by Norman Lock
“They’re a quarrelsome lot,” replied Isaac, who knew nothing of Rhode Island women or shrews. Constance was inclined to patience and gentleness. He recalled some harsh words he had spoken to her and keenly regretted them.
“Our goodwives would do well to think on the covenant of marriage and gentle their dispositions.” Hance studied the lofty pile of a cloud, as if he could see gentlewomen dressed in cloth of gold on its airy porches. “They do order their poor husbands about like servants. In my father’s day, such wives as we have now would have been dunked in Wilkins Pond or shut up in the root cellar.”
“Your goodwife seems a pious woman,” observed Isaac, hoping to turn the conversation to graver matters. From his research into Salem’s history, he knew that he had only until June 10 to act. On that day, Bridget Bishop was—would be—hanged. As Isaac watched Hance whittle a stick into the shape of a cow, the tumult that would whip New England into a frenzy had not yet drawn blood. When it did, the universe would shrink to Arnold’s jail, Thomas Beadle’s tavern, where the accused were examined and arraigned, Salem Town House, where their death warrants were signed, and Proctor’s Ledge, where they were hanged.
“Our women think God whispers in their ears,” complained Hance, knocking the spent tobacco from his pipe against his boot heel. “They scold us, as Moses did the Hebrews when he came down from Mount Sinai and, in a fit of temper, smashed the Tablets of the Law. They preen themselves in their pews while we sit sulking like boys who’ve gotten their ears pulled.”
“Are Salem husbands less virtuous and industrious than their wives?” Bridget Bishop’s tryst with the hangman is a month away, Isaac told himself, his mind drifting like the smoke unraveling from the Hance’s chimney pot, to his eyes a miniature of Geoffrey’s briar.
“We apply ourselves in obedience to the Lord; we toil like the biblical ox or ass,” replied Hance as he picked a red pokeberry flower to pieces. “I heard John Arnold is getting Boston’s jail spruced up for all the witches and wizards who’ll be staying there.” Hance made a sour face, and as if to rid his mouth of a bitter taste, he spat. “He ordered two hundred board feet of lumber from Dodge’s sawmill, as well as chains to keep Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne from turning their specters loose upon the town. Lord knows how iron can bridle apparitions! I nearly forgot to mention that Goody Arnold bought two blankets for Sarah Good’s infant, who does poorly in prison. I suspect, by this, she hopes to prove herself a charitable Christian woman.” Once again, Hance spat into the dust and ground the damp spot underfoot. “Is this drought the Devil’s work or God’s punishment on the poor in spirit?”
“I’ve heard that there be much ‘gripping, and squeezing, and grinding the faces of the poor,’” said Isaac, who, as a student at Bowdoin, had read Urian Oakes’s exhortation against usury in the Bay Colony.
“They will be given fine clothes to wear in the hereafter.” After a silence, Hance said, “John Arnold might have work for a carpenter, if you’ve a mind to see the sights of Boston.”
“I wouldn’t care for such work.”
Hance grunted and brushed a leggy spider from his knee. Isaac saw that his refusal had pleased his host. “We’re raising a barn at the Buckley place. If you care to work for your supper, there’ll be better fare than fish pie and peas.”
“A man cannot rest in Salem,” said Isaac, sighing extravagantly.
“We are God’s children in the New Jerusalem. He intends for us to enjoy the fruits He has set within our grasp, if we are willing to sweat our arses for them.”
Isaac concluded that Hance’s argument was not with God, but with His human creatures, especially those who were likely to dance on their neighbors’ graves. There would soon be many new graves in Salem.
VII
arly next morning, the two men broke their fast with pease porridge and coffee, “that grave and wholesome liquor,” and walked to the Buckley place, their shadows dogging at their heels. The parched fields ought to have been green with spring wheat. Indifferent to drought, clouds sailed across the azure bowl of sky, dragging their bluish shadows over the brown hills. “We have no rain for you!” the clouds taunted in a voice disguised as wind. “And what of September?” asked the fields. “Will the stalks of corn incline their tasseled ears toward the earth, as if to hear Aristotle’s primum movens, commonly known as God?”
The framing for the new barn lay in pieces on the ground. The odors of raw wood and recently turned soil would—150 years hence—intoxicate the mechanic, hoer of bean fields, and natural philosopher Henry Thoreau, a New Englander whose nonconformity cost him only a night in jail. At the Buckley farm, a score of men—some burly, others thin as rakes—were rolling up their sleeves, while a muster of women, dressed in bright colors befitting a May morning, set trenchers of bread, cold beef, and ham on planks thrown across sawhorses. The men picked the platters clean. By the time their shadows had dwindled to no more than midgets of themselves, they’d been swarming over the beams and rafters of the rising barn for hours, each man armed with a saw, mallet, or chisel, according to his proficiency. They chewed on wooden pegs, as if they were stalks of sweetgrass, which common folk called “holy.”
Isaac had been present at raisings in his own century. The frame that slowly grew by the work of many men had always reminded him of the sketch of a barn, which they would finish and sunset embellish with the golden brushwork of falling light. He liked the sweetness of a good join and took pleasure in the words of the craft, which he would repeat to himself, as if they held a secret known only to carpenters: beam, spar, batten, lath, joist, spline, girt, tendon, mortise, post, purlin, scarf, sill, plank. He remembered the joy with which he had beheld the Phalanstery at Brook Farm, which he helped to build, and how he had grieved when the great assembly hall of the communalists burned to the ground.
Having read much of the history of Salem, Isaac knew that the barn, along with the house and furnishings, would pass into grasping hands when, later that spring, Goodman Buckley’s wife and widowed daughter were clapped up for witchcraft—unless Isaac could prevent their imprisonment. He had begun to question whether or not he had the courage to intervene. It was one thing to hatch bold schemes in Lenox while lending half an ear to a distant locomotive chuffing in the Housatonic Valley and quite another to stand on a rafter in Salem Village and hear the wind moaning in the forest, where, for all he knew, the Devil did preside over a dance of degenerate souls.
More and more, Isaac would come to see through a glass darkly as he doubted himself and wondered at his skepticism. He had not seen tooth marks left by witches and wizards on maiden flesh, nor had he been in the watch house at the inquest of Daniel Wilkins, the “greatest part of whose back seemed to be pricked with an instrument about the bigness of a small awl.” Isaac had not been present at the examination of the boy’s murderer, John Willard, who had only to chew his lip nervously before magistrates Hathorne and Corwin to cause Annie Putnam and Mary Warren to cry, “Oh, he bites me!” Isaac had read accounts of these things just as he had read, in the Acts of the Apostles, the words with which the disciple Paul had rebuked King Agrippa, also called Herod: “Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?” You were not in the forest or at the village watch house any more than you had been in Judea when Christ returned from His harrowing, he told himself. You were not so much as a speck of dust. Truth is easy to accept when all the world proclaims it. When doubt assailed him, Isaac would examine himself, as if he were the accused and the magistrate in the same person. Who am I to meddle in time—God’s curse on the race of Adam? My forebear’s bones have lain these thirteen decades in the grave. Who am I to dig them up and interrogate their former owner in absentia?
As a boy, Isaac had willingly joined the others in schoolyard hectoring. Years later, he regretted having let an opportunity to show moral courage pass him by, one that had come and gone unrecognized. Next time, I’ll do right by the harried and abused, he promised himself. But
would he? If he had been at the Sacramento River in 1846 when Captain Frémont and his men slaughtered two hundred Wintun Indian men, women, and children, would Isaac have lifted a finger or raised his voice to stop them?
WILLIAM DILL HAD ALSO GONE to the barn raising. Isaac marveled at his strength. He could take the weight of a dragon beam on his broad back while six other men drove the dowels home. He had the brawn of an ox and, now and then, would shake his shaggy head to rid it of a pest, a bead of sweat, or, perhaps, an unwelcome thought. Isaac could not have said why he’d been shy of Dill all day. Happening to look down from the truss beam on which he was cutting a mortar, he saw that Dill was regarding him with an uncommon intensity.
“Good day to you, Master Page.”
“Good day, Dill. You look broiled.”
“They say it be hotter by a hundredfold in Hell.” He wiped his damp face and chest on an old sack.
“Who says?” Isaac climbed down from the beam, took off his sweat-stained doublet, and laid it on a stump to dry.
“Them that have been there do say it.” Dill laughed with an almost imbecilic glee.
“Do you mean those that send their spirits abroad to cause others mischief?”
“Nay, Isaac Page. If those have been in Hell, they do not say it. I mean them that describe ‘its exquisite agonies, and anguishes.’ You never heard Cotton Mather scare the people out of their wits with Hell’s pains. ‘And another that was broiling in the fire of such troubles, roared in this manner, O might I have this mitigation of my torments, to lie as a backlog in the fire on the hearth, for a thousand ages!’ Now there be the true meaning of broiling!”
“Aren’t you frightened by such a picture of Hell?” asked Isaac, amazed at Dill’s sudden articulateness.
“Dilly has no wits to be frightened out of.” He laughed again, as if at some fabulous joke.
“I wonder if that is true,” said Isaac, as much to himself as to the other man.
Dill shrugged his sunburned shoulders, cinched his mallet in his belt, and climbed up to the ridgepole as agilely as a monkey.
Isaac took up the chisel with which all morning he’d been cutting mortises. He delighted in a snug piece of joinery, as once he had in a well-wrought sentence. Increasingly, there were days when Isaac could not have said if Lenox was a memory of a previous life or a premonition of one that awaited him. Salem Village is no figment, he told himself. Thus does time lay traps and snares for those who travel recklessly in it.
That evening, the weary men ate supper at the makeshift tables. The women had brought chickens, and while the men had worked toward sundown, they slaughtered, plucked, and boiled them, which they then served, together with corn and parsnips from the Buckleys’ cellar. Matthew Howes, the landlord, contributed a hogshead of beer, in exchange for a dozen bushels of potatoes payable at the fall harvest. (Given the drought and the tardiness of the growing season, his barrel of beer was an act of munificence.) After the meal, a scraggly fiddler plied his bow with the fervor of an Indian straining to light a fire with a bow and drill. Reminiscent of a lewd Morris dance, the tune would have made the blood of Thomas Morton and his licentious crew run hot at Merry Mount. An affront to the pious of New Plymouth Colony, the idolatrous maypole was cut down in 1627 by sobersided John Endicott. Later in the gloomy history of Massachusetts Bay, Miles Standish, whom Morton had belittled, calling him “Captain Shrimpe,” put an end to pagan revels at Merry Mount, scattered the wastrels, and exiled the profligate Pilgrim to the rocky Isles of Shoals.
Having finished her chores at John Buxton’s house, Hannah Smyth was helping at the tubs. With a look of disapproval contending with a blush of pleasure, she consented to partner with Isaac in the Haymakers’ Dance, judged to be a naughty figure by the Sticklers, if not quite an indecent one.
“Your gaze is oppressive, sir!” she chided when they met together and commenced the promenade, whose measure the by-now-tipsy fiddler accelerated.
“And how, Mistress Smyth, might a gaze oppress, its being nothing more substantial than the ether?”
“I do not know what ether may be, but a gaze can fall heavily enough to leave a red mark on a lady’s cheek.”
“My gaze, like any other gentleman’s, approaches your cheek but stops short of touching it, howsoever my lips may wish to come nigh.”
“You’re uncommonly forward, Goodman Page!”
“You are uncommonly pretty, and my gaze has the weight of admiration, which cannot shift a balance beam so much as a hairsbreadth.”
“Mind your feet! You’re not a pretty dancer, sir, though I admit the tune does gallop.”
“It’s the fault of my boots. Roger de Coverley himself would trip over them.”
“They were made for clodhopping and not for dancing.”
“Then won’t you walk with me a little, Hannah?”
“Where would you have me walk?” she replied suspiciously, but she did not resist when he took her arm and led her away from the rest.
“To yon clump of trees.”
“Not so far as that! I’ll accompany you only as far as the light of the bonfire falls.” “One step farther, please!”
Having read chivalric romances, Isaac was amused to find himself in a coy exchange with a young woman whose menial situation could not have prepared her for a conversation found in the pages of a novel by Jane Austen. Later, he wondered whether he had imagined it—no, not imagined, but translated it in his mind, as he did the vernacular into artifice in his own tales. Isaac believed in words more than in actions, since a man will often do nothing, but it is seldom he won’t speak, if only to himself.
“Not one step more, or we’ll be talked about in church on Sunday,” replied Hannah to Isaac’s courtly pleading.
“Gossip is another thing that has no weight.”
“It has a sting notwithstanding.”
The deadweight of a hanged man or woman will often begin in gossip.
“You reduce me to beggary,” said Isaac.
“There are no beggars in God’s kingdom.”
“Is that where we are?”
“Some say so.”
“What do you say, Hannah Smyth?”
“That in such a time and place as we do find ourselves, we should keep our thoughts to ourselves.” She had spoken apprehensively.
The couple stood at the light’s deckled edge and watched it gild the giddy phantasms in their dance.
“I think it be too like the old maypole not to annoy the Reverend Parris,” said Hannah, referring to the night’s frolic around the fire.
Salem Village was not Merry Mount, where green-men and glee-men, bears and wolves, mummers, rope dancers, mountebanks, horned gentlemen, and Morris dancers—all the merry crew of Comus—used to disport themselves around a festooned pine tree to the music of pipes, cittern, and viol.
Drink and be merry, merry, merry boys;
Let all your delight be in Hymen’s joys.
Io to Hymen now the day is come,
About the merry May-pole take a room.
Merry Mount meant wine; Salem meant water—and tepid at that.
“The dancers take an innocent pleasure in one another,” said Isaac.
“Increase Mather would not consider it so. I’ve heard the minister read from An Arrow Against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing Drawn Out of the Quiver of Scriptures so often, I know the words by heart.”
“What does your heart tell you?”
“That we have tarried enough in the dark.”
They walked back toward the barn. To Isaac’s dismay, Hannah curtsied saucily and bid him a good night.
“Shall I see you again?” he asked.
“Salem is not London, Master Page. Nor even Boston.”
Isaac joined a knot of revelers and swallowed a fiery draft to ease his disappointment. A sentence he’d composed for a sketch fifteen years before (or would do nearly a century and a half hence) came to mind: “… it was high treason to be sad at Merry Mount.” Would that the sa
me could be said of Old Salem, which seemed a fount of sorrow.
What could be said of Salem was particularized in the words of two women, who were gossiping nearby.
“I was at Beadle’s tavern when Constable Osgood brought Abigail Soames before the magistrates to answer for having sent out her specter against Mary Warren. Of course, the witch denied it. But no sooner did Soames lay eyes on Mary than she cried she were being stabbed in her belly. They searched the witch and found a great botching needle hid in her skirts.”
“Matthew Hopkins said that specters are ‘venomous and malignant particles ejected from the eyes.’”
“Better not look a witch in the eye.”
“It’s enough for a witch to look at you with hers. Though you be blind, you shall be possessed.”
“Best not look anyone in the eye.”
VIII
istress Smyth is a pretty thing,” said Dill, coming up behind Isaac as he stood and stoked his ardor with brandy. Passions, be they grand or mean, are not easily put away. “She be a reason to stay, I think.”
“Stay?” asked Isaac, fuddled by drink and disappointment, which self-pity embittered.
“In Salem Village. I say the pretty wench is good reason to keep you here with us … unless you have another put by,” said Dill slyly.