The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  Upon assuming his position on the Examination Committee, Walter asked the chairman, John Hathorne, the town’s imperially unpleasant magistrate, if he might visit the seven indicted suspects in their gaol-cells. He wanted to test them all, from four-year-old Dorcas Good to seventy-one-year-old Rebecca Nurse. Hathorne ultimately admitted Walter into the prisoners’ presence, but he forbade him to scan their skin, for the Puritans in their purity held it unseemly that a man should search a woman for imp teats or Devil’s marks. Moreover, though Judge Hathorne and his colleagues did not deny the reality of animal servants, they thought it impossible to tell a true familiar from a mundane beast, and so they discouraged him from doing any watchings. As for the cold-water test, Mr. Hathorne perversely dismissed this proof as “the rankest Anglican superstition.” It went especially hard with Walter that he could not scrutinize the flesh of Rebecca Nurse, as most of her neighbors regarded her as a kind of living saint: probably this was another case, like Jephthah’s daughter, of a seemingly virtuous woman who practiced sorcery in secret, but he wanted to be sure.

  “Why do you invite me into your enterprise only to tie my hands and shackle my talents?” he complained to Hathorne and his slithery assistant, Jonathan Corwin.

  “For the simple reason,” Hathorne replied, “that when the new governor sees his own Witchfinder-Royal sitting on the Committee, he’ll appoint a proper court without delay.”

  “’Sheart, ’twould seem I’m but a figurehead,” Walter said. “’Tis my inclination to resign.”

  “Resign?” Corwin gasped. “Desert your post at the height of New-England’s greatest cleansing?”

  Walter pinned his lower lip betwixt his teeth. “Were you better acquainted with me, sir, you would know that I would sooner pluck out mine eyes than abandon my sentry-box to Lucifer.”

  The magistrate offered Walter a nod that seemed at once condescending and conspiratorial. “Mr. Stearne, methinks we’re all wondrous useful to one another. Might I suggest we stop bickering amongst ourselves and save our spleen for Satan?”

  As the month progressed, the screaming girls identified twenty-three additional Devil-worshippers in the village, and these suspects were duly summoned to the meeting-house, where they stood before the Committee in ostensible perplexity whilst Hathorne and company interrogated them. After much negotiation Walter convinced the chairman to let him exercise his scanning skills indirectly. By this compromise each accused female undressed herself in the foyer, Walter present but blindfolded, and then the wives of Hathorne and Corwin ran their hands across her skin, describing all marks and pricking any that sounded suspicious to the Witchfinder-Royal. Although this procedure brought to light dozens of incriminating excrescences, Walter could barely abide his frustration. For the first time ever, he understood the impetus behind the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther had loathed those platoons of priests styling themselves the sole earthly agents binding Man to his Creator, and Walter was likewise repulsed by these two superfluous females mediating betwixt his fingers and his judgment.

  In the unique case of the beloved Rebecca Nurse, neither Goodwife Hathorne nor Goodwife Corwin could find a bloodless aberration on her person, and so Walter administered the secondary tests. Goodwife Nurse recited the Lord’s Prayer start to finish without the slightest hesitation or mildest elision. She easily met the weeping standard, shedding more than twenty tears under the thumbscrew’s rude influence. When he scalded her index finger with boiling water, the resulting blister stretched well beyond the range, zero to one inch, that bespoke diabolism. Goodwife Nurse, it surely seemed, was innocent.

  Despite Walter’s success in detecting Devil’s marks amongst the suspect population, the Examination Committee continued keying its sessions not to solid demonology but to the impulsive children. Whenever an alleged Satanist entered the meeting-house, Abigail Williams’s band went into paroxysms of bewildering intensity. Each girl had her forte. Miss Williams herself vomited thorns. Mercy Lewis bled from her nose and mouth. Elizabeth Hubbard swooned. Betty Parris was a champion writher. Ann Putnam fell down gasping, a victim of spectral choking. Mary Warren shrieked and wailed as she beheld invisible imps alight upon the prisoners’ shoulders. Mary Walcott—the Captain’s daughter and the group’s newest member—beat her head against the floor, raising bumps and welts so terrible as to suggest the violence of a Nimacook hatchet.

  The Committee had just commenced its seventh week of service, with sixty-two indictments to show for its efforts, when Increase Mather finally returned from London bearing the sorely needed provincial charter and accompanied by the new Massachusetts Royal Governor. Sir William Phipps soon proved the very sort of anti-Satanist that Salem required in this, her darkest hour. On the twenty-seventh of May, he brought into being a Court of Oyer and Terminer to try the accused witches, an ad hoc institution featuring Deputy Governor William Stoughton heading up a panel of eight justices, amongst them John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, the famously formidable Samuel Sewall of Boston, and one of Walter’s Haverhill neighbors, Major Nathaniel Saltonstall.

  Six days later the defendant Bridget Bishop entered Salem-Town Courthouse. Eleven persons submitted statements against her, with Miss Williams’s troops claiming abuse at the hands of the defendant’s specter and Walter adducing the Devil’s mark on her left calf (a determination he’d made after hearing Goodwife Corwin’s account of both the excrescence itself and its insensibility to the pricking needle). The jury, led by Foreman Thomas Fisk, rendered a verdict of guilty. Despite Bridget Bishop’s blubbering protestations, Judge Stoughton forthwith ordered her execution “according to the direction given in the laws of God and the wholesome statutes of the English nation.” On the tenth of June, Walter stood at the foot of Gallows Hill and watched as the sheriff and his men carted the convicted enchantress to the summit. After leaning a ladder against the largest oak, the sheriff hauled Bridget Bishop ten rungs skyward, slipped a noose around her throat, and pushed her into the air. The witch’s cervical vertebrae failed to separate, and in consequence her strangulation lasted nine minutes.

  On the first morning in July, the Court heard the collective evidence against Sarah Wildes, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, and Sarah Good. Walter and the tormented girls offered abundant proof of Satanism, and before the noon recess the jury found against all four prisoners. The day’s events were not entirely soothing to the Witchfinder-Royal, however, for that afternoon a fifth defendant came before the Court, the saintly Rebecca Nurse, whose friends and relations had persuaded Judge Stoughton to consider her case separately. True to form, the girls shrieked in pain the instant Goodwife Nurse approached the bench, but then Walter assumed the witness-stand, telling how the Pater Noster test, the weeping proof, and the scalding ordeal—not to mention the pricking of her several blemishes—all appeared to vindicate the old woman.

  “In my thirty years of cleansing,” he told the judges, “I’ve ne’er met a person as innocent to a witch as Rebecca Nurse.”

  From the defendant’s husband, Francis Nurse, came a final piece of exculpatory evidence, a petition signed by thirty-nine of the community’s most respected citizens. “We cannot imagine any Cause or Grounds,” they wrote, “to suspect Goody Nurse of those Things of which she is accused.”

  Shortly after dusk Thomas Fisk led his fellow jurymen into the antechamber. They returned twenty minutes later. A hush settled over Salem-Town Courthouse. Walter thought of Revelation 8:1. And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in Heaven for the space of half an hour.

  “How goes’t with the defendant?” Judge Stoughton asked. “Be she guilty or nay?”

  Walter leaned forward. A single drop of sweat descended from beneath his peruke, tickling his skin as it slid down his brow.

  Goodman Fisk coughed deliberately, anxiously shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Not guilty.”

  So wild was the subsequent frenzy that a stranger happening upon the scene might have thought he’d wandered into a
lunatic asylum. The bewitched girls clawed at their breasts, drove their teeth into their forearms, and ripped clumps of hair from their scalps, all the while screaming like sinners dredged in burning sulphur.

  “Goody Nurse clutches my throat!” shouted Ann Putnam, retching and wheezing.

  “Goody Nurse gnaws my tongue!” cried Mercy Lewis, spitting blood.

  “Her specter fells me!” Abigail Williams crashed to the floor like a tree limb riven by a lightning-bolt. “She bids me kiss the Devil’s bum! Nay, Goody Nurse, I shan’t kiss it! I shan’t! I shan’t!”

  When at last the chaos subsided, William Stoughton turned to the foreman. “Goodman Fisk, I have no wish to impose upon the jury, but I must ask that you reconsider your verdict.”

  “On what grounds?” Fisk asked.

  “Yes, Excellency, on what grounds?” Walter demanded, leaping from his chair as if wrenching free of a thornbush.

  “On the grounds of the maleficia these girls suffer at the hands of this she-wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Stoughton said.

  Foreman Fisk guided his jurors back into the anteroom. It took them but ten minutes to frame a new and better verdict.

  On the nineteenth of July, Sarah Wildes, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Good, and Rebecca Nurse were carted to Gallows Hill, where scores of spectators awaited, singing hymns and sharing corncakes. Walter brought Dunstan along, their first such communion since the cleansing of Isobel Mowbray. Cotton Mather came all the way from Boston, exquisitely dressed in a black linen robe, his felt hat screwed smartly over his bulbous wig. Not since Jesus himself had passed through Jerusalem’s gates amidst a thousand waving palm fronds, Walter mused, had a Christian made so impressive an entrance.

  Singling out the Witchfinder-Royal, Mather approached and presented him with a bound copy of his latest sermon, Remarkables of the Divine Providence, Including Sea-Deliverances, Gallows Speeches of Criminals, and an Account of How God Lifted a Plague of Caterpillars through the Sending of Flocks of Birds. Walter bowed gratefully and turned back the cover. On the title-page the minister had written, “For my Colleague Walter Stearne. A Friend to Virtue, to Vice alone a Foe. With Admiration, the Reverend Cotton Mather.”

  “I shall evermore treasure this little book,” Walter said, “and especially thine affectionate inscription.”

  As it happened, Mather’s presence on Gallows Hill that morning proved essential to the task at hand. Each of the first four heretics was swung, strangled, and cut down with nary a comment from the crowd, but when the sheriff made ready to push Rebecca Nurse off the ladder, a score of Salemites grew conspicuously discontent, screaming, “Spare her! Spare her!”

  Like the Redeemer making ready to deliver the Sermon on the Mount, Mather scrambled up the face of a granite boulder and, reaching the summit, spread his arms wide as if to gather every spectator into his loving embrace.

  “Good farmers and merchants of Salem, be not deceived by outward forms!” he insisted, his tone striking in Walter’s estimation an ideal balance betwixt beneficence and expertise. “Oft-times hath the Devil been transformed into an angel of light!”

  “Listen to Reverend Mather,” Judge Hathorne demanded, “who knows more of Satan’s wiles than a barn owl knows of mice!”

  The crowd grew still, and Walter watched in awe as face after face on Gallows Hill acquired the glow of newfound theological understanding—indeed, only the frail and weeping Francis Nurse was manifestly unpersuaded—and not a single dissident voice arose when Judge Stoughton approached the ladder, squeezed the leg of the elevated sheriff, and muttered, “Hangman, do your duty.”

  The sheriff shoved the prisoner. As Dunstan set about sketching her terminal gyrations, Mather descended from his granite pulpit and returned to Walter’s side.

  Rebecca Nurse required nearly twelve minutes to complete her passage to the Dark One’s realm.

  The more he thought about it, the more clearly Walter remembered noticing, the first time he’d visited her, a tiny protuberance on the defendant’s neck, an excrescence he’d lamentably forgotten to commend to the attention of Goodwife Hathorne and Goodwife Corwin. Had the women pricked that ominous nodule, it would have yielded no blood—though mayhap a drop or two of the notorious black acid that to an imp was sweet as wine, bracing as coffee, and nourishing as milk.

  “Such a deft impersonation of an angel of light,” Walter observed.

  “She simulates a saint for fair,” the Reverend Mather said.

  j

  IT WAS A CREDIBLE MEASURE of her boredom, Jennet felt, that the longer she lived in Salem-Village, the more she sought amusement from her dreary brother, whose conversation of late was restricted to the minutiae of demonology and the trivialities of witch tests. Doggedly devoted to the pursuit of mirthlessness, the Salem Puritans made Dunstan seem by comparison the wittiest jester ever to tickle a king’s fancy. She would not say that she enjoyed her brother’s companionship these days, but she certainly preferred it to the never-ending funeral that passed for family life in the Walcott household.

  Dunstan meanwhile cleaved to Mr. Parris’s tall, angry, ever-chattering niece, Abigail Williams. Shortly after sunrise each morning, Abigail and her raving peers would betake themselves to the meeting-house and spend several hours throwing fits before the Examination Committee. Returning the parsonage, she would do whatever chores her uncle required of her, whereupon she would lead Jennet and Dunstan to yet another “place of preternatural import” near the village. Abigail showed them the marsh where George Burroughs’s murder victims had supposedly appeared to her, their winding-sheets rippling in the wind. She guided her newfound friends through the meadow where Martha Carrier had, quoth Abigail, “given birth to some monstrous malformed thing, which the woman then laid upon the ground and cleaved in twain with an ax.” She took them to the abandoned barn in which John Proctor and Martha Corey had signed Satan’s book, and next to the glade their coven had once used as a gathering place. After arriving astride their flying besoms and airborne goats, Abigail explained, the thirty heretics had consumed a deer’s rotting carcass, washing it down with goat’s urine, these substances having been transformed by Bridget Bishop into, respectively, Lucifer’s body and blood.

  Throughout Abigail’s tours Dunstan kept trying to impress her—not only with his father’s position as Witchfinder-Royal but also with the fact that he, Dunstan, stood to inherit the title. He flourished each demon-detecting tool as he would a piece of the True Cross. Joyfully Abigail stroked the bright pricking needles. The mask-o’-truth likewise enthralled her, as did the Paracelsus trident. Her brother’s infatuation, Jennet surmised, traced largely to the male lust that Aunt Isobel had described in her treatise with such a peculiar mixture of chariness and celebration, for Abigail’s twelve-year-old body had begun to acquire the topography of womanhood. Although Jennet’s initial impulse was to lend her A Woman’s Garden of Pleasure and Pain, the thought of this dissembling vixen finding herself pregnant ultimately proved so delectable that she decided to keep private her knowledge of cock-sheaths and fertility cycles.

  Abigail, for her part, spoke seductively to Dunstan whenever the opportunity arose. “My uncle’s Barbados slave taught us how to divine our fortunes,” she said in her granular voice. “You break an egg and drop the white in a bowl of water, and then you watch what shapes may appear. One time I beheld a coffin floating in the cloud, and I decided I was marked to marry a sexton, but now I know my husband will be a pricker, sending many a heretic to his grave.”

  “A pricker’s wife doth endure a hard lot,” Dunstan said. “He stays away from home as long as any sailor.”

  “I would fain wait for thee, Dunstan,” Abigail said. “’Tis obvious you’re destined to have an illustrious career. By century’s end Massachusetts will be a-swarm with o’er ten thousand witches, for such was told to me in a dream by a golden-haired angel named Justine.”

  When the trials themselves began, and Abigail was obliged to spend each day in Salem-T
own, presenting herself to the Court as a victim of maleficium. Dunstan went to every session, not so much to study his future vocation as to study Abigail. Each evening ere they drifted off to sleep in Captain Walcott’s loft, Dunstan made Jennet listen whilst he recounted whatever grotesquery his friend had enacted that day. Pain figured prominently in many of Abigail’s antics. “Before the whole Court, the witch Goody Wildes bid Abby hold her hand o’er a lighted candle!” Dunstan exclaimed. Often Abigail’s performance was simply disgusting. “The hag Goody Martin made Abby stab herself in the stomach with a knitting needle!” On at least one occasion she resorted to self-exhibition. “’Twas an amazing sight, Jenny! Upon coming face-to-face with Goody Howe, Abby tore off every scrap of clothing and ran naked from the hall!”

  The Court never convened on the Sabbath, and it also stood in recess on those days when the sheriff had scheduled an execution, so that everyone could witness the heretics’ final moments. Despite Dunstan’s ardent and repeated entreaties, Jennet refused to accompany him to any Salem hanging, for she felt that her appearance on Gallows Hill would sully Aunt Isobel’s memory as surely as the epitaph she’d carved in Colchester had honored it. One damp gray afternoon in September, however, she allowed Dunstan to lead her to an open field beside the courthouse, where “something passing wonderful” supposedly awaited.