The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  Whilst not normally given to bluster, Okommaka never tired of relating how, shortly after the Haverhill raid, he’d bested seven other braves, Pussough amongst them, in a quartet of games—wrestling match, canoe race, archery contest, spear toss—and thereby acquired the right to woo and wed the sky-eyed, fire-haired English maid. Jennet wasn’t sure how she felt about this prologue to her matrimony. There was much in the narrative to gratify her vanity (not since Homer’s Penelope had a woman occasioned such fierce competition amongst suitors), but even more to make her feel like a piece of booty, a spoil of war. Whether its genesis was chivalric, barbaric, or something betwixt the two, however, her bond with Okommaka clearly entailed guarantees of safety and sustenance, and so she resolved that for the immediate future she would give no thought to escape. Her body and mind could readily tolerate the rôle of Nimacook bride, whereas frigid winds and an empty stomach surely awaited any white woman foolish enough to flee into the inhospitable reaches of the Shawsheen.

  The marriage ceremony was spare but elegant, a simple matter of Jennet and Okommaka sharing a bowl of corn soup in his family’s presence, clasping each other’s hands above the muchickehea stone, and, finally, exchanging gifts. He gave her three eelskin hair ribbons and a clam-shell necklace. She presented him with Dunstan’s drawing of the horse-head promontory, along with a pouch she’d made from cedar bark, suggesting that he use it to store his tobacco. When dusk came he led her to the back of his family’s longhouse and removed her deerskin mantle, immediately finding himself in a state of hydraulic fervor. He shed his garments and bade her lie with him. She did not embrace her husband with enthusiasm, but neither did she know fear, for Chapter Two of her Woman’s Garden promised that the discomfort would be brief, and she’d calculated that her fertile period was at least ten days away. Forcing a smile, she permitted Okommaka to deflower her in the quick and awkward manner that Isobel had called “the universal buffoonery of young men on their wedding nights,” and then came the soothing sensation, unique in her experience, of falling asleep in another person’s arms.

  “Cowammaunsh,” he told her in the morning. Later she learned his meaning. I love you.

  What most astonished Jennet about her adoptive family—which included Okommaka’s mother, Magunga, his father, Quappala, and an assortment of siblings and cousins—was their willingness to grant her the same privileges she would have enjoyed if born into the Owl Clan. To transmute an outsider into a full-blooded Nimacook, you needed merely to change her name. On Welcoming Day, one month after her wedding, she became Waewowesheckmishquashim, Woman with Hair like a Fox, an epithet whose sense delighted her and whose abridged form, Waequashim, fell pleasingly on her ear.

  Indifferent as the Nimacooks were to a wife’s ancestry, the same could not be said of her fertility, and none of Waequashim’s new relations pretended she’d been abducted for any reason beyond her presumably hale womb. Extinction was a possibility these people could not discount. Famine, wild beasts, intertribal warfare, and Puritan violence regularly reduced the population of childbearers amongst them—amongst all the Algonquin peoples. But it was the terrible small-pox epidemics, raging through the Indian settlements at unpredictable intervals, that wrought the greatest devastation. Skishauonck, they called it, the “flogging sickness,” and to Jennet that sounded like the perfect word, skishauonck, the rasp of Satan clearing his barbed and pustuled throat.

  Although Latin had always been for her a laborious pursuit, it was child’s play compared to Algonquin, whose rhythms and idioms seemed better suited to the inhabitants of Callisto than to any race on Earth. To say “I am glad you are well” meant teaching your lips to form “Taubot paumpmauntaman.” “It will rain today” pressed your tongue into the service of “Anamekeesuck sokenum.” “How fare your children?” required the questioner to articulate “Aspaumpmauntamwock cummuckiaug?” For Okommaka, logically enough, English proved equally perverse. He had difficulty grasping that eight words, “A man shot by accident during the hunt,” were needed to translate “Uppetetoua.” He resisted the fact that “I am not inclined to pursue the matter” was the simplest possible rendering of “Nissekinean.” It bewildered him that “When the wind blows northwest” was the most efficient way to say “Chekesitch.” And so it happened that, during the first several weeks following their nuptials, Waequashim and her husband managed to conduct quotidian transactions solely through their mutual though defective French, Okommaka and his fellow Owl Clan braves having absorbed bits and pieces of this language from a Jesuit missionary who’d lived in the village for a year, during which interval he’d succeeded in winning only two Indian souls to the Roman faith. But gradually, steadily—and with considerable delight—Jennet and Okommaka learned each other’s native tongue, even as their natural tongues found novel ways to fill their private hours with connubial amusement.

  Despite their fears of oblivion, the Nimacooks behaved exactly as Pussough had foretold, permitting Jennet to set the terms of her fertility. Okommaka did not complain when she forswore the marital act on those nights when conception was most likely, especially since Chapter Six, “Labia North and South,” detailed several compensatory procedures. As a further precaution, before lying with Okommaka she always suffused her privy shaft with a seed-stilling unguent of pennyroyal and marjoram. The physic came from Hassane, the clan’s lithe and puckish medicine-woman, their taupowau: a kind of wood nymph, Jennet decided, forever flitting about the village as if borne on invisible fairy-wings, merrily dispensing bits of cryptic wisdom—“The dog hath found its brother in the wolf, but humans still await their kindred kind”—along with her songs and simples.

  Having reduced the menace of pregnancy to a minimum, Jennet felt free to experiment with the activities outlined in both Chapter Four, “The Lust of the Goat,” and Chapter Five, “The Algebra of Desire.” To the degree that Isobel’s knowledge was firsthand, it would seem that as a sensualist Edward Mowbray had suffered few equals. But Okommaka, too, possessed an aptitude for the priapic, and as their private encounters grew ever more heated, Waequashim gradually apprehended the strange and satisfying truth that swiving had become as central to her sustenance as eating.

  It was this newfound carnal appetite that made Jennet resolve to forestall indefinitely the day when she would cease to be attractive in her husband’s eyes. Despite the many virtues of a crop-woman’s life—the agreeable companions, frequent diversions (she took a special delight in pisinneganash, a kind of card game played with bulrushes), heady tobacco (its pleasures being permitted to both genders), and nightly exchanges of tales both factual and fabulous—she had come to regard the plantation as the great enemy of her youthfulness. Her time beneath the burning New World sun was causing her brow to peel like birch bark and her hands to become as coarse as a toad’s skin. Eventually she brought the matter before Hassane, who gave her a musky ointment with which to butter her exposed flesh ere venturing upon the maize field to battle the weeds and shoo the crows. Owing to this balm, plus the unsightly but effective bonnet she’d woven from corn husks, Waequashim eventually grew confident that she and Okommaka would wither at the same rate.

  As her fifth year amongst the Nimacooks began, Jennet found herself in possession of a compelling hypothesis, perhaps even a truth, concerning the two very different worlds in which Dame Fortune had thus far deposited her. The European universe, she speculated, was in essence a road, a meandering thoroughfare bearing its pilgrims from one impressive way-station to the next, from Greek civilization with its beautiful geometry, to the Christian nations with their brilliant theology, to the star-gazing trinity of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. But the Indian universe was a wheel, always turning, its rotations marked by the movements of game, the ripening of crops, the shoaling of fish, the fruiting of trees, and the running of sap. Beyond their fondness for French muskets and English fowling-pieces, technical innovation meant little to these people; no Nimacook had ever sought to fashion an astrolabe or a microscope. At first th
is deficit bewildered Jennet, but in time she came to see certain limitations in her aunt’s allegiances. Although natural philosophy was the noblest of enterprises, it had never tracked a deer, maintained a maize crop, trapped salmon in a weir, woven a reed mat, or wrought syrup from the ichor of a maple tree.

  Europeans and Indians did not see the same moon, the same nanepaushat. For the Cambridge Platonists as well as the Continental Cartesians, Earth’s satellite was a mass of dead matter pulled around the planet by an arcane entity (gravitation for the Platonists, vortices for the Cartesians) that could cause “action at a distance.” But the Nimacook moon was an immense wampumpeag bead fashioned by an ancient coastal people, the Quanquogt, their intention having been to offer it to Kautantouwit, the Great Southwest God, source of all salutary winds, in exchange for the ocean that nurtured them.

  “I assume that Kautantouwit did not smile on the proposition,” Jennet said to Okommaka as they planted a row of merry yellow trilliums along the walkway leading to their wigwam.

  He grunted in assent. “Kautantouwit was much offended. He banished the Quanquogt to a barren desert, then hurled the great wampumpeag bead into the sky.”

  “A harsh but fitting sentence.”

  Casco the dog ambled onto the scene, approached the stew pot in which they’d cooked their midday meal, and inserted his snout in quest of venison scraps.

  “Ah, but even a god can be tempted.” Okommaka pressed a wad of tobacco into the bowl of his soapstone pipe. “Even Kautantouwit will have his greed. And so it happens that once each month he reaches toward the nanepaushat-sawhoog, the moon-bead, obscuring it bit by bit with the shadow of his hand—but in the end he always decides to leave the bead in place.”

  “A sign, aye?” Jennet said. “A symbol of his displeasure with the Quanquogt.”

  “Nux. Yes. No part of the Earth may be bought or sold, Waequashim, no piece of Mittauke. No sea, forest, lake, or mountain.”

  “If the moon is a bead, then what is the sun?”

  “In England they have no knowledge of the sun?” He frowned emphatically. “The sun, cherished wife, is the council fire around which our ancestors gather. When a Nimacook dies, his soul travels to the southwest mountain, and if Kautantouwit judges it worthy he will deliver that same soul to Keesuckquand, Guardian of Heaven’s Torch.”

  “Now that I am Nimacook, do my ancestors gather around the fire?”

  “Look at the sun,” he said, pointing skyward. “Not long, lest it blind you. Look, and you will see all those who came before you.”

  She locked her gaze on the sun. The burning rays flooded her skull with light, and she turned away, blinking, eyes smarting. Casco licked the stew pot. Okommaka lit his pipe.

  She lifted her head and again stared at the council fire. A golden frieze appeared. Her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother sat huddled in the sun’s corona like jewels decorating a diadem.

  Some desire of her mind, quite likely. Some phantom of her brain. And yet the glimmering chimera produced in Jennet a joy such as she’d not known since that long-gone March evening at Mirringate, a night of hot sugared coffee and dancing oak-wood flames, when Aunt Isobel had taught her to comprehend the grand cosmic drama, more than twenty-five thousand years in duration, known to natural philosophers as the precession of the equinoxes.

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  NEAR THE END OF JENNET’S SEVENTH YEAR in the Owl Clan, it became obvious that Okommaka, Magunga, Quappala, and the rest of her immediate family could no longer abide her vacant womb. Assenting to the inevitable, she set aside Hassane’s unguent, and she and Okommaka started clustering their connections toward the middle of her cycle. Within three months she was pregnant. Despite the cessation of her lunar bleeding, she found the condition supremely uncomfortable, but she did not experience the terror she’d so long anticipated. Her qualified equanimity traced to the tradition whereby Nimacook squaws dropped their babies whilst standing erect—the very attitude that Aunt Isobel (having researched the matter in four languages) regarded as the safest and least painful, “the upright pagan posture, ninety degrees from the horizontal lying-in to which a European woman subjects herself.” Whatever hardships the birthing process might involve, Jennet imagined that through heathen tradition and Hassane’s talent she would elude the fate her mother had suffered in delivering Dunstan. If the infant was a girl, she would name her Bella, a variation on Isobel. If a boy, he would be Anton, in homage to the inventor of the microscope.

  As Jennet entered her final month, the infant kicking against her womb at least once an hour, protesting its imprisonment, a distressing report reached the village. The flogging sickness had struck the Moaskug, the Black Snake Clan, a Nimacook community a half-day’s walk to the north. Later that week the rumor received vivid confirmation as the pied corpses of two Moaskug women came floating down the Shawsheen. Jennet’s fellow Indians knew from experience what would happen now. First, more skishauonck victims would appear on the river. Then, for miles around the village, the forest would tremble with the shrieks of the dying and the keening of the bereaved. And finally a new sound would arise, the marching feet of the machemoqussu, the wandering doomed, those still-living sufferers whom the disease had transformed into madmen.

  Theirs was an understandable insanity. In the initial stage of skishauonck, Hassane explained, the patient endured a burning fever and violent vomiting, even as tiny red spots appeared all over his body. In the second stage the spots became blisters filled with lustrous pus. If the victim was going to survive, this happy fact soon became manifest: his fever broke, and the blisters turned to scabs and fell off. But many did not survive. For these unfortunates, the blisters began erupting, thereby causing the outermost tiers of the flesh, both internally and externally, to split away from the underlayers, so that the victim was literally flayed alive, without and also within, blood oozing from his mouth, nose, genitals, and anus.

  With every brave except Miacoomes and his councilors away on the summer hunt, it fell to the women to take up firearms and prevent the machemoqussu from spreading the contagion amongst the Owl Clan. Despite Jennet’s gravid state, Miacoomes required her to spend two hours each morning doing sentry duty in collaboration with a crone named Winoshi, the two women pacing back and forth outside the stockade wall, muskets in hand, all senses at peak. Although the machemoqussu were nowhere to be seen, Jennet did not for an instant doubt their actuality. She could hear them wailing and moaning amidst the shadows as they crashed blister-blind from tree to tree and boulder to boulder—the world’s true demons, the goblins with dissolving skin.

  Shortly after sunrise on her twentieth morning of guarding the village, Jennet’s sac abruptly split, sending a stream of warm clear water spilling down her thighs. The fluid rolled across the ground, irrigating the grass and quenching the wildflowers. A half-hour later the first spasm arrived, seizing her body with all the force of a plowshare breaking hard earth.

  She took her leave of Winoshi, ran to her wigwam, and grabbed the poppet she’d made two nights earlier—deerskin body, eyes of white beads—that she might gift her child with a toy upon its disembarkation. As she made her way to the taupowau’s dwelling, the immured and impatient baby bobbing before her, a second spasm came, stronger even than the first. Hassane gathered together the steel knife, leather flask, linen rags, figwort leaves, deerskin blanket, and other necessities, then guided Jennet to the wooded northwest quadrant of the village. The birthing lodge was a typical Nimacook longhouse, though equipped with a nesseanaskunck: two shorn hemlock branches suspended five feet above the floor, positioned in parallel like railings on a bridge, and supported by leather thongs affixed to the ceiling.

  “Step betwixt the poles,” Hassane commanded.

  Jennet did so.

  “Set your arms around the centers,” Hassane said.

  Even as Jennet obeyed, a third spasm took hold of her.

  “Breathe quickly and deliberately,” Hassane said, “as if you are swimming across the Sha
wsheen.”

  Jennet opened her mouth and sucked in a great sphere of air. She released it with a sharp calculated puff.

  Owing to Hassane’s midwifing skills and the virtues of vertical birthing, the delivery fell short of an ordeal. It was exhausting to be sure, punctuated by ferocious explosions of pain, but never once did Jennet feel herself in thrall to those profane forces that had carried her mother to the hallowed ground of a Mistley churchyard.

  “You have a daughter, Waequashim.” The taupowau eased the expelled infant into the good air and soft light of the birthing lodge, then took up the knife and with a single stroke severed the umbilical cord.

  Healthy and unharmed, or so Hassane asserted, Bella fascinated Jennet from the moment the taupowau placed the infant in her arms. Whilst Hassane buried the bright blue placenta by the riverbank, Jennet sat outside the lodge and contemplated the creature’s tiny eyelashes and subtle nose, her articulated knuckles and wrinkled brown knees, her wispy black hair and stubby but differentiated toes. Who could have guessed that the great bulky stone in Waequashim’s womb would emerge into daylight boasting such glorious detail?