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

Cossayuna Lake. Then the house burned down during a particularly vicious late-season cold snap when they ran the woodstove all out and a chimney fire got into the old laths in the walls. It was March. A few weeks later on Easter, the temperature reached eighty-six degrees and the last remnants of the winter’s snow melted into something like a banana daiquiri. The world was turning upside down, Trish said. They moved into the abandoned Hi-Dee-Ho Motel while Perry tried to figure out what to do next. The plumbing was shot, the electricity was shut off, and April being what it was, some nights they froze in there. That was when she left. In those last days of the old times, with gasoline getting scarce, a few jitney buses were still running for people who wanted to go somewhere. Now even they were bygone. That May after Trish left him, Perry started to build the shack on the river to get on with the business of living off the land. It seemed more and more evident that the economy was not coming back to anything like it had been.
    Trish didn’t say where she was going, but she had a brother in Plattsburgh, a hundred miles north on Lake Champlain, and Perry suspected she was there. He sometimes entertained notions about venturing up there to bring her back— back home , he put it to himself, as if to suggest he would be doing her a service—but it sure wouldn’t be a matter of just driving up some afternoon and stuffing her in the car. At best, now, he might rent a horse and cart from Mr. Allison and it would take maybe two weeks up and back, and he worried about what kind of hazards lurked on the roads. There was talk of pickers (bandits) in the places between towns that had gone back to near wild, and the roads themselves were in miserable shape after years of frost heaves and neglect. Hardly anyone went anywhere anymore. In less sober moments, Perry also dreamed of tromping all the way up to Plattsburgh in winter on snowshoes like some kind of mountain man from the pioneer days, and he imagined the impression he would make when he got there: a hunk of avenging muscle, fur-swaddled, with blood in his eyes, come to claim his woman!
    That was where the fantasy fell apart. His brother-in-law, Randy, was the type to take an aluminum baseball bat to somebody when only mildly annoyed, and he was a large fellow, much bigger than Perry. And besides, why would he want to force Trish to be with him against her will? That wasn’t love. Perry was overwhelmed suddenly with sorrow for his own stupidity. If only he’d cleaned that damned chimney out.
    In despair, he got out of bed, threw some pine chunks into the potbellied stove, which stood across the single room of his shack, and sat down in the chair beside it. He’d made the chair himself out of cedar roots. It was as solid as a throne. On the adjacent table was the bottle of corn whiskey he’d been working on earlier in the evening, along with his lap dulcimer, also made by hand out of spruce and cherrywood, with strings taken from a ruined piano he’d come across in a church basement out on the Spraguetown road. He poured a glass of the whiskey, which was a 150-proof straight distillate filtered through charcoal and flavored with artemisia (wormwood), which gave it a taste weirdly reminiscent of marshmallows.
    The whiskey drove the panicky edge off his despair and left him with the more familiar and manageable feeling of pure loneliness, which he was able to channel into the simple tonic chords he had learned to produce on his dulcimer. His pluckings formed a sound track that allowed him to comprehend and bear what he had become. They were also, it seemed to him, a defense against God’s apparent plan to heap hardships upon him, though he was not altogether certain that it was God behind his tribulations. Perhaps it was God’s eternal opponent, the fallen angel, the Dark One. He sometimes thought of his music as an attempt to call out to God, in the grammar of God’s own