The Witch of Hebron (10 page)

“Too bad. The bass is a noble creature.”

“Well, up here we consider them trash fish. This is trout country.”

SEVENTEEN

Robert Earle and the doctor walked their horses steadily north up old Route 29 in the low afternoon sunshine, scanning the road, fields, hillsides, and ridgelines for a glimpse of Jasper. A wonderful perfume of the season hung in the air, a combination of ripe apples, burning cornstalks, and the rot of fallen leaves. The landscape they traversed came alive intermittently with figures laboring at one thing or another: stooking up barley sheaves, forking hay, digging potatoes, spreading manure, harrowing fields behind a team, repairing walls. It looked, at times, the doctor thought, like a scene out of Van Gogh, complete with one weary figure napping sweetly up against a haystack on a back quarter of the Schmidt farm. The two often stopped to inquire if anyone had seen a boy of eleven making his way on the roads or fields. No one could say that they had seen such a boy.

By late afternoon, some twelve miles northeast of Union Grove, with the sun kissing the voluptuous summit of Lloyd’s Hill and the temperature dropping, they came upon a well-kept homestead, a cottage in the gothic style surrounded by an extensive compound of beautifully tended gardens. The garden closest to the house was planted mostly with herbals, the doctor noted—sprawling borage, stately angelica, blue green wormwood, drifts of mint, shaggy humps of cannabis, burdock, tansy, rue, lovage, as well as other things that he couldn’t identify. Behind the herb garden, hops climbed up a twenty-foot tepee of saplings, and chickens strutted in a little hen yard surrounded by a wattle fence. There were several outbuildings, including a substantial barn. It looked like new construction, Robert noted. A brindle horse grazed in a paddock beyond the barn and a cow in a pasture behind that. White smoke curled out of a fieldstone chimney at the back of the house. Twilight was settling over the property like a soft velvet cloak.

“We might inquire about spending the night here,” Robert said. “They look like clean, decent people.”

The doctor thought about the alternative, camping out in the cold. “All right,” he said.

They dismounted, tied their horses to some lilacs growing by the stone wall along the road, went up the porch steps to the front door, and knocked. A woman of startling appearance soon answered. Her hair was silvery, but she had an ageless unlined face that did not match. Upon seeing the two men, she offered a reserved, mysterious smile, as if, perhaps, she was pleased to discover that a package she’d expected had been delivered. She looked to Robert like a ghost of something from the lost world of movies or magazines—an actress, a model, the girl in a vodka ad in a
Vanity Fair
. It rocked him for a moment, but her magnetic presence soon brought him sharply back to himself. She wore a full patchwork skirt of vibrantly colored satin pieces, arrayed in sweeping diagonals according to the ranks of the spectrum, like a sash made of rainbows descending from her hips. Above she wore a black long-sleeved tunic, belted so that her figure was on display. An herbal perfume radiated from her: notes of rosemary, tansy, bee balm.

“Afternoon, uh, ma’am,” the doctor said, with something catching in his throat. He proceeded to explain who they were, that they were searching for his eleven-year-old son who had run away from home down in Union Grove, and he asked whether she had seen the boy.

“No,” she said.

“The thing is, ma’am,” Robert said, “we’re going to continue our search tomorrow.”

“Of course,” the woman said.

“We were wondering if we could possibly put up for the night here. Maybe sleep in the barn.”

“We can pay,” the doctor said.

“Silver coin,” Robert added. Paper money was disdained in the new times. Hard metal currency was preferred, though scarce.

She looked each of them up and down, sizing them up, apparently comfortable with what she saw. Her poise was as striking as her costume and demeanor.

“All right,” she said. “You can stay here tonight.”

“We’re upright and straightforward,” Robert said.

“You better be. I imagine you’d like a hot supper.”

The doctor and Robert spoke simultaneously:

“You don’t have to trouble yourself,” the doctor said.

“That would be kind of you,” Robert said. “We’ll pay for that, too, of course.”

“It’d be my pleasure,” the woman said and turned to the doctor. “You must be terribly worried about your boy.”

“I am,” he said.

“You can turn out your horses with mine back there,” she said, pointing behind the house. “You’ll find hay and oats in the barn, and some feed buckets. Help yourselves.”

“Why, that’s very generous, ma’am,” Robert said.

“I’d like to improve your chances of finding what you’re looking for. Besides, I could stand some company,” she said. “My name is Barbara Maglie.” She held out a hand to each of them in turn and shook firmly as they introduced themselves. Her hand was long-fingered and delicate but red from work in the garden and kitchen. Her touch was warm and vaguely electric.

“When you’ve settled your horses come to the back door. I’ll be in the kitchen.”

Robert undressed the horses while the doctor fetched two buckets of oats and a big wad of hay from the barn, which was immaculately kept. Out in the paddock there was a hand pump beside a wooden trough. The horses seemed relaxed and content there. After the men stashed their tack and gear in the barn, they reported to the back door of the house, as instructed. The exterior had been painted recently, a rich buttery yellow with white trim. Commercial paints of that quality had not been available for years and Robert wondered how she had accomplished it.

Barbara Maglie admitted them to the rear addition to the house, which comprised a large kitchen. She had set more than a few beeswax candles around the big room against the failing daylight. They cast a soft glow on what was clearly a hardworking production center but also a place of striking charm and style. A substantial soapstone sink occupied the near window wall, with a red-handled brass hand pump at one end. A long library table ran perpendicularly to it, opposed at the other wall by a claw-foot cookstove with bright nickel handles and appointments, and an attached hot-water reservoir. Robert had been searching for such a stove for years. It was the sort of thing that was no longer manufactured anywhere in the vicinity of Washington County. A cat snoozed on a fleece beside the hot-water reservoir. On a large ceiling rack above the stove hung a formidable array of pots and pans, many of them heavy-gauge copper, all polished and gleaming in the candlelight. Half the library table was occupied with small pumpkins, Turk’s head and butternut squashes, and large globe onions with traces of garden soil on their skins.

“I’ve been canning,” Barbara Maglie said, tossing a chunk of maple wood in the stove’s firebox. “Have a seat.”

She gestured beyond the library table, at the center of the big room, where a comfortable old sofa was grouped with a wing chair, a couple of spindle-back rockers, and a drop-leaf coffee table on a red and gold Oriental rug. Several large books lay stacked on it, with a picture history of New York City on top. The darker side of the room behind the seating contained two more long tables, one with a marble pastry slab. Shelves full of glass jars, bottles, bins, and books filled the entire far wall, except for a gothic window at the center. Strings of garlic, onions, and red chili peppers hung from the ceiling beams along with some drying crookneck gourds that were destined to become birdhouses, and a collection of baskets. A wonderful buttery aroma emanated from the stove. Some additional pots stood on the stovetop. Robert wondered at their contents and his stomach growled.

“Listen to you!” Barbara Maglie said.

“Sorry, ma’am.”

“Call me Barbara. Do you like chicken pie?”

“That sounds too good to be true, Barbara.”

“Oh it’s true. You must be thirsty, too.”

They agreed that they were. She disappeared down a stairway into the cellar with a candle, returning shortly with a plastic gallon jug of cider and a small wheel of cheese. She brought these items to the coffee table before the sofa and then brought over a bottle of brandy, a candlestick, some glasses, a wooden cutting board, and a knife, which she stabbed into the cheese.

“It’s like a Queso de Aracena,” she said. “Goat’s milk. The rind is edible.”

“Did you make it yourself?”

“No, I traded for it. I can’t do everything myself.”

She poured them each a bolt of the brandy with a cider chaser, and a cider for herself, and left the brandy bottle on the coffee table.

“Oh lord that’s good,” the doctor said.

“This is a lovely place,” Robert said. “Do you mind my asking, is there someone else in the picture here?”

“Besides the two of you?”

“A husband.”

“No,” Barbara said. “There used to be. Before.”

“Children?”

“A grown daughter. She was last in San Francisco as far as I know. It’s been more than a few years now. I worry.”

Robert told her about his son, Daniel, who had gone off to see what happened to America when he was nineteen, two years ago, how he’d set off with the teenage son of his good friend, the congregational minister, and that they hadn’t been heard from since.

“I keep expecting him to walk in the door any day, though,” Robert said.

“Well, maybe he will,” Barbara said.

They all addressed their cider glasses a quiet moment. Barbara poured the two men another shot of brandy.

“It must be difficult for you out here all alone,” Robert said.

“I like it. Do you remember what Georgia O’Keeffe said? No, of course you don’t. Why would you? She said the cure for loneliness is solitude.”

The doctor smiled slightly. “That’s good,” he said.

“You don’t worry about pickers and vagabonds out here?” Robert said.

“My cats protect me,” she said, then made a fierce face and held up her hand as if it were claw-filled, and let out a growl. Even the doctor laughed.

She adjourned to her stove and, in a little while, called the men to the cleared end of the library table, where she set three places with antique bone-handled flatware and napkins in silver rings.

Her chicken pie came to the table in a big copper pan with about a third of it already missing.”

“Leftovers,” Barbara said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

“It’s magnificent,” the doctor said, his hunger excited by the brandy.

She set down a big wooden salad bowl full of rocket and sliced pears dressed with vinegar, bacon fat, and fresh thyme, then went back to the stove to fetch a pot of collard greens braised in butter, onions, and cider. A basket of corn bread with a ramekin of butter arrived last. Her table reminded Robert of a particular restaurant he had loved back in Boston in the old days. It used to boast that all its ingredients came from within a hundred miles of the city. Now there was no other option.

“Grace,” she said. “There. Let’s eat.”

“You don’t stand on ceremony, do you?” Robert said.

“Ha!” Barbara said, heaping chicken pie and collards on their plates.

“You’re not from here, are you?” Robert said.

“Neither are you, I’d guess,” she said.

“Boston area,” Robert said. “Can I ask how you happened to end up here?”

“Well, sure,” she said, dandling her fork, the silver tines gleaming in the candlelight, which, in turn, reflected in her dark eyes. “We lived in New York. This was our country place. I’d done some modeling. I met Albert, my husband, on a Grey Goose shoot—”

“Grey Goose vodka?” Robert said, struggling to speak with his mouth full.

“That’s right. One of Albert’s accounts. It was his agency. After Nine/Eleven I wanted a place outside the city. I mean really far outside the city. This place is really far. In the old days it took us four and a half hours to get up here in a car. Except I came here alone, mostly. Albert wanted to be in the Hamptons. I guess you could say our interests diverged. I’d accumulated some real estate in the city over the years with my modeling money, in Chelsea and the West Village. I had my own income from rentals in them. After the Wall Street crash, New York got very depressing. I spent more and more time up here. By then, Andrea, our daughter, was off in Berkeley. Of course the place was a wreck when we first got it.”

“The barn out there looks new,” Robert said.

“It was built last year.”

“You do it yourself?”

“God, no.”

“Who renovated the house?”

“I had some help.”

“They did a fine job.”

“Outstanding,” said the doctor, who had been eating with single-minded intensity. “The whole place is charming as hell. Amazing really, considering.”

“What happened to Albert?” Robert said.

“I put a spell on him.”

“What kind of spell?”

“I turned him into a rat.”

“I see,” Robert said, though he didn’t see at all.

“His whole identity was wrapped up in the agency, and when that went, well… I haven’t been back in the city for eight years now. My property is still there, I suppose, but the rents don’t come in anymore. I haven’t heard from anyone in New York since the phones went out. When was that?”

“Five years ago,” the doctor said. “What were your friends still doing there?”

“Waiting for things to return to normal.”

“I knew people like that back in Boston,” Robert said.

“They must have been very disappointed,” the doctor said.

“I miss the electricity,” Barbara said.

“Don’t we all,” Robert said.

“Ever try to set a compound fracture by candlelight?” the doctor said. “Sorry. I guess that’s not really table talk.”

“Your boy will come back home,” Barbara said.

“You think so?”

“I know it.”

“How so?”

“Just a feeling.”

“We’ll find him,” Robert said.

“He’ll come home even if you don’t find him,” Barbara said.

“What do you mean by that?” the doctor said.

“He’ll find you again when the time comes,” she said.

The doctor gazed at her a long moment, then sighed and drained his cider glass.