? Billy Bones?”
“Yessir. The very same.”
“Well, I don’t have time for no song and dance, son.”
“There ain’t any dance to this. Not yet, anyway.”
“Mind if I pass on the song, then?”
The boy unbuttoned his brown leather coat and drew it open to reveal the butt of an automatic pistol tucked into the waistband of his striped trousers and something that looked like a two-foot-long brush knife in a scabbard on his other hip.
“Give it a chance, sir. You won’t regret it.”
“Along about now the only thing I regret is not bringing a firearm to entertain you with.”
“So much the better then, because neither of us will get hurt. Are you ready for my song?”
“Fire away.”
“Here goes:
“When first I came to New York State
My fortune here to find
I followed reg’lar upright ways
Was always nice and kind
But as I rambled round the state
A bandit I became
I plied the roads with gun and sword
And plundered many a man.…”
He sang these verses in the style of a mournful dirge. During the second verse, he drew the automatic pistol out of his waistband and held it aloft in an emphatic manner.
“I think I get the picture,” Brother Jobe said.
“I ain’t done. There’s lots more verses.”
“I heard enough. If you got yourself a ding-dang ukulele, folks might stand it better.”
“You know where I might find such a thing?”
Brother Jobe felt his patience melting away. “Lookit here, son, I don’t carry no cash money. This here’s a waste of your valuable banditry time. Anyways, you are a durn sorry excuse for a minstrel and a worse robber.”
“You think so? Well, maybe I’ll just have that horse of yours. I’m sick of pounding this road.”
“This here’s a mule, you dumb ass.”
“Mind how you speak to me or someone might get hurt after all.”
“Look right here, boy.” Brother Jobe held an index finger to the outside corner of his right eye.
“Huh?”
“That’s right. Look right in.”
“Think you can run the snake eye on Billy Bones?”
“I already done it. As we speak, I can see inside your mush-filled brainpan at a throbbing vein within. I’m surprised you can’t feel it.”
The young man cried out in pain and visibly drooped while his gun hand fell to his side. “Sweet Jesus,” he moaned.
“Well, look what you found after all.”
The young man staggered to the side of the road and squatted into his haunches. “What are you doing to me, mister?”
“I’m calling a halt to these monkeyshines and giving you something to reflect on.”
“My head’s splitting open,” the boy said, and vomited between his dusty shoes, a thin stream of yellow green puke, as if he had been eating grass for his breakfast.
“You’ll be all right in a while, long as you quit the vicinity and don’t never show your sorry face here again.”
At that, Brother Jobe gave Atlas some heel and the big mule resumed his stately walk. As he left Billy Bones on the roadside, the young man was weeping loudly in the sunshine.
FOURTEEN
The Reverend Loren Holder ventured onto the old steel-truss railroad bridge that spanned the Battenkill, thinking he was leaving his last footsteps on solid earth behind him forever. The notion to end his life had seized him in the night with a force comparable to true love, something sudden and irresistible. He’d worked out all the details mentally in the hours before dawn. Though his mood now was such that he seemed to be viewing the whole world through a narrow culvert, he retained enough presence of mind to see the despair that consumed him as a kind of object narrative, so that his life seemed like a story unspooling to this inexorable destination. The bridge. The river. The beautiful day. The end.
When he got to the middle of the bridge, he dawdled on a girder that supported the rusty old track and its half-rotten ties. He carried a length of rope looped over his shoulder like a mountaineer. It was a very good machine-made nylon
rope of the kind that was no longer manufactured or sold, another useful remnant of the old times. It occurred to him that whoever found him ought to be sure to keep the rope for some better use than the one he intended it for.
He peered over the edge of his precarious perch on the girder. It was a good forty-foot drop to the water. The river was low this time of year and he could see trout finning in the shallow pool down beside the central bridge abutment. These very trout, he thought, had been preceded by how many millions of generations of fish, and how many more would come after? And how many more seasons would revolve in the future history of this mysterious world before all the generations of everything would exhaust themselves? And then what? Would all the worlds and worlds and worlds of worlds fold in upon themselves to nothing? And what could prevent more worlds from emerging out of nothing after that? And might he, Loren, emerge new and whole out of the nothing he intended to enter this beautiful afternoon? He hardly dared hope to find out. A moment of vertigo left him trembling.
He felt a tear start down his cheek and quickly wiped it away, chiding himself for being a coward in the face of the infinite. He noted also that his strange view of things this day did not include a glimpse of the putative character known as God. He had given up on that personage some time ago, preferring to see a divine spark in his fellow human beings, who had, after all, dreamed up this great Lord and protector to avoid the lonely burdens of their own sanctity. And so, Loren reasoned, it was a more responsible thing to deny the existence of the deity to the very end than to succumb to the fairy tales about him and his celestial kingdom. That was Loren’s theory, and he was oddly satisfied with himself for having summed it up so concisely in his own mind, especially at this moment. It would allow him to enter the cosmic interstices between this life and whatever lay beyond it clear-eyed and honestly. He took the coil of rope off his shoulder, looked up into the truss work of the bridge, and tried to calculate which structural member above would be the most suitable to tie up to. This took his mind off metaphysics.
The Witch of Hebron Page 6
