by Norman Lock
As I watch an ant cross the parlor floor, bearing a crumb of stale scone or a particle of eternity on its back (who knows to what purposes ants give themselves), I imagine myself in a room that even dust would hesitate to enter. I’m standing before a stiff-necked magistrate who is infuriated by the shouts of boys playing in the road outside his window—an affront to the gravity of a man who handles others’ souls as washerwomen do soiled linen.
“What do you want?” he demands of me.
“To examine you,” I reply.
“I am examiner here!”
“Then I would have you examine yourself.”
“To what end?”
“To discover the absence of God in you.”
“You are standing on the gallows, sir. It would take only a nod of my head to the executioner to have you taken off the Earth. Or perhaps you do not fear me?”
“I fear you well enough because I know the Devil has made himself at home in you.”
With those words, I will begin the arraignment of my ancestor. If not those, then some others equally cogent. Ah, Nathaniel! You’re never so eloquent as when you admit your love or vent your rage within the theater of your mind. But the words will gush from Isaac Page’s mouth as they never could from mine. Isaac Page will voice my abhorrence for Magistrate Hathorne.
I’ll see to it.
The Red Shanty’s gate stands open. Isaac has only to step into the lane to begin his journey. The day is fine, the month April—I’ll spare my surrogate a Massachusetts winter. And yet he hesitates, hobbled by uncertainty. But I am his author, and he is my creature—a thing of words, like the past itself and the people who walk there. I have only to write the first sentence of my tale to send Isaac on his way.
Tooth of the Covenant
A NOVEL BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
SPRING 1692
THE PROVINCE OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY
I
n an otherwise unremarkable April morning in 1851, Isaac Page, a writer of literary romances, prepared to set out from the town of Lenox, in western Massachusetts, to save Bridget Bishop from hanging. She would be the first of the witches put to death in Salem Town during the Year of Desolation, 1692, when John Winthrop’s godly plantation in New England, which was to have been an example to all the world of a righteous commonwealth, withered, like an ear of corn in a field no longer green. Perhaps New England’s shores were too stony a place on which to build a New Jerusalem or else God’s chosen had become, in sixty years, mean-spirited, backbiting, tale-bearing Sabbath breakers no more worthy of His favor than the wicked of Sodom or Gomorrah. For whatever reason, He seemed to have turned His back on the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Or so His cold granite shoulder was interpreted in Isaac’s own time by those of a religious bent who made a study of the nation’s past, which will not cease to trouble its present till the course of empire shambles to an end and those who govern amid its ruins are forced to make amends or perish.
Isaac Page was not the pilgrim’s real name, but a pseudonym taken to conceal the identity of his author from his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, the Salem magistrate who did as much as the perjured girls of Salem Village to stoke the fever of unreason in the province. It was Hathorne who sentenced Bridget Bishop to death and set going the cruel engine that separated men, women, and children from their mortal husks.
The writer of romances who lived, together with his wife and children, in a farmhouse painted red, overlooking the Housatonic Valley, was not interested in Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” in God, or even—let him once be honest with himself—in forestalling a Terror that was inferior to Robespierre’s only in the number of executions. (Seventeen thousand French persons were decapitated by order of the Revolutionary Tribunal.) Isaac Page wanted to save himself from the anguish of a guilty conscience. To do so, he would need to convince John Hathorne that Bridget Bishop and the others whom he condemned were guiltless of sorcery. Should he prove deaf to persuasion, Isaac needs must knock sense into his head with a stick or, if worse comes to worst, cudgel the brains out of the man.
Naturally, Isaac knew that the past had been foreclosed on by time: the lights put out, the doors and windows boarded up, the drapes and carpets left to moths and rot. None can ever live there again, except in stories. But storytelling was Isaac’s one and only skill. By it, he reasoned, he could travel to the Salem of his rawboned ancestor, whose shadow had eclipsed his own and darkened a nature that otherwise would have been genial.
Isaac buttoned a doublet over a linen shirt and put on leather breeches and stockings that red garters kept from becoming, as Ophelia said of mad Prince Hamlet’s, “down-gyvèd to his ankle.” These articles had served him as a costume for a recent patriotic tableau. For hat, he had a shapeless thing with a dented crown and a ruckled brim to shade his bristled face. Having let his hair grow long in the fashion of an earlier time, he tied it in a sailor’s queue. In his doublet pocket, he carried a pair of spectacles that had belonged to the unrepentant magistrate who had taken in evidence the ranting of a pack of “afflicted” girls. Like the flagon of Hollands gin quaffed by Rip Van Winkle, the spectacles would convey Isaac backward in time, by the sympathetic attraction transmitted through the ether, which connected all things. Mostly, the so-called savage races were attuned to it, although some poets and writers among the “civilized” were aware of its presence, residing in a stone, in a talisman, or at the bottom of a glass of ardent spirits.
The spectacles had come to him by the law governing the transfer of a legacy. He had believed them to be of little value until one day he sensed an urgency rarely, if ever, expressed by objects—the wish (call it that) to return to their original owner. With them in his pocket, he had only to set out on the path that began not far from his farmhouse in the Berkshires, to know in his bones the way through space and time to the Province of Massachusetts Bay, where Bridget Bishop waited—along with eighteen others who would follow her to gallows and grave—for the great clock to tick forward to her end. Our bones belong not to us alone but also to our forebears, whose origin was Eden, if one happens to be religious, or a “center of creation,” if one subscribes to Lyell’s cosmography. (Isaac’s friend Herman Melville would add that his bones belong to his creditors.)
After having said good-bye to his wife, Isaac walked along a country road into the forest and soon found himself amid towering spruce trees on a needle-sown path leading to Old Salem. Trodden centuries earlier by Indians of the Woodland tribes, the path had disappeared beneath Newbold cast-iron plows some years before, as a scar will fade and, in time, vanish. In the way of phantoms, however, the primordial forest had not passed entirely into history. It struggled on in the minds of Isaac and his countrymen, as real a place as Athens had been to the ancient Greeks, and still was to students of the classical age. Aided by the antique spectacles in his doublet, Isaac passed down the years toward one of time’s stubborn tangles, purposing to unravel it or, if he must, to severe it as Alexander once did the Gordian knot.
One would expect the forest primeval to be a windless place outside history and beyond temporal disturbances. But isn’t time said to be a wind at our back, pushing us into the future? As the poet Marvel wrote, “… at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.” Those vast wings—what a wind they would make, enough to sweep away all present things! In the case of a man who willed himself to walk toward a year whose leaves had long since been torn from tree and calendar, wouldn’t he feel the wind of time on his face like a blast of musty air? Having risen in April 1692, one of time’s ill winds buffeted Isaac, intending to drive him back to 1851 and to the red farmhouse where Constance, his wife, had gone to bed with a sick headache. In 1692, Isaac would often recall their parting kiss at the gate and the stirrup cup of rum she had given him for his courage’s sake. Not that he needed courage at the outset of the journey. Isaac was brave in the way that people sometimes are who are overcome by passion—whether a desire to possess or an equally str
engthening wish to destroy. He was in thrall to that desire and that wish, though he was conscious of neither. He thought only of his own small fate and of how he would alter it in Old Salem. To hold the thought in mind, however, was difficult because of the wind. The serpentine path seemed to writhe. His face burned, and his lips were chapped. His eyes were made to water by flying particles of grit. Creeping vines tripped him; nettles stung him; burrs fastened onto his bootlaces and woolen hose; the trees pummeled him with gall- and hickory nuts. He felt time slipping through his fingers like nubs in raw silk.
He had not expected a wind, and he fretted over it. In the red farmhouse, Isaac had often dreamed of the forest where he now walked, painfully. Like a vast timbered cathedral dressed for the risen Christ in sweet fern and Spanish moss, purple flags and hyacinth, it had stretched from Baffin Bay to the Florida Straits, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Silence had reigned over the sylvan colonnades—a silence in which a leaf might turn, a movement so slight and fitful that it was mistaken for stillness.
He told himself that he was being foolish and that no malign agency harried him—this man from Lenox of no special importance, whose mind was prey to fancies. The wind is in your head, he said, which is opposed to your proceeding against your own interests, which lie behind you in the farmhouse, in Constance’s arms, and in modern Boston, which publishes your books and whose nighttime streets are illumined by gaslight. There is nothing for you, Isaac, in a city on a hill that shines only in a figure of speech—nothing anymore in Salem Village, which is, at the middle of the nineteenth century, a place to visit and smirk at the simplemindedness of men and women who believed in the Devil’s mark and witches’ teats hidden beneath their skirts.
As he made his way through the crowding trees, he asked himself the everlastingly futile question: Who can understand the ways of God? In reply, he adjured himself to “… lean not unto thy own understanding.” Or was it the trees who admonished him?
Isaac leaned into the wind and held on to his hat. “The strongest wind cannot stagger a Spirit,” Thoreau had written.
But I’m not a spirit; I am a material man!
Through this improbable wilderness, Isaac ventured onward, that is to say backward—one hand on his slouch hat, the other on a satchel of carpenter’s tools. He did not hunger, nor did he thirst. The peevishness that he had felt at the start left him. He had walked beyond weariness and had been granted the elation experienced by a climber who ascends to a great height.
“Where else may the forest path lead?” he asked of no one.
A voice that may have come from the forest or from Isaac himself replied, “To the origin of life, the first green leaf and flower. To the sowing of Earth with stones and the upraising of its mountains. To the shore of the ancient ocean and the first night. To the day before creation.”
Suddenly appalled at the arrogance of his undertaking, Isaac shivered. Or was it only the wind that made him do so?
“How far is it from Lenox to Salem?” he asked aloud of whatever spirit—virtuous or foul—might be inhabiting the place on which he had trespassed.
“One hundred and fifty miles, more or less. Between more and less, a chasm opens, large enough to engulf an elephant. Between more and less, kindness can sour, smooth become rough, forgiveness vengeance, and goodwill enmity. A fit man can walk the distance in four or five days—seven in snow. To tread one hundred and fifty-nine years, however, takes no longer than it did for you to open and close your front gate. What seems to you a far pace of time is nothing but the crumbs of time you carry in your pockets.”
“Is the forest dark?” Isaac asked anxiously, because his sensations were confused.
“Dark as night and, at the same time, not. The forest is touched by paradox. Twilight, then—perpetual and shadowless—like the setting of a dream or an allegory,” said the voice, which could have been Isaac’s or his Creator’s. (Or the Devil’s.)
In that remote age, New Englanders feared what lay beyond the reach of common day and the ambit of their candlelight. Wampanoag and Narragansett trod in stealth, and ravaging sickness was visited upon the people by an angry God. Hunger and sharp winters, blight and drought, cholera and smallpox smote them for backsliding. In the Book of Isaiah, the people’s tribulation had been foretold.
And they shall look unto the earth; and behold trouble and darkness, dimness of anguish; and they shall be driven to darkness.
An impenetrable, even inexplicable, forest must come to an end. Coming out from the trees, Isaac noticed a pall hanging above a village, as if gloom had transpired from the Puritan temperament, like dirty water from a rag. His eyes were unaccustomed to the dim view taken by benighted minds fearful of the unholy wonders of the invisible world. The Age of Enlightenment had not yet dawned in New England, where pillory, whip, prison, and noose extorted obedience to ironbound dogma. Faith—the genuine article—does not fear for its life, does not answer for itself, does not bring fire and the sword to heretics and infidels. The Province of Massachusetts Bay, however, was a faithless place, whose people did not trust in God’s mercy, but in His wrath, and would not believe in their neighbors’ goodness, but only in their malice.
Isaac would not soon be rid of the “dusk” of self-doubt. Now and then, he would repent of having flouted the universal law of time—a blasphemy that had brought him to a place hostile to reason and goodwill. He would become frightened that his arrogance had lost him his rightful time and he would never see his wife and children again. Then he would recall the silver dollar stamped with the year of its minting, 1851, buttoned in his doublet pocket. Like the spectacles, the coin could overcome time itself by the operation of nostalgia, or by the “contagion of objects,” as the affinity was known by the Puritans and the East Anglians before them. Isaac had only to clench the coin to return to the middle of the nineteenth century, when witchery was a game for children and magistrates did not examine them for the seal of the Devil’s covenant.
Sixteen hundred and ninety-two was a frightful year in Massachusetts. The brutal winter promised a meager spring, sickness went abroad, and New England’s failed assault on Quebec had crowded the streets of Salem Town with refugees from Maine, fleeing the Abenaki and the French. Men who coveted their neighbors’ land or livestock, together with their spiteful wives, whose tongues could curdle milk, were crying “witch” against one another. Few there were in the village and the town who were not afraid.
II
saac arrived in Salem Village on April 19, 1692. On that day, Bridget Bishop was examined at meetinghouse, where inquisitors probed for cankered souls. Though he stood miles from the village crossroads, he heard voices. One voice, a man’s, was cold and imperious; the other, a woman’s, defiant.
“I am no witch.”
“If you have not wrote in the book, then tell me how far you have gone. Have you not to do with familiar spirits?”
“I have no familiarity with the Devil.”
“How is it then that your appearance doth hurt these girls?”
“I am innocent.”
“Why you seem to act witchcraft before us, by the motion of your body, which seems to have influence upon the afflicted!”
“I know nothing of it. I am innocent to a witch. I know not what a witch is.”
“How do you know then that you are not a witch?”
“I do not know what you say.”
In 1630, when the Winthrop Fleet made safe harbor on the Charles at the start of the Great Migration, the Puritans brought the idea of the Devil with them from East Anglia, together with his Powers, Principalities, Thrones, and Dominions. They hopped like fleas from the gaunt bodies of the starved, seaworn passengers into the endless, lightless forest, where they would henceforth “worry and annoy” the new colonists, whose infants’ blood witches drank in unholy communion and whose names they sought to write in Satan’s book.
“How can you know, you are no witch, and yet not know what a witch is?”
“I
am clear: if I were any such person you should know it.”
Silence flooded the meadow where Isaac stood like someone not entirely in the world or outside of it. And then he heard several cries and shrieks of pain, so that he needs must take his head in his hands to keep it from breaking. Having read Cotton Mather’s account of the trials, Isaac knew that Tituba, the Reverend Parris’s Indian slave brought from Barbados, and his daughter, Betty Parris, as well as the young Putnam girl, Mary Walcott, Abigail Williams, Mary Warren, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mercy Lewis, and Susannah Sheldon, were playacting for the village gawkers. Although unseen by Isaac, those girls—vipers whose poison had been turning every man against his neighbor—were twitching and writhing in a simulacrum of possession.
The counterfeiting girls had begun their notorious careers with “little sorceries,” such as “turning the sieve” or gazing in a Venus glass to see the shapes of future husbands. Soon they were miming agonies caused by an imp or a poppet pierced by a sewing needle, at Ingersoll’s ordinary. By curse, charm, and effigy, witches were believed to be at large in Salem, making cruel sport of the innocent children who were now crying out against them. Salem people knew that the girls had only to point to send one or the other of them to Arnold’s jail. They may have been irked by the discipline imposed on their young lives or terrified of being whipped to within an inch of them for having been caught frisking naked in the forest by the Reverend Parris. They may have craved attention, which their histrionics brought them in abundance. Had the saints in the New World not outlawed playhouses, the girls would have had a proper stage on which to “saw the air” and “tear a passion to tatters”—the melodramatic playacting style despised by Hamlet. As it was, the frustrated thespians tore their neighbors to pieces by pretense and lies.