The Witch of Hebron (11 page)

“More chicken pie?” she asked.

She served a sweet pudding of walnut and quince afterward. They lingered at the table, drinking cider and brandy, talking about the old days, three people of middle age whose lives had turned upside down and inside out, who remembered cars and television and paying for things with plastic cards, and the great thrumming engine of modernity that history had driven into a ditch. Eventually the men found their eyelids drooping as fatigue and drink overcame them. Instead of the hayloft, Barbara offered them each a regular bed in the house.

“I have rooms galore.”

“You’re very kind,” the doctor said. “You run a tab on us. I’ve got enough silver. People pay me real money now and then.”

“There’s nothing wrong with money,” she said.

She took the men upstairs and steered each to a well-appointed room with a full bed, crisp clean linens, and lofty feather quilts. It was chilly upstairs and the men fell asleep as if drugged.

Much later that night, Robert dreamed that Barbara Maglie came to him under a ceiling of summer stars in startling unclothed fullness, smelling of fragrant garden herbs, with flowers in her silver hair, offering the wet and yielding center of herself, and promises of open-ended delight in a secret realm. The dream went on and on and he woke up panting with the light of dawn pouring through his east-facing window, wondering if Barbara Maglie had actually stolen into his room during the night. Otherwise he could not remember an erotic dream as vivid and prolonged as this one. Had she put a spell on him? How was it possible that such a woman did not have a man? As his mind reeled, Robert remembered the young woman who had come to share his own house and bed back in Union Grove, and who, with her seven-year-old daughter, comprised his family now. He shook his head at the dangerous thought that lurked at the margin of his consciousness and prepared to pull his pants on.

In the room next door the doctor had a dream as powerful and confusing as Robert’s. Barbara Maglie came to him as the most intimate companion he had ever known. He woke up short of breath on a damp spot in the sheets, at once amazed and embarrassed at the first wet dream he’d had since med school. Had she put something in his food or cider? Some hallucinogen, a fragment of mushroom or scraping of toad, a sprig of wormwood? Or maybe she had not employed any chemical artifice at all, and the dream was merely the product of her magnetism. How could such a woman not have a man, he wondered. He got up and caught sight of himself in a mirror over the chest of drawers. The gaunt, bearded figure there was a stranger to him.

The men came downstairs a few minutes apart to find Barbara busy at her stove frying potatoes in bacon fat and preparing to scramble up a half dozen eggs to go with them and last night’s corn bread. They ate gratefully but abashedly, speaking only of the boy they were searching for and how to recognize him in case he wandered by. In the chance that Jasper did come by her place, the doctor asked Barbara not to tell the boy that they were out searching for him, and she said she understood perfectly.

When the doctor went to the outhouse, Barbara brought a refreshed teapot to the table and sat down across from Robert.

“Did you sleep well?” she asked.

“Like a box of rocks,” he said.

“Any dreams?”

“Sure,” he said, working to avoid her gaze.

“Men pay me for what they see in their dreams,” she said.

Robert looked up at that. “Excuse me?”

“How do you think I get by?”

“I wondered, frankly.”

“Did you like your dream?”

“Was it an advertisement?”

“It was your dream. You’d be joining a very select group. Only silver coin when you come, no paper.”

“It’s a long ride up here from Union Grove.”

“Some come from farther away than that.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything now. Just don’t tell anyone—not your companion, the doctor, not anybody. This is just between the two of us.”

“All right,” Robert said.

When the doctor returned, he said it was time for the two of them to push on and that he was going out to saddle his horse. Robert took a turn in the outhouse. When he was done there, he saw the doctor and Barbara Maglie in the paddock behind the barn. They appeared deep in conversation and seemed to stop suddenly when they saw him coming up the path. Robert wondered, naturally, whether Barbara had tendered an offer to the doctor, too. He went straight to the barn to fetch his saddle and things. When he was ready, they both mounted up and bade farewell to Barbara Maglie, thanking her for her kindness and hospitality and reminding her what the boy looked like, in case he should turn up—while trying to avoid the mutual recognition that each now carried a secret.

She walked with them as far as her vegetable garden and, brushing loose strands of hair out of her face in a rising chill breeze, watched as they turned out past the leafless lilac bushes, up the open road.

EIGHTEEN

Ned Allison turned up early at the Congregational church school knowing that this time of year his teacher, Jane Ann Holder, came in a half hour before class to fire up the woodstove. School was far from what it had been in the old times. Mrs. Holder managed a classroom with children ranging from seven to fifteen. Formal education in Union Grove ended there. Young people sixteen and older with ambition entered apprenticeships or the few family businesses like the Allisons’ livery and Einhorn’s store, while the dull ones went to work as farm laborers. As far as anyone knew, college had been discontinued entirely in this region of the United States. The local colleges—Greer, a four-year liberal arts school in Excelsior Springs, twenty-five miles to the west, Bennington College, an equivalent hike to the east, and Washington County Community College—had all closed years ago. One heard as little about higher education in America as about the doings of the putative president, Harvey Allbright, who supposedly headed what remained of the federal government, now relocated to Minneapolis since the bombing of Washington, DC. No young person in Union Grove was prevented from improving his or her mind beyond what the church school offered. The town library was still a going concern, open six days and five nights a week under the care of the polymath Andrew Pendergast.

Ned Allison found his teacher feeding splints to the stove and actually startled her when he stole over and touched her on the shoulder.

“You’re here early,” she said, blinking. Her breath was visible.

“Robert Earle and the doc went out looking for Jasper,” Ned said.

“Yes, I heard,” Jane Ann said.

“They didn’t come back last night, though.”

“I suppose they’ll ride around the county until they find him.”

“I don’t know if they will,” Ned said.

“They’ll find him,” Jane Ann said. “Or maybe he’ll come back on his own.”

“I’m real worried. Someone should know what we saw.”

“What did you see?”

“The other day, down by the river, we were spying on the hermit.”

Jane Ann knew who the hermit was and where he made his home.

“You shouldn’t spy on people.”

“The hermit, he was doing something… bad.”

“What was he doing?”

“I don’t know how to say.”

“Try.”

Ned rolled his eyes.

He had his… thing out.”

“His… male thing?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you when he did that?”

“On the riverbank across from his shack. We had a real clear view through the window. He was weeping and carrying on.”

“Did he see you?”

“That’s what I’m worried about. I went to leave, but Jas he lagged behind a while longer. I wonder if the hermit saw him.”

Jane Ann fed more splints into the woodstove and stood up.

“I wonder if maybe he snatched him on his way to school,” Ned said. “Or something like that.”

“Snatched him?” Jane Ann said, taken aback. She knew quite a bit about the imagined fears of children, and she had assumed that the hermit, Perry Talisker, was harmless despite his isolation from the life of the town. What if her assumptions were wrong, she wondered.

“What would he do with him?” she heard herself wonder out loud.

“I don’t know,” Ned said. “That’s what I’m worried about.”

NINETEEN

Perry Talisker locked up his shack on the river and set out in God’s radiant morning light to hunt down a catamount. He was outfitted lightly, for peak efficiency, in a waxed canvas coat, with a thin wool blanket slung and tied over one shoulder. Over the other he carried a lever-action Marlin rifle chambered for the .30-30 cartridge, of which he had many boxes, stockpiled during the last months when he still received a paycheck from the Hovington supermarket chain, just as the country was heading straight into the tank. He was pleased this morning also to be wearing the tracker moccasins he’d recently finished sewing himself, with cow leather soles and fringed deerskin uppers that rode above the top of his powerful calf muscles.

In daylight, the Dark One he suspected of corrupting his spirit and lurking in the hidden corners of ordinary life did not maintain its maddening pull over him. But he felt no more comfortable thinking that God was watching over him and judging his every thought. So what did it matter whether you gave your bond to the light or the dark? Each was a despot in its own way, he thought.

Preoccupied as he was, Perry did not fail to notice the spectacular beauty of the river, the golden leaves shimmering in a breeze, trout dimpling the pool upstream of the house, the flight path of a barred owl winging home silent and ghostly after a night of mousing, the rich perfumes of the autumn woods and living water, the eternal music of the rushing stream. All these sensations filled him with a joy that transcended the quarrels of his mind. For the moment, then, he settled on the notion that he was venturing out in defiance of both spectral forces, bringing to his task a nascent third force with its own lonesome sacredness of human will. He would make his way across the country in their full view and he would act as he had prepared himself to act.

He intended to scour the rugged rural township between Hebron and the place where the Hudson River looped west toward Glens Falls. The human population in that corner of Washington County had dwindled away to almost nothing in the years since everything went to hell. The high rocky ridge of hills known as the Gavottes made farming difficult there. Hebron itself was nearly a ghost town now, having been especially hard-hit by the encephalitis that traveled in the wake of the deadly Mexican flu. The remaining deer herds found refuge from jackers in this empty part of the county— few people respected the idea of hunting season in the face of universal hardship. It was there, in the rugged Gavottes, living off the deer herds, where the big cats denned up, raised their young, and hid from their dwindling human adversaries. Now and then one would range down into the farming townships, including one big female that had reportedly killed a four-year-old boy in the parlor of a house in the glen behind Vail Hill.

Whatever his relations with the hidden entities who animated the world, Perry Talisker felt fully alive and keen for the hunt, a healthy animal in his own right, ranging wide-eyed and alert into the glorious autumn landscape.

TWENTY

Jasper Copeland slept well in the ruined mobile home. His body heat alone had brought the temperature up ten degrees in the small, tight bedroom. After roasting and devouring all but one of his remaining potatoes, he had set out on the road again eager to walk off the morning chill and determined to get to the shining city of Glens Falls as soon as possible. He had traveled six miles up the pot-holed and fissured county Route 30 since he departed.

Jasper was practiced in the art of telling time by the position of the sun in the sky. He knew it rode lower above the horizon at this time of year and he calculated that it was about noon. He was hungry again. He stood now on a little rise in the road surveying a farmhouse a quarter mile in the distance. Behind it was a pasture dotted with tiny specks of animals—goats or sheep—too distant to make out. Smoke rose out of one of several chimneys. He decided to venture down and ask whoever was in the house for some articles of food that he was unlikely to glean from the fields and orchards—corn bread, cheese, butter, jam, perhaps some ham or sausage. Minutes later he presented himself at what he presumed to be a kitchen door, since the little porch to it was full of cabbages and squashes, and red peppers hung from the disintegrating fretwork around the roof. A thin, blowsy woman who was older than his mother answered his timid knocks. After opening the door to reveal the large kitchen within, the woman wiped her hands on a soiled apron and regarded him with suspicion. Beads of perspiration glistened on her forehead and upper lip as though she’d been exerting herself. She drew a spray of auburn hair out of her eyes.

“You by yourself?” she asked.

“Huh?” Jasper said. He thought it was obvious he was by himself. “Yes, just me, ma’am.”

“Sometimes pickers work in teams,” the woman said.

“I’m not a picker,” Jasper said.

“What are you then?”

“I’m just a boy.”

“What do you want?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why did you knock on the door?”

“Just wondering if you could spare some food.”

The woman gazed at him a long moment as though trying to figure him out.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“Not from around here.”

“Give me a straight answer.”

“I’m from Bennington,” Jasper said, mentioning a town he’d heard of many times but never been to.

“My brother Ellis lives there,” the woman said. “Ellis Lovejoy. Do you know him?”

“I might have heard of him.”

“He’s county magistrate.”

“Then I must have heard of him?”

“Sounds like you’re not sure.

“No, I surely have heard of him.”

“What are you doing so far from home?”

“I’m going to Glens Falls.”

“By yourself? On foot?”