The Witch of Hebron (3 page)

He gaped down at Willie in disbelief. The dog was still alive, eyes open, panting shallowly, but otherwise not moving. He lay on his side with a drop of blood forming a bubble at one nostril. With mounting terror, Jasper scooped the dog into his arms, ducked through the fence, and began loping toward what had been the old main driveway to the high school where Salem Street turned into the North Road at the edge of town. He ran all the way home with Willie cradled in his arms, though the dog weighed thirty-eight pounds. When he finally got there and cried out for his father, he felt like his heart was going to burst.

Dr. Jerry Copeland rushed out of his lab behind the room where he saw patients. Jasper had laid Willie on the padded examination table and was screaming, “Daddy, please, save him!”

“What happened?”

Jasper explained about Willie chasing a groundhog into the paddock where the stallion was.

Dr. Copeland grabbed a stethoscope and found a heartbeat, but in doing so he realized that he knew almost nothing about canine anatomy, other than that they had the usual array of mammalian organs and that he was unlikely to be able to do anything to save the dog. There was one other remote possibility.

“Go run over to Mr. LaBountie’s place and ask him to hurry over here as quick as he can,” the doctor told Jasper. Jason LaBountie was Union Grove’s veterinarian. The boy blinked and nodded. He shifted his attention to Willie on the table and ran his hand along the dog’s side, from his ears, which were still very warm, all down its flank.

“Don’t, Son,” the doctor said. “He’s in shock. Better not to touch him.”

Jasper was well acquainted with the meaning of shock, being the son of a doctor in a time and place where there was no longer any access to hospitals. Everything came to his father’s doorstep these days. He often assisted his father with patients after school and in the evenings, even in surgeries, and had already acquired as much knowledge as a first-year medical student might have in the old times, though available remedies were much sparser and advanced technologies no longer existed.

“Go, quickly now,” the doctor said.

The boy nodded again and ran out of the office.

The doctor began to systematically examine the dog’s body to try to assess its injuries. There were no obvious wounds on the surface. Its abdomen seemed distended and he suspected that the animal was bleeding internally. There was some blood mixed with fecal matter around its rectum and a small discharge at the nose. Through the stethoscope he heard the rales and crepitations that signified fluid in the lungs. The heartbeat was accelerating and the dog’s panting was noticeably quicker and shallower than minutes before. He was quite sure the dog was not going to make it. He thought of his internship out in Madison, Wisconsin, years ago, those rotations in the emergency room, the incredible destruction of the body in a car crash, the moment when life left the body and all the wonders of modern medicine did not avail to make sense of that awful moment. These days there were no more car crashes, at least.

A movement across the room brought him out of himself. His wife, Jeanette, closed the door behind her. She had a handsome dish-shaped face with very large, questioning eyes. Her family had moved to America from France when she was nine years old. He could see her size up the situation immediately. She was a nurse.

“Oh, Jerry…,” she said.

He could only offer a sigh and a pained glance.

Then Willie convulsed and gave out a strange little strangled bark that resolved in a sickening gurgle. Jeanette flew across the room to the doctor’s side. After another moment, the dog lay still with its eyes wide open and their own anxious breathing was the only sound in the room. Jeanette buried her face in her husband’s shoulder as her eyes filled with tears. The doctor took her in his arms. Looking over the top of her head, he could not help but observe what a beautiful dog Willie was. The dog population was way down in these new times. Most people had little surplus meat to feed them and manufactured pet foods no longer existed. The doctor had gotten Willie as a puppy in barter for treating the daughter of Lloyd Hokely, the sawmill owner up in Battenville. She had been bitten by a copperhead snake. There was not much the doctor could do. There wasn’t even any ice to be had out that way on short notice, so icing the leg was out. He ran a saline IV drip into her, gave her some willow extract, and that was about it. The bite of such a snake was generally not fatal, and the girl was nearly full-grown at fifteen, so she recovered fully. The doctor left the Hokely place with the puppy in his lap in payment for services as he drove his cart back to town behind a horse named Mac. He fell in love with the puppy right away.

“Where’s our boy?” Jeanette asked, turning around. The doctor told her. Just at that moment, Jasper’s little sister, Dinah, five, stepped warily into the room. Jeanette watched her attempt to take in the scene.

“What’s wrong with Willie?” Dinah said.

“Nothing,” the doctor said, at once ashamed and angry with himself for lying.

Jeanette hurried across the room, swept the child off her feet, and made for the door. The doctor heard Dinah break out bawling as they left the office.

When they were gone the doctor poured himself a glass of 100-proof pear brandy, which he kept in a fine glass-stoppered decanter on the steel cart beside the examination table. He often administered a dose of strong spirits to patients who came in, just to calm them down enough so he could proceed with treatment. He’d run out of advanced analgesics years ago and was otherwise reduced to using opiates and other herbals.

The brandy warmed the doctor’s stomach. He soon began to feel it move through his stomach lining into his bloodstream and brain. He sat down in the padded chair beside the cart to wait for his boy. The beauty of the dog’s still body brought tears to his eyes.

FOUR

Jason LaBountie, a large specimen of a man, sweating even in the cool evening air, entered the doctor’s examination room like an ox coming into a stall. He had cornbread crumbs in his beard and the doctor imagined that he’d been dragged away from the dinner table. He came right to the exam table and bent so closely over Willie’s body that he appeared to be sniffing it. Meanwhile, Jasper entered the room.

“This dog’s passed on,” LaBountie said.

“Yes,” the doctor said. “I’m afraid we’ve lost him.”

“Isn’t there something you can do?” the boy asked.

LaBountie shook his head. “The life has gone out of him.”

“I’ve seen my daddy start up people’s hearts. Can’t you try?” the boy said, almost yelling. “Either of you?”

“He’s beyond that, even if we tried,” LaBountie told the boy. Then he turned to the doctor. “He was stomped pretty good, looks like.”

“Well, apparently so,” the doctor said.

LaBountie addressed the boy: “Severe internal injuries. Hemorrhage. Shock. It’s a bigger deal than just an arrested heart, young man. Awful sorry.”

Jasper recoiled into a far corner of the room, sank on his haunches, and began to sob in a high keening manner. Darkness crowded the windows and the room seemed to dim moment by moment. The doctor turned to the steel cart behind him. Among the items on it was a fat three-wick candle to which he struck a match. He turned back around with the candle on its brass saucer.

“I told the boy I was strictly a large-animal man, Jerry,” LaBountie said. “I haven’t worked on dogs and cats since the old days in vet school. We don’t have a dog ourselves.”

“It’s moot now. Thanks for coming, though.”

“There’s damn few dogs around the county these days.”

The doctor grunted in affirmation.

“Who can afford to feed a dog now?”

The doctor realized it was self-evident that he was able to. “Hell, Jason,” he said, “you must take some pay for service in meat, given your line of work.”

“Sure I do. But not enough for a dog.”

“Is trade in kind okay with you on this call? Or are you looking to get paid?”

“Well, I doctor my own family,” LaBountie said.

“I thought you were strictly a large-animal man,” the doctor said.

“My kids are large enough. Anyway, I ran like hell to get here.”

“We appreciate it.”

“You can send over a ham sometime, Jerry. You’ll do that, won’t you?”

“Of course I will, Jason,” the doctor said.

The two men had locked eyes, while the boy remained sitting in the corner with his knees drawn up and his face buried in his crossed arms. Just then a gust of cold wind rattled the door and then seemed to blow it open. The figure of a short man in a dark suit with a broad-brimmed hat stood framed within it.

The doctor and the vet turned to take in the intruder. Jasper looked up, red-eyed.

“I’m starting to feel the goldurned chill of winter already,” Brother Jobe said, stepping over the threshold into the office, “and it ain’t Halloween yet. I think I found something belongs to you.”

LaBountie excused himself and almost shoved Brother Jobe aside in making for the door.

“What’s with him?” Brother Jobe asked.

The doctor didn’t feel like trying to explain. Meanwhile, he noticed that Brother Jobe was holding the two pieces of a flyfishing rod in his right hand. It looked familiar to the doctor and it also looked broken. He was about to ask to see it when Brother Jobe held it up and read an inscription on the nickel silver butt-end cap.

To Jeremy
On his graduation
May 18, 2001
From Dad

“Must be your daddy gave you this here pole,” Brother Jobe said, handing it over.

The doctor took it. It was a very fine graphite fiber rod made by the Orvis Company, nine and a half feet long, designed for a number 5 line. The company no longer existed as far as the doctor knew. The carbon fiber represented the height of synthetic material engineering from the golden era of technology that was no more. The doctor saw that the rod was smashed about six inches above the rosewood reel seat. Shattered carbon fibers stuck out like unkempt hair. The reel itself was also crushed. Gazing at the rod, the doctor realized it could never be fixed or replaced.

“I found it in the paddock where we keep our stallion,” Brother Jobe said. “Sorry about the dog.”

The doctor looked up slowly. “Jasper, would you go in the house, please?” he asked the boy.

“I want to sit up with Willie.”

“He’s passed away, Son.”

“Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean I can’t sit with him.”

The doctor went to the corner of the room where his son sat on the floor and he squatted down to his eye level.

“You go inside right now,” he said quietly, suppressing a roiling surge of emotion. “Brother Jobe and I have some business here and you have to go in the house.”

The boy did not fail to perceive the tremor in his father’s voice and the striking paleness of his face in the meager light. It unnerved him enough to obey this command, and just then he remembered leaving his father’s wicker creel in the stubble field where he’d cast it off to follow Willie into the paddock. He choked back a sob and left the room, leaving the door open. When the boy was gone, Brother Jobe gave the door a little shove shut with the toe of his boot. The doctor lay the broken fly rod on the table with the dead dog.

“It’s a right dreary situation,” Brother Jobe said. “Ain’t it?”

“Drink?” the doctor asked, ignoring the remark.

“Sure. What’s on tap?”

“Pear brandy.”

“Make it yourself ?”

“I got it in trade.”

“You do well in trade, I suppose.”

“I’ve got my share of patients who can’t pay anything.”

“Of course. Not being critical, mind you. Just an observation.”

The doctor poured a generous drink for Brother Jobe in a cobalt blue pony glass that was more than a 150 years old. Brother Jobe appeared to admire it.

“You like fine things, don’t you?” he said.

“I’m what used to be called a cultured person,” the doctor said.

“At least you’re plain about it. I admire that. You’re a man of science to boot.”

“Yes, I am,” the doctor said, refilling his own glass. “That’s why I feel a little queer about what I’m about to ask you.”

“Fire away, Doc.”

“That dog died less than ten minutes ago. I’ve got a notion that you might be able to bring him back.”

“Where’d you get that idea?” Brother Jobe asked.

“I think you know.”

Events of the summer just past had led many in town to wonder if the chief of the New Faith brotherhood possessed abilities beyond the limits of ordinary experience. Robert Earle, who had come closer to knowing Brother Jobe than anyone else in Union Grove, once asked him flat out whether he was “a regular human being”—to which Brother Jobe replied, “I like to think so.” The doctor, too, had seen evidence that Brother Jobe was, at least, something more than he merely seemed.

“We’re frittering away precious time,” the doctor said. “I’m asking you to try to bring this dog back.”

“I can’t do that,” Brother Jobe said.

“Can’t or won’t?” the doctor said.

“Don’t you think I would’ve brought my own son back if I could’ve?”

In July, Brother Jobe’s son, named Minor, had been killed by the miscreant Wayne Karp, who himself died less than twelve hours later under mysterious circumstances in the town jail. The bodies both came into the doctor’s “morgue”—his spring house—where he was obliged, as the official coroner, to assess the causes of death. Brother Jobe’s son had sustained fatal gunshot wounds to the head, the bullets entering through the eye and the mouth. Wayne Karp had died of wounds that appeared to be identical. The difference was that Wayne Karp had neither exit wounds nor any lead bullets in his head.

The doctor knocked back what was left in his glass and gave the dog a long look.

“My boy loved that dog very much, and I did, too.”

“Of course you did.”

“I can’t shake the feeling that you’ve got something going on.”

“Some kind of what?”