Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  “Why do you use thee?”

  “It was the way Jesus spoke to His friends.”

  Kenworthy explained how Fox, this unpretentious Englishman, had come to see that many of the manifestations of religion were vain trappings and that the ritual was unnecessary: “Thee does not require priests or blessings or ministers’ sermons or benedictions or the laying on of hands. God speaks directly to the human heart, and the blessings of Jesus Christ are available to every man and woman.”

  Paxmore noticed that Kenworthy never said man in the religious sense without adding woman, and the Quaker told him, “When I was whipped in Virginia, one woman hung beside me at the tail of the cart, and she was braver than I could ever be. The cords hurt me, but they tore the woman apart, and she refused to whimper.”

  “Does it hurt, the lashings?”

  “In Virginia, I wept and cursed, but in Ipswich, God came to me and asked, ‘If my Son could bear His crucifixion, cannot thee endure a mere whipping?’ ”

  Paxmore asked if he could touch the scars, and Kenworthy said no. “It would make them too important. The dignity of my back lies in my heart, where I have forgiven the whipmen of Virginia and Massachusetts. They were like the Roman soldiers, doing their duty.”

  He was describing to Paxmore the other tenets of the Quakers—equality of women, refusal to bear arms, tithing, no hymns or outward manifestations in worship, no priests, no ministers and, above all, the direct relationship of God and man—when the carpenter exclaimed, “Thomas, I left Boston and wandered through the countryside because I was searching. Is this the revelation I was seeking?”

  “It is no revelation, no mystery, and thee did not have to leave Boston to entertain it. It is the simple discovery that each man is his own pathway to God.”

  Long after nightfall a jailer brought food to the prisoners, but neither could eat. Leg bound to leg, they wanted to talk about the spiritual revolution of which Quakerism was only a minor manifestation. “There will be many others like me,” Kenworthy predicted. “There will have to be, because God approaches people in different ways.”

  “Is the governor right in his religion?”

  “Of course he is. For him, what he says and what he believes in are altogether right.”

  “Then why does he condemn—What was the word he used?”

  “Quakers,” the Oxford man said. “Our enemies accuse us of quaking in the presence of God, and we do.”

  “Why does he condemn you to death?”

  “Because he is afraid.”

  “Is that why the judge ordered you to be whipped ... and hanged?”

  “It is. When he saw my scarred back in court, scars he put there, and realized how little effect they had had upon me—Edward, the last time in Roxbury, I did not even feel the cords ...” In a sweep of spiritual insight he lost his line of thought, and his awareness of jail, and any sense of pressure from the leg irons. He tried to rise, then tried to kneel in prayer. Defeated in each effort, he sat on the bench and folded his hands over his heart, saying, “If thee had not told me that thee had left Boston to go a-searching, I would not presume to tell thee what I am about to say, for I am putting a heavy burden on thee, Edward. But God has summoned thee.”

  “I believe He has,” Paxmore said, and the two men talked through the night.

  On Friday morning the blacksmith came in to cut the leg clamps, separating them, and while doing so, advised Kenworthy that he was to hang this day. From his leg the clamp was removed entirely, but on Paxmore’s the iron cuff was allowed to remain and a seven-foot chain was attached to it. “All prisoners must watch the hanging,” the smith explained, “and with this chain the sheriff can hold you so you don’t run away.”

  When the two prisoners were left alone in their cell Paxmore supposed that Kenworthy would want to pray, but the Oxford man was in such a state of exaltation that he did not need prayer to prepare him for the death that waited: “We are children of God, and reunion with Him can never be painful. I go with additional peace in my heart because I know that thee has taken up the burden I leave behind.”

  “Could we pray?” Paxmore asked.

  “If you feel the need.”

  “I have not the understanding you have—” He corrected himself, and for the first time used the Quaker expression: “The understanding thee has.”

  “Thee has, Edward. That is, the capacity for it. All men and women do. What is required is the unfolding of truth. And that will come.”

  They knelt and Paxmore began a tortured prayer, but Kenworthy placed his hand on the carpenter’s arm and said, “The words are not necessary. God hears thee,” and the two men prayed in silence.

  They were in this position when the jailers came. They were stocky men with powerful arms and seemed to enjoy their work, for they attacked it with a kind of easy joviality. “Time’s come,” the heavier of the two men announced, taking Kenworthy by the upper arm. The other grabbed Paxmore’s chain and told him, “The sheriffs handling you, special.” The two Quakers were separated for the last time, but not before Paxmore had a chance to cry, “I will be on the scaffold with thee, Thomas,” to which Kenworthy replied, “All Boston will be.”

  Paxmore and three other prisoners—two men and a woman who had questioned some small detail of Puritanism—were led to the hanging ground, where a large crowd of watchers waited with varying kinds of delight. Some were fascinated by the gibbet from which a man would soon hang, others by the monstrous cannon to whose wheel the heretic would be lashed. Eight men of the town had already volunteered to pull the cannon and were busy attaching ropes to the carriage. But all experienced a heightened sense of existence, because their church was about to cleanse itself.

  Paxmore, standing with the other prisoners who were constantly jeered at by the townspeople, looked in vain for Kenworthy, he was being held back until the colony officials put in their appearance, and now from the white church, where they had been praying, came the governor and Judge Goddard, dressed in black, followed by the town fathers, grim-lipped and ready.

  “Bring forth the prisoner!” the governor shouted. It was clear that he intended to supervise personally the death of this obnoxious dissenter. When Kenworthy was produced, the governor went to him, thrust his face forward and demanded, “Are you satisfied now that we have the power to silence you?”

  “My voice will be stronger tomorrow than it ever was,” Kenworthy replied.

  “To the cannon!” the governor cried, and the sheriff dropped the chain that held Paxmore and summoned three helpers, who came forward to grab the Oxford man and lash him, legs and arms far separated, to the iron wheel of the cannon, face inward.

  “Jailer,” the governor commanded, “thirty lashes, well laid on.”

  The heavier of the two jailers stepped forward, and the town clerk handed him a length of wood to which had been fastened nine heavy cords of the kind used for guiding a light sail. Into each had been tied three stout knots, and as the jailer approached the cannon he snapped the whip expertly, close to the ear of the prostrate prisoner.

  “That one don’t count,” he said, and the crowd laughed.

  “One!” the clerk intoned impassively, and the nine cords cut into the scarred back of the Quaker.

  “Two!” the clerk counted, then “Three!” and “Four!”

  “Make him cry out,” a woman in the crowd shouted, but Kenworthy uttered no sound.

  “Seven” and “Eight” passed with still no sound from the wheel, so the governor said, “Pull the cannon forward,” and the men on the ropes strained until the wheel moved into a new position, exposing different parts of Kenworthy’s body to the lash.

  “Lay on, lay on!” the governor cried, and when the next strokes still failed to elicit any cry of pain from the prisoner, the governor stepped forward angrily and took the lash from the hands of the first jailer, handing it to the second. “Lay on! Destroy that man!”

  The second jailer, eager for an opportunity to display the kind o
f service he was ready to give his colony and his church, raised on his toes and brought the lashes down with savage force, causing Kenworthy’s whole body to shudder. At the fifteenth stroke the body went limp, and as the enthusiastic jailer was about to apply the lash again, Edward Paxmore shouted, “He’s fainted. Stop! Stop!”

  “Who cried out?” the governor demanded, and Judge Goddard, who had been watching Paxmore, replied, “That one,” and the governor stopped to mark the culprit. “We’ll take care of him later,” he said. Then he cried, “Men, move the cannon,” and the great wheel revolved.

  By the twenty-fifth lash Thomas Kenworthy was nearly dead, but now the governor directed that the whip be turned over to a new aspirant eager to show how well he could strike, and pieces of flesh flicked off the bloody mass.

  “Give it to him!” a woman called as the clerk finished his litany: “Twenty-nine, thirty and done.”

  “Water in his face,” the sheriff ordered, and after this was done, the limp body was cut down.

  “To the gibbet,” the governor said, and he led the way to the hanging spot.

  The water and the walk revived the prisoner, and after he was dragged aloft to the platform from which he would be dropped, he said in a voice which could be heard at some distance, “Thee will be ashamed of this day’s work.”

  A minister who had watched the whipping ran to the scaffold and cried in fierce, condemnatory accents, “Heretic, separatist! God has shown us the true religion and you traduce it. You have a right to die.”

  “Hangman, to your task,” the governor said, and a black bag was placed over Kenworthy’s head. As the radiant face disappeared, Paxmore whispered, “Oh, God! He is not as old as I.”

  The rope was lowered over the black mask, and the knot was located at the base of the neck. “Let him die!” cried the woman who had shouted before, and the trap door was sprung.

  On Monday, when Edward Paxmore, his left leg still in chains, stood before Judge Goddard, he did not present a pleasing sight. His wrists and ankles still protruded from tight homespun; his Adam’s apple still bobbed like the cork on a fisherman’s line; his eyes were still accusatory; but now his beard was scraggly, for he had not been allowed to shave, and he looked the perfect criminal. Without amenities the judge attacked. “Well, Brother Paxmore, you had a chance to see what we do with heretics. Are you now willing to take an oath of allegiance to our religion and then leave Massachusetts forever?”

  The proposal was so contradictory, so unlike the crystal-pure logic of Thomas Kenworthy—to swear allegiance to a religion and then to leave it—that Paxmore had to speak. “Thy reasoning makes no sense,” he said. “What’s this thy? Are you already infected?” “To the extent that thy mouthings seem confused and the work of the devil, not the words of God.”

  The tall judge fell back in his chair. Not even Kenworthy had spoken to him in terms of such contempt, and for a moment he was discomposed. But his fury revived and he shouted at Paxmore, “Are you, then, a Quaker?”

  “I believe in a personal God, who speaks to me as He did to Thomas Kenworthy.”

  “Thomas Kenworthy was lashed at the wheel and he is dead.”

  “He lives in every heart that saw him die.”

  “Hearts have no eyes. They cannot see.”

  “And soon the people who watched Kenworthy die will grow sick of your beatings and hangings, and anathema will be on your name.”

  “You know I can order you whipped?”

  “And other judges like you ordered Jesus whipped.”

  This was so blasphemous, an attack on both the colony and its church, that Goddard would hear no more. “Drag him away, Sheriff,” and the burly sheriff took the judge at his word. Jerking mightily on the iron chain, he brought Paxmore to the floor, then dragged him feet first from the court. Before the hour was out Judge Goddard had penned this sentence:

  To the Constables of Dover, Roxbury, Rowley and Ipswich:

  You and every one of you are required in His Majesty’s Name to receive into your custody Edward Paxmore, vagabond carpenter and suspected Quaker, and you are to convey him from town to town at the tail of a cart, and you and each of you are to whip him out of town with ten stripes well laid on, and this is to be done in accordance with the stated Law of Vagabond Quakers. And the constable of Ipswich is to see that Edward Paxmore is delivered over the border of Massachusetts and into the Colony of Rhode Island, where heretics abide. Dated, 17th March, 1661.

  When the horrid terms of punishment were read to Paxmore in his cell, he fell to his knees and asked the spirit of Thomas Kenworthy to give him courage, but when the first lashes fell at Dover he found that he had no power of resistance, and when the twenty-seven knots cut into his flesh he cried aloud. At the tenth stroke he was a quivering idiot, and when the cold water, heavily salted, was thrown across his back he screamed and fainted.

  He would never forget the terrible journey from Dover to Roxbury, struggling along at the tail of the cart. His body ached; flies nibbled at his wounds; his face became cloaked with dust; and during the entire passage villagers scorned him, and asked him if now he would repent and accept the true God.

  When he reached Roxbury he was allowed three days’ rest. The constable said, “Just time enough for the scars to heal, so that I can whip them open again.” He thought of this statement a long time and wondered why people so attached to God should take such positive delight in crucifying a man who had precisely the same love for God, but with a different manner of expressing it. He even understood the punishment, for he had observed that all people allied to a church seek to protect it, but he would never understand the pleasure the Puritans took in the infliction of punishment.

  The whipping at Roxbury was even more severe, for the constable studiously moved from side to side so as to cover his entire back with deep wounds. As the cart left town the driver called back, “That was a good one, wasn’t it. Our constable ties a double knot. You won’t forget him soon.”

  Paxmore, thinking himself close to death from the pain and the insects that gnawed upon him, reached Ipswich unable to move his legs; the cart dragged him into town. For five days he lay in a stupor, for the doctor gave it as his opinion that ten more lashes now would kill him, and when he recovered enough to understand what was happening, he heard from three different individuals that the whipping in this town was to be special, and everyone who spoke of it obviously relished the prospect.

  Not only would Paxmore be whipped—and word had sped through the town that he might well die of his lashes—but a female Quaker had also been apprehended, and she was to be lashed too. Her name, Paxmore heard, was Ruth Brinton, and she had already been exiled from Virginia because of her brazen adherence to the Quaker heresy, and she had been whipped in Roxbury.

  “Women we give only six lashes,” the jailer explained with a sense of real compassion. “They can’t stand much more, but they say this one is a vixen. She kept preaching while they beat her, and in Roxbury to silence her they had to beat her across the mouth.”

  From Virginia! Could it be that this Quaker woman was the one of whom Kenworthy had spoken, a calm, determined, God-sent woman who exuded sanctity and gave men courage? He tried to interrogate the jailer, but the man only repeated that this one was a vixen, and that when she was whipped, the good people of Ipswich would see something.

  This so agitated Paxmore that he demanded to see the local judge, and when that worthy man appeared in the cell, Paxmore said, “To whip a woman is indecent and against the will of God.”

  “We have a law,” the judge said.

  “It cannot be the law of God.”

  “Who are you to determine what God wills?”

  “He speaks to me.”

  The judge put his two hands before his face as if to ward off evil. “It’s a good thing, Paxmore, that you’re leaving Massachusetts. We have no place for evil men like you.”

  The carpenter, seeing that it would be no use to argue further with this righteo
us man, bowed his head and said, “Allow me to take her lashes.”

  “But the sentence has been written.”

  “In the mercy of God, allow me to take her lashes.”

  “That would accomplish nothing. After here she has six more in Duxbury.”

  “Oh, dearest Father!”

  “Are you appealing to God against God’s law? We have a sentence on this woman, in writing.”

  “Thee had better go,” Paxmore said, “and hide thyself in a deep well, for God will surely seek thee out.”

  These prophetic words disturbed the judge, and he said in a voice of reasoning, “Paxmore, it would be fatal to give you six more lashes. The doctor told us you might not even survive the ten that are due you. Sleep in peace before tomorrow, and quit Massachusetts. You do not belong among the godly.”

  When Edward Paxmore and Ruth Brinton were tethered to the same cart, they formed an incongruous pair—he tall and awkward, she small and delicately proportioned. But when the sheriff stripped them both to the waist, with watchers ogling in delight, their common heritage became obvious: each back was flayed and marked with indented scars. There was no man or woman.

  Of course she drew the greater comment, for when the Puritans surged forward to see at close quarters a half-naked woman, with the great welts already marking her back, they shouted their satisfaction, and one cried, “She won’t forget Ipswich!”

  Twice Paxmore tried to speak to the woman tied beside him, and twice the local judge ordered the constable to silence him, as if words passed between the two proscribed Quakers might contaminate the theocratic town. But on the third try he succeeded. “Is thee the woman from Virginia that Thomas Kenworthy—” The constable struck Paxmore brutally across the mouth and shouted, “Silence, infidel.” But the woman nodded, and through bloody lips Paxmore said, “He was hanged,” and she replied, “So shall we all be,” and the whippings began.