The Witch of Hebron (34 page)

Elam rolled over, blinking.

“BJ ain’t feeling so good,” Seth explained.

“Go fetch our mounts from what’s-his-name,” Brother Jobe told Seth. “I ain’t in no mood to linger or dawdle.”

“What about all them onions?”

“Leave them on the sidewalk for folks or something. O Lord, I never felt nothing like this before.”

They borrowed a grain scuttle from Efraim, the livery owner, and shoveled all but a few pounds of the onions onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel, a gift to the town of Glens Falls. Soon the horses were hitched onto the wagon and they were under way, Seth driving, with two saddles stashed beside him. Brother Jobe lay in the cargo box under several blankets on a mattress purchased hastily from the hotel, with the bundled remains of the dead man with him for company. Elam rode Atlas behind the wagon to keep an eye on Brother Jobe and distract him from his torment with conversation.

Leaving town, with Brother Jobe croaking in pain from the jolts of the wagon, they again crossed the ancient bridge over the town’s eponymous waterfall where the Hudson River leaped sixty feet down on its run from the Adirondack wilderness below Mount Marcy. There was a great whirlpool beneath the bridge.

“Maybe we should dispose of the body here,” Seth said over his shoulder. “Commit his soul to the watery depths and all.”

“That ain’t right,” Brother Jobe said. “And you know it.”

“He stinks something awful.”

“If I can stand it back here, you can too.”

“We’re more worried about you than him,” Elam chimed in.

“My daddy lived like this for months before it took him.” Brother Jobe winced as the wheels bounced over a loose chunk of concrete. “O Lord have mercy!”

A few miles east of there, beyond the last traces of small-town suburbia, they came upon an overgrown rural cemetery. Brother Jobe directed them to stop and bury the remains of the onion-wagon man.

“I hate to tell you this, but we ain’t got no shovels,” Seth said.

“What happened to that shovel you took all them onions off here with?”

“I give it back to the man at the stable before we left.”

“You mean to tell me we left home without no shovels?”

“We didn’t expect to be burying folks all up and down the county.”

“What are you going to bury me with if the Lord snatches me before we make it home?”

“You said your daddy lived for months after he got the cancer.”

“Well, I ain’t him. And besides, they had hospitals back then. They doused him with enough chemicals to put down the weeds on a hundred acres of goldurned cotton.”

“I say we just leave him under a tree somewheres, nice and peaceful,” Elam said. “I don’t think it’s doing you good to lie there with it.”

“He’s our brother now. We ain’t chucking him aside like a banana peel.”

Elam was beginning to wonder if Brother Jobe’s illness was affecting his mind, but he didn’t want to argue.

“All right, then, gee your team back up, Seth,” Elam said.

They went five miles more and the road grew steeper as it ascended into the Gavottes. Brother Jobe appeared to be slipping out of consciousness at times. In one of the intervals when he lay quietly laboring in his agony, Seth said it would help the horses make it into the highlands if they could lighten the load.

“It’s either the saddles or you-know-who.”

“I say we hold the five-minute funeral.”

“I’m with you. It ain’t doing anybody no good to ride him around.”

They halted in their journey and found a suitable place for the dead man, still bundled up in Seth’s blanket, in a grove of tamarack trees. They piled a cairn of loose granite stones over him to discourage the wild animals from getting to him and spoke a very few words over his grave.

“Lord, please hallow the ground where we leave these mortal remains,” Elam intoned over the cairn, with his hat upon his heart and Seth standing beside him likewise, while Brother Jobe groaned in the wagon. “He hath no marker but was some poor mother’s son and perhaps some poor son’s father, and maybe some good woman’s husband, and if he was not all those things he was his own soul, at least. Take him home in your keeping, ye who alone knows his name, amen.”

“Okay, we done it,” Seth said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Over in the wagon, Brother Jobe groaned again.

SIXTY-FIVE

Barbara Maglie was shocked at first to wake up in a bed with the boy. She had taken him into one of the other bedrooms very late in the night and locked him in a protective embrace while he slept. But Barbara could not find sleep. Worry consumed her for hours. She didn’t know how to persuade the boy to return to his home and his family, when he was bent on going to Glens Falls. She would offer to ride him down to Union Grove in her own one-horse trap, she thought, but would he come willingly? She doubted it. She might have to journey down to Union Grove by herself to inform the doctor and his comrades to go to Glens Falls and search for the boy there.

This acid swirl of worry dissolved sometime before daylight gathered in the eaves. Sleep finally found her and when she did wake up—because Jasper was trying to pry her hands off him—she recalled the dire events of the evening before while a sharp conviction of the boy’s immediate destiny flashed through her mind, spooling out as colorfully as cinema used to. She saw that indeed he would set out for Glens Falls but some circumstance would cause him to return to her house. The intimation was powerful enough to persuade her that it was inevitable, and she resigned herself to it.

“Please help me get the body out of the house,” she said. “Then you can go if you must.”

“I’ll help you,” he said.

So the two of them rose out of bed in the gray morning and proceeded to remove Billy Bones from the house without ceremony. His twisted body was stiffened in rigor mortis. Barbara pulled up and fastened his trousers for the sake of decorum, then asked Jasper to take a leg and help pull him outside. Doing so, they left a long smudge of coagulated blood down the hall and through the kitchen, and Billy’s head bounced audibly on the steps as they dragged him out the door. They dragged him down a path past the outhouse, through the yellowing high grass beyond the paddock where Barbara’s brindle horse grazed oblivious to them, and behind the pasture where her cow, Sonya, stood waiting to be taken to the barn and milked. They penetrated the margin of the woods there and deposited Billy between two locust trees.

“Help me get the shovels,” Barbara said, and Jasper dutifully accompanied her to a toolshed attached to the barn. She handed him a long-handled shovel and took a garden spade for herself, and they walked back toward the woods. “Who was he?” she asked.

“I don’t really know,” Jasper said.

“You were his companion.”

“Only for a few days and nights. He tried to rob me when I first came upon him.”

“Why did you join up with him?”

“He made me. He wouldn’t let me go. He kept calling me his pro… pro…”

“Protégé?”

“Yes. I tried to get away from him but he caught me and said he’d kill me. He meant it, too. He killed three people that I know of during the time I was with him, maybe others, too. I didn’t have any part of it—” Jasper broke down sobbing again. Barbara gathered him in her arms.

“No one will blame you for his crimes,” she said.

“How do you know?”

The truth was she didn’t know. She knew the law had become a flimsy thing in these new times, but she also knew that people acted in concert in the absence of the law, when they felt strongly enough about something, and that justice and the law were not always the same thing.

“You’re just a child,” she finally said.

They walked silently the rest of the way back to the locust glade in the margin of the woods. Barbara spaded out the top layer of leaves and weeds, and then they took turns digging out the grave with the long-handled shovel. When they had gone down less than three feet, she said, “That’s enough.” They dragged Billy’s body into the hole, where his body deployed itself rigid and twisted, his dead eyes staring blindly up, and his mouth open as if caught in a smart remark. Of course his expression did not change as Barbara dumped the first shovelful of earth on his face. She did the remaining work while Jasper stood by, wiping tears from his eyes with his sleeve. Soon, she had the body covered up.

She took Jasper back to the house and fed him a breakfast of fried potatoes and eggs, resigned to what she knew about his fate, which she did not reveal to him because he would not understand it, and it wouldn’t change anything.

“Do you need help cleaning up the mess?” he asked, when he was finished with his breakfast.

“No. I’ll take care of it.”

“Can I go now, then?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry about what happened here.”

“I know. It’s not your fault.”

“Please don’t tell anybody.”

“I won’t.”

“I don’t think anyone will come looking for him,” Jasper said. “Nobody cared about him.”

“I understand.”

“You’re a very kind lady.”

“Thank you. You’re a good boy. I see the light of love in you.”

Jasper made a pained face, as if he couldn’t imagine such a thing.

“Maybe we’ll meet again some day,” he said.

“I know we will,” she said.

She gave him three hard-boiled eggs, a wedge of cheese, and a slab of corn bread wrapped up in a kerchief, and kissed him on the forehead. He went to fetch his backpack out of the barn and set out to make his way over the highlands toward Glens Falls, with the visage of Robin centered in his mind as a totem to ward off the frightening memories of his recent misadventures and his fears about the journey ahead.

He had gone four miles that gray morning, feeling lighter and less burdened by the mile, imagining his career in the distant town and the friend who waited for him. He was not altogether sure of the way, but he followed a route that took him ever higher through the Gavottes, knowing that eventually he would descend back into the Hudson Valley. On a forgotten byway called Shine Creek Road, he entered into a rocky defile where the road twisted severely in its effort to traverse the ridgeline. He rounded the curve of the road and heard a high-pitched cry, as of a baby stuck with a pin, and ran his eyes up the jutting rocks until, in amazement, they fastened on the sight of a big golden catamount perched down on its haunches ten feet above him, its mouth wide open and fangs in bold display. In the long moment of recognition that this was something apart from anything he had seen in his childhood storybooks, Jasper became a statue. He locked eyes with the creature and saw in their red brilliance the odd apparition of his own death.

SIXTY-SIX

Perry Talisker woke up on the summit of Wilmot Hill, the highest point in the Gavottes, enveloped in a fog bank. The fog reminded him emphatically of his position in the transit between life and death. He greeted the morning with a solemn joy that his final trial was at hand and he was fully prepared for it. He had left the darkness of night and darkness in general behind, along with its agents and principalities, and knew he would never be troubled by them again. The fog that blanketed his bivouac on Wilmot Hill was a vapor of angels, heralding the Great Thing that awaited him on this last day of his life on earth. Even his profound loneliness had become an exultation.

He left his campsite without breakfast—indeed, he had not taken a meal for days—and an animal instinct guided him down from the summit, out of the fog cloud, onto a barren hillside of rocky scree, below which the forest seemed to spread endlessly in a golden tapestry, with no sign of man along the vast panorama. He was beyond the cares of man now. He knew that his destiny lay below, that he was closing on it, and that it would reveal itself shortly. A bright confidence unbounded by the leaden tropes of memory or need lured him down into the golden woods, with the rifle slung over his shoulder, gliding effortlessly through the understory, over blowdown and rill, in pursuit of his own transcendent becoming.

Hours later, he emerged from the rapture of the forest at a place just short of where Shine Creek Road entered the defile over the Gavottes. He stepped lightly uphill on the road with his senses on fire, in thrall to his own animal instinct. His breathing and his heartbeat quickened, and when he rounded a bend where the road cut a cleft between two scarps of ancient uplifted rocks, he was struck more by the beauty of leaves fluttering soundlessly on the breezeless air than the fraught frozen stances of the crouching cat up on the rockpile and the boy below.

Jasper did not hear Perry Talisker come up behind him so much as smell him—a vibrant stink like the rectified essence of the woods itself. Jasper thought it was the cat. The big cat snarled and sank deeper into its haunches. Perry swung the rifle off his back and shouldered it in a single deft movement. But when he pulled the trigger, the only report was a dull metallic click. He shoved down the lever and the next bullet failed to enter the chamber properly. By then, the cat was in the air with all four limbs extended against the sky. In that timeless interval, Perry flung away the rifle, drew a knife from his belt, and turned the eight-inch blade upward so that it entered the cat’s heart at the exact moment the cat closed its jaws on his head. As they fell to the earth, the back of Perry’s skull dashed against a jagged chunk of broken pavement, and the force of the fall drove the shard of asphalt deep into his brain stem. Both the cat and the man quivered a few moments while life struggled out of them.

Jasper, who had recoiled in the event and fallen over, lay goggle-eyed on the road’s dusty shoulder beneath the wall of rock with his own pulse pounding in his ears and the air scintillated with death. He remained motionless for a long time, afraid to do more than breathe while he studied the mute vignette of cat and man a few scant yards away. It was a long while before he was satisfied that the cat was dead, and the man beneath him, as well. A pool of blood had poured out of the cat’s heart and joined with a pool of blood that came out of the man’s brain, and flowed in a single rivulet off the crown of the road into the yellow weeds of the roadside. So absorbed was he in his study of cat and man that he did not register the sound of the wagon struggling up the road from the west until it had crested the ridge.