by James Morrow
“The ritual is simple, though burdened with a certain ambiguity,” the red monk said. “Before dawn you will perform on Dame Themis an act of raw concupiscence.”
“I don’t understand,” Roger said.
“You will subject the goddess to a vigorous carnal embrace,” the orange monk said.
Revulsion coursed through Roger’s frame like a wave of nausea. “I am determined to become the paragon of my profession,” he said, his tone vibrant with incredulity and outrage, “but I shan’t commit the sin of fornication to attain that goal.”
“Fear not, novitiate,” the white monk said. “Just as Christ is forever married to his Church, so are you now wed to Dame Themis, though for an interval considerably short of eternity.”
“Nay, good friar, I am not married to anyone, as my dear Caroline passed away three years ago.”
“We know all about it,” the orange monk said.
“A bone in the throat,” the green monk said.
“Your second wedding occurred last night,” the red monk insisted. “The fact that you were nearly asleep at the time does not annul the marriage.”
“I find all this most unpersuasive,” Roger said, though he had to admit that the thought of conjugal congress with the dryad did not displease him.
“Perhaps you would care to see the relevant document,” the green monk said.
From his robe he produced a small leather valise, then flipped it open and retrieved a paper that in the combined light of moon and lantern appeared to indeed consecrate a circumscribed marriage between Roger Taney of Baltimore and Dame Themis of Athens. Their union had commenced twenty-four hours earlier and would terminate at cockcrow. Roger’s signature featured his characteristic curlicues. The goddess’s handwriting was likewise ornate, a marvel of loops and serifs.
“I am entirely astonished,” Roger said.
“In metaphysics all things are possible,” the yellow monk said.
“So this is in fact my wedding night?”
The red monk nodded. “Your bride awaits you.”
For the remainder of the journey Roger fixed his eyes on that nebulous zone where the glow of the torches and the light of the moon shaded to black. He scrutinized the shadows, studied the breaching roots, fixed on the wisps of fog. Dame Themis was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she had retired to her private quarters, that she might prepare for the coming consummation.
A shot-tower loomed out of the darkness, a crumbling pile of stone whose calculated verticality had probably not cooled a cannonball since the War of Independence. Roger’s sponsors led him inside, then guided him up a helical staircase that curled along the inner wall like a viper lying dormant in a hollow tree. A door of oak and iron presented itself. The red monk pushed it open.
Never before had the Chief Justice beheld so sumptuous a bedchamber, its windows occluded by velvet curtains, its walls hung with tapestries depicting hunting scenes, its floor covered with an Oriental carpet as thick and soft as Irish moss. Dame Themis’s sword of justice stood upright in the far corner. The brass balance-scales rested on the window ledge, one carriage holding a daisy-chain, the other a garland of lilies.
Roger’s bride was utterly naked, stripped of both her blindfold and her gown. She lay supine on the mattress, her luminous hair flowing across the pillow, her concavity beckoning like a portal to Paradise, whilst east of Eden her firm and noble breasts canted in opposite directions, one north, the other south. Her eyes, unhanded now, were as large and golden as Spanish doubloons.
What most caught Roger’s attention was neither his bride’s face, nor even her form, but rather the way the monks had presumed to compromise her powers of speech with a silken gag and constrain her limbs through an elaborate network of shackles, chains, and locks held fast to the floor by iron cleats.
The Chief Justice was quick to bring a complaint before his sponsors.
“We can assure you that the chains are essential,” the red monk replied.
“In the throes of passion, Dame Themis is known to grasp her lover’s windpipe and squeeze,” the blue monk elaborated. “Your strangulation would be no less deadly for being unintended.”
“And the silken kerchief—likewise necessary?” Roger said.
“Before we added it to the ritual, Dame Themis’s ardor would often drive her to bite off her lover’s ear,” the orange monk said.
“Good friars, I am appalled,” Roger said. “How can you imagine I would assent to know my wife in so barbaric a manner?”
“For many centuries the Brotherhood sought a gentler method of instructing its novitiates,” the blue monk said. “Alas, they discovered that a certain theatricality is the sine qua non of a proper initiation.”
“Tonight you will learn exactly how it feels to violate justice,” the red monk said, “so that you will never commit such a transgression in the future.”
“I would never have a woman against her will,” Roger asserted.
“Against her will?” the red monk said in an amused tone. “As you set about acquiring this carnal knowledge, your bride may indeed groan and whimper in apparent distress. Please know that these noises are all for show, the better to impress the event on your psyche.”
“For show?” Roger said.
“Dame Themis is a consummate actress,” the white monk said.
“My conscience rebels at this arrangement,” Roger said.
“And now we leave you to your lesson,” the red monk said, resting an affirming hand on Roger’s shoulder for the second time that night. “We are confident you will learn it well.”
Against all odds and defying his every expectation, the monks were but five minutes gone when Roger found himself in a condition of acute arousal. He fixed his gaze on the object of his desire. His mute bride bucked against the mattress, her chains clanking together with a discordant but oddly affecting music.
He got undressed as quickly as he could, his breeches snagging briefly on his manhood.
The evening unfolded as the monks had foretold, Dame Themis issuing unhappy sounds and muffled protests throughout the ritual. Roger closed his eyes and concentrated on the lesson, and when at last the spasm arrived he understood his seed to be a great gift, a numinous filament from Arachne’s loom, perhaps, or a segment of the thread by which Theseus had solved the Labyrinth of Minos. Justice deserved no less.
It was only with the approach of dawn, as the Caveat blew back up the Potomac in thrall to a violent tempest, that Roger felt prepared to put his wedding night into words. Sitting with the red monk and the white in their private cabin, imbibing their wine and reveling in their conversation, he attempted to narrate his recent liaison in all its cryptic beauty.
“It truly seemed that my bride did not reciprocate my passion.” Roger took a generous swallow from his goblet.
“Dame Themis plays her part with great skill,” the red monk said.
“Her bleating still echoes in my ears,” he said, recalling her impersonation of agony. “I am hoping this wine might silence it.”
“If not the wine, then the passage of time,” the white monk said.
The red monk stiffened his index finger and plunged it into the shadowy depths of his cowl, presumably to relieve an itching nose. “What matters is that you have absorbed every sensation that attends the abuse of Dame Themis. In the decades to come, whenever you begin to render a brutish opinion, the erotic fire you experienced last night will start coursing through your flesh.”
“Whereupon you will summon all your inner strength and bank those terrible flames,” the white monk said.
“With God as my witness, such a conflagration will never again prosper in my loins.” Roger inhaled deeply, sucking in the orchid glory of the red monk, the honeysuckle elegance of the white. “I shall resist the enticements of injustice with every fiber of my being.”
The white monk filled his third goblet of the evening. “But, ah, such felicitous enticements—yes?”
Roger heaved a sigh. “F
elicitous. Yes.”
“You can see how easily a jurist might become addicted to iniquity,” the white monk said.
“I would never have expected it,” said Roger. “I am not so well educated a man as I thought.”
“Metaphysics can be as subtle as the serpent,” the red monk said. “Welcome to the Brotherhood of the Scales.”
In the interval stretching from his first Supreme Court case to the outbreak of the Civil War, Roger Brooke Taney made four separate journeys across the Chesapeake Bay in search of the place where he and Dame Themis had consummated their mayfly marriage. He never found the shot-tower—indeed, he never even found Janus Island. And yet he did not for an instant doubt that the Brotherhood of the Scales existed, or that the friars had sponsored his membership in that arcane organization, or that he had connected with a dryad sometime after midnight on April 23, 1836.
To his infinite satisfaction, not one of the opinions Roger wrote during the first twenty-two years of his career was accompanied by the concupiscent symptoms that the friars had taught him to recognize. Had the despoilment of Dame Themis wrought a cure so complete as to purge pettiness and ignorance from his psyche forever? Or was his congenital sense of justice so acute that he’d never needed the ritual in the first place? In any event, it seemed clear that the name of Taney would be handed down to history as a synonym for integrity, an antonym for malice, and the very definition of fairness.
There were two cases in particular for which he believed he might be revered. The first traced to a suit brought by the Charles River Bridge Company, which charged travelers a small fee to cross its eponymous bridge, against a nascent competitor, who permitted pedestrians, horsemen, and carriages to pass over the same watercourse for free. The plaintiffs contended that their original charter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had granted them a monopoly, but the Taney Court took a different view. The charter in question, noted the majority, did not use the word “monopoly.” Ergo, the ambiguity would be resolved in favor of the public. Roger Taney: man of the people, guardian of toll-free bridges.
Then there was the controversial and distasteful business of the Negro. Dred Scott was a black African slave whose peripatetic master, an army surgeon named John Emerson, had moved first from Missouri to Illinois, and thence to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory, and finally back to Missouri. In 1846 Dr. Emerson died, whereupon Dred Scott sued Irene Emerson, the doctor’s widow, for his freedom. Because Illinois had always been a free state, ran the plaintiff’s specious and naïve logic, and because slavery had been banned from the Wisconsin Territory under the Missouri Compromise, he had spent much of his life in a condition other than bondage, and therefore he could no longer be regarded as chattel. For some perverse reason Dred Scott had won his suit in a lower St. Louis court, but then the Missouri State Supreme Court had wisely overturned the earlier decision.
In their characteristic arrogance Scott and his Negro-loving confreres had refused to quit, and eventually they found a way to make a federal case of the matter. For it so happened that the legal administrator of Irene Emerson’s property—her brother, J.F.A. Sanford—was a resident of New York, not Missouri, which meant that technically the whole affair lay beyond the jurisdiction of either state. After losing in a U.S. District Court, Scott appealed to the highest court in the land, whose Chief Justice was only too happy to set the plaintiff straight concerning the nature of chattel slavery in America—the plaintiff, the black race, the infernal abolitionists, the troubled republic, and, indeed, the whole world.
In Scott v. Sanford, Roger and six other justices ruled that any entity whose ancestors had ever been sold as slaves could never enjoy the rights of a federal citizen, most especially the right to bring a suit in court. Dred Scott and his kind were in fact pieces of property, as befitting the “inferior order” to which they belonged. Negroes, Roger averred, were “altogether unfit to associate with the white race.” As for the nefarious practice of chopping up the republic into slave zones and free zones, the Taney Court concluded that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. The Missouri Compromise was, in a word, unconstitutional.
If Roger had been forced to make a choice, he would have guessed that future generations would venerate him more for his opinion in Scott v. Sanford than for the Charles River Bridge decision. But the issue of the bridge mattered too. It was one thing to earn an honest profit, and quite another to stifle the freedom of a competing corporation.
How strange, this darkness. As usual he’d gone to bed at ten o’clock. Now he was fully awake, ready to hear the arguments in Torrance v. Ashton—and yet not a single ray of light pierced his room. Could it be that he’d slept for an entire day? Was his characteristic vigor finally failing? Perhaps he should take his nephew’s advice and step down from the bench before the year was out.
He dropped his head back on the pillow and brooded. An insect chorus reached his ears, a noise that made even less sense than the darkness. He had shut all his windows before retiring and, besides, since when had Delaware Avenue become a gathering-place for cicadas and crickets?
His attempt to rise from the mattress perplexed him even more than either the darkness or the insects. Manacles encircled his wrists and ankles, the concomitant chains snaking across his body and disappearing beneath the bed. Whenever he moved, the links of rusted iron gave forth a sound suggesting a bullfrog in pain.
A door swung open. A flickering light filled the bedchamber. The red monk entered, holding aloft a torch, followed by Knock the Dwarf.
“How long has it been?” the red monk said. “A quarter century? No, longer. Twenty-eight years.”
Roger glanced in all directions. Dame Themis’s broadsword lay in the corner. Her balance-scales rested on the window ledge, although the daisy-chain and the garland of lilies had long since disintegrated and blown away.
“Good friar, you must set me free,” he gasped.
“The Brotherhood has been following your career with great interest,” the red monk said. “Alas, I’m afraid we are disappointed with your performance on the bench.”
“I’ve done nothing to deserve these chains,” Roger said, straining against the shackles.
“My employers disagree,” the dwarf chimed in.
“Did I bring an unconsidered populism to the Charles River Bridge decision?” Roger asked. “Is that it?”
The dwarf snickered. The red monk smirked.
“Perhaps I committed an error or two whilst serving on the bench,” Roger continued, “but I always held fast to my principles.”
“Dozens of errors,” the red monk said. “The first occurred the very week you were sworn in, when you decided that a greater good might come from ravishing Dame Themis.”
Anger and indignation boiled up in Roger’s blood. “That was your decision, not mine!”
“No, Judge Taney—yours.”
“You forced me to ravish her!” Roger cried.
“Shut up!” the dwarf demanded, and then, as if he doubted Roger’s ability to carry out the directive, he pulled a silk kerchief from his trousers and used it to render the Chief Justice mute.
Lantern in hand, the white monk strode into the bedchamber, accompanied by a middle-aged man dressed far too foppishly for his years: blue velvet dressing gown embroidered with golden peacocks, red calfskin slippers, pomaded curls.
The white monk pointed toward Roger and said, “Behold Apollo, avatar of wisdom and probity.”
“I was expecting someone younger,” the coxcomb said.
“Tonight you will learn exactly how it feels to violate Apollo,” the white monk informed the coxcomb, “that you might avoid such a lapse in your coming career.”
Roger made every effort to accuse the monks of deception, but the intervening kerchief turned his sentences into absurdities.
“How can a god be so elderly?” the coxcomb asked.
“Metaphysics rarely follows a predictable course.” The white monk installed his lant
ern on the nightstand and headed for the open door. “Cleave to the ritual, and all will be well,” he added, marching through the jamb.
“Apollo is a young man,” the coxcomb protested.
“Don’t be deceived by appearances,” the red monk said. “Your job is not to estimate Apollo’s age but to abuse his flesh as emphatically as possible.”
Roger tried to scream, You have no right!
The red monk pivoted ninety degrees and marched out of the room, taking his torch with him.
“As emphatically as possible,” echoed the coxcomb in a tone of consternation.
Roger wanted to shout, You must show pity!
“Might I make a suggestion?” the dwarf inquired.
“Indeed,” the coxcomb said.
Knock approached Dame Themis’s broadsword and, seizing the handle, brought it before the coxcomb. “What better way to violate Apollo than to excise his virility?”
Have mercy!
“To become a great judge, I shall do whatever is required of me,” the coxcomb told the dwarf.
Hear me, sir! I am not a god! I am a citizen of the United States! I am a human being!
The coxcomb went to work, and when he was done the balance-scales of Dame Themis had achieved Platonic equipoise, both loads of equal weight and identical mass, each carriage in perfect harmony with the other.
In 1857, one year after Roger Taney wrote the majority opinion in Scott v. Sanford, Irene Emerson of Missouri remarried. Her new husband, Calvin Chaffee, was a devout abolitionist, and so the former Mrs. Emerson sold Dred Scott, his wife Harriet, and their two daughters to the sons of the late Peter Blow, Scott’s first owner.
The Blow brothers, childhood friends of Scott’s who had paid his legal fees over the years, immediately manumitted the African and his family. For nine months, the interval of a human gestation, Dred Scott lived a free man in the city of St. Louis, succumbing to tuberculosis at the age of fifty-nine.
Initially Scott’s remains were laid to rest in Wesleyan Cemetery, but in 1867 the burial ground was closed and his body placed beneath a blank slab in Section 1, Lot No. 177 of Calvary Cemetery. A commemorative marker was added in 1957, giving the facts in the case, and the grave now bears an inscription: “In memory of a simple man who wanted to be free.”