The Witch of Hebron (6 page)

NINE

Habitually a poor sleeper, Perry Talisker lay alone on a thin mattress in his shack by the river listening to the endless tragic music of the water rushing over its own hard bed. Sometimes, Perry’s loneliness cocooned him in such a tight place that he cried out against God’s mysterious wrath, and he wondered what he had done to become the object of it.

He missed his wife, Trish, who had left him years ago when times had just started to get hard and the Hovington Supermarket chain closed down, including the one at Union Grove Plaza, because the truckers could not make their deliveries, and no meat came in for Perry to butcher and sort, and the local farmers had not yet come to realize the necessity of raising meat for more than themselves, and the whole equation of chain retail failed. In the store’s last weeks, the electricity was still on, but the cooler and freezer shelves were bare. They’d run out of everything they needed to get the job done anyway, including foam trays, shrink wrap, and self-adhesive label blanks for the check scale.

More than a few people died that first year without heating oil, mainly the old. Perry had barely gotten himself and Trish through the winter by jacking deer and ice-fishing at Cossayuna Lake. Then the house burned down during a particularly vicious late-season cold snap when they ran the woodstove all out and a chimney fire got into the old laths in the walls. It was March. A few weeks later on Easter, the temperature reached eighty-six degrees and the last remnants of the winter’s snow melted into something like a banana daiquiri. The world was turning upside down, Trish said. They moved into the abandoned Hi-Dee-Ho Motel while Perry tried to figure out what to do next. The plumbing was shot, the electricity was shut off, and April being what it was, some nights they froze in there. That was when she left. In those last days of the old times, with gasoline getting scarce, a few jitney buses were still running for people who wanted to go somewhere. Now even they were bygone. That May after Trish left him, Perry started to build the shack on the river to get on with the business of living off the land. It seemed more and more evident that the economy was not coming back to anything like it had been.

Trish didn’t say where she was going, but she had a brother in Plattsburgh, a hundred miles north on Lake Champlain, and Perry suspected she was there. He sometimes entertained notions about venturing up there to bring her back—
back home
, he put it to himself, as if to suggest he would be doing her a service—but it sure wouldn’t be a matter of just driving up some afternoon and stuffing her in the car. At best, now, he might rent a horse and cart from Mr. Allison and it would take maybe two weeks up and back, and he worried about what kind of hazards lurked on the roads. There was talk of pickers (bandits) in the places between towns that had gone back to near wild, and the roads themselves were in miserable shape after years of frost heaves and neglect. Hardly anyone went anywhere anymore. In less sober moments, Perry also dreamed of tromping all the way up to Plattsburgh in winter on snowshoes like some kind of mountain man from the pioneer days, and he imagined the impression he would make when he got there: a hunk of avenging muscle, fur-swaddled, with blood in his eyes, come to claim his woman!

That was where the fantasy fell apart. His brother-in-law, Randy, was the type to take an aluminum baseball bat to somebody when only mildly annoyed, and he was a large fellow, much bigger than Perry. And besides, why would he want to force Trish to be with him against her will? That wasn’t love. Perry was overwhelmed suddenly with sorrow for his own stupidity. If only he’d cleaned that damned chimney out.

In despair, he got out of bed, threw some pine chunks into the potbellied stove, which stood across the single room of his shack, and sat down in the chair beside it. He’d made the chair himself out of cedar roots. It was as solid as a throne. On the adjacent table was the bottle of corn whiskey he’d been working on earlier in the evening, along with his lap dulcimer, also made by hand out of spruce and cherrywood, with strings taken from a ruined piano he’d come across in a church basement out on the Spraguetown road. He poured a glass of the whiskey, which was a 150-proof straight distillate filtered through charcoal and flavored with artemisia (wormwood), which gave it a taste weirdly reminiscent of marshmallows.

The whiskey drove the panicky edge off his despair and left him with the more familiar and manageable feeling of pure loneliness, which he was able to channel into the simple tonic chords he had learned to produce on his dulcimer. His pluckings formed a sound track that allowed him to comprehend and bear what he had become. They were also, it seemed to him, a defense against God’s apparent plan to heap hardships upon him, though he was not altogether certain that it was God behind his tribulations. Perhaps it was God’s eternal opponent, the fallen angel, the Dark One. He sometimes thought of his music as an attempt to call out to God, in the grammar of God’s own beauty, to rescue him from the devices of the arch fiend. What should he make of God’s failure to answer him?

The yellow light of the resiny pine chunks and the purer white rays of moonlight shining through the treetops, reflecting off the water, and then faintly on his ceiling played through the dwelling with patterns evocative of either heaven or hell, depending on which direction Perry looked. On the wall above his bed hung a large old print of a painting, circa 1862, by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, of an Adirondack hunter surprised by a mountain lion. The animal was about to spring and the hunter seemed late in swinging up his rifle. Perry loved the picture, apart from its artistic qualities, for the fact that the tale was never resolved. He could imagine any outcome.

He poured himself four fingers more of the whiskey and knocked back half of it in a gulp. The burn pleased him. Perhaps there was something of the devil in it, he thought, and in him, too. His sleep deprivation combined with his loneliness and the whiskey and his anxious ruminations about the supernatural forces at work upon him, causing his head to swim. Looking at the picture on the wall, he realized he had killed many animals in recent years. Had he affronted God by doing so? Yet hunting for sustenance was the human race’s oldest occupation. Then it came to him very suddenly, as though beamed down on the moonlight: He needed to hunt down and kill a mountain lion, or catamount, as they were called in Washington County. This would be his challenge to God. The act would determine who exactly was the directing persona behind the predicament of his life. Even if the quest killed him, he would leave this world knowing the answer. The clarity and authenticity of this idea, in his gathering drunkenness, seemed absolutely ineluctable as he hobbled across the room and collapsed back on his bed.

TEN

At seven-thirty in the morning, Brother Jobe was summoned to the east paddock where the body of Jupiter, his half Morgan stallion, lay motionless on its side. Beads of dew glistened in the sunlight on the horse’s dark flank just as it did on the cropped grass he lay upon, prompting Brother Jobe to suppose his prize stud had had some time to cool off where he lay. He examined the horse from a dozen different angles and heights, even crouching a few inches off the ground to look into its big unseeing black eye.

“You got any idea what fetched him down, sir?” asked Brother Enos, the person in charge of the morning feed. At sixteen he was barely a man, with carrot-colored hair and a port-wine birthmark that ran up his jawline to the vicinity of his left earlobe. He fidgeted with the bucket containing the stallion’s uneaten morning ration of oats.

“I thought you might venture a clue,” Brother Jobe muttered, prying open the stallion’s jaws with both hands and examining inside the mouth.

“I don’t have no idea, sir.”

“Hmmmph,” Brother Jobe said. “We’ll see about this.”

Minutes later, he was in the central chamber of the new construction that had filled the courtyard between the two wings of the U-shaped modernistic high school. Twenty-four other new rooms surrounded this chamber. It served as the summer quarters for Mary Beth Ivanhoe, originally of Lynchburg, Virginia, who was known within the New Faith order as “Precious Mother,” and sometimes “the Queen Bee.” Two things had happened to Mary Beth Ivanhoe at age nineteen as a result of being struck by a sport-utility vehicle driven by a drunken undergraduate from Radford University: She developed an unusual form of epilepsy that seemed to enable her to perceive events beyond time and place, and she grew convinced that she was able to speak to God directly. That was back in the period now referred to as the old times. She’d come into the New Faith a year after her release from the hospital, spellbound for Jesus. She had joined the group as just another initiate seeking a structured community life at a time of great turmoil and uncertainty in America. But her peculiar abilities had led the New Faith order to rapidly elevate her to an exalted position within the organization. She used her gifts to guide the people of New Faith in their journey to find safety and peace that had led them to the town of Union Grove, New York, the previous spring. A retinue of handmaidens almost constantly attended her, and her physical condition was such that she spent all her hours in bed.

The chamber was dim. The only daylight came from the windows in a cupola at the center of the room. The air was close and warm, though at this hour of the morning the outside temperature hovered not much above freezing. It bore a sharply sweet odor of fecundity that might have put off anyone not already acquainted with it. Five women in smock dresses bustled about a large bed in the center of the room that held the corpulent object of their attentions. She was propped up on a mass of pillows, her skin unnaturally pale. She wore a distempered expression beneath a black silk turban that made her head look small. Physical pain of one sort or another had been her intimate companion for many years. Somewhere in the distance, babies cried.

“Mebbe you sisters could excuse us for a few minutes,” Brother Jobe said, and the women fluttered out of the room like moths until the only sound was the heavy breathing of the room’s chief occupant.

“Get thee behind me, sumbitch!” Mary Beth said to her visitor, punctuating the command with a screechy laugh that resolved into a coughing spasm.

“Morning to you, too, Precious Mother,” Brother Jobe replied. He pulled a wooden side chair up to the bedside. “You full of vinegar today.”

“I don’t feel so good.”

“What else is new?”

“You got a dead studhorse lying under the cold dew is what.”

“A little birdie tell you that?”

“You don’t need no TV special reports with a mind like I got,” she said. “It’s half exploding as I speak.”

“He wasn’t a day over nine years and was in the very pink of health last time I laid eyes on him. I give him a good look-over just now. There ain’t a mark on him, nor no sign of colic or founder. I’m stumped out loud.”

“Everything you are is out loud,” she muttered, and coughed again.

“What’s got you so cranky, then?”

“When you moving me to those new quarters? I get cold in here these days.”

“It’s like a durn steam bath.”

“Not for me it ain’t. I chill easy.”

“Soon as the carpenters are done.”

“Hurry ’em along, why don’t you.”

“You can’t lean on men that do fine custom work. We’ll get you in there soon enough. Can we get back on track here, Mary Beth?”

Her eyes rolled up under the lids, briefly, as they always did when her emotions rose and the visions streamed in.

“I can tell you it wasn’t no natural death,” she said.

“I already figgered that out. Why don’t you help me a step further. Tell me who done it and how.”

“Not one of us,” she said.

“Ditto what I said before. Pay out some.”

“A little lost soul.”

“You holding back.”

“Mebbe you should just let this one alone, BJ.”

“Not on your life,” Brother Jobe said. “There’s hell to pay.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Alls you do is eat.”

“I eat for more than myself. Since when you become a ding-dang diet doc, anyway, you sawed-off, baby-faced, vengeful little sumbitch?”

“Aw, hell’s bells, girl, alls I want to know is who done this deed. You’ll tell me or I swear I’ll put all your girls to work out in the fields forking compost and you can just do for yourself in here.”

Mary Beth Ivanhoe’s eyelids fluttered, her teeth clenched, and her back stiffened. A gob of foamy spittle bubbled from one corner of her mouth and she issued a series of strained grunts. Brother Jobe merely watched from his chair. Mary Beth suffered dozens of these fits every day. Not much could be done about them. Those who spent time in her company had learned to patiently endure them. The spell subsided after a minute and left Mary Beth gasping among her heaped pillows. Beads of sweat glistened all over her waxy face.

“Have… mercy,” she gasped. Eventually her breathing resumed its labored normal rhythm. “You been here all along?” she asked Brother Jobe.

“I ain’t moved a muscle,” he said.

“You got any idea what this takes out of a body?” she asked wearily.

“Yes I do. Your curse is our blessing.”

“We’re all cursed when you get down to it. The innocent as well as the wicked. That’s the tragic heart of the matter, and I’m sorry about it.”

“I daresay you speak the truth there, Precious Mother.”

“Listen up then. Here’s what you wanted to know.”

ELEVEN

About the same time that morning, the doctor appeared at the door of his friend, Robert Earle. Robert’s housemate, Britney, answered the door, a petite woman of twenty-six, hard-muscled like the gymnast she had once been. Her tough, wary expression softened when she saw it was the doctor, a trusted figure in town. Behind her, and clinging to her ankle-length linen skirt, stood Sarah, her seven-year-old daughter by Shawn Watling. The child fled shrieking at the sight of the doctor. She had last seen her father’s body in the doctor’s spring house, an impromptu morgue, after he was murdered at the General Supply, as the town landfill was called since it became a salvage operation for useful articles. Shortly, Robert emerged from deeper within the house holding a chisel and a sharpening stone.