The Witch of Hebron

by James Howard Kunstler

  “I’d like that.”

  “Lie back.”

  She unbuckled his belt and pulled off his trousers.

  “Look at me!” he said, marveling at his own excitement as if at a great spectacle from a distant hilltop. “I’m the man in the room!”

  “Ah! You’re coming home to yourself.”

  “How did I get lost?”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. Turn over.”

  Barbara went to get a little pan of clarified butter that she’d put on a trivet by the woodstove to warm, and began her ministrations by spreading the oil on his shoulders and then straddling his long back so that her breasts lightly met his oiled skin as she reached forward to press and release the large muscles of his neck and shoulders. She operated her charms and secrets on Loren well beyond that, deep into the night, working his arousal as though it were a project in the arts, a composition, a culinary venture, or an opus of chamber music, taking care to forestall his arrival at the ordained destination until his every cell aligned with her purposes and rang in harmony at the molecular level. To Loren, the witch of Hebron became the essence of all women, in a delirium of scent, warmth, wetness, hair, and yielding flesh that had him, finally, spinning on a blinding circle of light until he sobbed in a spasm of gratitude. The herbal agents in his system transformed what had begun as a physical experience into a musical one, carrying him from a suspended chord to a resolving seventh, like the conclusion of a hymn.

  FORTY-NINE

  It was much later that night when thirteen-year-old Robin returned from her duties and chores to her upstairs room in the back of Madam Amber’s Fancy House. The rooms below still rang distantly with voices, laughter, notes plucked on strings, and fugitive strains of lovemaking. In the light of her candle, Robin found Jasper immobilized in the toils of sleep just as she had left him hours before. She slipped out of her clothing into an oversize faded green T-shirt printed with the likeness of a forgotten star of a forgotten musical fashion from a forgotten faraway place and the words RASTAMAN BUFFALO SOLDIER on it, and inserted herself between the sheets beside Jasper like a bookmark. He rolled onto his side. Robin pressed up against his back and curled an arm around his chest. He wheeled around suddenly.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m coming to bed,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t be in here with you.”

  “Of course you can. Why not?”

  “You’re a girl.”

  “So what?”

  “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

  “No, stay.”

  He struggled to get out of the covers, but she held on to him and he was effectively pinned between her and the wall.

  “Let go of me.”

  “Wait,” she said.

  “Please!” he said, his voice breaking.

  “Be still. Just for a little while. I won’t hurt you.”

  He stopped struggling. They lay quietly together for several minutes.

  “See,” she said. “You’re safe with me.”

  His breathing modulated.

  She ventured to stroke the smooth skin where his temple met his hairline. “You’re a beautiful boy,” she said.

  “I’m nothing,” he said.

  “Has nobody ever been kind to you?”

  He dissolved in tears, thinking of his mother and father and their constant kindness, and his teacher, Mrs. Holder, and his friends, and all the people back in town, and his betrayal of their kindness in his many crimes. But as he sank into desolation, his body yielded to the shelter of Robin’s arms and her fragrance of soap and lilac. Slowly, as the moon outside the small window moved from behind a chimney into the naked limbs of a locust tree, he melted farther into her embrace, becoming aware of her softness and her sweet breath against his ear, until at last, still hiccuping with broken sobs, he dared to reach around the surprising curve above her hip.

  “Sweet, lost boy,” she whispered.

  “What will happen to me?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said and kissed his lips.

  Rather than shrink away, he submitted and was astonished to feel a thrill running through him, a thrill with the qualities of a metabolic awakening. She kissed him again and he kissed her back, wishing suddenly to drink her soft lips in, to consume her. The minutes moved the moon through the naked branches of the locust tree to a perch above a nearby rooftop as the two lay entwined, their breathing more rapid and their kisses ever more urgent, until Jasper kicked off the blankets. Robin wriggled out of her T-shirt, presenting to him a field of warmth and softness as astounding as a new world, and assisted him out of his nightshirt, so they were finally skin to skin, moving and rocking with each other in a tropism that led Jasper into a velvet rhapsody of stars and tides.

  As he came back to himself, he lifted his body above Robin, the moonlight holding her nakedness, marveling at what he had just discovered.

  “Something happened to me,” he said.

  She giggled shyly behind her hand. “It’s what happens to people,” she said.

  “Do you know what I mean?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Did it happen to you, too?”

  “Yes,” she said. “More than once.” She giggled again.

  “More than once?”

  “Girls are like that.”

  Jasper settled onto his back, his mouth open.

  They lay quietly, head by head, watching the moon move behind a distant church steeple. She fished for his hand and he allowed her to hold it. The ambient sounds throughout the house had subsided into silence.

  “I brought something for you,” Robin said. She deftly rolled onto her feet, stepped over to the chest of drawers, and returned to bed with a plate of something, which she balanced now on the flat of her stomach beneath the shelf of her ribcage and her emerging breasts.

  “What is it?”

  “Birthday cake.”

  She gave him the fork. He rapidly devoured several mouthfuls.

  “You have some, too,” he said.

  “I had a piece of my own already. This is all for you.”

  He slid the plate onto his own belly and finished the rest of the cake.

  “Do you know the name of the doctor here in town?” he asked.

  “Dr. Hankinson. He comes and sees the ladies twice a month.”

  “I want to go see him tomorrow.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I’m looking for a position. Do you know where his office is?”

  “Yes. Not far from here. What sort of position?”

  “Assisting. When I grow a little more, I’ll go out doctoring on my own.”

  “You should wait until your voice changes. People like their doctor to have a deep voice.”

  “People aren’t so picky when they’re sick or injured. You’d be surprised.”

  “If Dr. Hankinson takes you on, you can stay here.”

  “I hoped to get a room with my position.”

  “You can stay here until you do. Then I’ll come visit you in your room.”

  “All right.”

  “You just stay away from that Billy Bones. He’s no good.”

  “I’m through with Billy Bones. He’s a crazy person. They should lock him up somewhere and throw away the key.”

  Robin took the empty plate and put it on the floor. She pulled the covers up over them and buried her nose in the place where Jasper’s neck met his shoulder.

  “Don’t be sad anymore,” she whispered to him. “You have me now.”

  The moon drifted below the distant silhouette of the old Finch-Pruyn Paper Mill’s smokestack. Very soon, foreheads touching, they both fell asleep.

  Gray daylight was gathering in the branches of the locust tree outside the window when a commotion downstairs woke Jasper and Robin. They bolted out of bed together, fumbling with their nightclothes, and followed the screams to the stairway. Someone was fighting on the floor below. Through the stairwell, they could
see bodies moving and clothes flashing and something red spattering the carpet. More screams joined the commotion and the thuds of something hard striking flesh. Jasper and Robin crept down the stairs to see.

  Billy Bones wrestled on the floor of the landing with a strapping figure in a negligee. He repeatedly brought down the barrel of an automatic pistol against his adversary’s head. By now, several of the other girls had ventured from their rooms into the hall, along with a naked elderly male customer and Madam Amber herself.

  “Oh my goodness,” Robin whispered, gripping Jasper. “It’s Angel!”

  “You’re killing me!” Angel shrieked as Billy brought the steel down on her again and again.

  “That’s exactly what I aim to do, you goddamned freak of nature. Try to rob me, will you!”

  Madam saw Robin on the stairs and screamed up at her. “Run down the back stairs! Go get Mr. Bliss and his men!”

  Robin reacted instantly and automatically and ran up to the third floor to get around to the back staircase. Jasper hesitated, in thrall to the blood and mayhem, gripping the balusters like prison bars.

  Angel lay motionless. Blood ran out of her head off the edge of the stairwell and dripped down into the first-floor foyer below. Her pulse had faded and her organs were shutting down. Billy Bones hoisted himself up and wobbled in place, still drunk.

  “Don’t bother going to get Luke the Duke. I killed the son of a bitch an hour ago.”

  All the women shrieked again and ran off in different directions.

  By this time, Robin was out the back door and running down the alley for help.

  Billy glanced up and spied Jasper on the stairway.

  “Get your stuff,” he said. “We’re leaving.”

  “I’m not going,” Jasper said.

  Billy Bones didn’t waste a moment arguing. He sprang around the landing and up the stairs and caught up to Jasper in the doorway of Robin’s room. He seized a fistful of Jasper’s nightshirt, shoved him in the room, and slammed the door. He saw Jasper’s backpack at the foot of the bed.

  “Where are your clothes?”

  “They took them to the wash.”

  Billy Bones rifled Robin’s chest of drawers and found a red sweatshirt and a pair of denim overalls. “Here, put these on,” he said, shoving them into Jasper’s midsection.

  Jasper just stood there holding them. “They’re girl’s clothes,” he said.

  Billy smacked him on the side of the head so hard that Jasper’s ears rang. Trembling, he struggled into the shirt and then the overalls.

  “Hurry up.”

  “I don’t know how to fasten them.”

  “Goddamn you,” Billy said, doing it for him. “You can doctor on people and you can’t put a pair of bibs on yourself. Jeezus H. Christ. Get those boots on now.”

  “The legs are too long.”

  “Roll them up, goddamn it! Are you just pretending to be stupid all of a sudden?”

  Jasper fished into his backpack for his spare socks while Billy tossed his boots at him.

  “I don’t want to go with you.”

  “Too goddamn bad. You’re coming. Tie them laces up!”

  When he was done, Jasper remained seated resolutely on the edge of the bed. Billy reached out and yanked him onto his feet.

  “Grab that sack of yours. Let’s go.”

  With a fistful of the hood on Jasper’s sweatshirt, holding him like a dog on a short leash, Billy dragged Jasper downstairs, past Angel’s body, which still lay sprawled in the second-floor hallway. Billy retrieved his own shoulder bag from Angel’s bedroom and proceeded down to the kitchen on the first floor. None of the other women of the house, including Madam Amber, were still on the premises. Only the elderly Ernie, the man-of-all-work, remained, and he stood stunned in the kitchen, leaning on a broom, having just come up from firing the wood furnace in the basement.

  “What are you looking at, you sorry old gomer?” Billy said.

  “Where’d everybody go all in a hurry like that?” Ernie asked in a wheezy voice.

  “The circus is in town. Get the hell out there and watch the parade before I cut your goddamn throat.”

  Ernie slunk out the back door while Billy plundered the cabinets for chunks of cheese and sausage and bread and stuffed them into his sack. Then, with Jasper still in tow, he ventured out of the house into the alley. The outside air had a shocking bite to it, nothing like the mild day before, and the sooty clouds scudded over the city rooftops on an ominous wind that stripped leaves off the trees.

  “Why do I have to come with you?” Jasper asked.

  “You’re still my protégé,” Billy said. “All the pains I took teaching you what I know? We got a special bond now, you and me. If you try to run off, I’ll make sure you regret it.”

  Billy dragged Jasper forward and gave him a kick in the pants to urge him forward. They wended through the backstreets and alleys to the ragged edge of town, and before long they could look back and see the rooftops and steeples and defunct industrial smokestacks of Glens Falls in the distance.

  FIFTY

  Brother Jobe was dismayed to discover Martha Lovejoy stone dead in her bed that morning when he went up to persuade her one last time to give the New Faith a try before he and his men took their leave. Her refusal, he judged, was now complete and unalterable and her own stubborn fault. There was no obvious sign of what exactly had caused her death, though she was not young. Her recent injuries and deprivations may have taken some time to catch up with her, he reasoned further, taking a seat on the edge of her bed and studying her inert features, not so harsh and contrary as they had seemed in life, though her static demeanor now did not look exactly peaceful, either. He wondered if his own pain during the long, restless night had somehow affected the operations of his mind. In his distress, had he projected a wish of death her way, or had he imagined that? He simply didn’t know. But it was yet another vexation to lose a valuable witness to what was shaping up as a pretty heinous crime spree by the singing bandit and his younger accomplice.

  It happened that the pain in his own gut had abated again. It got bad every time he took a meal, he now realized. Perhaps he had grown an ulcer, not a cancer, due to all the annoyances and irritations that ceaselessly visited him. Consequently, he swore to lay off eating until they’d accomplished what they set out to do: find the boy—and his bandit cohort—and return to town with them. If some bug had got a foothold in his innards, he’d starve it out. He could stand to lose a little blubber, anyway. His clothes felt tight these days.

  “Martha,” he said quietly to the corpse, “I’m truly sorry it has come to this. But we got to push on. We going to lay you to rest beside your papa before we do.”

  He took up her hand in his. It was cold.

  “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law,” he intoned. “But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed!”

  He put Martha’s hand back down on the covers, patted it, and went downstairs.

  There, in the kitchen, Elam had fired the cookstove and was frying up a batch of cornmeal pancakes in a big cast-iron skillet to eat with apple butter and a pot of roasted dandelion root “coffee,” a New Faith staple. Seth stepped in the door with an armload of stove splints.

  “Looks like we got another hole to dig,” Brother Jobe said. “Sorry, boys.”

  Elam glanced over his shoulder and Seth turned his eyes to the ceiling.

  “Martha done up and died on us last night.”

  “Dang,” Seth said. “After all that.”

  “She hang herself up there?” Elam asked and flipped three corn cakes expertly. “They tend to do that, I’ve noticed, when the man of the house is taken.”

  “No, looks like her heart just give out, poor thing,” Brother Jobe said. “You two go ahead and eat, though. I’ll turn out th
e animals.”

  “I’ll save some flapcakes for you.”

  “Don’t bother. I ain’t hungry.”

  They buried Martha next to her father between two butternut trees behind the house. When Martha’s grave was ready to receive her body and they lowered her down into it on a blanket, Brother Jobe conducted a brief ceremony. Then he went to the paddock behind the barn and saddled their mounts while the younger men filled in the grave. Before leaving the Lovejoy farm, they opened the gate to the goat pasture and set the animals free.

  “Shame not to take them back with us,” Elam said.

  “We ain’t the herder type,” Brother Jobe said. “Anyway, how I see it, if I leave them in that there pen, by the time we get home and send someone to fetch them, they could all be dead. This way they at least got a chance.”

  The goats followed the mounted men as far as the road where, seemingly bewildered by their freedom, they stopped and turned to gaze back on the only home they had ever known.

  FIFTY-ONE

  The Reverend Loren Holder woke up from the most intense cavalcade of dreams he had ever known, in a room filled with light. He knew at once exactly where he was. The clarity of his mind amazed him, considering the substantial dose of chemicals he’d received the night before. Nothing about what he was feeling might be described as a hangover. If anything, he felt energized and confident, fully within himself and comfortable, completely and cosmically refreshed, younger. Restored hardly encompassed it. Reborn came closer.

  All the particulars of his hours with Barbara Maglie, and the hours of dreams they melded perfectly with, seemed immediately accessible to him, without being overwhelming—the symphonic swirl of perfume, hair, yearning, and warmth that was woven against a tapestry of the highest pitched emotion. She was not in the room, but her scent lingered on the pillows, and so did some strands of her silvery hair. The things in his world assumed a satisfying congruent order that had been absent for as long as he could remember, even his knowledge of what had happened to his country and his people over the years. It suddenly seemed as ineluctable as gravity or the presence of love in the universe. He was tempted to think again in terms of God.