The Witch of Hebron (16 page)

“I know it sounds crazy coming from someone with a medical education, a background in science, but am I the only one around here who wonders if there’s something evil about the son of a bitch?”

“I don’t think he’s the devil, if that’s what you mean.”

“I can’t even believe we’re having this conversation,” the doctor said.

“Well,” Loren said, momentarily at a loss.

“Only two of us in town, myself and Robert Earle, saw the bodies of Wayne Karp and Brother Jobe’s son—what was his name?”

“Minor.”

“Right. Anyway, the wounds were identical. I mean, to the micromillimeter. I measured them very carefully. Robert witnessed it. Each was shot in the eye and the mouth. Same teeth sheared at exactly the same place and same angle. It was literally an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It couldn’t have been coincidental.”

Loren now grunted inconclusively.

“I’m telling you: Brother Jobe was sending a message,” the doctor said. “And when all is said and done, and in spite of who I am, I wonder if he really is some kind of other-than-normal being with powers we can’t account for.”

“In my opinion he’s just a mortal with a talent for pushing people around.”

“Funny, you’re the one who supposedly consorts with supernatural powers.”

“You mean God?”

“Yeah, God.”

“I’m not so sure about God anymore,” Loren said.

“Have you given up on him, Reverend? I suppose many others have in these hard times. But I’d like to think you’re hanging in there with him, or the idea of what he represents.”

“Can I tell you something personal?” Loren asked. “Confidentially, between a patient and a doctor?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve thought about doing away with myself more than once.”

The doctor, who had been slumping in his seat, sat up straighter.

Loren continued, “I went out to the old railroad bridge over the river yesterday with a rope.”

“Are you depressed?”

Loren laughed, heartily.

“Yes, I suppose I was kind of upset,” he said.

“What happened?”

“For starters, I threw the fucking rope into the river. Not on purpose. I tried a hook shot over this steel beam about twenty feet up. I forgot to hold on to the other end of the rope. It was so fucking stupid it made me want to kill myself even more. But then the rope was gone and I was too chicken to throw myself off the bridge. I remember thinking how cold the water would be.”

Loren’s hilarity became so intense it doubled him up. The doctor was infected by it and couldn’t help laughing himself. Loren laughed until tears came to his eyes. Their laughter subsided gradually while Loren poured them both more tea.

“You know what really pulled me out of it?”

“What?”

“Robert’s little lady turned up.”

“Britney?”

“She’d been gathering wild things up the tracks. Rose hips or something. I suppose she saw the whole stupid business with me and the rope. She was very kind about it. Didn’t put me on the spot or ask any questions. Just took my hand and walked me home.”

“She’s a very sturdy girl.”

“I don’t know if she saved my life, but she kind of bolstered my faith in the human race.”

“Why did you want to take your life?” the doctor asked.

Loren sighed and rearranged his bulky frame in the fragile-looking Windsor chair, as though trying to make himself look smaller. “I’m unable to have sex anymore.”

“Can’t get an erection?”

“Right.”

“Is that a recent thing?”

“It’s been a while.”

“Depression often expresses itself that way.”

“How do you know it’s not the other way around—that I’m depressed because I can’t get it up?”

“It could be vascular problems.”

“You know what my blood pressure was last time you took it—a hundred and ten over seventy. You said it was perfect.”

“Considering the amount of butter and cream we eat these days, it’s remarkable.”

“It’s not like I don’t get any exercise, either. I must have spent ten hours this week just forking compost into the garden. Not to mention walking here and there all over town. I’m wondering if there’s anything you might suggest?”

“There’s no more Viagra, of course.”

“Is there anything natural that actually works?”

“Have you tried jerking off?”

“Actually, yes. Are you being funny?”

“No. It works for some people. I thought maybe you being a minister—”

“I was a frat boy before I was a minister. Do you know of any herbals that grow around here that might help?”

“There’s nothing that I know of,” the doctor said. But something about the candlelight in the room brought him back to the previous night at Barbara Maglie’s house in Hebron—the startling, vivid dreams he had and what she had told him in the morning about how she made her living—and he wondered if perhaps she’d put something in his food or drink to stimulate those wild dreams, the longings they provoked, and the orgasm he’d apparently had in his sleep. It certainly would have been in the service of her livelihood, as she had made it clear to him—if he understood her correctly. He was not exactly sure he had, because it was all so strange.

“There’s a woman up in Hebron…,” the doctor began, and he went on to try to explain who she was and what she might do for Loren.

“Is she a witch or a whore?” Loren asked when the doctor finished.

“Maybe some of both.”

“Witches, devils. This is pretty wild stuff for you, Jerry.”

“I don’t know what I believe these days,” the doctor said. “The world we know is slipping away and something weird is taking its place.”

Loren made a face that suggested he did not disagree.

“She’s an unusual woman,” the doctor said. “I think she might help you. It can’t hurt to go see her. If you can stand the journey.”

“I’ll think about it. I want you to think about going to see Brother Jobe about finding your boy.”

“Aw, Christ,” the doctor said.

“Who else can you turn to?”

“Nobody,” the doctor said, finishing his tea. “There’s one other thing bugging me: Robert and I passed through Argyle on our way. The shopkeeper there might be trading in young boys.”

“Huh?”

“We stopped in to buy some food. I told him we were looking for a boy. He said, ‘Labor or sport?’”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Like I said, trading in boys. Selling them for work or sex, I took it to mean. You ever hear of any such racket around the county?”

“No,” Loren said. “But I’ll ask. First thing in the morning I’m going over to Perry Talisker’s shack down on the river to have a heart-to-heart with him. I’ll let you know what I find out.”

The doctor stood up and Loren did likewise.

“You’ve been a good friend and a good doctor,” Loren said. “And I know you’re a good father, too.”

The doctor nodded while he choked with emotion, mumbled thanks, and headed back out into the cold rain.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Perry Talisker had come across more than a few abandoned dwellings on his journey to the uplands of the Gavottes. But as the evening sky clotted up with voluptuously malevolent clouds and his left hip began to ache, as it always did when rain was coming on, he determined to build himself a natural shelter rather than stay indoors. On his sojourns away from Union Grove, trapping and hunting, he avoided staying in empty houses, with their stinking carpets, mold, rot, and worse. He found himself a flat spot twenty yards back from a little freestone stream called Joe Bean Creek— named after a nineteenth-century farmer of Washington County who was killed at the Battle of Trevilian Station, Virginia, June 12, 1864—and built himself a lean-to. He made a fire a few yards from the mouth of his lean-to and very happily boiled himself a steel cup of “coffee” devised from his own recipe of roasted barley grains and burdock root, which he improved with a liberal ration of whiskey. He then placed two large white potatoes, a turnip, and three fat carrots (all gleaned from local farm fields) on a flat rock in the center of his fire and tenderly watched over them, turning them this way and that with a stick until he judged that the roots were well cooked. He ate them with minced jalapeño chili peppers macerated in vinegar that he had made himself and carried in a jar, and a big block of sweet buttery corn bread he’d packed from home. For dessert he ate some chunks of a homemade confection composed of crystallized honey and ground butternuts.

The rain came on gradually as the day’s last light yielded to darkness—just, he thought, as if some superior intelligence were directing it to happen that way. He wondered which of the two powers competing for his attention and, ultimately, for his soul was behind it or whether they had worked out some regular schedule, like a protocol of battle, in which one took control from the other at set times. The whiskey inclined him to reflect with a certain pleasure that he had gotten through another day without falling captive to either the Dark One or his opposite, the all-seeing and ever-judging God. He drew immense comfort from eluding both of them and standing on his own, though he knew they were both out there. It occurred to him that if he got far enough from the realm of man—town, that is—and became more embedded in the natural world, perhaps the lords of darkness and light would forget about him and focus their attention on those who remained in society, with its endless varieties of wickedness.

He was snug, dry, and content in his little lean-to. The rain slid right off the layered pine boughs. He had inserted himself in a durable Mylar emergency sleeping sack bought by mail order years ago that had become one of his prize possessions in these times of hardship. It folded into an eight-inch-square packet, was apparently indestructible and entirely waterproof, and kept him warm inside with just one liner blanket in temperatures below freezing. He had laid a thick mattress of pine boughs on the ground under his lean-to, and they were as springy as the best factory-made mattresses used to be. As much as he feared and avoided human society, Perry reserved a wondrous respect for the manufactured outdoor adventure products of the old days, none of which was available anymore. He loved his little butane stove, which folded up into something the size of a hockey puck, but the minitanks of butane were no longer sold anywhere, so it was campfires now. He possessed an assortment of Swiss Army knives, folding multitools, and a military belt knife, which had serrated saw teeth on one side and a razor-sharp blade on the other. His steel Sierra cup was an old, treasured friend.

The food and whiskey and the many miles he had trod that day were dragging him now into sleep like a log to a hearth. He knew he was apt to wake up in the middle of the night, as he always did when the whiskey wore off and left his heart pounding, with his mouth dry, and his brain buzzing. But he also knew this first round of sleep would get him at least two or three good hours, and he rather looked forward to being alert later on when he could lie back and listen for animals in a place wilder than his shack on the river back in town. He wondered if one of the big catamounts might be among them. He laid his Marlin .30-30 rifle right next to his Mylar cocoon and sank back on the boughs. He pictured the earth turning on its axis through the dark ethers of space, and the face of his erstwhile wife flashed through his memory, which propelled him out of himself and the known world into the bonds of slumber.

TWENTY-NINE

“Put them onions there into the mush and mix them in good,” Billy Bones told his protégé, Jasper Copeland, as they prepared their feast in the abandoned house on Goose Island Road. Billy had his goat-meat skewers jacked up on a couple of concrete blocks over the fire, and the meat juices dripped aromatically into the coals. “Keep stirring it,” he said.

“The handle’s hot.”

“Well, get a sock or something out of your sack and use it like a pot holder.”

Billy took the skewers off the fire and moved one of the concrete blocks to the side and set the meat on it to rest.

“Okay,” he said, “now take them cheese crumbles and stir them in.”

Jasper followed Billy’s instructions.

“Now, take her off the heat and just keep stirring until the cheese gets melty.”

A minute later, Billy declared the cornmeal mush with onions and cheese done. He took a spoon out of his shoulder sack and Jasper did likewise. Billy directed Jasper to set the pot down right between them and then laid the meat skewers on the concrete block beside it. Finally, he took a small jar of white crystals out of his sack and opened it with ceremony.”

“Look here what I got.”

“Salt?”

“You’re damn right.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Won it in a poker game,” Billy said. He sprinkled salt into the cheesy cornmeal mush and lifted a spoonful of it to his mouth. “Mmm-mmm, that is goddamn tasty. Dig right in. And help yourself to meat.”

Jasper obliged. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until Billy set all the food between them. He imitated Billy by sprinkling salt on his meat strips and then rolling them up to fit neatly inside his mouth. They ate silently until the ragged edge of their hunger faded.

“You know something, little desperado?” Billy said. “I don’t believe I even caught your proper name after the better part of a day rambling together. What should I call you?”

“John.”

“John what?”

“John S. Hopkins.”

“What’s the
S
for?”

Jasper had to think a moment.

“Sebastian.”

“Aw, you just made that up.”

“Did not.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter. John’s good enough. Johnny. Johnny-on-the-spot. How do you like your supper?”

“It’s okay.”

“Just okay? I got news for you—this is about as good as it gets on a ramble. Fresh meat, a tasty side dish, and brandy to wash it down. We even got nuts and honey for dessert. Last night, alls I had was a pocketful of acorns.”

“I had roasted potatoes,” Jasper said.

“Well ain’t you special.”

“Every farm around here has got a patch, and lots are still left in the ground.”

“I don’t go for grubbing around in the dirt. Billy Bones is not any clod-scratching land humper. But tell you what. Since you seem to like it, and you’re my protégé, I’ll let you get all the potatoes for us while I get the meat on our rambles.”