The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  “Many are the lessons I would teach thee,” Jennet said, setting the deerskin doll in her baby’s reflexive grasp.

  She told Bella that the season for planting began when the leaves of the white oak were as large as a mouse’s ears. She explained how each time the sun refracted the lingering damp of a summer shower, a rainbow appeared in the sky, and if you could somehow gather up that spectrum and strain it through another such prism, its rays would fuse into a beam of purest whiteness. When guarding the plantation, a squaw must never slay a raven, neither with arrow nor spear nor musket-ball, for it was that bird and no other who had brought to the Algonquin the very first maize seed. She informed her daughter that they would one day scour the Shawsheen’s bottom until they discovered a stone so clear and pure it could serve as a microscope lens, and then they would find another such stone, and next they would fit the two lenses to a tube of soapstone, and by this means they would explore the world that lay hidden within the world.

  “Six sides there be to each and every snow crystal,” Jennet said, alternately stroking the deerskin doll and the infant’s brow. “Mr. Hooke hath proved as much. That is the planet to which you have come, my beautiful, darling Bella.”

  j

  NOW THAT OKOMMAKA’S DAUGHTER had arrived, launched upon the trajectory of her joys and the vector of her sorrows, Miacoomes forbade Waequashim to do sentry duty, lest the toxic breath of the machemoqussu bring sickness to the infant. Instead Jennet became a plantation maid again. Each morning she would package Bella’s bum in an absorbent mixture of cattail fluff and sphagnum, roll a deerskin around her body until the child resembled an unhusked ear of corn, strap her to a cradleboard, and equip her with the rattle Magunga had made from bits of bone and a scooped-out gourd, whereupon the two of them would set off for the field des trois soeurs, the baby riding on her mother’s spine like a turtle basking on a log. As she attacked the weeds with her hoe and unburdened the bean crop of dead vines, Jennet kept an eye peeled for the machemoqussu, and she did not relax her vigilance until, five weeks after Bella’s birth, the Moaskug sagamore sent word to Miacoomes that the skishauonck epidemic had finally lifted. In her mind Jennet saw this event as the abating of a furious storm, its gusts and rains and sleet burned into oblivion by the sun.

  Bella’s fortieth night on Earth was lit by a moon as pale and yellow as a firefly’s lanthorn. Jennet was sitting in the village plaza, the baby’s lips clamped around her left nipple, when she noticed the aberrant blotch. It was dark, solitary, no larger than a freckle, fixed like a wood tick to Bella’s cheek.

  Jennet brushed the blotch with her thumb. It remained rooted, a hundred times more ominous than any Devil’s mark. She brushed it again. The dot persisted.

  “Dear God in Heaven…”

  Without breaking the seal betwixt mouth and breast, she rose and proceeded directly to her mother-in-law’s longhouse. Upon seeing the excrescence, Magunga let out a howl as loud and anguished as a machemoqussu’s cry, and then came three more howls interspersed with wheezing gasps, until finally Magunga grew rational enough to assert that only the blaze of the sun could reveal the mark’s true nature. For the immediate moment Jennet could do nothing but nurse the baby to sleep: if there was any hope for Bella, it lay in the dream world—once set roaming across those ethereal hills, the infant’s spirit might meet a mauchatea, a “ghost guide” who would lead her far beyond the demon-infested land of the flogging sickness and bring her to the healing waters of the River Woaloke.

  Staggering home along the moon-lit path, Jennet felt as if she had herself become a wanderer in the dream world, but no mauchatea appeared to point the way. She entered the wigwam and, after suckling Bella until the infant’s lips stopped moving and her jaw went slack, eased her sleeping body into the cradle as she would shelve the only existing copy of a wise and exquisite book. She sat down, sprawled across the mat, and closed her eyes, all the while imploring Kautantouwit and Jehovah to collaborate in delivering her child from the small-pox. Bella’s breathing filled the air, the gentle inhalations and soft exhalations, delicate as breezes meant to launch a fledgling finch on its first flight. Sleep came to Jennet but fitfully that night, her wakeful moments a concatenation of unbidden twitchings and involuntary doggish yelps, her dreams aboil with machemoqussu infantries on the march.

  At first light she unfurled her clenched fingers and set her palm on Bella’s brow. The baby’s skin was hot, deathly hot, skishauonck hot. Seconds later Bella awoke, and from her little chest a jagged screech shot forth.

  Jennet picked up the baby, her infinitely detailed Bella whose spirit had failed to find a mauchatea, and carried her into the remorseless light of day. Pustules speckled Bella’s torso like Satanic wampumpeag beads.

  “Blessed Kautantouwit, I beg thee…”

  Thirty pustules, fifty, a hundred.

  “Hear me, Kautantouwit…”

  Again Bella screeched.

  She bore her daughter to Hassane’s wigwam, hoping the medicine-woman would judge Bella afflicted with a rare but curable disease whose symptoms uncannily mimicked those of the flogging sickness. But instead of offering any such lore, Hassane merely directed Jennet to swab the child head to toe with river-soaked wads of sphagnum, again and again and again.

  To what unspeakable precinct of their pantheon did the Nimacooks consign skishauonck? From whence sprang this Satanic contagion? Jennet never found out. The Indians were not given to raging indignantly against the plague, but neither did they regard it as a fitting punishment for their sins. Apparently they viewed skishauonck as a mystery. The disease confounded Jennet as well. Bathing Bella as Hassane had prescribed for five unbroken hours, all the while watching her daughter transmute from a baby into a machemoqussu, and thence to a corpse, she could not decide whether skishauonck represented the iniquity of Lucifer, the wrath of God, the perversity of Nature, or yet another force, beyond all human comprehension.

  She grieved as would any other Nimacook, staining her teeth with juniper berries, loading her moccasins with pebbles, and cutting her hair with a sacred elk-bone knife, so that ragged auburn tufts now sprouted from her scalp. She prepared a cake of charred oak and rubbed it across her face, darkening her cheeks and brow with an itching patina of soot.

  Taking the corpse in her arms, she hobbled down to the riverbank, where Hassane and Magunga awaited, their faces likewise blackened.

  “Kutchimmoke,” Hassane told her. Be of good cheer.

  “Kutchimmoke,” Magunga echoed.

  After searching the shore for an hour, the women found a soft and secluded spot beneath a willow tree, and there they dug a grave with clam-shell spades, lining the bottom with a cushion of sticks. Jennet placed Bella in extreme flexion, hands covering face, then slipped the deerskin doll under her arms and wrapped her in a reed mat. In tandem the women fitted Bella into the grave, slowly, deliberately, seed into furrow, string into nock, feather into braid, and then Jennet said good-bye to the child with the wondrous knuckles and the rich black hair. The women filled the hole with sand. Hassane erected atop the mound a tower of twigs and stones no higher than a maize stalk, gently tilting it toward the southwest—for this was a cowwenock-wunnauchicomock, she explained, a “soul-chimney” meant to draw the child’s immaterial essence from her dead flesh and point it toward Kautantouwit’s sacred mountain, that it might join with the God of Gods.

  “And now, Waequashim, you must take the river-cure,” Hassane said.

  “Today and every day for a month,” Magunga elaborated, “you will give yourself to the Shawsheen.”

  Did the Nimacook river-cure represent a foolish heathen superstition, or was it rather a paragon of pagan wisdom? In her numb and pliant condition Jennet could form no opinion, and so it was with a divided heart that she removed her mantle and skirt, pulled off her moccasins, bid Hassane and Magunga farewell, and stepped into the cool racing fluid. She walked along the muddy bed until the water reached her waist, and then she lifted her heels and tipped her
body forward. She swam north, face down, countering the current by moving her legs in a frog kick and raising her head to breathe. Waterborne twigs stroked her thighs. Clusters of leaves caressed her sides. The Shawsheen washed the soot from her cheeks and brow.

  At twilight she reached Hawk-Isle, then rolled on her back like an otter and let the river return her to the mound where Bella lay. Clambering onto the shore, she locked her gaze on the little wooden tower, still pointed toward Heaven. Such a fragile talisman, this soul-chimney, this cowwenock-wunnauchicomock. It would not survive the briefest rain-shower, much less a blizzard or a thunder-gust.

  “In the spring you and I shall fly it.” Her knees failed, and she collapsed naked and shivering atop her daughter’s grave. “We shall fly it for fair, my dearest, sweetest Bella.”

  For an indeterminate interval she sobbed and keened, pummeling the mound with her fists, soaking the sand with her tears as her birth waters had saturated the earth outside the village gateway, until at last her grief grew so thick and hard—a kind of second pregnancy, malign this time, tumoral—that she could no longer work her wailing limbs or move her weeping joints. She curled her body into a tight sphere, a human moon-bead, and she did not bestir herself until dawn.

  j

  FOUR DAYS LATER Hassane brought Jennet a male infant whose mother had succumbed to the contagion, so that the white woman’s engorged breasts might nourish him. Kapaog’s sucking proved far more vigorous than Bella’s, so that, true to a phenomenon documented in Chapter Seven, Jennet found herself in a state of concupiscent arousal. When Hassane required her to hand Kapaog over to another lactating woman, a potter named Cumunchon, likewise mourning her infant machemoqussu, a deep carnal longing settled into Jennet’s bones, lingering until at last Okommaka returned from the hunt.

  “I gave our daughter an English name,” she told him. “Bella, after my Aunt Isobel, the natural philosopher. All the world held great fascination for her, from the meanest worm to the brightest star.”

  “The brightest star,” Okommaka echoed. “Then our child was Pashpishia.”

  “Pashpishia…”

  “She Who Loves the Night.”

  With every visit she paid to Pashpishia’s grave that month, Jennet grew more determined to evoke nupakenaqun—the right of a bereaved mother to exempt herself from further procreation. Okommaka in turn claimed a collateral privilege, so that his nubile cousin Maansu became his second wife. In a development so ironic it might have given even Sophocles pause, Jennet found that, far from arousing her jealousy, this bigamous arrangement increased tenfold her sense of unity with the Owl Clan. She would never be a Nimacook mother, but now she knew herself for an absolute Nimacook squaw, the first and favorite of Okommaka.

  This pagan marriage was real. The Kokokehom were the case. Her clam-shell necklace, eelskin hair ribbons, bead bracelet, fur robe, deerskin leggings, and moose-hide moccasins were factual as grass. As for Salem and Boston, Colchester and London, the Aristotelian Earth and the Newtonian moon, these were just labels on dreams, mere names for places as mythic as Atlantis or El Dorado.

  Out there, it was 1703: so said her calendar of fired pots. Out there, some bright young natural philosopher was likely on the point of discovering Newton’s lost demon disproof. Even as her twenty-fifth birthday arrived—an event she celebrated by fashioning for herself a head-dress of hawk and pheasant feathers—an argumentum grande was doubtless appearing on the stage of European history, poised to topple all witch-courts and shred all conjuring statutes. But for Waequashim of the Nimacook, there was no more work to do.

  j

  ALTHOUGH JENNET REMAINED HORRIFIED by the brutality and the bloody scalps, the Indians’ war against the Merrimack Valley settlers had evidently accomplished its aim. By the turn of the century a crop-woman could spend a productive morning tilling her clan’s acres without fear that some eager Puritan would try to steal them come afternoon. To all appearances an undeclared truce had emerged betwixt Chabaquong’s people and the English towns, including a reconstructed and repopulated Haverhill, and in time the Nimacooks permitted the Puritans to inscribe a toll road along the extreme eastern edge of their territory—a mail route from Boston to Amesbury—with the Indians receiving a fee of one wampumpeag bead per mounted wayfarer and two per horse-drawn coach.

  Because the far boundary of the Owl Clan’s plantation abutted the Amesbury Post Road, Jennet now became witness to a daily stream of white men—galloping mail-carriers, marching soldiers, sweating drovers, panting peddlers—a circumstance that prompted Quappala and Magunga to imagine their elder daughter-in-law imploring some traveler to bear her away. Eventually her family’s suspicions grew so acute that, whenever their farming chores brought the crop-women near the new thoroughfare, Magunga outfitted Waequashim with the exact sort of leather halter by which she’d been abducted.

  And so it happened that Jennet once again came to regard the Nimacooks not as her kin but as her keepers. Nothing moved them, neither her protestations of loyalty—the louder she asserted her allegiance to the tribe, the more convinced they became that she intended to bolt—nor her protests against the yoke: “I shan’t be harnessed! I am not an ox! I am not an ass! I am not a plow horse!” All such metaphors proved equally impotent, partly because draught animals played no rôle in the Indian way of life, largely because the subject was not up for discussion.

  By 1708 a new element had entered the Nimacook economy. Those braves with a talent for trapping learned that if they brought their beaver pelts, their toumockquashuncks, down the Shawsheen to the English village of Bedford, they could exchange them for a panoply of European goods. The Nimacooks’ grand-sachem disdained this so-called “fur trade,” for it seemed to embody the very mercantilism that the Moon-Bead Legend condemned. Chabaquong’s councilors, however, argued that the Great God Kautantouwit would not feel offended by such commerce if the trappers limited their acquisitions to flintlock muskets, forged knives, iron kettles, and other products unknown to Algonquin industry. Eventually Chabaquong permitted the enterprise to go forward, though without his blessing.

  The grand-sachem was not the only Nimacook to lament the tribe’s entry into the fur trade. Jennet did so too, for once the toumockquashuncks were in hand, the tedious job of treating them fell to the women. She detested each step in the process: scraping the backs of the skins, rubbing them with marrow, trimming them into rectangles, sewing six or eight such pieces together into a robe, wearing the garment from dawn to dusk until the pelts grew supple enough to command a top price. But then one day Okommaka mentioned that books were amongst the items available at the Bedford Trading Center, and Jennet’s opinion of the fur trade improved considerably.

  “What sorts of books?” she asked.

  “The English God-Book,” Okommaka replied. “The Bible of Grand-Sachem James.”

  “What else?”

  “French verses. English plays. Histories written in Latin.”

  English plays! Oh, to scan that linguistic music again, to experience once more Juliet’s longings and Cleopatra’s passions and Lady Macbeth’s depravity. If she came upon a Principia Mathematica in Bedford she would immediately toss it aside—she was no longer a Hammer of Witchfinders, after all, no longer obligated to cultivate an acquaintance with Lucasian Professors—but a quarto Macbeth would be as welcome as a reincarnation of Aunt Isobel’s treatise.

  Okommaka, predictably, recoiled at Jennet’s desire to accompany him on his next Bedford adventure. Fur trading, he insisted, was a masculine enterprise, and any brave who brought a wife along risked ridicule by whites and Algonquins alike. But she continued to press the matter, and eventually, owing either to the righteousness of her case, the pathos in her voice, or the chapter called “Labia North and South,” Okommaka relented, solemnly declaring that a great Nimacook trapper did not prostrate himself before the opinions of lesser men.

  The expedition comprised three canoes bearing Okommaka, Pussough, six other braves, Casco the dog, and�
��now—Okommaka’s headstrong elder wife. All during their passage down the Shawsheen, a glorious anticipation filled every pipe and parlor of Jennet’s heart. Okommaka had agreed that she could acquire four volumes, assuming they collectively cost no more than half a beaver-robe, and with each paddle stroke she imagined herself savoring yet another line of Shakespeare or Marlowe or Jonson.

  The celestial council fire had passed its zenith by the time they reached the trading center—an impressive installation, three well-made cabins supplemented by a livery and a forge, plus a tavern called Paradise Misplaced. A flagpole rose in the front yard, flying both the Union Jack and the device of the Shawsheen Fur Exchange Authority, a beaver surrounded by the company’s motto, Profit, Prosperity, Plenitude. Okommaka steered his canoe to the wharf, where three white traders fidgeted about, thickset men in plain muslin shirts, idly smoking pipes and skimming stones across the water. As Jennet climbed onto the dock, the traders greeted her with dark scowls and hostile mutterings. Perhaps they regarded her as pitiable, so pitiable in fact that—were they made of sterner stuff and not outnumbered by the Kokokehom—they might have tried liberating her with the aim of collecting a reward. But more likely they simply found Jennet repulsive, this corrupted woman whose braids smelled of bear grease and whose soul stank of idolatry, and the less they had to do with her, the better.

  Much to her frustration, Okommaka and Pussough insisted on patronizing the first two stores, one featuring muskets and shot, the other offering tools and cooking implements, before venturing into the third, an emporium specializing in felt hats, leather boots, wool blankets, and steel gorgets. Okommaka guided her to a battered shipping crate. She lifted the lid. Books filled the compartment top to bottom—one hundred volumes at least: five score jolts for a dozing intellect, a banquet for a hungry brain. She took a breath, praised Kautantouwit, and got to work, unloading the crate and organizing the jumble as her husband and his cousin looked on in amusement. She did not really expect to find Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra in the mess, but there was indeed a Shakespeare quarto, The Tempest, as well as Marlowe’s Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, both of which she set aside. Her third decision, Thomas Shelton’s translation of Don Quixote de la Mancha, was similarly easy. Now came an impossible choice. How much did she desire Cæsar’s Commentaries as opposed to Spenser’s The Færie Queene? Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans versus Xenophon’s Recollections of Socrates? One thing was certain. She would eschew the ratty copy of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, one of the skeptical works Aunt Isobel had told her to consult in devising the argumentum grande. A Hammer of Witchfinders might find that tome of use, but she wouldn’t trade a beaver’s cheek for it.