The Witch of Hebron (18 page)

“I’ve been expecting something like you for a long time,” Bullock said.

“That’s nice,” said the tallest one, who wore a leather helmet leaking coyote fur, with an eagle crudely embroidered on a patch at the forehead. “It’ll save us all a lot of bother. Just take us to where the gold is.”

“What makes you think there is any?”

“Oh, come on. How could there not be in a place like this?”

While Bullock sized up the trio, he heard a scream from below and assumed it came from Jenny or Lilah.

“If you harm any of my people, you’ll pay,” he said.

“You’re not calling the shots here just now,” said the apparent leader, who brandished a very large revolver. He used its long barrel as a pointer, gesturing to reinforce his instructions. “Get out of the rack, Mr. Big.”

Bullock threw back the sheets and sprang to the floor with an athleticism that surprised the intruders as much as his state of complete nakedness.

“Check out the missus,” said another of the intruders, shorter and younger than the first. He wielded a sawed-off pump shotgun and sported a head rag that had once been a small American flag. A spray of blond hair leaked out from under it. “Nice-looking for an older gal.”

Sophie Bullock didn’t flinch.

The muffled screams continued from below.

The third member of the trio, black-haired and broadly built, with a tight-cropped beard and no visible weapon, approached the bed and seized the end of the blankets. Sophie resisted, but the burly man succeeded in yanking them off. She threw her arms across her bosom against the inadequacy of her nightgown.

“You come with me,” the leader told Bullock.

“I’m not leaving my wife alone with your gorillas.”

As though to emphasize the obvious, the shorter one unzipped his fly.

“These here boys are gentlemen,” the leader said. “They just need some mothering.”

The screams from downstairs had become sobs.

“Can I put my pants on?” Bullock asked.

“Go ahead.”

The dark-bearded hulk fingered Sophie Bullock’s silk nightgown. She issued a strangled cry of distress, while trying desperately to maintain her composure. The nightgown came away with a ripping sound. Sophie drew up her thigh in a posture of protection. Bullock calmly went to the wing chair in the corner where he had deposited his riding breeches. He pulled them on and fastened the buttons, keeping his eyes on the tall one in the leather helmet with the eagle on it. Then he reached casually beside the curtained window and pulled a braided cord, which set off a blaring electric klaxon on the roof.

“What the hell?” the dark-haired hulk said. The three intruders all shared a troubled glance. In that distracted instant, Bullock reached beside the wing chair into a bronze umbrella stand and withdrew from a sharkskin scabbard the twenty-six-inch-long
katana
, or samurai sword, that had been another of his acquisitions during his Japanese sojourn. The rigorous training he had undergone in those years returned to him unfailingly. He wheeled around and swung the weapon at the one who had been issuing instructions. The motion was so fluid and exact that for a moment a mere red line appeared between the man’s beard and his shoulders. But then his legs wobbled and his body collapsed in a heap on the rug, while bright arterial blood gushed out of the stump of his neck and his detached head, still in its leather helmet, bounced on the floor and rolled up against the chest of drawers. The young, flag-headed accomplice barely had time to goggle at the spectacle before Bullock delivered a thrust of the sword cleanly through the young man’s sternum, sectioning the heart from top to bottom and separating its owner from his life so efficiently that his brain was able to behold his own death for several seconds before he, too, crashed to the floor. The third one had the presence of mind to lunge for his companion’s sawed-off shotgun, but he also presented the back of his neck so perfectly to Bullock that a minimum of effort was required to remove his head. The eyes could be seen rolling in the head as it became lodged between the legs of the dressing table.

When all three lay dead on the floor, with just the residual twitching of their shocked nervous systems, Bullock wrested the revolver from the dead leader’s hand, grabbed the sawed-off shotgun from the floor, and hurried out of the room. Sophie remained naked on the bed above the fallen, bleeding intruders, her screams subsumed in the noise of the klaxon, which had succeeded in summoning the men from Bullock’s village up the hill. They now swarmed around the house, barns, and workshops of Bullock’s manor in the rain, rounding up nine other intruders at gunpoint in the electric floodlights which were part of the alarm system that tripped when Bullock had pulled the chord.

Bullock, shirtless and bloody in the stark glare of the floodlights, ordered the captured invaders to be locked in the enormous cold-storage locker that his grandfather had installed in one of the barns in 1965 for preserving his apple crop. Others attended to Jenny Ferris, the housekeeper, on the first floor of the big house, where she lay battered and misused, while Sophie Bullock, now dressed in her gardening denims, supervised the removal of the bodies from her bedroom and the mopping up of the blood that had spilled from their worthless hearts.

THIRTY-ONE

“Who can tell me why we celebrate Halloween?” Jane Ann Holder asked the pupils in the classroom of the Congregational church school. The twenty-seven children in her class ranged from six-year-old Robin Russo to fifteen-year-old James LaBountie. At her question, the teenagers in the room grinned, squirmed, and rolled their eyes to display their embarrassment at the childishness of the subject (despite their residual love for it). But the younger ones became avidly alert at the mention of a festival so close to their hearts. “What’s the purpose of Halloween?”

“To share good things like sweets and cakes,” said Kelly Wheedon, who was ten, “because not everybody is fortunate.”

“That’s true,” Jane Ann said. “What else?”

“To honor dead people who can’t be here among us anymore,” said Ned Allison.

“Yes. To acknowledge them. Our memory of them, at least.”

“I think that’s where the idea of ghosts comes from,” said Mary Moyer, twelve, a blossoming intellectual. “A mix of memory and imagination.”

“Very good,” Jane Ann said. “How many of you believe in ghosts?”

Several of the younger children raised their hands, a few tentatively, while checking around the room to see whether they had company in their belief.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” said David Martin, fifteen, a cynic through and through.

“Maybe the boundary between memory and imagination isn’t as firm as we like to think,” Jane Ann said.

“What is is and what ain’t ain’t,” David Martin said.

“Isn’t, not ain’t,” Jane Ann said.

“Whatever.”

“No, not whatever. Isn’t, not ain’t,” Jane Ann said.

“Well ghosts ain’t, as in there ain’t no such thing.”

“Isn’t!”

“That too.”

“I don’t want to hear ‘ain’t’ come out of your mouth anymore, David.”

He slumped in his seat, defeated, more cynical than ever.

“Any more ideas about why we celebrate Halloween?” Jane Ann asked.

“To get rid of rotten eggs,” said Darren McWhinnie, thirteen, the class wit, to a smattering of laughs.

“Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty for your house,” cracked Barry Hutto, fourteen, an instigator. “I’m saving ’em up, personally.”

“Like to see you try it—”

“All right, that’s enough of that, thank you,” Jane Ann said. “Who can tell us where the ‘tricks’ part of trick or treat comes from?”

“Tradition,” said Carey Allison, nine, Ned’s little brother.

“Last year we put Mr. Stimmel’s rooster up in the church tower,” said Albert Hoad, twelve.

“He didn’t stay there long,” said Billie Gasperry, twelve, a tomboy who followed along with Darren McWhinnie’s gang. “Its wings were clipped and it fell out and broke its neck.”

“You probably ate him, too,” said Barry.

“I wished I did,” said Billie. “I bet all you get is possum over at your house.”

Jane Ann stepped in. “Let’s cut out the quarreling and baiting, shall we?”

“He started it—”

“I don’t care who started it. I’m tired of it. Who has an idea for a costume this year?”

“I’m going around as a flu victim,” said Darren McWhinnie, who added some ghoulish sound effects.

“That’s not funny,” Jane Ann said. Hardly a family in town was untouched by the visit of the deadly flu three years earlier, and some of the children in the class had lost a sibling or a parent.

“I’m dressing up as Brother Jobe this year,” said Arthur Shroeder, ten.

“My mother says he’s the devil,” said Nina Pettie, thirteen.

“He’s like a big black bug,” said Darren McWhinnie. “If you dress up like him, we’ll squash you!”

Jane Ann allowed the general hilarity at that crack to subside on its own.

“Can anyone else tell me what we celebrate on Halloween?”

“It’s the harvest time of the year with all the pumpkins and cornstalks and giving out of treats and all,” said Sally LaBountie, fourteen, James’s sister, an inward-looking girl who loved books and animals equally and who often evinced impatience with the workings of the other childrens’ minds. “It’s a time of plenty.”

“Very true,” Jane Ann said. “Does anyone know where all these traditions come from?”

“The old times,” said Jason Schmidt, nine. “When it was the USA.”

“It’s still the USA,” Jane Ann said.

“My dad says the USA is finished,” said Jared Silberman, twelve.

“No, it’s still here,” Jane Ann said.

“Then why don’t the electric come back on anymore?” asked Ryan Arena, fourteen. “Where’s the army?”

“Why
doesn’t
it come on,” Jane Ann said.

“The army’s still bogged down in the Holy Land,” said Corey DeLong, twelve, who had heard the last bits of news on the radio before the electricity went out.

“We might’s well be on our own here in town now,” Ryan Arena said.

“We are on our own,” Sally LaBountie said. “Haven’t you noticed?”

“My dad says it’s good riddance about the government—”

“I heard there’s Chinese now in California—”

“And Texas has gone with Mexico, or the other way around—”

“They landed a man on the moon, the Chinese did—”

“We already done that, America, ages ago—”

“Can we get back to Halloween, class?” Jane Ann said, asserting her dominion in the room. “Who can tell me the nation that had the biggest influence in bringing Halloween to America?”

After a lull, Sally LaBountie said, “England. The Salem witch trials happened after the pilgrims landed. They believed witches could take the form of an animal like a black cat.”

“Actually it was Ireland,” said Jane Ann, who occasionally lost patience with Sally LaBountie’s grandstanding. “The Irish came to America in waves, first in the late 1700s and again in the 1840s and 1850s, when the potato famine struck Ireland.”

“How can potatoes cause a famine?” said Albert Hoad. “It’s a food.”

“Maybe they didn’t know how to cook ’em,” said Ryan Arena.

“Nobody’s that stupid,” said Darren McWhinnie.

“That’s enough, Darren,” Jane Ann said. “The Irish were subject to very harsh living conditions. Many were tenant farmers on land owned by rich people who lived in England, some of whom never even set foot in Ireland. The poor Irish tenant farmers lived on just a few acres. It wasn’t enough land to grow corn or grain crops. So they grew potatoes as a subsistence crop.” Jane Ann wrote
subsistence
on the blackboard with a piece of chalk that was actually a fragment of salvaged gypsum board. “That means just enough to get by on.”

“Sounds like life here,” said Billie.

“Yes, these are hard times,” Jane Ann said. “But we’re not as poor as they were.”

“Not yet,” said Sally.

“What pushed Ireland over the edge,” Jane Ann continued, “was the potato blight, a plant disease that came into Ireland, possibly from seed potatoes grown here in America, and wiped out all the potato crops for several years in a row. Roughly a million people died, many from disease that accompanied the famine, when people’s resistance was lowered by starvation. Many of the survivors left Ireland and came to America. Do any of you have Irish ancestors?”

A number of hands went up around the room.

“The Irish had a very rich cultural heritage, which they brought with them to America,” Jane Ann continued. “Halloween is part of that heritage. It is a combination of the Celtic festival of Samhain”— she wrote the word on the blackboard—“which is an old Gaelic word meaning summer’s end—the harvesttime—and the Christian holy day devoted to all the saints, or all saints, which traditionally falls on November first.”

“Isn’t
holy day
where we get the word
holiday
from?” asked Kelly.

“Yes it is. Very good,” Jane Ann said. “All Saints’ Day came to include anyone who had died faithful to the church and its beliefs. Therefore, the night before November first, October thirty-first, is when departed souls come back and roam the earth, and we the living encounter them while we’re celebrating our harvest fest. Another term for the dead of the ages was
all hallows
, whose souls were hallowed by entrance to heaven.” She wrote
hallows
on the blackboard. “And the
een
part is a contraction of the word
evening
. So, you see we end up with this interesting combination of a harvest festival joined with a night of the dead returning to earth. And that is where Halloween comes from.”

A stillness fell over the class. The sounds of hammer blows were audible in the distance behind a closer cawing of crows.

“I’m gonna dress up as a potato,” said Barry Hutto, breaking the spell. His joke went over with all the children, from the oldest to the youngest.

“I’m sure that will be easy,” Jane Ann said, happy for the release of tension that the laughter represented. “Just put a burlap sack over your head.” More laughter. “Now I want to read you a wonderful story about Halloween written by a great American author, Washington Irving, who also happened to be the great bard of the Hudson Valley.”