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.
He’d already decided to spend the night in the trailer. In the meager twilight emanating from the last red streaks in the sky, he gathered up some of the plentiful dry twigs lying around the trailer’s clearing and started a fire with them, the light of which allowed him to find some larger branches to feed the fire. Soon he had a majestic blaze roaring. He ate two apples from his pack while he watched the fire burn down enough to rake a bed of embers apart from the main fire with a stick. He placed his three largest potatoes on these embers and tended them carefully—rolling them this way and that way—for half an hour until he judged that they were cooked. Then he stabbed each with the sharpened end of his stick and put them on a rock out of the heat. Though blackened on the outside, they were yellow and creamy within. He was so hungry that he burned the roof of his mouth devouring the first two, and only while consuming the last one did he think how much better they would have been with some butter and salt.
When he finished his meal and had no more room for even another apple, he tossed more wood on his fire and hatched a scheme for begging provisions at some farmhouse door the following day. He was far enough from hom
e, he reasoned, to not be recognized by anyone. He could make up a story about who he was and where he was going, and ask for whatever he needed to sustain him—corn bread, eggs, butter, cheese, maybe even meat—as he made his way to Glens Falls, where he would find a place for himself.
In a little while he retired to the trailer. The door to the little bedroom was still on its hinges and the deadbolt on it worked. The plywood bed was hard, but he was glad to feel sheltered and secure. He stuck the six inches of candle to a blob of hot wax on the night table and retrieved the stuffed animal from his sweater. He could put his hand a little ways inside and hold it up like a puppet.
“What’s your name?” he asked it.
“I don’t know,” he said on the animal’s behalf.
“Do you mind if I call you Willie?”
“No, that’s a nice name.”
“I’m going to take care of you now. Nothing bad will happen to you anymore.”
“I’m tired of laying on that dirty floor.”
“You’re with me now,” Jasper told it. “Everything will be okay.”
When he said that, the tears gushed out of his eyes as he thought about his home, and his family, and town, and dear friends, and the other Willie, whom he had been unable to keep out of harm’s way.
SIXTEEN
Brother Jobe rode up into the driveway of Stephen Bullock’s plantation house, dismounted, approached a man standing at the mouth of a great gray barn—one Dick Lee, an insurance claims officer in the old days and now the chief stable hand—and inquired about the lord of the manor. Dick Lee gazed at the visitor with bewilderment.
“The head honcho of this outfit,” Brother Jobe explained. “Mr. Bullock. I’m here to see him.”
“And who would you be?”
“I’m the head honcho of the New Faith outfit back to town. You heard of us?”
“I guess I have.”
“Do you know the Lord?”
“I don’t think about it much.”
“Is that so? What about the extraspecial select moments when you do?”
“I don’t think about it much even in those moments when I do think about it.”
“It just passes through your noggin like the morning breeze?”
“No, it’s more like when I’m going at it with the wife. She always yells ‘Jesus Christ’ when I hit her sweet spot.” Dick Lee enjoyed a laugh. “Anyway, Mr. Bullock isn’t around.”
“Is he on the property somewheres?”
“He’s over to the sorghum mill just now, I think.”
“Well, if you’ll just maybe send and fetch him, I’d be grateful.”
Dick Lee seemed to weigh this a moment. Then he yelled into the dark mouth of the barn to his back: “Eddie Flake!”
A boy about sixteen with a lopsided head and a touch of palsy came limping out. He was directed to fetch Bullock. Brother Jobe watched him lope off down the grassy wagon lane that connected the house and barns to the other parts of Bullock’s vast acreage.
“You send a cripple boy all the way over there?”
“It’s what he does,” Dick Lee said. “I’ll take your mount.”
“Mind how you handle him.”
Dick Lee’s demeanor had settled into one of not-well-concealed condescending amusement. Brother Jobe, at five foot six and plump, with facial features that seemed crowded together in the center of his face, and dressed in his severe black frock topped off with a broad-brimmed straw hat, presented a figure that others seemed to find risible, sometimes to their later regret.
“Never rode a mule myself,” Dick Lee said.
“It’s the coming thing,” Brother Jobe said.
“It isn’t coming here,” Dick Lee said as he vanished into the barn with Atlas.
“Our Lord rode an ass into Jerusalem, you know,” Brother Jobe called after him.
Brother Jobe waited a good half an hour by the soapstone horse trough under a blazing orange old maple between the house and the barn. The waiting irritated him, as there was really nowhere to sit except the rim of the horse trough, which was not comfortable. It also irritated him that no one had invited him into the house, and his gall reached such a pitch that he almost went into the barn to retrieve his mount when Bullock appeared in the wagon lane in front of Eddie Flake, who was more than forty years younger and struggled to keep up. Bullock, with his Roman nose, longish white hair, tailored trousers, cotton blouse, and fine polished boots, looked something like Buffalo Bill, Brother Jobe thought, lacking only the flowing mustache and goatee.
“You take tea?” he asked Brother Jobe rather brusquely.
“When poteen ain’t available,” Brother Jobe said.
“Follow me.”
Like the crippled boy, Brother Jobe, too, found it hard to keep up with Bullock’s long strides. He followed him around the graceful old white clapboard house to a pavilion beside a pond. Inside, the pavilion was furnished with a low table between two substantial cushions on a tatami mat. The west wall was open to the pond.
“Have a seat.”
“You mean on that pillow?”
Bullock didn’t even reply. He removed his boots and sat down on the cushion to the left, Indian-style, and Brother Jobe did likewise to the right. He took off his straw hat and placed it on the table.
“Don’t put that there,” Bullock said, and Brother Jobe snatched it back.
Just then, Mrs. Bullock swept into the pavilion bearing a tray with a rough-looking ceramic teapot and two matching cups without handles.
“Why, Mr. Jobe,” she said. “What a pleasant surprise.”
Brother Jobe struggled to stand up.
“Sit down,” Bullock said.
“Afternoon, ma’am.”
Sophie Bullock, a signal beauty at fifty-eight, wore a russet-colored full skirt and a golden silk shirtwaist with long gathered sleeves and ruffles in front. An alluring topaz pendant dangled below her collarbone. While she kept busy directing the daily operations of the household on the large plantation, looking after the many needs of the families who lived there, she rarely undertook physical labor. To Brother Jobe, she looked like a goddess of autumn. As she bent to place the tray on the low table, he got a good look down her décolletage, exercising his senses to the degree that he silently invoked his Savior’s name. He was still enjoying the view as she poured him a cup.
“Why this here’s real ding-dang tea,” he said.
“Of course it is,” Bullock said.
“Where all do you get it?”
“We get a lot of things.”
“Do you get any coffee?”
“Sometimes. These days we get tea. And we like it.”
“Well, there ain’t nothing wrong with it.”
“We hear your group is making great strides reviving Main Street over in town,” Mrs. Bullock said as she filled her husband’s cup.
“Why, yes, ma’am. We’ve done opened a barbershop and a haberdash already, and I aim to get a tavern room going sometime this winter.”
“Really? How is it your denomination goes along with ardent spirits?”
“Well, ma’am, our spirits are ardent for the Lord.”
“She means how come you let your people drink liquor,” Bullock said. “Most religious people we know of take a dim view of that.”
“We ain’t Baptist or Methodist, Your Honor. We got our own ways. Lookit here, the pope of Rome and his bunch are all for drinking the blood of the lamb, ain’t they? And their outfit is ongoing in bidness some two thousand years now. In these hard times, folks need a spot of life’s comfort. We’re all for music, dancing, and poteen in moderation and in its place. It don’t conflict with love of Jesus. And the town needs a place where all folks can meet and mix, theirs and ours. There ain’t any such facility in town. Everybody stays all buttoned up in their households after sundown. It ain’t healthy.”
“You don’t have to call me ‘Your Honor,’” Bullock said.
“You are the elected magistrate,” Brother Jobe
said.
“Don’t remind him,” Mrs. Bullock said with a girlish laugh as she withdrew from the pavilion. Brother Jobe craned his neck to watch as she retraced the flagstone path back to the house.
“I’m sorry, but I have to remind you,” Brother Jobe said, turning back to Bullock, “we still got the matter of that killing back in June. Young man, name of Shawn Watling. We attended his funeral not two weeks after we got here. I’d expect by now that you would have called for an inquest, got started convening a grand jury and such.”
Bullock’s irritation increased visibly. He shifted on his cushion, put down his teacup, and took it up again. “I’ve had my hands full here on the farm,” he said.
“I expect you have,” Brother Jobe said. “Believe me, I know what it’s like to run a big outfit. But you and you alone represent the rule of law around here. And forgive me for saying it, you’ve been neglecting your duties.”
“Are you lecturing me?”
Bullock’s eyes met Brother Jobe’s directly for the first time and their gazes locked. Apparently Bullock saw something in there that made him wince.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll order that young man’s body dug up and we’ll have a look.”
“I’ll be grateful if you’d get hopping on that,” Brother Jobe said.
“I don’t think we’re going to learn anything,” Bullock said.
“Anyway, Mr. Wayne Karp himself is no longer with us—thanks to you, rumor has it—and I’m inclined to think that he or one of his people was the trigger man in that incident. As long as you’re here, I’d like to ask you: How’d you manage to kill that tough little bird?”
“I didn’t have nothing to do with Mr. Karp’s death.”
“Come on. Just between the two of us.”
“The Lord’s wrath took him down.”
“I guess the Lord works in mysterious ways.”
“You got that right, sir. Somebody poisoned my studhorse last night.”
The Witch of Hebron Page 7