The Witch of Hebron (28 page)

It happened that the pain in his own gut had abated again. It got bad every time he took a meal, he now realized. Perhaps he had grown an ulcer, not a cancer, due to all the annoyances and irritations that ceaselessly visited him. Consequently, he swore to lay off eating until they’d accomplished what they set out to do: find the boy—and his bandit cohort—and return to town with them. If some bug had got a foothold in his innards, he’d starve it out. He could stand to lose a little blubber, anyway. His clothes felt tight these days.

“Martha,” he said quietly to the corpse, “I’m truly sorry it has come to this. But we got to push on. We going to lay you to rest beside your papa before we do.”

He took up her hand in his. It was cold.

“The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law,” he intoned. “But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed!”

He put Martha’s hand back down on the covers, patted it, and went downstairs.

There, in the kitchen, Elam had fired the cookstove and was frying up a batch of cornmeal pancakes in a big cast-iron skillet to eat with apple butter and a pot of roasted dandelion root “coffee,” a New Faith staple. Seth stepped in the door with an armload of stove splints.

“Looks like we got another hole to dig,” Brother Jobe said. “Sorry, boys.”

Elam glanced over his shoulder and Seth turned his eyes to the ceiling.

“Martha done up and died on us last night.”

“Dang,” Seth said. “After all that.”

“She hang herself up there?” Elam asked and flipped three corn cakes expertly. “They tend to do that, I’ve noticed, when the man of the house is taken.”

“No, looks like her heart just give out, poor thing,” Brother Jobe said. “You two go ahead and eat, though. I’ll turn out the animals.”

“I’ll save some flapcakes for you.”

“Don’t bother. I ain’t hungry.”

They buried Martha next to her father between two butternut trees behind the house. When Martha’s grave was ready to receive her body and they lowered her down into it on a blanket, Brother Jobe conducted a brief ceremony. Then he went to the paddock behind the barn and saddled their mounts while the younger men filled in the grave. Before leaving the Lovejoy farm, they opened the gate to the goat pasture and set the animals free.

“Shame not to take them back with us,” Elam said.

“We ain’t the herder type,” Brother Jobe said. “Anyway, how I see it, if I leave them in that there pen, by the time we get home and send someone to fetch them, they could all be dead. This way they at least got a chance.”

The goats followed the mounted men as far as the road where, seemingly bewildered by their freedom, they stopped and turned to gaze back on the only home they had ever known.

FIFTY-ONE

The Reverend Loren Holder woke up from the most intense cavalcade of dreams he had ever known, in a room filled with light. He knew at once exactly where he was. The clarity of his mind amazed him, considering the substantial dose of chemicals he’d received the night before. Nothing about what he was feeling might be described as a hangover. If anything, he felt energized and confident, fully within himself and comfortable, completely and cosmically refreshed, younger.
Restored
hardly encompassed it.
Reborn
came closer.

All the particulars of his hours with Barbara Maglie, and the hours of dreams they melded perfectly with, seemed immediately accessible to him, without being overwhelming—the symphonic swirl of perfume, hair, yearning, and warmth that was woven against a tapestry of the highest pitched emotion. She was not in the room, but her scent lingered on the pillows, and so did some strands of her silvery hair. The things in his world assumed a satisfying congruent order that had been absent for as long as he could remember, even his knowledge of what had happened to his country and his people over the years. It suddenly seemed as ineluctable as gravity or the presence of love in the universe. He was tempted to think again in terms of God.

The smell of bacon frying prompted him to dress and go downstairs, where Barbara Maglie attended to their breakfast. She wore a long skirt of bright silk patches and a thick gray sweater.

“Good morning,” she said, lifting a pan of corn bread from her oven and cracking some eggs into a buttery skillet using one hand, as a professional chef might. “How do you feel?”

“Strangely marvelous.”

“I would think so.”

“Something happened to me last night.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“I think I even know what it was. But something tells me not to talk it to death.”

“Your instincts are right,” she said. “Come and have breakfast before you go.”

He took a seat at the end of her long table. She brought over two plates, dishes of fresh butter and blackberry preserves, and steaming mugs of rose-hip and skullcap tea.

“Your wife is very beautiful,” Barbara said.

“How do you know?”

“I had a vision.”

“What kind of vision?”

“The far-seeing kind.”

“She is beautiful,” Loren said.

They ate silently for a while. Loren watched a red-tailed hawk alight on a fence post in the nearest of the several gardens. It carried a mole in one of its talons and reached down furtively to tear off bits of the mole’s flesh, quickly returning upright again to survey the yard with its fiercely hooded eyes.

“You’re very beautiful, too,” Loren said.

“I know. I’m a witch.”

“You kill me.”

Loren finished his eggs and mopped the last of the yolks with a piece of corn bread.

“I have a feeling everything will be all right with me now,” he said.

“It will,” she said.

“What about you? Will you be all right, here, all by yourself?”

“Of course. It’s how I live.”

“Don’t you get lonely?”

“Loneliness is a state of mind, not a state of being.”

“I guess I should know that.”

“You did. You forgot. Now you’ll remember.”

“Men,” Loren said. “We have these protective instincts.”

“I know,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. But I’m a witch. We have our ways.”

She placed her fork and knife on her plate in a conclusive gesture.

“I’d better see to my horse.”

In a little while, Loren had Lucky saddled up and ready for the long ride back to town. Barbara came outside to bid him farewell. There was a bite to the morning air that was new. Wind bent the treetops and stripped away leaves. Clouds moved swiftly through the sky, while here and there patches of blue appeared, suggesting a weather front breaking through.

“The thing is,” Loren said, “what if I want to see you again?”

“You can,” she said. “But you’ll be all right, anyway. You might imagine you’re in love with me, but you’re really in love with the world again.”

“That’s a good way of describing how I feel.”

“By the way, I had another vision. I saw you with four children. Boys.”

“Really? Doing what?”

“I don’t know. Nothing bad. It was like you were their father.”

“Do you have a lot of visions?”

“Not so many as you’d think.”

“Can you tell me what this one means?”

“No. It was just a flash through the brain. I’m a witch, not a goddess.”

“I don’t know about that.”

Loren took her hand and she allowed him to kiss her on the lips. Then he mounted his horse.

“You know something I really like about these new times?” she said.

“What?”

“You men look so good on your horses.”

“Really?”

“Yes, much better than the old times, in a German car with the top down. A horse is better.”

She laughed musically and turned back toward her house. Loren reined out Lucky and walked him up toward the road.

“Thank you for everything,” he called out over his shoulder to her.

She waved without looking back.

FIFTY-TWO

More than once in the early going that day Jasper attempted to run away from Billy Bones as they hiked up another shattered road into the lonely highlands of Washington County on the east side of the Hudson River. Each time, Billy ran him into the ground, banged his head against the dirt or the pavement or a tree, and told him he would kill him if he tried it again. As their climb grew steeper, Jasper gave up trying to run away. He reasoned that sooner or later they would stop for the night and he’d find an opportunity to slip off and make his way back to the house in Glens Falls and take refuge with Robin, who would hide and protect him. All he had to do was be patient.

Around midday they halted at a little bridge over a nameless creek on the back side of the Gavottes.

“Take a seat,” Billy said.

“Right here on the bridge?”

“I don’t see any traffic around.”

Jasper sat down with his back against the rusty old guardrail. Billy did likewise.

“Give me that hunting knife of yours.”

“What for?”

“For my peace of mind is what for. Give it over.”

Jasper did not respond quickly enough to suit Billy, so the bandit grabbed Jasper’s backpack and began rooting around in it. “What the hell?” he said, extracting a potato. “You holding out on me?”

“I didn’t know that was in there.”

“Like hell you didn’t.”

“It’s just a stinkin’ potato.”

“What else you got in here?” Billy asked. He felt around, found the hunting knife, and stuck it in his own sack. Then he came across the tattered remains of the toy stuffed animal that Jasper had rescued in the abandoned trailer. “What all’s this?”

Jasper’s insides ran cold. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s some kind of puppet or dolly.”

“It’s nothing.”

“You keep saying that. All right then.” Billy lobbed it over the guardrail on the downstream side of the bridge. Jasper sprang up and rushed to the rail.

“What’d you do!” he screamed.

“Nothing,” Billy said. “Don’t you run after it and make me get up. Get over here and sit your ass back down again. I aim to eat my lunch now.”

As Jasper watched the current carry away the stuffed animal, his helplessness closed a door to the room in his mind where his rage lived. He shuffled back and slumped next to Billy.

“Puppets and dollies is girl stuff,” Billy said. “You got to man up.”

He took out the victuals he had purloined from Madam Amber’s kitchen and spread them out on his leather shoulder sack between them.

“Help yourself,” he said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Aw, don’t give me that. You just walked five miles without no breakfast. You got to be hungry.”

Jasper shrugged.

“You going to give me the silent treatment now, like you don’t like me anymore?”

“I never liked you.”

“What? You lying little bastard—you worshipped me!”

Jasper couldn’t help issuing a noise that was half laugh, half sob.

“You begged to be my protégé.”

“You imagined that.”

Billy glared at him as if a bad odor had come between them.

“Well, I’m hungry, even if you’re not, so excuse me while I eat my damn lunch.”

He devoured a half pound of Moses Kill cheddar and a hunk of hard sausage and battled the oppressive silence by making sounds of delectation as he ate.

“What’s not to like about me?” Billy asked when he had put a dent in his hunger. “I got a sunny disposition, I got style, I’m colorful, I’m generous to a fault, I even got a song to sing. You won’t meet a better companion in these hard times than yours truly. Answer me.”

“You keep murdering people.”

Billy recoiled as if stung. “I don’t mean no harm by it,” he said.

Jasper laughed ruefully.

“Okay, maybe that don’t sound right. Look, people get in the way and they don’t have the sense to get out of the way.”

“What about that man on the onion wagon? How’d he get in your way?”

“Is your memory impaired, boy? That son of a bitch emptied two barrels of birdshot at me. A man does that, and misses, he might as well write out his own death warrant.”

“You were robbing him at the time.”

“Yeah? Well, he should’ve been perfectly happy to part with a little bit of cash money and a pound or two of goddamn onions than to lose his goddamned life protecting them. But no, he up and decides to defend his onions. Jeezus Christ on a cracker! Would you pay four bits of silver to save your damn life? I sure would for mine, if it came to that. Let me tell you something, Johnny boy. There’s a whole world of goddamn stupid gomers out there who make bad choices in life. You can’t blame Billy Bones for that. Their fate is in their own hands.”

“Why’d you kill that Luke the Duke?”

“You weren’t even there!”

“I know that.”

“You know everything, you goddamn know-it-all. You really want to know? I caught the son of a bitch cheating again at cards and I called him on it and he got all huffy and said his boys were going to teach me a lesson. And I don’t take threats to my person lightly.”

“You already knew he was a cheater.”

“Well, I gave him another chance. Billy Bones is fair-minded and bighearted.”

“Maybe you should have just stayed away from that card game like Madam said.”

“Maybe you should just shut your damn mouth, since you’re a child and don’t know nothing about how the grown-up world works. Society’s got a right to honest games of chance. If everybody cheated like that, there wouldn’t be any card games at all in this world. And the world would be poorer for it.”

“Were you trying to rob them, too?”

“Hell, no! Why would I do that? Then there wouldn’t be any game.”

“Because that’s what you do. You’re a bandit.”

“I don’t do it around the goddamn clock. You say you’re a doctor. I don’t see you doing that nonstop twenty-four goddamn hours a day.”

“If you didn’t drag me out of Glens Falls, I might be working for the doctor right now.”

“I took you out of that hellhole for your own good, believe me.”