by James Morrow
The source of this literary abundance was Ben. Every spring and again in the fall John Tux would employ Herr Strossen to bear him to the Hoosic, the young Nimacook having decided that he owed his mother such constancy, and he always hauled along a gift-crate from the ambitious editor of The Pennsylvania Gazette. By the end of her third year in exile, Jennet had accumulated a substantive library. Her trove included an especially nourishing shelf of Shakespeare, a credible collection of Milton, and a half-dozen quartos from Alexander Pope. “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, whose body Nature is, and God the soul”—a reasonable enough sentiment, though she preferred Rica’s evocation of Spinoza in Chapter Twenty-nine of Lettres Persanes: “If triangles had a god, it would have three sides.”
Beyond its bibliographic treasures, each Franklin crate included a hodgepodge of clothing, tools, and news-clippings. In the accompanying letter Ben would offer amusing accounts of William’s adventures, and he also narrated his own accomplishments—his election as Grand Master of the Masons, his establishment of a public subscription-library in Philadelphia, his inauguration of America’s first German-language newspaper, his definitive demonstration, via kite and collection jar, that lightning-bolts and Von Guericke sparks were in essence identical—but he always began by reporting on the aftermath of the Webster trial, which had evidently wrought a greater measure of justice upon the Earth than Jennet would have dared imagine. “As you can see by the enclos’d Clipping from The New-England Courant,” he wrote in the spring of 1733, “Governor Belcher hath depriv’d the Purification Commission of its Charter, quite clearly in Consequence of your Testimony.” Six months later: “According to this Day’s Issue of The Bible Commonwealth, quote, ‘His Majesty’s American Witchfinders have temporarily ceas’d their Activities, mayhap pursuant to Governor Belcher’s ill-conceived Injunction, more probably that they might mourn the Passing of their guiding Light, the Reverend Samuel Parris.’” The spring of 1734 brought the most heartening news of all: “I scour the Pages of every Colonial Journal to reach the Printing-House,” Ben wrote, “and I find no Evidence that your Brother and his Wife are abroad in the Land. Is it too much to hope we have seen the Last of them?”
Not every message from Ben was cause for celebration. Scarcely a month went by in which Governor Gordon neglected to declare that he still regarded Rebecca Webster as a convicted Satanist and a fugitive from justice. A bounty of fifty pounds sterling lay upon her head, and Gordon fully intended to prosecute her the instant she was brought before him. Another unhappy dispatch detailed the attack of pleurisy, attended by a suppurating lung, that Ben had suffered in the summer of 1735. Still another sad bulletin disclosed the demise of Das Philadelphische Zeitung. But the most terrible letter from Pennsylvania concerned Deborah and Ben’s first-born son, Francis Folger Franklin, dead of the small-pox at age four. “Shortly after we interr’d that good and loving Boy in the Yard of Christ Church,” Ben wrote, “I was mov’d to reverse a long-standing Prejudice of mine, and in consequence our William is now inoculat’d against this Pestilence.”
When not contemplating the mysteries of arachnid architecture, Jennet pursued a construction project of her own, an enclosed veranda extending along one side of her tree-hut. She took a particular pride in the window curtain, which she’d made by attaching colorful pebbles and shiny snail-shells to three-foot lengths of twine. It was shortly after she’d hung the last curtain-strand, on a congenial August afternoon, that a loud greeting came wafting through her oak. “Hallo, Jennet Stearne!” John Tux? No, this was a different sort of voice, less musical, more hearty. “Hallo, dearest friend!” Nor could her visitor be Pussough, whose tongue boasted a distinctly Nimacook cadence. This man sounded entirely English.
“Hallo!” she called back.
“Is it true a brilliant philosopher dwells up there, and will this same sage entertain a wayfarer from Pennsylvania? For he brings most glorious news!”
“Oh, my bonny Ben!” she cried, unfurling her rope ladder.
Five minutes later they stood together on her veranda, locked in a protracted embrace, at the end of which she stood back, pressed Ben’s hand betwixt her palms, and offered her condolences on the death of little Francis.
“This life oft-times seems to me a squall of scalding tears,” he said, “and they ne’er burn deeper than when a parent must bury his own child.”
“I know too well the despond of which you speak,” she said.
He brushed his fingers along the curtain, wringing a soft carillon from the pebbles and shells. “Let us think on happier matters, dearest. I cannot say what miseries the morrow may bring you, but today, J. S. Crompton—today every rose in Christendom blooms in your honor, every lark warbles your praises, and Dr. Halley’s comet dances to an air called ‘The Song of Jennet.’” Dipping into his waistcoat he withdrew a news-clipping. “Behold an article from The London Journal of this past July the first concerning a parliamentary act to be henceforth known as the Witchcraft Statute of George the Second.”
Jennet snatched away the clipping. She rushed past the introductory paragraphs, lingered briefly on a sentence identifying the new law’s initiator as an alderman named Heathcote, then plunged into the heart of the matter.
I. Be it enact’d by the King’s most excellent Majesty, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembl’d, that the Statute made in the first Year of the Reign of King James I, entitl’d “An Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Dealing with Evil and Wicked Spirits,” shall, from the 24th day of June next, be repeal’d and utterly void and of non effect.
II. And be it further enact’d that from and after the said 24th of June, the Act pass’d by the Parliament of Scotland in the ninth Year of Queen Mary entitl’d “Anentis Witchcraft,” shall be and is thereby repeal’d.
III. And be it further enact’d, that from and after the said 24th of June, no Prosecution, Suit, or Proceeding shall be commenc’d or carried on against any Person or Persons for Witchcraft, Sorcery, Enchantment, or Conjuration, in any Court whatsoever in Great Britain.
“‘Repealed and utterly void and of non effect,’” she said, voice trembling. “‘Repealed and utterly void…’” Her tears hit the clipping with soft silent collisions. “Oh, Ben, you must promise me these words come not from the pen of Ebenezer Trenchard, for I could ne’er abide such a hoax.”
“Even Ben Franklin places certain matters beyond jocularity. Read on, Jenny. The best is still to come.”
She dropped her gaze to the final paragraph, scanning it through the watery veil.
In voting to overturn the Conjuring Statute of King James I, some several Parliamentarians allud’d to a Treatise with which we Journal Editors were heretofore unfamiliar, Mr. J. S. Crompton’s The Sufficiency of the World. In the Words of William, Duke of Newcastle, “This noble Tome offers a Rationale, rooted in the most rigorous Newtonian Experimentalism, whereby ev’ry thoughtful Christian might see how the suppos’d Crime of Witchcraft is an Impossible Thing.”
“My book’s been read by Newcastle himself!” she cried.
Now Ben was weeping too. “‘Some several parliamentarians,’ it says. ‘Some several.’” He patted his eyes with a corner of his handkerchief, then passed the cloth to her. “And now I must tell you of yet another blessing. Right before John Tux and I departed for the Hoosic, Governor Gordon made public his intention to lift the bounty and pardon you in full. To wit, my dearest love, you are a free woman, heir to the same rights enjoyed by all British subjects this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Shall I save you a place in Herr Strossen’s coach?”
“On first principles, the answer requires no thought.” She twisted the handkerchief into a taut cord of silk. “And yet there be riches on these shores.”
As if cued by Jennet’s remark, a red-tailed hawk took flight from a nearby chestnut tree, gliding past the veranda in a majestic parabola.
“The grandest telescope in Ameri
ca hath lately come into my possession,” Ben said.
“I have my lofty house and my humble library. My industrious spiders and my beauteous rocks. I have my tranquility.” She returned the handkerchief to Ben. “‘Repealed and utterly void and of non effect.’ Did a Lutheran hymn e’er boast a more beautiful refrain?”
“Certainly not,” he said.
“Did Shakespeare e’er write a better line?”
“Not more than once or twice in his whole life.”
“Bear me to Philadelphia, bonny Ben, that I might peruse the Codex Naturæ, study the Galilean satellites through your new telescope, and watch our son grow to manhood!”
j
FORESEEABLE AS THE PHASES of the moon, predictable as the pull of charged sulphur on chaff, Pussough’s reaction to the news of her imminent departure involved no surprises, few nuances, and much lamentation. He moaned and keened and stamped his moccasined feet. He declared that he wanted to die. They spent the night together, alternately quarreling and swiving, and by morning her Lynx Man had found within himself a proper measure of gallantry. Of course she must return to Mr. Penn’s province. No question. D’accord. Her child needed her, and moreover she was a philosopher at heart, far less Waequashim of the Kokokehom than J. S. Crompton of the argumentum grande. She belonged in Philadelphia.
And so it was that Rebecca Webster, née Jennet Stearne, ended her exile, allowing Herr Strossen to bear her and Ben back to the Colonial capital.
It was not long after their arrival that a typically Franklinesque obsession took hold of Ben. He wanted the reading public of America and Europe to know that the author of The Sufficiency of the World was in fact Rebecca Webster, vindicated witch, who was in turn Jennet Stearne, natural philosopher, a revelation he imagined making in either The Pennsylvania Gazette or his newest publishing venture, Poor Richard’s Almanack. Once Mrs. Webster’s true identity was known, he argued, Jennet might earn a handsome income touring the great cities of Europe, lecturing on how she’d brought the English Parliament to its senses.
But Jennet had no interest in eminence. She wanted only to pursue a modest philosophic life, designing and executing experiments spun from her intuition that magnetism and electricity, like lightning-bolts and Von Guericke sparks, shared a common heritage. Though it was not at first obvious how she might support herself during these investigations, she eventually solved the problem by selling the Chestnut Street townhouse to a Dutch shipbuilder named, strangely enough, Van Leeuwenhoek, a distant relation to the father of microscopy.
A succession of brief visits to Ben’s Market Street residence convinced her that her son’s real family consisted of his distractible but doting father and his dull but affectionate stepmother. If she wanted to serve William’s happiness most fully, she would play a rôle analogous to that which Aunt Isobel had assumed in her own upbringing. She would become the child’s secondary nurturer, his deputy mother, introducing him to Newton’s optics and Virgil’s epic, to Shakespeare’s lovers and the Nimacooks’ lore, to the glories of geometry and the satisfactions of swimming—but, alas, she would not be the one to dry his tears, wipe his nose, prepare his supper, bandage his abrasions, tuck in his bed-clothes, or comfort him when phantoms troubled his sleep.
Ignoring the counsel of Ben, Barnaby, John Tux, Nicholas Scull, and everyone else she knew in Philadelphia, she seized the opportunity to purchase, for a fraction of its worth, the Sumac Lane farm, a property that, owing to its reputation as the home of a convicted sorceress, had found no tenants since her flight to the Hoosic Valley. Her friends all agreed that the Witchcraft Statute of George II, with its unequivocal rejection of the demon hypothesis, had implicitly turned the Manayunk villagers into objects of ridicule, which meant they were certain to variously shun and harass the woman who’d brought this humiliation upon their heads. And yet something like the opposite occurred. Not long after her return to the farm a delegation of her neighbors, some twenty in all, gathered outside her door bearing home-brewed ales and piquant apple pies. This committee of the contrite owed its formation to Bethany Fallon, the goose girl who’d once fed contaminated rye seeds to her flock, though now she was Mrs. Markley, a brewer’s wife with a brewer’s child in her belly.
“We have sinned against thee, Mrs. Webster,” she said, stepping onto Jennet’s stoop. “We wronged thee no less than Judas wronged our Savior.”
“My trial brought to light a wicked judge and three corrupt prickers, but I see no such malefactors here,” Jennet said.
“We always remove the black bodies from our seeds ere we feed ’em to our geese,” Mrs. Markley said, “and so far our flock’s been free o’ the ergot.”
Next to speak was Mr. Plum, the flax-planter who’d told the Court how a lightning-bolt had burned his crop. “Now that Parliament hath endorsed Mr. Crompton’s opinions,” he told Jennet, “I am pleased to call electricity and Heaven’s fire the selfsame substance.”
“Sir, you must ne’er accept a scientific principle simply because it boasts the weight of authority,” Jennet said. “Accept it rather because it enjoys the blessing of evidence.”
The blessing of evidence. As her neighbors drifted away, the euphonic phrase lingered in her brain, mocking her aspirations. The blessing of evidence was exactly what her magneto-electric hypothesis could not claim. It was just that, a mere hypothesis, trapped in the foggy valley of conjecture, miles below the towering crag of fact.
Throughout the spring of 1738, whenever a thunder-gust seemed about to break over Manayunk, she would assemble and launch a silk kite surmounted by an upright wire. The fly-line terminated in a lean-to sheltering a collection jar in which stood an iron horseshoe, the surrounding area ringed by twenty hobnails laid flat on the grass. To guide the wire directly into the clouds, she always detached the kite from the mooring post and steered it by hand, but only after putting on boots outfitted with paraffin soles and equipping the fly-line with a water-repellent leather bridle.
By the summer solstice she’d seen a dozen storms rip apart as many silk handkerchiefs, and still not a single lightning-bolt had found its way to the collection jar. But then, one turbulent evening in July, she managed to pilot a kite directly into a burst of Heaven’s fire. As the collateral sparks contacted the wire, electrified the wet twine, and entered the jar, the hobnails stirred and shivered—but they did not leap toward the encased horseshoe. Did the hobnails’ agitation trace to a brief moment of magnetism, she wondered, or had they moved simply in consequence of the celestial explosion itself?
She retrieved the horseshoe and passed it over the hobnails. No movement. Not the slightest quaver. The shoe was evidently inert. Ah, but did this mean that her magneto-electric hypothesis was wrong, or merely that the collection jar had not stayed charged long enough to magnetize the iron? She couldn’t decide.
The following Sunday, whilst Ben, Deborah, and William attended their dreary little Presbyterian church in Pine Street, and Jennet with equal devotion pruned her cherry tree, the vivid noon sun vanished abruptly behind a mantle of slate clouds. A thunder-gust was coming, she surmised—a new opportunity to imbue a horseshoe with the Gilbertian force.
Methodically she set the stage for the experiment, positioning the horseshoe inside the collection jar and encircling it with hobnails. This time she rested the jar on a slab of paraffin in hopes that the glass would thereby remain charged for a significant interval. She rushed into the house and laid out the necessary materials—handkerchief, cedar sticks, pointed wire, tail-cloth, skein of twine, leather bridle—on the parlor worktable. Within ten minutes she’d fashioned the wooden cross and affixed the wire. A thunderclap rolled across Manayunk, and then came another. She glanced through her front window. Myriad chestnut leaves vibrated on their twigs. The rosebush shivered as if experiencing dread. It was going to be a magnificent hunt.
As the thunder boomed a third time, her front door reverberated with a frenzied, desperate pounding. Her immediate thought was that, contrary to her wishes, Be
n had revealed the Widow Webster’s identity as J. S. Crompton, and now some local oddfellow wished to waste her time expounding upon the moon’s inhabitants or presenting his disproof of uniform acceleration.
She abandoned the worktable and marched to the door, her humor worsening with each step. “Who goes there?” Silence. “Tell me your name!” More silence, then renewed pounding. “I receive no visitors today!”
“You will receive me!”
The door swung open, and a rangy man of some sixty years lurched through the jamb, clad in a shredded linen smock and, about his legs, pieces of blanket tied with thongs. He shoved past Jennet and scuttled into the parlor. It took her several seconds to recognize the intruder, so broken was his form and weathered his face. Bits of dead leaves and flecks of moss clung to his arms and shoulders. He’d lost a third of his weight, much of his color, and most of his teeth.
“’Sheart,” she muttered.
As if no longer yoked to one another, Dunstan’s eyes flickered madly behind his brass-framed spectacles. “Hallo, Jennet Stearne.”
“I am Rebecca Webster.”
“Thou art Jennet Stearne, convicted witch, whom Providence saw fit to deliver from the gallows. As for your brother, he is now a voice crying in the wilderness, preparing the way for the divine cleanser Suedomsa.” He darted to the couch and, doffing his torn felt hat, eased himself onto the bolster. Splotches of dirt covered his fire-scarred brow, making each wrinkle look like a wheel-rut. “When the messenger heard of your reprieve—he sees a newspaper but rarely—when he heard, he was glad in his heart. He started south betimes. That was…two months ago, three mayhap.”