The Witch of Hebron

by James Howard Kunstler

  “Yes it is.”

  “You can show me.”

  The man took off his shirt with some difficulty. He had a boil the size of a pullet egg beside a saggy, milk-colored left pectoral, another in the region of his left underarm, two in the region of the right.

  “There’s two more down around here,” he said, indicating his groin.

  Jasper asked the woman to throw open the curtains. As she did, mild north light flooded the room.

  “Do you want me to treat them?” Jasper asked.

  “I guess I do,” the man said.

  “I’ll need some things,” Jasper said. “A lighted candle, a pot of boiled water, a pot of regular water, some strong soap, a needle, and some jack cider or whiskey or brandy with a glass. Also some clean rags, and please boil up a couple of them with that water. Can you gather up those things?”

  The woman said, “I’ll try,” and left the room.

  “You ever seen a case like this before?” the man said.

  “Yes,” Jasper said.

  “It hurts.”

  “I would think so.”

  They remained in a globe of silence for some time after that. The man emitted occasional grunts of discomfort. Jasper stood before him trying to fix his gaze on anything but the man. Through the window he could see a pasture with six Nubian nanny goats grazing in it. He was half sorry he had chosen this house to stop at, but another part of him was eager to treat his first patient. Eventually, the woman returned with all the things he’d asked for, though she had to make several trips.

  “This is plum brandy,” she said. “Will it do?”

  “Is it strong?”

  “Very. I made it myself.”

  “Okay.”

  Jasper scrubbed his hands in the pot of regular water, then fished the boiled rag out of the hot water. He made a lather with the soap and the rag and very gently washed the surface of the boils on the man’s upper body. Then he asked the man to remove his drawers and he washed the boils on his groin and thigh. He observed an eczematous rash around the man’s nether parts as well.

  “Ma’am,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Fill that glass about half full with the brandy.”

  She did.

  “Give it to him.”

  She did.

  The man held the glass up before his face and looked at it angrily.

  “Drink it down, mister,” Jasper said.

  “What for?”

  “I don’t have any laudanum.”

  “I don’t believe in drinking before sundown.”

  “You only have to do it this once.”

  He raised the glass and drank the contents in five large swallows, then sucked in a lungful of air. Jasper twisted up one of the clean rags and proffered it to the man.

  “Bite on this.”

  He took it and did so, making an incongruously high-pitched gleep of dread as he bit down. The woman started to leave the room.

  “I’ll need you to stay and help,” Jasper told her. She returned to her place behind him. “Light that candle you brought in.” He poured brandy all over his hands and rubbed them. Then he poured on some more, lavishly.

  “Lord,” the woman muttered. “What a waste.”

  “Do you have that needle?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Hold it in the candle flame. Then pour some brandy on it.”

  Jasper soaked one of the rags in brandy and carefully swabbed down the boils.

  “Hand me that needle,” he said, and then systematically set about piercing the white head of each boil and draining it. Then he swabbed them all down with brandy again, which caused the man to squirm and make noises that sounded like cursing with the rag clamped in his mouth.

  “Okay, that does it,” Jasper said.

  The man spit out the rag and drew in a series of sharp, pained breaths.

  “Do you know how come you got like this?” Jasper asked.

  “God don’t like me, I suppose.”

  “I don’t know whether that’s so or not,” Jasper said. “But boils come from being filthy. You have to wash more regularly than you do. You have to change your clothes once in a while.”

  “You a professional scold, too?” the man said.

  Jasper didn’t answer. He turned to the woman and said, “You should fetch him some clean clothes. Swab him down with brandy again before supper. And see to it he changes his underwear twice a day at least for the next week or he’ll just get infected again. If you do that, these ones might heal up and he won’t get any more.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m done then.”

  Jasper dripped more brandy over his hands.

  “Jesus,” the woman said.

  They left the old man in the dim bedroom and returned to the kitchen.

  “I suppose you want to get paid,” the woman said when they got there.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Jasper said. He’d seen his father negotiate the difficult issue many times, with people who had little to give in trade for services.

  “I can’t give you any money,” the woman said. “We don’t have any.”

  “I’ll take food,” Jasper said. “I could use some cheese and sausage.”

  “Don’t have any.”

  “You’ve got six nanny goats out there. How could you not have cheese?”

  “You’re a little smart-ass.”

  He asked about corn bread, butter, and honey. She said they were out.

  “What else have you got?” he asked.

  “I’ve got cabbage.”

  “I’ll take a cabbage.

  “Take two.”

  “I can’t carry two.”

  “That’s a pity. I’ve got cabbage all day long.”

  “Is there anything else you can spare?”

  “I’ve got some apples.”

  “I can pick all the apples I want along my way.”

  “Isn’t that nice? You steal from folks?”

  “What about those butternuts in the basket over on that counter?”

  “They’re all we have. I can’t spare any.”

  “Are you sure you don’t have any cheese?”

  “Goddamn it!” she shouted back, rising visibly out of the heels of her shabby shoes. “What’s the matter with you? You deaf? We don’t have any damn cheese.”

  “I’ll take the rest of that brandy, then.”

  “I’m not giving brandy to a child.”

  “It’s for doctoring.”

  “I can’t spare any.”

  “I don’t believe you don’t have cheese.”

  “Are you calling me a liar?”

  “No.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “I’ll just take a cabbage and be gone, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t know that I care to give you anything now, you little smart-ass. Calling me a liar.”

  “I didn’t call you liar.”

  The woman glanced furtively around, grabbed a weeding hook off an empty curtain rod where it hung, and brandished it at Jasper.

  “You get out of here right now or you’re gonna have to doctor yourself. Get out!” she shrieked.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Billy Bones perched hungrily on a large glacial rock that anchored one corner of a forsaken rural cemetery along old Route 30. He felt a gaping emptiness in his midsection and cinched up the tired old belt that held up his filthy striped pants. He had eaten nothing but apples all day and he was sick of them. They hurt his stomach and made him vomit. The previous night he’d had only acorns for supper. But they required too much preparation, and he could barely gag them down.

  He’d passed several farmhouses along his way and had more than half a mind to venture a burglary, but he lacked the patience to stake out any house long enough to determine how well defended it might be, and he didn’t want to rush into a situation where someone might cut him a new rectum, or worse. He imagined—but didn’t know for sure, lacking good orienteering skills
—that he was still more than a day shy of his objective: Madam Amber’s fancy house in Glens Falls, which he considered his base of operations. Madam Amber let him stay there and even fed him in consideration for doing odd jobs, some of them rather unsavory. And if he returned from an outing on the roads with any takings in cash money, she let him enjoy the girls, of course. A number of the girls would have consorted with him free of charge, since he exerted a certain peculiar charm, but Madam Amber ran a disciplined enterprise and didn’t allow giveaways. She would even punish a girl if she found out about it.

  Billy Bones now huddled against the afternoon chill, listening to the dry oak leaves rustle overhead and longing for a plate of Madam Amber’s fried trout and eggs, a house specialty, when down below his perch, he saw Jasper Copeland round a bend in the road. Jasper trudged along with his eyes downcast, since it was so easy to trip on the broken pavement.

  Billy Bones was both thrilled and disturbed to see what appeared to be someone ripe for picking. Being nearsighted, he thought for a moment that the approaching figure was a small man, perhaps even a dwarf—in any case, a person capable of defending himself, perhaps desperately and viciously so, since it was unusual even in these hard times for a solitary child to wander the byways. But as Jasper drew closer, Billy Bones quickly sized up his quarry as a boy indeed, and slipped off the back of the rock when Jasper had trudged past. He skulked around the weed-filled graves through a gap in the ancient cast-iron fence and presented himself to Jasper’s back.

  “A good afternoon to you, little vagabond.” he called out.

  Jasper wheeled around stoically.

  “By yourself, then?” Billy Bones asked.

  “No,” Jasper said.

  “You look alone.”

  “My brothers and uncle are not far behind me.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Are you a picker?” Jasper asked.

  “I’m more than that. How far behind would they be?”

  “Who?”

  “Your people.”

  “Just a little way. Can’t you hear them?”

  Billy Bones cocked his head and perked an ear in the direction Jasper had come from.

  “I don’t hear anything. You must be weary, boy. Cast off your sack and rest a while.”

  Jasper didn’t respond.

  “I said drop your sack!” Billy Bones repeated. Then he opened his leather coat to reveal his weapons. Jasper put his backpack down gingerly on the pavement and backed away. Billy Bones came forward and squatted down to rummage inside it. He almost instantly found Jasper’s one remaining potato, held it up triumphantly, and took a big sharp bite as if it were a less than perfectly ripe pear. He turned it over in his hand, regarding it while he chewed, as though struggling to unravel its mysteries. “Where all’s that supposed family of yours, then?”

  “They’re almost here,” Jasper said. “I can hear them.”

  “You keep saying that. Where all’s you going to today?”

  “We’re going home, just up the road. Less than a mile. Mom and Dad and three uncles and my five older brothers.”

  “No sisters or aunts in the family?”

  “Just men.”

  “Is that right? Your mom a man, too?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Where all’s you been?”

  “Union Grove.”

  “That’s a pissant town.”

  “It’s all right—”

  “Don’t contradict me! I say it’s pissant. Full of Jesus jokers and he-shes. I don’t give a good goddamn about that town. I curse it.”

  “What did it ever do to you?”

  “Never mind. And one more thing: You don’t have any family coming down the road here. You’re by your lonely, I’m quite certain.”

  Jasper did not reply.

  Billy Bones chewed up the rest of the potato.

  “I hate a raw potato,” he said.

  “Then why didn’t you roast it up first?”

  “I don’t have time for cookery. I got places to go and people to see.”

  “You are a picker.”

  “I’m a bandit, goddamn it. That’s several steps above your picker, understand?”

  “I don’t see any difference.”

  “A picker doesn’t have a song. You want to hear my song?”

  “You’re going to sing a song?”

  “You’re goddamned straight I am. Listen now.”

  Billy Bones shoved the backpack into the pavement and stood up. He sang his introductory verses and then two more stanzas in his customary nasal drone:

  “The ladies know young Billy Bones

  Whose kisses are like candy

  And when they see what’s in his pants

  It makes them good and randy.

  They moan and groan and shake it up

  And love him till they’re weeping

  But Billy is too smart to stay

  In any one woman’s keeping.”

  When he was finished he asked, “You like how I made those rhymes up?”

  “Is it about yourself?”

  “Well, hell, it’s my song. ’Course it is.”

  “What do you need a song for? The people you rob don’t care to hear about you.”

  “Well, they got to hear it whether they like it or not. That’s how a legend is born. Imagine how they go and tell their people they came upon this audacious bandit that sings about his exploits, and the tale spreads. I’m known far and wide.”

  “I don’t see why you’d want to be known. Sooner or later, men are going to hunt you down.”

  “They can try. I guess it hasn’t happened yet. I’ll stand my ground with the best.”

  “Are you done robbing me?”

  “I haven’t robbed nothing but a damn potato. And there’s no one coming up the road behind you. Why don’t you just tell it straight?”

  Jasper rolled his eyes and shifted his weight from one foot to the other but did not reply.

  “Am I boring you?” Billy Bones asked.

  “No, this is the most fun I had all day except when I had to treat this old man for disgusting boils and then his daughter cheated me out of my pay.”

  “What do you know about boils?”

  “I’m a doctor.”

  “I never heard such a tale. A boy doctor?”

  “My father is the doctor of Union Grove and I help him all the time. I know medicine and I’m setting out to be a doctor on my own.”

  “Had enough of childhood, then?

  “I guess I have.”

  “What about your homefolks?”

  “They’re home and I’m here.”

  Billy bones chuckled with admiration.

  “You must not like that pissant Union Grove much yourself,” he said, “if you’re striking out on your own at such a tender age.”

  “I had to go. I’ve done deeds as bad as yours.”

  “Such as what?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “You kill someone?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Aren’t you a doozy! Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m not going to rob nothing more of your things. See, this is the main difference between a picker and bandit, besides having a personal song. A picker is a low-down cowardly parasite like a rat or a bug. A bandit, he’s a gallant soul with a sense of fun and honor, too. I don’t rob little children. In fact, I could use a sidekick with your accomplishments and experience, especially if you’re such a dangerous desperado as you say. How’d you like to be the sidekick of the bandit Billy Bones?”

  “I just want to be on my way.”

  “Goddamn it, I’ve got a proposition for you. You say some people cheated you? I say, let’s go see about that. I’m at your service, my young friend, along with Blast’em and Slice’em.” Billy Bones held open his leather coat again and gestured toward the pistol in his waistband and the brush knife that hung off his belt. “Now where’d this happen with the boils and all?”

  “
Just back up the road a bit,” Jasper told him.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Billy Bones and Jasper Copeland watched the house from a thicket in the woods above the farmhouse. A witch-hazel shrub there blazed yellow in its strange fall flowering. Jasper recognized it from foraging botanicals with his father. He cut off some switches with his knife and stuffed them in his pack.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Billy said.

  “It’s a medicine tree.”

  “Where’d you get that knife?”

  “It’s mine.”

  “Let me see it.”

  Jasper handed it over.

  “Nice,” Billy said, turning it over in his hand. “I’ll let you keep it, long as you don’t try to stick it in me.”

  “I won’t stick it in you.”

  “You bet you won’t, little desperado. Now lookit here.…”

  Billy instructed Jasper to go down to the kitchen door while he, Billy, sneaked around to the blind side of the building where the old garage stood along with a small barn and a half-collapsed corn crib.

  “Go on now. Go down there.”

  “What am I going to say?”

  “Ask her to have pity on you and give you some food. Tell her you’re an orphan.”

  “I already tried that. She said she’d carve me up with a weeding hook.”

  “We’ll see about that. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “No you’re not. Not really. You just think you are. I can tell what a plucky young vagabond you are, deep down. If you play your cards right, I might make you my protégé.”

  “I don’t want to be a bandit. I can doctor.”

  “Who says you can’t be both? Especially when you practically have to rob folks to get paid these days. You get along now and do what I told you.”

  Jasper trudged down the hill, through a ragged field of winter squashes and pumpkins, and climbed the steps up the porch to the kitchen door. He waited there for a moment, feeling exposed and panicked before rapping on the door’s glass pane. When the door swung open, the same blowsy woman presented herself. She stood with her hands on her hips and her mouth open in an expression somewhere between consternation and horror at the sight of Jasper.

  “You again! What do you want?”

  “Please ma’am. I’m an orphan and I’m very hungry. Surely you can spare a little cornmeal and bacon.”