She was out the door before he could ask her name.
When the tub was filled to his satisfaction, Jasper folded his dirty clothes and left them in a pile on the floor across the room, between a sink and an unlit chunk stove. He climbed into the tub and sank slowly into the steaming water, marveling at the luxury of it. The soap was very harsh and the brushes very stiff. He worked to scrub the grime out of his fingernails, and everywhere else he could see, and when he was done scrubbing he ventured out of the tub to pump more hot water in. He had almost fallen asleep again, lying back in the warm, soapy water, when the door creaked and the girl returned. Jasper cupped his private parts in both hands and went rigid.
“Don’t come in here,” he croaked. “Please.”
“It’s nothing to me to see a naked person,” she said.
“I’m not used to it.”
“Lookit, I brought you a nice nightshirt,” she said.
“Can you just hang it on the hook there.”
“Madam told me to put you to bed.”
“Okay.”
The girl hung the nightshirt up on the back of the door, strode confidently across the room, and grabbed a white cotton towel off the table.
“I can get one myself,” Jasper said.
She came over to the edge of the tub, dangling the towel.
“Here,” she said. “Take it.”
“I can’t take it.”
“Why not?”
“I’m covering myself.”
“So, uncover yourself.”
“Can’t you just drop it on the floor next to the tub?”
“There’s water on the floor. Look what a mess you made! You slopped water all over the floor.”
“I’m not getting out with you in here.”
“Fine,” the girl said, and tossed the towel back on the table with the stack of folded ones. “I’ll be in the hall.”
She marched out of the room. The door shut with a resonant click. Jasper opened the tub drain, stood up, and cautiously climbed out. He was halfway to the table when the door opened and the girl came back into the bathroom. Jasper lunged for the towel and wrapped it around himself.
“You don’t even have hair down there yet,” the girl said and started to laugh, bringing a hand up to cover her mouth as she did. Jasper just cringed in place. The girl came forward again, took a second towel off the table, and began drying Jasper’s hair and shoulders while he remained hunched in mortification. The towel smelled of strong soap. “How old are you, anyway?” she asked.
“Eleven,” Jasper mumbled.
“I’m thirteen,” the girl said. “I could have a child soon.”
“That would make you somebody’s mother,” Jasper said.
“You’re brilliant,” the girl said.
She declared Jasper dry and retrieved the nightshirt from the hook on the door.
“Put your hands over your head.”
“I can put it on myself.”
“Okay, put it on yourself.” She handed over the nightshirt. He took it in his left hand while he held the towel over himself with his right.
“Would you at least turn around?” he asked.
“I’m not going to look at you.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I’m not the least bit interested in you.”
“Then turn around. Please.”
“Oh, all right, you big baby.”
She turned around. Jasper turned his back on her, too, dropped the towel and slipped on the nightshirt, which also smelled of strong soap. When he turned back around, she was facing him again.
“I saw your backside,” she said.
“Did you enjoy it?”
“It’s a nice little backside.”
“Everybody has one.”
“So true,” she said.
“Even you,” he said.
“I have a very nice one, thank you.”
“Good for you.”
“People have commented.”
“Do you go around showing it off?”
“Not especially.”
“Then why would anybody care?”
The girl smiled. It transformed her face.
“You really don’t know, do you?”
“Why, is it some big secret?”
“You could say that,” the girl said. “Pick up your boots and come with me.”
“What about my clothes?”
“You’ll get them back clean tomorrow. We do wash morning, noon, and night around here. Come now.”
She scooped the candle off the dressing table. With his boots in one hand and his knapsack over his shoulder, he followed the girl farther down the back hallway to a small bedroom. It contained a bed with a few threadbare stuffed animals on it, a bookcase, a battered chest of drawers with a lace counterpane and little colored glass bottles and other small treasures on it, and a small doorless closet with a few dresses and coats hanging within. On the wall was an old poster in black-and-white of the New York City skyline lit up at night in the old times, viewed from under the span of the Brooklyn Bridge. The girl turned down the sheets and blankets and told Jasper to get under the covers. He did. She put down her candle and sat on the edge of the bed. Jasper lay back blinking at her.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Robin.”
“Are you somebody’s daughter?”
Robin laughed ruefully. “Of course, silly.”
“Who? Madam?”
“No one here.”
“Why are you here?”
“I’m an orphan,” she said. “I heard about who you are.”
“I’m nobody,” he said. “Whose bed is this?”
“Mine.”
“I can’t sleep in your bed.”
“You’re nobody, so there’s nobody here.”
“You’re a girl.”
“Thanks for noticing. Anyway, I have things to do still. We only get busy at night and I have to fetch and do for the ladies.”
“Just give me a blanket and I’ll sleep on the floor,” Jasper said, but moments after the last word left his lips, he fell fast asleep.
“Good night, nobody.”
Robin leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead, then reached for her candle and left the room.
FORTY-SEVEN
Brother Jobe gritted his teeth and grunted, gazing up at the star-strewn heavens, his gut aching and his mind roiled by disturbing notions. The pain in his belly had retreated during the day and then returned after his supper of mashed potatoes, fried cabbage, and salt ham with the inevitable corn bread. The pain started with the ham, and he had tried to quell it with whiskey, which he now regarded as a damn-fool boneheaded mistake, since the idea was growing on him that he had developed cancer of the stomach—weakness of the gut ran in the males of his line. His daddy had fallen ill back when the American car industry was collapsing and headquarters in Detroit called one day to say they had a mind to close down the family’s Ford dealership. His daddy fought the higher-ups, but they had to consolidate, they said, to save the company. His father drank Pepto-Bismol by the crate that year and lost seventy pounds until he looked like a scarecrow in his old shirt collars. A visit to the hospital and a battery of tests sealed his fate. The doctors poured chemicals into his veins and aimed radiation into his gut for nine months, but it was an ugly, losing battle. The way Brother Jobe saw it, the Ford Motor Company had killed his daddy just as surely as if they’d stuck a tire iron in his heart.
It all happened so quickly. And then the United States itself got some kind of fatal thrombosis of the economy, and people all over Scott County lost jobs and couldn’t pay their obligations, and the malls shut down one by one, and the oil stopped coming from Mexico and Venezuela and Africa and wherever else it used to come from until neighbor was fighting neighbor for it at the pumps, and then the goldurn pumps shut down. And then things really started going downhill. The lights went out. Folks started shooting. It was sickening. The whole Sun Belt was boiling over with gunfire and with animosities that everybody thought had been left behind in the old century. Boy were they wrong. By then, Brother Jobe was running his New Faith church in a tin-can Butler building that used to be a beverage store out on Highway 664. He never liked the building but it was all he could afford. To his way of thinking, the building itself was kind of an affront to the grace of Jesus. Anyway, before you knew it, Brother Jobe and his people had to get out of Scott County, Virginia, and they went north, where things were said to be more peaceful.
Now, as Brother Jobe looked up into the autumn night sky he thought that the constellation Pegasus traced the shape of a Ford F-110 pickup truck. He gnashed his teeth at the pain in his gut and cursed Henry Ford and the invention of the automobile, which had ruined his father as well as his beloved state of Virginia, with every meadow and pasture paved over for discount shopping and the NASCAR nonsense.
His two men, Brothers Elam and Seth, slept in their bedrolls a few yards away across the glowing remnants of their campfire. Elam snored like an outboard motor. They were tired from a long day in the saddle and then having to dig a grave for the old man. Brother Jobe was weary, too, but his gut hurt too much to sleep. He wished he could conjure a healing spell upon himself, but his gifts, such as they were, ran in other directions. They mystified even him, the possessor of them. But they were what they were.
Someone lit a candle in an upstairs room of the Lovejoy farmhouse. It couldn’t have been anyone but Martha up there, he thought. How did she imagine that she could carry on alone all the way out here? And if, in the days or weeks ahead, with winter coming on, she realized the futility of her situation and set out from this desolate place to find family or loved ones elsewhere who might take her in—why, then, how would he, Brother Jobe, find her again when he finally took the vicious child he was after into custody, hauled him back to Union Grove, and sued for prosecution of his crimes? Not to mention the singing bandit. Martha’s pigheaded independence galled him. As another spasm of pain sliced through his gut, Brother Jobe wished he might strike a taste of his own pain into Martha, for her impudence, and in the process perhaps persuade her to come back to town with them. At that moment he thought he heard a groan from the vicinity of the upstairs room with the candle burning in it. It soothed him to feel his righteous powers in operation, and he turned his gaze away from the farmhouse window back to the stars above, whispering into the darkness: “Oh, Jesus, son of mercy, by thy wounds am I healed. I resist sickness and disease. Carry my sorrows and let me walk again in wholeness. All praise to thee, thy will be done, amen.…”
FORTY-EIGHT
The angles of the wall suddenly yielded to curves as Loren Holder tried to focus his vision beyond Barbara Maglie, who led him gently by the hand upstairs into a bedroom. She had fed him a supper of smoked trout chowder, little dumplings of acorn squash worked into cornmeal and fresh cheese in sage and butter, sausage sautéed with apples, and a pear pudding. It took her two hours to prepare the meal and he did not tire of watching her move about in her kitchen. He listened to her talk about her life, and he talked to her of his life, and they shared stories about the common life of their times and their country. She’d given him an especially fine delicate etched stemmed glass to drink from and she refilled it repeatedly with a reddish beverage she brewed herself. It was a potent infusion made with various amounts of monkshood, ginseng,
Turnera diffusa, Tribulus terrestris, Datura metel
—one of the nightshades— cardamom, Salvinorin A, hellebore, cherry root, borage, staghorn sumac (for color), and active agents from the resin of
Cannibis sativa
.
In the sparsely furnished but airy room above, Barbara lit beeswax candles on stands at each side of a low platform bed, which was covered with an intricate patchwork quilt in the design of a nine-pointed star.
“Did you make that yourself?” Loren asked.
“No,” Barbara said. “Someone gave it to me.”
“It’s complex.”
In one corner a little chunk stove stood with glowing embers visible through the window in its door. The room was quite warm, a novelty in these times, especially at this time of year.
“Are you comfortable?” she asked.
“My thoughts are racing.”
“Don’t worry. Soon we’ll focus them.”
One thought that raced through Loren’s mind was that it might be better to flee the premises than go through with the ceremonies at hand. But he apprehended that it was only a thought, and no accompanying panic rose up in him to assist the impulse toward action. He was amazed at how easy it was to dismiss it and see it replaced by another thought: a recognition of how beautiful Barbara Maglie’s face looked in the flickering light.
“Let me help you take those boots off,” she said.
He looked around and, seeing no chair in the room, sat at the edge of the low bed. Loren watched Barbara pull off his boots as if she were bringing to conclusion a long ordeal in his existence. She took the boots and very deliberately arranged each before the window opposite the bed, with the toes pointing outward.
“What’s that for?” Loren asked.
“You’ll walk on moonbeams when you leave here.”
“There was something in those drinks you gave me, wasn’t there.”
“A few things.
“I was a stoner back in the day.”
“I know. You told me.”
“I did?”
“Yes.”
“I’m more than a little stoned.”
“I would think so. I’ve got something else for you.” She reached for an inlaid enamel box and held it open for him.
“What’s this?”
“A little extra treat for your spirit.”
“How did you learn so much about herbals,” Loren asked and reached tentatively for a dark lozenge-shaped tidbit in the box, turning his gaze from the box to Barbara and back.
“I’m a witch.”
He broke into a sudden gale of laughter. “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”
Barbara smiled radiantly, enjoying his intoxication.
“I’m a good witch,” she said.
Loren recomposed himself.
“Okay then,” he said. He placed one of the little tidbits in his mouth. It was sweet, fruity, with an undertone of turpentine.
“Be still and behold,” she said.
She kicked off her slippers, reached down and pulled a draw-string at her waist that let her skirt fall, and, in a motion that seemed continuous, crossed her arms and drew her cotton blouse over her head so that she was left perfectly naked. Loren felt things shift drastically inside of himself, a long-lost feeling that was like the return of a familiar companion after a long separation.