The Witch of Hebron (8 page)

Brother Jobe had come about halfway to his destination when, lost in musing about back home, he saw a lone figure up ahead on the road. As he drew closer, the figure began to wave its arms in a broad gesture that reminded Brother Jobe of a railroad grade-crossing signal from the old times. He instinctively reined in Atlas. The lone figure strode forward confidently. The closer he came, the more his appearance resolved from that of a grown man into something more like a gangly, overgrown boy. He was perhaps twenty, with curly yellow hair and a scraggly blond beard that, if he ever took to shaving regularly, would hardly require the razor twice a week. His cheeks were sunken as if he had not been getting regular meals. He was carrying a bulging leather shoulder sack, which he now took off and tossed aside to the edge of the road.

“What’s up, stranger?” Brother Jobe said.

“And good afternoon, to you, too, sir.”

“A fine day to be rambling.”

“I’m a rambler and a gambler—you’ve got that right.”

“That so? Are you knowing the Lord, son?”

The young man dipped his whole upper body in a guffaw. “Not yet,” he said.

“Would you like to?”

“I hope not to meet up with him for some time yet. I like it here on earth, rambling and gambling as I do.”

“You can be born again in this world and know the Lord.”

“I’ve had enough of birthing, sir. I’m enjoying my prime. Would you like to hear some of my song?”

“Your song… ?”

“Yessir, the ‘Ballad of Billy Bones.’”

“That’d be you? Billy Bones?”

“Yessir. The very same.”

“Well, I don’t have time for no song and dance, son.”

“There ain’t any dance to this. Not yet, anyway.”

“Mind if I pass on the song, then?”

The boy unbuttoned his brown leather coat and drew it open to reveal the butt of an automatic pistol tucked into the waistband of his striped trousers and something that looked like a two-foot-long brush knife in a scabbard on his other hip.

“Give it a chance, sir. You won’t regret it.”

“Along about now the only thing I regret is not bringing a firearm to entertain you with.”

“So much the better then, because neither of us will get hurt. Are you ready for my song?”

“Fire away.”

“Here goes:

“When first I came to New York State
My fortune here to find
I followed reg’lar upright ways
Was always nice and kind

But as I rambled round the state
A bandit I became
I plied the roads with gun and sword
And plundered many a man.…”

He sang these verses in the style of a mournful dirge. During the second verse, he drew the automatic pistol out of his waistband and held it aloft in an emphatic manner.

“I think I get the picture,” Brother Jobe said.

“I ain’t done. There’s lots more verses.”

“I heard enough. If you got yourself a ding-dang ukulele, folks might stand it better.”

“You know where I might find such a thing?”

Brother Jobe felt his patience melting away. “Lookit here, son, I don’t carry no cash money. This here’s a waste of your valuable banditry time. Anyways, you are a durn sorry excuse for a minstrel and a worse robber.”

“You think so? Well, maybe I’ll just have that horse of yours. I’m sick of pounding this road.”

“This here’s a mule, you dumb ass.”

“Mind how you speak to me or someone might get hurt after all.”

“Look right here, boy.” Brother Jobe held an index finger to the outside corner of his right eye.

“Huh?”

“That’s right. Look right in.”

“Think you can run the snake eye on Billy Bones?”

“I already done it. As we speak, I can see inside your mush-filled brainpan at a throbbing vein within. I’m surprised you can’t feel it.”

The young man cried out in pain and visibly drooped while his gun hand fell to his side. “Sweet Jesus,” he moaned.

“Well, look what you found after all.”

The young man staggered to the side of the road and squatted into his haunches. “What are you doing to me, mister?”

“I’m calling a halt to these monkeyshines and giving you something to reflect on.”

“My head’s splitting open,” the boy said, and vomited between his dusty shoes, a thin stream of yellow green puke, as if he had been eating grass for his breakfast.

“You’ll be all right in a while, long as you quit the vicinity and don’t never show your sorry face here again.”

At that, Brother Jobe gave Atlas some heel and the big mule resumed his stately walk. As he left Billy Bones on the roadside, the young man was weeping loudly in the sunshine.

FOURTEEN

The Reverend Loren Holder ventured onto the old steel-truss railroad bridge that spanned the Battenkill, thinking he was leaving his last footsteps on solid earth behind him forever. The notion to end his life had seized him in the night with a force comparable to true love, something sudden and irresistible. He’d worked out all the details mentally in the hours before dawn. Though his mood now was such that he seemed to be viewing the whole world through a narrow culvert, he retained enough presence of mind to see the despair that consumed him as a kind of object narrative, so that his life seemed like a story unspooling to this inexorable destination. The bridge. The river. The beautiful day. The end.

When he got to the middle of the bridge, he dawdled on a girder that supported the rusty old track and its half-rotten ties. He carried a length of rope looped over his shoulder like a mountaineer. It was a very good machine-made nylon rope of the kind that was no longer manufactured or sold, another useful remnant of the old times. It occurred to him that whoever found him ought to be sure to keep the rope for some better use than the one he intended it for.

He peered over the edge of his precarious perch on the girder. It was a good forty-foot drop to the water. The river was low this time of year and he could see trout finning in the shallow pool down beside the central bridge abutment. These very trout, he thought, had been preceded by how many millions of generations of fish, and how many more would come after? And how many more seasons would revolve in the future history of this mysterious world before all the generations of everything would exhaust themselves? And then what? Would all the worlds and worlds and worlds of worlds fold in upon themselves to nothing? And what could prevent more worlds from emerging out of nothing after that? And might he, Loren, emerge new and whole out of the nothing he intended to enter this beautiful afternoon? He hardly dared hope to find out. A moment of vertigo left him trembling.

He felt a tear start down his cheek and quickly wiped it away, chiding himself for being a coward in the face of the infinite. He noted also that his strange view of things this day did not include a glimpse of the putative character known as God. He had given up on that personage some time ago, preferring to see a divine spark in his fellow human beings, who had, after all, dreamed up this great Lord and protector to avoid the lonely burdens of their own sanctity. And so, Loren reasoned, it was a more responsible thing to deny the existence of the deity to the very end than to succumb to the fairy tales about him and his celestial kingdom. That was Loren’s theory, and he was oddly satisfied with himself for having summed it up so concisely in his own mind, especially at this moment. It would allow him to enter the cosmic interstices between this life and whatever lay beyond it clear-eyed and honestly. He took the coil of rope off his shoulder, looked up into the truss work of the bridge, and tried to calculate which structural member above would be the most suitable to tie up to. This took his mind off metaphysics.

When he’d chosen a particular horizontal beam, he attempted to lob his coil of rope over it, not a hard trick for someone who once had a pretty good layup shot on the basketball court. Except that, in his tremulous state, he forgot to hold on to one end of the rope, and the whole rope sailed over the beam in a clump and arced down into the river, where it landed with a splash, spooking many large trout. He watched it catch the current and float away past a tangle of blowdown around the next bend.

“Reverend,” somebody said softly behind him.

Loren wheeled around to find Britney Watling standing on the tracks with pack basket slung over one shoulder. He regarded her with a combination of wonder and horror.

“I was over there.” She pointed to the far end of the bridge. “I couldn’t help noticing.”

Loren was struck, at that moment, by an incongruous recognition of the young woman’s beauty in the autumn sunlight, her caramel hair piled up halolike, her small mouth slightly open, her upper lip an inquisitive pink V, and the soft flesh just beneath her collarbone heaving slightly with each breath.

“Do you remember a more beautiful day?” she asked.

Loren’s throat was so dry he could not even croak out an answer.

“This is the kind of day you think God is in everything,” she added.

“Of course,” Loren said.

“Are you feeling okay?”

Loren nodded.

“You’re all shaky.”

“I slipped for a second. Lost my footing.”

“You could break your neck falling off this thing. I always stay over here in the middle, where you can’t fall off. Why don’t you step away from the edge and come over by me.”

Loren nodded and stepped off the girder and came over beside her.

“Thank you,” Britney said. “You were making me nervous.”

As Loren quietly hyperventilated, the staggering beauty of the world flooded his senses. His heart raced.

“Robert and the doc have taken off,” she said.

“Taken off where?”

“The doc’s son ran away. They’re looking for him.”

“Why did he run away?”

“His dog got killed by a horse.”

Without speaking further, Britney reached out and took Loren’s large hand in her small one. He was shivering as though he had just survived a plunge in an icy pool. Together they walked off the bridge back toward town.

FIFTEEN

Jasper Copeland stayed off the roads for the remainder of the afternoon as he moved north from Union Grove in the direction of Glens Falls. He’d traveled seven miles through woods, fields, and orchards since his adventure in the potato field. His mood, however, had devolved from ebullient that morning to dejected as the day wore on. His pack seemed heavier and his prospects for the coming night seemed increasingly uncertain, and a longing for the familiar things of home began to stir dimly in a remote sector of his consciousness. He dragged in his footsteps, searching now for a place to spend the night, until he came upon a ruined fieldstone foundation that was little more than a pentimento on the landscape of an earlier society—in this case, the house of one Benjamin Rodney, an early settler of Washington County, who laid the stones in 1762 and whose grandson had deserted the homestead for the Ohio frontier in 1817. Mixed hardwoods had reclaimed their fields and pastures except for this rectangle of stones, in the corner of which Jasper found the skeleton of a human being.

He approached it warily, as though it might spring to life and attack him if he was not careful. The bones were draped in frayed and shredded gray nylon pants and a torn grayish green sweater. A broad ashen smudge along the neckline and diagonally down the front suggested that the garment, and the person in it, had been subjected to flames. Jasper did not fail to notice that a foot was missing. But the skeleton was so twisted where it lay quasi-upright against the rocks that it took him a moment to understand that the tibia and fibula were gone as well. He wondered whether an animal had made off with them or the person had lost his leg in the process of losing his life. Study it as he might, crouching among the pungent dead leaves, he could not determine whether it was the skeleton of a man or a woman.

He eventually realized that he would learn no more about the skeleton by studying it and that the evening seemed to be falling like a curtain in the woods. So he plodded on, thinking he might be better off finding his way onto a road again. He knew that abandoned houses were plentiful in the county and he reasoned that it would be nice to find one for the night. The temperature was dropping and he retrieved his gloves and hat from his pack. A three-quarters moon was rising through the treetops against the purple sky when he came upon a decrepit mobile home, as such dwellings were once called, at the end of what had once been a quarter-mile-long driveway into the woods. The driveway was overgrown with poplars. The hulk of a pickup truck stood on bare rims in a thicket twenty yards from the trailer. Nothing remained of it but rusted metal suggesting it had been set on fire some years ago. Vines crawled in and out of its openings.

Jasper set down his pack beside the truck and got a candle and a match. The sheer physical relief of setting down his load lifted his mood. The door to the trailer hung open and askew on one hinge. He ventured inside, waited until his eyes adjusted to the dimness, and then searched for a surface to strike his match on. He could not afford to waste one. The wall surface, he noticed, was some kind of plastic material embossed with a stuccolike texturing. He ran his match over it and the head flared, illuminating the building’s interior so brightly for a moment that it hurt his eyes. He lit the candlewick and carefully cupped his hand around the flame until he was sure it was going.

The light revealed a small table with a plastic bench on either side of it. He dripped a little wax onto the table and stuck the candle on the spot. The place looked pretty well stripped. The plumbing fixtures were gone from the tiny galley kitchen opposite the table. He rummaged through the cabinets and the drawers, thrilling a little to be acting like a burglar, but found absolutely nothing. He retrieved the candle and ventured into the next room where he found a plywood box platform for a double bed. The mattress was long gone. There was nothing in the two small closets except a couple of plastic hangers, one of them broken. A little bathroom crammed between the galley and the bedroom was also stripped of plumbing and fixtures. There was a hole in the floor where the toilet used to be. But next to the hole Jasper found the front half of a child’s stuffed animal. There was little stuffing left in it, except for in the head, and it was all dusty. He was at a loss to understand what kind of animal it represented—it was nothing that he recognized—but it had a cheerful expression, big eyes, and a snout full of nylon whiskers. Jasper dusted it off and, thinking that he’d found something like a new companion, tucked it tenderly into his sweater, determined to keep it from further harm.