by Norman Lock
For the boisterous patrons of Thom Croft’s ordinary, matters of greater consequence centered on the miraculous fermentation of barley and the distillation of grain. The roisters were blithely unconcerned by controversies surrounding the Geneva gown, the placement of the altar rail, man’s depravity, election, redemption, the kissing of one’s wife in public, or playing shovelboard on the Sabbath. They cared not a whit whether babes were sprinkled or dipped in baptism, nor did they obey the Puritan dictum concerning strong drink—“one and done.” The thirsty souls in Master Croft’s keeping were pricked immoderately by appetites sharpened after the Fall, when grain could be turned into something other than bread, and grapes into the means of an ecstatic communion having nothing to do with the Supper in Emmaus. Wine consoles us for the loss of Eden and reminds us that things ripen toward perfection and not away from it. Beauty is achieved in time and, because of its transience, is the more moving to behold.
Rough-hewn, coarse, sometimes sottish and bawdy, Croft’s patrons were nearer Isaac’s sort than the disputatious Puritans of the Bay. He took pleasure in the spicy fumes of Thomas Croft’s tavern. He would have been nauseated by the stale opinions aired at the meetinghouse, which he avoided, or the odor of sanctimony at Deacon Ingersoll’s ordinary, where the afflicted village girls performed in the chief spectacle of the age—the examining and arraignment of the witches. The pious and the indecently curious alike would gather there to enjoy the amateur theatricals.
“This afternoon I’ve some business in Salem,” said Croft, joining Isaac in the shade of an elm tree, where the latter was digesting his supper. “Why don’t you come?”
“Not today, Thom. I want to get started on the roof.”
“Your industry does you credit, Isaac, though I take to heart the proverb ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’”
“Aye, but my name’s not Jack.”
Like a man who steps into the shallows to accustom his body to the chill of the ocean, Isaac stayed away from Salem, where hearts were likely to be cold. He was safer amid the dregs. A man can enjoy being shunned by the majority, as long as a jolly minority keeps him company. The virtuous of Salem kept their distance from the scruff, as they would from a plague house or leper colony. With a partial knowledge of men, which he had cultivated as a storyteller (none can claim a perfect one), Isaac suspected that many of the “Sticklers” envied the freedom of the little congregation of the damned, whose hearts were gay. A few of the saints, overcome by curiosity, would peek through the tavern window. Their smirking would turn to gawping as they watched some “perishing sinner” bouncing a lusty girl on his knee. Sitting on stools drawn up to the fire, the hellions were heating mulling pokers and roasting partridges while they sang a bawdy song.
Sometimes I am a Taylor,
And work with Thread that’s strong Sir;
I have a fine great Needle,
About two handfulls long Sir;
The finest Sempster in this Town,
That works by line or leisure;
May use my Needle at a pinch,
And do themselves great Pleasure.
The dissolute were sometimes fined or whipped for flouting heavenly ordinances, which were also the laws of the province. A few of the reprobates had seats in the stocks, as well as in the tavern. But the government had need of them, since their number included men who carted away filth, bore the stink of the tannery, dug lime pits, cellars, and graves. When sober, they could be depended upon to hunt savages, when a hue and cry was raised against an uprising. Among their caste were trappers, sawyers, indentured servants, and wharf rats from Salem Harbor. Piety was not the sole business of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. As in every other place on God’s round Earth, His kingdom in New England rested on a midden heap.
ONE EVENING, ISAAC AND THOM CROFT spoke with an openness encouraged by aqua vitae, the fellowship of outlaws, and the impending darkness, which falls kindly on those who may be spurned in the light of day. As men who are brought together by circumstances sometimes will, the two talked about themselves—each wanting the other to know the life that had been given him, the strains that may have warped it from his youthful imagining, and the moment, which might have been brief or long, when he exerted himself—perhaps for the first time—to shape his own end, regardless of how destiny had roughly hewed it. Most of our bedeviled kind may be incapable of exertion and granted only a crumb of courage or selflessness before Death closes our eyes in the rounding sleep and snatches the crust from our nerveless hands. The nut of ourselves, which we have saved against the endless winter famine, is hulled and eaten by a hungry squirrel.
“You’ve done many things in your life,” said Croft after Isaac had told his story, which, of course, was mostly invention. He manufactured a great variety of plots and skeletons of tales, and kept them ready for use, leaving the filling up to the inspiration of the moment. “Now I’ll tell mine.”
Croft had been a musketeer in the Andover militia during the native uprising of 1675, known as King Philip’s War, waged against New England by the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Narragansett. Chief of the Wampanoag, Metacomet had taken the Christian name Philip to show his goodwill toward the English, who showed theirs by taking still more of the Indians’ land, as well as their muskets, and, for good measure, stretching a few red necks on an English gallows. In reprisal, Metacomet, a son of the sachem Massasoit, who had fed the famished separatists at Plymouth in the lethal winter of 1621, led a confederacy of aggrieved tribal nations against the English. Among the militiamen were descendants of Mayflower planters, who gave thanks to their Indian deliverer by drawing and quartering his “doleful, great, naked, dirty beast” of a son, in Rhode Island’s Miery Swamp, at Mount Hope, near Bristol. They hung his parts in the trees and set his head on a pike at the entrance to Plymouth. For twenty years, he scowled at the white trespassers and thieves, who gloated as they passed the black and shriveled remnant, until nothing remained.
Not content to have dismembered Metacomet, the militia, aided by Pequot and Mohawk warriors, harried the surviving Narragansett into the Great Swamp and burned their wigwams, along with their shrieking occupants, mostly women and children, whose spirits flew by the hundreds to their creator, a lesser deity than the Christian’s God. Those escaping the pyre fell to English carbines, halberds, and axes or, like Metacomet’s two sons, were sold as slaves to sugarcane plantations in Bermuda. (Just prior to the rising, the savages had considered it a good omen when Earth’s shadow, in the shape of a scalp, fell across the moon. But the heavens, like the American continent, belong to the white man.)
Thom Croft’s story was not uncommon for the age, save in its particulars, which are the hinges on which a story can be hung. The door is the same for all; we open it and, after a time, close it—or hear it close—behind us. Between the opening and closing of the door is the subject of tales, which writers put to paper in the hope that they will profit by them, as do the makers of coffins, graves, and funeral goods from the actuality of death. Isaac already knew that Croft had lost his wife and children to fever and his farm to an avaricious neighbor who connived with the assessor to have him put off his land.
The two had been walking beside the Great River, which goes to Ipswich. They halted at the confluence of Beachy Brook. Where trees had gathered in a shade, they made themselves comfortable. Croft took off his hat, rubbed his nose, and kicked a stone loose with his boot heel. By those tokens, Isaac understood that his friend had not yet finished his story, whose thread stitched up the fabric of his life. He had first to tell of his youth in the Old World.
“I was a young man when I left the Dorset coast, where I was raised in the Church of England. My father’s faith was lukewarm. I’ve always thought his trade made him irreligious. He was a barber-surgeon, and as many times as men’s innards were open to his inspection, he’d never seen anything like a soul. He was a skeptic and would have likely been hanged had he not been a discreet man, as behooves a barber. He kept his mouth shut and
his thoughts to himself.”
Croft worked a cottonwood twig down his back and scratched it.
“When I was twelve or thirteen, my father began to instruct me in the mysteries of his trade, but I had no stomach for it. The smell of blood and putrid matter overcame me each time I stood beside him and watched him cut.”
Croft examined his hands, first the backs, with their raised veins, and then the calloused palms, as if he might see his past inscribed on them. He had not much future left.
“I apprenticed at a forge. Being a muscular fellow, I soon earned my master’s approval. I wasn’t dissatisfied with the life. I took pleasure in my skill and strength. I’d have a forge of my own in Dorset instead of a rundown tavern in Massachusetts Bay if not for an argument over a horse.”
“A horse?” repeated Isaac stupidly. He was distracted by Beachy Brook, which had its own tale to relate. He could not decide whether it was a cheerful or a tragic one—or something else, which, to fathom, would disclose the meaning of everything. Brooks have more uses for storytellers than as settings for drowned lovers. “A horse,” said Isaac again, as if trying out the word in his mouth for the very first time.
“A mare. She belonged to the justice of the peace for Shaftsbury, a swaggering midge whose powdered wig reminded me of a hedgehog squirming at the bottom of a sack. He burst into the forge one morning, calling me a whoreson this, that, and the other thing and shouting that I’d lamed his horse. He demanded five pounds’ compensation, or I would see the inside of Shaftsbury jail before the noon meal.”
“You struck him, I suppose.” Croft’s confession demanded a serious response from Isaac, which he found difficult because of the picture in his head of the justice’s wriggling periwig.
“My blood was up,” said Croft, shrugging his broad shoulders. “I hit him with the first thing that came to hand—a hammer, which I brought down on his head and turned his brains to mush. He looked even smaller sprawled on the blood-soaked floor. I felt wonder—only that—at what can happen to the human head when sufficient violence is brought to bear against it. I knew I’d be hanged as a murderer. With no way to conceal my crime, I ran from it. At the time, New England and the Indies were much talked about, and the idea of starting anew where land could be had at the cost of four, or six, or seven years’ service or apprenticeship was enticing.” He scratched his cheek with a ragged nail. “I decided to take passage on one of the westbound ships as a deckhand—or a smith, if I was lucky.”
Isaac’s thoughts had wandered once again to the brook, where a momentary shadow on the water betrayed the presence of a grass pickerel.
“You’d show some interest if I’d killed him because of a woman!” growled Croft.
“Let me hear the rest,” said Isaac, breaking the snare that had caught his attention.
“I forged a brand and burned the letter P—here.” He touched the scar, as though he felt its heat. “I’d seen the like on other men’s faces, put there by the Anglican royalists after Charles the First dissolved Parliament to quash Puritan opposition and began to fill the Tower with luckless saints. I dressed it to hide my ‘stigmata’ till I could make use of it, and with my father’s blessing, I walked to Yarmouth, where Winthrop’s fleet waited to set sail for Massachusetts. The Puritans took my branded cheek as prima facie evidence of righteousness.”
“You talk like a lawyer.”
“Most everyone hereabout knows the law, since few have not stood before a magistrate to complain about a neighbor’s pig trespassing on their vegetable patch or to sue a man who sold them a cow that died soon afterward. Giles Corey”—in our time his name has come to signify a man who will not recant—“has been thirty-three times in court. He’s a fractious fellow. I doubt there’s a more backbiting and contentious race of human beings than God’s chosen people in New England, and the worst of them live in Salem Village.”
Their descendants will be equally malicious and covetous, thought Isaac, who excepted himself from the forecast.
“I was taken onboard the Talbot for my experience at the forge as much as my avowed faith. Lacking the five pounds needed to pay for the crossing, I couldn’t have emigrated otherwise.”
Catching sight of the pickerel threading the brook’s weeds, Isaac shied a hickory nut at it.
“I applied myself to my trade, which was much in demand. The following year, I married a Lincolnshire woman, who’d arrived on the Ambrose in 1630, when Winthrop was made governor. We had a house and garden and a child and could be said to have thrived wonderfully in Salem, and would be thriving still had God shown us mercy. But He’s not obliged to be kind or gentle, and the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay prefer a dark and inscrutable Deity.”
“Do you know John Hathorne?” asked Isaac after a silence in which the brook raised its voice again.
“I would sooner know a snake!”
“Is he so very wicked, then?”
“Not by his lights or by those of the congregation of saints hereabout. He glories in the reverence they show him. He’s a wall against the Devil for the fearful and a champion for the spiteful, who look to him to punish neighbors who happen to be better off than themselves.”
In the palm of his hand, Croft had been weighing a stone pried up by his boot, as if to judge it.
“Massachusetts came down with witch fever before this,” said Croft. “The colony was not yet thirty years old when Margaret Jones, a midwife, was hanged at Boston Neck for having a ‘malicious touch,’ which caused deafness, vomiting, agonies, and suchlike evidence of Satan’s favor in her victims. Goody Jessup claimed that Jones had dried up her cows. She was arrested, tried by the General Court, and ‘watched’ in her cell, as prescribed by Matthew Hopkins in The Discovery of Witches, which is a merry thing to read, Isaac. One of her teats withered before the eyes of witnesses. Governor Winthrop himself swore he saw an imp feeding at her breast ‘in the clear daylight.’”
“It may be she was a witch for all that,” said Isaac, and was instantly amazed at himself.
Croft’s eyes pierced Isaac’s like wimbles, making him squirm. “It had more to do with some natural misfortune that befell her neighbor’s milch cows than witchcraft. They dried up by themselves!” Croft threw the stone into the brook, saying, “When stones don’t sink, I’ll believe women ride on brooms and cuddle with the Devil.” His hands muddied by the stone, which could have lain in the damp earth since the days of Genesis, he wiped them on the grass and stood as if to set the carpenter at defiance.
Isaac’s mind was on graver things than brooms and milch cows. The idea of killing John Hathorne had stolen into his thoughts, insinuated by the brook’s muttering, which had been gay five minutes earlier but now spoke of sinister matters, as the Three Witches had to Macbeth.
“And you say John Hathorne is a wicked man?” asked Isaac.
“What is he to you?” asked Croft, suspicion and anger proportionate in his tone.
Isaac shrugged and would say no more. He would sometimes act contrary to his best interests and, in doing so, put himself at risk. His reckless words and acts would call to mind Edgar Poe’s observation in “The Imp of the Perverse,” which Isaac had read (how long ago it seemed!) in Graham’s Magazine: “We perpetrate them merely because we feel that we should not.”
The two men left the hickory trees and the flowery pink ribbons on their branches. They were like a pair of sullen children, each nursing a grievance as he walked back to the tavern. As the light died out of the sky, the witch hazel bushes beside the brook were transmogrified into sarsens and the brook turned zinc.
At one point, Croft stopped and took Isaac by the arm. “Did I misjudge you?”
“I won’t be judged by you, old man!” he replied, roughly shaking off the other’s hand. Much later, Isaac would regret his anger, realizing that he had mistaken Croft’s disappointment for resentment. His thoughts had been on his great-great-grandfather, whom he had come from so far away to judge. And what if he should turn the table and judge
me? Isaac had been asking himself when Croft brought him up short.
A conciliatory gesture, a kind word spoken, either would have been sufficient to make amends, but Isaac couldn’t bring himself to make the gesture or say the word. So has it always been for our prideful, stiff-necked race. When a man has the Devil gnawing at his heart, there is nothing that will defang it.
At the end of the week, Isaac took his satchel of tools and the rucksack in which he kept the few things that he had brought from the red farmhouse and left Thom Croft’s ordinary. The two men, who had liked each other and then fallen out, parted ways without so much as a nod to each other.
Isaac had broken the bowl that fed him.
V
t Log Bridge, on the road to the village, two laborers were dressing logs. A rude bridge had been hastily thrown across the Great River by a previous generation and was in need of repair. One was barking a branch with a drawknife. Isaac could see that he had not much skill with it. Isaac sat on a rail fence in the hot noon sun and watched them sweat at their work. He offered them water from his bottle. They put down their tools and thanked him for his charity.
“My name’s Geoffrey Hance. This fellow,” he said, cocking his head at the man who had been ill-using the knife, “we call ‘Dilly.’ He was born William Dill and is accounted a simpleton, though he speaks sense sometimes.”
Dill grinned. He looked like the sort of man whose life was measured in plowed fields and the copses where he hunted birds and rabbits. His view of the world was what he could see of it from the top of a hill. In this, he was no different from most.
“Isn’t that so, Master Dilly?”
Dill nodded and scratched his ear, which was hidden underneath a quantity of unruly hair.
“And who might you be?”
“Isaac Page.”
“Dilly and I’ve been dancing on the Devil’s own skillet all morning, Isaac Page.” Hance wiped his stubble on a dirty linen sleeve, laid a patched waistcoat across the rail, and sat beside Isaac. Dill followed suit. “We could do without shirts, but the elders would frown,” said Hance.