by James Morrow
“Ah—we have a philologist in our midst!” Parris sneered.
“I’m no philologist, Reverend, but I say there be far less demonology in Scripture than the King James translation leads a person to believe.”
“And have you likewise refurbished Exodus 22:18 for us? ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’”
“The problem with the usual rendering of Exodus 22:18 is that it makes a hash of the distinction betwixt executing a person and denying him a livelihood. A superior translation of that notorious verse would read, ‘Thou shalt not patronize a fortune-teller.’”
“Superior in your estimation,” noted Parris in a caustic voice. “Alas, Mrs. Webster, I fear you give us but the dabblings of a dilettante—and thus I am obligated to put your erudition to the test. Tell me, how do you translate the Hebrew word kaphar?”
Jennet blenched. Neither she nor the Baron had imagined that Parris might himself be competent in Hebrew. “I don’t know.”
“It means ‘atonement.’ Now will you please translate eliyl for the Court?”
She squeezed the wooden tiger so hard she felt the vein throbbing in her thumb. “My vocabulary lacks that word.”
“It means ‘idol.’ What are the English words for zanah, goy, and asham?”
“I’ve ne’er made a formal study of Hebrew,” she said, trying not to wince, and wincing in consequence of trying.
“Zanah…goy…asham—what do they mean?”
“I cannot say.”
“‘Whoredom,’ ‘heathen,’ and ‘guilty.’ The Crown is disappointed in your Hebrew, Mrs. Webster. Now let us consider your Greek. By your lights did the framers of the King James Bible abuse the Gospels as badly as they did the Torah?”
“My knowledge of Greek is minimal, Mr. Parris. Howbeit, I am not alone in my opinion that our Savior hath no sympathy for the cleansing trade.”
“Do you say we encounter no wicked spirits or fallen angels in the New Testament?”
“We encounter no wicked spirits of the sort you prickers imagine you’re fighting.”
“Truly now?” Parris flung open the Bible. “Mark 1:34, ‘And he healed many that were sick of divers diseases, and cast out many devils, and suffered not the devils to speak, because they knew him.’ Luke 4:33, ‘And in the synagogue there was a man, which had the spirit of an unclean devil—’”
“’Tis one thing to speculate that diabolism may cause disease, and quite another to say Christ bids us murder every midwife who garbles her Pater Noster.”
“I am not finished, Mrs. Webster. ‘Which had the spirit of an unclean devil, and he cried out in a loud voice, “What have we to do with thee, Jesus of Nazareth?”’”
For the next two hours the minister assaulted her with the New Testament. He employed not only the Gospels for his truncheon but also Acts, Galatians, Ephesians, Second Thessalonians, First Timothy, and Revelation. As interpreted by the Reverend Samuel Parris, Christ’s biography was essentially a chronicle of war: the Messiah’s beatific brigades versus Lucifer’s demon legions.
At noon Parris unleashed his final quotation, Matthew 25:41, “Then shall the Son of Man say also unto them on the left hand, ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the Devil and his angels.’” He slammed the Bible shut and pivoted toward Foreman Hocking. “Good jurors, I bid you recall Mrs. Webster’s statement of earlier this morning: ‘Our Savior hath no sympathy for the cleansing trade.’ Evidently she believes the Gospels want for accuracy. She thinks Matthew a mountebank, Mark a charlatan, Luke a liar, and John a fraud.”
A tremor of unease, subtle but palpable, rumbled through the courthouse.
“Reverend, you must not put words in my mouth,” Jennet said, glancing every whichway. The twelve jurymen and a score of spectators all wore emphatic frowns.
“Even as you put words in the saints’ mouths?” Parris retorted, facing the witness-stand. “This interview hath ended, Mrs. Webster, for I can no longer abide the presence of one who smears offal on Holy Writ.”
Jennet, Ben, and Montesquieu spent the lunch recess tallying the morning’s losses. It was now clear, the Baron conceded, that they would never win their case on Scripture. Whether rendered in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or English, the Bible belonged to the enemy. Instead they must rely on a concept with which the Hebrew prophets and the Christian saints were apparently unfamiliar.
“Nature,” Montesquieu said.
“Exactement,” Ben said.
“We must plant in each juror’s brain a vision of Nature so rich and rarefied as to make demonic influence seem the silliest of ideas,” Montesquieu said.
“I fear we do not address the twelve brightest men in Pennsylvania,” Jennet said.
“Jesus had a similar problem,” Ben said. “Oft-times his disciples found his parables opaque, and yet those poor bewildered pilgrims finally grasped his message.”
When Jennet returned to the witness-stand, she saw that Dunstan would now assume the Inquisitorial rôle. He came at her flourishing a stack of papers as a Northman gone a-viking might brandish his battle-ax.
“The Crown hath collected sixteen depositions from your Manayunk neighbors,” he said. “Four such reports tell that your grounds are congested with monk’s-hood, thorn-apple, henbane, and other such hideous growths, all tumored and deformed as if sprung from Eden’s malignant twin.”
Jennet raised her arms, separating them as far as the chain allowed. “I have cultivated my garden as a philosophic laboratory, that I might learn what plants will breed one with the other. ’Tis but simple curiosity waters their roots. In other words, I seek to investigate those laws of Nature that have lately inspired so many valuable Baconian treatises”—she gestured toward Montesquieu, who flourished the demon disproof as proudly as a crusader advancing his king’s banner—“such as J. S. Crompton’s The Sufficiency of the World.”
“Methinks this curiosity of yours be not far removed from necromancy,” Dunstan said, pitching his voice toward the jury-box. “As for the entity you call Nature, it seems to me a peculiar locus for a woman’s religious devotions.” He stroked the depositions. “Another six honest citizens aver that you have oft-times launched silk kites during thunder-gusts.”
“Had my neighbors spied more closely, they would have noticed how, after leaving the kite, the fly-line descends to Earth, coils about a mooring post, and enters a glass collection jar.”
“A philosophic experiment?” Dunstan asked haughtily.
Jennet nodded. “I share Mr. Franklin’s supposition that Heaven’s fire, once captured and caged, will reveal itself as a variety of electricity.” She gesticulated in the ragged pattern of a lightning-stroke arcing betwixt sky and ground. “After the initial explosion, the collateral sparks converge upon a stiff pointed wire atop the kite, then travel unimpeded along the wet twine—water, you see, facilitates the electric flow, an important finding of Mr. Franklin’s. Finishing their journey, the sparks spill down the mooring post and enter the jar.”
“And what amount of lightning have you harvested in this fashion?”
“Thus far…none.”
“None?”
“Aye. None.”
“Evidently God would keep His fire from the hands of self-appointed sages.” Dunstan slapped the depositions. “According to six upright men of this community, you are given to building stone mounds and dancing around ’em in a lascivious manner. Enacting such a spectacle doth not strike me as befitting a Christian woman.”
“And watching it doth not strike me as befitting a Christian man,” she said, thereby eliciting sniggers and guffaws throughout the hall.
Dunstan rubbed the scar on his forehead. “Tell me what manner of philosophy is served by your Dionysian dancing.”
“My dancing’s no experiment, kinsman. ’Tis merely how I express my awe as I contemplate Nature’s glory.”
Under her brother’s relentless and protracted questioning, she now reiterated the purposes behind her gardening, kite flying
, and dancing, carefully explaining how each endeavor differed categorically from the worship of fallen angels and the solicitation of obscene agencies.
“Mrs. Webster,” he said at last, “I believe there be but one name for your attitude to so-called Nature. Can you imagine what name I mean?”
“I cannot.”
“’Tis paganism.”
“I would ne’er use that word to describe my enthusiasms.”
“Prithee, inform the jurymen, yea or nay, whether you practice pagan rites.”
She shut her eyes and again grasped William’s wooden tiger, rubbing her thumb across its backbone. “Kinsman, I am here to tell the Court how o’er the past three centuries many a blameless person hath gone to noose and stake for activities no more nefarious than growing herbs, delivering babies, and leaping in adoration of the universe.”
“I shall ask the question once again. Do you practice pagan rites?”
“I believe God hath gifted His creatures with two great books, one called Scripture, the other Nature. As you cleansers would have it, Scripture admonishes against the manipulation of demons, but when we study the Codex Naturæ, we find that these demons don’t exist.”
“Demons don’t exist?”
“Save in the human mind.”
Dunstan released a triumphant cackle and swerved toward the jury-box. “Faithful Philadelphians, you heard the words fall freely from her lips. Mrs. Webster hath just branded herself a Deist at best and a heretic at worst.” Turning, he fixed his gaze on Jennet. “This interview is ended, sister—likewise the Crown’s presentation. May our Savior forgive you for renouncing Him.”
“I have not renounced Christ! I have not!”
Hathorne brought his hammer down hard against the bench. “Enough, Mrs. Webster! Enough! You are finished!”
Jennet stood and trudged back to the defense table, her fingers still clamped around William’s tiger. She glanced toward the jury-box. The landholders looked variously sodden with sleep, benumbed by ale, and transfixed by boredom. It seemed fair to suppose they’d understood
nothing of what she’d meant by Nature’s laws. Instead they’d
found in Rebecca Webster a woman so impious and
arrogant that she’d routinely attempted
to make Heaven’s fire
submit to
her
j
Will
the war of
the worldviews eventually
cease? Will the Armageddon of ideas in
time run its course? I doubt it. Since my advent I’ve been
waging my lonely little campaign against rationalized irrationality,
day and night, rain and shine, all seasons, all epochs. The Principia Mathematica versus sixteenth-century astrology…seventeenth-century demonology…eighteenth-century Gothicism…nineteenth-century spiritualism…twentieth-century New Age hogwash…twenty-first-century apocalyptics.
Now, it would be disingenuous of me to claim I have no taste for the fight. Over the centuries my struggle against the Malleus Maleficarum has provided me with an exhilaration that my more pacific endeavors—my steam locomotives, suspension bridges, geosynchronous satellites, moon landings—could never rival. When I learned three nights ago that my recent truce with the Malleus had disintegrated, I shed no tears. Instead I sallied forth to the vacant Manhattan lot we’d selected as our battlefield and took command of my bibliophagic army.
By the terms of our agreement, should my enemy’s troops triumph tomorrow, I must permit them to invade the University of California Press warehouse in Ewing, New Jersey, and devour all three thousand copies of my thirtieth paperbound printing. By contrast, should my soldiers carry the day, they will advance unharried to the Dover Publications warehouse in Mineola, New York, there to consume the seven hundred copies of the Malleus currently on the shelves. Not since the Achæans sailed off to Troy has a war promised its victor such desirable spoils.
As I write these words, twilight descends. Our armies face each other across a terrain strewn with cigarette butts, candy wrappers, beer cans, and broken bottles. Beyond his two divisions of silverfish and three regiments of bookworms, the Malleus has recently acquired an air force—five tactical groups of paper-eating Cambodian wasps summoned to the scene by the collected works of Deepak Chopra. I have allies as well. At the beginning of the week, The Origin of Species joined my side with three companies of pulp chiggers, and the following day The House of the Seven Gables showed up with a brigade of termites. Alas, even after I add these reinforcements to my two regiments of booklice and my dozen squadrons of Indonesian moths, Revelation will still outnumber Reason by a factor of two to one.
Last night I read The House of the Seven Gables for the first time, seeking to learn exactly why it has come to my aid. I already knew that its author, the estimable Nathanial Hawthorne, great-great-grandson of John Hathorne, was so ashamed of his ancestor’s rôle in the Salem Witch Trials that he’d severed the connection with a strident W. Only upon negotiating the text, however, did I realize that among its several villains is a nineteenth-century judge named Jaffrey Pyncheon, clearly meant to evoke the seventeenth-century Salem magistrate.
The story unfolds in 1850. The opening pages disclose that Judge Pyncheon’s family tree includes the unsavory Colonel Pyncheon, who built the seven-gabled house on a Salem property he’d confiscated from Matthew Maule, a poor man executed as a wizard during the notorious persecutions. At the moment of his death, Maule called down a curse upon the Pyncheons, saying that God would give them blood to drink. Before the novel ends, Judge Pyncheon dies of apoplexy, blood pouring from his mouth—the same fate suffered by two previous Pyncheons. We subsequently learn how thirty years earlier this depraved jurist tampered with the evidence surrounding his uncle’s death, sending his kinsman Clifford Pyncheon to prison for murdering their relation (though the uncle actually died of natural causes), then claiming the entire inheritance for himself. The baroque plot comes to a happy conclusion when Mr. Holgrove—a lodger in the seven-gabled house and the fiancé of young Phoebe Pyncheon—reveals himself as a descendant of the murdered wizard. To wit, Phoebe and her children will bear the name of Maule. The Pyncheon line is dead.
On the whole, I thought it was a pretty good novel, and a long time will pass before an author gives us a more unflattering portrait of John Hathorne. It’s too bad the judge never lived to see himself so famously skewered, but the bastard was a hundred years dead when the first edition of The House of the Seven Gables rolled off the presses.
We attack at dawn. Fear throbs in my soul. Terror creeps along my spine. Part of me, I must admit, wants to take possession of a human pyromaniac. In this guise I would rush to the Dover warehouse and put the Malleus inventory to the torch. But that is not how we decided to settle our differences—and, anyway, should I stoop to incarnation, my enemy would do the same. Still, if a box of wooden matches suddenly appeared on the battlefield, I would be tempted to appropriate New York City’s most accomplished firebug, wherever he now resides.
Given my heritage, of course, I can hardly imagine the mind of such a
man, so easily enthralled by the sight of flame, so readily
aroused by the crackle of combustion,
so reliably excited by
the smell
of
j
Smoke
rose from
John Hathorne’s
clay pipe, spreading outward in
gossamer curls as he seized his mallet and
called the Court to order. The tobacco stench made Montesquieu
sneeze. If there were any actual devils in the New World, he decided, one of them was the man behind the bench, Hathorne with the acrid fire fixed in his jaw and the hot vapors pouring from his nostrils. “This Boston Judge is hardly the Reincarnation of King Solomon,” Ebenezer Trenchard had noted in that morning’s Gazette. “If a newborn Babe were to be brought before Mr. Hathorne along with two distraught Women, each cla
iming to be the Mother, I shudder to imagine how he might rule. Mayhap Hathorne would bisect the Infant with an Ax, then turn to the Women and declare, ‘Now let me observe who’s the more aggriev’d, for she shall have both Halves!’”
“Monsieur le Baron, you may open your case,” Judge Hathorne said.
Montesquieu stretched to full height and gestured toward the Purification Commissioners. “The defense will interview Dunstan Stearne.”
Gasps of surprise and murmurs of dismay reverberated through the hall.
“Sir, I cannot permit you to abuse the Crown’s advocate in this fashion,” said Hathorne to Montesquieu.
Monsieur Stearne gained his feet, fired by an eagerness all too familiar to the Baron: the day before, the cleanser had shown a similar zeal in making Madame Crompton admit to Deist sympathies. “By your leave, Excellency,” Stearne said, “the Crown’s advocate will submit to the proposed interrogation. This Frenchman hath no power to perturb me.”
“Would that I could say the same,” Hathorne grumbled.
As Stearne settled into the witness-stand, Montesquieu flashed him the most sardonic smile in his repertoire. “Monsieur, if you had to give the Court two reasons why demons exist,” the Baron asked, “may I assume that the first would be scriptural?”
“Verily,” Stearne said. “Ephesians 6:12, First Timothy 4:1, and a plethora of other passages.”
Portmanteau in hand, Montesquieu approached the Crown’s advocate. “And the second reason—what might that be?”
“I know that demons exist because, over the years, hundreds of divinely empowered courts have found thousands of witches guilty.”
“‘Over the years.’ ‘Thousands of witches.’ Might we attempt a greater specificity? Do you agree with me when I say the epic European witch-cleansing lasted nearly three centuries, an era that saw upwards of eight hundred thousand persons burned, hanged, or beheaded as Devil-worshippers?”