The Witch of Hebron Read online

  THE WITCH OF HEBRON

  ALSO BY JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER

  Fiction

  World Made by Hand

  Maggie Darling

  Thunder Island

  The Halloween Ball

  The Hunt

  Blood Solstice

  An Embarrassment of Riches

  The Life of Byron Jaynes

  A Clown in the Moonlight

  The Wampanaki Tales

  Nonfiction

  The Long Emergency

  The City in Mind

  Home from Nowhere

  The Geography of Nowhere

  THE WITCH OF HEBRON

  A World Made by Hand Novel

  JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER

  Copyright © 2010 by James Howard Kunstler

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9628-6

  Atlantic Monthly Press an

  imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

  841 Broadway New York, NY

  10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  This book is for my wing men

  Adam Chromy and Duncan Crary

  Be watchful, and strengthen the things which

  remain, that are ready to die: for I have not found

  thy works perfect before God.

  —Revelation 3:2

  In the not-distant future…

  First, gasoline became scarce and expensive, and now it is simply gone. The automobile age is over. The electricity has flickered out. The computers are all down for good. The great corporations have fallen. Paper money is worthless. Two great cities have been destroyed. Epidemics have ravaged the population. The government isn’t functioning. There may be a president and he may be in Minneapolis, but it’s little more than a rumor.

  The people of a little town named Union Grove, in upstate New York, endure, living very locally in a world made by hand.

  The world beyond Washington County has become an unknown country.…

  ONE

  Now it could not have been a more beautiful mid-October day in upstate New York in the year that concerns us, which has yet to come in history. Long jagged Vs of honking Canada geese winged their way toward the Hudson River over Pumpkin Hill, where the crowns of the suffering maples blazed red and orange as if on fire, and the birch leaves glowed like golden coins, and the line of sumacs at the edge of Deaver’s hayfields ran as vivid as blood against the darker margin of the woods, as though Pumpkin Hill were a living thing itself, with a pulsing interior. Some people in the nearby town of Union Grove might have said it was, since the habits of thought having to do with old, deadening certainties were yielding to another way of seeing and feeling the world that, instead, brought everything to life.

  Two boys and a yellow dog made their way up a dirt path along the Battenkill River, a tributary of the Hudson. In the low water this time of year, some gravel bars lay exposed, as bright and clean as the beaches on desert isles, and many fine trout lurked unmolested in the dark runs of cold water between the bars. Indeed, far fewer people were to be found angling there in these new times on a fall afternoon when there was a harvest to get in. The boys, both eleven, were Jasper Copeland, son of Union Grove’s only doctor, and Ned Allison, whose father, a doctor of philosophy, not medicine, and once vice president of a now defunct college, ran the town’s livery stable—as good a livelihood as medical doctoring in an age when cart and saddle horses were in short supply.

  Up ahead across the river the two boys spied a rude shack made of castoff, salvage, and flotsam between the abandoned railroad tracks and the river. It was not without charm, having a deck cantilevered out over the riverbank with a rustic railing composed of fancifully shaped driftwood balusters, and behind all that, several generous, vertical windows, none of them matching. Two beaver pelts and one of bobcat were tacked up along the upstream exterior wall. The boys could smell them from where they came to crouch behind a clump of stately bracken.

  The shack was the home of Perry Talisker, known around town as “the hermit,” who did not altogether shun his fellow human beings but led a solitary existence there beside the river some distance from town. He trapped animals and traded their furs for necessities. Earlier in life, he had worked as a butcher for a supermarket chain. He could skin a rabbit in five seconds flat. He made his own corn whiskey and consumed just a little less than he made every year. It was reputed to be as good as or better than the whiskey made by Stephen Bullock, the wealthy planter. Perry Talisker made regular visits to Einhorn’s store in town and was capable of polite conversation about the weather and conditions on the river. But he smelled as ripe as the pelts tacked to his house, and his conversational partners tended to cut it short. When he left the store with his sack of cornmeal and jug of seed oil, Terry Einhorn would have to light a candle to defeat the lingering odor.

  “I think he’s in there,” Ned whispered. “I saw something move. C’mon, let’s get closer.”

  The two boys crawled farther up the path along with the dog, which was a five-month-old puppy, a sweet-faced mutt named Willie with feathered fur on his legs. From their new position just opposite the shack they were afforded a clear view within.

  “I see him,” Ned said.

  “Spying isn’t right,” Jasper said, but he kept looking anyway.

  “Crazy people bear watching.”

  “My dad says he’s just odd.”

  “Odd folks can turn crazy,” Ned said.

  They watched the hermit silently for a minute from their hideout in the bracken.

  “What the hell is he doing?” Jasper muttered.

  Talisker appeared to be sitting in a chair fighting with what, across that distance and through the glare on the windowpanes, appeared to be a snake in his lap. A little while later he subsided, dropping his arms to his sides and throwing his head back. The defeated snake lay inert on his lap. Then his chest heaved and the boys heard what sounded like an elongated sob above the noise of the river. A train of racking, descending sobs followed.

  Jasper shuddered. He clutched the puppy close to himself there on the hard-packed dirt path. It licked him on the chin and he murmured, “Stop it, Willie.”

  “Listen, he’s crying now,” Ned said. “Jesus.”

  The sobbing continued. Whatever they thought they had witnessed—and neither was altogether certain what it signified— they knew at least that these were the sounds of a grown man in anguish, and it made them more uncomfortable than anything else they had seen him do.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Ned said. He cut out up the path. Jasper lingered another moment in a sickened thrall, watching the hermit and listening, then quit their hiding place and caught up with his friend. Willie shadowed him. They didn’t discuss what they had seen. Each in his own way was embarrassed by it, sensing the dark mystery it represented and the indecorum of w
atching it. Eventually, the path took them up the riverbank at Lovell Road by the ruins of the old power station. There they burst up from the glowing golden tunnel of the river into the starker late-afternoon light. Jasper carried a wicker creel on a leather strap diagonally across his body. The creel contained two heavy trout. In his right hand he carried his father’s carbon fiber fly rod, a miraculous artificial material that might never be seen on earth again, his father said, now that things had changed so much for the human race.

  Jasper had little recollection of what the old times were like except for a vivid sense memory of riding in an automobile all trussed up in a special seat designed to immobilize small children. He remembered the speed of objects rushing past a window, and the brightly illuminated signs of commerce, and his own discomfort in the strangely aromatic plastic seat, even the mood of desperation in the sharp, terse exchanges between the adults up front. That was all. Everything else beyond that memory was the familiar world of Union Grove and Washington County and the people in it he had known, including the sad and disgusting hermit.

  The boys walked silently an eighth of a mile to where the road came to a T at old State Route 29, with its fissures and potholes and stretches where there was no pavement at all anymore.

  “What the hermit was doing,” Ned said as they walked back toward town, “that’s nature’s way.”

  “What was he crying for, then?” Jasper said.

  “Nature’s harsh and strange,” Ned said.

  In a little while, they came to the edge of town, marked by the ruins of an old strip mall. All that remained of the Kmart sign were the letters that spelled art. Though his mother and father had explained these things to him, the strange idea persisted in him that this had once been some kind of great bazaar at which objects of art were bought and sold. He knew that in the old times everybody had a lot more money and things. He knew that there had been many machines besides cars that ran on a liquid called oil that, for various reasons, had become impossible to get in the new times. The sharp break between the old times and the new times was something his parents carried with them constantly like a wound that refused to heal.

  The rusty skeleton of an old car squatted deep in the poplar scrub behind the remnants of the Kmart building. The interior had long been burned out. Its steel roof was peeled back like the tongue of an old shoe, saplings had grown through holes in the floor, the hood was a tangle of raspberry canes, and blazing red Virginia creeper struggled up an empty wheel well along the rusty door. Somehow the car had escaped the Great Collecting that had occurred years before when the nation was hard up for steel to prosecute a war in the Holy Land. Jasper hardly remembered that. The boys sometimes visited the car, regarding it with the same morbid awe as the skeleton of a large mammal that had crawled into the woods to die.

  “You want to go see the old car?” Jasper asked as they came to the strip mall.

  “No,” Ned said. “I have things to do.”

  “You want to visit the stallion over at the New Faith?”

  “No,” Ned said. “We’ve got all the horses I need to see. I have to rake out their stalls before supper.”

  “You want one of these trout?”

  “I’ll take a trout. Thanks.”

  “Get a stick.”

  Ned got a green stick and ran it through the gills and the mouth, twisting the ends like a handle. He didn’t have a fishing rod. They weren’t making them anymore. He was too proud to use an alder branch.

  “I think I’ll go visit that stallion,” Jasper said.

  “I wouldn’t tell anyone what we saw out here today,” Ned said.

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  “They’ll ask why we stayed around and watched.”

  “I know.”

  Ned took off down the road for his home in town. Willie followed him for a few steps, then returned to Jasper’s side as the boy cut behind the strip mall, past the ghost of the car, and took a shortcut through the woods around the town reservoir to the edge of the old high school property on the northern edge of town. The high school, which was abandoned after the epidemics that winnowed the town population, had been sold the previous June to a group of seventy-seven wayfaring Christian Evangelicals from Virginia who called themselves the New Faith Brotherhood. Fleeing the disorders of their home state, they had found peace and tranquillity in Union Grove, decided to settle there, and had worked sedulously to renovate the high school for their own purposes. The old football field had been transformed into a magnificent garden. The crop rows were mostly laid up for the winter now except for table greens and winter squashes. They had converted the old school bus garage into a stable. The other grounds and ball fields had been fenced up as pasture. One paddock held the group’s prize stallion, a liver chestnut half Morgan named Jupiter. Not many people outside New Faith had been inside the main buildings of the establishment, and their ways remained mysterious, even threatening, to many townspeople of Union Grove.

  As Jasper came out of the woods into a stubble field of recently harvested corn, he was struck by the low angle of the sun and the long shadows of everything on the landscape, the brilliant color in the trees behind the school and the perfection of the air temperature as the afternoon merged into evening. A warm nugget of profound contentment at the center of himself welled into a deep gratitude for being. He could see the beautiful stallion grazing in its paddock a hundred yards away. As he set out across the stubble field, a brown blur darted from behind a hummock of cornstalks in the direction of the paddock. The groundhog made desperately for his home in a hole behind the run-in shed. Willie lit out after it.

  “No, Willie,” Jasper hollered at the dog. “Get back here!”

  TWO

  About the same time that fine fall afternoon, three men made their way around the construction site that was the old Union-Wayland box mill, which had shut down in 1971, decades before the U.S. economy imploded altogether in the aftermath of the banking collapse, two terrorist nuclear strikes, the Holy Land War, and the sharp decline in oil supplies that shattered everyday life in America. The three men, all of middle years, were the Reverend Loren Holder, minister of the town’s congregational church and part-time town constable, Robert Earle, mayor of Union Grove and journeyman carpenter (formerly a software company executive in the old times), and one Brother Shiloh, a member of the New Faith order, who had much useful experience for the task at hand, having once served as a civil engineer with the Roanoke Water Authority.

  Loren and Robert wore beards in the town fashion while Brother Shiloh was clean-shaven in the custom of his sect. His handmade black broadcloth frock coat, wheat-colored linen trousers, and white shirt would have also distinguished him from the townsmen, who mostly dressed in whatever garments they had leftover from the old times. Robert wore a threadbare tartan flannel shirt with patches on the elbows and canvas overalls hand-sewn by the young woman who had come to dwell with him after his wife died, while Reverend Holder favored a well-worn blue sweatshirt bearing the faded seal of Middlebury College (defunct) and corduroy pants with frayed cuffs.

  The old mill building, which had been established in 1894 as a sash-and-blind works, had been successfully gutted over the summer. Robert had directed the reconstruction of the roof, repairing it with slates that came from the quarry in Granville, twenty-two miles away by the Vermont border. The joists and floorboards of both levels had been replaced, too. The materials were paid for with three and a half ounces of gold from jewelry collected among the townspeople. The labor was volunteered. The general idea— Reverend Holder’s inspiration—was to construct a community laundry. American society, at least as those in Union Grove understood it—since news of anything outside Washington County was sketchy at best—had changed drastically from one in which every household ran laborsaving appliances such as clothes washers to one in which certain tasks were better done communally. The last spasm of electric service had shuddered through town for less than a minute in August, and for practical
purposes everybody now assumed it was off for good.

  As a business proposition, the laundry was conceived as a three-way partnership between the town, the New Faith organization, and the two “proprietors,” Robert and Loren. They hoped to have it in operation by spring and expected to employ ten people. Brother Shiloh’s job was to design a system for lifting water from the adjacent Battenkill River and directing it to a heating tank driven by a wood-fired furnace, then to a series of copper kettles where the washing and rinsing would occur. Wastewater would be directed into a sand and gravel leach pit excavated in the old parking lot, now overgrown with sumacs. In theory, the sand-filtered water would seep back to the nearby river hardly less clean than it came out. The excess heat from the furnace would be ducted into the capacious second-floor loft, where a network of drying racks could be used in place of the outdoor clotheslines when the weather was bad.

  “It’ll be hot work,” Brother Shiloh remarked as they navigated a steep temporary stairway down from the loft. He appeared to know what he was doing, technically, but he always managed to put a little added negative spin on things, both Robert and Loren noticed, as if he didn’t really want the project to succeed. It was an annoying note to what was otherwise shaping up to be a very positive development in a town that had known little but hardship and loss for years.

  On the whole, the New Faithers had proven to be a valuable addition to the community. They possessed a broad array of practical skills, from metalworking to animal husbandry. Just weeks after moving into the old school building, they’d helped repair the town’s crippled, gravity-fed water system. Though ardent proselytizers, they were careful not to push too hard among the townspeople, in the interest of good relations. They even proved valiant in the face of danger: Some of the brothers were veterans of the Holy Land War, and four of them, along with Robert Earle, had carried out the daring rescue, in June, of Stephen Bullock’s trade-boat crew, who had been held in a hostage-and-ransom racket run by the boss of the Albany docks, Dan Curry. Several of Curry’s gang had died in that venture—not least their boss, who received a bullet between the eyes from the expedition’s leader, Brother Joseph. Shortly after that, a party of New Faith brothers brought to justice the local bully Wayne Karp, whose cohorts and kinspeople ran the old landfill as a salvage business, took apart abandoned buildings for their materials, and pushed around anyone outside their clan with whom they disagreed. In a reckless act one very hot day in June, they’d murdered a young townsman named Shawn Watling up at the landfill’s general supply depot, where salvage was sorted and sold. Robert Earle had been on the premises when the murder happened, though he did not witness it. The courts were not functioning and no one was prosecuted. In the wake of that incident, Robert happened to take Watling’s widow, Britney, and her daughter, Sarah, into his household, a decision that raised more than a few eyebrows around town, though the fact of the matter was that the young widow’s choices were extremely limited. New Faith had tried to recruit her, but she would not go their way.