The Witch of Hebron (36 page)

“Yes,” Barbara said. “Apple brandy.”

“We have some whiskey somewheres in our gear,” Elam said. “You going to knock him out with it?”

“No, it’s to kill germs,” Jasper said. “Do you know when Brother Jobe last ate anything.”

“He didn’t have supper with us,” Elam said. “Said he wasn’t hungry. And I’m sure he didn’t have breakfast, neither.”

“Good.”

Brother Jobe cried out from his mattress. Only the word
Jesus
was comprehensible.

“I wish we had some opium,” Jasper said.

Elam looked at the boy askance.

“I have some opium,” Barbara said.

“Black gum?”

“Yes. I have other herbals, too.”

“Which ones?”

“What do you want?”

“Monkshood.”

“I have it.”

“Can you pull a tuber and crush out the juice?”

“Yes.”

“What’s that for?” Elam asked.

“Numbs tissues,” Jasper said. “I need three bean-size lumps of black opium as soon as possible.” He turned to Elam. “Mister, you’ll have to put this opium up his rear end.”

“What!”

“It gets absorbed through the bowels,” Jasper said.

“Can’t you just put it in his mouth?”

“He could choke on it, or it could make him vomit and he’ll choke on his vomit.”

“I don’t know as it’s right to—”

“Please, sir, just do what I say.”

Elam made a sour face.

“I’ll need instruments,” Jasper said. “Do you have a razor?”

“I have a straight razor,” Elam said.

“Can you strop it up real sharp?”

“Of course.”

“I need a very sharp, fine pair of scissors.”

“I have several,” Barbara said.

“Do you have a curved needle?”

“Yes, my lamp-shade needle.”

“Silk thread?”

“Yes.”

“Have you got any musical instruments with strings? A fiddle or something?”

“I have a guitar,” Barbara said.

“What kind of strings?”

“Gut.”

“Real gut or the old kind.”

“Real gut.”

“Cut off the highest string.”

“What for?”

“I have to stitch something inside him. It dissolves in the body after a week or so. I’ll need something that you can fire up red-hot on the coals. Something with a metal tip. A tool.”

“What’s that for?”

“To burn the places where we cut the appendix. It stops the bleeding into the cavity.”

“I have some screwdrivers,” Barbara said.

“Good. By any chance do you have a hemostat?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a little forceps that clamps shut.”

“You mean one of these?” Barbara rummaged in a kitchen drawer and found one, a Kelly mosquito.

“How’d you happen to have that?” Elam asked.

“In the old times, we used them for smoking dope,” she said.

“Oh, ’course, well…,” Elam said.

“I could use a small needle-nose pliers, too,” Jasper continued.

“I’ve got a tool box.”

“Tweezers?”

“I have different ones.”

“Have you got any sponges?”

“Yes. Little natural ones.”

“You’ll have to boil them. Do you have one of those things with a bulb at the end for squirting a roast chicken?”

“Yes.”

“Have you got salt?”

“Plenty.”

“Make a salt solution with some of the boiled water and put it aside to cool.”

“Okay.”

“Now go ahead and get that opium ready, ma’am. It takes a good half hour to start working, and please put the water on to boil.”

Elam set about fetching lamps and candle stands and arranging them around the long table. Barbara put water on and prepared the opium suppositories. She and Elam removed Brother Jobe’s boots and trousers and, with Jasper watching, rolled him onto his left side.

“Would you mind doing the honors, ma’am?” Elam asked. “I don’t know as he’d ever forgive me for touching him up there.”

“Spread his cheeks for me,” she said. She put the bean-size pellets of opium gum in place without ceremony. Elam rolled Brother Jobe onto his back again while Barbara went to scrub her hands.

“Soak your fingertips in that brandy when you’re done, ma’am,” Jasper said.

By that time Seth returned from feeding and bedding down the horses. He and Elam hoisted Brother Jobe onto the table. Elam went to the barn to fetch his razor out of his pannier. Jasper asked Seth to remove the rest of Brother Jobe’s clothing. The heat from the cookstove had made that part of the kitchen very comfortable. Brother Jobe’s fervid restlessness was clearly subsiding under the influence of the opium. Barbara returned with various tools and went about shredding a monkshood root with a box grater. She pounded it in a mortar, added some brandy, and strained a brownish fluid into a bowl. Elam stropped his razor on his belt and then dropped it in the pot of boiling water with the other tools and instruments. Jasper found a footstool that would allow him to work on Brother Jobe at a comfortable level. Then he fetched a side table from the front parlor to hold instruments. Finally, he told Seth to heat up several screwdriver tips through the grate of the cookstove’s firebox.

“You have to get them red-hot,” Jasper said.

“Yessir,” Seth said.

“Ma’am, do you have some kind of a clean nightshirt I can put on?” Jasper asked. “I can’t do this in dirty clothes.” She bustled away and returned with a long white cotton T-shirt displaying cartoon black-and-white Holstein cows, the logo of a bygone ice-cream manufacturer.

Jasper took it around the corner into the hallway and discarded his overalls and sweatshirt. When he came back, he told the three adults to roll up their sleeves, wash their hands up past their elbows, and douse them in brandy. When they had finished, he did likewise. He asked Barbara to fish the various tools and instruments out of the boiling water and set them on a clean white towel on the side table. He noticed that she used a set of kitchen tongs, and he said he could use it as a retractor when the time came. Next, he had Barbara cut a hole in a clean bedsheet about twelve inches across. He positioned it over Brother Jobe’s lower abdomen to frame a surgical field.

“Sir,” Jasper said to Elam. “I’m going to ask you to turn that mirror to shine the light on where I’m working, okay?”

“Yessir, son,” Elam said, and began experimenting with it until he had focused a nice bright spot in the field.

“I’m ready to begin,” Jasper said, and took several deep breaths.

“Can we say a prayer?” Seth asked.

“I wish you would,” Jasper said.

“O Lord of mercies and miracles, please guide this boy’s hand surely and fortify the spirit of our boss and brother in his hour of need, amen.”

“Amen,” they all said.

“Ma’am, will you please swab down the field with alcohol,” Jasper said, and she did. “Now, will you hand me that razor.…”

In the eyes of the adults present, Jasper worked with stunning speed and economy. He made a three-inch diagonal incision through McBurney’s point, carved past a layer of blubber, found the external obliques, and sectioned through them to the internals. He retracted the incision with the tongs, asked Barbara to hold them in place, and entered the abdominal cavity proper. Along the surgical pathway, he swabbed the exposed tissues with the tincture of monkshood and explored the area inside the peritoneum with the tip of the hemostat until he found the pouch of the cecum at the base of the ascending colon. There, with a deft flip of the steel tip, he exposed the appendix. It was inflamed—as red as a sumac leaf—but intact. The fluid within the abdominal cavity was clear. He called for the length of catgut, made a slip loop, and tied a ligature near the stump of the appendix, then drew it tight, repeated it twice more, and clamped the hemostat ahead of it. Next, he took up a pair of fine embroidery scissors and attacked the appendix with a series of cuts between the last two ligatures. With each cut, he called to Seth for a screwdriver with a red-hot tip and cauterized the tissue at the site, vaporizing the escaping pus and sealing the wound. Then he unclamped the stump of the appendix and used the hemostat to lift it out of Brother Jobe’s body and deposit it in a little saucer on the table, where it lay like an angry red worm.

“Lord above,” Seth said. “Is that the miserable bugger itself?”

“Yessir,” Jasper said.

“I be dog.”

“Ma’am, would you wipe my forehead, please?” Jasper said.

She did. He told Seth to take her place at the retractor and asked Barbara to fill the baster with salt water. He laved the saline solution into the abdominal cavity and then suctioned it out with the baster, repeating the procedure twice more, until he was satisfied that there were no visible shreds of infected tissue swimming there. He dribbled a little whiskey around the ligatures on what was now the stump of the appendix, withdrew the tongs to rejoin the obliques and close the abdominal cavity, and sewed the wound closed with the silk thread and the lamp-shade needle held in a pair of needle-nosed pliers. Finally, he swabbed the stitches with more whiskey. Barbara had cut another sheet into long bandages. Seth helped lift Brother Jobe’s trunk so she could wind the bandage around him and secure it with safety pins. When this was concluded, all three of the grown-ups turned their gaze to Jasper.

“That’s it,” he said. He wobbled a moment on his footstool and then crumpled in a heap on the floor, unconscious.

SIXTY-NINE

Loren brought the four boys over to the doctor’s office right after breakfast to have them checked out. The doctor looked rumpled, his clothes slept-in, his eyes red-rimmed. Loren gave him an abbreviated version of the incident at Argyle and said he was both glad and sorry that Jasper was not among them—glad that Jasper had not fallen into the hands of Miles English but very sorry that the boy was still missing.

“I think he’s going to be all right,” the doctor said.

“How do you mean?” Loren said.

“It’s hard to explain. I’ve had a vision, I guess you could call it. You think I’m nuts, don’t you.”

“Not at all,” Loren said. “We can’t account for everything.”

“It goes against my training, of course.”

“Do you want to tell me about this vision?”

The doctor hesitated. Loren noticed that his hands were trembling.

“I think I had a conversation with a ghost,” the doctor said. “How nuts is that?”

“Well, it’s that time of year. Who was it the ghost of?”

“Shawn Watling.”

This time, Loren stopped to puzzle and reflect.

“Why him?” he asked.

“His body is over there in the springhouse. Bullock had him dug up.”

“What for?”

“To settle the issue of what killed him, I guess.”

“We know what killed him.”

“Bullock wants it signed and sealed.”

Loren glanced at the springhouse. It looked like a mausoleum.

“And you think the corpse communicated with you?” he said.

“I was pretty drunk.”

“What did it say?”

“It told me Jas was coming home soon.” A tear leaked out of the doctor’s left eye, and he leaned in closer to Loren in order to whisper. “I’ve got to stop this drinking,” he said. “Can you help me?”

“Yes,” Loren said. “I can help you.”

Aside from their nutritional problems and ringworm, the doctor pronounced the four orphans healthy. Little Jesse, however, seemed to have a mental problem. He was less than completely responsive to verbal promptings. The doctor told Loren to pay him special attention and report what he observed in the days ahead. When they were gone, the doctor had no other patients. Wishing to get away from the temptation of the several kinds of alcohol around his office, he decided to take advantage of the cool and brilliant weather and go for a walk out to the Battenkill. But he was intercepted by Robert Earle before he could even get out to the street in front of his house.

“Are you on your way to see a patient?” Robert asked.

“No, just a walk. Clear my head.”

“Mind if I walk with you a ways?”

“Sure.”

They set out toward the east edge of town, past the Union-Wayland Mill, where the community laundry was under construction, then out the east end of town, past the abandoned Walgreen’s drugstore building and the empty Cumberland Farms convenience store.

“A bunch of the men wanted me to cancel Halloween on account of Jasper,” Robert said. “I didn’t think it was a good idea.”

“I understand.”

“I just want you to know it wasn’t out of disrespect. I saw it as a question of community morale.”

“Of course,” the doctor said. “Life has to go on. When Ed Hardie’s wife died of tetanus last year around this time, everything went on as usual.”

“The adults are still having their ball upstairs at the old town hall,” Robert said. “I’ll be playing with the band.”

“I hope everybody has a swell time.”

“Our thoughts will still be with you and your boy and the family.”

“Of course.”

They walked silently for a while, past the remnants of Kmart.

“I hear you’ve dug up Shawn Watling’s body,” Robert said.

“Bullock issued a writ. I got some of the Jesus boys to do the actual digging.”

“What do you suppose he’s up to?”

“He wants some kind of legal proceeding. To settle the matter.”

“Why now, I wonder.”

“I suppose he’s finally taking his duties seriously.”

SEVENTY

It seemed to Stephen Bullock that his wife had come to the breakfast table from her morning bath in turbulent spirits. She slapped butter on her spelt crumpet rather aggressively, he thought, as if she wished to teach it a lesson, and she pushed her scrambled eggs this way and that way with seemingly no intention of actually eating them.

“Something on your mind?” Bullock asked.

Sophie’s shoulders drooped and she put down her fork. “Won’t you cut those bodies down?” she said. “I can smell them from the bedroom now. And they get worse by the day.”

“Good,” Bullock said. “They’ll make all the more of an impression on the bad guys.”

“And who are these hypothetical bad guys?”

“You know. Men like them. Pickers, bandits, vagabonds. People who would rob us, harm us.”