The Witch of Hebron

by James Howard Kunstler

  She glared at him a moment, then softened slightly.

  “All right, damn you. But don’t you come inside this time. Wait out here.”

  As soon as she turned back inside, Billy Bones tiptoed up the porch steps, slithered around Jasper, and entered the kitchen like a weasel entering a poultry house. Jasper heard a sharp cry—the woman—and then Billy calling for him to come inside, too. Jasper entered the house and found Billy red-faced, brandishing his big pistol before the woman, who stood quivering against the sink.

  “I knew you were a picker, you little shit,” she said to Jasper, practically spitting.

  “Pickers?” Billy cried. “Goddamn it, we’re bandits!” He proceeded to explain the distinction before offering to sing his ballad.

  “Keep your song to yourself, you scum,” she said.

  “Scum?” Billy said. “Us? My protégé here doctors you up and all he asks is a little supper and you threaten him with a weed hook? A goddamn child! Don’t you have a motherly bone in that ugly carcass? I got half a mind to gut-shoot you.”

  He waved the pistol closer to her face. The woman screamed. A commotion down the hall signaled the arrival of the father. He had barely stepped into the room when Billy Bones shoved the muzzle of the pistol up against his face. The terrified man, in obvious pain, had changed into different clothing that was not much cleaner than the outfit Jasper had found him in earlier. Billy Bones appeared to swell upward like an orchestra conductor summoning a momentous chord and then brought the butt of his pistol crashing into the side of the man’s head. He hit the floor like a grain sack. Blood poured out of a gash above his ear.

  “Guess who won’t be getting doctored now?” Billy muttered. “Too damn bad.” The woman continued screaming. “Shut up!” he said. “Or you’ll be down there with him!” Then to Jasper: “While I sing my song, see what you can find in these cabinets. Go on!”

  Jasper brought a wobbly chair over to the cabinets and stood on it as he rummaged through them. The woman fell into sobs while Billy sang half a dozen quatrains of his song and the man remained motionless on the floor. Jasper found two jars of cider jelly in one cabinet and a jar of dried lima beans in another. A ceramic jar decorated like a keg contained coarse-ground cornmeal. He emptied a quart jar of dried rose hips onto the floor and scooped the jar full of the meal. Wild rose hips were rampant this time of year. He jammed the box of shelled butternuts into his backpack. All he found in the remaining cabinets was a small jar of honey.

  By this time, Billy Bones concluded his song. He asked the woman where she kept her cheese and meats.

  She pointed to a door and said, “Cold room,” before resuming her sobs.

  Jasper didn’t have to be told to look in there. On an otherwise bare shelf he found a jagged cake of hard cheese under a brown bowl and two onions with the field dirt still on them.

  “No butter,” he said, stuffing the cheese into his sack.

  “We don’t have a cow,” the woman said between sobs.

  “Any hams or bacon in there?” Billy yelled across the room.

  “None that I can see.” On a pantry counter on the other side of the cold room, among stacks of old soup plates, platters, tureens, and other items for table service, Jasper spied the same bottle of plum brandy that he had used as a disinfectant a few hours before. It was still half full. “There’s a bottle of brandy in here.”

  “You don’t say! Hot damn.”

  “I don’t have room for it in my pack.”

  “You let me worry about that bottle. Bring her on out.”

  Jasper came back and handed over the bottle. Billy held it at arm’s length, regarding it with a look of incandescent satisfaction. He pulled the wooden stopper and glugged down three big swallows.

  “Ah!” he said. “That’s what I call medicine!” Then, to the woman, he growled, “Where’s the money?”

  “What money?”

  “The money you got.”

  “There’s no money here,” she said.

  Billy dipped his upper body in a guffaw.

  “Do I have to tear the place apart? I will.”

  She did not answer, so he set the liquor bottle on the table among the cabbages, dragged her out of the room, and down the hall. While they were gone, Jasper searched through the kitchen drawers, finding little besides a jar of red chili pepper seeds. Somewhere vaguely overhead, he heard things bang around along with muffled voices and cries and sobs. The man on the floor stirred once and groaned but did not get up. Soon Billy Bones returned to the kitchen without the woman. Thumping sounds above suggested to Jasper that Billy had locked the woman up.

  “Feel this here,” Billy said, indicating a lump on the side of his pants. “Go ahead, touch it.”

  Jasper fingered the lump. He surmised it was a pocketful of coins.

  “Bunch of silver coin and one gold half eagle,” Billy said. “I’m rich! How’s the old mister doing?”

  “He moved.”

  “He’s lucky I didn’t kill him,” Billy said, directing his voice to the body on the floor. “And if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll lay low right there for the next half hour or so, or sure as my name is Billy Bones I will put a bullet in the back of his head.”

  With that, Billy used hand gestures to tell Jasper that they should go. Jasper slung on his pack and followed Billy out the door. Billy led him around the house to the other side where the goats were browsing in a nubbly paddock.

  “Take this and wait here,” he told Jasper, handing him the brandy bottle.

  Billy let himself into the paddock through a gate of battered steel pipe and rusty chain-link. The goats came to him as if they knew him. He stooped to pet them. Jasper didn’t really apprehend the exact moment when Billy caught one of the smaller goats in a headlock, drew the bush knife off his belt, and slit the animal’s throat. The goat kicked two or three times and made a gurgling noise. The other goats skittered across the paddock and then went about their browsing, insensible to what had happened. Billy stooped to the carcass on the ground. When he was sure it was dead, he separated the little goat’s head from its body in a few deft strokes. Jasper took it all in with a sense of paralyzing despair. He watched as Billy picked up the goat’s head, held it above his own, and ran across the paddock to where the other goats browsed, as if to gambol with them. They scattered. He seemed to lose interest in this game almost instantly and chucked the goat’s head among the other goats. He returned to the dead goat, gutted it, butchered off its hindquarters, and left the rest in a red heap. Finally, holding each hindquarter like a club, he left the paddock and shut the gate behind him.

  “What’d you do that for?” Jasper asked.

  “You like meat for your supper, don’t you?”

  Jasper did not reply.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Billy said. “That’s what it takes to get meat in this world. Something has to give up its life, you know. I don’t relish doing it. You eat meat, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then. Come on, let’s get out of here. I left my sack in those woods up the hill. We’ll find a hideout for the night and have a fine supper and get warm and I’ll school you in the ways of the road.”

  They proceeded together back across the field of pumpkin and squashes.

  “What did you do with the woman?” Jasper asked halfway up the hill.

  “I tied her to a bed frame. The old geezer’ll untie her.”

  “What if he doesn’t wake up again?”

  “He’ll be all right.”

  “We don’t know how bad he’s injured.”

  “What’s it to you if he ever gets off that floor?”

  “Who’ll untie that woman?”

  “What do you care?” Billy said, slinging his bag over his shoulder. “She was going to take a weeding hook to you. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Robert Earle and Dr. Jerry Copeland rode southwest on the Coot Hill Road, watchful and gl
um in the fading daylight. They had been crisscrossing the roads between Hebron and Argyle all day long, using an old topo map from the U.S. Geological Survey that had been folded and unfolded so many times over the years it barely hung together. They had seen many curious things since leaving Barbara Maglie’s house that morning—a red-tailed hawk eating a pine martin, a man being flogged in an apple orchard while nine other men on his crew looked on, a dead ox rotting in a locust grove off the Goose Island Road—but they encountered no sign whatever of the doctor’s son.

  Robert and the doctor had ridden most of the day in silence, each lost in observation and thought. Now the doctor became aware that his horse was walking just a little off its customary gait. He dismounted, took a position at the horse’s forequarter, and hoisted up its leg.

  “He’s lost a shoe,” the doctor said.

  Robert knew what that meant but also knew that it was the doctor’s call. He remained silent in his saddle.

  “We’ll have to go back,” the doctor said. “For now.”

  It was eleven miles back to Union Grove. Leading their horses on foot, they knew they would not get back to town before dark.

  The silence persisted as they marched into the low-hanging sun.

  The tiny hamlet of Argyle still had a store, an ancient establishment offering a scant array of local trade goods: grain, honey, eggs and milk, bacon, dried fruit, sauerkraut, candles, jack cider, old and new furniture, and tinware. The proprietor, one Miles English, was a man of fifty with a head too small for his body, like a chicken’s. He was just closing for the day, locking the front door of the old brick building, which had been a store since the time William Henry Harrison occupied the White House. For a while in the twentieth century it had even featured a pair of gasoline pumps out front. They were long gone now. When Robert and the doctor came by, Miles English was not altogether pleasant about seeing to their needs, but he grudgingly reopened the store for them. The doctor bought a pint of 100-proof jack and took a long pull from the bottle as soon as he got his hands on it.

  “Don’t drink in the store,” English said.

  “We’ve come a long way.”

  “I don’t care where you come from or where you’re going. Just don’t drink in the store.”

  “Do you have any corn bread made up?” Robert asked.

  “Meal only.”

  “Any cheese?”

  “No cheese today.”

  “Sausage?”

  “None today.”

  “A hard-boiled egg?”

  “None.”

  “You got any food made up that doesn’t require preparation?”

  “This is not that kind of store.”

  “Dried fruit?”

  “I’ve got dried apples.”

  Robert bought two pounds of dried apples wrapped in a cone of old yellowed newspaper that carried the headline ACTIVISTS PUSH TOUGHER RULES FOR TAPPING GROUNDWATER. The local section of the Glens Falls Post-Star was dated April 20, 2009. The price for the apples was 150 paper dollars or a dime in silver coin. The jack was 500 paper or a silver quarter. The doctor paid for all of it in silver. Robert wolfed down apple rings as English examined the coins in the meager light of a window until he appeared satisfied.

  “If you eat too much of them, you’ll get the shits,” the doctor said.

  “Mind your language in here,” English said. “Anything else you need? I’d like to get on with closing up.”

  “We’re looking for a boy,” the doctor said.

  “A boy for what purpose?” English said. “Sport or labor?”

  The doctor glared at the storekeeper for a long moment as if trying to puzzle something out. Then, having come to a certain conclusion, he reached across the counter and seized English by the frayed collar of his threadbare flannel shirt.

  “My son ran away from home some two days ago and we’ve been searching the county for him,” he said.

  “I ain’t seen him.”

  “Are you carrying on some kind of trade in wayward boys?”

  “Take it easy,” English said. “You’re hurting me.”

  “I can hurt you a lot more if you don’t give me a straight answer.”

  “I don’t trade in boys.”

  “Then why did you say that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The doctor tightened his grip.

  “You can explain better than that.”

  “Just playing the joker card,” English croaked.

  “It wasn’t very funny.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry!”

  The doctor let go of English’s collar with a little shove so that the storekeeper bumped against the back counter, rattling a row of glass jars.

  “I’m the doctor down in Union Grove. If you see a wayward boy of eleven years old around here, you send word down to me immediately. His name is Jasper Copeland.”

  “Yessir.”

  “I’m going to ask around about you in the meantime. If it turns out you’re selling wayward boys out of here, you’ll be a storekeeper in this county no longer. Do we understand each other?”

  English nodded vigorously.

  Robert, still chomping on his dried apples, followed the doctor out the door and they resumed their march homeward.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Reverend Loren Holder, sitting at the table of his spacious rectory kitchen, studied the sun going down over Pumpkin Hill until it vanished with a little orange flash. Not long afterward, his wife, Jane Ann, came in from foraging mushrooms behind the reservoir at the edge of town. She put the basket on the kitchen table where her husband might admire them, being an enthusiastic cook. But he seemed lost in thought.

  “I came back from school at noon,” she said, “but you weren’t here or over in the church, either.”

  “Charles Pettie’s father passed away. I was called over there to help make funeral arrangements.”

  “I didn’t know he was ill.”

  “He wasn’t. He was old. Anyway, I was over there.”

  “How come you didn’t fire the stove?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She got up and stuffed some pinecones, birch bark, and splints into the big cookstove’s firebox and set a match to it. When she was satisfied the splints were going, she shoved some larger split logs in, returned to the table, and sat down.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  She wasn’t so sure.

  “Ned Allison told me something disturbing this morning.”

  “What’s that?”

  She described what Ned thought they had seen Perry Talisker doing in his shack by the river, and she tried to convey the boy’s anxiety that the hermit might have had something to do with the disappearance of Jasper Copeland. Loren seemed to come out of himself.

  “I never thought the hermit was a danger to anyone,” he said.

  “What do we really know about him?” she asked.

  Loren shifted heavily in his seat. “Nobody has ever complained about him.”

  “The boy is still missing,” she said. “And you’re the acting constable.”

  “This kind of thing can lead to a witch hunt,” he said. “You put sex in the picture and people get hysterical.”

  “Somebody should at least go over and talk to him.”

  Loren hesitated a moment, then said, “Okay. I’ll go talk to him in the morning.”

  “Thank you. And one more thing.”

  He turned to look at her directly for the first time and was struck by how beautiful she was in the sparse purple light. “What?” he asked.

  “I want to apologize,” she said.

  “What for.”

  “The time with Robert.”

  Loren sighed. “Well, we all agreed on the arrangement,” he said.

  “We made a mistake. It ended up hurting both of us.”

  “If Robert didn’t have a girl of his own now, you might still be there every Thursday n
ight.”

  “Does that mean you won’t accept my apology?”

  “No, I will, I will,” Loren said and, bringing a hand up to his brow, began to cry quietly.

  Jane Ann reached across the table for his other hand, took it in both of hers, and kissed it. The fire in the cookstove was beginning to heat up the large room.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Brother Jobe and five New Faith brothers stood near the edge of the woods in drizzling rain over a large hole in the ground. On the other side of the hole lay the dead stallion, Jupiter. A mule team had dragged his bloated body there from the pasture where he was poisoned. Four locust fence posts were levered under his body over the fulcrum of a thick pine log. Brother Jobe spoke a homily about how Jesus was born in a stable, a house for horses, and how the newborn king was laid in a manger, a box that horses eat out of, and how the horse therefore is imbued with the power of Jesus by the act of eating from the manger. Next he offered a prayer for the soul of Jupiter and another prayer for a fitting replacement, and then four of the brothers levered Jupiter over the edge into his grave. With tears disguised by the drizzle, Brother Jobe left them filling the hole, and returned to his quarters in the former high school.

  Brother Jobe’s personal quarters consisted of what had once been the high school principal’s suite of offices. The outermost, where the secretary once sat, now served as his study and sitting room, while the innermost became his bedroom. The suite contained furnishings that were familiar and comfortable to him, carted all the way to Washington County, New York, from the far reaches of Virginia—a tulipwood bed, a chest of drawers that featured a bas-relief Indian head carved by his great-grandfather, an Enoch Woodard–made shelf clock that once graced the mantle of his childhood home, and a large framed photograph of his mother and father taken in the lot of their Ford automobile dealership. There was no kitchen in the suite, as Brother Jobe took his meals with the others in the school’s cafeteria. He did, however, enjoy a private bathroom. He was quite satisfied with his new living arrangement.