Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V (32 page)

“Then what is it? Since we both know...” John glanced around and lowered his voice. “... that the one certainty in this trial is that there
are
no witches.”

“The boy was full of brag about some knack or other. All she knows is what he told her, or someone in his party. But she believed it. She’s doing this because she
must
believe in the law that hanged her parents. If she did not believe that the law was right, then the sheer injustice of it would drive her mad.”

“Oh, now, Hezekiah. ‘Drive her mad’? Have you been reading sensational novels?”

“I mean it quite literally. She has a deep faith in the goodness of our Christian community. If she thought her parents were falsely accused and hanged for it—”

“Who were her parents? Is it a case I...” And then, doing the arithmetic in his head—the girl’s age, that many years ago—he realized whose daughter she was. “Oh, Hezekiah.
That
case?”

Tears spilled from Hezekiah’s eyes. “What I wanted you to know, John, was that the one who seems to be the accuser is merely the last victim of that wretched affair.”

John answered gently. “New England is a lovely place, Hezekiah. We have our share of hypocrisy, of course, but generally we face up to our sins and the frailty of human nature, and confess our wrongs right smartly. But this one—how did it ever go that far?”

“You didn’t see what I saw, John,” said Hezekiah.

“No, don’t tell me. You need no excuse, my friend. You stood alone.”

“I couldn’t... I could not...”

John laid his hand over Hezekiah’s. “Thus we take a good breakfast and render it indigestible,” he said. “Come, now, there’s no blame attached to you.”

“Oh, but there is.”

“So you’re defending her, to make up for it?”

Hezekiah shook his head. “I’ve looked after her all her life. It’s my penance. To stay here, in obscurity. There’s blood on my hands. I won’t have more. The young lawyer who’s languishing in the jail, he’s the one. When you let him out, when he defends his friend, see if he doesn’t give you a way to resolve the whole matter. All I ask is that you not bring charges against the accuser.”

“This English barrister can do it, but not you?”

“I took a vow most solemnly before heaven.”

“And deprived the New England bar of an honest man. The bench as well. You should be in robes like mine, my friend.”

Hezekiah brusquely wiped the tears from his cheeks. “Thank you for seeing me, John. And for treating me as a friend.”

“Now and always, Hezekiah. Will I see you at the trial?”

“How could I bear that, John? No. God bless you, John. He brought you here, I know it. Yes, I know you think God is a watchmaker who installed an infinite spring—”

“A quotation I never said, though it’s much attributed to me—”

“I heard the words from your lips.”

“Stir your memory, and you’ll recall that I was quoting the line in order to refute it! I’m no deist, like Tom Jefferson. That’s
his
line. It’s the only God he’s willing to worship—one who has closed up shop and gone away so there’s no risk of Tom Jefferson being contradicted
when he spouts his nonsense about the ‘rational man.’ Him and his wall of separation between church and state—such claptrap! Such a wall serves only those who want to keep God on the far side of it, so they can divide up the nation without interference.”

“I’m sorry to have brought your old nemesis into this.”

“You didn’t,” said John. “
I
did. Or rather,
he
did. You’d think that he’d stop getting under my skin, but it galls me that
his
little country is going to be part of the United States, and mine isn’t.”

“Isn’t
yet
,” said Hezekiah.

“Isn’t in my lifetime,” said John, “and I’m selfish enough to wish I could have lived to see it. The United States needs this Puritan society as a counter-influence to Tom Jefferson’s intolerantly secular one. Mark my words, when a government pretends that it is the highest judge of its own actions, the result is not freedom as Jefferson says, but chaos and oppression. When he shuts religion out of government, when men of faith are not listened to, then all that remains is venality, posturing, and ambition.”

“I hope you’re wrong about that, sir,” said Hezekiah. “Many of us look to the United States as the next stage of the American experiment. New England has come this far, but we are stagnant now.”

“As this trial proves.” John sighed. “I wish I
were
wrong, Hezekiah. But I’m not. Tom Jefferson claims to stand for freedom, and charges me with trying to promote some kind of theocracy or aristocracy. But there is no freedom down his road.”

“How can we know that, sir?” said Hezekiah. “No one has ever been down this road?”

“I have,” said John, and regretted it at once.

Hezekiah looked at him, startled, but then smiled. “No matter how precise your imagination, sir, I doubt it will be accepted as evidence.”

But it wasn’t imagination. John had
seen
. Had seen it
as clearly as he saw Hezekiah standing before him now. It was a sort of vision that God had vouchsafed to him all his life, that he could see how power flowed and where it led, in groups of men both large and small. It was a strange and obscure sort of vision, which he could not explain to anyone else and had never tried, not even to Abigail, but it allowed him to chart a course through all the theories and philosophies that swirled and swarmed throughout the British colonies. It had allowed him to see through Tom Jefferson. The man talked freedom, but he could never quite bring himself to free his slaves. Abolitionists criticized him for hypocrisy, but they missed the point. He wasn’t a lover of freedom who had neglected to free his slaves; he was a man who loved to control other people, and did it by talking about freedom. Jefferson had stood naked in front of the world when he tried to silence his critics with the Alien and Sedition Acts almost as soon as Appalachee won its freedom from the Crown. So much for his love of freedom—you could have freedom of speech as long as you didn’t use it to oppose Jefferson’s policies! Yet as soon as the acts were repealed—after years of hounding Jefferson’s enemies into silence or exile—people still talked about him as the champion of liberty!

John Adams knew Tom Jefferson, and that’s why Tom Jefferson hated John Adams, because John really was what Jefferson only pretended to be: a man who loved freedom, even the freedom of those who disagreed with him. Even Tom Jefferson’s freedom. It made them unequal in battle. It handed the victory to Jefferson.

“Are you all right, sir?” asked Hezekiah.

“Just fighting over old battles in my mind,” said John. “It’s the problem with age. You have all these rusty arguments, and no quarrel to use them in. My brain is a museum, but alas, I’m the only visitor, and even I am not terribly interested in the displays.”

Hezekiah laughed, but there was affection in it. “I would love nothing better than to visit there. But I’m
afraid I’d be tempted to loot the place, and carry it all away with me.”

To John’s surprise, Hezekiah’s words brought tears to his eyes. “Would you, Hezekiah?” He blinked rapidly and his eyes cleared. “You see, now, you’ve moved this old man with your kindness. You found the one bribe I’m susceptible to.”

“It wasn’t flattery, sir.”

“I know,” said John. “It was honor. May God forgive me, but I’ve never been able to purge my heart of the desire for it.”

“There’s no sin in it, John. The honor of good men is won only by goodness. It’s how the children of God recognize each other. It’s the feast of love.”

“Maybe God
did
bring me here,” said John. “In answer to my own prayers.”

“Maybe that’s how God works,” said Hezekiah. “We pray for a messenger from God—who knows but what the messenger also prayed for a place to take his message?”

“What does that make me, an angel?”

“Wrestle with Jacob. Smite his thigh. Leave him limping.”

“Once your allusions were all to Homer and the Greek playwrights.”

“It’s the Bible now,” said Hezekiah. “I have more to fear from death than you do.”

“But longer to wait before it comes,” said John ruefully.

Hezekiah laughed, shook John’s hand, and left the table. John sat back down, tucked in, and finished. The meeting had been more emotional than John had expected, or than he cared for, truth be known. Emotions had a way of filling you up and then what did you do with them? You still had to go on about your life.

Except for Hezekiah Study. He had
not
gone about his life. His life had ended, all those years ago, back in Netticut, on the end of a couple of ropes.

And my life? When did it end? Because it has ended, I see that now. I’m like Hezekiah. I took a turn, or didn’t take a turn; I stopped, or failed to stop. I should have been something else. I should have been president of a fledgling nation of free men. Not a judge at a witch trial. Not a stout little man eating the dregs of his breakfast alone at table in a boardinghouse in Cambridge, waiting for Tom Jefferson, damn him, to die, so I can have the feeble satisfaction of outliving that bastard son of Liberty.

Oh, Tom. If only we could have been friends, I could have changed you, you could have changed me, we could have become in reality the statesmen you pretend to be and I wish I were.

Purity could hardly sleep all night. It was unbearable, yesterday, the running, running, running. And yet she bore it. That’s what surprised her. She sweated and panted but she kept on and on and on, and all the while she ran there was a kind of music in the back of her mind. As soon as she tried to listen to it, to find the melody of it, the sound retreated and all she could hear then was the throbbing of her pulse in her head, her own panting, her feet thudding on the grassy ground. But then she’d stagger a few steps and the music would come back and it would sustain her and...

She knew what it was. Hadn’t Arthur Stuart talked about how Alvin could run and run with the greensong he learned from that Red prophet? Or was it Ta-Kumsaw himself? It didn’t matter. Alvin was using his witchery to sustain her and she wanted to scream at him to stop.

But she had learned a little between yesterday and today. Quill had taught her. Everything she said got twisted. She had never mentioned Satan, had never even thought of him, but somehow her meeting with Alvin and his friends on the banks of the river had turned into a witches’ sabbath, and Alvin swimming in the river with Arthur Stuart had been turned into incestuous sodomy.
And she finally realized what should have been obvious all along—what Reverend Study had tried to warn her about—that whatever fault there might be in Alvin Smith, it was nothing compared to the terrible evil that resulted from denouncing him as a witch. What would happen if she cried out what was in her heart? “Stop it! Stop witching me to keep running!” It would only make things worse.

Is this what happened to my parents?

Gradually, as the day wore on, she had begun to notice something else. It was Quill who was filled with fear and rage, his mind alert to take anything that happened and turn it into proof of the evil he was looking for. Quill looked at Purity with fascination and loathing, a combination she found fearful and disturbing. But Alvin Smith, he was as cheerful toward her today as he ever was on the riverbank. Not a complaint toward her for getting him locked up. And yes, he used his witchery, or so it seemed to her, but he did it out of genuine kindness toward her. That was the truth—by her own knack she knew it. He was a little impatient with her, but he bore her no ill will.

Now, as the day of her testimony loomed, she did not know what to do. If she bore witness against Alvin now, telling the simple truth, Quill would make it seem as though she was holding back. She could imagine the questioning. “Why are you refusing to mention the witches’ sabbath?” “There was no witches’ sabbath.” “What about the naked debauchery between this man and this half-White boy who is said to be as it were his own son?” “They played in the river, that’s all.” “Ah, they
played
in the river, a naked man, a naked boy, they sported in the river, is that your testimony?” Oh, it would be awful, every word twisted.

Simpler by far to confess to a lesser crime: I made it up, Your Honor, because they frightened me by the riverbank and I wished them to see what it felt like. I made it up because I had just learned my parents were hanged
for witchcraft and I wanted to show how false accusations are too readily believed.

She had almost resolved on this course of action when the key turned in the lock and the door opened and there stood Quill, his face warm and smiling, filled with love. To her it looked like hate, and now she could see what somehow had eluded her before: Quill wanted her to die.

How could she have missed it? It was her knack, to see what people intended, what they were about to do. Yet she saw no further than his smile the first time they met, saw nothing but his genuine love and sympathy and concern for her. How could her knack have failed her?

Was it what Quill had said to her, in one of his many rambling discourses on Satan? That Satan was not loyal and did not uphold his disciples?

Why, then, would she see the truth now?

Or was it the truth? Was Satan now deceiving her into thinking she saw hatred where love truly existed?