“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 Yet as soon as the acts were repealed– after years of hounding Jefferson's enemies into silence or exile– people still talked about him as the champion of liberty!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.