The Witch of Hebron (32 page)

They were finished in a matter of minutes except for two of the eggs, a few pickles, and a fragment of corn bread.

“It ain’t much for breakfast,” Billy said with a burp. “Maybe we can winkle a little more out of her before we leave tomorrow. Put everything in the basket. We’ll take it up to the loft so the animals don’t steal it.”

Back in the barn, Billy told Jasper to go up in the loft while he remained below, rummaging in the empty stalls. He followed in a matter of minutes with a coil of rope.

“What’s that for?” Jasper said.

“You talking again?”

“No.”

“Then shut up. I’m going to tie your leg to my wrist so you can’t run off on me. You think Billy Bones is a moron? Sit down there and hold your leg up for me.”

Billy tied at least half a dozen complicated-looking knots and hitches at Jasper’s end of the rope, leaving about eight feet between them.

“Don’t even try untying yourself. Billy Bones sleeps like a goddamn cat. I can tell when a mouse is cleaning its whiskers from twenty yards away.”

Billy proceeded to burrow into the hay and Jasper dug out a nest for himself close by. He lay still in his hay cave for a long while, waiting for Billy to stop shifting around and jerking the cord between them. He determined that he was going to try to pick the knots out no matter what Billy said. The worst that would happen, he reasoned, would be a beating, and having to stay with Billy was worse than that. As he waited, the last streaks of twilight yielded to the rising moon. It shone silvery through the open loading door and was attended by a chill breeze. Jasper curled up in his nest, drawing up his leg so he could feel the train of knots. He found the short end of the rope and traced it back to where it entered the knots and began to pick and pull on them.

“What’d I tell you?” Billy said, a muffled voice within the hay.

Jasper stopped picking at the knots and lay still again, thinking that he would wait longer this time, until he was sure Billy was asleep. But it had been such a long and wearying day, and they had walked fifteen miles, and sleep began to gather him in as if he were a tiny bug that had been drawn into the web of a great spider, a spider that curiously had the face of the lady who had given them this place to sleep. And then he was asleep.

FIFTY-NINE

Since the disappearance of Jasper Copeland, Ned Allison had taken to adventuring with Darren McWhinnie, who was two years older but full of fun and mischief in a way that was absent in the more inward Jasper. It was Darren who came to the Allison house with interesting news just as Ned finished an early supper. He waited until he got Ned outside to tell him.

“There’s bodies hanging from the trees down by River Road,” Darren said.

“What? Did you see them?”

“No. But I heard my dad talking to Mr. Einhorn. Mr. Bullock hanged them.”

“What for?”

“Busting into his house, I think.”

“Who were they?”

“Just common pickers and roving riffraff. Two of them have their heads cut off.”

“What?”

“Old Mr. Bullock chopped them off with a Japanese sword. How do you like that?”

“How’d he hang them from a tree when they don’t have any heads?”

“You’ll love this. From their ankles!”

“Jesus!”

“It gets better. He jammed their cutoff heads between their legs.”

“Who said that?”

“Mr. Einhorn. I heard it. And Robert Earle went down to ask Bullock to take them down and he wouldn’t do it.”

“We have to go see them.”

“We can go see them tomorrow.

“Let’s go now while there’s some light. I never saw anyone with a cutoff head.”

“We can’t go now. There’s something else going on.”

“What?”

“The doc is over at the cemetery with some of those Faith men. They’re digging up a grave.”

“Which grave?”

“I don’t know. They’re at it right now. Let’s go over and watch.”

“This is going to be some Halloween.”

“Mr. Einhorn wants to cancel it.”

“What? You can’t cancel Halloween. It’s a holiday.”

“He wants to cancel trick or treat. Him and other men. My dad among them.”

“Why?”

“Out of respect to the doc and Jasper and all.”

“But what’s the doc doing digging up a grave?”

“I don’t know. Let’s go watch.”

“Something bad is going on around here.”

“It’s that time of year. People are only doing what comes naturally.”

SIXTY

The Reverend Loren Holder led the four boys down Route 40, past ever more familiar land forms and landmarks as they came closer to Union Grove—Crone Hill, whose rocky outcrops seemed to compose the face of an old woman in the moonlight; the old Agway agency with its ghostly chemical storage tanks and abandoned offices; the ruins of the Town and Country Diner, shining like a silvery space vehicle, its windows broken, furnishings looted, and parking lot overgrown with thistles and milkweed.

Loren carried Jack on his shoulders while the oldest boy walked beside him and the two others rode Lucky. They’d made short work of the remaining apples and pears. Loren made an effort to conduct a friendly, bantering interrogation of the boys, with the dual purpose of finding out something about them and occupying their minds on the tedious journey back to town. It was obvious to him that all the boys were in poor physical condition and beaten down in spirit.

“I’m the minister of the Congregational church in Union Grove,” he told them, “and the appointed town constable. I’m going to try to get you home, if that’s possible, or see to it that you’re properly taken care of if it’s not.”

Jack’s brother, Roy, age nine, said that following the death of their parents in June, they had walked from Sandgate, Vermont, to the village of Shushan, New York, where they were taken in by an uncle, one Otto Singletree, a drinker who could barely farm and resented having to provide for them. One day toward the end of summer he marched them to Argyle and sold them to the storekeeper, whose name they never did learn. Otherwise, Roy said, he knew that his mother had a brother, Uncle Dick, in a faraway place called San Diego. He was married to Aunt Shelly, and they had several children who were his cousins, but Roy had never gone to visit them, indeed had never met them, and had no idea what their address was.

“I don’t even know what they look like,” Roy said. “Did you ever go to San Diego?”

“Many many years ago,” Loren said. “It’s in California.”

“What’s California?” Roy asked.

Sandgate, he learned, did not have a school.

The boys riding Lucky were Paul Byrd, age eight, and Jesse, five, who appeared dazed and did not seem to know his surname. Paul’s home was in a place called West Nyack. He didn’t know where that was, exactly. Loren knew it was right off the old New York State Thruway, near the Tappan Zee Bridge, less than an hour from New York City. Paul said he and his parents left their home in a great hurry one night late that spring. He remembered houses on fire. They walked for days, slept in the woods, stopped to stay with people on a farm for a while, then walked some more. They moved into a tent in a place with many tents. Nobody knew anybody. Days went by and nobody did anything. Nights, grown-ups sat around fires talking, singing, telling jokes. He liked that. The food came in pouches. It was very tasty. Then a lot of men swept through the place knocking down the tents, shooting and clubbing people. He remembered grown-ups and other children lying lifeless in the dust. There was a lot of confusion, fire. He became separated from his mother and father. He ran for his life into the nearby woods and hid there. In the morning, he saw that the tent city was a scene of smoldering desolation. Everyone who remained was dead. He waited in the woods all day, growing horribly thirsty. Eventually he came out of the woods and searched the tent city for his mother and father. He looked at all the bodies and couldn’t find them. He found some containers filled with water and packages of food and went back to the woods to sleep and spent another day searching among the bodies. Again he returned to the woods. He thought that if he stayed in the vicinity, his parents might come back and look for him. They didn’t. He repeated this cycle of searching and hiding several days more until the bodies started to stink and bloat and the animals started to come around and eat them. The wild dogs terrified him. He realized that he couldn’t stay there anymore. He walked away and followed the big river. He came to a town where a man invited him onto a boat. The man gave him a big bowl of barley and some milk. He sailed on the boat with the man, whose name was Frank. Frank made him do things. He refused to say what they were. Just things. They came to another river town on a hill where Frank turned him over to another man, whose name he never learned. The man had a wagon with other boys. They were all taken around to farms to pick fruit and vegetables. Their legs were tied together so they couldn’t run away. They would go from one farm to another, picking tomatoes, squash, apples. At night the boys slept in the wagon, roped together and locked with chains. Finally, he was turned over to the man who stuck him in the hole under the barn with Jack, Roy, Jesse, and Mark, the boy who had died sometime in the past week.

Jesse, Paul explained, had told them he didn’t know how he ended up in the hole under the barn. He didn’t talk much.

“How do I know you’re not going to take us to some other terrible place?” Paul asked.

Loren hesitated.

“After what you’ve been through, I wouldn’t expect you to trust anybody,” he said. “The world is not full of bad people. Your mothers and fathers were not bad people. I’m not a bad man. When we get where we’re going, you’ll find yourself among good people who will take care of you.”

SIXTY-ONE

Jasper woke up to the sound of screams coming from the house. He tried scrambling out of his hay cave but the rope on his left ankle jerked tight when he did. It baffled him for a moment that Billy Bones had not awakened instantly and set upon him. He tugged against the rope again, which did not yield an inch, and he wondered if Billy had miraculously died in his sleep. Then he traced the rope to its other end and discovered it was tied around a queen post that supported the barn roof. With moonlight flooding the loft through the open loading door, he spied Billy’s shoulder bag in the hay. He dove for it and groped around inside until he found his hunting knife. The screams from the house continued, seeming to rip the fabric of the night.

Jasper sliced the rope off his ankle and climbed down the ladder to the ground floor. He ran to the back steps of the house where the lady had left their food earlier. The door was ajar and he could see that the jamb was splintered near the knob where Billy had pried the door open. He ventured inside and traced the screams in the dim interior through the kitchen and down a hallway to a bedroom on the first floor. Billy was on the bed, on top of the lady, with his pants down around his ankles and his hips pumping. The woman struggled underneath him as she screamed, batting at his head with her fists. He brandished his pistol over her, threatening to smash her face.

“Get off her!” Jasper screamed.

Billy cranked his torso around and, eyes bulging with malice, leveled the pistol directly at Jasper.

“Get out of here, boy, or I’ll blow your damn head off!”

“Help me!” the lady screamed. “Please, help me!”

Jasper ran straight into the room at Billy with his knife raised high and brought it down at an angle, slashing Billy’s gun arm. The pistol flew out of his hand and bounced off a chest of drawers.

“You stabbed me, you crazy little shit!”

Jasper plunged his knife down again into a soft place between Billy’s shoulder blade and his spine. Billy torqued his body around, struggling to avoid the blade, and hoisted his bloody arm in a posture of defense while Jasper brought his knife down again into a hollow at the base of his neck. Both Billy and the woman screamed. Now the blood really began spurting all over the room, black in the stark moonlight, as Jasper had severed Billy’s carotid artery. Billy struggled desperately to get off the woman and claw his way toward Jasper. In the effort, he blurted out, “You’ve killed me!” and then collapsed in a heap just off the foot of the bed, with his ankles tangled up in his pants, and his head down near the floor, bleeding out into a puddle that spread darkly on the varnished pine planks. Curiously, perhaps because his head was upside down, he seemed to have a smile on his lips, as if he found satisfaction in the manner of his departure from this world. His last words, muttered at Jasper looming above him, were “Look who’s a murderer now.…” And then the last vapors of his life rattled out of him, and his cheek squashed against the floorboards as the rest of his body slumped off the bed and fell with a thud.

Instinctively, Jasper and the lady rushed toward each other, the lady enfolding Jasper in her arms as they both trembled and gasped. They remained frozen together for minutes, not speaking, eyes riveted to the other side of the room where Billy’s twisted body lay half hidden and utterly still at the foot of the bed, and the pool of black blood continued to spread across the floor, until their breathing returned to normal, and the lady felt the knife still clutched in Jasper’s hand, and he allowed her to wrest it out of his fingers.

“Stay here,” she said.

She stepped around the chest of drawers and reached for a robe hanging from the closet door. It was only then, watching her move across the room in the moonlight, her flesh like a silver liquid, that Jasper was startled by her nakedness. And then she was covered up. She returned and took him by the hand, led him gingerly around the bed, around the pool of black blood on the floor, and into the hall, where she pressed her back up against the wall just across from the bedroom door and slid down to sit on the floor with Jasper held tight under her arm beside her. Together they sat watching Billy Bones for a long time, until the moon rose above the sash of the window it had been shining through.

“I think he’s dead,” Barbara said eventually.