The Witch of Hebron (14 page)

TWENTY-THREE

Robert Earle and Dr. Jerry Copeland rode southwest on the Coot Hill Road, watchful and glum 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 A
CTIVISTS
P
USH
T
OUGHER
R
ULES FOR
T
APPING
G
ROUNDWATER
. 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 night.”

“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.

A small sheet-metal stove had been recently installed in the bedroom, and when Brother Jobe came in from the sad chore of burying Jupiter, he found Brother Boaz laying a fire. Brother Boaz served as Brother Jobe’s manservant, though he was not formally referred to as such. He simply made himself as useful as possible and was not assigned to any other duties required in such a large operation as the New Faith brotherhood. If anything, Brother Jobe referred to Brother Boaz simply as “my right hand.”

A beeswax taper burned on the bedside table, throwing eerie shadows on the wall. The splints flaring in the little stove put Brother Jobe in mind of Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. Sometimes, he reflected, the Lord wants to see if you can stand the heat. He remembered the night a few months earlier when the flesh of his flesh, Minor, was shot dead by the miscreant Wayne Karp. He pictured the sweet-faced visage of his wife, Hannah, who had been killed in an automobile crash before the Holy Land War put the kibosh on oil and the whole grisly spectacle of the USA carnival on wheels unraveled. He didn’t miss the NASCAR, that embodiment of wickedness and foolery, one bit. Gazing into the flames, he marveled at the miraculous survival of himself and his people in the fiery furnace of the new times and wondered what further travails awaited them all. Just thinking about it all brought on the peculiar feeling of being uncomfortable in his own skin.

Shuddering, he poured himself two fingers of corn whiskey from a crystal decanter on the chest of drawers and sat gingerly on the edge of his bed. He felt a dull ache in his lower abdomen and wondered if it was something he ate. The squash pudding? The collards? The mashed turnips? They hadn’t served meat in a week. A fugitive thought: Scour the countryside for piglets! Maybe, he thought further, they should have stewed poor Jupiter instead of burying him. But there was the matter of what had poisoned him, and he didn’t want to poison the whole ding-dang New Faith outfit. And there was the matter of
who
poisoned him. Dwelling on the problem accentuated his feeling of dull, creepy unease.

“Anything else you might need tonight, sir?” Boaz asked.

It took Brother Jobe a few moments to come out of himself.

“You might send for Sister Susannah,” he said. “There are some verses I’d like to have transcribed for Sunday.”

“I’ll fetch her right away, sir.”

Boaz left the room. Brother Jobe peeled off his clothing, hung his black frock coat and trousers on pegs beside the chest of drawers, tossed his suit of underwear in a basket hamper, and donned a long cotton nightshirt. He wearily drew back the bedclothes and inserted his legs between the sheets as though he were filing a bad memory of himself in a folder that might be mercifully lost and forgotten in the cosmic bureaucracy of sleep. The wind was picking up outside, rattling the windowpanes in their old industrial sashes.

By and by, Boaz returned to Brother Jobe’s quarters alone.

“It’s Sister Susannah’s time of the month,” he said.

“Is that so.”

“Apparently.”

“Transcription of holy verse will have to wait then.”

“Maybe I can help with that—”

“I’ll work on accounts instead,” Brother Jobe said. “Fetch Sister Annabelle.”

When Boaz left, Brother Jobe reached for the small mouth harp on his bedside table and began blowing a medley of songs remembered from his Virginia homeland: “He’s Gone Away,” “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” “Barbara Allen,” and a full-out, especially lachrymose rendition of the inevitable “Shenandoah.” His performance brought tears to his own eyes. He was weeping loudly when Sister Annabelle entered the chamber.

Sister Annabelle was a stately young woman of twenty-three with a lithe figure and the dark hair and eyes of her Greek American parents who had run a chain of pizza shops from Norfolk to Richmond in the old times. She had excellent business sense and was in charge of the clothing store—the “haberdash”—that the New Faith order had recently opened on Union Grove’s Main Street. She moved into place at the foot of the bed, across from the pink-faced figure weeping in his nightclothes, her strong-featured face clouded with concern.