The Witch of Hebron (29 page)

“Why did you kill Angel, the he-she?”

Billy glanced this way and that way, as if searching the labyrinth of bare branches above for an answer.

“He, she, it,” he mumbled. “That’s a whole different story. There’s no way a child would understand that.”

“You sure acted like you hated her.”

“’Course I do. Did.”

“Then what was your bag doing in her room just before we left?”

Billy began to speak but hesitated and puffed out his cheeks, sighed, and shook his head.

“Look,” he eventually said, “you don’t want to eat none of this food, that’s your business, but we got a ways to go yet today.”

Jasper gazed at the remains of sausage and reached for it.

“That’s right. You better eat,” Billy said. “That’s a good choice you just made, however you judge me for the moment. I want you to know, I ain’t any wild-eyed crazy killer type. I ain’t had a week like this one in, well, never. This is not my normal way. A lot of things seem like they got out of hand in recent days. When it rains, it pours. I vow to you that the next bunch of people we come across, I will be as nice as pie to, long as they don’t pull a shotgun on us or try to cheat us or beat our ass. Does that sit all right with you?”

Jasper nodded his head, still chewing.

“Say it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“It’s all right with me if you don’t kill anyone ever again.”

“Okay,” Billy said. “And it’s all right with me if you don’t kill no more horses, either. Come on. Let’s go.”

FIFTY-THREE

Not long after departing the Lovejoy farm, Brother Seth picked up some tracks in a muddy stretch of Goose Island Road leading northwest into the highlands of the county. They were the footprints of an adult and a child. They followed them through midmorning until, in the elevations of the Gavottes, they came upon the grisly scene of a body in a ditch near an abandoned wagon filled with onions. There was no horse in the vicinity.

Seth and Elam, who had seen plenty of death in the Holy Land, agreed that the corpse was about a day old. They agreed it was a man’s body based on its size, remaining scraps of clothing, and the length of the hair on the skull. But much of the flesh had been consumed by animals, including the soft tissues of the face and hands. One whole leg was missing, and there was a black maw of blood and shredded cloth around the abdomen, where the organs had been eaten out.

They all held rags up to their faces not so much against the stink as the awful carnage it presented. Seth and Elam rolled the corpse over to examine the other side. It was as stiff as a cedar slab.

“Lookit here,” Elam said to Brother Jobe, who squatted in the dust beside them. “The back of his skull’s all bashed in. That ain’t the work of any wild animal.”

“I got to suppose that this mischief was done by our quarry, the boy and the other,” Brother Jobe said.

“Their tracks lead right to it,” Seth affirmed.

“What a terrible wickedness that child walks in,” Elam said.

“A sorry amen to that,” Brother Jobe said.

“What do you want to do with these here remains, BJ?” Seth asked.

“I say we load him in the wagon, hitch it up to a couple of horses, and follow where the road leads. Maybe inquire along the way if this poor soul belongs to somebody. Try to find the law hereabouts, if there is any.”

“That suits me,” Elam said. “I’m tired of digging graves for strangers.”

Seth took a map out of his jacket and looked it over.

“Looks to me like these two are heading straight for this here town of Glens Falls, about seven miles up the road.”

“All right,” Brother Jobe said, “then that’s where we’ll go. Hoist that body aboard, boys.”

“You want us to put him right up there on them onions?” Elam asked.

“Didn’t I just say so?”

“It’s disgusting.”

“Well, you can’t throw all them onions in a ditch in times like these,” Brother Jobe said. “This here must be a thousand-dollar load. Folks can always peel a onion. Go on, heave him on in.”

They covered the body with a blanket and lifted it into the wagon’s box. The blanket happened to be the one rolled up behind Seth’s saddle.

“Dang,” Seth said. “That blanket was like an old friend to me.”

“You can warsh it out,” Elam said.

“Not after a dead man slept amongst it. You can never warsh that out. And Halloween’s coming, too. It gives me the chills just to think of it.”

“Well, let’s get him to where he’s going before he turns into a durned pumpkin,” Brother Jobe said.

“I wish he would turn,” Seth said. “He’d smell a whole lot better.”

Elam carried a small repair kit of waxed thread and an awl with a number 5 needle. He stitched back the girth, collar, and traces of the wagon harness. Then they hitched the horses to the wagon, leaving Brother Jobe aboard Atlas, the mule. Seth and Elam tossed their saddles into the wagon box with the onions and the dead man, and the trio set out once more, down from the highlands into the broad Hudson River valley below.

An hour later they came upon a white farmhouse set a hundred yards from the road. It was a tidy establishment with an orchard in the front yard whose trees were heavy with apples. Fields of neatly stooked cornstalks rolled out on the land beyond the house. Elam and Seth hung back on the road with the wagon and the corpse while Brother Jobe rode up to the house, dismounted, and went to the door. A woman in an apron answered, wiping her hands, and spoke briefly with Brother Jobe. Then he withdrew with a tip of his hat and swung up onto Atlas again while the woman went back inside.

“Our man don’t belong to this outfit here,” Brother Jobe reported. “Nor has she heard any of her neighbors say they’re missing nobody. She ain’t seen any sign of the boy and his cohort either.”

They stopped at three other farms along the way. Nobody knew where the dead man was from and no one had seen Jasper and Billy Bones. They did learn, however, that the closest thing to constituted law in Glens Falls was a gentleman named Luke Bliss, whom people spoke of as “the Duke” in a generally ironic way. The town, one old farmer told them, was a pitiful remnant of its former self. In his childhood, he said, the town was so lively and fine that a national magazine called it Hometown USA.

“It don’t look like we’re going to locate who this fellow belongs to,” Seth said.

“Maybe we’ll be keeping these onions, after all,” Brother Jobe said as they continued on.

“And the wagon to boot,” Elam said.

“Long as we don’t have to keep the corpse,” Seth said.

FIFTY-FOUR

Robert Earle walked the four miles from Union Grove to Stephen Bullock’s plantation. For most of it, he enjoyed the bracing autumn air and the tranquillity of the landscape away from town and the bustle of the New Faith headquarters where he’d been working for weeks. On the last stretch, along River Road, he came upon the twelve hanged men, two of them dangling by their ankles with their heads jammed incongruously between their legs, just as Terry Einhorn had said. Vultures and crows were roosting on the corpses now, picking away at the flesh. Robert’s presence barely disturbed their grisly operations. He tried throwing stones at one especially ugly vulture, but it returned quickly to perch on one of the purple-faced victims, using its beak to enlarge the hole where the nose used to be. The stench of death was overwhelming and Robert did not linger. It was a quarter mile farther to Bullock’s place.

After inquiring at the mansion, Robert was directed to Bullock’s landing across the road on the Hudson River. The landing consisted of a U-shaped wooden crib wharf and a small-goods warehouse in unpainted board and batten. Bullock had come down to dispatch his new trade vessel for Albany, thirty-seven miles downstream, with a cargo of new cider in barrels and several tons of grain: barley, corn, and oats. The boat was a sloop with the name
Sophie
painted on the transom in yellow and black. It carried a crew of six. Bullock was giving the manifest a last look before handing it back to his captain, Tom Soukey, one of four men who had been held in a hostage-and-ransom racket in Albany the previous summer before being rescued by Robert and a company of New Faith men.

“Tom,” Robert said in greeting. “You’re looking fit.”

“I’m back at it,” Tom said. “That’s how much I love this river.”

“Nice boat.”

“It’s a great improvement over the old girl,” Tom said, referring to the
Elizabeth
, a much smaller catboat that had been their former trading vessel.

“Did you build her right here?” Robert asked Bullock.

“We found a man who used to run the boatyard up at Essex on Lake Champlain. Or rather, he found us.”

“How fortunate.”

“For us or for him?”

“Both, I guess.”

A mate called down from halfway up the main mast saying that the halyard was clear. Tom Soukey said they were ready to go. “If we’re not back in four days, send the boys down to fetch us home again,” he added.

Tom hopped aboard. Two of his crew pushed off the wharf with gaffs while one raised a jib. Once they got clear of the landing, the mainsail went up with a great flapping of canvas. Robert and Bullock watched as the stately, tall-masted boat heaved downriver against the brilliant ochre of the foliage on the far shore.

“Tom and I played on a softball team in town years ago,” Robert said, admiring the progress of the
Sophie
.

“Is that so?” Bullock said. “Why, that gives me an idea. How about you get a team of the townsmen together and play a team of my people? We could make it a regular thing. Maybe even get the farmers to put up a team, and the men up in Battenville. Pretty soon we’ll have a league. Everyone would like it.”

“I still have my old glove,” Robert said. “I’m sure there are some aluminum bats kicking around town. But what do we do for a ball?”

“I’ll have the ladies here stitch one up,” Bullock said.

“I bet those New Faith boys could field a pretty good team, too.”

Bullock made a face. “I don’t know. Those Southern rednecks have a special gene for baseball. They might wipe up the floor with us.”

“It’d force us to raise the caliber of our play.”

Bullock sighed. “There’s something about them I just don’t like,” he said. “But I suppose you’re right. Is that what you came over to see me about? Softball?”

“No, that was your idea, Stephen. I came to see you about those bodies hanging along River Road.”

“Quite a spectacle, isn’t it?”

“I’ve had some complaints about it.”

“I suppose you heard we were invaded the other night.”

“I did.”

“We came very close to being murdered. In our own bedroom.”

“I heard.”

“I killed three of them myself. Kind of amazed I still had it in me.”

“Would you consider cutting them down now?”

“Absolutely not. They’re just getting ripe.”

“Stephen, this isn’t the fourteenth century.”

“It’s not our mom and dad’s America, either. I intend to keep them strung up until they rot out of their nooses.”

“That’s just plain morbid.”

“If there are any more out there like them, looking to rape and pillage, I want them to see how things work around here.”

“It looks like lynch law. You’re supposed to be the magistrate.”

“Believe me, justice has been served.”

“What do I tell the folks back in town?”

“Tell them to steer clear of River Road for a month or so,” Bullock said.

“I doubt they’ll want to come down here and play softball with all these bodies rotting.”

“Well, it’s getting late in the year anyway,” Bullock said. “There’s no point in rushing anything. Let’s aim for next spring on this softball league idea. But I suggest you start organizing it now. Talk it up. See if the farmers and the others want to get in on it.”

FIFTY-FIVE

At midafternoon, Perry Talisker hunkered behind an ancient stone wall at the margin of the woods and caught sight of the big cat pronking for mice in a blueberry flat behind an abandoned farm below Todd Hill. The farmhouse, in the distance, was a roofless charred ruin. The barns lay fallen in heaps covered with brambles and Virginia creeper. Poplars dotted the old cornfields and pastures. It thrilled Perry to see nature triumph over the residues of man, even while it quickened his desire to strike back at God and his creations. He put down his field glasses and swung the Marlin rifle off his shoulder. He could get the cat in his sights, but at more than three hundred yards, lacking telescopics, and with the wind gusting, he decided to hold back the shot. The cat probably had a feeding range of ten square miles or more, and a missed shot might send him to another part of the county.

Perry felt lightheaded, having not taken a meal in two days. He was content with the notion that his duties in this life were winding down, and except for this final obligation, he felt the weightless delight of being untethered at last from the things of the world. Yet as his existence worked toward merging with the ethers of time and space, he felt the beauty of the earth ever more keenly. Watching the big panther pounce playfully in the blueberry scrub, Perry imagined the joy it felt in its muscles and nerves. The way its flesh rippled under its reddish brown coat, it looked well-fed, as though it had enjoyed a summer of kills and feasts. More than once, he wished he were the big cat.

The cat kept at it for a good half hour, stopping twice to eat something less than a mouthful. The North American mountain lion was known to like crickets and grasshoppers, too, though its regular fare was the white-tailed deer. Then something Perry Talisker could not hear caused the big cat to stop pouncing and hold its head high at attention. It blinked ostentatiously, then slunk away in high grass the same color as its fur. Perry slung his rifle back over his shoulder and left his rocky lair in pursuit.

FIFTY-SIX

Brother Jobe and his comrades entered the city of Glens Falls from the south along old Route 9, a desolate highway strip of plundered building shells, broken signs, and empty parking lots, across the sagging bridge over the famous falls itself into the city center. They left the mule, the wagon, and its blanket-shrouded contents in front of a three-story building that advertised itself as H
OTEL AND
M
EALS
. The sun had just set behind the rooftops, casting the deserted sidewalks into dispiriting shadow.