The Witch of Hebron (17 page)

“They feed acorns to the pigs back home.”

“That’s all they’s good for in my book. Anyways, tomorrow you and me will be up in Glens Falls at Madam Amber’s house. Wait until you see what comes out of the kitchen up there. Katie Savage —she’s the cook—she was a whore, but she got too old and ugly. She knows her way around the stove, though. Meat pies, trouts and viands, puddings of all sorts, fine cakes and sweetmeats, punches hot and cold. You ever enjoyed a woman, Johnny?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’d think you would know one way or the other.”

“I kissed Susie Einhorn at the Battenville Grange.”

“Did you? You get any further?”

“We kept it up for a while.”

“Did you get your pecker wet?”

“No.”

“You know how it all works, don’t you?”

“I’m a doctor, aren’t I?” Jasper said.

“You’re a child is what you are.”

“I’ve seen women that died in my father’s office. Naked and laid out.”

“Have you? Hope you minded your manners around them.” Billy took a long pull from his bottle and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

“I know what their private parts look like,” Jasper said.

“Do you know how to work your own parts?”

Jasper picked silently at a strip of meat. He had defeated his hunger entirely and the gaminess of the roast kid was asserting itself unpleasantly.

“I guess that’s just another thing Billy Bones’ll have to teach you. Now that I’m rich, I vow I’ll treat you to one of the girls when we get to Glens Falls tomorrow and your education in that department will be under way. Let’s see them nuts over here.”

Jasper shoved over the wooden box of shelled butternuts. Billy poured some honey into the lid of the honey jar and daintily dipped the nuts in it one after another, inviting Jasper to share. As the rain fell harder, more of it entered the hole in the ceiling, and the fire began to sputter. When the nuts were all gone, Billy got up, belched dramatically, and hung the remaining meat skewer from a wire that dangled off one wall where a lighting fixture had been ripped down.

“That’ll be our breakfast,” he said, “if the rats don’t get it first.” He kicked what remained of the fire, scattering embers across the concrete floor. “Grab your sack and that candle and let’s go up to the bunkhouse,” he added, then drained the last of the liquor, reared back, and pegged the bottle at the fireplace, where it smashed in a great fanfare of shards.

“What’d you do that for?” Jasper said. “That was a perfectly good bottle.”

“Aw, shut up, you little scold!”

Upstairs in the one room that was dry, Billy claimed his corner and Jasper defaulted to one diagonally across. Jasper put on his extra sweater, his wool hat, and a second pair of socks and wrapped himself up in his blanket like a mummy, keeping his eyes on Billy across the room. Billy kicked off his boots and unbuckled his belt, took off his bush knife, and planted his automatic pistol on the floor right beside it. Weaving on his feet from the effects of the brandy, and belching, Billy unbuttoned the front of his striped trousers and took out an impressive appendage that seemed to Jasper like an alien being with a life of its own, bobbing this way and that way as though searching some indeterminate horizon for prospects.

“This here’s what the ladies like best about Billy—the bone that made him famous. Big ’un, wouldn’t you say?”

Jasper lay frozen in vivid revulsion.

Billy addressed his organ with a kind of ceremonial tenderness, squeezing, patting, and shaking it.

“Do you have to do that?” Jasper said.

“Just thinking about those girls up north makes me crazy with the itch. Tomorrow at this time, I’ll be swimming in their sweet flesh. Titties and thighs. Wet lips. I’m gonna have each and every one of them in size order.”

“At least blow out the candle—”

“Shut up, you might learn something.”

“Learn to be disgusting—”

“Watch now. Here it comes.…”

He picked up the pace of his self-attentions, pumping and stroking with fierce animal commitment. Then he let out a howl as his back arched and he sent a few jets of his generative fluids against the wall of his corner. Afterward, he stood slumped and weaving in place with his shoulders hunched while his gasps reverted to simple breathing. Then, with a conclusive grunt, he shook out a few remaining drops and replaced the organ inside his striped trousers.

“Helps me sleep,” he mumbled as he sank to his knees, wrapped himself in his leather coat like a bat in its wings, and pulled a thin blanket from his bag. “God, I’m tired.”

He blew out the candle and within a minute he was snoring. Jasper closed his eyes, but his brain blazed with light. He thought of home and family and friends and town. But these thoughts only led to a recognition of how much trouble he was in and the impossibility of returning. He couldn’t help worrying about the woman tied up in the farmhouse and whether she’d managed to free herself or was locked in an upstairs closet, desperate with thirst, praying for help. He also wondered whether her father, the old man Billy had coldcocked with his gun, was still lying where he fell on the kitchen floor. He even stole downstairs with the idea of possibly going back to the house to rescue the two of them, but when he looked outside the rain was pouring off the roof in a sheet. The night couldn’t have been blacker, and he calculated that his chance of finding his way back to their house was close to zero, so he returned to the upstairs room and took refuge in his blanket again.

His thoughts now turned to the future, to his new life in Glens Falls. He determined to shake himself loose of Billy Bones as soon as possible once they arrived and to seek out opportunities to make himself useful in a doctoring way, perhaps attaching himself to a local physician, someone like his father, whom he might assist in exchange for a place to sleep and meals. In time, he thought, he would be able to set up on his own. These agitations finally subsided and he sank into a fervid sleep. He was dreaming about Willie when the lucid awareness that the pup was no longer alive provoked him back to waking. He had no idea what time it was. The rain had ceased and a big waxing moon shone through the skylight, illuminating the room more than the candle had. He sat up panting with fright and despair as the starkness of his situation came back into focus. It took a mighty effort to control his panic. He told himself that his chances of finding Glens Falls were better tagging along with the odious Billy Bones than striking out on his own in the dead of night. Anyway, this was possibly the only night he’d have to spend in Billy’s company, and it was probably not long until morning, when they would be on their way.

The bandit snored musically across the room. Jasper’s eyes fixed on the automatic pistol that lay on the floor beside him. He carefully untangled himself from his blanket and crept across the room to Billy’s corner. Billy continued to snore. Jasper reached out for the pistol. He had handled rifles before. His father let him shoot the Weatherby .240 that he hunted with, but ammunition was hard to come by, even for a man in Dr. Copeland’s position, who traded services for anything and everything. Ammunition in the county depended mostly on reloads these days, and the doctor was down to nine usable brass casings of the odd .240 caliber. His father also kept a Smith and Wesson nine-millimeter automatic in a drawer in his office. More than once, when he knew his father was off on a call around the county, Jasper took it out of its hiding place and handled it, though he’d never fired it. In fact, his father never showed it to him; he’d discovered it by accident below the counter where the autoclave sat, in a low drawer full of medical odds and ends. Billy Bones’s pistol, a Springfield .45, was impressively heavy. Jasper hefted it, aimed through the sights, and was examining its many complicated parts, levers, and stops, when he happened to notice that the butt of the pistol was empty. There was no magazine. He wondered if Billy Bones kept it hidden somewhere or if he just didn’t have one.

Billy stirred and groaned. Jasper froze, while his heart skittered. The bandit coughed, snorted, and flopped over onto his stomach. Jasper remained frozen just long enough to feel sure that Billy Bones had gone back to sleep. Then he replaced the pistol on the floor and stole back to his own corner, where sleep continued to elude him for hours while the moon sank out of view and the fetid room filled with daylight.

THIRTY

The last thing Stephen Bullock did before bedtime, in his capacity as town magistrate, was to sign a warrant directing Dr. Jeremy Copeland to exhume and examine the body of Shawn Watling and report his findings, the costs of which, labor included, were to be billed to the town of Union Grove, repayable in up to four dollars’ silver coin. He gave the folded and sealed document to his chore boy, Roger Lippy, for delivery in person the following day. Then Stephen Bullock retired to the bedroom upstairs in the large manor house that was the beating heart of his four-thousand-acre holdings.

The spacious, cheerful bedroom was wallpapered in a motif that featured pink cabbage roses, with a flowery chintz-upholstered wing chair in one corner. His wife Sophie’s dressing table stood between two large light-gathering windows, with curtains that matched the wallpaper. Two nineteenth-century landscapes of the upper Hudson Valley by the painter Hastings Lembert (1824–93), an ancestor, hung on the wall above a fine early Meiji (1871)
tansu
chest of drawers in
kiri
wood and chestnut. Bullock had picked it up forty years ago during his postcollege sojourn in Kyoto teaching English.

Sophie sat in bed reading by the light of her bedside electric lamp. Bullock’s farm was the only establishment in the vicinity of Union Grove that still enjoyed electricity. It was thanks to a small hydroelectric generator where the Battenkill made one final ten-foot leap before it flowed into the Hudson River. It put out fifty kilowatts of power, enough to light the main house, the barns, the workshops, and the cottages his “employees” had constructed for themselves on his property. Finding replacement lightbulbs was a problem now that trade had fallen off so sharply. He’d laid in as many as possible during the hoarding times that followed the bombings in Washington and Los Angeles and the fall of the government, but his supply had run down so severely that he’d had to stop giving new ones to his cottagers—they were going back to candles—and lightbulbs were not the kind of thing he was equipped to manufacture on the farm, though his workshops did turn out many useful items from glassware to harnesses.

“You look very handsome tonight,” Bullock remarked to his wife as he pulled off his blousy linen shirt and unbuttoned his riding trousers. She looked up over her reading glasses with a sly smile. She wore a silk nightgown that merely pretended to contain her abundant bosom. Bullock was observant enough to know that she tended to wear that particular article of clothing when she wanted his attention.

“Are you proposing to entertain me?” she asked.

“I’d be honored.”

She put down her book,
Them
, by Joyce Carol Oates, a novel of mid-twentieth-century family depravity, and threw back the covers on her husband’s side of the bed, patting the mattress to welcome him. He slipped between the cool, clean sheets until he was pressed warmly against the wife he adored. Soon he was kissing the little hollow below her ear where the wisps of silvery hair met her perfumed neck, as familiar a place to him as the wooded glens of his dreams, where he was forever young and on the hunt. She reached and turned out the light. His left hand ranged over the deeply contoured geography of her torso—as perpetually beautiful and interesting to him as the terrain of his own great farm—and she opened herself to him. Their ceremony was well practiced but no less pleasurable for its countless repetitions over the years. If anything, their comfort with each other only added to the pleasure they took together, along with their mutual wonder that they remained avid well into age. When their ceremony was complete, they lay panting, giggling, and whispering to each other in delight.

“Sleepy, now?” he asked.

“You know how I am,” she said. Indeed, the transports of love acted on Sophie Bullock as the most potent soporific. It was a joke between them. Bullock himself always claimed to be reenergized by lovemaking, as if he had taken a shot of espresso.

“Would you like me to read a bit to you?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. “What have you got, darling?”

“
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
, by Washington Irving.”

She let out a delighted little yelp.

“Halloween’s almost here,” he said.

“You love holidays, don’t you?”

“They’re more important now than in the old days, when there were more distractions.”

“Well, you go right ahead, but don’t mind me if I slip off to dreamland.”

Bullock kissed her damp forehead, reached for the lamp on his night table, and put on his reading glasses.

“
In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson
,” he began reading aloud, “
at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town
—”

Bullock stopped reading at the apprehension of strange noises emanating from somewhere in the house, something banging, a dull thud, a squeak. The old house was alive in its own way, always heaving and groaning with the weather and the seasons. And there were the two servants who lived in the house, Lilah the cook and Jenny the housekeeper, who sometimes moved about downstairs late at night, getting something from the kitchen or the library.

But then Bullock heard a commotion on the stairs. He flung his book aside just as three figures crashed through the bedroom door and stopped in their tracks, apparently dazzled by the electric light. Bullock knew at once what they were. The three figures—bearded, bundled in close-fitting clothing, like soldiers, with trousers tucked into the boot tops, yet not in any discernable uniform—gaped in awe at what they had discovered and not just at the finery of the room. Sophie Bullock, shocked into waking, had been prepared for a moment like this by her husband and by her own intelligence. She sat up in bed beside her husband and drew the bedclothes above her bosom. The Bullocks and the intruders stared squarely at one another in steely resolve during that interminable instant before one of them spoke.