The Witch of Hebron Read online

  Now, as the summer turned the corner into fall, and the remorseless heat yielded to temperate days and cool nights, and the hills and hollows of Washington County lay ripe with the harvest, the people of Union Grove settled into a deferential amity with the pious newcomers. But suspicion about the group, and its odd ways, persisted quietly among the “regulars,” as the townsfolk now distinguished themselves from the New Faithers.

  The three men crossed the first floor to the riverside end of the mill building, where a waterwheel would go. There was a hole in the brick wall there, awaiting the hub and the machine linkages and gearing that would run off its axle. The site was a good one. The river ran through a natural rocky flume that channeled the water tightly and concentrated its power.

  “It looks like you got about twelve foot of head going to that old millrace,” Shiloh said, speaking loudly above the whoosh of water in the flume outside. “The way she lies, I recommend an overshot wheel. Lifting water up here will be the least of it. We can fabricate a serviceable pump. It’ll be a little crude but give you all you need. You’ll have a good deal of power left over for a takeoff to run the mangles and agitators and whatnot. Probably mill some corn while you’re at it,” Shiloh couldn’t resist adding. “Pity to run those raggedy clothes you-alls wear through this fine new setup, though,” he said.

  “Maybe we’ll dress up more when it’s going,” Loren said.

  “No disrespect, Reverend, but why wait?” Shiloh said. “That beat-down look can’t be good for the town spirit. And those beards are downright primitive.”

  “If we all dressed alike, how could we tell our folks from your bunch?”

  “Oh, we’ll all come together by and by,” Shiloh said. “You’ll see.”

  “All drinking from the same Kool-Aid bowl?”

  Robert could see where this was leading. His good friend Loren had an instinct for the last word, and he had been in prickly spirits for many months, especially where the New Faithers were concerned.

  Robert ventured to change the subject. “Do you suppose we might get some electric running off of this waterwheel setup as well as all the other stuff ?” he said.

  “In theory, sure,” Shiloh said. “Question is scrounging up anything like a suitable generator or finding enough scraps to piece one together, not to mention the right size copper wire, plus your step-down transformers and whatnot.”

  “Mr. Bullock has a little hydro unit running at his place, you know.”

  “I’ve heard. Shows it can be done.…”

  Their attention was diverted by a commotion at the street end of the big building. Brother Jobe, minister and chief executive of the New Faith Covenant Church of Jesus, clamored up the crude plank ramp that substituted for steps at the front entrance. He was incapable of entering a place quietly. He never simply moved from point A to point B—he bustled. Today he was accompanied by one Brother Eben, a slight, red-haired Carolinian, who scribbled with a pencil into a pad of foolscap even as he tried to step over heaps of scrap lumber and stacks of brick and buckets and other hazards in his path. Brother Jobe appeared to be issuing directives and Eben wrote them down as rapidly as possible.

  “... and I’m serious as all get-out on this hog business,” he said to Eben. “We are going to raise us some commercial-grade pork next year, and I think we can show these folks hereabouts a thing or two about hams. It’s the feed and the cure both. We going to finish ours on acorn, and this here allotment is thick with sweet white oak. Ah, gentlemen, I thought I would find you down here.”

  “Evening,” Robert said.

  “We’ve just acquired twenty-two acres adjoining our holdings to the north.”

  “Who from?” Robert asked.

  “A Mr. Kelvin Lochner.”

  “He’s dead,” Loren said.

  “Yes, I’m aware of that. Mr. Murray is seeing to the title issues,” Brother Jobe said. With the legal system in tatters, Attorney Dale Murray affected to act as the town’s chief conveyer of land deemed to be in ownership limbo, with the heirs and assigns scattered to the four winds. But with the registry of deeds at the county seat in Fort Edward having burned to the ground two years previously in a suspicious fire, it was unclear what he pretended to accomplish, other than collecting a fee now and again. A drinker and Robert Earle’s predecessor as Union Grove’s mayor, Murray had “sold” the vacant, decaying high school and all its property to the New Faithers in the spring for what amounted to a promissory note.

  “Anyways, we’re looking to put in a hog operation there,” Brother Jobe said, grinning broadly.

  “Pigs smell bad,” Robert said.

  “That’s true. Pigs ain’t house cats, for sure. But these are the new times and things got to be done a little differently. I think you’ll agree that the niceties of single-use zoning is over and done with. Now imagine the taste of barbequed baby back ribs melting in your mouth. Not to say country sausage. And did I mention anything about Virginia-style hams?”

  “I think our folks might object.”

  “Object to ham? I never heard such nonsense. Half your folks in town here got goats and we all got chickens. A pig is a noble beast. Only thing smarter than a pig, I hear, is a human being or a ding-dang dolphin, if there’s any left out there. Besides, we ain’t going hog wild, no pun intended. We going to start real modestly and work up. Your folks will get over it. Now look here,” Brother Jobe changed the subject, “it appears like we missed a case of this here corn smudge.”

  Washington County had been afflicted with a formerly unknown crop disease that blackened the corn kernels on the stalk. It prompted the town trustees to vote in an emergency law requiring the destruction of affected crops. The disease had appeared on three farms so far, including that of trustee Ned Larmon, where it was first discovered. He’d sacrificed five acres of standing corn back in September.

  “Who is it this time?” Loren asked.

  “This fellow, Corey Elder, on the Center Falls Road.”

  “He’s a hard one.”

  “I’ll depend on you to talk sense to him.”

  As constable, it was Loren’s job to ask the affected farmer to voluntarily comply. So far, no one had refused. They had been promised fair compensation.

  “You tell this farmer he can get it back either in corn or direct in silver, his choice,” Brother Jobe said. “But he’s got to act. We can’t have this corn sickness running rampant. And if you’re nervous about going over there, you can have some of our boys for backup.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Loren said. “I’ll go talk to him.”

  THREE

  As Jasper Copeland raced through the stubble field after his dog, he caught a shoe on the butt of a cornstalk. It sent him sprawling facedown against the hard ground. As he got up and resumed running he saw the big brown stallion rear back on its hind legs, whinnying wildly. He was aware of his heart pounding, and not just from the dash across the field. As he drew closer to the paddock, he saw Willie dart in and away and around the bigger animal, nipping at its fetlocks and even leaping up at its muzzle, barking the whole time.

  Jasper cried “Willie, stop it!” and “Willie, come!” and “Willie, no!” over and over but the dog would not stop harrying the stallion. The stallion reared repeatedly. Jasper’s heart sank as it pounded in his chest. He banged up against the split-rail fence, where he continued to yell at Willie. And then as the horse came down again and its hooves seemed to miss Willie by inches, Jasper ducked inside the fence and ran toward the horse, brandishing his father’s fly rod as if it were a carriage whip. The horse reared again and Jasper tried repeatedly to beat it across the head with the rod without effect. This time when the horse came down, its hooves found some part of the dog’s body. There was more than one scream. The stallion bolted away, leaving Jasper alone with the dog lying at his feet.

  He gaped down at Willie in disbelief. The dog was still alive, eyes open, panting shallowly, but otherwise not moving. He lay on his side with a drop of blo
od forming a bubble at one nostril. With mounting terror, Jasper scooped the dog into his arms, ducked through the fence, and began loping toward what had been the old main driveway to the high school where Salem Street turned into the North Road at the edge of town. He ran all the way home with Willie cradled in his arms, though the dog weighed thirty-eight pounds. When he finally got there and cried out for his father, he felt like his heart was going to burst.

  Dr. Jerry Copeland rushed out of his lab behind the room where he saw patients. Jasper had laid Willie on the padded examination table and was screaming, “Daddy, please, save him!”

  “What happened?”

  Jasper explained about Willie chasing a groundhog into the paddock where the stallion was.

  Dr. Copeland grabbed a stethoscope and found a heartbeat, but in doing so he realized that he knew almost nothing about canine anatomy, other than that they had the usual array of mammalian organs and that he was unlikely to be able to do anything to save the dog. There was one other remote possibility.

  “Go run over to Mr. LaBountie’s place and ask him to hurry over here as quick as he can,” the doctor told Jasper. Jason LaBountie was Union Grove’s veterinarian. The boy blinked and nodded. He shifted his attention to Willie on the table and ran his hand along the dog’s side, from his ears, which were still very warm, all down its flank.

  “Don’t, Son,” the doctor said. “He’s in shock. Better not to touch him.”

  Jasper was well acquainted with the meaning of shock, being the son of a doctor in a time and place where there was no longer any access to hospitals. Everything came to his father’s doorstep these days. He often assisted his father with patients after school and in the evenings, even in surgeries, and had already acquired as much knowledge as a first-year medical student might have in the old times, though available remedies were much sparser and advanced technologies no longer existed.

  “Go, quickly now,” the doctor said.

  The boy nodded again and ran out of the office.

  The doctor began to systematically examine the dog’s body to try to assess its injuries. There were no obvious wounds on the surface. Its abdomen seemed distended and he suspected that the animal was bleeding internally. There was some blood mixed with fecal matter around its rectum and a small discharge at the nose. Through the stethoscope he heard the rales and crepitations that signified fluid in the lungs. The heartbeat was accelerating and the dog’s panting was noticeably quicker and shallower than minutes before. He was quite sure the dog was not going to make it. He thought of his internship out in Madison, Wisconsin, years ago, those rotations in the emergency room, the incredible destruction of the body in a car crash, the moment when life left the body and all the wonders of modern medicine did not avail to make sense of that awful moment. These days there were no more car crashes, at least.

  A movement across the room brought him out of himself. His wife, Jeanette, closed the door behind her. She had a handsome dish-shaped face with very large, questioning eyes. Her family had moved to America from France when she was nine years old. He could see her size up the situation immediately. She was a nurse.

  “Oh, Jerry…,” she said.

  He could only offer a sigh and a pained glance.

  Then Willie convulsed and gave out a strange little strangled bark that resolved in a sickening gurgle. Jeanette flew across the room to the doctor’s side. After another moment, the dog lay still with its eyes wide open and their own anxious breathing was the only sound in the room. Jeanette buried her face in her husband’s shoulder as her eyes filled with tears. The doctor took her in his arms. Looking over the top of her head, he could not help but observe what a beautiful dog Willie was. The dog population was way down in these new times. Most people had little surplus meat to feed them and manufactured pet foods no longer existed. The doctor had gotten Willie as a puppy in barter for treating the daughter of Lloyd Hokely, the sawmill owner up in Battenville. She had been bitten by a copperhead snake. There was not much the doctor could do. There wasn’t even any ice to be had out that way on short notice, so icing the leg was out. He ran a saline IV drip into her, gave her some willow extract, and that was about it. The bite of such a snake was generally not fatal, and the girl was nearly full-grown at fifteen, so she recovered fully. The doctor left the Hokely place with the puppy in his lap in payment for services as he drove his cart back to town behind a horse named Mac. He fell in love with the puppy right away.

  “Where’s our boy?” Jeanette asked, turning around. The doctor told her. Just at that moment, Jasper’s little sister, Dinah, five, stepped warily into the room. Jeanette watched her attempt to take in the scene.

  “What’s wrong with Willie?” Dinah said.

  “Nothing,” the doctor said, at once ashamed and angry with himself for lying.

  Jeanette hurried across the room, swept the child off her feet, and made for the door. The doctor heard Dinah break out bawling as they left the office.

  When they were gone the doctor poured himself a glass of 100-proof pear brandy, which he kept in a fine glass-stoppered decanter on the steel cart beside the examination table. He often administered a dose of strong spirits to patients who came in, just to calm them down enough so he could proceed with treatment. He’d run out of advanced analgesics years ago and was otherwise reduced to using opiates and other herbals.

  The brandy warmed the doctor’s stomach. He soon began to feel it move through his stomach lining into his bloodstream and brain. He sat down in the padded chair beside the cart to wait for his boy. The beauty of the dog’s still body brought tears to his eyes.

  FOUR

  Jason LaBountie, a large specimen of a man, sweating even in the cool evening air, entered the doctor’s examination room like an ox coming into a stall. He had cornbread crumbs in his beard and the doctor imagined that he’d been dragged away from the dinner table. He came right to the exam table and bent so closely over Willie’s body that he appeared to be sniffing it. Meanwhile, Jasper entered the room.

  “This dog’s passed on,” LaBountie said.

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “I’m afraid we’ve lost him.”

  “Isn’t there something you can do?” the boy asked.

  LaBountie shook his head. “The life has gone out of him.”

  “I’ve seen my daddy start up people’s hearts. Can’t you try?” the boy said, almost yelling. “Either of you?”

  “He’s beyond that, even if we tried,” LaBountie told the boy. Then he turned to the doctor. “He was stomped pretty good, looks like.”

  “Well, apparently so,” the doctor said.

  LaBountie addressed the boy: “Severe internal injuries. Hemorrhage. Shock. It’s a bigger deal than just an arrested heart, young man. Awful sorry.”

  Jasper recoiled into a far corner of the room, sank on his haunches, and began to sob in a high keening manner. Darkness crowded the windows and the room seemed to dim moment by moment. The doctor turned to the steel cart behind him. Among the items on it was a fat three-wick candle to which he struck a match. He turned back around with the candle on its brass saucer.

  “I told the boy I was strictly a large-animal man, Jerry,” LaBountie said. “I haven’t worked on dogs and cats since the old days in vet school. We don’t have a dog ourselves.”

  “It’s moot now. Thanks for coming, though.”

  “There’s damn few dogs around the county these days.”

  The doctor grunted in affirmation.

  “Who can afford to feed a dog now?”

  The doctor realized it was self-evident that he was able to. “Hell, Jason,” he said, “you must take some pay for service in meat, given your line of work.”

  “Sure I do. But not enough for a dog.”

  “Is trade in kind okay with you on this call? Or are you looking to get paid?”

  “Well, I doctor my own family,” LaBountie said.

  “I thought you were strictly a large-animal man,” the doctor said.


  “My kids are large enough. Anyway, I ran like hell to get here.”

  “We appreciate it.”

  “You can send over a ham sometime, Jerry. You’ll do that, won’t you?”

  “Of course I will, Jason,” the doctor said.

  The two men had locked eyes, while the boy remained sitting in the corner with his knees drawn up and his face buried in his crossed arms. Just then a gust of cold wind rattled the door and then seemed to blow it open. The figure of a short man in a dark suit with a broad-brimmed hat stood framed within it.

  The doctor and the vet turned to take in the intruder. Jasper looked up, red-eyed.