Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  Indeed, they planned their arguments. They met in Cambridge once a month, just before the regular meeting of the Harvard Corporation. John would ride out from Boston, and Isaac would travel from his little school in Sudbury. They would dine together; they would argue until meeting time. And afterward, they would argue all the way back to John’s home in Boston, and argue there until the last call of the town crier.

  So they were arguing on a bright October afternoon . . . about a seventeen-year-old girl named Margaret Rule, who had fallen to fits in the Mathers’ meetinghouse and had been taken home hysterically proclaiming that the devil was upon her.

  “I tell you,” said Isaac, “the stories of this Rule girl are nonsense.”

  “Father,” said John, “the devil levitated her from her bed. She rose near to the ceiling. I have seen the affidavits of men who were there.”

  “And did they see her affidavits, or did her nightgown cover them?”

  Father and son were crossing the greensward where the Old College once stood.

  John went with the regal, slow gait of a man who knew his worth in the world, one who had married well, who had inherited his father-in-law’s ships, and whose success in managing them had earned him a place on both the governor’s council and the Harvard Corporation. There were thirteen Congregational ministers on the governing board, and John Wedge, so highly did President Increase Mather respect him.

  Isaac moved slowly, too, but with no touch of regality. He had lived too long and seen too much, and a fall from a horse had frozen one of his hips.

  Not only did their manner of motion distinguish them. The son kept his princely dark beard carefully trimmed. The father went clean-shaven but let his white hair grow to his shoulders.

  John said, “Our goal in Salem was to root out true evil. We will do as much in Boston, if we must. Otherwise, we invite Satan back in.”

  “The trials were a disgrace,” said Isaac. “Spectral evidence used against friends, neighbors, classmates—”

  “Only Burroughs was charged from any college class. And half the judges on the court were educated here as well . . . Stoughton, Saltonstall, Sewall—”

  “Sewall speaks of making public repentance. So should you. Burroughs was no more guilty of witchcraft than I.”

  “Don’t say that so loud, Father. Should that remark be heard by the wrong ears—”

  “Such as his?” Isaac gestured toward the courtyard between Harvard Hall and the president’s house. There Cotton Mather stood in conversation with several other ministers of the corporation.

  At the approach of the Wedges, Mather doffed his wide-brimmed black hat. “Our meeting may begin, now that Judge Wedge is here.”

  “A judge no longer, Reverend Mather,” said John, responding with similar formality, though they were lifelong friends.

  “You may be called on yet again,” answered Mather, “should we fail to stop the devil’s incursion into the body of Margaret Rule.”

  “Have you seen her rise to the ceiling?” asked Isaac.

  Mather ignored Isaac and said to John, “I fast for her soul tomorrow. I would have you join me at her home. I hope for an audience as we pray over her and drive Satan out.”

  “An audience?” cried Isaac.

  “We must show Satan our minions,” Mather answered.

  “I shall be there,” said John. “And I shall make a fast for your success.”

  “I won’t fast,” said Isaac. “Old men need their victuals. But I’ll be there, too.”

  “Come in the right spirit,” said Mather, “one of vigilance. As my father says, we’ve claimed a corner of the world where the devil reigned without control for ages. We’ve claimed it from his Indians and his witches, too. We must be vigilant.”

  “Aye . . . vigilant,” said Isaac. “I be ever vigilant.”

  Mather glanced at the sundial on Harvard Hall and went inside.

  “Father, you must control your words,” whispered John.

  Isaac patted his son on the shoulder. “Go do your business. I’ll go and visit my book. ’Tis a fine work of natural philosophy, but so sadly neglected that only two students have signed it out in sixteen years. One died of consumption. The other made no comment. And then there was Burroughs. Do you think the girls called him a devil because they knew he’d read the devil Shakespeare?”

  “Father,” said John in a low, angry voice, “I may have resigned from the court, but I have responsibilities to the colony. You should not speak to me of such things.”

  “Someday, I’ll speak to the world of such things. But when simple ministers are hanged as witches, what fate would befall him who preserved the work of Shakespeare?”

  Section twelve, shelf eight, space six. To Isaac’s relief, Corporei Insectii had not been read by anyone since last he had been there. Indeed, it seemed not to have been moved. The Lord, he concluded, still approved of its presence in the college library.

  And that became the topic of argument that evening in Boston.

  John’s wife, Mary, was racked by a cough that left her weak and feverish. So she retired early, leaving father and son to dispute the question of God’s favor on a playwright whom some considered a devil but many others had come to revere.

  “You’ve read the play,” said Isaac, “and you would agree that this Shakespeare has much to say to man about men.”

  “’Tis why I’ve never cast out Love’s Labours Won. But the law—”

  “The law.” Isaac Wedge laughed. “The belief that the devil can speak through playwrights is as crazy as the belief that he can raise a woman to the ceiling.”

  “Father,” said John in all seriousness, “the devil can do anything. He is a spirit.”

  “We will find out tomorrow.”

  When the first shaft of sunlight struck his eyes, John Wedge awoke. His bed was empty, for his wife slept in another room. She did this, she said, so as not to disturb him with her coughing. She also did this, he surmised, so as not to be disturbed by a husband whose needs she could no longer fulfill.

  He pulled on his breeches and threw himself onto the floor, so that his face was pressed against the smooth red nap of the Turkish carpet and his body was stretched out in the morning sun. Ordinarily, when he prayed, he retired to his study with his books and his thoughts. But on days when prayer preceded a fast, he began in prostration.

  “Oh, Lord,” he said aloud. “One of our neighbors is horribly arrested by evil spirits. I beg Thy help to free her. Send us Thy bright angels, to watch over us and guide us in this and all our torments and sadnesses, that we may serve Thee as Thou wish.”

  John had never seen his father fast or prostrate himself in prayer. These aspects of piety John had learned from Cotton Mather. And he had learned well, because God had blessed him.

  John needed only to look out his window to see the Lord’s bounty upon him. He could gaze across his vegetable garden and down to the Great Cove, to his ships—half a dozen his by his wife’s inheritance, half a dozen his by his own intelligence. Some of them sat at the wharves, loading on the goods of New England, and some of them sailed in with the products of the wide world.

  But his piety and faith had not been great enough, because the richest of the Lord’s blessings—a house filled with happy noise—had not come to John Wedge. His morning sounds were always the same—the humming of the slave woman who stirred his porridge, the whisk of a broom worked by an indentured servant, and the quiet coughing of his wife. He heard no childish bickering, no motherly voice rising to calm a dispute, and for those, he would have surrendered everything else.

  He went down to the dining room and kissed his wife on the forehead. She raised her face and smiled, but only briefly. She invited no further show of affection, and given her sickly appearance—eyes sunk in gray pits, lips as white as flour—it would have been unseemly of him to offer more.

  “Good morning, my darling,” she said. “Rosetta prepares a fine gruel.”

  “Save his share for me,�
� said Isaac from the other end of the table. “He fasts.”

  “For the usual fulfillment?” She cast her eyes to her husband.

  “He fasts for the soul of Miss Margaret Rule, that the devil may leave her.” Isaac spooned a mouthful of porridge. “Possessed she is, or so they tell us.”

  “Most times,” said Mary, “John fasts that we may give you a grandchild. A son for us, a grandson for you, another Wedge for the college.”

  Isaac lowered his spoon and said, “Nothing would make an old man happier, dear, save knowledge that my son walks through life with you as a companion.”

  For all their disputations, thought John, his father knew the right words at the right moment. The smile that brightened Mary’s face was proof enough.

  “You know,” she said, “John even keeps his old commonplace book in his study. He would give it to his son, on the day that the boy enter Harvard.”

  And once more the eyes of father and son met in memory of that distant day when Isaac had first brought John from the Sudbury marshes to Cambridge.

  John stepped out of the room and a moment later returned with a book. “Do you recognize this?”

  Isaac took it as though it were a talisman of lost happiness. He flipped through the pages of John’s tight-writ, upright, adolescent script. He read Latin quotations, passages from the Bible, and bits of conversation, including this, dated March 19, 1677:

  Cotton Mather: I h-h-h-have a new prescription to over- c-c-c-come the stammer.

  Me: By what science comes this knowledge?

  Cotton: The advice of that g-g-g-good old schoolmaster Mr. Corlet. He suggests I apply a certain d-d-d-dilated deliberation in speaking, as though I were a singer. In singing, there is no one who stammers, so by prolonging your pronunciation you will get a habit of speaking without hesitation.

  Me: I shall pray on it for you.

  And interspersed with such things were passages of blank verse, including one that Isaac found familiar, dated April 30, 1676, just two weeks after the Sudbury attack:

  A man be but a speck of dust, begot

  By dust that breathed before, but dust that lives

  Again, when dust itself hath turned to dust.

  Beneath it was a parenthetical comment about the joys of love’s labors.

  John said, “Do you remember those days, Father?”

  “I remember,” said Isaac. “It please me that you remember, too, and share such memories, for they were days that showed love’s labors won.”

  And John went on, as if he had not heard that meaning. “Today, we labor for the love of Christ, against Satan and his minions, whether they be unseen spirits or living deceivers who distract us with their work and words.”

  They heard Margaret Rule before they saw her. She was screaming.

  She and her mother lived in a little house within the shadow of the Mathers’ church, a quarter mile from the Wedge home on Hanover Street. A large crowd were peering in the doors and through the windows, for here was a grand spectacle.

  “Rum!” she was screaming. “The devil bids me drink rum!”

  “Aye,” said a sailor at one of the windows. “The devil will do that.”

  “Make way,” said John. And the crowd parted for the ex-judge and his father.

  The sailor muttered, “Cotton Mather and John Wedge together. No wonder the devil wants her to have a dram. She’ll need her strength.”

  “Aye,” said another sailor. “I’ll take one meself.”

  “Rum!” cried Margaret Rule again.

  John and Isaac pushed through a doorway into the bedroom, where a dozen men and women crowded around the bed in thick, stifling heat.

  And there she lay, a beautiful girl in a jumble of bedclothes and wild black hair.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed was Cotton Mather. “Peace, dear girl.”

  “Rum!” she cried, and then she began to toss her head from side to side. “Rum . . . No . . . no . . . no . . . rum . . . rum . . .”

  “Dear girl,” said Mather gently, “you must eat.”

  “But the devil . . . he forces me”—her jaw dropped and she looked about the room, then she tried to talk with her mouth seemingly locked open—“he pours brimstone down my throat. Burning brimstone! Burning!”

  “I smell it,” said a goodwife standing close to Isaac.

  And Isaac thought, for a moment, that he smelled it, too, so convincing was this girl in her possession.

  “Calm yourself,” said Mather, reaching out to touch the girl’s forehead.

  And she closed her mouth.

  “That’s better.” Mather was not wearing his wig or black hat, but rather a brown suit, which softened his presence considerably.

  The girl smiled now and nuzzled his outstretched hand like a cat.

  “See the bright angel,” said Mather. “See him come to you and chase the dark man toward perdition.”

  “I . . . I . . .” The girl’s eyes cast about the room until they fell upon John Wedge. “Who is here? Be this the white angel?”

  “This is John Wedge,” said Mather, “whom wicked spirits do fear.”

  She smiled at him. “He is most welcome, then, and most handsome . . . most . . .” Suddenly, her eyes opened wide and she gave out with a horrified shriek.

  “What?” cried Mather. “What happens?”

  “The devil lifts me!” she cried.

  A gasp went through the room as she seemed to rise, first by her shoulders, then by her legs and feet, so that her shift fell back, revealing long, naked legs, almost to her crotch. “The devil lifts me. Help me!”

  And a voice whispered in Isaac’s ear, “She rises, all right, all but her arse.” It was Robert Calef, the Boston merchant who was still criticizing the Mathers at every turn. “That glorious white arse that every man in the room would love to touch.”

  Isaac brought a finger to his lips.

  But Calef kept on. “Her arse be the fulcrum for her body. She folds herself in the middle, so we get to see her parts and she gets to blame the devil for showin’ them.”

  “’Tis a fine arse,” whispered Isaac.

  “’Tis the reason the room be so full.”

  Mather shot a glance in their direction, then picked up the sheet and tried to cover the girl’s legs. “We must pray! Pray!”

  “No!” The girl thrust her hands toward the ceiling, so her shift fell from her breasts. “I burn to hear the word prayer. I seethe to hear prayers. So utter no p-p-pr—” And she shrieked, then reached to John Wedge. “Please, master, lay on thy hands.”

  John looked at Mather, who nodded. “Lay on thy hands. It has worked before.”

  “Go on,” said someone from the back of the room. “Give ’er a good feel.”

  “Quiet yourself,” growled Mather.

  John gently took one of the girl’s legs.

  She cried, “No, good sir. Not the legs. The breasts, for they be near the heart.”

  “Yes,” said Mather. “The evil one cannot stand her to be touched near the heart. Like . . . like this.” Mather pushed up the woman’s shift, raised his chin, as if to say he was above reproach in what he was about to do, then firmly pressed his hand to her breast.

  Immediately, her left side—stiffened arm and leg—sank back to the bed.

  A cry of surprise and awe went through the room, as if it were a fine magic trick.

  But her right side remained rigid, arm and leg both pointing toward the beams above her, and she cast her eyes again at John.

  Cotton Mather said to John, “Quick. The evil in her weakens. Lay on thy hands.”

  Calef whispered in Isaac’s ear, “She seduces your son. She relishes her play.”

  John put his hand on her right breast, and her arm and leg dropped to the bed.

  “Lord be praised,” said one of the goodwives.

  “Lord be deceived,” muttered Calef.

  Isaac made no response. He was watching his son, who stood rigid at the side of the bed, his arm stretched out,
his hand pressed on her breast.

  “I feel the demons go,” said the girl. “I feel the goodness of men.”

  “Look!” cried Mather. “Look there!”

  “What?” answered John, eyes widening.

  “Movement, under the pillow!” Mather stood up, and immediately, Margaret’s left arm and leg shot toward the ceiling.

  “Take my place, John, whilst I”—Mather’s voice grew low—“take on the imp.”

  John did as he was told. He kept his left hand on her right breast and slipped his right hand onto the other, which relaxed the arm and leg. He told himself that he was acting above reproach. But her breasts were full and round and . . . he thanked God that there were so many witnesses.

  Suddenly, Mather threw himself across the girl, in a flurry of flying legs, shoe buckles, and white stockings.

  “What is it?” she cried from beneath him.

  “An imp!” Mather drove his hands into the bedclothes. “I feel him.”

  “Where?” shouted John.

  “Here! No, here! No . . .” Mather thrust his hands about while his muffled voice seemed to vibrate in the bedding. “Yes . . . I have him. Yes . . . no . . . no . . .” He pushed himself off of her, breathing heavy with excitement, and said, “I held it but a moment. A spirit, and yet it had substance. A living creature. It so startled me that I released my grip.”

  “What did it feel like?” asked John.

  “A . . . a rat,” said Mather. “For all the world, the imp of Satan felt like a rat.”

  “Then perhaps,” said Robert Calef, “it was a rat.”

  Mather turned and glared at him. “No coffeehouse witling will turn us from our holy purpose. We are here to do the Lord’s work, sir.”

  “But the imp?” said Calef. “If it felt like a rat, perhaps it was a rat.”

  “It was an imp of Satan!” He turned back to Margaret, who seemed to have settled. “And we are here to save this girl from such evil.”

  “You have, sir,” she said groggily, and she arched her back against John’s hands. “You and John Wedge . . . at least for today.” And then she began to giggle.