The Witch of Hebron (37 page)

“Can’t you just put up a sign that says ‘Trespassers will be shot’ or something?”

“They’d laugh at it. Before cutting our throats.”

“Well, I have to say that living with the constant stench of death is extremely unpleasant.”

“I find it a piquant reminder of how delicate our situation is here,” he said. “And how blessed we are.”

Bullock reached for his wife’s hand, but she rapped his knuckle with the fork.

“Oh, darling,” he said. “Don’t go all soft on me now.”

SEVENTY-ONE

Barbara had had the men move Brother Jobe carefully into her own bedroom, and she brought the little fainting couch up close by the bed to lie near him and monitor his condition. He came to in the hours before dawn. He called for water, and she helped raise his head while he sipped from a tonic she had made, composed of tincture of opium and cannabis, with whiskey for flavor.

“Oh, Lord, my guts hurt,” he groaned.

“This will make you feel better,” she said. “Drink some more.”

“Tastes horrible,” he said.

“You’ll appreciate the effect.”

Brother Jobe blinked at her in the candlelight.

“What all happened to me and who all are you?”

“You were very sick. You’ve had surgery.”

“You the doctor?”

“No.”

“This a hospital?”

“No.”

“This a dream?”

“No.”

“Well, you seem real enough, anyways, I suppose,” Brother Jobe said. Then his eyes narrowed in concentration. “I can see inside of you, you know. Lots of interesting colors in there.”

“I think you and I have a few things in common,” she said.

Soon, the potion allowed him to subside again in peaceful sleep.

He was resting comfortably without a fever when the men got up with the sun. Barbara apprised them of Brother Jobe’s progress and they were satisfied when they looked in on him resting in the big bed. They put the sweat-stained hotel mattress out on the front porch and retrieved a basket of eggs from Barbara’s chicken house. She had bacon frying and a pan of corn bread working in the oven by the time they got back from turning their animals out in her paddock. They got a greater surprise when she filled two steaming mugs from a pot on the stove.

“Why, this here tastes like coffee!” Seth said.

“It is coffee.”

“I be dog. How’d you get that?”

“People bring me things,” she said.

“How’s that, ma’am?”

“Born lucky,” she said, leaning against the counter and sipping from her own coffee mug. “What happens with the boy now?”

“I’m going to send him back to town with Seth,” Elam said. “I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind, until our boss is ready to go home.”

“I could use a man’s help around here for a day or two,” she said.

“It’ll be my pleasure, ma’am,” Elam said.

Barbara took the corn bread out of the oven and refilled Elam’s cup. She’d washed out Jasper’s sweatshirt and overalls and hung them above the hot cookstove to dry while the men finished their breakfast.

“The boy’s been through a lot,” she said.

“I expect he has.”

“He’s afraid to go home.”

“I expect things will go all right with him from here on,” Elam said.

“I think they will,” she said.

“There’s been some bad blood between them. But the boss owes him a debt of gratitude.”

“He owes that boy his life,” Barbara said.

Jasper woke to the murmur of voices downstairs, conscious that he was not in his own keeping and uncertain where he stood with the New Faith men who were now his keepers. In the meantime, a sense of duty prompted him to look in on Brother Jobe, who was asleep again, but unmistakably alive. Jasper took his pulse, felt for a temperature, pressed his ear against the patient’s chest to listen, and was satisfied that his condition was stable. He followed the breakfast aromas to the kitchen, still wearing the T-shirt with the cows on it. Elam had gone to the outhouse and Seth could be seen outside throwing a saddle on Atlas. When Barbara told him that Seth was going to ride him back to town, Jasper seemed resigned, yet peaceful. He had never tasted coffee, and she gave him a mug of it, well-creamed, to wash down with his eggs. His clothing was still warm when he changed back into it.

Just before they departed, Barbara took Jasper aside while Seth waited atop the mule. “I’m very proud of you,” she told the boy.

He searched the ground with his eyes, and she lifted his chin up with a long slender finger.

“I did what I was taught to do,” he said.

“Things have changed for you in ways that you may not understand just now,” she said. “You might feel uncomfortable with it for a while. But you’re growing into yourself, and you will fit yourself perfectly when you do.”

Jasper nodded, though he was not altogether sure what she meant.

“Be patient with your father,” Barbara added. “He’s suffered.”

“How do you know?”

“I can tell things.”

“Are you a witch?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you know some magic.”

“Tonight’s Halloween,” she said. “Did you know that?”

“No. I’ve lost track of the days.”

“And it’s a full moon, too. A good time for a boy to return to his family and his people. Thank you for everything you’ve done.”

She kissed him good-bye and squeezed him, and then she helped boost him up into the saddle in front of Seth.

The two made excellent time in fine, crisp weather, trotting smoothly on some of the long flats where the road followed Mourning Creek, then Black Creek, and then the Battenkill on the way into Union Grove. At one of the farms along the way, the hired men and their wives had set up plank tables in an orchard and were holding a harvest feast, drinking and laughing. One of the woman plucked a banjo and sang a song about the devil being in the corn. They fed Seth and Jasper a lunch of roasted goat, cider, and squash pudding. The rest of the way, Seth entertained Jasper with tales of adventure as a soldier in the Holy Land War, of his missions, shoot-outs, rescues, and ambushes, and his flight in an airplane to the hospital in Germany with a piece of shrapnel the size of a jackknife blade in his thigh.

Eventually they arrived at a place in their journey where the landscape was no longer a mere composition of random hills and valleys but a disposition of things achingly familiar to the boy— the old steel railroad bridge over the Battenkill, the back side of Pumpkin Hill, glowing like a heap of folded gold fabric in the slanting late-day sun, the white steeple of the Congregational church. Even the shell of the old ruined Kmart strip mall had a comforting, familiar look. The boy’s brain was effervescent with emotion as they entered town. Several women had been enjoying the late-day sunshine in front of Einhorn’s store. They turned and stared as Seth and the boy rode past. Then one waved excitedly when she recognized Jasper, and turned to inform the others, whose mouths opened and faces lit up. Townsmen returning on foot from their work on the surrounding farms recognized the boy and looked up at him on the big mule with guarded curiosity. Seth rode Atlas right up the drive between the house and the doctor’s office in the rear. First Jeanette came out of the house, with little Dinah trailing, and then the doctor stepped out the door to his office, blinking in the low sun. Seth lowered Jasper out of the saddle and down into their waiting arms, where parents and children became one tearful, pulsing organism for a while.

“That’s some young man you got there,” Seth said. “I’ll be seeing you around, junior.” He reined out his mount and headed up Van Buren Street toward his own people, as goblins, ghosts, pirates, and princesses made their way from house to house with their begging baskets, thrilling in the onset of night.

SEVENTY-TWO

The family had supper of Jeanette Copeland’s chicken braised in cider, a recipe from her native town of Evreux in Normandy. Nobody knew what to say, and Jasper himself ate silently. Before the meal ended, neighbors began appearing at the door to pay their respects and offer good tidings for Jasper’s return and to catch a glimpse of the boy. Children in costumes also came calling, Jasper’s schoolmates and friends, disguised as ghosts and witches, begging for treats and also angling to see the object of so much town mystery, speculation, and gossip.

Jeanette was in charge of politely fending off the well-wishers with her charming European manners, giving out popcorn balls to satisfy the goblins, while Jasper and the doctor retreated to the doctor’s study, where the doctor struggled to overcome his craving for a drink and endured the strange stoical silence of his son. He deliberately chose not to light a candle so that he and his boy would not be visible through the window to anyone coming up to the house from the street, and anyway the moonlight was sufficient.

“When will you feel able to tell me what happened to you?” he asked.

The boy shrugged and sighed.

“Nobody’s going to punish you. I just want you to resume your regular life.”

Jasper looked up at his father. “I want to be a doctor,” he said.

“You can be a doctor. I always thought you would be.”

“I don’t want to go to school anymore.”

“You should go to school.”

“I just want to see patients with you.”

“You can do both. You can go to school in the mornings and see patients with me after.”

The boy turned his gaze out the window, where costumed figures moved along the moonlit street laughing and shrieking.

“I performed an emergency appendectomy on Brother Jobe last night,” Jasper said.

His father fumbled with his mug of peppermint tea.

“You mean, like, in a dream?” he said.

“No,” Jasper said, still peering into the moonstruck street. The silence between them was so oppressive that the doctor’s hand started to tremble again.

“You really did it?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you can tell me how on earth that came to be,” the doctor said.

Jasper told his father how the New Faith men had caught up with him, how Brother Jobe lay ailing in the wagon, how he examined him and reached a diagnosis. He described the procedure in precise clinical detail, the place where it was conducted, and the woman who lived there, and gave an account of the patient’s postoperative condition.

“I know that woman,” the doctor said. “I know that place.”

“I’ll never forget her,” Jasper said, but he offered nothing more about the events that preceded that night, or where he had been, or with whom.

The doctor had a peculiar feeling that he was sitting with a person he hardly knew anymore, someone like a distant colleague from an earlier time in life instead of the child who had been his own boy not so many days ago. They sat in silence for many minutes more, clutching their mugs of tea, watching the spectacle of Halloween darkly through the window. The children Jasper had grown up with skipped, ran, and laughed as they went from house to house.

“Aren’t you going to tell me why you ran off in the first place?” the doctor eventually asked. “And what else happened to you out there?”

“Death was everywhere,” Jasper said.

The doctor waited for the boy to elaborate, and was chilled when he didn’t.

SEVENTY-THREE

Later that evening, up on the third floor of the old town hall—a grand room that, in the 150-odd years of its existence, had hosted everything from political meetings to boxing matches to community theater extravaganzas—the annual Halloween levee, or ball, got under way. A heightened spirit of festivity filled the big room, with its beautiful coffered ceiling on which the signs of the zodiac had been painted long ago. Candles burned along the walls in a dozen sconces and on stands up on the small proscenium stage where the six members of the string band tuned their instruments, but the candles were outshone by the moon streaming though the tall arched windows. The news had crackled rapidly across town that the doctor’s son had returned to town unharmed, thanks to Brother Jobe’s rangers, but little else was known about his misadventure or about the fate of the hermit, Perry Talisker, who was thought by some to have abducted him.

Tables were laid with savories and confections, pumpkin and apple puddings, nut cakes, jam cakes, meringues and fondants. Felix Holyrood supplied ciders of several kinds, and Carl Schmidt brought a ten-gallon keg of his strong dark ale, and the men and women, fathers and mothers, of Union Grove came costumed as astronauts and scuba divers and hippies and football players and all types of characters who no longer existed, leaving their younger children at home in the keeping of their older children, who had returned from their rounds. The grown-ups ate and danced and laughed and flirted until the moon swung above the windows and hung at the zenith of its transit above the town.

Along about the middle of the evening, Stephen Bullock appeared in the old town hall, having ridden alone from the farm on one of his big Hanoverian geldings. He had enjoyed the contents of a silver flask filled with his own whiskey on the ride, and he wobbled slightly as he entered the festive scene. When the musicians went on a break, he navigated to the beverage table, where Robert Earle was refilling his glass with strong sparkling cider.

“You came a long way,” Robert observed.

“Beautiful night out there on the road. Full moon and all.”

“Don’t your people put on their own levee?”

“Of course. I showed my face. But I think they’re more comfortable when I’m not around. If you know what I mean.”

“I think I get it,” Robert said.

“Just so you know,” Bullock said, “I cut down those miserable bastards along River Road and buried them.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“I’m henpecked.”

“Well, we appreciate it here in town, whatever motivated you. I understand you ordered Jerry to dig up Shawn Watling’s body.”

“Indeed I did,” Bullock said. “It’s like the night of the living dead around here, isn’t it? I’ll be glad when Halloween is over.”

“Isn’t it a little late to start a proceeding over Shawn?”

“The mills of the law grind slowly, Robert. Why?”