The Witch of Hebron (9 page)

He’d already decided to spend the night in the trailer. In the meager twilight emanating from the last red streaks in the sky, he gathered up some of the plentiful dry twigs lying around the trailer’s clearing and started a fire with them, the light of which allowed him to find some larger branches to feed the fire. Soon he had a majestic blaze roaring. He ate two apples from his pack while he watched the fire burn down enough to rake a bed of embers apart from the main fire with a stick. He placed his three largest potatoes on these embers and tended them carefully—rolling them this way and that way—for half an hour until he judged that they were cooked. Then he stabbed each with the sharpened end of his stick and put them on a rock out of the heat. Though blackened on the outside, they were yellow and creamy within. He was so hungry that he burned the roof of his mouth devouring the first two, and only while consuming the last one did he think how much better they would have been with some butter and salt.

When he finished his meal and had no more room for even another apple, he tossed more wood on his fire and hatched a scheme for begging provisions at some farmhouse door the following day. He was far enough from home, he reasoned, to not be recognized by anyone. He could make up a story about who he was and where he was going, and ask for whatever he needed to sustain him—corn bread, eggs, butter, cheese, maybe even meat—as he made his way to Glens Falls, where he would find a place for himself.

In a little while he retired to the trailer. The door to the little bedroom was still on its hinges and the deadbolt on it worked. The plywood bed was hard, but he was glad to feel sheltered and secure. He stuck the six inches of candle to a blob of hot wax on the night table and retrieved the stuffed animal from his sweater. He could put his hand a little ways inside and hold it up like a puppet.

“What’s your name?” he asked it.

“I don’t know,” he said on the animal’s behalf.

“Do you mind if I call you Willie?”

“No, that’s a nice name.”

“I’m going to take care of you now. Nothing bad will happen to you anymore.”

“I’m tired of laying on that dirty floor.”

“You’re with me now,” Jasper told it. “Everything will be okay.”

When he said that, the tears gushed out of his eyes as he thought about his home, and his family, and town, and dear friends, and the other Willie, whom he had been unable to keep out of harm’s way.

SIXTEEN

Brother Jobe rode up into the driveway of Stephen Bullock’s plantation house, dismounted, approached a man standing at the mouth of a great gray barn—one Dick Lee, an insurance claims officer in the old days and now the chief stable hand—and inquired about the lord of the manor. Dick Lee gazed at the visitor with bewilderment.

“The head honcho of this outfit,” Brother Jobe explained. “Mr. Bullock. I’m here to see him.”

“And who would you be?”

“I’m the head honcho of the New Faith outfit back to town. You heard of us?”

“I guess I have.”

“Do you know the Lord?”

“I don’t think about it much.”

“Is that so? What about the extraspecial select moments when you do?”

“I don’t think about it much even in those moments when I do think about it.”

“It just passes through your noggin like the morning breeze?”

“No, it’s more like when I’m going at it with the wife. She always yells ‘Jesus Christ’ when I hit her sweet spot.” Dick Lee enjoyed a laugh. “Anyway, Mr. Bullock isn’t around.”

“Is he on the property somewheres?”

“He’s over to the sorghum mill just now, I think.”

“Well, if you’ll just maybe send and fetch him, I’d be grateful.”

Dick Lee seemed to weigh this a moment. Then he yelled into the dark mouth of the barn to his back: “Eddie Flake!”

A boy about sixteen with a lopsided head and a touch of palsy came limping out. He was directed to fetch Bullock. Brother Jobe watched him lope off down the grassy wagon lane that connected the house and barns to the other parts of Bullock’s vast acreage.

“You send a cripple boy all the way over there?”

“It’s what he does,” Dick Lee said. “I’ll take your mount.”

“Mind how you handle him.”

Dick Lee’s demeanor had settled into one of not-well-concealed condescending amusement. Brother Jobe, at five foot six and plump, with facial features that seemed crowded together in the center of his face, and dressed in his severe black frock topped off with a broad-brimmed straw hat, presented a figure that others seemed to find risible, sometimes to their later regret.

“Never rode a mule myself,” Dick Lee said.

“It’s the coming thing,” Brother Jobe said.

“It isn’t coming here,” Dick Lee said as he vanished into the barn with Atlas.

“Our Lord rode an ass into Jerusalem, you know,” Brother Jobe called after him.

Brother Jobe waited a good half an hour by the soapstone horse trough under a blazing orange old maple between the house and the barn. The waiting irritated him, as there was really nowhere to sit except the rim of the horse trough, which was not comfortable. It also irritated him that no one had invited him into the house, and his gall reached such a pitch that he almost went into the barn to retrieve his mount when Bullock appeared in the wagon lane in front of Eddie Flake, who was more than forty years younger and struggled to keep up. Bullock, with his Roman nose, longish white hair, tailored trousers, cotton blouse, and fine polished boots, looked something like Buffalo Bill, Brother Jobe thought, lacking only the flowing mustache and goatee.

“You take tea?” he asked Brother Jobe rather brusquely.

“When poteen ain’t available,” Brother Jobe said.

“Follow me.”

Like the crippled boy, Brother Jobe, too, found it hard to keep up with Bullock’s long strides. He followed him around the graceful old white clapboard house to a pavilion beside a pond. Inside, the pavilion was furnished with a low table between two substantial cushions on a tatami mat. The west wall was open to the pond.

“Have a seat.”

“You mean on that pillow?”

Bullock didn’t even reply. He removed his boots and sat down on the cushion to the left, Indian-style, and Brother Jobe did likewise to the right. He took off his straw hat and placed it on the table.

“Don’t put that there,” Bullock said, and Brother Jobe snatched it back.

Just then, Mrs. Bullock swept into the pavilion bearing a tray with a rough-looking ceramic teapot and two matching cups without handles.

“Why, Mr. Jobe,” she said. “What a pleasant surprise.”

Brother Jobe struggled to stand up.

“Sit down,” Bullock said.

“Afternoon, ma’am.”

Sophie Bullock, a signal beauty at fifty-eight, wore a russet-colored full skirt and a golden silk shirtwaist with long gathered sleeves and ruffles in front. An alluring topaz pendant dangled below her collarbone. While she kept busy directing the daily operations of the household on the large plantation, looking after the many needs of the families who lived there, she rarely undertook physical labor. To Brother Jobe, she looked like a goddess of autumn. As she bent to place the tray on the low table, he got a good look down her décolletage, exercising his senses to the degree that he silently invoked his Savior’s name. He was still enjoying the view as she poured him a cup.

“Why this here’s real ding-dang tea,” he said.

“Of course it is,” Bullock said.

“Where all do you get it?”

“We get a lot of things.”

“Do you get any coffee?”

“Sometimes. These days we get tea. And we like it.”

“Well, there ain’t nothing wrong with it.”

“We hear your group is making great strides reviving Main Street over in town,” Mrs. Bullock said as she filled her husband’s cup.

“Why, yes, ma’am. We’ve done opened a barbershop and a haberdash already, and I aim to get a tavern room going sometime this winter.”

“Really? How is it your denomination goes along with ardent spirits?”

“Well, ma’am, our spirits are ardent for the Lord.”

“She means how come you let your people drink liquor,” Bullock said. “Most religious people we know of take a dim view of that.”

“We ain’t Baptist or Methodist, Your Honor. We got our own ways. Lookit here, the pope of Rome and his bunch are all for drinking the blood of the lamb, ain’t they? And their outfit is ongoing in bidness some two thousand years now. In these hard times, folks need a spot of life’s comfort. We’re all for music, dancing, and poteen in moderation and in its place. It don’t conflict with love of Jesus. And the town needs a place where all folks can meet and mix, theirs and ours. There ain’t any such facility in town. Everybody stays all buttoned up in their households after sundown. It ain’t healthy.”

“You don’t have to call me ‘Your Honor,’” Bullock said.

“You are the elected magistrate,” Brother Jobe said.

“Don’t remind him,” Mrs. Bullock said with a girlish laugh as she withdrew from the pavilion. Brother Jobe craned his neck to watch as she retraced the flagstone path back to the house.

“I’m sorry, but I have to remind you,” Brother Jobe said, turning back to Bullock, “we still got the matter of that killing back in June. Young man, name of Shawn Watling. We attended his funeral not two weeks after we got here. I’d expect by now that you would have called for an inquest, got started convening a grand jury and such.”

Bullock’s irritation increased visibly. He shifted on his cushion, put down his teacup, and took it up again. “I’ve had my hands full here on the farm,” he said.

“I expect you have,” Brother Jobe said. “Believe me, I know what it’s like to run a big outfit. But you and you alone represent the rule of law around here. And forgive me for saying it, you’ve been neglecting your duties.”

“Are you lecturing me?”

Bullock’s eyes met Brother Jobe’s directly for the first time and their gazes locked. Apparently Bullock saw something in there that made him wince.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll order that young man’s body dug up and we’ll have a look.”

“I’ll be grateful if you’d get hopping on that,” Brother Jobe said.

“I don’t think we’re going to learn anything,” Bullock said.

“Anyway, Mr. Wayne Karp himself is no longer with us—thanks to you, rumor has it—and I’m inclined to think that he or one of his people was the trigger man in that incident. As long as you’re here, I’d like to ask you: How’d you manage to kill that tough little bird?”

“I didn’t have nothing to do with Mr. Karp’s death.”

“Come on. Just between the two of us.”

“The Lord’s wrath took him down.”

“I guess the Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“You got that right, sir. Somebody poisoned my studhorse last night.”

Bullock gagged on his tea and fell into a coughing fit.

“You all right there, sir?”

“Poisoned?” Bullock said, recovering.

“That’s right.”

“Then I suppose you have some idea who’s responsible.”

“We’re working on it.”

“If you don’t know who might have done such a thing, then what makes you so sure the animal was poisoned in the first place?”

“Don’t you worry. We know.”

“Do you have a vet amongst your people?”

“We have more than a few that served in the Holy Land,” Brother Jobe said, referring to the war years earlier that closed down oil imports from the Middle East and brought the industrial nations to their knees.

“Not army vets. I mean horse doctors.”

“We got several fellows that knows everything there is to know about horses.”

“Horses sometimes do just drop dead, you know.”

“This here horse was as healthy as you or me.”

Bullock poured himself another cup from the teapot.

“Do you want to tell me who you think did this?” he said. “Just between the two of us.”

“It wouldn’t serve no purpose. I don’t know as we could prove anything at this point.”

“So you say you know who did it, but you can’t even prove that the animal was poisoned.”

“Yessir. That’s it in a nutshell.”

“I must say, it doesn’t quite add up.”

“Well, it adds up to this: I need another stallion.”

“Oh? I can lend over ours. Darwin. He’s just hitting his prime.”

“I’d be grateful for that. But I was wondering if you might have a spare stallion for purchase outright.”

“Not just now. But I’ve got some pregnant mares.”

“Is that so? We could stand new blood.”

“They’re Hanoverians. Wonderful, big, strapping, all-around brutes. First-rate behind either a combine or a carriage. And excellent saddle horses, too.”

“My Jupiter was a half Morgan. Sumbitch was fruitful and multiplied like all get-out, but I castrated all his male offspring. Rest his poor soul.”

“Do you think horses have souls, Brother Jobe?”

“I hope to think so. Why not? They’re better than we are. Look what we done to our world.”

Bullock reached for his boots, slipped back into them, and got up from his cushion.

“It’s been a pleasure, as usual, passing time with you, Brother Jobe.”

“Always uplifting to share in your bounty, sir,” Brother Jobe said, pulling on his boots and rising likewise. “When do you suppose those mares of yours are liable to foal?”

“Late March, I expect.”

“You let me know if there’s a colt amongst them. And don’t rush to cut his balls off, sir.”

“You can depend on me.”

“I know I can, sir. By the way, that’s a handsome pond you got. Any bass in there?”

“Bass?”

“We’re all about bass where we come from. Why, this might surprise you, but you’re looking at the two-time consecutive winner of the McDonald’s Big Bass Splash.”

“What’s that? A fishing contest?”

“One of the big tournaments back in the day. Paid out half a million and I won the ding-dang thing twice in a row. Set me free to pursue my own interests instead of selling cars off my pappy’s Ford dealership.”

“No kidding?” Bullock said.

“I’m a regular fish hawk, sir. It ain’t bragging if it’s true, right? You must have some big old honkin’ hawgs in that pond.”

“Gosh, no,” Bullock said. “The only thing in there is native speckled brook trout. It’s spring-fed. Probably too cold for bass.”