Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  “I now order you to leave,” said Mather, “for it is her laughing time.”

  “That girl be taken with some female hysteria,” said Isaac the next morning.

  “Cotton Mather saw an imp,” answered John.

  “He saw a rat.” Isaac swung an old leg over the saddle. “And I smell one.”

  “I’ll see you in a month, Father.”

  “Aye,” said Isaac. “But wait six weeks to see that girl again. Let her monthlies come and go at least once, then see if she improve.”

  John Wedge did not take his father’s advice. He was back at Margaret Rule’s house with the Mathers the very next day. He laid on hands, he prayed, and he soothed a young girl, all of which, he told the Mathers, felt far better than hanging her.

  And he went to visit her another day when neither of the Mathers was in attendance, though the room was filled with gossiping townsfolk who had made this house a regular stop on their daily rounds.

  At the sight of him, the girl cried out, “The bright angel!” Then she extended her hand and bade him sit on the edge of the bed, in the place usually occupied by Cotton Mather. As he did, her thigh pressed against his and her face broke into a smile, revealing fine, unbroken teeth.

  And John had a strange thought: good teeth were the sure sign of good health.

  Suddenly, the girl shrieked, and John leapt to his feet, thinking he had sat on her, or perhaps it was an imp and not her thigh pressing against him.

  “The women!” she shrieked. “The women must leave!”

  “Why?” asked a toothless old goodwife by the window.

  “Because the dark angel is above your heads.”

  The goodwife ducked, as though a bird had just swept over her.

  “All women leave!” Then Margaret opened her mouth and emitted an ear-piercing shriek that drove all the women and most of the men from the room.

  But Robert Calef remained, at least a few moments more. He came every day to observe, comment, and scrawl notes in a small book. He stopped in the doorway and waited until Margaret had tired of shrieking, then said to John, “Be careful of the imps. They may be invisible, but they leave black droppings in the corners.”

  “Go and put that in your foul book,” said Margaret with a sudden, cold calm.

  “I believe that I will,” said Calef. “And someday, I will publish your story.”

  Once more, Margaret became the possessed woman-child, all but levitating from the bed and shrieking for John to lay on his hands.

  And so he did, in the name of the Lord, directly onto her barely covered breasts.

  She arched herself into him and cried out in relief, “Ahh . . . the devil flees.”

  “Keep the white angel before you,” he shouted.

  “I cannot see him. Help me to see him.” And with that, she placed her hands on his and directed them down, under the bedclothes, toward her loins.

  He felt himself sinking toward her temptation. He yearned to touch her, to knead her, to caress the naked flesh under her bedclothes. But then the old sailor poked his head in the window and said, “Squeeze her good, Judge. Devil’s in deep. Got to squeeze him out like the core of a boil.” This brought John up straight.

  “Please, good master,” cried Margaret. “Massage the devil away.”

  Though it was meant to be a spiritual act, John Wedge was responding physically. He could not let them see his breeches bulging, not the old sailor nor Robert Calef nor the goodwives whose faces were reappearing in the window and doorway. So he left off massaging and hurried from the room, while Margaret Rule cried out for him to come back and free her from her torment.

  That night, John Wedge was awakened by a torment of his own, a devil in the form of a dream, a naked spirit, a female spirit, with black hair and a dazzling smile, a spirit enticing him to embrace her, to kiss her, to press his hands against her breasts.

  And when he did these things in his dream, the spirit moaned and moved against him, and the dream was so alive that even in his sleep, he could feel himself rising.

  Then, his spirit lover began to cough, and the sound of the coughing woke him. And as the rising between his legs persisted, so did the coughing, for it was not a spirit that coughed but the sick woman sleeping in the next room.

  For a time, John lay there and tried to will his hardness away, but it was as needful in its yearning as a soul for God. So he rose and went to the window. In the moonlight, the masts and spars of his ships looked like skeletons. But the turrets of the great triangular warehouse looked like breasts—three large, round, slate-covered breasts with flagstaff finials for nipples. How could a man look at a warehouse and see teats, unless he was going crazy or had himself been touched by Satan?

  Soon he was hurrying along the moonlit street. If he met a constable, he would say that he was on the business of the colony, because he was. He was going to chase away demons. But whose?

  At Margaret’s house, he stopped by the window and peered inside. Though it was late, her light burned, as if the possessed did not sleep. To his surprise, she was reading the Bible. He whispered her name, and she raised her head. After a moment’s start, she smiled. “I have prayed for your visit, good master. I have prayed that you would come and pierce the evil spirit within me.”

  If Cotton Mather could have seen him at that moment, climbing through the window, stripping off his shirt and his breeches, slipping into her bed, pushing up her shift, John Wedge would have been cast out of church and colony, too. He might have been cast straight into hell.

  But the touch of her bare legs sent a thrill through his body that made him forget everything else. He pressed against her and murmured, “We’ll fight the devil together.”

  “Together,” she gasped, “now.”

  And she swung a leg over him and pushed herself down upon him with a force that he had never felt in his now sickly wife. If it was glory or sin that engaged him, he did not know, but he would see it through, so he answered her strength with his own.

  iii

  It was a year later that Isaac Wedge heard alarming news:

  “Sir, they’re burning books in Harvard Yard.”

  “Burning books?”

  “’Tis what I’ve heard,” said the farmer who brought the story.

  “What books?”

  “I know not, just that Increase Mather . . . he has told his tutors to assemble the students in Harvard Yard this very night, to burn a foul book.”

  Isaac looked at his students, immersed in their mathematics, their phonics, their mental wanderings, and for a moment, he was a boy himself, making a promise to John Harvard.

  He flipped the hourglass and told the young farmer, “Keep them in order till the sand run out. Then send ’em home.”

  It was a little after two o’clock on an October afternoon. If Isaac rode as hard as he could, which would not be very hard for he was an old man with a bad hip on an old horse, he would reach Cambridge just after dusk.

  The Post Road flamed with the fall colors that Isaac considered one of God’s most abundant gifts. But he did not think about colors as he rode, and he tried not to think about flames. He thought instead about the pain in his hip . . . and about his son.

  Had John set this thing in motion? Had he finally revealed the truth about the Harvard bequest? Had he done it to curry favor with the Mathers? But to what purpose?

  Any man whose wife had died in spring would not yet be himself by autumn. But whenever John spoke of his Mary’s passing, he told his father, “Grief burdens me, and guilt, too . . . that I was not a good enough husband.”

  Isaac had assured him many times that he could not have been anything but a good husband. And yet, on quiet nights by the Sudbury marsh, the old man had let his mind take pathways he should not have followed, and they led to Margaret Rule.

  Her “demons” had begun to retreat soon after John Wedge had visited her on his own, laid hands on her, and gone running from her room with a “tumescence” in his breeches, as Robe
rt Calef had described it to Isaac. “But don’t worry,” Calef had said, “’tisn’t your son interests me. ’Tis the Mathers.”

  Had his son been taken by the charms that Margaret Rule displayed for all of Boston? Had he acted upon desires that his dying wife could no longer fulfill? Was that why Mather had called him to spend a whole day in prayer shortly after Mary’s death?

  And if John was still burdened with guilt, might he have decided to cleanse his soul of whatever sins he could?

  Isaac passed from Sudbury through the farm precinct of Watertown, then another eight miles to Watertown village, and there, his horse went lame. She was simply too old to be ridden so hard for so long, and though she was game enough to go on, she could not.

  So he left her in a field, determined to go the last three miles to Cambridge on foot. The setting sun cast a long, limping shadow ahead of him, and the pain in his hip was blinding, but on he went. By the time he reached the west side of the Cambridge Common, darkness was rushing across the heavens like the evening tide across the Back Bay.

  But on the other side of the Common, a bonfire had been lit. Isaac could see it flaming in the courtyard between the president’s house and Harvard Hall. So he hurried on, stumbling in holes and slipping in piles of cowflop. He ignored the old pain in his hip and the new pain blossoming in his chest, because the firelit shadows were jumping higher, and the arms of the Harvard Hall sundials seemed to be jumping, too, as if time itself had gone crazy.

  Isaac realized that he must have been crazy to think he would outlive the prejudices and fears of his Massachusetts brethren. If a man would be known by his books, Isaac must proclaim himself at last. He had spent his life questioning the wisdom of those around him and seeing ignorance where others saw good sense. Reading a book had begun his rebellion. It had not been a book of philosophy or theology, but a play.

  So he pushed himself through the darkness. He pushed himself toward the fire. He pushed himself across the road and came staggering into the crowd of students and townsfolk.

  Increase Mather was standing close by the flames. Though he was president of the college, he seldom visited Cambridge, preferring to govern from his church in Boston. “What? Should I leave off preaching to fifteen hundred souls,” he had once been heard to ask, “so that I may expound to forty or fifty children, few of them capable of edification by such exercise?” But for this night, he had come.

  Isaac looked over the crowd for the tall familiar silhouette of his son, or of Cotton Mather, but he saw neither. He did not know if that should comfort him or not. He did see tutor John Leverett, however, at the same moment that Leverett saw him.

  Isaac reached out to strong-armed Leverett, as much for moral support as physical. Leverett had helped run the college during the absence of the elder Mather. He had proved a liberal thinker who more than once had angered the younger Mather. And more than once, Isaac had considered revealing the truth to him. Tonight he would reveal it to all of them, if he did not pass out from the pain.

  “Tutor Leverett,” said Isaac, “what’s happening?”

  “The president shows his displeasure at a book.”

  “Students!” proclaimed Reverend Mather. “We come to burn the evil in this book.”

  Isaac tried to cry out, but the words would not come. They were strangled by an intense pain, and he staggered backward, clutching his chest.

  “Master Wedge!” Leverett put his arm around Isaac’s shoulders.

  Meanwhile, Increase Mather raised a book high over his head. “This foul volume, which has brought so much—”

  And now Isaac forced the word out. “No! No!”

  The eyes of all the students turned to an old man in the shadows.

  “No to what?” roared Increase Mather.

  “No to burning that book.”

  “You would not burn a book of lies?” demanded Mather. “A besmirchment of my son, of all those who stood against the late evil, of your son, too?”

  Isaac’s old legs were shaking, there was a fire in his chest, and emotion was closing his throat. He tried to shout, but no words would escape him.

  “The man is stricken,” said Leverett.

  “With ignorance,” answered the president, “for his name is in this book, too.”

  Isaac tried to cry out that ignorance was all around and that this college should exist to drive it away. But he felt a great sinking, in his legs and in his head.

  “This book is a work of lies,” said Mather. “Lies are evil. Evil must be burned.”

  “No!” said Isaac weakly, his voice heard only by John Leverett. “That book is not evil. ’Tis truth in blank verse.”

  And the last sight that Isaac saw before his legs collapsed under him was the shadow of Increase Mather, hurling the book into the fire.

  His last words were “Ignorance . . . ignorance.”

  “Massah Wedge?”

  At the sound of his slave’s voice, John Wedge popped up from between Margaret Rule’s breasts. “Rosetta?”

  “Massah Mather askin’ for you, sir.” The slave stood in the shadows outside the window, but she did not look into the room. “He say he have bad news.”

  John Wedge jumped out of bed, oblivious to his own nakedness. “Did he say what?”

  “No.” It was Mather himself, appearing behind the slave. “Your father is dead. Put on your breeches.”

  At dawn, John Wedge and Cotton Mather rode the ferry from Boston to Charlestown, on their way to retrieve Isaac’s body. The sky was the gray of a dead man’s cheek. The water was the gray of a headstone.

  “Your father objected to the burning of a book,” Mather said.

  “A book?” said John. “A book in the Harvard bequest?”

  Mather turned to him. “Is there a book in the bequest that should be burned?”

  “No. No . . . what book, then?”

  “More Wonders of the Invisible World,” said Mather.

  “The book by Robert Calef? Just published?”

  “Yes. A foul satire of my own work. Nothing but lies. Calef even claims that my father and I laid hands on Margaret Rule’s bare breasts for the pleasure of it, as if we were no better Christian men than you turn out to be.”

  John Wedge studied the water and considered jumping into it.

  “Be thankful Calef knew nothing of your transgressions.” Mather spoke softly his hard-tempered words. “Or he would have written of those, too.”

  John offered no response. He simply listened to the screech of the cable pulley hauling the ferry across the narrow inlet.

  “You have been taken in fornication,” said Mather. “You should be punished.”

  “I can withstand it.”

  “Had you not been a judge in the court of oyer and terminer, I would expect it. But punishing you would give the witlings even more to use against us.”

  “Does your father intend to burn more books?” asked John Wedge.

  “Worry not for the books,” said Mather, “lest there be something in them to worry about. Worry for your immortal soul instead.”

  At the Charlestown side, they walked their horses off the ferry.

  “I must consider a punishment,” said Mather.

  All the way down the Charlestown Road, John Wedge did as Mather suggested: he worried for his immortal soul. He worried as well for his father’s. And he wondered if some truth-telling about a certain play would do both their souls some good.

  But Mather, it seemed, worried less for John’s soul than for the reputation of such a respected Puritan, because shortly after the little cluster of college buildings came into view, he slowed his horse and said, “You should be met with a public humiliation and fine. ’Tis the law.”

  “Aye.”

  “And Margaret Rule should be striped with a dozen lashes. But better that we ignore her, whilst you retire . . . to Sudbury perhaps, until the storm raised by Calef’s book be blown over. Then, if Margaret grow big with some bastard and lay her belly to you, why . . . your
distance from Boston will permit you to deny it.”

  John pulled on his reins. “Deny it?”

  “She used us, John, as part of some grand performance to conceal her lustful desires behind the most serious of afflictions.”

  “You would have me deny my own seed?”

  “’Tis seed planted in hard-worked earth. Be thankful I protect you, while I inspire Mistress Rule to find other haunts.” Then Mather spurred his horse and went galloping toward the college, his coattails flapping.

  And in that moment, John Wedge heard the echo of his father’s voice warning him that someday, if he read widely, he would read of man’s passions, his vanities, his appetites, all the things that lead us toward sin. And why had his father warned him? Because there would come another day when he would meet those weaknesses in the flesh, in himself and in other men, even in a man who seemed as flawless as Cotton Mather. Best be prepared.

  Chapter Ten

  ENGLISH 122. From the Puritan Migration to the American Revolution. Professor Thomas Benedict. Tu, Th, 11 A.M. Emerson 105. An examination of literary currents flowing from Plymouth Rock to the frozen Delaware, with special emphasis on Colonial-era relationship between religious thought and political action. Readings in Bradford, Bradstreet, the Mathers, Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, etc.

  Peter Fallon slipped in at the back. He’d taken classes in Emerson 105. He remembered how bright the room was—bright sunlight flooding through the east windows, seats for 150 bright students, a stage for one brilliant professor. In Peter’s case, it had been Walter Jackson Bate lecturing on the life of Samuel Johnson. Today it was Tom Benedict talking about the Mathers:

  “Although Harvard’s president apologized publicly to the descendants of Robert Calef in 1983, the story of book burning in Harvard Yard has the tinge of apocrypha. Most sources cite only Josiah Quincy, whose 1840 history of Harvard gives considerable space to his own anti-Mather prejudices. Quincy was president of Harvard from 1829 to 1845, a nineteenth-century Unitarian who didn’t put anything past the Mathers. Neither do I.”