Seth cut her bonds and Brother Jobe helped her slump the rest of the way to the floor. She groaned but did not wake up. They heard footfalls on the stairs. Seth drew a hog-leg Colt Bisley .45. The door squeaked open with a push from without. Seth cocked the hammer with his thumb.
“Expecting trouble?” Elam said when he found himself staring down the barrel of Seth’s pistol.
“We found plenty,” Brother Jobe said. “A wickedness without mercy come this way.”
“I saw downstairs,” Elam said.
“Put that ding-dang iron down!” Brother Jobe barked at Seth. “You two bring her outside in the fresh air. Find a clean blanket if you can. And move that man’s body out of the house. I’ll get her some water.”
Minutes later, they had the woman outside on a blanket. Seth propped her up while Brother Jobe carefully held a glass of water to her lips. Some residue of instinct prompted her to take a first swallow. Then reflexes took over. A pint of water later, she opened her eyes, but didn’t speak. Brother Jobe added a few spoonfuls of whiskey and some honey to her glass from his own rations and in a little while she began to cough and sputter. When she cleared her air passage, they let her lie back on the blanket with her head on a lumpy pillow.
“What’s your name?” Brother Jobe said.
“Martha.”
“Who done this to you?”
“I’m filthy,” she said and began weeping.
“It’s all right. We don’t mind.”
“I mind, goddamn it,” she said.
“Seth, go fetch something clean for Martha to put on.”
She continued to weep. Elam went inside and made a fire in the cookstove and heated a bucket of water. He found some soap and tore a bedsheet into rags and carried a chair outside. Seth returned with clean clothes. He and Elam hoisted Martha onto her feet and held her up. Brother Jobe unbuttoned her soiled shift and began swabbing her down with soapy rags. She cried through the entire procedure.
“Don’t worry, ma’am,” he said. “I worked in a nursing facility in my younger days. I done this a thousand times.”
He dried her off with the remaining rags and helped her into the clean outfit: an old pair of green polyester pants and a rose-colored sweatshirt printed with a cartoon roadrunner and a word balloon saying beep beep. They set her back down on the blanket. With the late-afternoon temperature dropping, Seth found her a quilt from inside. Brother Jobe took a seat in the chair beside her blanket while Seth and Elam retired to the kitchen to make supper.
“Where’s my papa?” she eventually asked.
“I’m sorry to tell you,” Brother Jobe said, “but someone killed him. We got him out back now.”
Martha cried some more but not as energetically as before, and she stopped rather abruptly. Brother Jobe suspected she was less than shattered by the news.
“We’ll bury him after supper,” he said. “You can choose the spot.”
“All right.”
“You going to tell me who done this?”
“Two boys. One about eighteen, twenty. The other younger. A child.”
“You sit tight while I fetch some pictures.”
Brother Jobe returned with the manila folder and handed her the pencil drawing of Jasper Copeland.
“He was older than this.”
“That there’s an old picture.”
“It might be him then.”
“He’s the son of the doctor down to Union Grove.”
Martha dropped the drawing.
“He claimed to be a doctor,” she said. “Imagine that.”
“Looks like he doctored you folks to a fare-thee-well.”
“I’ll tell you what: You ought to shoot him on sight. Him and his cohort both.”
“I intend to bring them to the law.”
“I wouldn’t take the trouble.”
“Yes, well, we’re for due process and all that.”
“They robbed me and left me for dead.”
“What’d they take?”
“What do you think? Money. The older one, he violated me up there.”
She broke down in tears again.
“I’m sorry,” Brother Jobe said and proffered the water glass. She drank deeply as if trying to wash her insides clean. He waited until her weeping subsided before resuming his questions. “What did he look like, this older boy?”
“Fair-haired. Very skinny. And crazy, too. He made me listen to a song about himself.”
“You don’t say?”
“Oh, he’s very proud.”
“Matter of fact, he crossed my path not a few scant days ago, this selfsame singing bandit.”
“Did he rob you, too?”
“Tried to. I give him a little taste of the Lord’s wrath. In hindsight, I should have served up a man-size portion.”
“If you see him again, you put a bullet in his head.”
“We’ll see about that. Tell me: Do you know the Lord, Martha?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Jesus.”
“You find somebody else to talk about him with.”
“I know you’ve been through a tribulation, ma’am—”
“God doesn’t care when we suffer. I know that now.”
“We have a community down Union Grove way. We’re building a New Jerusalem there one soul at a time. Oh, it’s a sweet corner of the country in this time of hardships and travails. You’re welcome amongst us, if you’d like to come.”
“No thank you.”
“You don’t have to love Jesus right off.”
“I’m not interested.”
“You can think it over, Martha.”
“I thought about it as much as I ever will. You tell me: If your Jesus has power over anything, why don’t you ask him to turn the electric back on and make the world like it used to be.”
“That world is no more, I’m sorry to say. But we can offer fellowship, warm hearts, busy hands, good eats, a place of refuge in the world.”
“I got my own place right here.”
“You can’t stay here now, all alone.”
“Of course I can.”
Brother Jobe drank some of his own whiskey out of an old Lexan expeditionary bottle he carried it in.
“What sort of church man drinks whiskey right out of the jar, anyway?” she said.
Brother Jobe shrugged.
“You’ll be called down to testify,” he said. “Robbery, rape, and murder is serious business.”
“First you got to catch them.”
“We aim to.”
“He’s got a gun, that older one.”
“I know.”
FORTY-THREE
At the end of a long afternoon in the saddle, the Reverend Loren Holder rode around the back end of Lloyd’s Hill in the northern reaches of the county and, just as the doctor’s map indicated, came upon the cottage of Barbara Maglie with its gothic trimmings and aura of mystery. He had the odd notion, looking around, that he no longer knew what time he was living in, whether it was today or yesterday, or some temporal space apart from his personal experience of the world.
Upon his first glimpse of her, she was bent over at the waist picking rosemary stems in one of the several fenced gardens that extended around the cottage like formal outdoor rooms, each with its own geometry of beds, paths, plantings, colors, and scents. He sat atop Lucky watching her for a long moment, feeling light-headed, as if his blood were carbonated. The horse shifted its weight and the saddle creaked just loudly enough so that Barbara Maglie lifted her head and then her upper body, balletically, with a pronounced curve to her spine. She found Loren in her field of view and returned his gaze.
Panic seized Loren as her eyes met his. A chill pulsed through his inner fluxes, urging him to call off what suddenly seemed a foolish adventure, to rein out his horse and return to Union Grove as quickly as possible. But he did not yield to the panic. Instead, as though he were watching himself in a movie, Loren dismounted and led t
he horse down the path between the house and the sequence of gardens. Barbara Maglie waded through drifts of herbs and late-blooming asters, goldenrods, and cornflowers, and finally stepped through a garden gate fashioned fancifully out of twisted tree limbs.
Loren introduced himself, explained that he was the minister of the Congregational Church in Union Grove, and stated flatly that he had come to see her at the suggestion of his friend Dr. Jerry Copeland, who said that she might be able to help him with a problem of a delicate nature. Barbara Maglie appeared to understand exactly why he was there. Loren felt that she could see completely through him, as though he were one of those plastic models of human anatomy in the science museums of yore, only instead of his heart and liver, his sensibilities were on display and clearly labeled.
“Did he find his boy?” she asked.
“Not yet. We’ve got more men on the search now. Men who were soldiers in the Holy Land, who know what they’re doing.”
“They’ll find him.”
“How do you know?”
“How far can he go in these times?”
Lucky nickered. Barbara Maglie ran her hand along the horse’s big jaw muscle and down his velvet nose. The horse did not flinch at her touch.
“It’s terrible to lose a child,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
“You look healthy.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
“Did you bring silver?”
“I did. What are you going to do to me?”
“I’m going to help you.”
“You sound very confident.”
“I am.”
“Do you ever fail?”
“May I call you Loren?”
“Please.”
“Be easy, Loren.”
“I’m trying.”
“You don’t have to try. I’ll take care of you.”
Her smile radiated an essentially female mystery that thrust Loren back to the sublime terrors of sexual awakening he had nearly forgotten: age fifteen, a summer night at a big house on Lake George, New York. A girl named Debbie Darrow, of advanced experience, who smelled like a strawberry and insisted on skinny-dipping in a thunderstorm. His excitement had reached such a pitch that he couldn’t stop shivering, even after they got out of the water and made love on a sleeping bag in the room above the boathouse while lightning crashed all around and shook the flimsy rafters. She had a pack of menthol cigarettes and afterward lay smoking, whispering things to him in French, which he pretended to understand. The world never looked the same after that night. She dumped him a week later for seventeen-year-old Chad Moyer, who had a yellow Mazda Miata sports car of his very own.
“You can put your horse in the barn,” Barbara said, startling him out of memory. “There’s hay in the loft. I’ll be in the kitchen.”
Loren settled Lucky in a stall with a bucket of water and a manger full of hay and left his damp saddle pad drying on a half door. Then, traversing the yard between the barn and the house, he became acutely conscious of his fears, hopes, worries, and not a small degree of shame in selfishly seeking his lost carnal appetites. He felt hopelessly awkward in his own skin, a physically large man trespassing awkwardly in a female realm, like a Minotaur who had contrived to enter a bower. Meanwhile, the sun had dipped behind Lloyd’s Hill, putting a bite in the smoke-scented air. He paused at the window in the kitchen door and watched Barbara Maglie move gracefully between her stove and various counters, hutches, and tables, the way her long skirt swayed and her hips shifted, the way her arms moved and her hands held their implements, the way the tops of her breasts heaved with her breathing in the shadows cast by the candlelight. She seemed purely representative of what was universally female and human, unknowable without being frightful. He knocked on the window. She signaled him to come in. Trembling, he entered her world.
FORTY-FOUR
Perry Talisker didn’t bother making a supper for himself. Bundled in his blanket and Mylar sleeping pouch on a mattress of balsam boughs, he watched a single bright star emerge against a lustrous blue green twilight sky streaked with rose-bellied clouds. He knew now, as surely as he had ever known anything, that his days were numbered and that the number was a low one. He could sense, too, as vividly as anything he ever knew, that he was drawing close to his quarry: the big cat that left tracks the size of a child’s mitten in the low, damp places and the bracken flats. He felt himself drawn to this climactic moment of his life like the man in a riptide being swept out beyond sight of land, and he was oddly relieved at the prospect of leaving the shore behind.
Lying on the fir-scented bed, reflecting on the end of his days, Perry Talisker’s hunger pulled his train of memories past all the wonderful meals he had enjoyed across a lifetime, many of them dishes he had not tasted for years and never would again. He could imagine in all his senses, for instance, the gigantic batter-dipped, deep-fried sweet onion he used to order on weekend nights in the old times when he and his wife, Trish, splurged at the Outback restaurant at Aviation Mall outside Glens Falls. What a marvel that thing was! A gigantic sweet Vidalia split open by a cleverly designed patent device so that the onion layers formed petals like a great flower, allowing an eggy batter to penetrate every crack and fissure and then puff up magnificently when it met the hot fat in the Fryolator. The sublime crunch of the batter contrasted with the yielding sweetness of the onion and the smoky piquant dipping sauce that was several notches better than plain ketchup. He could never finish a whole one, but he’d still follow it with a rack of baby pork ribs, slow-cooked until they were nearly falling off the bone and then finished on the grill, offset with a dish of creamy coleslaw, which he regarded as a vegetable, something good for you.
Being in the food business himself back then, as head of the meat department in Union Grove’s Hovington’s Supermarket, Perry had standards. He wouldn’t go to McDonald’s—he didn’t especially go for mustard and a dill pickle on his hamburger and he didn’t trust their meat. He patronized only the better chains, where you could sit down on something soft and the lights were not fluorescent and the meat was a cut you could at least identify, a rib, a T-bone, a drumstick. But he also made a point, in those days, to seek out the few mom-and-pop places that remained in the backwaters. The Miss Ann Diner in Fort Ann was one of these. They offered homemade chicken and biscuits that Perry would drive twenty miles out of his way to eat. The gravy was made with real cream, the biscuits were wonderfully flaky, the chicken all white meat, and the portions heroic. They had a way with desserts, too: a bread pudding studded with chunks of bittersweet chocolate and saturated with bourbon whiskey; a many-layered coconut cake with supertart lemon filling; and, in summer, a toasted-almond peach cobbler.
For straightforward meat, he preferred his own cuts on the home grill. The steaks, of course, he butchered himself at the shop, his first choice being the porterhouse or New York strip with A-1 sauce and Tabasco, so tingly on the tongue. The hamburger he ground personally on the big Hobart machine at work, using a mix of sirloin, brisket, and chuck with the number 52 grinder plate. He always molded his burgers around a butter patty so that when they came off the fire, the butter perfectly saturated the hefty beef patty and then seeped out into the toasted kaiser roll. And, of course, there wasn’t a better, meltier cheeseburger cheese than Velveeta. Toward the end of the good old times, before his credit cards went bad and the trade in electric appliances dried up, he bought his own personal home French-fryer machine so he could have fries whenever he wanted, and not those lame, limp oven fries from the frozen box—the real thing: thick-cut fresh Idahoes with a Russian dressing he made himself.
He held pizza in high esteem, though he had to admit that there was nothing wrong with good old macaroni and cheese.… This was Perry Talisker’s last thought before the currents of sleep swept him away from himself onto the starry shoals of night.
FORTY-FIVE
Robert Earle worked a full day on the special room of inlaid wood paneling at the center o
f the former gymnasium of the old high school, where the New Faith order had framed in a multileveled warren of rooms resembling something like a beehive or, Robert sometimes thought, a maximum-security cell block. The room, he’d been told, was intended to be the winter quarters of Mary Beth Ivanhoe, the eccentric clairvoyant revered by the group as though she were its queen bee. Robert was also charged with instructing several young brothers in the finer points of finish woodworking and marquetry. What a contrast they were to the demoralized younger townsmen of Union Grove, he thought. The young men of the New Faith were positively buoyant with their situation in the world, eager to learn, and attentive. They didn’t seem to miss the old times at all. They loved to scorn and disdain the absurdities of the old times in their workaday chats, cutting veneers and piecing together the complex patterns designed by Sister Zeruiah, who was chief among the women who attended Mary Beth Ivanhoe. Even with the high spirits of his students, Robert was not altogether comfortable laboring within the New Faith compound, but Brother Jobe paid in silver.
It was already dark when Robert returned home that mild Indian-summer evening. The woman he’d come to live with, Britney Watling, had had a long day of her own. She began it digging potatoes and onions, bedding them in straw in the cellar. Then she mucked the barn where she kept Cinnamon the cow, next door to the burned skeleton frame of her former home a block away from Robert’s house. Then she forked the stall bedding into the compost heap for the following spring’s planting. Then she worked on a set of ash-splint sorting baskets ordered by Mr. Schmidt, the wealthy farmer who had employed her murdered husband as a laborer and who, since Shawn’s death, was always making little gestures of caretaking with her. Amid all this activity, she put together a supper of “fall pudding,” a casserole of leftover corn bread, bacon cracklings, kale, onions, milk, eggs, butter, and hard cheese for Robert and her daughter, Sarah. They ate it with a salad of late-season lettuce and rocket in buttermilk dressing.
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