The smell of bacon frying prompted him to dress and go downstairs, where Barbara Maglie attended to their breakfast. She wore a long skirt of bright silk patches and a thick gray sweater.
“Good morning,” she said, lifting a pan of corn bread from her oven and cracking some eggs into a buttery skillet using one hand, as a professional chef might. “How do you feel?”
“Strangely marvelous.”
“I would think so.”
“Something happened to me last night.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“I think I even know what it was. But something tells me not to talk it to death.”
“Your instincts are right,” she said. “Come and have breakfast before you go.”
He took a seat at the end of her long table. She brought over two plates, dishes of fresh butter and blackberry preserves, and steaming mugs of rose-hip and skullcap tea.
“Your wife is very beautiful,” Barbara said.
“How do you know?”
“I had a vision.”
“What kind of vision?”
“The far-seeing kind.”
“She is beautiful,” Loren said.
They ate silently for a while. Loren watched a red-tailed hawk alight on a fence post in the nearest of the several gardens. It carried a mole in one of its talons and reached down furtively to tear off bits of the mole’s flesh, quickly returning upright again to survey the yard with its fiercely hooded eyes.
“You’re very beautiful, too,” Loren said.
“I know. I’m a witch.”
“You kill me.”
Loren finished his eggs and mopped the last of the yolks with a piece of corn bread.
“I have a feeling everything will be all right with me now,” he said.
“It will,” she said.
“What about you? Will you be all right, here, all by yourself?”
“Of course. It’s how I live.”
“Don’t you get lonely?”
“Loneliness is a state of mind, not a state of being.”
“I guess I should know that.”
“You did. You forgot. Now you’ll remember.”
“Men,” Loren said. “We have these protective instincts.”
“I know,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. But I’m a witch. We have our ways.”
She placed her fork and knife on her plate in a conclusive gesture.
“I’d better see to my horse.”
In a little while, Loren had Lucky saddled up and ready for the long ride back to town. Barbara came outside to bid him farewell. There was a bite to the morning air that was new. Wind bent the treetops and stripped away leaves. Clouds moved swiftly through the sky, while here and there patches of blue appeared, suggesting a weather front breaking through.
“The thing is,” Loren said, “what if I want to see you again?”
“You can,” she said. “But you’ll be all right, anyway. You might imagine you’re in love with me, but you’re really in love with the world again.”
“That’s a good way of describing how I feel.”
“By the way, I had another vision. I saw you with four children. Boys.”
“Really? Doing what?”
“I don’t know. Nothing bad. It was like you were their father.”
“Do you have a lot of visions?”
“Not so many as you’d think.”
“Can you tell me what this one means?”
“No. It was just a flash through the brain. I’m a witch, not a goddess.”
“I don’t know about that.”
Loren took her hand and she allowed him to kiss her on the lips. Then he mounted his horse.
“You know something I really like about these new times?” she said.
“What?”
“You men look so good on your horses.”
“Really?”
“Yes, much better than the old times, in a German car with the top down. A horse is better.”
She laughed musically and turned back toward her house. Loren reined out Lucky and walked him up toward the road.
“Thank you for everything,” he called out over his shoulder to her.
She waved without looking back.
FIFTY-TWO
More than once in the early going that day Jasper attempted to run away from Billy Bones as they hiked up another shattered road into the lonely highlands of Washington County on the east side of the Hudson River. Each time, Billy ran him into the ground, banged his head against the dirt or the pavement or a tree, and told him he would kill him if he tried it again. As their climb grew steeper, Jasper gave up trying to run away. He reasoned that sooner or later they would stop for the night and he’d find an opportunity to slip off and make his way back to the house in Glens Falls and take refuge with Robin, who would hide and protect him. All he had to do was be patient.
Around midday they halted at a little bridge over a nameless creek on the back side of the Gavottes.
“Take a seat,” Billy said.
“Right here on the bridge?”
“I don’t see any traffic around.”
Jasper sat down with his back against the rusty old guardrail. Billy did likewise.
“Give me that hunting knife of yours.”
“What for?”
“For my peace of mind is what for. Give it over.”
Jasper did not respond quickly enough to suit Billy, so the bandit grabbed Jasper’s backpack and began rooting around in it. “What the hell?” he said, extracting a potato. “You holding out on me?”
“I didn’t know that was in there.”
“Like hell you didn’t.”
“It’s just a stinkin’ potato.”
“What else you got in here?” Billy asked. He felt around, found the hunting knife, and stuck it in his own sack. Then he came across the tattered remains of the toy stuffed animal that Jasper had rescued in the abandoned trailer. “What all’s this?”
Jasper’s insides ran cold. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s some kind of puppet or dolly.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You keep saying that. All right then.” Billy lobbed it over the guardrail on the downstream side of the bridge. Jasper sprang up and rushed to the rail.
“What’d you do!” he screamed.
“Nothing,” Billy said. “Don’t you run after it and make me get up. Get over here and sit your ass back down again. I aim to eat my lunch now.”
As Jasper watched the current carry away the stuffed animal, his helplessness closed a door to the room in his mind where his rage lived. He shuffled back and slumped next to Billy.
“Puppets and dollies is girl stuff,” Billy said. “You got to man up.”
He took out the victuals he had purloined from Madam Amber’s kitchen and spread them out on his leather shoulder sack between them.
“Help yourself,” he said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Aw, don’t give me that. You just walked five miles without no breakfast. You got to be hungry.”
Jasper shrugged.
“You going to give me the silent treatment now, like you don’t like me anymore?”
“I never liked you.”
“What? You lying little bastard—you worshipped me!”
Jasper couldn’t help issuing a noise that was half laugh, half sob.
“You begged to be my protégé.”
“You imagined that.”
Billy glared at him as if a bad odor had come between them.
“Well, I’m hungry, even if you’re not, so excuse me while I eat my damn lunch.”
He devoured a half pound of Moses Kill cheddar and a hunk of hard sausage and battled the oppressive silence by making sounds of delectation as he ate.
“What’s not to like about me?” Billy asked when he had put a dent in his hunger. “I got a sunny disposition, I got style, I’m colorful, I’m generous to a fault, I even got a song to sing. You won’t mee
t a better companion in these hard times than yours truly. Answer me.”
“You keep murdering people.”
Billy recoiled as if stung. “I don’t mean no harm by it,” he said.
Jasper laughed ruefully.
“Okay, maybe that don’t sound right. Look, people get in the way and they don’t have the sense to get out of the way.”
“What about that man on the onion wagon? How’d he get in your way?”
“Is your memory impaired, boy? That son of a bitch emptied two barrels of birdshot at me. A man does that, and misses, he might as well write out his own death warrant.”
“You were robbing him at the time.”
“Yeah? Well, he should’ve been perfectly happy to part with a little bit of cash money and a pound or two of goddamn onions than to lose his goddamned life protecting them. But no, he up and decides to defend his onions. Jeezus Christ on a cracker! Would you pay four bits of silver to save your damn life? I sure would for mine, if it came to that. Let me tell you something, Johnny boy. There’s a whole world of goddamn stupid gomers out there who make bad choices in life. You can’t blame Billy Bones for that. Their fate is in their own hands.”
“Why’d you kill that Luke the Duke?”
“You weren’t even there!”
“I know that.”
“You know everything, you goddamn know-it-all. You really want to know? I caught the son of a bitch cheating again at cards and I called him on it and he got all huffy and said his boys were going to teach me a lesson. And I don’t take threats to my person lightly.”
“You already knew he was a cheater.”
“Well, I gave him another chance. Billy Bones is fair-minded and bighearted.”
“Maybe you should have just stayed away from that card game like Madam said.”
“Maybe you should just shut your damn mouth, since you’re a child and don’t know nothing about how the grown-up world works. Society’s got a right to honest games of chance. If everybody cheated like that, there wouldn’t be any card games at all in this world. And the world would be poorer for it.”
“Were you trying to rob them, too?”
“Hell, no! Why would I do that? Then there wouldn’t be any game.”
“Because that’s what you do. You’re a bandit.”
“I don’t do it around the goddamn clock. You say you’re a doctor. I don’t see you doing that nonstop twenty-four goddamn hours a day.”
“If you didn’t drag me out of Glens Falls, I might be working for the doctor right now.”
“I took you out of that hellhole for your own good, believe me.”
“Why did you kill Angel, the he-she?”
Billy glanced this way and that way, as if searching the labyrinth of bare branches above for an answer.
“He, she, it,” he mumbled. “That’s a whole different story. There’s no way a child would understand that.”
“You sure acted like you hated her.”
“’Course I do. Did.”
“Then what was your bag doing in her room just before we left?”
Billy began to speak but hesitated and puffed out his cheeks, sighed, and shook his head.
“Look,” he eventually said, “you don’t want to eat none of this food, that’s your business, but we got a ways to go yet today.”
Jasper gazed at the remains of sausage and reached for it.
“That’s right. You better eat,” Billy said. “That’s a good choice you just made, however you judge me for the moment. I want you to know, I ain’t any wild-eyed crazy killer type. I ain’t had a week like this one in, well, never. This is not my normal way. A lot of things seem like they got out of hand in recent days. When it rains, it pours. I vow to you that the next bunch of people we come across, I will be as nice as pie to, long as they don’t pull a shotgun on us or try to cheat us or beat our ass. Does that sit all right with you?”
Jasper nodded his head, still chewing.
“Say it.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“It’s all right with me if you don’t kill anyone ever again.”
“Okay,” Billy said. “And it’s all right with me if you don’t kill no more horses, either. Come on. Let’s go.”
FIFTY-THREE
Not long after departing the Lovejoy farm, Brother Seth picked up some tracks in a muddy stretch of Goose Island Road leading northwest into the highlands of the county. They were the footprints of an adult and a child. They followed them through midmorning until, in the elevations of the Gavottes, they came upon the grisly scene of a body in a ditch near an abandoned wagon filled with onions. There was no horse in the vicinity.
Seth and Elam, who had seen plenty of death in the Holy Land, agreed that the corpse was about a day old. They agreed it was a man’s body based on its size, remaining scraps of clothing, and the length of the hair on the skull. But much of the flesh had been consumed by animals, including the soft tissues of the face and hands. One whole leg was missing, and there was a black maw of blood and shredded cloth around the abdomen, where the organs had been eaten out.
They all held rags up to their faces not so much against the stink as the awful carnage it presented. Seth and Elam rolled the corpse over to examine the other side. It was as stiff as a cedar slab.
“Lookit here,” Elam said to Brother Jobe, who squatted in the dust beside them. “The back of his skull’s all bashed in. That ain’t the work of any wild animal.”
“I got to suppose that this mischief was done by our quarry, the boy and the other,” Brother Jobe said.
“Their tracks lead right to it,” Seth affirmed.
“What a terrible wickedness that child walks in,” Elam said.
“A sorry amen to that,” Brother Jobe said.
“What do you want to do with these here remains, BJ?” Seth asked.
“I say we load him in the wagon, hitch it up to a couple of horses, and follow where the road leads. Maybe inquire along the way if this poor soul belongs to somebody. Try to find the law hereabouts, if there is any.”
“That suits me,” Elam said. “I’m tired of digging graves for strangers.”
Seth took a map out of his jacket and looked it over.
“Looks to me like these two are heading straight for this here town of Glens Falls, about seven miles up the road.”
“All right,” Brother Jobe said, “then that’s where we’ll go. Hoist that body aboard, boys.”
“You want us to put him right up there on them onions?” Elam asked.
“Didn’t I just say so?”
“It’s disgusting.”
“Well, you can’t throw all them onions in a ditch in times like these,” Brother Jobe said. “This here must be a thousand-dollar load. Folks can always peel a onion. Go on, heave him on in.”
They covered the body with a blanket and lifted it into the wagon’s box. The blanket happened to be the one rolled up behind Seth’s saddle.
“Dang,” Seth said. “That blanket was like an old friend to me.”
“You can warsh it out,” Elam said.
“Not after a dead man slept amongst it. You can never warsh that out. And Halloween’s coming, too. It gives me the chills just to think of it.”
“Well, let’s get him to where he’s going before he turns into a durned pumpkin,” Brother Jobe said.
“I wish he would turn,” Seth said. “He’d smell a whole lot better.”
Elam carried a small repair kit of waxed thread and an awl with a number 5 needle. He stitched back the girth, collar, and traces of the wagon harness. Then they hitched the horses to the wagon, leaving Brother Jobe aboard Atlas, the mule. Seth and Elam tossed their saddles into the wagon box with the onions and the dead man, and the trio set out once more, down from the highlands into the broad Hudson River valley below.
An hour later they came upon a white farmhouse set a hundred yards from the road. It was a tidy establishment with an orchard in the front yard
whose trees were heavy with apples. Fields of neatly stooked cornstalks rolled out on the land beyond the house. Elam and Seth hung back on the road with the wagon and the corpse while Brother Jobe rode up to the house, dismounted, and went to the door. A woman in an apron answered, wiping her hands, and spoke briefly with Brother Jobe. Then he withdrew with a tip of his hat and swung up onto Atlas again while the woman went back inside.
“Our man don’t belong to this outfit here,” Brother Jobe reported. “Nor has she heard any of her neighbors say they’re missing nobody. She ain’t seen any sign of the boy and his cohort either.”
They stopped at three other farms along the way. Nobody knew where the dead man was from and no one had seen Jasper and Billy Bones. They did learn, however, that the closest thing to constituted law in Glens Falls was a gentleman named Luke Bliss, whom people spoke of as “the Duke” in a generally ironic way. The town, one old farmer told them, was a pitiful remnant of its former self. In his childhood, he said, the town was so lively and fine that a national magazine called it Hometown USA.
“It don’t look like we’re going to locate who this fellow belongs to,” Seth said.
“Maybe we’ll be keeping these onions, after all,” Brother Jobe said as they continued on.
“And the wagon to boot,” Elam said.
“Long as we don’t have to keep the corpse,” Seth said.
FIFTY-FOUR
Robert Earle walked the four miles from Union Grove to Stephen Bullock’s plantation. For most of it, he enjoyed the bracing autumn air and the tranquillity of the landscape away from town and the bustle of the New Faith headquarters where he’d been working for weeks. On the last stretch, along River Road, he came upon the twelve hanged men, two of them dangling by their ankles with their heads jammed incongruously between their legs, just as Terry Einhorn had said. Vultures and crows were roosting on the corpses now, picking away at the flesh. Robert’s presence barely disturbed their grisly operations. He tried throwing stones at one especially ugly vulture, but it returned quickly to perch on one of the purple-faced victims, using its beak to enlarge the hole where the nose used to be. The stench of death was overwhelming and Robert did not linger. It was a quarter mile farther to Bullock’s place.
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