The Witch of Hebron (2 page)

As Jasper came out of the woods into a stubble field of recently harvested corn, he was struck by the low angle of the sun and the long shadows of everything on the landscape, the brilliant color in the trees behind the school and the perfection of the air temperature as the afternoon merged into evening. A warm nugget of profound contentment at the center of himself welled into a deep gratitude for being. He could see the beautiful stallion grazing in its paddock a hundred yards away. As he set out across the stubble field, a brown blur darted from behind a hummock of cornstalks in the direction of the paddock. The groundhog made desperately for his home in a hole behind the run-in shed. Willie lit out after it.

“No, Willie,” Jasper hollered at the dog. “Get back here!”

TWO

About the same time that fine fall afternoon, three men made their way around the construction site that was the old Union-Wayland box mill, which had shut down in 1971, decades before the U.S. economy imploded altogether in the aftermath of the banking collapse, two terrorist nuclear strikes, the Holy Land War, and the sharp decline in oil supplies that shattered everyday life in America. The three men, all of middle years, were the Reverend Loren Holder, minister of the town’s congregational church and part-time town constable, Robert Earle, mayor of Union Grove and journeyman carpenter (formerly a software company executive in the old times), and one Brother Shiloh, a member of the New Faith order, who had much useful experience for the task at hand, having once served as a civil engineer with the Roanoke Water Authority.

Loren and Robert wore beards in the town fashion while Brother Shiloh was clean-shaven in the custom of his sect. His handmade black broadcloth frock coat, wheat-colored linen trousers, and white shirt would have also distinguished him from the townsmen, who mostly dressed in whatever garments they had leftover from the old times. Robert wore a threadbare tartan flannel shirt with patches on the elbows and canvas overalls hand-sewn by the young woman who had come to dwell with him after his wife died, while Reverend Holder favored a well-worn blue sweatshirt bearing the faded seal of Middlebury College (defunct) and corduroy pants with frayed cuffs.

The old mill building, which had been established in 1894 as a sash-and-blind works, had been successfully gutted over the summer. Robert had directed the reconstruction of the roof, repairing it with slates that came from the quarry in Granville, twenty-two miles away by the Vermont border. The joists and floorboards of both levels had been replaced, too. The materials were paid for with three and a half ounces of gold from jewelry collected among the townspeople. The labor was volunteered. The general idea— Reverend Holder’s inspiration—was to construct a community laundry. American society, at least as those in Union Grove understood it—since news of anything outside Washington County was sketchy at best—had changed drastically from one in which every household ran laborsaving appliances such as clothes washers to one in which certain tasks were better done communally. The last spasm of electric service had shuddered through town for less than a minute in August, and for practical purposes everybody now assumed it was off for good.

As a business proposition, the laundry was conceived as a three-way partnership between the town, the New Faith organization, and the two “proprietors,” Robert and Loren. They hoped to have it in operation by spring and expected to employ ten people. Brother Shiloh’s job was to design a system for lifting water from the adjacent Battenkill River and directing it to a heating tank driven by a wood-fired furnace, then to a series of copper kettles where the washing and rinsing would occur. Wastewater would be directed into a sand and gravel leach pit excavated in the old parking lot, now overgrown with sumacs. In theory, the sand-filtered water would seep back to the nearby river hardly less clean than it came out. The excess heat from the furnace would be ducted into the capacious second-floor loft, where a network of drying racks could be used in place of the outdoor clotheslines when the weather was bad.

“It’ll be hot work,” Brother Shiloh remarked as they navigated a steep temporary stairway down from the loft. He appeared to know what he was doing, technically, but he always managed to put a little added negative spin on things, both Robert and Loren noticed, as if he didn’t really want the project to succeed. It was an annoying note to what was otherwise shaping up to be a very positive development in a town that had known little but hardship and loss for years.

On the whole, the New Faithers had proven to be a valuable addition to the community. They possessed a broad array of practical skills, from metalworking to animal husbandry. Just weeks after moving into the old school building, they’d helped repair the town’s crippled, gravity-fed water system. Though ardent proselytizers, they were careful not to push too hard among the townspeople, in the interest of good relations. They even proved valiant in the face of danger: Some of the brothers were veterans of the Holy Land War, and four of them, along with Robert Earle, had carried out the daring rescue, in June, of Stephen Bullock’s trade-boat crew, who had been held in a hostage-and-ransom racket run by the boss of the Albany docks, Dan Curry. Several of Curry’s gang had died in that venture—not least their boss, who received a bullet between the eyes from the expedition’s leader, Brother Joseph. Shortly after that, a party of New Faith brothers brought to justice the local bully Wayne Karp, whose cohorts and kinspeople ran the old landfill as a salvage business, took apart abandoned buildings for their materials, and pushed around anyone outside their clan with whom they disagreed. In a reckless act one very hot day in June, they’d murdered a young townsman named Shawn Watling up at the landfill’s general supply depot, where salvage was sorted and sold. Robert Earle had been on the premises when the murder happened, though he did not witness it. The courts were not functioning and no one was prosecuted. In the wake of that incident, Robert happened to take Watling’s widow, Britney, and her daughter, Sarah, into his household, a decision that raised more than a few eyebrows around town, though the fact of the matter was that the young widow’s choices were extremely limited. New Faith had tried to recruit her, but she would not go their way.

Now, as the summer turned the corner into fall, and the remorseless heat yielded to temperate days and cool nights, and the hills and hollows of Washington County lay ripe with the harvest, the people of Union Grove settled into a deferential amity with the pious newcomers. But suspicion about the group, and its odd ways, persisted quietly among the “regulars,” as the townsfolk now distinguished themselves from the New Faithers.

The three men crossed the first floor to the riverside end of the mill building, where a waterwheel would go. There was a hole in the brick wall there, awaiting the hub and the machine linkages and gearing that would run off its axle. The site was a good one. The river ran through a natural rocky flume that channeled the water tightly and concentrated its power.

“It looks like you got about twelve foot of head going to that old millrace,” Shiloh said, speaking loudly above the whoosh of water in the flume outside. “The way she lies, I recommend an overshot wheel. Lifting water up here will be the least of it. We can fabricate a serviceable pump. It’ll be a little crude but give you all you need. You’ll have a good deal of power left over for a takeoff to run the mangles and agitators and whatnot. Probably mill some corn while you’re at it,” Shiloh couldn’t resist adding. “Pity to run those raggedy clothes you-alls wear through this fine new setup, though,” he said.

“Maybe we’ll dress up more when it’s going,” Loren said.

“No disrespect, Reverend, but why wait?” Shiloh said. “That beat-down look can’t be good for the town spirit. And those beards are downright primitive.”

“If we all dressed alike, how could we tell our folks from your bunch?”

“Oh, we’ll all come together by and by,” Shiloh said. “You’ll see.”

“All drinking from the same Kool-Aid bowl?”

Robert could see where this was leading. His good friend Loren had an instinct for the last word, and he had been in prickly spirits for many months, especially where the New Faithers were concerned.

Robert ventured to change the subject. “Do you suppose we might get some electric running off of this waterwheel setup as well as all the other stuff ?” he said.

“In theory, sure,” Shiloh said. “Question is scrounging up anything like a suitable generator or finding enough scraps to piece one together, not to mention the right size copper wire, plus your step-down transformers and whatnot.”

“Mr. Bullock has a little hydro unit running at his place, you know.”

“I’ve heard. Shows it can be done.…”

Their attention was diverted by a commotion at the street end of the big building. Brother Jobe, minister and chief executive of the New Faith Covenant Church of Jesus, clamored up the crude plank ramp that substituted for steps at the front entrance. He was incapable of entering a place quietly. He never simply moved from point A to point B—he bustled. Today he was accompanied by one Brother Eben, a slight, red-haired Carolinian, who scribbled with a pencil into a pad of foolscap even as he tried to step over heaps of scrap lumber and stacks of brick and buckets and other hazards in his path. Brother Jobe appeared to be issuing directives and Eben wrote them down as rapidly as possible.

“... and I’m serious as all get-out on this hog business,” he said to Eben. “We are going to raise us some commercial-grade pork next year, and I think we can show these folks hereabouts a thing or two about hams. It’s the feed and the cure both. We going to finish ours on acorn, and this here allotment is thick with sweet white oak. Ah, gentlemen, I thought I would find you down here.”

“Evening,” Robert said.

“We’ve just acquired twenty-two acres adjoining our holdings to the north.”

“Who from?” Robert asked.

“A Mr. Kelvin Lochner.”

“He’s dead,” Loren said.

“Yes, I’m aware of that. Mr. Murray is seeing to the title issues,” Brother Jobe said. With the legal system in tatters, Attorney Dale Murray affected to act as the town’s chief conveyer of land deemed to be in ownership limbo, with the heirs and assigns scattered to the four winds. But with the registry of deeds at the county seat in Fort Edward having burned to the ground two years previously in a suspicious fire, it was unclear what he pretended to accomplish, other than collecting a fee now and again. A drinker and Robert Earle’s predecessor as Union Grove’s mayor, Murray had “sold” the vacant, decaying high school and all its property to the New Faithers in the spring for what amounted to a promissory note.

“Anyways, we’re looking to put in a hog operation there,” Brother Jobe said, grinning broadly.

“Pigs smell bad,” Robert said.

“That’s true. Pigs ain’t house cats, for sure. But these are the new times and things got to be done a little differently. I think you’ll agree that the niceties of single-use zoning is over and done with. Now imagine the taste of barbequed baby back ribs melting in your mouth. Not to say country sausage. And did I mention anything about Virginia-style hams?”

“I think our folks might object.”

“Object to ham? I never heard such nonsense. Half your folks in town here got goats and we all got chickens. A pig is a noble beast. Only thing smarter than a pig, I hear, is a human being or a ding-dang dolphin, if there’s any left out there. Besides, we ain’t going hog wild, no pun intended. We going to start real modestly and work up. Your folks will get over it. Now look here,” Brother Jobe changed the subject, “it appears like we missed a case of this here corn smudge.”

Washington County had been afflicted with a formerly unknown crop disease that blackened the corn kernels on the stalk. It prompted the town trustees to vote in an emergency law requiring the destruction of affected crops. The disease had appeared on three farms so far, including that of trustee Ned Larmon, where it was first discovered. He’d sacrificed five acres of standing corn back in September.

“Who is it this time?” Loren asked.

“This fellow, Corey Elder, on the Center Falls Road.”

“He’s a hard one.”

“I’ll depend on you to talk sense to him.”

As constable, it was Loren’s job to ask the affected farmer to voluntarily comply. So far, no one had refused. They had been promised fair compensation.

“You tell this farmer he can get it back either in corn or direct in silver, his choice,” Brother Jobe said. “But he’s got to act. We can’t have this corn sickness running rampant. And if you’re nervous about going over there, you can have some of our boys for backup.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Loren said. “I’ll go talk to him.”

THREE

As Jasper Copeland raced through the stubble field after his dog, he caught a shoe on the butt of a cornstalk. It sent him sprawling facedown against the hard ground. As he got up and resumed running he saw the big brown stallion rear back on its hind legs, whinnying wildly. He was aware of his heart pounding, and not just from the dash across the field. As he drew closer to the paddock, he saw Willie dart in and away and around the bigger animal, nipping at its fetlocks and even leaping up at its muzzle, barking the whole time.

Jasper cried “Willie, stop it!” and “Willie, come!” and “Willie, no!” over and over but the dog would not stop harrying the stallion. The stallion reared repeatedly. Jasper’s heart sank as it pounded in his chest. He banged up against the split-rail fence, where he continued to yell at Willie. And then as the horse came down again and its hooves seemed to miss Willie by inches, Jasper ducked inside the fence and ran toward the horse, brandishing his father’s fly rod as if it were a carriage whip. The horse reared again and Jasper tried repeatedly to beat it across the head with the rod without effect. This time when the horse came down, its hooves found some part of the dog’s body. There was more than one scream. The stallion bolted away, leaving Jasper alone with the dog lying at his feet.