He had carried out the first part of Magistrate Stephen Bullock’s writ to exhume the body from its resting place in the cemetery with the help of three New Faith brothers, who actually did the hard work of digging up the coffin. They conveyed it to the doctor’s place in a horse cart, removed the corpse from the coffin—an odious task—and arranged it in the springhouse with its head on a wood block on the long table that had hours earlier been occupied by an array of winter squashes and onions. A dozen hams, which the doctor sometimes received as payment for services, hung dimly up in the rafters gathering protective mold. The shelves were lined with glass jars of vegetables and preserved fruit, some of it also payment for services. Stoneware crocks of sauerkraut stood on the floor along the fieldstone wall. A beeswax candle in a tin saucer guttered at the end of the long table, inches from the corpse’s moldy boot heels.
The doctor lifted the bottle again, hesitating a moment as he wondered whether he had imagined some slight movement in the corpse’s facial expression—such as it was. The fragment of the jaw bone that remained hung from a shriveled tendril of ligament. The eyes and surrounding flesh had dissolved into the sockets, and various organisms of the soil had bloomed within the coffin and eaten down most of the nose. The doctor managed to ignore the vivid stink of decomposition, as he had learned to do years earlier during a rotation in pathology.
“What’s next?” the doctor thought he heard the corpse say. He had known Shawn Watling since the dead man was a teenage boy, had treated him for one thing and another, had delivered his daughter, Sarah, seven years ago, and knew his voice. The doctor lowered the bottle, squinting at the corpse, who seemed strangely now to have assumed the very look of Shawn Watling when alive, that is, a perceived representation of it.
“What happens next to me?” the corpse seemed to speak again.
“Postmortem examination,” the doctor said.
“Are you going to cut me open?”
“Afraid so. Bullock ordered it.”
“It isn’t pretty in there.”
“I’m well aware.”
“Can you give me a little something to ease the pain?”
“You won’t need anything.”
“Says you.” The corpse appeared to laugh.
The doctor blinked, raised the bottle to his lips again, and tipped his head back. The powerful liquor transpired through his stomach lining and soon roared in his veins.
“I have to search for the bullets that killed you,” the doctor said.
“You’ll find a couple of 206 grain .41 caliber hollowpoints in there,” the corpse said. “One in my neck up against the C2 vertabrae. Another way up in the parietal lobe of my brain, or the miserable jelly that remains of it.”
“I still have to go through with it,” the doctor said.
“I don’t hold it against you, Doc. Cheers.”
The doctor stared at the corpse in the dim, flickering light. He was strangely relieved to have someone to talk to. The room and everything in it rotated slightly.
“I’m drunk,” the doctor said.
“You’re worried about your boy.”
“I’m worried sick and crazy,” the doctor said.
“He’s in a lot of trouble,” the corpse said. “But he’s a good boy.”
“He was never anything but a good boy,” the doctor said, and tears began to pool in his eyes. He hoisted the bottle again but paused to rest the butt of it on his thigh. “I couldn’t save his pup. I couldn’t. There was nothing I could do.” The doctor sank his chin down into his chest and began quietly blubbering.
“Your boy’s been through an ordeal,” the corpse said.
“Where is he?”
“He’s up north.”
“Up north where?”
“In the north end of the county.”
“Where exactly?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“Of course I do.”
“He’s coming back to you.”
“When?”
“Soon. He’s got one more tribulation.”
“What is it?”
“No point telling you. He has to go through it alone. The way we all go through this life.”
“What good are you?”
“That’s a helluva question, Doc.”
“You’re a useless piece of rotten meat.”
“I’ll try to not take that personally.”
“Go to hell.”
“I know you only say that because you feel helpless,” the corpse said. “In life, you liked me.”
“You should tell me where he is, goddamn you.”
“He’ll be home soon enough. He’ll be changed, but he’ll be home.”
“Changed how?”
“Not a child anymore.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I’m so weary—”
“Goddamn you.”
“Goddamn me? I’m beyond that now,” the corpse said. The appearance of life went out of it and it settled back into mute stillness.
The doctor tried to raise the bottle to his lips again, but the effort defeated him. His eyes rolled up in his head, he listed to the left, fell off the ladder-back chair, and crashed to the floor unconscious.
SIXTY-THREE
Jane Ann, in her nightclothes and robe, rushed down the front porch steps of the big rectory in the lustrous moonlight as Loren helped Paul and Jesse down off Lucky.
“Look what I found,” Loren said.
Jane Ann knelt down in the maple leaves and the boys naturally gravitated around her. She wanted to embrace them, but Loren warned her about the lice. He gave her a very abridged version of the rescue story, who they were, and their situation, while Jane Ann looked them over one at a time, turning them this way and that, attempting to determine if any of the boys had an immediate problem that would require an urgent trip to see Dr. Copeland. She couldn’t see much, even under the nearly full moon. They all seemed able to stand on their own and had few obvious sores or injuries. But the temperature had dropped and their breath hung on the still air in silver clouds; they wasted no more time getting inside the warm rectory. Throughout, the boys hardly spoke, so undone were they with fatigue, trauma, and malnutrition, and merely obeyed anything they were told to do.
When Loren returned from putting Lucky away in Tom Allison’s barn down Van Buren Street, he brought in two of the largest pots from the church’s community room, filled them with water, and put them on the stove to warm. Meanwhile Jane Ann had cooked a big batch of scrambled eggs with pieces of hard sausage and carved a leftover corn bread into blocks for the boys to eat with a tub of butter, a three-pound chunk of Mr. Schmidt’s Center Falls brick cheese, and glasses of that same farmer’s milk. They ate as much as hard-working grown men and with the same kind of fierce concentration, even little Jesse.
When they were finished with their meal, Loren took each boy into his study, where he placed a chair on a bedsheet that was spread on the floor, and cut his hair as closely to the scalp as possible without shaving it altogether. He rubbed sunflower seed oil on their scalps and their eyelashes to suffocate the remaining lice. Jane Ann brought each boy into the bathroom, where she rubbed vinegar onto their scalps to loosen the gluelike substance that kept nits attached to what remained of the hair shafts. Loren took the sheet with all its hair clippings outside in a bundle to his burn pile. Then Jane Ann bathed the boys one at a time, scrubbing them with strong soap. Loren waited outside the bathroom to apply another dose of oil to each boy’s head and give him something to wear to bed in the way of an old T-shirt or some other article from the church’s impressive collection of donated clothing.
Finally they brought the boys upstairs and put the two Single-tree brothers in the room that had been their own boy’s room up until the day he left Union Grove. The room had a set of bunk beds. Paul and little Jesse were installed for the night in a double bed in another room that years before had been reserved for sojourning relatives and out-of-town guests—two categories
of visitors lately made obsolete by circumstances. That they were being cared for, bathed, fed good food, and shown to comfortable beds seemed enough to reassure them that they were finally safe in good hands. Loren and Jane Ann took turns saying good night to the boys, telling them again that an effort would be made to find their parents or relatives, and that they would be looked after in any case. The boys fell asleep within seconds of crawling under the blankets. Then Loren and Jane Ann retired to their own bedroom. He gave her a more rounded version of his discovery and rescue of the boys from the dungeon behind the Argyle store and of his doings with Miles English, their captor, and of the boys’ probable destiny: to remain in Union Grove, perhaps with them, or with other families willing to take them in. Loren and Jane Ann clung together closely in bed as he told her all this. He felt her physical presence in a way that he had not for years, and she sensed his feeling her, and each perceived the other in the fullness of the moment, and then a wondrous thing occurred.
In the aftermath Jane Ann held on to his broad chest as if it were a life raft in a tumultuous strait between two unknown shores. Her eyes remained wide open, as if struggling to comprehend something that might reveal itself in the moving shadows of the naked tree branches, cast by the moonlight through the windows, that played over the walls.
“What’s happened to you?” she asked.
“I’ve changed.”
“But how?”
He hesitated. “I found a witch,” he said. “And she put a spell on me.”
Something in his voice convinced her that it was not necessary to ask if he was kidding. Instead she asked, “Have you changed? Or is the whole world changing around us?”
“Both, I think.”
SIXTY-FOUR
As dawn broke over Glens Falls, Brother Jobe woke up in his hotel room with sharper pains in his abdomen than anything he had felt in the days preceding. Despite the window being open and his labored breath coming out in a frosty fog, he sweated into his bedclothes, and the damp made him shiver. It galled him additionally that he’d made himself go hungry the whole day before and now his gut hurt worse than ever. He managed to pull himself out of bed and knocked on the door of the adjoining room. Seth answered it in his long drawers, scratching.
“What’s up, BJ? You don’t look so good.”
“I’m low. I got the cancer or something.”
“Cancer?”
“Cancer of the guts. It killed my daddy. I must have it, too. You got to bring me back.”
“Uh.… Okay.”
“And I mean right away. If I’m going to die, it’s going to be amongst my own. Prepare that wagon for me. I can’t take a mule now.”
“What do you want to do with our dead man?”
“Guess I’ll ride with the sumbitch until we find a suitable place to bury him. Get your lazy rear end out of the rack, Elam!”
Elam rolled over, blinking.
“BJ ain’t feeling so good,” Seth explained.
“Go fetch our mounts from what’s-his-name,” Brother Jobe told Seth. “I ain’t in no mood to linger or dawdle.”
“What about all them onions?”
“Leave them on the sidewalk for folks or something. O Lord, I never felt nothing like this before.”
They borrowed a grain scuttle from Efraim, the livery owner, and shoveled all but a few pounds of the onions onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel, a gift to the town of Glens Falls. Soon the horses were hitched onto the wagon and they were under way, Seth driving, with two saddles stashed beside him. Brother Jobe lay in the cargo box under several blankets on a mattress purchased hastily from the hotel, with the bundled remains of the dead man with him for company. Elam rode Atlas behind the wagon to keep an eye on Brother Jobe and distract him from his torment with conversation.
Leaving town, with Brother Jobe croaking in pain from the jolts of the wagon, they again crossed the ancient bridge over the town’s eponymous waterfall where the Hudson River leaped sixty feet down on its run from the Adirondack wilderness below Mount Marcy. There was a great whirlpool beneath the bridge.
“Maybe we should dispose of the body here,” Seth said over his shoulder. “Commit his soul to the watery depths and all.”
“That ain’t right,” Brother Jobe said. “And you know it.”
“He stinks something awful.”
“If I can stand it back here, you can too.”
“We’re more worried about you than him,” Elam chimed in.
“My daddy lived like this for months before it took him.” Brother Jobe winced as the wheels bounced over a loose chunk of concrete. “O Lord have mercy!”
A few miles east of there, beyond the last traces of small-town suburbia, they came upon an overgrown rural cemetery. Brother Jobe directed them to stop and bury the remains of the onion-wagon man.
“I hate to tell you this, but we ain’t got no shovels,” Seth said.
“What happened to that shovel you took all them onions off here with?”
“I give it back to the man at the stable before we left.”
“You mean to tell me we left home without no shovels?”
“We didn’t expect to be burying folks all up and down the county.”
“What are you going to bury me with if the Lord snatches me before we make it home?”
“You said your daddy lived for months after he got the cancer.”
“Well, I ain’t him. And besides, they had hospitals back then. They doused him with enough chemicals to put down the weeds on a hundred acres of goldurned cotton.”
“I say we just leave him under a tree somewheres, nice and peaceful,” Elam said. “I don’t think it’s doing you good to lie there with it.”
“He’s our brother now. We ain’t chucking him aside like a banana peel.”
Elam was beginning to wonder if Brother Jobe’s illness was affecting his mind, but he didn’t want to argue.
“All right, then, gee your team back up, Seth,” Elam said.
They went five miles more and the road grew steeper as it ascended into the Gavottes. Brother Jobe appeared to be slipping out of consciousness at times. In one of the intervals when he lay quietly laboring in his agony, Seth said it would help the horses make it into the highlands if they could lighten the load.
“It’s either the saddles or you-know-who.”
“I say we hold the five-minute funeral.”
“I’m with you. It ain’t doing anybody no good to ride him around.”
They halted in their journey and found a suitable place for the dead man, still bundled up in Seth’s blanket, in a grove of tamarack trees. They piled a cairn of loose granite stones over him to discourage the wild animals from getting to him and spoke a very few words over his grave.
“Lord, please hallow the ground where we leave these mortal remains,” Elam intoned over the cairn, with his hat upon his heart and Seth standing beside him likewise, while Brother Jobe groaned in the wagon. “He hath no marker but was some poor mother’s son and perhaps some poor son’s father, and maybe some good woman’s husband, and if he was not all those things he was his own soul, at least. Take him home in your keeping, ye who alone knows his name, amen.”
“Okay, we done it,” Seth said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Over in the wagon, Brother Jobe groaned again.
SIXTY-FIVE
Barbara Maglie was shocked at first to wake up in a bed with the boy. She had taken him into one of the other bedrooms very late in the night and locked him in a protective embrace while he slept. But Barbara could not find sleep. Worry consumed her for hours. She didn’t know how to persuade the boy to return to his home and his family, when he was bent on going to Glens Falls. She would offer to ride him down to Union Grove in her own one-horse trap, she thought, but would he come willingly? She doubted it. She might have to journey down to Union Grove by herself to inform the doctor and his comrades to go to Glens Falls and search for the boy there.
This acid swirl of worry di
ssolved sometime before daylight gathered in the eaves. Sleep finally found her and when she did wake up—because Jasper was trying to pry her hands off him—she recalled the dire events of the evening before while a sharp conviction of the boy’s immediate destiny flashed through her mind, spooling out as colorfully as cinema used to. She saw that indeed he would set out for Glens Falls but some circumstance would cause him to return to her house. The intimation was powerful enough to persuade her that it was inevitable, and she resigned herself to it.
“Please help me get the body out of the house,” she said. “Then you can go if you must.”
“I’ll help you,” he said.
So the two of them rose out of bed in the gray morning and proceeded to remove Billy Bones from the house without ceremony. His twisted body was stiffened in rigor mortis. Barbara pulled up and fastened his trousers for the sake of decorum, then asked Jasper to take a leg and help pull him outside. Doing so, they left a long smudge of coagulated blood down the hall and through the kitchen, and Billy’s head bounced audibly on the steps as they dragged him out the door. They dragged him down a path past the outhouse, through the yellowing high grass beyond the paddock where Barbara’s brindle horse grazed oblivious to them, and behind the pasture where her cow, Sonya, stood waiting to be taken to the barn and milked. They penetrated the margin of the woods there and deposited Billy between two locust trees.
“Help me get the shovels,” Barbara said, and Jasper dutifully accompanied her to a toolshed attached to the barn. She handed him a long-handled shovel and took a garden spade for herself, and they walked back toward the woods. “Who was he?” she asked.
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