The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  Jennet approached the Baron and kissed his brow. “Mon cher Charles, ’twould appear I am profusely in your debt.”

  “I merely financed this madness,” Montesquieu said. “The scheme itself was entirely of Mr. Franklin’s design.”

  John Tux extended his fluttering hand and gestured toward the open compartment. “The faster we leave Philadelphia, Waequashim, the greater our chances of seeing the morrow’s sun come up.”

  “’Twill not be long ere the Redcoats break their bonds and come charging onto the scene,” Ben added urgently. “I shall give you till the count of five.”

  “How can we know the Kokokehom will take me back?” Jennet asked John Tux. “My long-ago departure was accomplished most discourteously.”

  “One!” Ben cried.

  “They will take you back,” said John Tux with prodigal confidence. “The rules of pittuckish require it.”

  “You must tell William his mother will always love him,” Jennet instructed Ben.

  “Two!” he barked. “You have my word,” he added.

  “Mon ami grand,” she moaned, throwing her arms around the Baron.

  “Hélas, we’ve no time for farewells, Madame,” Montesquieu said.

  “Three!”

  She turned and hugged the love of her life. “My bonny Ben.”

  “Four!” he shouted. “My dearest Jenny,” he gasped. “Five!”

  Uncoiling her arms from Ben’s heroic rotundity, she allowed John Tux to hoist her into the decrepit coach. As the Indian climbed up beside her, the Baron’s footman slammed the door, Herr Strossen cracked his whip, and the wheeled monstrosity lurched onto Henry Road and headed north. Leaning out the window, Jennet stole a final glance at Ben standing firmly beside the Baron’s equipage, enshrouded by the dust of her departure. His absurd feather head-dress was all askew, its cockeyed angle evoking Newton’s periwig or perhaps a drunken earl’s peruke.

  Her sweetest swain. Her bonny Ben. One day that remarkable young man would be known throughout the Colonies, for surely

  fame must touch a person so skilled at scheming

  and adept at deception, even though he

  made a thoroughly

  preposterous

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  Indian

  disguises were by

  far the most common subterfuges

  employed by dissident American patriots during

  the Colonial era. The stratagem through which Ben rescued

  Jennet foreshadowed the several pseudo-Mohawk and faux-Algonquin

  raids that occurred as the winds of insurrection blew from Boston down to Charleston. As far as I can determine, the Colonists’ goal was not to implicate any actual Indians but rather to lend a general mood of chaos and indeterminacy to the struggle against British rule.

  A typical such action was the Gaspée affair. In 1772, while chasing a smugglers’ ship, this British customs schooner ran aground at Namquit Point near Providence. At nightfall a wealthy Rhode Island merchant named John Brown led eight boatloads of patriots dressed as Indians out to the Gaspée. They shot the captain, routed the crew, and burned the vessel. The official inquiry failed to identify a single perpetrator.

  Then, of course, there was the legendary Boston Tea Party, sparked by the Royal Governor’s refusal to let the Dartmouth and her two sister ships leave for England with their unwanted tea until the Colonists paid a duty on the entire cargo. On the evening of December 16, 1773, several dozen “Mohawk braves” rowed out to the vessels, ripped the lids off 342 crates filled with the vexatious leaves, and dumped the containers into the bay. “Many Persons wish that as many dead Carcasses were floating in the Harbor,” John Adams wrote at the time, “as there are Chests of Tea.”

  As we all know, Jennet was right about Ben. He did become famous, not only in America but throughout Europe, largely in consequence of his 1751 treatise, Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America, and its two sequels. (Among their many insights, Franklin’s electricity papers clarified that lightning bolts do not descend from the sky like hailstones—even Jennet, as we have seen, labored under that common misconception—for these flashes manifest a reciprocal discharge between cloud and ground.) Now, I can’t really blame my father for treating Franklin so cavalierly during the four hours they spent together in 1725. How was Newton to know that this cheeky kid from Philadelphia, who seemed almost as unbalanced as his demented half-sister, would amount to anything? How could he guess that, by the turn of the century, scientists would be routinely referring to Franklin as “the Newton of electricity”?

  Naturally I’m more interested in Ben’s genius for experiment than his talent for expedience, but let me here acknowledge the man’s political gifts. A loyal British subject at heart, he was truly aggrieved to see the Empire sundered, but when the time came to consecrate the American Declaration of Independence, he signed it with the same species of aplomb Jonathan Belcher had displayed invalidating Dunstan’s witchfinding charter. “We must all hang together,” Ben said, taking pen in hand, “or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

  Whenever I ponder his many diplomatic achievements, I am especially moved by Ben’s success in convincing the French government to supply the American patriots with firearms, foodstuffs, ships, troops, officers, and, above all, money. Consider his inauspicious circumstances. He lands in Auray on December 3, 1776, proceeds to Paris, and meets secretly with the French Foreign Minister, the Comte de Vergennes, three days after Christmas. Our hero is seventy, exhausted, and still mourning his Deborah, now three years dead. He has come to Paris as the envoy of a dubious rabble in rebellion against a legitimate European king, and somehow he must persuade an absolute Catholic monarch, Louis XVI, to aid the very sort of Protestant insurgents who for a century and a half have been his country’s worst enemies in the New World. It’s like inviting Francis of Assisi to go duck hunting. And yet, through a combination of wit, charm, and bald propagandizing, not to mention his je ne sais quoi with the ladies (who wield considerable influence in French government circles at this time), Ben brings it off. In February of 1778 a treaty is signed at Versailles, and soon afterward millions of livres are flowing into the Yankee treasury. I would not claim that Ben won America’s war of independence with that treaty—he certainly didn’t win it apart from George Washington’s military prowess, Thaddeus Kosciuszko’s knowledge of fortifications, and Baron von Steuben’s ability to mold brigades from bumpkins—but I cannot imagine the Colonists’ victory without the Franco-American alliance.

  Yesterday my own war of independence, my lifelong struggle to rid myself of the Malleus Maleficarum, likewise received a boost from Benjamin Franklin. Throughout the long and bloody Battle of Fortieth Street, the pendulum of victory swung to and fro. The first engagement found my booklice outflanking and subsequently decimating the Malleus’s silverfish, but then his Cambodian wasps strafed my termites, sending them into retreat. When my Indonesian moths retaliated by firebombing the Malleus’s bookworms, his remaining silverfish grew so enraged that they massacred my pulp-chiggers. But then, suddenly, like Blücher at Waterloo, Poor Richard’s Almanack swooped onto the scene leading a corps of Madagascar papyrus beetles, and the tide turned in my favor. Once I’d hurled those five thousand carapaced berserkers into the fray, the Malleus’s doom was sealed.

  My arthropod mercenaries were quick to claim their prize. Shortly after two o’clock they departed a field strewn with legs, wings, antennae, and proboscises, subsequently crossing the East River in a coal barge, hitching a ride to Mineola in a garbage truck, and marching into the Dover Publications warehouse. At 4:30 P.M. the rationalist bacchanal began. With the same caliber of zeal the Colonial dissidents brought to the Boston Tea Party, the insects descended buzzing and singing upon the nearest carton of Witch Hammers, chewed off the lid, and sunk their mandibles into the epistemic obscenities.

  Only after my soldiers were well into the second carton did I perceive, and immediately repent, my
error. My God, I thought—my God, I’ve become that vilest of creatures, a biblioclast. I am no better than those misguided Greeks who consigned the works of Protagoras to the flames; no better than Diocletian building a pyre from any and all volumes pertaining to Jesus Christ; no better than the Emperor Shih Huang-ti ordering the destruction of every book published before his ascension (so that human history would appear to begin with his reign); no better, even, than Joseph Goebbels supervising the incineration of more than twenty thousand volumes—Freud, Steinbeck, Zola, Hemingway, Einstein, Proust, Wells, Mann, London, and Brecht among them—in the streets of Berlin on May 10, 1933.

  “Cease!” I told my insect hosts. “Cease and desist!”

  But, alas, I no longer controlled the bibliophages. Instead of heeding me they continued feasting, and by dawn Dover’s entire Malleus inventory lay in their digestive systems, the air filling with the sound of burping pulp-chiggers and cooing booklice. And so I must beg your sympathy, gentle reader. Now that I’ve regained my senses, I see that the best counter to a malicious idea is a bon mot, not a bonfire; I see that the correct reply to a corrupt text is a true

  one, not a termite corps; I see that the proper way to defeat the

  agents of darkness is not to burn down their houses

  but to rip away their shutters,

  open their doors,

  and let in

  the

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  Sunlight

  dancing on the

  mist above Cutshausha Falls,

  fashioning a rainbow even as it corroborated

  refraction’s eternal laws. Snowflakes sifting down from

  the winter sky, each crystalline wheel a marvel of Euclidian precision.

  Rivulets rushing along the thicketed slopes, eager to feed the swollen river in accordance with ancient hydraulic principles. Nux, yes, no question: here on the shores of the Hoosic, here amongst its beasts and fish and fowl, the sufficiency hypothesis obtained in full.

  An ample valley, a robust forest, a place in which Jennet had found—not happiness exactly, not bliss, nor even satisfaction: the word, she decided, was tranquility. For the first time since receiving her commission from Aunt Isobel, she enjoyed an inner equipoise, her soul’s pendulum describing an arc neither too long nor too short. Her body grew firm and muscular. Her barren scalp, so brutally shaved by Abraham Pollock’s sisters, again yielded its shock of hair, the auburn now inlaid with silver. Her curiosity became keener than ever, eventually finding a worthy object in the countless species of spider thriving near the Indian village. Why didn’t these daughters of Arachne get tangled in their own threads? Were they Platonists at heart, spinning their webs in reference to an unseen ideal? Was a spider’s bite always a calamity, or might the poison be a secret medicine? The Kokokehom had noted her obsession. Waequashim Ashaunteaug-Squaw, they called her. Waequashim the Spider-Woman.

  Owing largely to John Tux’s correspondence with his sagamore mother, Quannamoo, an exchange in which he’d cast Jennet as the heroic enemy of the Indian-killing witchfinders, her return to the clan had occasioned much festivity. Shortly after Herr Strossen’s coach had clattered into the village, Quannamoo arranged a welcoming ceremony, a wopwawnonckquat. In form the custom was rather like running the gauntlet, though in spirit it was the opposite: instead of assailing the initiate with whips and cudgels, the assembled Nimacooks honored her with praise and caresses. As Jennet moved down the line, familiar faces appeared before her, each a bloated, shrunken, or otherwise unfaithful reflection of the memory she’d been carrying in her head. Thus did she experience a grand reunion with Hassane, no longer a rascally young medicine-woman but a middle-aged taupowau, well on the way to crone-hood. Likewise waiting to greet her was Kapaog, the brave she’d suckled as a babe following his mother’s death from the flogging sickness, his frame now towering over six feet, his legs as strong as saplings, his broad hands holding a bead necklace: a gift, he explained, offered in gratitude for her milk. But the acme of the wopwawnonckquat was the moment in which Pussough, her Lynx Man, stepped forward and, cupping his hands beneath her jaw, tilted back her head until their eyes met.

  “Askuttaaquompsin?” he asked.

  “Asnpaumpmauntam,” she replied. Yes, I am well.

  From the pocket of his deerskin coat Pussough withdrew the largest raven feather Jennet had ever seen, larger even than the specimens Abigail had disgorged during the trial, a quill that, crisply trimmed and dipped in venom, would have been worthy to record her most wicked thoughts and scandalous fancies.

  “I found it in the wayside cavern to which we guided you after the Haverhill raid,” he explained.

  “A strange place for a bird to shed its plumage,” she said.

  He slid the feather along her scalp, lodging it in the thickest of her nascent locks. “Mayhap it comes from the very raven who blessed us with the first maize seed.”

  “Then I shall wear this token with great respect, and never let it far from my sight.”

  After the wopwawnonckquat celebrants had dispersed, Jennet’s Nimacook mother-in-law appeared, the ancient Magunga, now dry and shriveled as a corn husk, bearing the news Jennet most dreaded to hear. The rumors were true. Okommaka had been sorely wounded whilst leading a foolhardy raid on the English settlement at Springfield. Taking Jennet’s hand, Magunga guided her toward the plaza, where two more Nimacooks joined their company, nimble young braves whom Magunga introduced as her grandsons, Wompissacuk and Chogan. The solemn procession continued to the village’s largest wigwam, its walkway planted with trilliums—his favorite flower, Jennet remembered.

  “Pausawut kitonckquewa,” Magunga said, pausing at the threshold. He cannot last long.

  “One bullet he carries in his side,” Wompissacuk elaborated, “another in his chest.”

  “At first the fight went our way,” Chogan added, “but then a company of lobsterbacks arrived.”

  Jennet stooped before the doorway and stepped forward, abandoning the blazing sunlight for the gloomy wigwam. It was a fœtid place, foul and swampy as Aunt Isobel’s anatomization theatre at the height of the experimentum magnus. Speckled with sweat and taut with pain, her wasick lay on a sleeping mat, eyes closed, mouth gaping, his quavering flesh swathed in a woolen blanket. A woman of middle years crouched beside him, the lissome mother of his strapping sons, soaking a wad of sphagnum in an earthenware bowl filled with water.

  Okommaka’s two wives exchanged hasty glances. “I am glad of your arrival,” Maansu told Jennet. “He speaks of you often.”

  As the squaw rubbed the dripping moss across Okommaka’s brow, Jennet dropped to her knees and took his fevered hand in hers. His eyes flickered open. He smiled.

  “Waewowesheckmishquashim?”

  “Aye, my husband, ’tis your wayward Waequashim, home at last.”

  “I am sensible of the destiny that took you from us.” A sudden spasm rippled through his frame. He clenched his teeth and groaned. “Your noble war on the witchfinders.”

  “Methinks we are not the luckiest of persons, you and I,” Jennet said. “The bold Okommaka lost his battle with the Redcoats, and the benighted Waequashim failed to defeat the demonologists.”

  “But we fought well, did we not?”

  “Aye, husband. We fought well.”

  “Then perhaps we are not so unlucky.”

  She bent toward him and kissed his lips. “Do you think of her?”

  “Nux. Yes. Almost every day.”

  “I would fain visit the mound beside the Shawsheen,” she said, “but I fear there would be naught left of’t.”

  Once again Maansu saturated the sphagnum. She caressed her husband’s face with the cool spongy mass.

  “Has the night come?” Okommaka asked.

  “Not yet,” Maansu said.

  “Ere the moon rises,” he said, “I shall fly to the mountain of Kautantouwit, who will then bear my soul to Keesuckquand. And after I am gone a month, dearest wives, you must look to the sun, and you will s
ee Pashpishia and her father, sitting by the council fire.”

  Okommaka did not die that night. Instead he lingered for three more days, succumbing to the bullets on a drear and drizzly afternoon, Thursday by the English calendar. At first Jennet felt nothing at all, and then she felt entirely too much, a knife in her heart, a nail in her gut. It was only through the greatest effort that she succeeded in applying a mask of soot to her face, paddling a canoe across the Hoosic, and joining the circle of mourners.

  From noon until dusk the grieving Indians sat around the grave, and for even the most stoic warrior there was no shame in letting his tears fall like rain. When at last the weeping was accomplished, Hassane came forward and erected the soul-chimney, the cowwenock-wunnauchicomock, atop the mound. Carefully she canted it to the southwest, so that Okommaka’s spirit might more easily find its way to Kautantouwit’s abode.

  At that precise moment Jennet’s prime impulse was to march up to the soul-chimney and kick it to pieces. She wanted to grind the foolish thing into the dirt. She desired nothing more than to subtract it from the world.

  But the Hammer of Witchfinders did not destroy the soul-chimney that day, nor would she destroy it the following day: Okommaka’s cowwenock-wunnauchicomock was evermore safe from her philosophy. Instead she went down to the river and climbed back into the canoe, and as she guided the vessel toward the far shore an alarming thought entered her already troubled brain. When summer came she would occasionally lift her eyes to the blue and cloudless Hoosic Valley sky, fixing on the sun’s corona. And one fine day—despite everything, despite sufficiency, despite the burning of Isobel Mowbray and the trial of Rebecca Webster—one day she would see them both, Okommaka and Pashpishia, laughing together and warming themselves by the council fire. The idea flooded Jennet with a deep distress, deeper even than her grief. It brought a chill to her blood and a hoarfrost to her veins, and she began to paddle furiously, as if in flight from the Dark One.

  j

  OKOMMAKA’S REMAINS WERE NOT A WEEK in the ground when Wompissacuk and Chogan embarked upon a scheme by which they hoped to ameliorate their grief whilst simultaneously bestowing a boon on Waequashim. Their intention was to build her a private wigwam, siting it in the enormous oak tree that flourished on the lee shore of the Hoosic. Completed in the space of a month, the dwelling proved a veritable mansion, a splendid assemblage of birch bark and cedar planks, subdivided into four discrete rooms, rather like the Market Street garret in which Jennet had first frolicked with Ben. The northwest chamber she devoted to dining, whilst the adjacent area became home to her spider experiments and rock specimens. In the southeast sanctum she erected her sleeping platform, an amenity that she oft-times shared with the passionate Pussough. Most sacred of all was the remaining space, the one in which she gathered and read and lovingly stroked her books.