The Witch of Hebron (33 page)

“I think so, too,” Jasper said.

“You can talk?”

“Yes.”

“He said you couldn’t.”

“That was just one of his lies.”

“Who was he?”

“A bandit and a murderer. Billy Bones was his name.”

“What were you doing with him?”

“He wouldn’t let me get away. It was all a mistake.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m nobody.”

“You’re the doctor’s boy, aren’t you? From Union Grove.”

“How’d you know that?”

“They were here, looking for you.”

“Who?”

“Your father.”

“When?”

“Some days ago.”

“Who else?”

“A friend. A man named Robert.”

“Robert Earle.”

“Yes, Robert Earle.”

“I’ve done terrible things,” Jasper said. “I can’t go home.”

“Yes, you can. You must.”

“I can’t. I have a place I can go to in Glens Falls.”

Jasper tried to get up but Barbara held on to him tightly.

“Don’t go now. Please. It’s night. There are wild animals out there. Wolves. Big cats. You can’t go out there on the roads by yourself at night.”

Jasper yielded and slid down against her again.

“Stay until morning, at least,” Barbara said. “Please. I’ll need help to get his body out of here.”

“Where are you going to take him?”

“Into the woods. We have to bury him.”

They sat quietly a while longer, watching Billy Bones’s inert corpse. His eyes remained open, unblinking.

“Why did you attack him like that?” she asked. “He could have killed you.”

“I had to stop him. He killed people. He would have killed you.”

“But he pointed his gun right at you.”

“The gun was empty.”

“What?”

“The metal part you shove in that holds the bullets. He never had one. He just hit people with it. He killed a man up in the hills, a wagon driver, trying to rob him. He smashed his head over and over with the gun and the man died. I was there. I saw it. He killed the he-she at the house in Glens Falls.”

Jasper burst into tears and buried his face against Barbara. He cried for a long time. She let him cry himself into exhaustion. They remained against the wall until they both fell asleep, well past midnight, when the moon had arced clear across the sky and begun disappearing behind the treetops on the other side of the house.

SIXTY-TWO

The doctor sat in his ladder-back chair and took another pull on the bottle of pear brandy while he gazed across the dank spring-house at the corpse of Shawn Watling, dead more than five months now, shot to death on a hot and dusty afternoon at the old town landfill, where he had gone with Robert Earle to buy a few pounds of roofing nails from the Wayne Karp gang, who ran the place as a retail salvage yard. The circumstances remained murky to those not present at the incident. Robert Earle had conveyed Shawn’s body back to town in a cart, and it was his word against about a dozen of the Karptown men as to how the young man happened to get half of his face blown off.

So enormous were the forces of rage and despair roiling inside the doctor this night nearing Halloween that he wanted to obliterate his consciousness. He didn’t want to do it inside the house, where his wife, Jeanette, and daughter, Dinah, would have to suffer it, or even in his office where someone might come looking for him. His tortured, convoluted thoughts prompted him to do his drinking in the company of the corpse, his only suitable companion at this time, he believed.

He had carried out the first part of Magistrate Stephen Bullock’s writ to exhume the body from its resting place in the cemetery with the help of three New Faith brothers, who actually did the hard work of digging up the coffin. They conveyed it to the doctor’s place in a horse cart, removed the corpse from the coffin—an odious task—and arranged it in the springhouse with its head on a wood block on the long table that had hours earlier been occupied by an array of winter squashes and onions. A dozen hams, which the doctor sometimes received as payment for services, hung dimly up in the rafters gathering protective mold. The shelves were lined with glass jars of vegetables and preserved fruit, some of it also payment for services. Stoneware crocks of sauerkraut stood on the floor along the fieldstone wall. A beeswax candle in a tin saucer guttered at the end of the long table, inches from the corpse’s moldy boot heels.

The doctor lifted the bottle again, hesitating a moment as he wondered whether he had imagined some slight movement in the corpse’s facial expression—such as it was. The fragment of the jaw bone that remained hung from a shriveled tendril of ligament. The eyes and surrounding flesh had dissolved into the sockets, and various organisms of the soil had bloomed within the coffin and eaten down most of the nose. The doctor managed to ignore the vivid stink of decomposition, as he had learned to do years earlier during a rotation in pathology.

“What’s next?” the doctor thought he heard the corpse say. He had known Shawn Watling since the dead man was a teenage boy, had treated him for one thing and another, had delivered his daughter, Sarah, seven years ago, and knew his voice. The doctor lowered the bottle, squinting at the corpse, who seemed strangely now to have assumed the very look of Shawn Watling when alive, that is, a perceived representation of it.

“What happens next to me?” the corpse seemed to speak again.

“Postmortem examination,” the doctor said.

“Are you going to cut me open?”

“Afraid so. Bullock ordered it.”

“It isn’t pretty in there.”

“I’m well aware.”

“Can you give me a little something to ease the pain?”

“You won’t need anything.”

“Says you.” The corpse appeared to laugh.

The doctor blinked, raised the bottle to his lips again, and tipped his head back. The powerful liquor transpired through his stomach lining and soon roared in his veins.

“I have to search for the bullets that killed you,” the doctor said.

“You’ll find a couple of 206 grain .41 caliber hollowpoints in there,” the corpse said. “One in my neck up against the C2 vertabrae. Another way up in the parietal lobe of my brain, or the miserable jelly that remains of it.”

“I still have to go through with it,” the doctor said.

“I don’t hold it against you, Doc. Cheers.”

The doctor stared at the corpse in the dim, flickering light. He was strangely relieved to have someone to talk to. The room and everything in it rotated slightly.

“I’m drunk,” the doctor said.

“You’re worried about your boy.”

“I’m worried sick and crazy,” the doctor said.

“He’s in a lot of trouble,” the corpse said. “But he’s a good boy.”

“He was never anything but a good boy,” the doctor said, and tears began to pool in his eyes. He hoisted the bottle again but paused to rest the butt of it on his thigh. “I couldn’t save his pup. I couldn’t. There was nothing I could do.” The doctor sank his chin down into his chest and began quietly blubbering.

“Your boy’s been through an ordeal,” the corpse said.

“Where is he?”

“He’s up north.”

“Up north where?”

“In the north end of the county.”

“Where exactly?”

“You don’t need to know.”

“Of course I do.”

“He’s coming back to you.”

“When?”

“Soon. He’s got one more tribulation.”

“What is it?”

“No point telling you. He has to go through it alone. The way we all go through this life.”

“What good are you?”

“That’s a helluva question, Doc.”

“You’re a useless piece of rotten meat.”

“I’ll try to not take that personally.”

“Go to hell.”

“I know you only say that because you feel helpless,” the corpse said. “In life, you liked me.”

“You should tell me where he is, goddamn you.”

“He’ll be home soon enough. He’ll be changed, but he’ll be home.”

“Changed how?”

“Not a child anymore.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I’m so weary—”

“Goddamn you.”

“Goddamn me? I’m beyond that now,” the corpse said. The appearance of life went out of it and it settled back into mute stillness.

The doctor tried to raise the bottle to his lips again, but the effort defeated him. His eyes rolled up in his head, he listed to the left, fell off the ladder-back chair, and crashed to the floor unconscious.

SIXTY-THREE

Jane Ann, in her nightclothes and robe, rushed down the front porch steps of the big rectory in the lustrous moonlight as Loren helped Paul and Jesse down off Lucky.

“Look what I found,” Loren said.

Jane Ann knelt down in the maple leaves and the boys naturally gravitated around her. She wanted to embrace them, but Loren warned her about the lice. He gave her a very abridged version of the rescue story, who they were, and their situation, while Jane Ann looked them over one at a time, turning them this way and that, attempting to determine if any of the boys had an immediate problem that would require an urgent trip to see Dr. Copeland. She couldn’t see much, even under the nearly full moon. They all seemed able to stand on their own and had few obvious sores or injuries. But the temperature had dropped and their breath hung on the still air in silver clouds; they wasted no more time getting inside the warm rectory. Throughout, the boys hardly spoke, so undone were they with fatigue, trauma, and malnutrition, and merely obeyed anything they were told to do.

When Loren returned from putting Lucky away in Tom Allison’s barn down Van Buren Street, he brought in two of the largest pots from the church’s community room, filled them with water, and put them on the stove to warm. Meanwhile Jane Ann had cooked a big batch of scrambled eggs with pieces of hard sausage and carved a leftover corn bread into blocks for the boys to eat with a tub of butter, a three-pound chunk of Mr. Schmidt’s Center Falls brick cheese, and glasses of that same farmer’s milk. They ate as much as hard-working grown men and with the same kind of fierce concentration, even little Jesse.

When they were finished with their meal, Loren took each boy into his study, where he placed a chair on a bedsheet that was spread on the floor, and cut his hair as closely to the scalp as possible without shaving it altogether. He rubbed sunflower seed oil on their scalps and their eyelashes to suffocate the remaining lice. Jane Ann brought each boy into the bathroom, where she rubbed vinegar onto their scalps to loosen the gluelike substance that kept nits attached to what remained of the hair shafts. Loren took the sheet with all its hair clippings outside in a bundle to his burn pile. Then Jane Ann bathed the boys one at a time, scrubbing them with strong soap. Loren waited outside the bathroom to apply another dose of oil to each boy’s head and give him something to wear to bed in the way of an old T-shirt or some other article from the church’s impressive collection of donated clothing.

Finally they brought the boys upstairs and put the two Single-tree brothers in the room that had been their own boy’s room up until the day he left Union Grove. The room had a set of bunk beds. Paul and little Jesse were installed for the night in a double bed in another room that years before had been reserved for sojourning relatives and out-of-town guests—two categories of visitors lately made obsolete by circumstances. That they were being cared for, bathed, fed good food, and shown to comfortable beds seemed enough to reassure them that they were finally safe in good hands. Loren and Jane Ann took turns saying good night to the boys, telling them again that an effort would be made to find their parents or relatives, and that they would be looked after in any case. The boys fell asleep within seconds of crawling under the blankets. Then Loren and Jane Ann retired to their own bedroom. He gave her a more rounded version of his discovery and rescue of the boys from the dungeon behind the Argyle store and of his doings with Miles English, their captor, and of the boys’ probable destiny: to remain in Union Grove, perhaps with them, or with other families willing to take them in. Loren and Jane Ann clung together closely in bed as he told her all this. He felt her physical presence in a way that he had not for years, and she sensed his feeling her, and each perceived the other in the fullness of the moment, and then a wondrous thing occurred.

In the aftermath Jane Ann held on to his broad chest as if it were a life raft in a tumultuous strait between two unknown shores. Her eyes remained wide open, as if struggling to comprehend something that might reveal itself in the moving shadows of the naked tree branches, cast by the moonlight through the windows, that played over the walls.

“What’s happened to you?” she asked.

“I’ve changed.”

“But how?”

He hesitated. “I found a witch,” he said. “And she put a spell on me.”

Something in his voice convinced her that it was not necessary to ask if he was kidding. Instead she asked, “Have you changed? Or is the whole world changing around us?”

“Both, I think.”

SIXTY-FOUR

As dawn broke over Glens Falls, Brother Jobe woke up in his hotel room with sharper pains in his abdomen than anything he had felt in the days preceding. Despite the window being open and his labored breath coming out in a frosty fog, he sweated into his bedclothes, and the damp made him shiver. It galled him additionally that he’d made himself go hungry the whole day before and now his gut hurt worse than ever. He managed to pull himself out of bed and knocked on the door of the adjoining room. Seth answered it in his long drawers, scratching.

“What’s up, BJ? You don’t look so good.”

“I’m low. I got the cancer or something.”

“Cancer?”

“Cancer of the guts. It killed my daddy. I must have it, too. You got to bring me back.”

“Uh.… Okay.”

“And I mean right away. If I’m going to die, it’s going to be amongst my own. Prepare that wagon for me. I can’t take a mule now.”

“What do you want to do with our dead man?”

“Guess I’ll ride with the sumbitch until we find a suitable place to bury him. Get your lazy rear end out of the rack, Elam!”