The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  Eventually she reduced the conundrum to three possibilities: Montaigne’s Essays, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and an old friend from her Mirringate youth, Virgil’s Æneid. She set the volumes on the floor, each at the point of an imaginary equilateral triangle, and, rising to full height, made ready to surrender the matter to Dame Fortune. Whilst Okommaka and Pussough snickered conspicuously, she stepped inside the triangle, shut her eyes, spun around thrice, stretched out her arm, and directed a pointing finger downward.

  She opened her eyes. The Æneid. A splendid resolution. Arma virumque cano.

  “What does that book talk about?” Okommaka asked.

  “Virgil recounts the adventures of Aeneas, destined to bring forth the Roman nation,” she said.

  “The missionary who lived amongst us spoke often of ancient Rome,” Pussough said. “Its founders were Romulus and Remus, suckled as babes by a she-wolf.”

  “Virgil tells a rather different story,” Jennet said.

  “No Romulus and Remus?” said Pussough. “No she-wolf?”

  “No she-wolf.”

  “My uncle knows a Moattoqus brave who was raised by wolves,” Okommaka said. “Such a thing can happen, Waequashim. Virgil should not have doubted it.”

  j

  AT DUSK THE INDIANS RETURNED to the Shawsheen, laden with the fruits of their bartering. Okommaka spread out his prizes on the wharf—Italian dueling pistol, keg of gunpowder, iron skillet, c mirror, striped blanket—then wrapped them in a deerskin and wedged the bundle into the bow. Jennet slid her books into a hempen sack and secured it beside her husband’s cache.

  A pastoral scene unfolded in her mind: the trading party camped that night beside the river, Jennet reading Virgil aloud by the fire, translating as she went. Storm-tossed Æneas and his men landing on the Libyan shore. The hero telling the Carthaginians the tale of the Trojan horse. The romance of Æneas and Dido. Her suicide following his decision to leave for Italy. The shade of Anchises showing Æneas the future history of Rome. The great war betwixt Æneas’s forces and the Latin armies of King Turnus. Æneas slaying Turnus in personal combat. Okommaka, Pussough, and the other enthralled Nimacooks attended every word.

  Excited shouts disturbed the gloaming. Jennet lifted her head.

  A mob of Indians and whites had collected by the riverbank, their attention fixed on a high footbridge arcing across the Shawsheen like a wooden rainbow. Huddled together in the center of the bridge, four figures in Puritan garb used a plow-rope to lower a woman toward the water, her legs and trunk concealed by a flimsy shift, her moans muffled by a leather napkin. Thongs drew the prisoner’s wrists and ankles together, forcing her body into the shape of a horseshoe.

  “Husband, I see a gang of Calvinist witchfinders, inflicting their tests on an innocent woman,” Jennet said. “By your leave, I shall go to ’em and protest this injustice.”

  “When English settlers choose to harry one another, a Nimacook finds this cause for joy, not bewilderment,” Okommaka said.

  “My conscience will torment me if I do not denounce these prickers to their faces.”

  Okommaka issued a series of low, discrete grunts. His taut tongue roamed around the inside of his mouth, bulging his cheeks, and then at last he spoke.

  “Tell the Englishmen that if they harm you, Waequashim, your husband and his fellow braves will not forbear to separate them from their scalps.”

  She leapt over the canoe, sprinted along the shore, and, reaching the bridge, mounted the stairway to the horizontal span. The quartet still held the swimming-rope, their gray capes rippling in the wind.

  She could not decide which shock was the greater: seeing Dunstan in the flesh, or apprehending the form in which that flesh had survived the burning of Haverhill. Although Nature had wrought a handsome adult from the raw materials of youth, the achievement was gravely compromised by the cataract of scar tissue spilling down from his high-crowned hat all the way to his jaw.

  “Dunstan!” she gasped. “Praise God! I was certain the fire had consumed thee!”

  Not unexpectedly, Abigail Williams had ripened into a comely specimen of womanhood. As for her uncle, the Reverend Samuel Parris, the fourteen intervening years had turned his face into a burlesque of itself, all beaky nose and receding chin. Time had been equally severe with Magistrate Jonathan Corwin, robbing him of so many teeth that his cheeks had collapsed, causing his head to resemble a skull dipped in tallow.

  “O sweet Jesus, can this be my own long-lost sister?” Dunstan lifted his hands from the swimming-rope. His confederates froze, leaving their prisoner to dangle above the Shawsheen like a fox caught in a snare. “’Tis truly Jennet Stearne beneath those feathers and skins?”

  “Aye, Dunstan. You must set that woman free.”

  He lurched away from the bridge rail, flung his arms around Jennet, and drew her to his chest like a laundry-maid pulling bedsheets from a clothesline. She answered his embrace by stroking his brow and kissing the frightful scar.

  “I feared you’d been scalped”—Dunstan touched the brim of his hat—“but ’tis I who lost his hair, every lock burned to the bone: a small price to pay, for with Jehovah’s help I retrieved our father’s license. Prithee, give us the space of a quarter-hour to switch off yon Satanist, and we shall bear you to the safety of our Framingham salt-box.”

  “Nay, Dunstan,” Jennet said. “I’m Waequashim of the Kokokehom now.” Defiantly she adjusted her head-dress. “Have you not yet learned that witchery’s an impossible thing? Unbind this woman, I implore thee.”

  “Unbind her?” Abigail sneered. She abandoned the swimming-rope, so that the task of counterweighting the prisoner fell entirely to Parris and Corwin. “Hah!” Her contemptuous eye ranged across Jennet’s wardrobe, moccasins to leggings to mantle to hair ribbons. “How the Algonquin fashion doth become you, Miss Stearne. Those stinking braids will bring many a savage suitor to your door.”

  “In point of fact I’m married to a Nimacook trapper,” Jennet said.

  “Do you hear that, Dunstan? Your sister swives a tawny pagan!”

  “I would rather be a pagan wife than a Protestant wench,” Jennet said.

  “You will not call me a wench, sister,” Abigail said, “for Dunstan and I are wed five years now.”

  Jennet raised a hand to her collarbone and anxiously fingered her necklace. Given the unspeakable pain and the demonic scar that were the price of Dunstan’s deliverance from the fire, she could hardly blame him for rushing to his demented friend and taking refuge in her affection. But it was one thing to understand their union and quite another to bless it. The thought of these two fanatics spawning a new generation of witchfinders nauseated her as surely as any emetic.

  Again she touched Dunstan, resting her hand on his sleeve. “To this day your drawing of the horse-head promontory hangs in my dwelling. I gave it to my husband as a wedding gift.”

  A flicker of remembrance lit Dunstan’s face. “’Twas an excellent sketch—I shan’t dispute you.” He pivoted toward Parris and Corwin. “Lower the hag!” he called, and the two cleansers offered their prisoner to the Shawsheen.

  “No!” Jennet cried.

  “I am my father’s son,” Dunstan said, turning toward her. “He did not rear me to coddle goblins or sup with Beelzebub.”

  “She floats!” Parris announced. “The river brands Susan Diggens a witch!”

  “I can prove that wicked spirits are but desires of the mind,” Jennet said.

  “My dear queen of the heathens,” Abigail said, “if you durst interfere with us, we shall bring you before the Bedford magistrate.”

  “We’re all of us now the Crown’s official prickers: the Massachusetts Bay Purification Commission,” Dunstan explained, “twin to the Kirkcaldy Cleansing League and chartered by Her Majesty’s Privy Council.”

  Parris and Corwin hauled Mrs. Diggens over the rail, spilling her onto the span as offhandedly as two Puritan farmers dumping a cartload of hay. The minister drew out a pair of dr
aper’s shears and sliced her thongs apart. Mrs. Diggens stretched but did not attempt to rise. She was short and sturdy of build, and for one breathless moment Jennet imagined that here was Aunt Isobel, come back from the grave.

  When at last Corwin untied the mask-o’-truth, Mrs. Diggens exhaled sharply and scrambled to her feet. Her frightened stare shot past her tormentors and fixed on Jennet. “Help me, friend Indian,” she whispered. “In my life I’ve stolen much and shagged many, but i’Christ I’m blameless to sorcery.”

  “The river hath revealed her nature,” Parris said. “Next comes her execution.”

  “Friend Indian, I beg ye,” Mrs. Diggens pleaded.

  A vortex of movement possessed the Purification Commission, and after the chaos had subsided Jennet stood pinioned against the rail, her right arm paralyzed by Parris’s grip, her left wrist trapped in Corwin’s skeletal fingers. Mrs. Diggens lay hunched and trembling on the span. The rope that had recently encircled her waist was now a noose about her neck.

  “’Tis not lawful to hang a person merely on the evidence of a swimming!” Jennet shouted. “She must go before a duly appointed committee and thence to a courtroom!”

  “Were you a subscriber to The Bible Commonwealth,” Abigail said, “you would know that by Queen Anne’s decree neither we nor our Scottish brethren need apply mundane standards to the invisible crime of sorcery.”

  Dunstan said, “However, if ’twill give you satisfaction, Jenny…” He pivoted toward Abigail. “Goodwife Stearne, as the Examination Committee on this bridge, you may now offer your findings.”

  “The Examination Committee returns a billa vera,” Abigail replied, looping the rope around the rail and securing it with three quick knots.

  “Oh, dear God!” Mrs. Diggens shrieked.

  “Stop this!” Jennet wailed.

  “Mr. Parris, what verdict doth the jury render?” Dunstan asked.

  “The jury finds Susan Diggens guilty,” the minister said.

  “Mr. Corwin, we shall hear your sentence,” Dunstan said.

  “Were this a case of thievery and bawdiness alone, I might be moved to spare her,” said the judge, forcing the prisoner to stand erect, “but Susan Diggens hath manifestly written in the Devil’s ledger, and so—”

  “Friend Indian!” Urine and liquid feces leaked from beneath Mrs. Diggen’s shift.

  With an efficiency doubtless born of experience, Dunstan and Abigail pulled a burlap sack over the prisoner’s head, lifted her onto the rail, and gave her a rude shove. Mrs. Diggens screamed as she fell, and then came a short, sharp report, like a dry twig snapping underfoot.

  The instant Corwin and Parris relaxed their hold, Jennet rushed toward the stairway, seriously pondering the possibility, at once tempting and terrible, of summoning the seven Kokokehom trappers and suggesting that they massacre this so-called Purification Commission. Instead she stopped and turned, her eyes now two gazing-crystals, each fixed on Abigail’s breast as if to scorch the vixen’s heart.

  “Hear me now, ye damned witchfinders! Your fellowship will not prosper! For all ye enjoy the blessings of the Crown, I shall one day destroy your enterprise as surely as Æneas slew King Turnus!”

  “Go back to your naked Redman,” Abigail hissed, “and trouble us no more!”

  Step by languid step, Jennet descended to the riverbank. Okommaka and the other Nimacooks collected around her, knives unsheathed, muskets cocked, tomahawks at the ready. Casco barked ferociously. She faced the bridge. Susan Diggens’s corpse swung from the rail like a Huygens pendulum. As Okommaka hovered by her side, Jennet walked back to the canoes, dislodged her new found Virgil, and carried it to the relevant cabin. The exchange took but a minute, and when it was over she no longer owned the Æneid, having acquired in its stead Reginald Scot’s treatise. True, it was unlikely that more than a paragraph from Discoverie of

  Witchcraft would end up in the argumentum grande. By themselves

  Scot’s words could never kill the Conjuring Statue or prompt

  the Privy Council to cancel her brother’s

  charter. But a Hammer of

  Witchfinders had to

  start

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  Somewhere

  amidst the private

  papers of the brilliant American

  sculptor Gutzon Borglum is a drawing that

  I regard as his crowning conception, greater even than

  his quartet of Mount Rushmore presidents. Borglum titled his idea

  “The Reader,” and he never got around to rendering it in stone; as far as I know, he never even took it to the maquette stage. Perhaps he lost enthusiasm. More likely he failed to find a patron. If realized, “The Reader” and its pedestal would have towered over twenty feet above some American park, common, or square. It shows a young woman sitting in a Windsor chair, lost in a book, a spaniel asleep at her feet.

  I needn’t remind you that readers have always constituted a minority within your species. Merely by opening this chronicle of mine, you have placed yourself in rare company. The odor of bowel wind is known to every human, but the fragrance of book glue has crossed only a fraction of mortal nostrils. And yet it behooves us not to judge the unlettered too harshly. We must stay the impulse to write CHUCKLEHEAD above their doors and carve DOLT upon their tombstones. For in days gone by, at least, a certain chariness toward typography made sense. Borglum’s woman in the Windsor chair is performing a traditionally problematic act.

  The first recorded instance of a troubled relationship between a reader and a book occurred in 590 B.C., when Yahweh ordered Ezekiel to eat a scroll, thereby absorbing its contents. Although the scroll displayed the words “lamentations, and mourning, and woe” front and back, Ezekiel acquiesced to the command. He reported that the book tasted “as honey for sweetness,” which strikes me as a mighty peculiar flavor for lamentations and mourning and woe. In my opinion Ezekiel was afraid to speak his mind: a prophet who knows what’s good for him does not go around criticizing God’s cuisine.

  One hundred and seventy years later, readers had to contend with Socrates’s pronouncement that books are useless artifacts. Literary works cannot explain what they say, the great philosopher argued—they can only repeat the same words over and over. To me this sounds less like the definition of a book than of a Heideggerian, but in any event Socrates clearly missed the point. Books don’t repeat the same words over and over. The Gulliver’s Travels whose whimsy amused you at twelve is not the Gulliver’s Travels whose acid engaged you at thirty.

  Some of you belong to my dear Jennet’s gender. I needn’t remind you that throughout Western history an argument has raged over whether women possess sufficient intellect to profit from the print medium. In A.D. 1333, the Renaissance artist Simone Martini provoked an ecclesiastical crisis when he painted the future Mother of God receiving the Annunciation while holding a book. Wasn’t Mary almost certainly illiterate? fretted the keepers of the faith. Wasn’t it sacrilegious to suggest that a woman might love knowledge when the Bible clearly stated, “Thy desire shall be to thy husband”? Would the painting’s audience even be able to recognize the Blessed Virgin in this strange scholastic stance?

  In 1740 the South Carolina legislature, haunted by images of their Negro chattel learning Jesus’ views on love and, worse, the abolitionists’ views on slavery, made it illegal to teach an African to read. According to this law, any black person caught with a book must be flogged. After the third such offense, the first joint of his forefinger was severed. Other Southern states rushed to enact identical measures, many of which remained in effect even after Emancipation.

  And so we see how throughout history the community of readers has been prey to sinister forces—to pedants and priests, legislators and lunatics, deities and demagogues. You have paid for your passion in humiliation, mutilation, and sometimes even—as when Henry VIII burned Bible translator William Tyndale as a heretic—immolation. I salute you all, as do my fellow

  books. Were you to c
all yourselves heroes, we would not smirk. Show

  me an accomplished reader, and I shall show you a person

  of many virtues, thoughtful and articulate,

  contemplative though rarely passive, temperate and yet

  benignly

  j

  Ambitious

  beyond his intellect,

  though timid in congruence with

  his clumsiness, Tobias Arnold Crompton

  had never fallen in love at first sight before, but now

  he’d done so, and the situation was causing him far more puzzlement

  than pleasure. The woman of his dreams was inaccessible. Insuperable circumstances, wide as any moat, high as any rampart, precluded the possibility of a chance meeting, let alone a tryst. Not knowing her name, Tobias had taken to calling her Bathsheba, for his plight indeed evoked King David peering down from the palace roof and beholding Uriah’s comely wife performing her ablutions.

  Two times a week, whilst carrying packets along the Amesbury Post Road for the Provincial Mail Commission, Tobias was privileged to observe Bathsheba laboring on the Nimacook plantation. Beyond her ridiculous bonnet of husks, she was a woman of transcendent desirability, one who made the cultivation of a maize crop—digging the furrow, inserting the seeds, adding a dead fish for fertilizer, extracting the weeds, harvesting the ears, uprooting the barren stalks, bundling them into sheaves for tinder—seem an arcane sport reserved to Vestal virgins or Greek goddesses. If by some blessed turn of fortune Bathsheba became Tobias’s wife, his joy would surely propel him through the ranks of his profession until he reached the pinnacle, Postmaster General of the British Crown Colonies in America.