IN THE SHADOW OF JOHNNY APPLESEED

Increase Chapin had three sons, named Sorrow Chapin, Christ-Suffering-on-the-Cross Chapin, and, the youngest, Fear-Not Chapin, whose mother Chastity, died giving him birth. Three girls – Flee-sin, Make-Peace, and We-Are-Dust – were born to Chapin’s second wife, Trinity, who suffered from a consumption shortly before the witch trials started in Springfield, Massachusetts.

That was in 1645, 1646, maybe a few years almost half-a-century before the witch craze in Salem (which was really in Danvers).

Fear-not Chapin accused his sister Make-Peace of attending a witches Sabbath on the top of a peak in the Metacomet Range north of Springfield. What was called Mt. Jack, because of Make-Peace’s pet deer, named Jack, that her suitor, Tom Arnold, shot with a bow and arrow and that wandered into the hills to die.”

Make-Peace refused to answer her brother’s charge. Who knows why? Her mother and father, her minister, the town council, all begged her to deny the charges.

On that subject, she kept her mouth shut.

2

Ever after Make-Peace was treated with distrust. Women avoided her. Men ignored her – during the day. After dark, they would stray by her window, figuring she was easy. Although Make-Peace never went with any of the men, they bragged about the experiences they pretended they had with her.

As with the charge of witchcraft, Make-Peace never responded to the lies. Her modesty was interpreted as brazenness – which was reinforced when her future husband, Philip Gilbert, one of the few men who didn’t come sniffing around at night, gave her books to read. Mostly in Latin like, Catullus. She liked:

Diana protects us,
Unmarried boys & girls;
Sing about Diana,
Sing, unmarried girls & boys…

Philip preferred the poem right before that, which starts:

O best of all who play the bathhouse game,
Vibennius & Son, that lecherous asshole…

Philip also shared with Make-Peace a few works in English: Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde and The Mirror for Magistrates, a collection of mostly tragic poems about princes and their counselors, who after death answer for their lives. Make-Peace’s favorite was “Lord Mowbray,” because of its lines:

Note here the end of pride, se Flatteries fine,

Marke the reward of enuy and false complaint…

Toward the end of her life, she like a smuggled manuscript copy of John Donne’s Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed.

“License my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
Oh my America! My new-found-land…

That spring, Make-Peace’s brother stole one of her knit menstrual pads, which he gave to a pal, who pinned it to his jacket when he had to discuss some business with Philip. (This was before Philip and Make-Peace were married.) Philip grabbed a cudgel. Make-Peace slipped between them. She reached under her dress and took out a fresh bloody pad, which she gave to the man.

At dawn, the next day, Make-Peace slipped out of town and wandered through the woods, her path dappled, trees looming above her, each green leaf picked out with sunlight. Across her face flitted shadows of birds. Insects kept up their mill-wheel whine. About her, bees hummed. A zig-zag strand of spider web glimmered and, with her step forward, vanished. A trick of light. Bear hairs were stuck in sap on a tree trunk where the bear had rubbed an itch. She stepped around deer droppings. With a whirr of wings, grouse exploded from the underbrush.

The woods opened into a field of purple flox. Make-Peace scuffed through white-headed yarrow – which, dried, made conjure sticks. The air smelled sweet of Timothy grass. She sprawled face down, her dress crinkling around her, the soil beneath her, the sun warm on the back of her neck.

When she woke, perhaps an hour later, the sun was lower, angled across the moving tips of grass. Sitting cross-legged a few yards away was a Pequot, the Praying Indian, known in the village as Jacob, gazing at her.

She grinned.

He grinned.

In the twilight cool, she went home, her thighs sticky with their mixed crusting fluids. She told her father, Increase, she was Jacob’s wife – they had said vows to each other and lain together.

“And Philip?” Make-Peace’s brother Fear-Not asked.

Increase slapped their Bible onto the dinner table. He opened it to Genesis 34:2-4, and read And Siche the sonne of Hemor the Heuite lorde of the countre sawe her and toke her and laye with her and forced her: and his harte laye vnto Dina ye doughter of Iacob. And he loued yt damsell and spake kidly vnto her and spake vnto his father Hemor saynge gett me this mayde vnto my wyfe.

“And his name Jacob at that,” Make-Peace’s mother Trinity, holding her apron between thumb and forefinger of each hand, said of the Praying Indian.

“You let her stand in the window where people could see her,” Increase said. “You should have forbid her roaming through the village.”

“Like Dinah, in my womb your daughter was a boy and, when she was miraculously born a girl, she kept a boy’s curiosity,” Trinity said.

“You should have scolded her,” Increase said.

“You should have beaten her,” Trinity said.

The Bible said Dinah became a saint and married Job, who also was saintly. Dinah bore Job seven sons and three daughters – Jemimah, Kaziah, and Keren-happuch – who were famed throughout the land for their beauty.

When Job was on his deathbed, he divided what he owned equally among his sons. His daughters objected. How, one of them asked for the others, could you leave us nothing?

I am leaving you a gift greater than flocks and land, Job said.

From a golden chest, he took three embroidered girdles, covered in gems that flashed in the sun.

Wear these girdles, Job told his daughters, and you will fear no man.

Jemimah put on her girdle and knew the language of the angels.

Kaziah put on her girdle and knew all that happened in Heaven.

Karen-huppuch put on her girdle and sang with the Cherubim.

Perhaps, Trinity thought, Make-Peace, too, would become a saint, and her children – Trinity’s grandchildren – would sing with the angels.

“As in The Book,” her father said, his hand flat on the cover as if to hold down what inside was threatening to emerge, “if this man and his father and his brothers shall circumcise themselves, he can have you, Child.”

“But you are not circumcised,” Make-Peace said.

“As the story goes he must,” her father said. “And his father and brothers.”

“Don’t ask for the moon,” Fear-Not said.

“And will you kill them all as they lie suffering from their wounds?” Make-Peace asked. “As the story goes.”

Make-Peace’s father exchanged a look with his wife, who said, “Of course not, Girl.”

“But they have to suffer something for the rape,” her father said.

“I lay with him because…,” Make-Peace started and not knowing herself why she had – it wasn’t love as she knew love or concupiscence.

She flounced off to wash herself.

36

When Make-Peace’s father demanded that Jacob and the men of his family circumcise themselves, Jacob laughed.

He offered no bride price. Make-Peace asked a blessing of her father, who said, “Yes, yes, of course.”

Make-Peace and Jacob lived away from her people and his

people, trading with them, but avoiding close contact – except for Philip, whom Make-Peace continued to see in a speckled grove or on the moss under a towering tree or on the flowering bank of a stream. Jacob never mentioned it. Make-Peace had twins, one of whom died within two days of the birth, God’s portion, Make-Peace said. Was it Philip’s child or Jacob’s.

Make-Peace said, “Both.”

The boy looked like neither of the three.

One night, under a bright moon, after one of the increasingly frequent skirmishes between the Settlers and the Pequots, Make-Peace stepped around the bloody, hacked bodies of both Natives and Settlers, avoiding steaming intestines and a lower jaw, its teeth almost phosphorescent in the moonbeams. Philip stood before her, his hands tacky with drying blood, glancing, beyond her, at Jacob, who had keep aloof from the fighting.

Without looking back at Jacob, Make-Peace took Philip’s arm.

39

In 1636, William Pynchon founded the Agawam Plantation (which he renamed Springfield after his home in England) on the East bank of the Connecticut (Quonenek-ta Cut) River, where the East-West crossroads met the North-South crossroads. It was on some of the most fertile land in the American Northeast.

A natural paradise, which Springfield’s first founders determined to turn into a man-made paradise. The town fathers were committed to religious toleration, freedom of speech, and universal (male) suffrage. White males did not need to own land to be full citizens. Pynchon learned the local Algonquin dialect, traded fairly with the Indians, and wrote a book that the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony found heretical.

Springfield, upriver from Hartford (then called Newtown), was part of the Connecticut Colony. Springfield and Hartford were jealous of each other. The Dutch, who had settled Hartford, distrusted the English in Springfield and claimed Springfield had hop-scotched over them to gain the northern-most navigable spot on the river, making it a better outpost for the fur trade.

In 1640, all along the Connecticut River crops failed. Unfed cattle died. Bloating gas-filled carcasses covered the fields. Pynchon and the local Algonquin tribe, the Pequot, couldn’t agree on a price for the corn the river towns of Springfield, Hartford, Windsor (then called Matianuck) needed. Because Pynchon didn’t close the deal (and left the settlers short of feed), Hartford felt betrayed by him – and by the Pequot.

The Pequot War had ended two years earlier. Memories of the brutalities were raw. The Pequot had stuck settlers’ heads on poles along paths. (Some said the settlers also stuck Indian heads on poles.) The Indians tortured some settlers. Roasted others alive. One Englishman’s eye was hooked like a fish, and he was hanged from a tree.

The Pequot, decimated by plague and war, capture and slavery, were almost exterminated.

Pynchon had tried to smooth over the differences between the settlers and the Natives, but Hartford sent Captain John Mason north to Springfield to force the Pequot to sell grain at what they considered a reasonable price. The Pequot capitulated – but Pynchon who deplored Mason’s strong-arm tactics convinced Springfield to leave the Connecticut Colony and join the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Springfield’s fears – of the Pequot, of the Dutch to the south, of the French to the north, and of other Englishmen to the East, of all the “scourging and dire calamities” – caused the town fathers, led by Samuel Chapin, to open private letters of anyone suspected of disloyalty – revealing revolting sexual activities, including birth control. Subsequent laws punished intercourse with animals by death.

There was a rumor of a baby born without a face.

Mary Lewis, who had married a Papist from whom she was separated, decided she could marry again to a Protestant, a brick maker Hugh Parsons, who quarreled with and threatened his neighbors. After the death of two of her infant sons – Samuel who was born in 1648, and Joshua, who was born in 1650 – Mary accused her husband of witchcraft.

She also accused the Widow Marshfield.

What was the proof?

Flickering marsh gas, curdled milk, vanishing utensils, light flashing from a red waistcoat. One neighbor dreamed of three entwined snakes. Another claimed that pregnant squirrels circled Parsons’ house, showing no fear. Two of Minister George Moxon’s daughters – Martha and Rebeckah – fell into fits. Others saw night prowlers “sometimes like cats and sometimes in their own shape.”

On May 17, 1651, Mary Parsons confessed she had been influenced by Satan. Why else would she have lied about her husband? She was condemned to death – but not for witchcraft. She and her husband Hugh were cleared of that charge. But for murdering her own child.

Hugh left Springfield.

Mary died in jail in 1651. The same year Make-Peace had a child, a girl she named Abigail.

The witch craze proved Springfield’s utopian dreams were dead.

For now.

Springfield would continue to have Dreamers.

40

In 1780, after mustering out of the Continental Army, where he served under George Washington, John Chapman – later known as Johnny Appleseed – settled in Longmeadow, a Springfield suburb. He headed up the Old Connecticut Trail through Great Barrington and across the Hudson River to Catskill, New York, then west, to plant apple trees and look for Swedenborgian angels.

“I liked the Indians,” Charles Allen Smart reported Johnny Appleseed as saying, “and I liked the white people and I liked the animals, and I didn’t hurt any of them… I tried to be a good American, on this land we had found.”

Before the Civil War, John Brown formed his abolition militia, the League of Giliadites, in Springfield.

In 1856, a Springfield inventor, made the world’s first adjustable monkey wrench.

In 1901, a mechanic at the Hundee Manufacturing Company, who was working on the Indian motorcycle, found a woman’s buried bones, which according to a local doctor were Mary Parsons’ remains.

For eleven years, the doctor charged anyone who wanted to see the skeleton a penny. In 1956, his grandson displayed a femur – all that was left of the bones – at his music store, near the booths where teenagers (after having a malt at the Nutty Goodie Tea Room on Main Street) listened to the Dell-Vikings, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Elvis.

By then – the 50s – Springfield was a magnet for leftists, because of The Springfield Plan, a radical 1940s court-mandated school integration policy.

Not long after that, Timothy Leary (a Springfield native) was turning the world onto LSD.

Utopias die hard.

4

Make-Peace’s husband, Philip Gilbert, was born in 1551 in England. In Devonshire. Where he first met Thomas Morton, who, in the 1590s in London, introduced him to Ben Johnson, Thomas Lodge, and other Elizabethan dramatists, including (possibly) Shakespeare.

At the Inns of Court, Philip’s room were cramped. He attended services at the Church of St. Mary’s, thumbing the Pegasus on the cover of the prayer book. He heard the legends about the nearby round churches, build by Templars. Turning a corner, he saw the flags flying over the South Bank theaters, which he frequented. He drank with actors and considered acting himself. He was one of the master-less crowd.

He was proud of his skill at hawking, which marked him as a gentleman. In the summer, outside of town, he helped build vine encircled maypoles and danced in the meadows, free and easy with men and women of all ages, behavior – including the maypole – he brought with him to America, a land (he wrote to a friend) which had “lost its maidenhead.”

5

One of Make-Peace and Philips’ descendants, baptized Morton – which had become a traditional family name although no one by that generation could tell where the name came from – had fought with other Englishmen alongside descendants of the Praying Indian, Jacob – in the French-Indian War. When the Revolution began, Morton Gilbert sided with the Tories and was imprisoned in the New Wycombe caverns. After the war, he refused to come out, a free man.

Free as long as he stayed in prison.

David Black is an award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and producer. His novel Like Father was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and listed as one of the seven best novels of the year by the Washington Post. The King of Fifth Avenue was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times, New York Magazine, and the A.P. NPR’s Weekend Edition called The Extinction Event one of the five best books of the summer. Amazon chose Fast Shuffle, as a Best Books of the Month. TV Guide chose one of his Law & Order shows – “Life Choice” – as one of the 100 best episodes in the history of television. He received the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best fact crime book for Murder at the Met. His second Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination was for "Happily Ever After," an episode of Law & Order. His third Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination was for “Carrier,” also an episode of Law & Order. In Rolling Stone’s 50th Anniversary history he was one of only six writers profiled. Mr. Black received the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best fact crime book for Murder at the Met. His second Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination was for "Happily Ever After," an episode of Law & Order. His third Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination was for “Carrier,” also an episode of Law & Order. He won the Writers’ Guild of America Award for The Confession. He was also nominated for the Writers’ Guild of America Award for an episode of “Hill Street Blues.” He received an American Bar Association Certificate of Merit for “Nullification,” a controversial episode of Law & Order about Militia groups, which the Los Angeles Times called an example of “the new Golden Age of television.”