Free The Witch of Hebron by James Howard Kunstler Page B

human beings, who had, after all, dreamed up this great Lord and protector to avoid the lonely burdens of their own sanctity. And so, Loren reasoned, it was a more responsible thing to deny the existence of the deity to the very end than to succumb to the fairy tales about him and his celestial kingdom. That was Loren’s theory, and he was oddly satisfied with himself for having summed it up so concisely in his own mind, especially at this moment. It would allow him to enter the cosmic interstices between this life and whatever lay beyond it clear-eyed and honestly. He took the coil of rope off his shoulder, looked up into the truss work of the bridge, and tried to calculate which structural member above would be the most suitable to tie up to. This took his mind off metaphysics.
    When he’d chosen a particular horizontal beam, he attempted to lob his coil of rope over it, not a hard trick for someone who once had a pretty good layup shot on the basketball court. Except that, in his tremulous state, he forgot to hold on to one end of the rope, and the whole rope sailed over the beam in a clump and arced down into the river, where it landed with a splash, spooking many large trout. He watched it catch the current and float away past a tangle of blowdown around the next bend.
    “Reverend,” somebody said softly behind him.
    Loren wheeled around to find Britney Watling standing on the tracks with pack basket slung over one shoulder. He regarded her with a combination of wonder and horror.
    “I was over there.” She pointed to the far end of the bridge. “I couldn’t help noticing.”
    Loren was struck, at that moment, by an incongruous recognition of the young woman’s beauty in the autumn sunlight, her caramel hair piled up halolike, her small mouth slightly open, her upper lip an inquisitive pink V, and the soft flesh just beneath her collarbone heaving slightly with each breath.
    “Do you remember a more beautiful day?” she asked.
    Loren’s throat was so dry he could not even croak out an answer.
    “This is the kind of day you think God is in everything,” she added.
    “Of course,” Loren said.
    “Are you feeling okay?”
    Loren nodded.
    “You’re all shaky.”
    “I slipped for a second. Lost my footing.”
    “You could break your neck falling off this thing. I always stay over here in the middle, where you can’t fall off. Why don’t you step away from the edge and come over by me.”
    Loren nodded and stepped off the girder and came over beside her.
    “Thank you,” Britney said. “You were making me nervous.”
    As Loren quietly hyperventilated, the staggering beauty of the world flooded his senses. His heart raced.
    “Robert and the doc have taken off,” she said.
    “Taken off where?”
    “The doc’s son ran away. They’re looking for him.”
    “Why did he run away?”
    “His dog got killed by a horse.”
    Without speaking further, Britney reached out and took Loren’s large hand in her small one. He was shivering as though he had just survived a plunge in an icy pool. Together they walked off the bridge back toward town.

FIFTEEN
     
    Jasper Copeland stayed off the roads for the remainder of the afternoon as he moved north from Union Grove in the direction of Glens Falls. He’d traveled seven miles through woods, fields, and orchards since his adventure in the potato field. His mood, however, had devolved from ebullient that morning to dejected as the day wore on. His pack seemed heavier and his prospects for the coming night seemed increasingly uncertain, and a longing for the familiar things of home began to stir dimly in a remote sector of his consciousness. He dragged in his footsteps, searching now for a place to spend the night, until he came upon a ruined fieldstone foundation that was little more than a pentimento on the landscape of an earlier society—in this case, the house of one Benjamin Rodney, an early settler of Washington County, who laid the stones in 1762 and whose