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A Voice That Said “Death”
Once, beside a great river at the edge of a forest, there stood a small town. Time has erased its every trace, but we can imagine it, quiet and still, settled under a pall of late winter darkness. A man is hurrying home along the main street, to his left a trickling brook and a fathomless bank of trees, to his right a curve of clapboard houses with steep roofs and leaded windows. Down the narrow lanes between homesteads he glimpses the moonlit river, in spate from the thaw. The air is ice-sharp, tinged with smoke and resin, the only sounds the rush of water, the muffled bellows of cattle and the distant cry of a wolf. It feels like the edge of the world, and to those who have settled here it is. Beyond the mountains to the west lie uncharted lands, as mysterious as the heavens, inhabited by people of an unknown, perhaps hostile, disposition.
It is February 1651. The man’s name is Jonathan Taylor, and he has had an unsettling day, which is not over yet. Arriving home, Taylor lifts the door latch, treading softly to avoid waking his wife, who is eight months pregnant, and their infant girl beside her. They have lived in the young plantation of Springfield for two years, laboring to make something of themselves in this new land. The family sleeps downstairs in one bed near the glowing hearth, which flickers shadows round the low-ceilinged room. Taylor undresses, slips between the coarse sheets. He closes his eyes. But then he’s awake, the room suffused with light. He sits up rigid with fear, sensing movement on the floor. He forces himself to look. Three snakes are slithering toward him. He glances at his wife but doesn’t rouse her, afraid the shock will hurt their unborn child. Nor does he want his daughter to see.
The smallest snake, black with yellow stripes, slides up the side of the bed. Taylor strikes it off, but it returns. Again he lashes out. Heart pounding, he shrinks back against the bolster. Daring to raise his head again, he meets the snake’s beady eye. With a flick of its jaws, the creature sinks its fangs into Taylor’s forehead. The pain is excruciating, but Taylor is too petrified to move. In the deep voice of a man—a voice he recognizes—the snake breathes the word “death.” Trembling, Taylor splutters that no man ever died from such a bite. Then, the room snaps back to darkness, and the snakes are gone. Taylor’s tremors wake his wife. Unable to calm him, she asks if he’s cold and whether she should warm his clothes. He replies that he’s hot and sick and falls back on the bed, shaking and sweating. All that Thursday night he writhes feverishly, his mind a confusion of images. But in the morning Taylor is clear about one thing. He knows who to blame for his torment: the brickmaker, Hugh Parsons.
Jonathan Taylor is not alone in suspecting Parsons. Two days ago, on Wednesday, the constable arrested Hugh’s wife Mary as a witch—the first that Springfield has known. Once, witches were unheard‑of in New England, but recently a plague of accusations has infected the colony. Back across the Atlantic, Old England has also been scourged by witch panics, reports of which arrive by letter and word of mouth. Stories that by day are food for gossip, after dark fuel nightmares. Colonists fear God but also the devil and believe that witches can send beast-like demons to hurt them. Such thoughts were always present, but now witchcraft has become real among the settlements of the Connecticut valley, lonely outposts of piety and trade, of which Springfield is the most northerly. Meanwhile, rumors of heresy dog the town’s all-powerful governor, William Pynchon. These days, anything seems possible.
Hugh Parsons is a workingman in his thirties, who says little but radiates discontent. He left England several years ago, and has spent the last six in Springfield, at odds with the world. After Mary’s arrest, he tossed and turned through Wednesday night—worrying for her sake, perhaps, but also for himself. The following morning Hugh came looking for the constable, a Welshman named Thomas Merrick, eager to know what was happening. The constable wasn’t around; Jonathan Taylor, laboring in Merrick’s barn, was. Hugh asked Taylor if he knew who had pointed the finger at his wife. Taylor replied tersely that he—Hugh—would know soon enough. Just then Merrick appeared, marching Mary to the house of William Pynchon, who was also Springfield’s magistrate, for questioning. Hugh did nothing. Strangely calm, he sat in the barn until dusk, waiting until Taylor had finished, then, as Taylor went up to Merrick’s house, followed him. The constable was still not back, but his wife said the two men could help themselves to beer. Taylor went down to the cellar, but the barrel plug was so stiff it hurt to twist it. When Sarah Merrick tried, it came out easily. “What are you, a witch?” quipped Taylor: a risky joke. Back upstairs, Goody Merrick made light of it all and was sorry about Taylor’s sore hand, which she showed to Parsons. He said nothing, convinced that Taylor’s joke was on him. The two men then went to their homes, Taylor scarcely imagining what lay ahead that night.
The next day—Friday—Taylor complains of what he described as “fits” racing through his body. His panicked wife summons their neighbors. What if Jonathan were to die? She has a child of seventeen months and another in the womb. Angry and afraid, the townsfolk go to Pynchon and demand that Hugh Parsons be arrested. After all, others in the community have recently suffered at the hands of witches. Two years ago the town barber was traumatized in bed at night by a fiery apparition of a boy, for which he now blames Parsons. The saturnine brickmaker is seized and bound with chains. Pynchon investigates, determined to restore peace, yet aware that he, too, is a fountain of dissension. From every corner of the town come disturbing tales and outbursts of anger and anguish. Hugh and Mary Parsons can only wait, thinking about the calamitous last few years and wondering what will become of them.
William Pynchon, the figure who presided over Springfield, was sixty years old. He had traveled far, taken huge risks and weathered storms, metaphorical and real. New England had proved a grueling ordeal. His wife had died; his boat had been swept away; other townships had censured him. With courage girded by a strong faith, he had journeyed far into the wilderness to trade with the Indians, standing his ground in tense, halting exchanges. Life was unpredictable, and there were few people he could trust. Pynchon had been stalked by war, hunger and pestilence. But he had never experienced anything like the events of winter 1650–51: strange accidents blamed on the Parsons household, their neighbors swooning and convulsing, eerie sounds and apparitions, and throughout Springfield a pervasive mood of dread.
Pynchon was head to foot an English country gentleman: austere and determined with a godly passion for rectitude. He was a natural entrepreneur whose gaze took in the entire world, or as much of it as he might reach with a scheme. Calculating yet candid in negotiations, he spoke plainly and never flattered to deceive. He had no need to be loved; God’s love was sufficient. To him, as to all migrant Puritans, New England meant religious freedom and bringing the gospel to the natives, both of which would come from populating virgin land with hardworking Christians: prosperity and piety were companionable virtues. Pynchon was also a theologian, steeped in classical wisdom, including restraint of the tongue: he knew when to speak, and then with economy and precision. He lacked the rhetorical discipline of an Oxford or a Cambridge education, which made him self-conscious and cranky, yet also preserved in him a certain independence of thought. He read prodigiously and took pains with his writing, craving to be understood. Even his letters went through drafts, full of crossings-out and substitutions in his crabbed hand, the lines bunched to save paper. But Pynchon had never flinched or faltered—yet.
The town he founded fifteen years earlier stood at the furthest western limits of New England, high in the Connecticut valley. Unlike so many other plantations, Springfield had not grown out of a Puritan congregation transplanted from England to the American wilderness. It was born of capitalist enterprise, godly yet commercial and confident. Nonetheless, it still comprised fewer than fifty households—a limit set by Pynchon to maintain coherence—on a plateau two and a half miles by one third. The homelots—house, barn and garden—formed parallel ribbons between the river and the main street. On the opposite bank of the river, to the west, lay planting grounds, and to the east, across the street and “hassocky marsh”—named for its clumps of grass—lay upland woodlots, thick with maple, elm, birch, oak and pine. Every family was thereby provided with food, fuel and shelter. Streams meandered down the hillside, feeding fresh water into a brook beside the main street. At the top of a sharp bluff lay the unmanageable “pine barrens” and, beyond, the long “Bay Path” to Boston, a hundred miles east. Indians, the people whose land this had been since time immemorial, were employed as messengers and carriers; but mostly their dealings with the English were limited to farming and trade; and watching, as their ancestral homeland was transformed.
The greatest transformation lay in the town’s north end, where the principal inhabitants lived. This was the heart of Springfield’s civic life, centered on a main square. There was no grandeur to it, and it flooded when the marshes were saturated. The only prominent building on the square was the meetinghouse, forty feet long, faced in clapboard, its gable ends topped with turrets, one for a bell—a recent acquisition—the other a lookout post. All meetings were held there. From the square, a lane led down to the field where, once a month, Hugh Parsons and his fellow militiamen trained with muskets and arrow-proof corselets. There, too, lay the burying ground, a two-acre plot rapidly filling up, for these were days of raging infection—of smallpox and other diseases. Many children and babies had died: Springfield’s long-standing minister, George Moxon, offered reassurance about salvation and helped the bereaved master their grief. Besides Moxon, William Pynchon’s staunchest supporter was his stepson Henry Smith, who, as husband to Pynchon’s daughter Anne, was also his son-in-law: this was a close-knit community, in more ways than one. Smith, the town clerk, had signed its founding covenant in 1636; Moxon arrived the following year. Pynchon was also close to his other son-in-law, Elizur Holyoke, whose father was a friend at the port of Lynn, between Boston and Salem. The estates of these men covered an area ten times the size of the holdings of other townsmen, many of whom rented land, houses, livestock or all three from Pynchon. Moxon’s house had bedrooms, a study, a south-facing porch, and—a real luxury—carpets. Pynchon’s, by contrast, was plain yet spacious and imposing. Together these four neighbors—Pynchon, Holyoke, Smith and Moxon—were the hub of power in Springfield.
Authority devolved to householders, who chose “selectmen” to regulate highways, bridges, fences and ditches. In this, they resembled vestrymen in English parishes, a quasi-republican model of governance that Pynchon knew well. But the selectmen also oversaw land distribution, any plantation’s most sensitive issue. Springfield abided by the Massachusetts law code, but like many settlements remote from Boston was largely autonomous. Ultimately, this was Pynchon’s town, at his command. His main reason for sharing power at all was to avoid the friction between magistrates and freemen endemic in other townships. And Springfield’s magistrate was, of course, Pynchon himself. His duties, stipulated by the General Court at Boston, included taking testimonies and hearing suits for slander, debt and breach of contract. He also saw himself as a mediator, a counselor—a “commissioner of the peace,” as much as a justice of the peace. Pynchon was in everyone’s life, like a lord of the manor from the Old World. Even the ties of patronage and clientage were similar. Men like Hugh Parsons sustained the customary illusion of independence, pretending to work for themselves when in fact they all worked for Pynchon. No other hierarchy in New England was quite like this—nor any town so industrious. Few Springfield folk would have admitted it, but burning ambition, made possible by Pynchon’s power yet also constrained by it, undermined community and piety. The worst sin, apart from murder or witchcraft, was idleness.
From March to September the working day lasted between ten and sixteen hours, 4:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Shadows marked time: at noon a man could step on his own head. Fieldwork was paid at 20d per day in summer, 16d for shorter winter days: twice the rate in England, which had a surfeit of workers. There was no clear division of labor. Men might be artisans and farmers, like Hugh Parsons, and still do jobs for Pynchon. They toiled in enervating heat and bone-chilling cold, felling timber, excavating stumps, sawing planks, splitting shingles, breaking rocks, digging drains, diverting streams, shoring banks, building bridges and laying causeways. They mowed meadows, stacked hay and boxed pine trees for pitch and resin. They tended cattle and sheep, netted pigeons and caught fish on deerskin lines, as the Indians had taught them. As well as wheat, barley, oats, flax and hemp, they grew “Indian corn” or maize, despite a sense that it was unwholesome. They learned the Indian tricks of planting when white oak leaves were as big as a mouse’s ear; using fish as fertilizer (dogs’ paws were tied to their collars to stop them digging it up); and growing pumpkins, squashes and beans between the tall stems. At the end of the six-day week, laborers rested aching muscles and rubbed grease into cracked hands. The Sabbath, kept holy by law, began at sunset on Saturday and ended the following night—though Pynchon, preferring the “natural Sabbath,” hated people using Sunday evenings for games or “the servile works of their particular callings.”
At home, men made furniture, whetted saws and axes, twisted rope and sewed sacks. They chopped firewood, repaired roofs, daubed walls, pruned trees, trimmed hedges, cleared paths, scoured ditches and maintained fences that were (so the saying went) “hog-tight, horse-high, and bull-strong.” Hugh Parsons did all these things. Pigs were slaughtered under a waning moon to prevent—or so it was believed—the pork swelling in the barrel. Nothing was wasted: the offal eaten at once, intestines stuffed with fat and blood for sausages, bacon smoked from the chimney lugpole; bladders were receptacles for lard. Wives like Mary Parsons made hog’s-hair twine for sewing buckskins. They also tended orchards and helped with the harvest, threshing and winnowing, and made hay; in the process, they too suffered from sunburn and chilblains, back pain and sprains. They foraged for herbs and nuts; grew carrots, cabbages and turnips; fed hens and geese; and milked goats and cows.
Copyright © 2022 by Malcolm Gaskill. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
