The Ruin of All Witches and Plywood

The week before Thanksgiving a crop of plywood pilgrims sprouted from a yard along one of my runs. Like mushrooms, they were small and round and numerous and appeared overnight.

The cut-outs were sweet, cartoonish, reminiscent of It's a Small World dolls. It's hard to imagine less accurate representation for the sharp, terrifying world the actual pilgrims inhabit in Malcolm Gaskill's The Ruin of All Witches.

Gaskill is a historian and authority on 17th century witch hunts. He places Springfield, Massachusetts' foundation in the context of English history and culture, particularly religious culture. He describes the influences of the same contexts on the town's founder, William Pynchon, a wealthy man smoldering with muted Puritan zeal. This is a history book with a strong narrative thread. Gaskill can write a killer scene while remaining factually reliable. 

*Spoilers Follow*  

Hugh and Mary Parsons were hard to get along with. Some of Springfield's more notorious residents, Hugh was sullen, Mary was nervous. Hugh was prone to threatening neighbors who offended him and Mary sometimes accused well-liked people of witchcraft. Hugh cheated and swindled and Mary had psychotic episodes in public. 

 

In 1650s Springfield, nobody had spare mercy. Everybody was freezing in the winters and baking in the summers, worried their crops and livestock would die, terrified their children would. So many children died, many with confounding speed to equally confounding illnesses. Life was too terrifying and precarious to tolerate odd and intimidating behavior.

Mary's obsession with witches was especially unfortunate since, it was believed, witchy thoughts only came from witchy minds. This, along with the uncanny events that occurred in Springfield when Hugh was nearby -- spoiled milk, a ruined pudding, snakes in bed -- led the town to conclude what Mary herself suspected: the Parsons must be witches. 

The ensuing trials found Mary guilty, though she died of illness in prison before she could be hanged. Hugh was spared but banished. Theirs was one of many families destroyed by witch trials on both sides of the Atlantic in that century, including the Salem events fifty years later. Witch executions only stopped when Puritan culture diluted with time.

The Ruin of All Witches ends with the sense that whether or not belief is true, communities reach a tipping point when something has to give. Change on a personal level is possible, but change on a communal level required tragedy or outrage. Tension required, and requires, sacrifice. Today, we call our witches by different names. 

The little lawn pilgrims, painted and quaint, have the wrong facade. But the material is appropriate. Plywood processing is violent, hot and cold. A collection of parts, under intense pressure, ends flat and nondescript. From this compliant sheet, anything can be cut.

This audiobook is read by Kristin Atherton and is 11hours and 4 minutes. I borrowed it from my library through Libby.