The Witch of Hebron (7 page)

“Everything all right?” he asked. Britney went to see about Sarah, leaving the two men alone in the front parlor.

“My boy’s run away,” the doctor said.

“Are you sure about that?”

“He stuffed a pillow and a bunch of clothes under the covers to make it look like he was sleeping late. But he’s gone.”

“Did you two have a fight?”

“I wouldn’t call it that, exactly. His dog got killed yesterday and he’s very angry because I couldn’t save him.”

“How’d that happen?”

“He got in with a horse and, being a puppy and all…”

“I’m very sorry.”

“I could use some help looking for Jasper, if you’re not too busy.”

“I can take a day off.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

Robert had been doing a job of very exacting finish carpentry for the New Faithers, something beyond their skills. He offered now to see about rounding up some of their more capable men who had been rangers in the Holy Land War to come along and help search for the boy. They were skilled trackers, he said.

“I don’t want them involved in this,” the doctor said. He explained how it was one of the New Faith horses that had stomped on the dog, how Brother Jobe appeared mysteriously at his office just after the dog died, and the strange business that had transpired between them there.

“I feel stupid even telling you this,” the doctor said. He ran his fingers through his beard and his hair. “I asked him to try to bring the dog back to life.”

Robert absorbed the statement but didn’t reply.

“Shows how desperate we get sometimes,” the doctor said. “Even someone like me, a man of science, who ought to know better.”

“Well, Brother Jobe, he’s got something going on,” Robert said. “I don’t know what to call it, but it’s something out of the ordinary.”

“I feel like a fool,” the doctor said.

“What did he say when you asked him that?”

“He said he couldn’t bring things back to life. He could only go the other way.”

“The other way?”

“That he could bring on death. Kill things. Something like that.”

“Well, I don’t want to seem mentally backward, Jerry, but between you and me, based on what we’ve seen around here, there seems to be something to that.”

“I don’t like to think so.”

“I don’t know that it depends on what we like or don’t like to think.”

“For all we know it’s some kind of hocus-pocus, like a magician on stage. They don’t do magic. They just very artfully distract your attention away from their trapdoors and devices.”

“What he did with Wayne Karp wasn’t smoke and mirrors, Jerry. It was flesh and bone.”

“Then maybe he’s just a garden-variety killer.”

“I think the truth is we don’t know what Brother Jobe is or how he does it. But for the moment, wouldn’t you rather have it on your side than against you?”

“Well, I feel like a damn fool asking him to bring that dog back from the dead. And for now I’d just like to keep him and his people out of this,” the doctor said. “You still willing to go search with me?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll stop by Tom Allison’s and arrange to get a saddle horse for you. I can ride old Mac.”

“Okay.”

“Come by the office when you’re ready to head out. And thanks.”

“Sure.”

Neither Robert nor the doctor knew, just then, that Jupiter the stallion lay dead in his paddock, nor how he met his end.

TWELVE

Jasper Copeland woke up in a field of golden bracken off the Battenville–Cambridge Road, a byway so untraveled even back in the old times that it had never been paved. He’d slept in his clothing with his father’s ancient wool hunting shirt over his sweater, his wool hat and gloves on, bundled in a blanket. His breath hung in a cloud on the cold, still air. Sparkling frost dusted the fronds of the bracken ferns. The dazzling sunlight that poured through the treetops, with the leaves at the height of fall color, filled him with an exhilarating terror. He was at large in a world that had made itself beautiful again, as free as a wild animal.

And then, as the reality of his situation rushed back at him, he remembered the woeful particulars of the life he had suddenly left behind: his beloved companion, Willie, who was now dead, the desperate scene in the paddock where Willie got hurt, then listening outside the window of his father’s office to his father bargaining with Brother Jobe, and the ghastly deed he had done to Brother Jobe’s stallion. His moral sense informed him that grave and terrible things had been set in motion that could not be undone and would change his life. He was not yet lonely for his family. If anything, he was still angry at them, especially his father. He supposed that the discovery of his foul deed would turn even them against him.

His backside was damp from sleeping on the spongy ground and his neck hurt. It occurred to him that he did not have a plan for what to do next and that it might be a good idea to come up with one. His lack of foresight frightened him, but he recognized that this moment required him to stand apart from his feelings, to simply act, and that his first order of business should be to just get going—that the act of getting himself into motion would stimulate him to begin to make a plan. So he stuffed his father’s hunting shirt into his backpack to give himself more freedom of movement and set off down the Battenville–Cambridge Road.

His footsteps warmed him up quickly, but after a little while hunger and thirst crowded out his more desperate thoughts, and he looked for a suitable place to stop and eat some of the provisions he’d brought with him. One side of the road was a set of fields and pastures belonging to farmer Ben Deaver, an airline executive in the old times. The fields were separated by hedgerows and low walls of granite stones worked up out of the ground every year in the relentless frost heaves. The corn, barley, and oat crops were reduced to stubble now that the harvest was over, and piles of fragrant manure lay up and down the rows waiting to be harrowed in. A final hay crop in one field was mowed and laid out in windrows, soon to be stacked or carted off to the barns. A substantial percentage of crop land had to be devoted to animal feeds in the new times.

The ownership of the land on the other side of the road was in limbo, since the family who had last lived and farmed there had all been taken by the Mexican flu some years earlier. What had been crop fields and pastures were now overgrown with sumac and poplar scrub. Adjoining parcels were second-growth woods from a previous era of abandonment when dairying had collapsed back in the 1980s. The casual observer might think it was mature old-growth forest. The flu and the encephalitis scourge that followed the flu had reduced the population of Washington County to less than half of what it had been at the turn of the millennium. A great deal of property now existed in legal limbo, since not only were its freeholders dead but communications had fallen off so severely that their far-flung relatives, heirs, and assigns could not be located. Nor were the courts functioning to adjudicate claims. Nor were the old computerized title records accessible. Nor were many people traveling anywhere. Houses and other buildings of all kinds stood vacant around the county. The people who ran the General Supply—inhabitants of Karptown, the former trailer park named after their fallen leader, Wayne Karp—enjoyed a lively business in the disassembly of these derelict structures and the resale of fabricated building materials that were no longer manufactured. Even old nails and screws had value. After farming, salvage was the town’s leading industry.

Farther down the road, Jasper spied a horse and cart as it came around a bend, perhaps a quarter mile ahead. He reacted quickly, slipping into the trees on the wooded side. He hid behind a blown-down locust tree and watched the rig pass by. The driver was an older man he recognized, but he could not attach a name to him. So many people came through his father’s office with their illnesses and injuries that over the years Jasper figured he’d seen everybody who was still alive in Washington County, though he never learned all their names. The driver hummed a tune to himself and the horse walked briskly, as if both were enjoying the crisp sunny weather. Jasper thought to himself that he would like a job driving a horse cart if he were ever allowed to rejoin society again after what he’d done. The sorrow attending that thought was shoved aside by his renewed awareness of hunger as he observed that the cart was filled with potatoes, freshly dug, still coated with earth. Potatoes were his favorite food, after apple pie. His mother made a kind of pan-fried cake of shredded potatoes cooked in butter in a cast-iron skillet that was about the tastiest thing he knew of. It came out of the pan upside down, all one piece, with the top brown and crispy. He was sorry that he had not brought a frying pan with him, but he knew how to roast potatoes in the coals of a wood fire, something his father had taught him on the overnight fishing and camping trips they sometimes made when the doctor needed to get away from his obligations. These memories of food sent him foraging in the pack for the corn bread, sausage, and cheese he’d brought with him. He told himself it would be smart to save some of it for a meal later in the day, but his hunger was so extreme that he couldn’t resist eating all of it.

When he was finished eating, he set forth carefully up the road in search of the field where that cart full of potatoes had come from. He didn’t have to go far to find it. From a distance, he saw half a dozen figures laboring there: hired men in rough clothes, forking up the earth and laying up the potatoes on the ground, where others came along and put them into willow baskets. Jasper stole around a hedgerow and crept up against a wall of old fieldstone, where he peered through the thicket of blackberry canes. He waited there for more than an hour, watching, sometimes slipping off to sleep from boredom until the gentle creak and clatter of the horse cart alerted him. When the cart came into the field, the laborers brought baskets of potatoes to it and dumped them in until the cart box was full again. Then the horse and cart went off down the road. The laborers gathered up their tools and departed. Jasper waited until he was sure they were gone and would not return. Down in the field, he found more than enough potatoes left for his purposes. He took enough for his supper and breakfast but not so many as to weigh down his backpack and slow his progress.

The way the sun was slanting, he knew that evening was not so far off. There were few clouds in the sky and he sensed that it would be a cold night. Feeling the urgent need to move on, he set off down the road again in a direction that he judged to be northerly, where the shadows of the trees pointed. North of here was the tiny hamlet of Hebron, where he had been a few times with his father, and farther north lay a place called Glens Falls, where he had never been but where his father had once worked in a hospital. It called itself a city. It was much larger than Union Grove. The words
Glens Falls
sounded musical, and he imagined it a handsome, lively place, full of bustle and enchantment, where a stranger, even a boy, could make himself useful in exchange for a warm place to sleep and regular meals. There were quite a few orphaned children in Union Grove, taken in by kind families. Hadn’t the shopkeeper, Terry Einhorn, taken in the dim-witted Buddy Haseltine, who swept the floor and stacked wooden crates and washed the windows? Or perhaps there was somebody like Stephen Bullock up there, a rich man of property who had a whole community of souls living on his plantation and was always looking for new blood. Jasper was not so keen on becoming a common laborer, like the potato diggers he had watched that day, but even at age eleven he had skills that full-grown men did not have. He had assisted his father and knew enough about illness to dispense useful advice. He had helped his father perform many routine surgeries, knew how to sew up wounds, and had once attended at the amputation of a man’s leg, hopelessly shattered by a falling barrel of flaxseed oil. It occurred to him that he could possibly find a position doctoring people.

With these thoughts in mind he made his way up the road. Not much farther he came upon the edge of an orchard. He reasoned correctly that this was the extreme corner of the property because there was not a person or a building in sight. It was planted with Northern Spy, a late-harvest apple, and he put six nice ones in his pack on top of the three that he ate then and there.

THIRTEEN

Brother Jobe enjoyed the gliding gait of his mount, a mule named Atlas. He was fond of telling people that a mule rode much more smoothly than a good saddle horse, and was smarter, and could stand up to heat better, and was not stubborn but rather sensible and disinclined to follow obviously foolish commands that might discommode or injure it. A mule was a superior animal, and he felt positively superior riding one, despite what others might think. And once he got his mule-breeding business up and going next spring, he was confident that folks would begin to see the advantage of mules. Of course people still wanted horses, and he aimed to keep breeding them, too, but for now he was out a perfectly good stallion.

Though it was a pleasant, crisp fall afternoon, and despite his enjoyment at being out on the road riding Atlas, Brother Jobe suffered in a personal globe of perturbation knowing, as he now did, that the doctor’s boy had poisoned his studhorse, Jupiter. He was further vexed by the knowledge that the boy had eloped from Union Grove and was on the loose somewhere in the county. He was reluctant to pursue the boy, fearful of roiling relations between his people and the townspeople if and when the boy was found. If the boy happened to come back on his own, well, that would be another matter. All politics aside, he wanted to flog the boy within an inch of his life, or maybe beyond that.

Brother Jobe was on a journey to Steven Bullock’s plantation, several thousand acres of fruitful bottomland and upland five miles outside town at the place where the Battenkill joined the Hudson River. He had business to discuss with Mr. Bullock, the grandee of the county, with his vast holdings, his many faithful servants, and his personal hydroelectric outfit. To start with, there were certain urgent matters of the law that required the attention of Mr. Bullock as Union Grove’s elected magistrate. But mostly, Brother Jobe wanted to inquire about getting a stallion to replace Jupiter. Bullock was raising big German Hanoverians for the saddle. America was dearly short of horseflesh, so rapid had been the descent out of the old times into the new. Wasn’t it odd, then, Brother Jobe mused to the soft rocking gait of Atlas the mule, that his daddy had owned the leading Ford dealership in Scott County, Virginia, back in the twentieth century?