Kunstler - The Witch of Hebron

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

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 authors 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 permissions@groveatlantic.com.

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

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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 isnt functioning. There may be a president and he may be in Minneapolis, but its 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.

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 Deavers 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 Groves only doctor, and Ned Allison, whose father, a doctor of philosophy, not medicine, and once vice president of a now defunct college, ran the towns livery stableas 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 Einhorns 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 hes in there, Ned whispered. I saw something move. Cmon, lets 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 isnt right, Jasper said, but he kept looking anyway.

Crazy people bear watching.

My dad says hes 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, hes crying now, Ned said. Jesus.

The sobbing continued. Whatever they thought they had witnessedand 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.

Lets 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 didnt discuss what they had seen. Each in his own way was embarrassed by it, sensing the dark mystery it represented and the indecorum of watching 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 fathers 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.