Free The Witch of Hebron by James Howard Kunstler Page A

don’t carry no cash money. This here’s a waste of your valuable banditry time. Anyways, you are a durn sorry excuse for a minstrel and a worse robber.”
    “You think so? Well, maybe I’ll just have that horse of yours. I’m sick of pounding this road.”
    “This here’s a mule, you dumb ass.”
    “Mind how you speak to me or someone might get hurt after all.”
    “Look right here, boy.” Brother Jobe held an index finger to the outside corner of his right eye.
    “Huh?”
    “That’s right. Look right in.”
    “Think you can run the snake eye on Billy Bones?”
    “I already done it. As we speak, I can see inside your mush-filled brainpan at a throbbing vein within. I’m surprised you can’t feel it.”
    The young man cried out in pain and visibly drooped while his gun hand fell to his side. “Sweet Jesus,” he moaned.
    “Well, look what you found after all.”
    The young man staggered to the side of the road and squatted into his haunches. “What are you doing to me, mister?”
    “I’m calling a halt to these monkeyshines and giving you something to reflect on.”
    “My head’s splitting open,” the boy said, and vomited between his dusty shoes, a thin stream of yellow green puke, as if he had been eating grass for his breakfast.
    “You’ll be all right in a while, long as you quit the vicinity and don’t never show your sorry face here again.”
    At that, Brother Jobe gave Atlas some heel and the big mule resumed his stately walk. As he left Billy Bones on the roadside, the young man was weeping loudly in the sunshine.

FOURTEEN
     
    The Reverend Loren Holder ventured onto the old steel-truss railroad bridge that spanned the Battenkill, thinking he was leaving his last footsteps on solid earth behind him forever. The notion to end his life had seized him in the night with a force comparable to true love, something sudden and irresistible. He’d worked out all the details mentally in the hours before dawn. Though his mood now was such that he seemed to be viewing the whole world through a narrow culvert, he retained enough presence of mind to see the despair that consumed him as a kind of object narrative, so that his life seemed like a story unspooling to this inexorable destination. The bridge. The river. The beautiful day. The end.
    When he got to the middle of the bridge, he dawdled on a girder that supported the rusty old track and its half-rotten ties. He carried a length of rope looped over his shoulder like a mountaineer. It was a very good machine-made nylon rope of the kind that was no longer manufactured or sold, another useful remnant of the old times. It occurred to him that whoever found him ought to be sure to keep the rope for some better use than the one he intended it for.
    He peered over the edge of his precarious perch on the girder. It was a good forty-foot drop to the water. The river was low this time of year and he could see trout finning in the shallow pool down beside the central bridge abutment. These very trout, he thought, had been preceded by how many millions of generations of fish, and how many more would come after? And how many more seasons would revolve in the future history of this mysterious world before all the generations of everything would exhaust themselves? And then what? Would all the worlds and worlds and worlds of worlds fold in upon themselves to nothing? And what could prevent more worlds from emerging out of nothing after that? And might he, Loren, emerge new and whole out of the nothing he intended to enter this beautiful afternoon? He hardly dared hope to find out. A moment of vertigo left him trembling.
    He felt a tear start down his cheek and quickly wiped it away, chiding himself for being a coward in the face of the infinite. He noted also that his strange view of things this day did not include a glimpse of the putative character known as God. He had given up on that personage some time ago, preferring to see a divine spark in his fellow