The Witch of Hebron by James Howard Kunstler Read Free Book Online Page A

clicked his tongue a few times. The stallion jerked up his head. Thinking to make sure the animal remained calm, Jasper begin humming a tune. It was “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” The stallion gave out a little whinny and dashed twenty yards toward the center of the paddock. There, he wheeled as if taking in his entire surroundings and then ran the rest of the way to the opposite perimeter. Jasper continued the song, now softly singing the lyrics. Soon the horse began making his way around the fence line at a trot, fully awake, as if challenging any interloper. He came directly toward Jasper, who continued to sing evenly. Jupitar replied with a snort, his big eyes flashing, and stepped up boldly to the fence where the boy stood on the bottom rail so that horse and boy were, for that moment, at eye level. Jupiter dipped his head as though playing a game and made another half-circuit around the perimeter, ending up again on the far side of the paddock.
    It occurred to Jasper that nothing might induce the stallion to come to him. But he was not afraid to go inside the paddock and try to go to him. He reasoned that Jupiter was used to being handled by the New Faith men. He set down his backpack against the post and climbed through the fence rails, then walked deliberately toward the horse. It sidestepped warily to the left. The boy countered, steadily clicking his tongue. Jupiter stepped back into a corner where the fence met the side of the old schoolbus barn and finally submitted to the inevitability of being approached by a human being. Jasper felt sorry, momentarily, for the stallion’s dumb domesticity. When the unwelcome notion that the stallion was a beautiful creature intruded, the boy remembered what a beautiful creature his dog Willie had been and how carelessly this stallion had stomped the life out of him.
    Twin clouds of steam blew out of Jupiter’s nostrils. Jasper slowly reached in his pocket and retrieved the lumpy rag from it. He carefully opened the rag, took out the sticky ball of oats, sorghum syrup, and opium, and held it out in his palm. The stallion looked at him fiercely. Jasper remained in position, motionless, arm extended, perfectly still. The stallion took a tentative step in his direction, sniffed the sweet gummy ball, snorted at it, and touched it with his prehensile lips. Then, at last, he took the whole thing delicately out of Jasper’s upturned palm. The boy watched the horse chew the sticky mass as he lowered his arm and felt the tension flow out of his muscles. Then he about-faced and hurried back to the rail fence, where he collected his backpack and made off into what remained of the night, thrilled by the horror of his prospects and by what he had done.

NINE
     
    Habitually a poor sleeper, Perry Talisker lay alone on a thin mattress in his shack by the river listening to the endless tragic music of the water rushing over its own hard bed. Sometimes, Perry’s loneliness cocooned him in such a tight place that he cried out against God’s mysterious wrath, and he wondered what he had done to become the object of it.
    He missed his wife, Trish, who had left him years ago when times had just started to get hard and the Hovington Supermarket chain closed down, including the one at Union Grove Plaza, because the truckers could not make their deliveries, and no meat came in for Perry to butcher and sort, and the local farmers had not yet come to realize the necessity of raising meat for more than themselves, and the whole equation of chain retail failed. In the store’s last weeks, the electricity was still on, but the cooler and freezer shelves were bare. They’d run out of everything they needed to get the job done anyway, including foam trays, shrink wrap, and self-adhesive label blanks for the check scale.
    More than a few people died that first year without heating oil, mainly the old. Perry had barely gotten himself and Trish through the winter by jacking deer and ice-fishing at