by James Morrow
That spring and summer Jennet’s father conducted the modest cleansing of 1693, a project that took him and Dunstan first to Topsfield and thence to Rowley. Whilst the prickers managed to indict six Satanists in these villages, the newly created Massachusetts Superior Court acquitted all but two. A propitious ratio, she decided, though not propitious enough to put her soul at ease. Whenever she walked through Haverhill on a mission to buy flour, mend harness, grind knives, or absorb gossip, she could not help scanning the children’s faces, wondering who amongst them might be destined for the gallows. Would a jury one day see diabolism in the sprightly eyes and mischievous smirk of the tavern-keeper’s daughter? Would the miller’s slow-witted niece ultimately stand convicted of carnal congress with incubi? Would the tanner’s bulky son go to the hangman in consequence of a pricker’s tests?
The hunt of 1694 proved the leanest yet—four arrests, one execution. Throughout the subsequent winter Walter perused his private library, ferreting out obscure bits of demonological lore and synthesizing them into prolix monographs that he then dispatched with lofty expectations to his London benefactors. By showing the Privy Council that he was not a mere pricker but a scholar of near-Thomist perspicacity, he sought to cast himself as a man worthy of respect, solicitude, and a salary increase. He’d grown particularly obsessed with an assertion in George Sinclair’s Sermons by Satan: the odd notion that the sensitivity of a Paracelsus trident doubled following its immersion in a kettle filled with boiling frog’s blood. Thus it was that, as April’s ubiquitous buds became a lush tapestry of May wildflowers spreading across the Merrimack Valley, Walter decreed that, upon completing their chores each day, Jennet and Dunstan must scour the Haverhill fens for frogs, and by month’s end they’d caught a dozen.
Although Dunstan preferred hunting collaboratively, so he might fill his sister’s ear with further accounts of Abby’s histrionics in Salem, Jennet usually elected to search alone. The conjunction of swamp and solitude launched her thoughts on unexpected trajectories—and yet, woolly as they were, she came to realize that these musings shared a common theme: escape. For she was almost eighteen now, old enough to make her way to Boston and find employment as a serving-maid, housekeeper, governess…any such position would do, provided it allowed her at least one free afternoon each week, a few golden hours for grappling with the Principia Mathematica. In her mind a sacred vow took shape. No matter what obstacles emerged, she would flee on Aunt Isobel’s birthday, the seventh of July. Even if she awoke shivering with a fever, even if the Nimacooks were proclaiming an intention to kill every white wayfarer who ventured across their lands, even if a terrible thunder-gust was blowing through the town, hurtling sheep into the air and turning the streets to raging rivers—come that dawn, she would pack up her Principia and her Woman’s Garden and quit Haverhill forever.
But first she would remove her father’s license from his door and rip it into a thousand pieces.
j
THE LAST AFTERNOON IN JUNE found sister and brother sitting by the Merrimack, Jennet contemplating a cohort of honeybees as they fertilized some bergamot, Dunstan sketching with his wax crayons. For a subject he’d selected a rock formation that surmounted the cliff-face on the far shore: a granite horse’s head emerging from the promontory like an enormous white chess-knight—not an ordinary horse, but a creature of mythic ambition, eager to pull Hector’s chariot, carry Alexander into battle against Xerxes, or bear Sir Percival on his Grail quest. A peculiar melancholy took hold of Jennet. Within a few days of her flight, she would surely long for Dunstan—not Dunstan the apprentice pricker but Dunstan the accomplished draughtsman, Dunstan whose eye and hand and brain were so felicitously interlinked, like colors in a sunbeam or voices in a fugue.
She leaned over the bank and added her reflection to the languid water. The woman who looked back boasted a full face framed by abundant auburn hair. Her chin was a tad presumptuous, and the tip of her nose took an unseemly upward turn, and yet her cheeks were stately, her eyes wide, and she was quite possibly beautiful.
Dunstan approached, adding his own form to the liquid image as he placed in her hands his drawing of the horse-head promontory.
“A gift for thee.”
“You have captured the beast in all his majesty,” she said, rising. “Do you want to know my wish? I hope that one day soon you will meet in this province some person of aesthetic sensibility, and he will betimes appoint himself your patron, sending you to Italy that you might become the prize pupil of a master painter.”
His lips lengthened into a taut and wistful smile. “Italy seems to me as far away as those Jovian moons of which my sister is so fond.”
“Florence and Rome are indeed a great distance, and yet withal they lie closer to your heart than doth that parchment scrap on Father’s door.” She folded the drawing and slid it into her dress pocket. “You will go to Italy, Dunstan. I can see it in these waters.”
“Jenny, you’re a keen young woman, competent in philosophy and mathematics, but you’ll ne’er have Abby’s powers of scrying.”
They resumed their search, traveling south along the marshy bank. As dusk came to Haverhill, the frog hunters admitted to each other that the day’s expedition had failed. Abandoning the shore, they ascended to firmer ground, then turned and headed north along an embankment thick with sunflowers that—just then, just there—struck Jennet as no less magnificent than the spires of Cambridge-Town. To their left the Merrimack caught the fire of the setting sun, so that its waters now seemed an alchemical amalgam of molten rubies and melted cinnabar.
“I’Christ, ’tis the Devil’s own brood!”
She spun, glancing downstream. The object of Dunstan’s distress lay a quarter-mile away: a flotilla of Nimacook canoes, perhaps sixteen in all, rounding the lee of Contoocook Isle like a huge, white, segmented worm. In each vessel sat four armed savages, their paddles thrashing madly against the current.
“Satan hath sent an entire legion against us!” Dunstan shouted.
Already the canoes were putting to shore, the Indians brandishing tomahawks, battle-clubs, and French muskets. War-paint spilled across their faces in hideous streaks and encircled their naked torsos like the stripes on a coral snake.
Jennet experienced a crushing sensation in her chest, as if the Salem judges were subjecting her to the peine forte et dure. She took a deep breath and followed Dunstan as he bolted from the embankment and ran pell-mell into the woods. They skirted boulders, ducked beneath fallen trees, and overleapt gullies, until finally the outlying barns and granaries of Haverhill came into view, and then—praise God—Kembel’s Ordinary. Her brother’s intention to alert the town proved superfluous, however, for the militia was already marching down Mill Street, Major Saltonstall at the head, his drawn saber thrust forward like a bowsprit. Though free of war-paint, the soldiers looked formidable in their own right, their brows and cheeks burned raspberry-red from countless hours of planting beneath the New World sun, their muskets supplemented by well-honed axes and sharpened sickles.
Catching sight of his children, Walter abruptly abandoned the company—so abruptly that he crashed into the cadence master and sent his drum rolling down the street like a barrel fallen from a brewer’s wagon—then rushed forward and seized their wrists.
Jennet, terrified, tried without success to speak.
“Savages!” Dunstan bleated. “Murderous heathen savages!”
“Oh, my sweetest darlings,” Walter gasped, dragging his children toward Kembel’s Ordinary.
At last the words broke from Jennet’s larynx and made their way past her vibrating teeth. “What will happen to us, Father? Are you and Dunstan to be butchered? Am I to be stolen away and made to run the gauntlet?”
Instead of answering, Walter hauled them onto the veranda and pointed toward a pyramid of cider casks. “There be your protection, children! ’Tis a God-given fortress against the tawnies’ spears and arrows!”
Without a moment’s hesitation Jennet st
epped behind the casks and crouched down.
“Sir, I fain would fetch my fowling-piece and fight by your side,” Dunstan said.
“Nay, lad.” Walter firmed his grip on his musket. “Thou art marked to become the next Witchfinder-Royal. I say that Satan hath sent these savages for no purpose but to destroy the son of Walter Stearne!”
A preposterous notion, Jennet decided, but Dunstan evidently believed otherwise, for he lost no time joining her in the supposed citadel.
“My dear ones, know that I love you more than my life!” Walter cried, then dashed away to rejoin his fellow soldiers as they marched onto the Common.
Major Saltonstall arranged the company in a dense cluster: a stockade of flesh meant to stand against not only the party of screaming savages now charging from the west but also the second such band arriving from the east, the third from the north, and likewise the fourth—the raiders who’d come by canoe—from the south. Though ignorant of military strategy, Jennet suspected that in contriving to attack the town from all directions at once the Nimacooks had achieved a victory well before launching their first canoe or applying their first smear of war-paint.
The staccato sound of discharging muskets filled the air. Jennet’s quaverings became more intense, and then a flux seized her, and she vomited up the undigested portion of her midday meal. Dunstan’s fear took the form of a beshitting, though he seemed oblivious to both the load in his breeches and the concomitant stench. He attempted to recite his Pater Noster, managing it no better than would the average accused Satanist standing before a magistrate.
“Our Father, which—which—which art—in—in—H-Heaven—which art in—b-b-be thy name!”
The cider casks afforded a reasonably safe vantage from which a person might observe the lopsided battle, but Jennet averted her gaze. Between the burning of Isobel Mowbray and the crushing of Giles Corey, she was already as well instructed in cruelty as in Euclid; she needed no further lesson. Instead she fixed on the cask beneath her jaw, contemplating the splinters and troughs, the nubbins and grooves. If only she might through some benign witchery turn herself into an insect, an ant perhaps, or a termite, any beastie small enough to disappear amidst these little ravines and forsake the human world forever.
“Be thy name—be thy name—be thy name!”
She clamped her hands over her ears, muting the cries of pain and the hacking cough of the muskets, sensations a hundred times more terrible than Dunstan’s stink.
“’Sheart!” he shrieked. “The day belongs to Satan!”
She glanced toward the Common. True to her expectations, both the major’s strategy and the militia that had attempted to enact it lay in ruins. The flesh stockade had collapsed into a thing that seemed not so much a collection of battlefield casualties as a festering fen in the heart of Hell, the damned souls struggling to raise their snapped limbs and cracked skulls and mutilated torsos from the muck.
Having destroyed Haverhill’s defenses, the Nimacooks now abandoned the Common and set about razing the town itself, jabbing firebrands into hay bales, hurling torches through windows, planting constellations of burning arrows in shutters and doors. An uncanny wind took source in Haverhill, a cyclone composed of the Nimacooks’ triumphant whoops and the English settlers’ screams.
Jennet and Dunstan sprinted from the veranda and hurried onto the Common, where their father lay supine beneath a sycamore, holding his musket as a drowning sailor might clutch an errant spar from his sunken ship. His chest had received three arrows. Blood pooled around the shafts; more blood spilled from the corners of his mouth. He shivered as if lying naked in snow, although Jennet couldn’t say whether this phenomenon traced to his physical suffering or to his dread of dying unshriven.
“My children,” he moaned. “My—lovely—children.”
She surveyed the scene with an attitude more akin to curiosity than grief, the sort of circumscribed astonishment she’d brought to “Christ at the Whipping-Post,” the engraved frontispiece of the Reverend Foster’s illustrated Bible. There was sadness in this picture, and pity too, but it was not her sadness, not her pity.
“Today a hundred tawnies shall die by my hand,” Dunstan rasped.
“You must—save yourself—for the—cleansing—ahead,” Walter mumbled.
“The great cleansing, aye.”
“Thy birthright—’tis on—bed-chamber door.”
As Jennet studied the Golgothan triad of arrows rising from Walter’s bosom, Dunstan poured promises into the witchfinder’s ear. He vowed that he would hunt down every Satanist in America—male and female, white and Indian, Protestant and Catholic: all would feel his needle, all would know the noose.
The instant Jennet bent low to address her father, the arrows finished their work. “I do thank thee, sir, for thy part in giving me life,” she told the corpse. “Beyond that, however, I hold thee a scoundrel and miscreant, and I shall dedicate my life’s remaining years to the destruction of all cleansers everywhere.”
She rose and, exchanging glances with Dunstan, saw by his livid countenance that he’d overheard her malediction.
“You truly hated him,” he said, tears rolling down his cheeks.
“Not always. Not before Colchester Castle.”
“A daughter who curses her father to his face”—he darted away—“doth thereby damn herself to Hell.”
“Then upon my arrival I shall curse him to his face again,” she said, following.
Side by side, the orphans raced along the burning streets. Everywhere they turned, the conflagration flourished, blurring the barns, stables, mills, taverns, and shops into a great red storm, the Jovian Hurricane come to Earth. As the fire consumed the buildings, the Indians next applied their rage directly to the Colonists. Haverhill became a slaughter-house, an anatomization theatre, a hemorrhaging landscape of craters gouged by battle-clubs, cavities carved by musket-balls, and gorges sculpted by tomahawks. With mounting horror Jennet realized that a Nimacook gauged no murder complete until he’d used his knife to add another shaggy trophy to his belt, peeling scalp from skull with the insouciance of an aristocrat removing the rind from an orange.
By the time they reached their house, she was expecting to find it ablaze, a premonition that proved lamentably correct. Helplessly she stood before the flames. She imagined them doing their worst, devouring the paper treasures within. Dunstan’s crayon drawings. Aunt Isobel’s treatise. Newton’s letter to Mirringate Hall. The Principia Mathematica.
“The Lord is my shepherd!” her brother cried, rushing toward the burning porch.
“Dunstan, no!”
The foolish boy crossed the threshold—“I shall have my birthright!”—and vanished.
A numbness spread through her, locking her legs in place, fixing her hips, taking the life from her hands. It seemed that she’d become an exhibit in Dr. Cavendish’s museum, a pickled freak a-float in a jar. A minute passed, and another, and then the jar shattered with a thunderous roar, and she looked up to see the house collapse upon itself. Squalls of fiery ash swirled through the air. Embers descended like red sleet.
The remorse that now seized her was asymmetrical, the lesser share devoted to the loss of A Woman’s Garden, the greater to her brother’s immolation. Was this catastrophe best interpreted as Providence in action, the Indians serving as implements of a divine plan to destroy a nascent witchfinder? Or had Jehovah followed a more passive course, noting Dunstan’s predicament and declining to deliver him?
Gradually she grew aware of a dozen shadowy Nimacooks standing in the vegetable garden, trampling down the pole-beans as they laughed amongst themselves. A discordance of wails, moans, and sobs reached her ears. The braves pointed mocking fingers toward two young Haverhill women of about Jennet’s age, both insane with fright, each hugging a tattered Bible. A leather halter coiled around the taller woman’s neck, encircled the throat of her companion, and passed finally into the hands of a looming savage with slithering black serpents painted on his chest
. Now Jennet received a tether of her own, binding her to the other girls, though the experience seemed less like a yoking than its opposite. She felt sundered from everything: the white race, the New World, the spinning planet—sundered from her own body and brain.
Pushing and shoving their threaded captives, the triumphant Indians skirted the raging holocaust that had once been Milk Street. As the war party and its human plunder passed the town limits, the pulsing heat of the flames yielded gradually to the chill of evening. Jennet took care to march in step with her fellow prisoners, lest the strap around her neck suddenly become a noose. They proceeded through the fields, the woods, then down to the Merrimack, where the rest of the war party waited by the beached canoes, attending their wounded.
Whether the tawnies were Lucifer’s lieutenants, as her late father had believed, or God’s agents, as she had recently imagined, Jennet could not help admiring the stoicism with which the hurt ones submitted to the necessary treatments. Directly before her, a sinewy warrior grimaced but did not cry out as a Nimacook physician wrenched his fractured leg straight. Not far beyond, a brave in a feather head-dress gritted his teeth whilst a surgeon probed his shoulder with a knife, seeking to dislodge a musket-ball.
She glanced toward the river, its waters lit by the glow of the dying town. Wrapped in deerskins, six Indian corpses lay along the shore like pieces of driftwood. Nearby stood three more white daughters, weeping and retching and pissing themselves, their throats linked like braided bulbs of garlic. One captive pressed a silver cross to her breast. Another cradled a rag poppet. The third grasped a small oval portrait of a dainty woman with a kindly face.
As the Nimacooks untied the tether and led her to the canoes, Jennet realized that she too would be bearing away a fragment of civilization that night, Dunstan’s sketch of the horse-head promontory. She lifted her eyes and fixed on the soaring cliff. The stone horse had vanished, claimed by the darkness. In a few hours the creature would reappear, of course, and later that day some passing traveler might pause to appreciate its splendor, his thoughts turning naturally to Hector or Alexander or Percival. But she would not be that pilgrim. God alone knew where the morning would find her: moving through the forest perhaps, or approaching a Nimacook village—or dead, quite likely, dead as Dunstan, dead as her father, lying in an obscure glade, a tomahawk in her back or an arrow in her heart, the rising sun glancing off the whiteness of her skinless crown.