Tooth of the Covenant

by Norman Lock

  “What quality of men might they be?” asked Isaac cautiously.

  “The elders? Oh, the usual sort.” Hance spat into some jimsonweed. “There be not much variety in men, or women, either, hereabout—except for the Indians and the unregenerate.”

  Dill snickered. Hance silenced him with a sharp look.

  “These days Salem streets are crowded with English refugees from Maine scared off by the French and the Wabanaki. The saints don’t like them, and they don’t much like the saints.”

  “Aye,” said Dill as he chewed on a blade of timothy.

  “And there’s a few Jersey families who follow the king’s religion out on Salem Neck. They’d be shunned if well-off folks didn’t need their ships to bring them window glass, fancy spoons, Spanish pots, and suchlike foreign goods.”

  Isaac watched in fascination as a green thread of drool swung from Dill’s lower lip.

  “You’re not from here, I think,” said Hance shrewdly.

  “Nay,” replied Isaac, “I arrived three weeks ago.”

  “Maybe he’s an unregenerate,” said Dill, biting the thread with his teeth.

  “Were you among the Germans and Dutchmen in New York? I’ve a cousin living with the English colonists who does not much care for them. They smell of sauerkraut, and their beer is vile.”

  Isaac shook his head, signifying that he had not been in New York.

  “You don’t look like a man who’s been picked clean. God’s truth, a Dutchman will steal buttons off a dead man’s coat and the pennies on his eyes! They are this greedy.” Hance rubbed a finger against a thumb, as if to conjure a banknote. Then with the delicacy of a monkey nosing a tempting piece of filth, he sniffed Isaac’s doublet. “You don’t smell like a German, either.”

  Hance took a worn briar from his waistcoat and plugged it with a twist of fig tobacco. He sparked a nest of lint into flame and, drawing breath through the stem, set the twist to crackling. His face showed that contentment seen in men with a pipe of “good creature tobacco” clamped between their teeth. Isaac, also, had savored it till Constance scolded him for the “wormholes” in his vests, bored by tiny embers, and he’d had to give it up. Now and then he would smoke a cigar rolled in some fetid New York tenement by a hollow-eyed Jew or a half-starved Chinaman.

  “I guess there are no Chinamen in Salem,” said Isaac, whose thoughts were often at the mercy of his mouth.

  “I haven’t seen one since I left Weymouth docks, where they were swarming over the East India ships.”

  “The goodies of Salem do stitch their mottoes with Chinese silk thread,” remarked Dill, who clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, as one does when “speaking” to ducks and chickens.

  “They do, right enough, and on New England linen,” said Hance, tamping down the live coal of tobacco that had risen in his bowl.

  Isaac took a sip of tepid water, then handed Hance the bottle. “I’m a carpenter by trade,” he said while the other two drank turn and turn about. “I was in Rhode Island and have come to Salem to fill my purse and belly.”

  He told them that he’d done work in Boxford for Thom Croft, neglecting to mention their unfriendly parting. Hance knew the man, and after having pronounced him “an honest landlord” and praised his venison stew, he argued the merits of the village’s drinking holes and those of Salem Town, on the seaward side of the North River. A man need not go thirsty in seventeenth-century Massachusetts.

  “Samuel Beadle waters his beer. … The tars at the Ship Tavern tend to be pugnacious when they’ve drained a hogshead dry…. Matthew Howes is a busy-body. … A man can’t enjoy a jar at the Blue Anchor for the bottle flies staggering across the sticky tables. … These days, Deacon Ingersoll’s is crowded with folk come to gawp.”

  “What cause have they to be at Ingersoll’s?” Isaac knew the answer, but as a stranger to the place, he thought it prudent to pretend to be ignorant of Salem matters.

  “They have their sport there.”

  “What sport is that?”

  “One better than a cockfight,” said Dill.

  “Aye, for them who like to see old women run to ground by a pack of shrieking girls!”

  “It may be Master Page has heard naught of our village girls,” said Dill, glancing slyly at Isaac.

  “Who has not heard of them?” replied Isaac vehemently. Dill turned his gaze on Isaac, which, at that moment, betrayed some little intelligence—or so Isaac thought.

  “Are they that famous, then?” asked Hance, tamping down the dottle in his pipe.

  Like so much dust, Isaac swept away the question with his hand. “Have you any cause to doubt their honesty?”

  “If foaming mouth and bucking hips can make them so, then they be honest girls.” Hance spat. “Or rare playactors.” He put his pipe between his teeth and fumed visibly, then took it out again. “Annie Putnam’s the ringleader; she pipes the spiteful tune and makes the others dance.” His anger turned hot. He shouted his resentment that a girl of twelve should have set a province on its ear: “Goddamn her for a bitch!”

  “And John Hathorne?” asked Isaac casually, as a man might ask after his neighbor’s sick dog.

  “What about him?” His blood on the boil, Hance had spoken sharply.

  “Is he honest?” Isaac waited with a childish expectation to hear his ancestor decried.

  “I don’t see plainly how he profits by the business—though it’s certain that he does.”

  “He has a covenant with God!” said Isaac, and wondered if he had mocked the magistrate or, for some reason, had defended him.

  “They all do!” cried Hance. “It’s what makes them appear lofty, that and their tall hats.”

  “Then you are not one of them?” asked Isaac.

  “My hat is as you see it. But I don’t cheat my neighbor or play shovelboard or stoolball on the Sabbath. I give the Lord His due.”

  “And the Devil?”

  “There is no Devil here, though there be many covetous souls among us. What say you, Master Dilly? Have you trafficked with the Black Man? Does he sneak up and kick you on the arse?”

  “He do kiss my backside with his boot!” Dill rubbed his muscular arm and whined, “And he sticks pins and needles in my arm.”

  “That’s what comes of arm wrestling with Old Nick, my sweet dafty.”

  “I arm-wrestled John Proctor and beat him!”

  “Now they’re saying that he’s the Devil’s man! God help him!” Hance gave himself up to his pipe, which he smoked thoughtfully for a time. “Well, we had best get to our work. We thank you for the water, friend.”

  “I’m handy with a drawknife, if you’ve another to spare.”

  “You can take Dilly’s. He can’t shave his own neck without nicking his Adam’s apple.”

  Dill laughed happily, his eyes fixed on a cow munching grass at the river’s edge. Sitting on the split rail, he aped the way the animal rolled its tongue around a tuft, took it into its mouth, and, with a jerk of the heavy head, pulled it from the ground. Isaac was near enough to the beast to see a glassy string of green saliva hanging from its chin.

  “You don’t mind if I borrow your drawing knife?”

  “I don’t mind,” replied Dill, who had discovered a pippin in his apron pocket. He chewed it with the same deliberateness and satisfaction as the cow did its grass. “Tuppence is tuppence,” said Dill, his mouth full of fruit.

  The three men went to work on the pile of felled trees. Isaac barked and shaved, while Hance and Dill pegged the rough-hewn timbers into place. By six o’clock, they had finished. Seven miles to the east of them, a sea wind rose and brought the rich odor of the salt marsh at Noodle’s Island. Dill’s nose snuffled like a horse’s, relishing the smell of brine and marsh mud spiced with sulfur, rotting fish, and clams.

  “Good smell, eh, Dilly, my lad?” Hance gave his friend an affectionate clap on his broad back. “Dilly has a fancy for smells you and I might turn up our noses at. Ah, but feel the breeze, man!”


  “A breeze is a wondrous thing!” declared Dill.

  As the sweat dried from his clothes, Isaac luxuriated in the cool air. “Aye, ’tis wondrous indeed, Master

  Dilly!”

  “You’ll be wanting your wages, I suppose,” said Hance, drawing a tentative figure in the dust with the toe of his boot.

  “They stand between me and the poorhouse.”

  “I thought as much,” said Hance. “To be round with you, I’ll have none of ‘mistress’ money till Saturday, when Thomas Putnam pays for the work.” He held up a hand to silence Isaac’s protest. “I don’t intend to tell you to go scratch for it. Go home with me and share our fish pie and peas. You can sleep in the buttery, which is cool, and on Saturday, you shall have your two shillings.”

  Isaac agreed, and the three men walked eastward to Fairmaid’s Hill, where the Hances—Geoffrey, Zipporah, their daughter, Alice, and Geoffrey’s senile father—lived in a four-room house on Andover Road. Dill continued to Thorndike Hill and the disused cowshed where he put up.

  VI

  saac was amazed by Zipporah’s sky blue gown.

  “My brother is a hand at Shattuck’s dye house, and I get a bolt of cloth, now and then, for me and little Alice.”

  In Salem Town, Isaac would see cloaks and kirtles cut from bolts of yellow, orange, blue, green, purple, even cloth of gold. Yet Bridget Bishop’s attire was considered extravagant. She wore a black cap and a red paragon bodice worked in various colors. To dress in a color that would incite a bull to charge was a reason to condemn her, in the eyes of many enough to send her to Proctor’s Ledge.

  “The Devil wears black,” said Alice, a girl of seven or eight, whose eyes sparked with mischief.

  “That he does, child,” said Zipporah.

  “Reverend Parris wears black, too,” said Alice. A more costly dye and given to fading, black was worn by solemn deputies, counselors, magistrates, and haranguing ministers, who pulled long faces on the Sabbath. “Mother, is Reverend Parris the Devil’s man?”

  “It does not follow!” she replied harshly.

  “Reverend Parris said Satan has come to Salem to smite us for our wicked ways.”

  “Eat your peas, Alice!” scolded Zipporah, vexed by her daughter’s interrogation.

  “Father, is it so, what Reverend Parris said in church? We’re going to be smote for our faith’s improvement.”

  “Smitten, you little imp! And the Reverend Parris is an ass.”

  “I won’t stand for such talk at table!” chided Zipporah, who bore the name of Moses’ wife and strove always to deserve it.

  Hance ignored her and addressed the child sternly: “There is no Devil in Salem, Alice, and those who say so are—”

  “Geoffrey!” Zipporah gave him a look that matched her voice’s flint. Had she been wife to Moses, not merely her namesake, he’d have lived considerably fewer years than his six score. “Tell the girl the truth, or you’ll sleep in the buttery along with your friend!”

  Hance turned to Isaac for help or pity. Isaac stared at his plate and a constellation of peas that he had arranged there in his distraction.

  “The Devil lives in the forest, which is why you must never go there alone,” said Hance, subdued. “Or with them who mean to dance in the woods.”

  “More fish pie, Goodman Page?” Zipporah would be cordial now that Geoffrey had been silenced.

  Alice pushed her peas around her plate with a tin spoon.

  “Tituba could read your future in those peas,” said her father slyly.

  Glaring at him for having broken the peace, Zipporah scolded Alice. “You’d be grateful for those peas, mistress, if you had nothing to eat except boiled acorns, like them that came with John Winthrop!”

  “Who’s Tituba?” asked Alice ingenuously, to bedevil her mother.

  Zipporah noisily cleared the table of the supper’s remains. From the lean-to built against the house, her anger was audible in the clatter of dirty plates and cutlery, which she emptied into a tub of boiling water set on brick and iron braziers.

  All Salem Village knew of Tituba. Annie Putnam and other of the bewitched girls used to visit her in secret for a glimpse of their future husbands’ faces reflected in a cup of water or some other forecast in a drop of egg white floating there. Tituba had excited their childish interest in white magic’s naughty arts, which she had learned as a slave on a sugar plantation in the Carib. Little Betty Parris’s father, the Salem Village minister, had once owned both the plantation and the slave. His congregation despised him for insisting on silver candlesticks for the altar, when plain pewter was good enough for the unassuming Lord. Who was this upstart divine to grouse that he had yet to see a penny of his wages? Was he ignorant of Christ’s admonition to the disciples: “The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment”?

  Hance led his guest into the hall, which, in Isaac’s time, was called the parlor, and filled two cups of cider from a Spanish jug, which Isaac thought he’d seen in pieces under glass at the Boston Museum—or one very like it.

  “I’ve heard things said about Salem’s magistrates that would trouble a reasonable man,” said Isaac.

  “If you can find a reasonable man in Salem, no doubt he would find them troubling.”

  “You are such a one, I think,” said Isaac cautiously. “A reasonable man.”

  “Aye, I hope to be! But the reason for all things only God knows.”

  With a jolt, Isaac realized that Hance, though he might seem cynical and irreligious, was rooted in his own age and country, which lay snug against the Atlantic between the Narragansett and Connecticut Rivers. Only with difficulty, if at all, could Hance’s thoughts escape the pillory of his origins. Just so was Isaac Page a man of 1851. Breathe, as he must, the air of the seventeenth century, neither his lungs nor the brain pickled in his skull had altered by so much as an atom. He felt the bumps on his head and, by the science of phrenology, declared himself unchanged.

  Alice was playing with a cloth doll. Zipporah came in from the lean-to, wiping her wet hands on her apron. Seeing the doll, she flew into a rage.

  “I’ll have no poppets in my house!” With one hand, she tore it from the girl’s grasp and with the other slapped her face hard enough to mark her cheek. Alice yelped. “Where did you get this wicked thing?”

  “Annie Oaks give it me.”

  Zipporah threw the doll into the fire.

  Alice was too terrified to whimper, much less to object.

  “Annie Oaks is a wicked girl!”

  “Wife!” said Hance, rebuking her. “You’re frightening the child!”

  “Don’t you know it’s witchcraft?”

  “But there be no pins in it, Mama!”

  Hance’s old father came downstairs in his nightshirt, his bare feet creaking on the worn oak treads. “What are you on about now?” he asked his daughter-in-law querulously.

  “Go back to bed, Father, while I have a word with Goody Hance.”

  The old man shuffled over to a sideboard and, from a lacquered box, took a biscuit, which he gummed. He had already forgotten the squabbling that had awakened him from his nap.

  “Geoffrey, I will speak no more on it! Mark you! Look how it burns!”

  The poppet had ignited in a crackling blaze, such as a dead pine tree will do when struck by summer lightning. Entranced, Isaac could not tear his glazed eyes from it.

  “Stuffed with straw, how else would it burn?” jeered Hance.

  Dolls intended for wicked purposes were packed with hog bristles. This rare fact Isaac knew from reading Cotton Mather’s tedious, often delirious, tome The Wonders of the Invisible World: Observations as Well Historical as Theological, upon the Nature, the Number, and the Operations of the Devils, published in Boston in 1693, the year the witch fever burned itself out, as plagues and fires do.

  Zipporah spluttered.

  Hance winked. Whether the cause of his eyelid’s flutter was the smoke twisting from the hearth or the wish to nettle hi
s goodwife, whose face had turned the color of stewed beets, Isaac could not tell.

  “Alice, get me the bone-handled knife,” said Hance as he searched the iron rack beside the fender for a stick of wood to carve. “What would you like to keep you company tonight?”

  “A papoose!” replied Alice happily. “Like the one you made me the other day.”

  “I would never whittle a heathen image!” he said, glancing sidelong at his wife. “Not in a Christian household! It was baby Moses in his papyrus boat I whittled you.”

  “But Indians are Christians, Father. Goody Proctor told me so.”

  “She meant those that gave up their heathen ways and live in the prayer towns. Savages belong to Satan.” Hance glanced at Zipporah, the barest of smiles on his lips. “Think of some animal instead.”

  “I can’t decide,” said the girl after rubbing an earlobe with her thumb in deliberation, a gesture Isaac had seen her father make.

  “A cow, then. Master Page and I saw a fine cow by the river this afternoon.”

  “I should like a cow,” she said seriously. “What color were it?”

  “It was a red cow.”

  “Make mine red, too!”

  “We’ll stain it tomorrow with pokeberries.” Hance gave the child an affectionate pinch.

  “Witches send their specters out to pinch little children. The minister told us.”

  “He spoke truly!” said Zipporah, giving her husband a scalding look.

  He returned it sweetly.

  Afterward, Isaac and Hance sat on a rough bench beneath a dogwood tree. Its blossoms, radiant the week before, had begun to rust. Hance kept mostly silent, puffing his pipe. His mind seemed elsewhere. Isaac wanted to speak of the witches but could not think of a way that would not raise the other man’s suspicions.

  “Be the women of Rhode Island as sharp-tongued as ours?” asked Hance. “They say that Anne Hutchinson was a great scold and a brazen heretic who whelped thirty unfinished creatures in a single monstrous birth.”

  When she had dared to argue theology with Governor Winthrop and John Cotton, they plucked her out of the company of saints and sent her to Rhode Island to live among the Narragansett. Sitting in Hance’s dooryard, Isaac wished that his ancestors had been other than Puritans. In the New York of 1692, the mercantile Dutch grew fat on beer and oysters, while the Quakers in Philadelphia lived in a peaceable kingdom—partly real, partly a delusion. In Massachusetts, all was a delusion, save for the gin and the rules regarding shovelboard, which were real. The peace of Salem and Boston, where the Council of Assistants and the General Court dealt with matters appertaining to the province, was disturbed by bickering over piety and property. The law courts were sized to narrow minds, as was the dogma of the day.