The Witch of Hebron (13 page)

“What did it ever do to you?”

“Never mind. And one more thing: You don’t have any family coming down the road here. You’re by your lonely, I’m quite certain.”

Jasper did not reply.

Billy Bones chewed up the rest of the potato.

“I hate a raw potato,” he said.

“Then why didn’t you roast it up first?”

“I don’t have time for cookery. I got places to go and people to see.”

“You are a picker.”

“I’m a bandit, goddamn it. That’s several steps above your picker, understand?”

“I don’t see any difference.”

“A picker doesn’t have a song. You want to hear my song?”

“You’re going to sing a song?”

“You’re goddamned straight I am. Listen now.”

Billy Bones shoved the backpack into the pavement and stood up. He sang his introductory verses and then two more stanzas in his customary nasal drone:

“The ladies know young Billy Bones
Whose kisses are like candy
And when they see what’s in his pants
It makes them good and randy
.

They moan and groan and shake it up
And love him till they’re weeping
But Billy is too smart to stay
In any one woman’s keeping.”

When he was finished he asked, “You like how I made those rhymes up?”

“Is it about yourself?”

“Well, hell, it’s my song. ’Course it is.”

“What do you need a song for? The people you rob don’t care to hear about you.”

“Well, they got to hear it whether they like it or not. That’s how a legend is born. Imagine how they go and tell their people they came upon this audacious bandit that sings about his exploits, and the tale spreads. I’m known far and wide.”

“I don’t see why you’d want to be known. Sooner or later, men are going to hunt you down.”

“They can try. I guess it hasn’t happened yet. I’ll stand my ground with the best.”

“Are you done robbing me?”

“I haven’t robbed nothing but a damn potato. And there’s no one coming up the road behind you. Why don’t you just tell it straight?”

Jasper rolled his eyes and shifted his weight from one foot to the other but did not reply.

“Am I boring you?” Billy Bones asked.

“No, this is the most fun I had all day except when I had to treat this old man for disgusting boils and then his daughter cheated me out of my pay.”

“What do you know about boils?”

“I’m a doctor.”

“I never heard such a tale. A boy doctor?”

“My father is the doctor of Union Grove and I help him all the time. I know medicine and I’m setting out to be a doctor on my own.”

“Had enough of childhood, then?

“I guess I have.”

“What about your homefolks?”

“They’re home and I’m here.”

Billy bones chuckled with admiration.

“You must not like that pissant Union Grove much yourself,” he said, “if you’re striking out on your own at such a tender age.”

“I had to go. I’ve done deeds as bad as yours.”

“Such as what?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

“You kill someone?”

“Something like that.”

“Aren’t you a doozy! Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m not going to rob nothing more of your things. See, this is the main difference between a picker and bandit, besides having a personal song. A picker is a low-down cowardly parasite like a rat or a bug. A bandit, he’s a gallant soul with a sense of fun and honor, too. I don’t rob little children. In fact, I could use a sidekick with your accomplishments and experience, especially if you’re such a dangerous desperado as you say. How’d you like to be the sidekick of the bandit Billy Bones?”

“I just want to be on my way.”

“Goddamn it, I’ve got a proposition for you. You say some people cheated you? I say, let’s go see about that. I’m at your service, my young friend, along with Blast’em and Slice’em.” Billy Bones held open his leather coat again and gestured toward the pistol in his waistband and the brush knife that hung off his belt. “Now where’d this happen with the boils and all?”

“Just back up the road a bit,” Jasper told him.

TWENTY-TWO

Billy Bones and Jasper Copeland watched the house from a thicket in the woods above the farmhouse. A witch-hazel shrub there blazed yellow in its strange fall flowering. Jasper recognized it from foraging botanicals with his father. He cut off some switches with his knife and stuffed them in his pack.

“What the hell are you doing?” Billy said.

“It’s a medicine tree.”

“Where’d you get that knife?”

“It’s mine.”

“Let me see it.”

Jasper handed it over.

“Nice,” Billy said, turning it over in his hand. “I’ll let you keep it, long as you don’t try to stick it in me.”

“I won’t stick it in you.”

“You bet you won’t, little desperado. Now lookit here.…”

Billy instructed Jasper to go down to the kitchen door while he, Billy, sneaked around to the blind side of the building where the old garage stood along with a small barn and a half-collapsed corn crib.

“Go on now. Go down there.”

“What am I going to say?”

“Ask her to have pity on you and give you some food. Tell her you’re an orphan.”

“I already tried that. She said she’d carve me up with a weeding hook.”

“We’ll see about that. I’ll be right behind you.”

“I’m scared.”

“No you’re not. Not really. You just think you are. I can tell what a plucky young vagabond you are, deep down. If you play your cards right, I might make you my protégé.”

“I don’t want to be a bandit. I can doctor.”

“Who says you can’t be both? Especially when you practically have to rob folks to get paid these days. You get along now and do what I told you.”

Jasper trudged down the hill, through a ragged field of winter squashes and pumpkins, and climbed the steps up the porch to the kitchen door. He waited there for a moment, feeling exposed and panicked before rapping on the door’s glass pane. When the door swung open, the same blowsy woman presented herself. She stood with her hands on her hips and her mouth open in an expression somewhere between consternation and horror at the sight of Jasper.

“You again! What do you want?”

“Please ma’am. I’m an orphan and I’m very hungry. Surely you can spare a little cornmeal and bacon.”

She glared at him a moment, then softened slightly.

“All right, damn you. But don’t you come inside this time. Wait out here.”

As soon as she turned back inside, Billy Bones tiptoed up the porch steps, slithered around Jasper, and entered the kitchen like a weasel entering a poultry house. Jasper heard a sharp cry—the woman—and then Billy calling for him to come inside, too. Jasper entered the house and found Billy red-faced, brandishing his big pistol before the woman, who stood quivering against the sink.

“I knew you were a picker, you little shit,” she said to Jasper, practically spitting.

“Pickers?” Billy cried. “Goddamn it, we’re bandits!” He proceeded to explain the distinction before offering to sing his ballad.

“Keep your song to yourself, you scum,” she said.

“Scum?” Billy said. “Us? My protégé here doctors you up and all he asks is a little supper and you threaten him with a weed hook? A goddamn child! Don’t you have a motherly bone in that ugly carcass? I got half a mind to gut-shoot you.”

He waved the pistol closer to her face. The woman screamed. A commotion down the hall signaled the arrival of the father. He had barely stepped into the room when Billy Bones shoved the muzzle of the pistol up against his face. The terrified man, in obvious pain, had changed into different clothing that was not much cleaner than the outfit Jasper had found him in earlier. Billy Bones appeared to swell upward like an orchestra conductor summoning a momentous chord and then brought the butt of his pistol crashing into the side of the man’s head. He hit the floor like a grain sack. Blood poured out of a gash above his ear.

“Guess who won’t be getting doctored now?” Billy muttered. “Too damn bad.” The woman continued screaming. “Shut up!” he said. “Or you’ll be down there with him!” Then to Jasper: “While I sing my song, see what you can find in these cabinets. Go on!”

Jasper brought a wobbly chair over to the cabinets and stood on it as he rummaged through them. The woman fell into sobs while Billy sang half a dozen quatrains of his song and the man remained motionless on the floor. Jasper found two jars of cider jelly in one cabinet and a jar of dried lima beans in another. A ceramic jar decorated like a keg contained coarse-ground cornmeal. He emptied a quart jar of dried rose hips onto the floor and scooped the jar full of the meal. Wild rose hips were rampant this time of year. He jammed the box of shelled butternuts into his backpack. All he found in the remaining cabinets was a small jar of honey.

By this time, Billy Bones concluded his song. He asked the woman where she kept her cheese and meats.

She pointed to a door and said, “Cold room,” before resuming her sobs.

Jasper didn’t have to be told to look in there. On an otherwise bare shelf he found a jagged cake of hard cheese under a brown bowl and two onions with the field dirt still on them.

“No butter,” he said, stuffing the cheese into his sack.

“We don’t have a cow,” the woman said between sobs.

“Any hams or bacon in there?” Billy yelled across the room.

“None that I can see.” On a pantry counter on the other side of the cold room, among stacks of old soup plates, platters, tureens, and other items for table service, Jasper spied the same bottle of plum brandy that he had used as a disinfectant a few hours before. It was still half full. “There’s a bottle of brandy in here.”

“You don’t say! Hot damn.”

“I don’t have room for it in my pack.”

“You let me worry about that bottle. Bring her on out.”

Jasper came back and handed over the bottle. Billy held it at arm’s length, regarding it with a look of incandescent satisfaction. He pulled the wooden stopper and glugged down three big swallows.

“Ah!” he said. “That’s what I call medicine!” Then, to the woman, he growled, “Where’s the money?”

“What money?”

“The money you got.”

“There’s no money here,” she said.

Billy dipped his upper body in a guffaw.

“Do I have to tear the place apart? I will.”

She did not answer, so he set the liquor bottle on the table among the cabbages, dragged her out of the room, and down the hall. While they were gone, Jasper searched through the kitchen drawers, finding little besides a jar of red chili pepper seeds. Somewhere vaguely overhead, he heard things bang around along with muffled voices and cries and sobs. The man on the floor stirred once and groaned but did not get up. Soon Billy Bones returned to the kitchen without the woman. Thumping sounds above suggested to Jasper that Billy had locked the woman up.

“Feel this here,” Billy said, indicating a lump on the side of his pants. “Go ahead, touch it.”

Jasper fingered the lump. He surmised it was a pocketful of coins.

“Bunch of silver coin and one gold half eagle,” Billy said. “I’m rich! How’s the old mister doing?”

“He moved.”

“He’s lucky I didn’t kill him,” Billy said, directing his voice to the body on the floor. “And if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll lay low right there for the next half hour or so, or sure as my name is Billy Bones I will put a bullet in the back of his head.”

With that, Billy used hand gestures to tell Jasper that they should go. Jasper slung on his pack and followed Billy out the door. Billy led him around the house to the other side where the goats were browsing in a nubbly paddock.

“Take this and wait here,” he told Jasper, handing him the brandy bottle.

Billy let himself into the paddock through a gate of battered steel pipe and rusty chain-link. The goats came to him as if they knew him. He stooped to pet them. Jasper didn’t really apprehend the exact moment when Billy caught one of the smaller goats in a headlock, drew the bush knife off his belt, and slit the animal’s throat. The goat kicked two or three times and made a gurgling noise. The other goats skittered across the paddock and then went about their browsing, insensible to what had happened. Billy stooped to the carcass on the ground. When he was sure it was dead, he separated the little goat’s head from its body in a few deft strokes. Jasper took it all in with a sense of paralyzing despair. He watched as Billy picked up the goat’s head, held it above his own, and ran across the paddock to where the other goats browsed, as if to gambol with them. They scattered. He seemed to lose interest in this game almost instantly and chucked the goat’s head among the other goats. He returned to the dead goat, gutted it, butchered off its hindquarters, and left the rest in a red heap. Finally, holding each hindquarter like a club, he left the paddock and shut the gate behind him.

“What’d you do that for?” Jasper asked.

“You like meat for your supper, don’t you?”

Jasper did not reply.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Billy said. “That’s what it takes to get meat in this world. Something has to give up its life, you know. I don’t relish doing it. You eat meat, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then. Come on, let’s get out of here. I left my sack in those woods up the hill. We’ll find a hideout for the night and have a fine supper and get warm and I’ll school you in the ways of the road.”

They proceeded together back across the field of pumpkin and squashes.

“What did you do with the woman?” Jasper asked halfway up the hill.

“I tied her to a bed frame. The old geezer’ll untie her.”

“What if he doesn’t wake up again?”

“He’ll be all right.”

“We don’t know how bad he’s injured.”

“What’s it to you if he ever gets off that floor?”

“Who’ll untie that woman?”

“What do you care?” Billy said, slinging his bag over his shoulder. “She was going to take a weeding hook to you. Come on, let’s get out of here.”