The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  C H A P T E R

  The

  Sixth

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  Our Heroine Variously Occupies an Algonquin Wigwam, a Philadelphia Townhouse, and the Nether Reaches of Newtonian Theology

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  Early in the seventh year of her life Jennet developed an intense yearning to possess some true and valuable memory of the mother she’d never known, and by her eleventh birthday she’d managed to summon the desired tableau. The veil of forgetfulness lifted, and there was Margaret Noakes Stearne, bloated with Dunstan, sitting alongside Jennet on the parlor floor in Colchester and fashioning one of her famous æolian machines, a wondrous kite of white birch and red silk. “In the spring you and I shall fly it,” Jennet’s mother told her, holding up the finished contraption. “’Twill glide above every steeple in England. I’faith, ’twill soar clear to Heaven!”

  Had Jennet’s fourteen-month-old brain in fact recorded this complex scene, or was the recollection but a phantasm? She didn’t know—though she could say with certainty that the flying of the red kite had never occurred, for by the spring of 1680 Margaret Noakes Stearne lay dead atop the birthing-bed, the newborn Dunstan squirming betwixt her thighs. And yet Jennet’s memory of the comely woman extolling the kite felt real, and whenever, as now, she found herself hedged by uncertainty and peril, she would conjure up this benevolent ghost and avail herself of its comforts.

  Before fleeing Haverhill, the Nimacooks separated the six white daughters from one another, forcing each into a different canoe, doubtless to prevent them from planning and executing a coordinated escape. All during the dark and frigid journey down the Merrimack, Jennet knelt in the lead canoe and fixed her thoughts on her mother and the kite. In the spring you and I shall fly it. Aided by the river’s current and the braves’ furious paddling, the flotilla made a rapid retreat from the burning town. ’Twill glide above every steeple in England. The passing water reflected the Indians’ torches, now deployed as beacons in the bows, so that the Merrimack seemed home to some fantastic breed of luminous fish. I’faith, ’twill soar clear to Heaven.

  The night was at its deepest when the savages put to shore. It took them but a few minutes to conceal their canoes beneath mounds of branches and boughs, which they’d evidently harvested that morning in anticipation of a victory. Having thus confounded whatever rescue parties the Haverhill survivors might launch upon the river, the savages snuffed their torches, shouldered their dead, and gathered up their spoils—including, Jennet noticed with a surge of nausea, several sacks of scalps. After aligning themselves with the waxing moon, the Nimacooks led the white daughters through a stand of cattails and thence into the woods, setting out along a path speckled with fireflies and limned by the glow of Earth’s lone satellite. The Stygian forest stretched in all directions, coils of fog entwining the branches, tree frogs chirping within the hollow trunks, heathen spirits roving the dark æther. With each step Jennet’s misery compounded. Her terror took on a life of its own, a thousand animalcules of dread cruising her veins like the blood-borne imps Aunt Isobel had expected the experimentum magnus to yield. She hugged herself, and ground her teeth, and put one foot before the other.

  An hour’s march brought the war party to a wide granite shelf rising from the earth to form an immense cavern. Stores of provisions lay everywhere within—barrels of salted fish, casks of water, ceramic jars filled with dried berries and cured venison, piles of moose-hide bedding. Apparently this vast chamber was the Nimacooks’ equivalent of an inn, a bountiful and capacious road-house marking the way into their territory.

  The Indians relighted their torches, revealing near the grotto’s entrance a large pit, freshly dug, waiting to receive the six skin-wrapped corpses. A burial ensued, brief and spare—no prayers, no eulogies, no moment of silence—though Jennet supposed that under peacetime conditions the savages accorded their dead a greater regard. The only whiff of ceremony occurred when a pensive brave with a yellow starburst on his stomach leaned over the grave and set atop each body a soapstone pipe and a small clay pot filled with tobacco.

  In obeisance to a series of gestures from their captors, the women removed their shoes and dropped them into the pit. Whilst three young warriors shoveled back the dirt, a third distributed new footwear to the prisoners, deerskin moccasins secured with thongs. At first this ritual perplexed Jennet, but then she grasped its logic: a moccasin, she realized, left no mark upon the world, no track the men of Haverhill might pursue in search of their stolen daughters.

  By now it was obvious that each captive had her own private keeper. Jennet’s guardian was a stolid young man with a horizontal crescent moon painted across his chest, the horns pricking his nipples. He’d used the same pigment to give himself a feline countenance, a lynx’s perhaps, or a panther’s. His hair, like that of his brother savages, was greased with rendered bear fat. The cavern gathered and compacted the collective scent, which seemed to penetrate not only Jennet’s nasal passages but every bone in her head. It was a protean odor, always shifting, now revolting, now beguiling, now benumbing, now bracing, as if refracted through some olfactory equivalent of a prism.

  The lynx-faced man filled a wooden bowl with venison and berries. As he proffered this spartan dinner, its savory smell somehow overpowered the bear grease to fill Jennet’s nostrils, and she realized that despite the day’s many disasters she would consume the entire portion.

  “Thank you,” she said, and he responded with a short declaration in his own tongue.

  Later, after captors and captives had finished eating, Lynx Man dipped a gourd ladle into a water cask and, presenting Jennet with the measure, spoke again in Nimacook. When she gave him an uncomprehending look, he attempted a sentence in halting French: “Ce soir nous coucherons ici.” We shall sleep here this evening.

  She drank eagerly, sucking every drop from the ladle. “Merci.”

  “Je veux vous montrer quelque chose.” I want to show you something.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

  “Suivez-moi.”

  Lynx Man borrowed a torch from the surgeon, then bade her follow him deep into the grotto. She reasoned that he did not intend to murder her—not after all the trouble his tribe had taken in abducting the white daughters—but it was conceivable he meant to make her the object of his lust. The sheathed knife protruding from his belt suddenly seemed as threatening as a puff adder, and images of ravishment filled her mind as he guided her into an alcove the size of a livery stall. Her heart hurled itself against her backbone, and her stomach spasmed as if preparing to eject the venison and berries.

  “Voilà,” Lynx Man said.

  Pictures emerged from the blackness, some executed in charcoal, others in paint. As her keeper raised the torch aloft, she beheld a band of savages hurling spears at an elk…a lone hunter setting a deadfall for an approaching bear…another hunter laying a snare for a rabbit…an archer bringing down a partridge with an arrow…a squaw trapping fish in a weir.

  “My brother was an artist,” she said, slipping a hand into her dress pocket. Her fingers brushed Dunstan’s sketch of the horse-head promontory. “Mon frère était un artiste.”

  Lynx Man said nothing.

  The flickering of the torch imparted to the images an illusion of movement, so that the elk seemed to leap, the bear to lumber, the rabbit to scamper, the partridge to plummet, the fish to swim. Each illustrated Indian shivered with the thrill of the hunt, and now Jennet shivered as well, and then her tears began to flow, and they did not stop flowing until, three hours later, lying on a moose-hide mattress in the savages’ road-house, the bear grease drilling through her brain, the torches decorating the walls with black lapping shadows, she drifted off to sleep.

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  AT FIRST LIGHT LYNX MAN and the others scrubbed the paint from their bodies, whereupon the forced march began, the savages pressing their prisoners ever westward. The Indians did not pause to break their fast, nor did they halt for a midday meal, but instead m
oved deeper and deeper into the conifer forest, eating and drinking as they went—venison from bulrush baskets, water from leather bottles—occasionally sharing these provisions with the white daughters. As the sun dipped toward the horizon, the war party at last crossed into the bounteous and sprawling estates of the Algonquin Nimacook.

  According to Jennet’s comprehension of her keeper’s French, each Haverhill prisoner was destined for a different village. Evidently her translation was accurate, for upon reaching a sun-dappled glade the company fractured like a dropped mirror, with no two daughters assigned to the same band. Suddenly aware that they might never see one another again, the young women squirmed free of their guardians and came together in a communal embrace—all save Jennet, whose attitude toward these wilting Puritans fell far short of affection. For a full minute the Indians permitted the prisoners to say their farewells, and then the great scattering began.

  Led by Lynx Man, Jennet’s band walked silently through the forest, bearing their sacks of spoils and scalps across mounds of brown needles shed by the firs and hemlocks. Within an hour the trees yielded to brush and thickets, which in time melted away to reveal a river: the Shawsheen, her keeper called it, as roiling and jaunty as the Merrimack was tame and somber. Here the band turned north, proceeding along a shore of such floral fecundity—violets, honeysuckle, clematis, buttercups—that it seemed to Jennet a kind of Paradise reserved for the souls of deceased honeybees and the shades of departed hummingbirds. By degrees her dread declined into simple foreboding, and the reeling shock of losing her father and brother became, regarding Walter, indifference, and, concerning Dunstan, the manageable ache of grief.

  “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,” she muttered, gesturing toward the blossoms, “where oxlips and the nodding violet grows.”

  “Quoi?” Lynx Man asked.

  “Shakespeare,” Jennet replied.

  “Votre nom est Shakespeare?” Your name is Shakespeare?

  “Non, je m’appelle Jennet,” she said.

  “Et je m’appelle Pussough.” I call myself Pussough.

  At length the band drew within view of a broad, undulating field, its gentle slopes dotted with small earth-mounds from which emerged tangled arrays of corn, beans, and squash. A score of Indian women moved amidst the crops, prising up weeds with quahog-shell hoes and using these same implements to frighten away rabbits.

  Upon realizing that the warriors were back from Haverhill, the women abandoned their plantation and headed for the riverbank. They ranged in age from pubescent girls to crones, but their clothing was nearly identical: grass mantles and deerskin skirts, with nary a cap or bonnet amongst them. Apparently no one from Pussough’s village had died in the attack, for every wife, sister, daughter, aunt, mother, and grandmother retained her smile throughout the various overlapping accounts of the great battle, and when the warriors finished reciting their tales a raucous celebration followed, the plantation ringing with bright laughter and a high wavering chant that sounded to Jennet like an Anglican hymn sung under water.

  Reunion accomplished, the plantation maids turned their attention to the white captive, examining her from every angle as might a company of Cambridge Platonists confronted with a unicorn or a griffin. They fingered Jennet’s dress, toyed with her unbraided hair, sniffed the sweaty juncture of her neck and shoulder. As far as she could tell, none of the women was paired with Pussough, and it occurred to her that she might be marked to become his bride. Certainly there was an intimation of courtship in the way he now led her up the nearest slope, so gloriously a-bloom it made her late father’s garden seem barren as a pauper’s grave.

  “Les trois soeurs,” Pussough said. The three sisters.

  To her eye each triad of crops indeed enjoyed an intimate and sisterly relationship. Green vines laden with beans coiled about the maize stalks, using them for support, even as the nascent squash huddled in the salubrious shade cast by the other vegetables.

  “Ces soeurs sont heureuses,” she said. These sisters are happy.

  Pussough laughed and squeezed her shoulder in a manner that seemed to occupy an Aristotelian middle-ground betwixt domination and affection. “Voici votre vie nouvelle.” Here is your new life.

  Evidently she too would become a plantation maid. “Ma vie nouvelle?”

  “Oui.” His hand strayed from her shoulder to her hip. “Nous ne vous ferrons pas de mal.” We shall not harm you. “Vous aurez un bébé, et nous ne vous ferrons pas de mal.” You will have a baby, and we shall not harm you.

  A pint of bile flooded her stomach. “Un bébé?”

  “Oui, un bébé.”

  Un bébé. The horrid idea seized her imagination, wrenching her from the company of the gentle trois soeurs, and suddenly her brain could conjure no object save human blood, in all its varieties. She saw pools of blood, creeks of blood, biblical rivers of blood. The absence of a child in your womb brought each month a rational and reassuring measure of blood, but the presence of such a monster could cause a very cataract. Un bébé was the vilest of phenomena. Un bébé was hemorrhage and darkness and death.

  “Quand est-ce que j’aurai le bébé?” she asked. When will I have the baby?

  “Quand vous serez prête,” Pussough said.

  Could this be true? A Nimacook wife might defer the gravid state until she was prête—ready?

  She ran a finger across the helical course of a bean vine, vowing silently that, whether her future husband was the man standing before her or another of these enigmatic tawnies, she would somehow, some way, hold him to the laudable custom of deferred procreation. The Nimacooks might make her their slave—they might force her to carry their water, sew their mantles, mend their moccasins, clean their hovels, tend their corn, run their gauntlet: all these indignities she could abide. But to spare herself the doom of Margaret Stearne, she would move Heaven and Earth and all the bodies in between.

  j

  AT FIRST SHE TALLIED only the days, noting each planetary rotation by dropping a pebble into the hollow of an oak tree growing just inside the village gateway. Then she started marking the months, recording every new moon by concealing a crow feather in the darkest corner of her wigwam. Eventually it became clear that her captivity must be reckoned in years, and so whenever the planting season came to the Shawsheen Valley, she fashioned and fired a commemorative pot, setting it beneath her sleeping platform.

  Her immediate community, forty-eight in number, occupied four stockaded acres on the eastern shore. They called themselves the Kokokehom, the Owl Clan, willing followers of a one-eyed sagamore named Miacoomes. Having determined that, true to Pussough’s assertion, these people meant her no harm—that, indeed, they were attempting to provide her with their notion of a happy life—she resolved to find in her circumstances some measure of redemption. Had Aunt Isobel ever landed amongst the naked tawnies, she would surely have endeavored to study them, bringing to the task the same fascinated detachment she accorded animalcules on a Van Leeuwenhoek stage. Thus did Jennet come to view the Kokokehom less as her captors than as the subjects of a philosophic project—though she could not deny that these same subjects were in turn scrutinizing her, casting many a curious and condescending eye on this woman so woefully ignorant of maize planting and mat weaving and everything else that mattered.

  Although the prospect of running the Nimacook gauntlet, the wopwawnonckquat, had always instilled in Jennet an unmitigated alarm, she had survived the initiation with nary a bruise or welt. It was a nasty business to be sure, requiring her to dress in naught but a linen shift, then dash betwixt two parallel columns of Indians, all of whom proceeded to set upon her with battle clubs, quahog-shell hoes, and rawhide lashes, their stated intention being to thresh the very whiteness from her soul. And yet at the midpoint of her sprint through this human chute, she realized that her captors were checking their blows, restraining their strokes, and staying their whip hands. Amongst certain Nimacook clans, no doubt, the gauntlet was still a bloody custom, bu
t within the Kokokehom it had evidently transmuted, violence to vestige, savagery to sacrament, ordeal to echo.

  Other Nimacook traditions, by contrast, seemed invulnerable to emendation by time. Each autumn, once the seeds were in the ground, the six clans always left their respective villages and came together as one tribe, congregating in a vast settlement to the south under the leadership of the Nimacook grand-sachem, Chabaquong. For two weeks the Indians would feast, dance, feast some more, seek out marriage mates, indulge in further feasting, smoke their tobacco, then throw another feast, all the while discussing public business, most especially the vexatious issue of the English settlers’ appetite for Algonquin land. Although these gatherings enabled Jennet to mingle with the other white daughters, she entered their vicinity but rarely, for the conversation of all five girls turned almost exclusively on the past—an understandable obsession, but also quite useless. The daughters grieved for their murdered parents and slaughtered friends, their burned homes and broken baubles, their razed dreams and ravaged aspirations. And yet, even as they indulged in these ritual remembrances, they were obviously learning to inhabit the present, and ere the first year had passed, the five seemed Nimacook to Jennet in all but blood, and two were already with child by their wasicks—their mandatory husbands.

  Jennet did not exactly love her own mandatory husband, who turned out to be not Pussough but rather his cousin Okommaka, the brave who’d officiated at the burial rite the night of the raid, setting pipes and tobacco atop the corpses. She nevertheless felt toward Okommaka an undeniable tenderness and devotion—a remarkable circumstance, given that she’d enjoyed no liberty whatsoever to reject his marriage proposal. The courtship consisted entirely in her wasick presenting her with a pictographic charcoal-on-deerskin catalogue of the assets he would bring to their union: a steel knife, a French musket, a birch-bark canoe, a snappish guard dog named Casco, and a set of reed mats sufficient for constructing a private wigwam. Beyond this strange fixation on his dowry, Okommaka seemed in his own way a reflective and philosophic young man, and this attribute, combined with his high-cheeked, black-haired beauty, aroused in Jennet an emotion that would serve for the poetic passion until it unequivocally entered her life.