The Witch of Hebron (24 page)

Her smile radiated an essentially female mystery that thrust Loren back to the sublime terrors of sexual awakening he had nearly forgotten: age fifteen, a summer night at a big house on Lake George, New York. A girl named Debbie Darrow, of advanced experience, who smelled like a strawberry and insisted on skinny-dipping in a thunderstorm. His excitement had reached such a pitch that he couldn’t stop shivering, even after they got out of the water and made love on a sleeping bag in the room above the boathouse while lightning crashed all around and shook the flimsy rafters. She had a pack of menthol cigarettes and afterward lay smoking, whispering things to him in French, which he pretended to understand. The world never looked the same after that night. She dumped him a week later for seventeen-year-old Chad Moyer, who had a yellow Mazda Miata sports car of his very own.

“You can put your horse in the barn,” Barbara said, startling him out of memory. “There’s hay in the loft. I’ll be in the kitchen.”

Loren settled Lucky in a stall with a bucket of water and a manger full of hay and left his damp saddle pad drying on a half door. Then, traversing the yard between the barn and the house, he became acutely conscious of his fears, hopes, worries, and not a small degree of shame in selfishly seeking his lost carnal appetites. He felt hopelessly awkward in his own skin, a physically large man trespassing awkwardly in a female realm, like a Minotaur who had contrived to enter a bower. Meanwhile, the sun had dipped behind Lloyd’s Hill, putting a bite in the smoke-scented air. He paused at the window in the kitchen door and watched Barbara Maglie move gracefully between her stove and various counters, hutches, and tables, the way her long skirt swayed and her hips shifted, the way her arms moved and her hands held their implements, the way the tops of her breasts heaved with her breathing in the shadows cast by the candlelight. She seemed purely representative of what was universally female and human, unknowable without being frightful. He knocked on the window. She signaled him to come in. Trembling, he entered her world.

FORTY-FOUR

Perry Talisker didn’t bother making a supper for himself. Bundled in his blanket and Mylar sleeping pouch on a mattress of balsam boughs, he watched a single bright star emerge against a lustrous blue green twilight sky streaked with rose-bellied clouds. He knew now, as surely as he had ever known anything, that his days were numbered and that the number was a low one. He could sense, too, as vividly as anything he ever knew, that he was drawing close to his quarry: the big cat that left tracks the size of a child’s mitten in the low, damp places and the bracken flats. He felt himself drawn to this climactic moment of his life like the man in a riptide being swept out beyond sight of land, and he was oddly relieved at the prospect of leaving the shore behind.

Lying on the fir-scented bed, reflecting on the end of his days, Perry Talisker’s hunger pulled his train of memories past all the wonderful meals he had enjoyed across a lifetime, many of them dishes he had not tasted for years and never would again. He could imagine in all his senses, for instance, the gigantic batter-dipped, deep-fried sweet onion he used to order on weekend nights in the old times when he and his wife, Trish, splurged at the Outback restaurant at Aviation Mall outside Glens Falls. What a marvel that thing was! A gigantic sweet Vidalia split open by a cleverly designed patent device so that the onion layers formed petals like a great flower, allowing an eggy batter to penetrate every crack and fissure and then puff up magnificently when it met the hot fat in the Fryolator. The sublime crunch of the batter contrasted with the yielding sweetness of the onion and the smoky piquant dipping sauce that was several notches better than plain ketchup. He could never finish a whole one, but he’d still follow it with a rack of baby pork ribs, slow-cooked until they were nearly falling off the bone and then finished on the grill, offset with a dish of creamy coleslaw, which he regarded as a vegetable, something good for you.

Being in the food business himself back then, as head of the meat department in Union Grove’s Hovington’s Supermarket, Perry had standards. He wouldn’t go to McDonald’s—he didn’t especially go for mustard and a dill pickle on his hamburger and he didn’t trust their meat. He patronized only the better chains, where you could sit down on something soft and the lights were not fluorescent and the meat was a cut you could at least identify, a rib, a T-bone, a drumstick. But he also made a point, in those days, to seek out the few mom-and-pop places that remained in the backwaters. The Miss Ann Diner in Fort Ann was one of these. They offered homemade chicken and biscuits that Perry would drive twenty miles out of his way to eat. The gravy was made with real cream, the biscuits were wonderfully flaky, the chicken all white meat, and the portions heroic. They had a way with desserts, too: a bread pudding studded with chunks of bittersweet chocolate and saturated with bourbon whiskey; a many-layered coconut cake with supertart lemon filling; and, in summer, a toasted-almond peach cobbler.

For straightforward meat, he preferred his own cuts on the home grill. The steaks, of course, he butchered himself at the shop, his first choice being the porterhouse or New York strip with A-1 sauce and Tabasco, so tingly on the tongue. The hamburger he ground personally on the big Hobart machine at work, using a mix of sirloin, brisket, and chuck with the number 52 grinder plate. He always molded his burgers around a butter patty so that when they came off the fire, the butter perfectly saturated the hefty beef patty and then seeped out into the toasted kaiser roll. And, of course, there wasn’t a better, meltier cheeseburger cheese than Velveeta. Toward the end of the good old times, before his credit cards went bad and the trade in electric appliances dried up, he bought his own personal home French-fryer machine so he could have fries whenever he wanted, and not those lame, limp oven fries from the frozen box—the real thing: thick-cut fresh Idahoes with a Russian dressing he made himself.

He held pizza in high esteem, though he had to admit that there was nothing wrong with good old macaroni and cheese.… This was Perry Talisker’s last thought before the currents of sleep swept him away from himself onto the starry shoals of night.

FORTY-FIVE

Robert Earle worked a full day on the special room of inlaid wood paneling at the center of the former gymnasium of the old high school, where the New Faith order had framed in a multileveled warren of rooms resembling something like a beehive or, Robert sometimes thought, a maximum-security cell block. The room, he’d been told, was intended to be the winter quarters of Mary Beth Ivanhoe, the eccentric clairvoyant revered by the group as though she were its queen bee. Robert was also charged with instructing several young brothers in the finer points of finish woodworking and marquetry. What a contrast they were to the demoralized younger townsmen of Union Grove, he thought. The young men of the New Faith were positively buoyant with their situation in the world, eager to learn, and attentive. They didn’t seem to miss the old times at all. They loved to scorn and disdain the absurdities of the old times in their workaday chats, cutting veneers and piecing together the complex patterns designed by Sister Zeruiah, who was chief among the women who attended Mary Beth Ivanhoe. Even with the high spirits of his students, Robert was not altogether comfortable laboring within the New Faith compound, but Brother Jobe paid in silver.

It was already dark when Robert returned home that mild Indian-summer evening. The woman he’d come to live with, Britney Watling, had had a long day of her own. She began it digging potatoes and onions, bedding them in straw in the cellar. Then she mucked the barn where she kept Cinnamon the cow, next door to the burned skeleton frame of her former home a block away from Robert’s house. Then she forked the stall bedding into the compost heap for the following spring’s planting. Then she worked on a set of ash-splint sorting baskets ordered by Mr. Schmidt, the wealthy farmer who had employed her murdered husband as a laborer and who, since Shawn’s death, was always making little gestures of caretaking with her. Amid all this activity, she put together a supper of “fall pudding,” a casserole of leftover corn bread, bacon cracklings, kale, onions, milk, eggs, butter, and hard cheese for Robert and her daughter, Sarah. They ate it with a salad of late-season lettuce and rocket in buttermilk dressing.

After supper, Robert and Britney took advantage of the mild weather to break down the contents and equipment of the summer kitchen and move it indoors for the winter—the round oak table, which had to be unscrewed from its pedestal to get through the door; the pots, pans, tubs, jugs, and crocks; the screened cabinet where they kept cheese and sausage away from flies, the china and tableware. When they were done and bathed—thanks to Union Grove’s still-functioning town water supply, gravity-fed by the ancient reservoir on a shoulder of Pumpkin Hill—Robert showed Sarah how to play the “A” part of a fiddle tune called “Angeline the Baker.” When Britney put her daughter to bed, there was still much to do. Robert had to sharpen his saws for the next day’s work, and Britney needed to repair the lining of Sarah’s winter coat. They were about to return to their chores when somebody knocked on the front door. This was not so unusual since Robert had become the mayor of Union Grove and was occasionally visited and even pestered at odd hours by townspeople with complaints.

This evening it was Terry Einhorn, the red-bearded, barrel-chested proprietor of the town’s only grocery and general merchandise store. He appeared agitated yet did not readily disclose the reason for his visit. Robert invited him in and offered him a glass of cider, Holyrood’s clear white, a new cider from the current year’s apple crop, at 12 percent alcohol. Einhorn sold it at the store. Robert sat Einhorn at the circular oak table they had just brought inside to the winter kitchen. Britney excused herself.

“Wicked warm today, wasn’t it?” Einhorn said when he had settled in his chair and drained about half his glass. Robert noticed that Terry’s hand was shaking.

“You didn’t come here to talk about the weather, did you, Terry?”

Einhorn drained the rest of his glass and Robert refilled it.

“There are twelve men hanging on River Road,” the storekeeper said.

“You mean hanging around?”

“I mean hanging by their necks, from trees,” Einhorn said. “Ten of them, anyway.”

Robert sat frozen, staring at him.

“Excuse me,” Robert said after an awkward interval. “Did you say ten or twelve?”

“Twelve. But two of them are hanging by their ankles. With their heads jammed between their legs.”

Robert struggled to put together a picture.

“I don’t get it. Like some kind of contortionist thing?”

“Their heads were cut off.”

Robert looked past the dining room to Britney in the parlor, where she sat very close to a pair of candles, sewing in a halo of yellow light. He pulled his chair around the table, closer to Einhorn.

“Have you told anyone else?”

“Robert, they’re right down there on the road for all to see. Everybody will know about it by tomorrow, if they don’t already know.”

Robert chewed the inside of his cheek. “Do you have any idea what this is all about?” he said.

“I was on my way to Bullock’s landing this afternoon,” Einhorn said, “now that he’s running that weekly boat to Albany again. His man, Dick Lee, was there at the landing. He said Bullock had them strung up.”

Einhorn proceeded to tell Robert what he had learned from Dick Lee about the bloody home invasion the previous night and Bullock’s decision to summarily execute the surviving invaders.

Robert poured himself another cider from the battered old plastic jug.

“How’d two of them get their heads cut off?” he asked.

“Bullock did that himself.”

“Pretty rough justice.”

“They busted right into his bedroom and threatened the missus,” Einhorn said. “I don’t hold it against him.”

“He’s our magistrate. He’s supposed to stand for the law.”

“His first task is protecting the community.”

“He’s not the police.”

“There are no police, Robert.”

Robert and Einhorn drank in silence for a moment.

“These bandits—were they part of a larger bunch?” Robert asked.

“Dick Lee said he thought not. They were just a small band, out on their own. From Connecticut, apparently.”

“Is that so,” Robert said, thinking that he was from Connecticut, too, a place that existed a long time ago, in a galaxy of men in suits on commuter-train platforms and mothers ferrying children to lessons and hauling enormous quantities of purchased goods around in gigantic cars. All gone.

“Dick Lee said they strung them up where any other pickers or bandits were most likely to see them,” Einhorn said. “In case there
are
more of them out there.”

Robert could see where this was all leading.

“Okay. I’ll go over there tomorrow and ask Bullock to cut them down and bury them,” he said.

“That would be a good thing, Robert.”

They sat silently at the table for a long time. Einhorn reached for the jug and poured himself another glass.

“You come by the store sometime,” he said. “I’ll give you a free refill.”

Robert noticed Britney glancing over her shoulder at him from the other room. Then she snuffed the candles she was working by and went up to bed. Moonlight streamed through the window on the staircase.

“Thanks, Terry. Was that pretty much it, then?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“What else?”

“A bunch of us are thinking maybe the town ought to call off Halloween.”

“Who?”

“Doug Sweetland, Tom Allison, Ben Deaver, Robbie Furnival, some others. Out of respect to the doc, with his son missing and all.”

“The trick-or-treat or the grown-up ball?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Maybe I should see how Jerry and Jeanette feel about that, first.”

“I don’t know as I’d bother them about it just now.”

“You know how the people in town look forward to it. Even the folks out in the countryside come in. It would be like canceling Christmas.”