The Witch of Hebron

by James Howard Kunstler

  “Mary Beth, I know you’re vexed. We’re both a bit sore beset this morning. I got two men waiting out there for me—”

  “I know what you’re up to.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d focus your mind and tell me what you know about this fellow they call the hermit.”

  “He’s an odd one,” she said, stripping the drumstick to the bone and reaching for her tea.

  “Has he ever hurt a child?”

  “Lord no. Where he goeth, the light shineth.”

  “Where’s he at right now?”

  “He’s up north somewheres. Not far.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “The hills. Hell’s bells, I can’t give you no coordinates. This ain’t the U.S. missile command sittin’ here. Sometimes I don’t receive too good, you know. You tell them to put more salt to these hush puppies when you get a chance. And I’d like some pepper jelly, too.”

  “Is the boy with him?”

  “The boy’s with somebody. Not that hermit. Another boy. Older. They’re up north, too. A valley. A bend in the river. What’s that sourpuss face all about?”

  “I got a bellyache.”

  “Alls you do around me is bellyache. Take some fennel tea. I know the sisters got some. They give it to me. Peppermint works, too. Taste this here and tell me if there’s a damn bit of salt to it,” she said, stabbing a fried corn tidbit with her fork and brandishing it in Brother Jobe’s face.

  “What all’s the matter with you today, Mary Beth? Didn’t I just say I got a ding-dang bellyache? I can’t eat no fry-up!”

  “Don’t you yell at me, sumbitch. You’ll give me a damn apoplexy.”

  A baby broke out crying in an adjoining chamber. Then another.

  “Look what you done now!” Mary Beth said, sputtering cornmeal crumbs on Brother Jobe. “They’ll put two more of them little monsters on me and I ain’t even finished my chicken.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Brother Jobe muttered and got up. “You want anything else today, you send for Brother Joseph. He’s in charge while I’m gone.”

  “Last time you left him in charge around here I nearly starved to death!” Mary Beth said, but by that time Brother Jobe was out the door.

  FORTY

  Dr. Jeremy Copeland was brooding over Bullock’s writ of exhumation when Brother Jobe stopped by on his way out of town with Brothers Seth and Elam, both of whom had served in the Third Ranger Battalion during the Holy Land War and more recently participated in the rescue of Bullock’s boat crew at Albany the previous summer. Seth, a kind-eyed half-Cherokee from Chance, Oklahoma, was a skilled tracker famous for surviving a five-day trek across the Negev Desert without water after escaping the massacre at Ein Yahav. Elam, whose family went back in the Appalachians eight generations to a Scottish horse thief named Fyfe Persons, had been a North Carolina wildlife officer when the war broke out in the Holy Land. His company had parachuted by mistake behind Syrian Chinese lines at Hatseva and fought their way back to the American-held town of Dimona, losing half their number on the way. Now he was in charge of the New Faith’s experiments with catfish farming. Both men were mounted on horses, a blue roan and a bay, while Brother Jobe rode Atlas, his big brown mule.

  The doctor pushed out the squeaky screen door of his office holding the writ aloft as he approached Brother Jobe.

  “Look what I received this morning from Mr. Bullock.”

  Brother Jobe took it and held it out at arm’s length where his eyes could focus.

  “This is about that young man you all laid to rest in June?” he asked.

  “Right. Did you know about this?”

  “First I heard of it,” Brother Jobe said and handed the paper back to the doctor.

  “You meet with Bullock now and again, don’t you?”

  “We ain’t exactly bosom buddies. But it’s good to see the wheels of justice finally aturning. Looks like he come to Jesus, so to say, on his elected duties.”

  “Can’t we just let this boy rest in peace?”

  “It’s a murder outstanding, Doc, a serious breach of the social contract that absolutely nothing has been done about. The killer’s still running free in our community. The rule of law is being flat-out snubbed.”

  “We know who did it.”

  “Maybe. But we still have to go through the proper procedure. You want me to send these two boys up to Karptown and do a summary execution? Believe me, they could get her done.”

  The doctor and Brother Jobe exchanged stares for a long moment. At length, the doctor shagged his head as if trying to shake a painful idea out of his skull.

  “It’ll work out for the best this way,” Brother Jobe said.

  “How about you lend me some manpower to dig up the coffin,” the doctor said. “It says here Bullock has allocated some money for it.”

  “You apply to Brother Joseph while I’m gone. I’m sure he’ll oblige.”

  Meanwhile, the doctor’s wife, Jeanette, came out of the house with a tattered manila folder.

  “I have those pictures you asked for,” she said in a breaking voice and handed them to her husband.

  “I’m right sorry about all this heartache with your boy,” Brother Jobe said. “But I’m confident we’ll run him down in short order.”

  “Run him down?” Jeannette said.

  “Find him, I think he means,” the doctor said.

  “Yes, find him,” Brother Jobe said. “You bet.”

  “Please do,” she said, becoming teary. “I’ll be so grateful.”

  She turned on her heels and went back inside, where she had been putting up hard sausage.

  “She’s suffering,” the doctor said.

  “Of course.”

  The doctor opened the folder and handed a photo up to Brother Jobe.

  “Jasper was only three then,” the doctor said. “Couldn’t get printer cartridges after that.”

  “Jasper,” Brother Jobe repeated. “I had a great-uncle Jasper. Biggest moonshiner in Scott County, Virginia. He did a volume business—”

  Just then, a commotion down the drive between the office and the main house sent the horses and Brother Jobe’s mule sidestepping nervously. Four men rushed forward bearing a fifth on a crude stretcher.

  “He’s hurt bad, Doc,” one of the men said. All were townsmen, laborers on the Schmidt farm two miles north of Union Grove on the sunny side of Pumpkin Hill.

  “You take those pictures and you find him,” the doctor said to Brother Jobe as he turned to see about the injured man. It was Bruce Sauer, the stonemason, who had fallen forty feet off a scaffold while repairing the chimney cap on Bill Schmidt’s house. “Bring him in the office,” he told the stretcher bearers and disappeared inside after them.

  “Lord have mercy,” Brother Jobe said. He was about to mention his nagging bellyache to the doctor, but now it seemed trivial.

  He and his men reined out the animals and turned down onto the quiet street.

  FORTY-ONE

  The town of Glens Falls, some two hundred miles north of New York City, nestled in an elbow of the Hudson River where that water way quit its stately northward progress and shifted to a twisting, uncertain course before disappearing altogether in the dark mystery of the Adirondack Mountains. Billy Bones and Jasper Cope land entered it from the valley to the east, along a state highway where the chain stores once overflowed with plastic goods made in distant lands, and cars plied the multiple lanes ceaselessly, and the clownish tilt-up buildings dispensed the staple fried foods of the multitudes under their pulsing banners of light. All lay in ruins now, with the town’s population reduced by disease, out-migration, and assorted hardships until it fell to sixteen hundred souls that were concentrated in the blocks of the old town center. They devoted themselves in the new times to a sparse trafficking in cordwood from the nearby forests and a trade in the meager wares that came on infrequent boats down the Champlain Canal from the workshops of Montreal. Not a few of the former inhabitants had scattered to the countryside, wher
e they farmed or worked for farmers or cut the timber that became cordwood.

  Jasper marveled at the vast, empty parking lots between the gutted strip malls, the shells of the bygone discount palaces, and the broad, broken highway itself, all of it encompassed by a tragic silence that was more a mute scream of history than an absence of noise.

  “I think I was here before,” he said.

  “These type of places are everywhere,” Billy said.

  “It was different.”

  “One ain’t no different than another anymore than one cornfield beats another.”

  “No, we had a car then. It was different.”

  “Damn, you must remember when you were a tiny baby.”

  “I do. Where did everything go?”

  “America went to the dogs. All this went with it.”

  They plodded on, past the shattered plinth of a Honda dealership sign and the wreck of a Friendly’s franchise sandwich shop and the bare concrete outline of a Stewart’s convenience store and the skeleton of a Best Buy and a dozen other former landmarks until the highway necked down to two lanes. This led to a half-mile stretch of houses that had been converted inelegantly to business establishments at the end of the previous century, displaying their hideous frontage additions in materials not found in nature, and freestanding signs for chiropractors, opticians, and martial arts studios.

  “What’s a sheeropractor?” Jasper asked.

  “Some kind of doctor. A foot healer, I think. Isn’t that something you might know, Mr. High-and-Mighty Doctor Boy?”

  “I must have forgot.”

  “Sheero, that’s Latin for ‘foot.’ My sheeros is goddamn tired of pounding this road, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Mine, too,” Jasper said.

  Only a few of the houses along this stretch appeared to be inhabited now. A column of smoke rose out of a chimney of one, a 1950s vintage bungalow. Two underfed children skulked without expression beside a broken fence. A woman in rough clothes dug in her dooryard potato patch while she sullenly eyed the passersby.

  “Friendly types, huh?” Billy remarked as they passed, and he called out: “Don’t worry, ma’am, we stole all our potatoes outside of town.”

  “Are you crazy?” Jasper said.

  “Relax. We’re almost there.”

  The stretch of miserable houses soon yielded on the river side of the street to the gigantic factory works of the defunct Finch-Pruyn Paper Company. Its wood pulp processing sheds were abandoned, its machines silent, its smokestacks idle, and the vast employee parking lot was given over to a cordwood-marshaling operation. Tumbled heaps of logs sprawled here, neater stacks of split logs there, and cribs of raw whole unsawn logs leaned up against the old factory walls. Gangs of grubby-looking men loaded wagons drawn by dray horses with the finished splits while others worked at cutting down the long logs on sawbucks in two-man teams. Another gang split these “rounds” with mauls and wedges. Yet another unloaded new logs just arrived off an ox-drawn wagon using block and tackle on a wooden crane.

  “There’s fools’ work for you,” Billy said.

  “People have to stay warm.”

  “I’ll stay warm this winter, you can be sure. But not by humping any old stove billets.”

  Not far from the factory grounds, Warren Street gave onto a burned-out district. Here once stood the fine homes of factory managers and executives, built in the paper company’s heyday. Only a few shells remained among the weed-choked foundations after a catastrophic fire had leveled several blocks two Christmases earlier. This vacant quarter finally transitioned into the old center of town, which was composed of once-grand business buildings made of brick, limestone, granite, and even marble in the case of the preeminent bank, built during the era of national ascendance, ornamented exuberantly with turrets and bays and pilasters and swags. Now, only a few of the storefronts were occupied. Crudely painted signs on the windows denoted the various businesses: CANADA GOODS, GROCERY, CLOTHING ALL SORTS, HOTEL + MEALS and BATHS, and finally LIVERY. The rest were vacant, their shop windows blown out or boarded up and the upper stories occupied by birds and small mammals. The streets were nearly deserted as late afternoon edged toward evening. Not a single horse-drawn vehicle plied the carriageway.

  Jasper gaped at the desolate scene in extravagant disappointment, his fantasies about making a new life in a bustling place dissolving.

  “Is it always like this?” he asked.

  “It’s just a slow time of day,” Billy said.

  “Where are all the people?”

  “Working in the cordwood yard or to home, I suppose. Madam’s place is just a few blocks from here. Come along.”

  They trudged on.

  “What’s in there?” Jasper pointed at a seven-story colossus that loomed behind the business blocks on Glen Street, the town’s main drag. The building had begun its existence in 1862 as the Glen National Woolens Company, making shoddy overcoats for the Union Army. After that, it housed companies that variously produced blankets, men’s hats, rolltop desks, rifle stocks (First World War), bomb sights (Second World War), engine gaskets, and, in its final industrial incarnation, a company that fabricated stage sets for Broadway musicals, theme-park installations, and shopping-mall decor. It stood empty for twenty years after 1991. Early in the twenty-first century, three new floors were added to the original four and it was converted into luxury condominiums, of which only a few were sold before the project sank along with the economy.

  “That’s the Duke’s castle,” Billy said.

  “They’ve got a duke here?”

  “Not a real one. Just a damn boss grifter. There’s lots of them around. Any town of size that’s left has some boss grifter trying to run the show. I spit on them. They wanted me to join up but I told them to go to hell. Nobody’s the boss of Billy Bones.”

  “What’s this duke’s name?”

  “What do you care?”

  “Just interested.”

  “Luke Bliss. Luke the Duke. He makes me laugh. He can barely run that cordwood concern, let alone rule a town. Don’t stand there gaping like a fool. Let’s go.”

  They trudged into another residential quarter, this one still intact, if run-down. The wooden houses were sturdy and dignified, in many fanciful styles, formerly the homes of businessmen and professionals in an age when the town’s economy had dimension. Most were now in need of paint. In the oncoming twilight, candles glowed behind curtained windows.

  “We’re almost there,” Billy said, “so listen up. Madam Amber, she rules the roost. You can’t give her the high-and-mighty. She loves me like a son, so just follow my lead. There’s eight floozies on board with her. One’s a damn he-she, name of Angel. You steer clear of that one.”

  Soon they stood on the broken sidewalk before a large three-story building in the foursquare Italianate style with a cupola on top and a domed lantern on top of that. A wisteria vine clawed tortuously around the pillars and brackets of the front porch. The building had begun its life as Dr. Mortenson’s Progressive Academy for Ladies in 1853, defunct in 1896. For decades after that it was a boardinghouse for single women employed on the Finch-Pruyn Paper Company’s clerical staff. After 1959 it was a six-unit apartment house until the bottom fell out of American life and its present occupant bought it for two ounces of gold. Townspeople joked that it had come full circle to being a kind of ladies’ academy again. The notes of a guitar were audible out on the street, something passionate and austere in the manner of Villa-Lobos.

  “Here she is,” Billy said.

  A high-pitched laugh erupted somewhere inside, followed by the lower-register bellow of a man. Jasper detected the sweet smell of something baking on the mild evening air. His stomach growled.

  “Don’t do that around Madam,” Billy said.

  “I can’t help it,” Jasper said.

  FORTY-TWO

  Brother Jobe and his two companions rode north in fine mild weather, inquiring, as they went, among workers in the fields and orcha
rds whether they had seen a boy on the run. They received no useful intelligence about him whatsoever. They came across a few suspicious holes dug in a remote potato field that suggested food theft by someone desperate. They did not dig any potatoes for themselves, being well provisioned and bound by the ethics of their sect to pay for anything they needed. By late afternoon, riding along the fissured and broken old County Road 30, they arrived at a hill overlooking a lonely farmstead. Seth, who had sharp vision, detected something out of order from a distance.

  “I see something dead, yonder, BJ,” he said. “Blood on the ground.”

  “Let’s have a look, then.”

  They rode down through a squash field to the little goat enclosure behind the house and found the mutilated carcass of a Nubian goat, its head cut off and hindquarters missing. The remains were stiff and flyblown, at least a day dead. Seven other goats milled about them bleating raucously. Their pasture was eaten down to dust.

  “Elam, go have a look in that barn, see if there’s any hay or grain. And fetch some water. I saw a hand pump in the dooryard. These critters is suffering.”

  Brother Jobe and Seth secured their mounts and went around to the kitchen door. For a house that was not abandoned, it was eerily still. They shared a glance and entered through the kitchen door, almost tripping over the body of an older man that the flies had been enjoying. Brother Jobe pulled a rag out of his coat pocket and held it up to his nose as he stooped to examine the body. He could tell by the disposition of things—the bloating, the blood pooled darkly in the back of the neck where gravity settled it—that the man had been dead for some time.

  Seth jerked his head to indicate that they should venture farther within. They searched the downstairs rooms, finding nothing but the general state of clutter and untidiness, and crept carefully upstairs. In one of the bedrooms they found an unconscious woman of middle age tied to a steel bed. Her exertions had caused her to slip off the bed itself so that she was suspended by her bonds just short of a sitting position, semicrucified. Blood had dripped from the abrasions on her wrists all the way down her arms and seeped into the filthy bedsheets. The room stank of her eliminations. But Brother Jobe quickly determined that she was still alive.