by Norman Lock
Isaac regarded him with mistrust and, after a moment’s pause, asked, “What kind of man are you?”
“A clever one, I hope,” replied Dill, laying a finger aside of his nose.
Isaac put down his cup. “I would hear more of what a clever man has to tell.”
The two men eyed each other like a pair of bantams searching for vitals where blood could be drawn. Isaac sensed that Dill wasn’t the daft fellow others supposed. The imposture made the erstwhile writer of romances both curious and apprehensive. He was himself a dissembler.
“You’re welcome to visit me,” said Dill offhandedly.
“Now?” Isaac would not sleep that night, he knew, without hearing what Dill had to say.
“If you’re not too weary from dancing.” His reply struck Isaac like a challenge or a taunt.
They walked east on Meeting House Road and then struck across the fields to Thorndike Hill. They were silent—Dill like a man nursing a grievance or a hope, Isaac like one waiting to hear something of consequence. The night, which had begun happily when he walked Hannah to the gold light’s flickering edge, had turned dark and sullen. Beloved by readers of romantic tales, a mist had risen. The gibbous moon had been erased, and the fires of numberless stars quenched. The night had an unpleasant odor—“sulfurous” Isaac would have said if he had not belonged, in principle, to an enlightened age. For many, the Inferno existed only as an image given shape and substance by Dante’s book.
Dill unlocked the cowshed where he lived by the sufferance of an ancient widow named Matilda Stowe, who, forty years earlier, had been his wet nurse. He lighted a grease-filled lamp and waved Isaac to the only chair.
“My house is not commodious like Hance’s, but then his was given to him—or rather, to his father, a hero of the Pequot War. He set fire to two villages at Mystic River. In the words of Captain Mason, Hance had ‘laughed his enemies and the enemies of his people to scorn making the Pequot fort as a fiery oven.’ Three hundred aboriginals were burned to death, as surely and completely as the Canterbury martyrs had been set ablaze during Bloody Mary’s reign. ‘It must have been a fearful sight to see the savages fry!’”
Isaac could hear them in the greasy sputtering of the lamp.
“The General Court deeded Hance a parcel of land, and John Winthrop paid for a house to be built on it for his use and enjoyment and that of his heirs. Famous by the age of twenty, he rested thereafter and, for more than fifty years, bored anyone within earshot with that single tale of cruelty. We thanked the Lord when senility took his mind away.”
Being a man of letters, Isaac was more interested in the books stacked on a plank table than in the elder Hance’s glorious pyromania. He was amazed to see Milton’s Paradise Lost, several plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Ford, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, as well as The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience, Discussed in a Conference between Truth and Peace and A Plea for Religious Liberty. The two latter works had been penned by Roger Williams, whom Winthrop and the General Court had banished to Rhode Island in 1635 for apostasy. Williams did not believe “Tis Satan’s policy, to plead for an indefinite and boundless toleration,” but that God was a broadminded Deity, who would hardly recognize Himself in His mean-spirited creatures settled in the Massachusetts Bay.
“Do you approve of my library, Master Page?”
“I’m surprised.”
“The widow’s husband was a worldly man. The New World killed him. Or is it that a simpleton can read that startles you?”
“Aye. In truth, Master Dill, it does.”
“I was raised in Rhode Island and educated in the home of Roger Williams, a person with too large a mind for Massachusetts Bay and too ardent a faith not to have enflamed the elders.”
“His views were heretical,” said Isaac, parroting the prevailing opinion of seventeenth-century Massachusetts as though it were his own.
“Heretical? Because he believed that our settlements rightfully belong to the aboriginals or that the magistrates ought not put to death women taken in adultery?”
Adulterers (men were never accounted such) might be pardoned if they exhibited tokens of irresistible grace and were not sluts, to whom mercy must be withheld. Such tokens were not easily discerned, however, and the women were almost always charged as whores and hanged.
“Do you believe in the Devil?” Isaac asked with too much eagerness.
“I believe there be many in Salem with an appetite to do the Devil’s work.” Dill perched on the edge of the table and, with a finger, reverently traced the tooled leather binding of a book, as though its contents, if only they could be fathomed, would untie the knots by which our kind has been pinioned since the riddles posed by the first philosopher. But the book was only Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.
“And Hell?”
“What of it?” asked Dill, whose face appeared to glower in the tawny light cast by the Betty lamp.
“In your opinion is there one?”
Like many another educated man of his time, Isaac scoffed at the notion of Hell. His own moral tales were ambiguous on the subject, which, in their epics, Dante and Milton had made palpable. Isaac was a modern man who rode in steam trains and elevated cars, cooked on a Rathbone stove, and hobnobbed with the literati of his age. To the Europeans of seventeenth-century Salem, Hell was gaudily real and its gate nearby. Why, one could swear that the damned were just beneath the hearthstone, when the fire in the grate was hot and roaring!
“If the Pequots’ burning villages weren’t Hell, I don’t know of another,” replied Dill.
“There was something you wanted to tell me.” Isaac had assumed a jaded tone to let the other man know that whatever he might say could be of no consequence.
“You asked what kind of man I am.”
Isaac studied his fingernails.
“I would ask the same of you, Isaac Page.”
“You know what I am.”
“I know what you say you are.”
“Then you know all that’s worth my saying and your knowing.”
“Is there nothing else?” asked Dill, fixing Isaac with the needle of his gaze.
“Nay, fellow, there is not.”
“Why do you look away, if there be nothing else?”
Isaac longed to lie down on the chaff bed in Hance’s buttery, at peace amid the fragrant oaken casks. The air was bad in Dill’s shed, and Isaac’s head hurt.
“Your face looks ghastly in this light,” said Isaac.
“You’re nervous, I think.”
Isaac glowered at him to show that he was not.
“I think you’re a liar,” said Dill.
The words stung, as though envenomed. Isaac would have struck him had Dill not taken a coin from his pocket and, giving it a fillip, made it ring against the tabletop.
Isaac was startled. In an instant, his weariness had turned to wariness. The coin, he saw, was the silver dollar he had brought from Lenox. “That belongs to me!” He made to snatch it from the table, but the other man was too quick for him.
“I’ve been wondering all evening if you would dare to claim it.”
Isaac ought to have disavowed ownership of the silver piece, but to do so would estrange him from what he knew best of Earth and all he cared to know. Salem would be for him a Hell, inescapable and desolate as Milton’s is for the fallen angel Lucifer: “As far remov’d from God and light of Heav’n / As from the Centre thrice to th’ utmost Pole.” Constance and his children were Isaac’s Heaven, and he would not lose them to save a multitude from hanging—especially those who had been already hanged by the neck until they were dead.
Dill gave no sign that he sensed the turmoil into which Isaac’s mind had been thrown. Did he mean him harm, or had he another reason for turning on his guest?
“What do you want?” asked Isaac when he could once more harness words to thought.
“I’m not Dilly the oaf and simpleton—a beast fit only to live in a cowhouse and bear burdens o
n its back!”
Why had he chosen to reveal himself to Isaac? Dill may not have been able to answer, except that happenstance had given him a confidant or, if Isaac spurned him, a victim.
“What do you want?” repeated Isaac, whose terror was turning into rage. They share a pivot—fear and anger, as do love and hatred; one can be made to swing round to its opposite by a mere touch or breath of wind. Isaac was no match for Dill, who, at that moment, looked very like a beast. But a weaker man, his good judgment in abeyance, will sometimes fly at the throat of a stronger one. Isaac would have done had Dill’s voice not modulated into awe.
“It is wondrous!” Dill held the silver piece and described it front and back: The phrase United States of America arched over an eagle clutching three arrows. Below it were the words One Dollar. On the obverse appeared a flag, a canopy of thirteen stars, and Liberty spelled out on a shield held by a seated woman draped in Attic fashion. Most puzzling of all, however, was the year engraved beneath her—for surely the four numbers must be that!—1851.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
Isaac could not explain it without telling a story the other man would not believe. Yet there was evidence: Dill held it in his hand. Even Thomas the doubter, who’d needed to touch the hole in Christ’s palm, would have had to believe in the miracle of Isaac’s arrival in Salem. But what would Dill do with this piece of intelligence? That was the question whose answer terrified Isaac.
Should I deliver myself into the hands of this man, who seems my enemy? Or should I make light of the coin or invent a plausible reason to have it? Can’t a man have a coin made to mystify his friends? To produce an object from the future—what an excellent jest it would be! Those thoughts passed through Isaac’s mind while Dill waited for an answer. Isaac wished he could read the other’s mind and was not encouraged by his growing anger, visible on his face and in the clenching of his fists.
“Well, Master Page, what am I to make of this necromancy?”
Isaac flinched. It was neither the time nor the place in the history of his countrymen to bandy such a dark word.
“It’s not necromancy!”
Dill sniffed the coin and said, like a bad actor in a miracle play, “Methinks I smell the stink of burning pitch and roasted human flesh. I do believe the Black Man paid this piece of silver into a sinner’s hand for signing away his soul.”
“Now that I’ve taken a closer look, I think the coin belongs to someone else,” said Isaac, having decided to renounce it. Better to spend the rest of his life in the past than to cut short his present and forestall any possible future. Thorndike Hill was only seven miles from Proctor’s Ledge.
“Nay, Master Page, I took it from your own doublet, which you’d set on a stump beside Buckley’s new barn.”
Isaac squirmed in the chair, as if his bowels were roasting.
“How came you by such a rarity?”
Isaac felt his neck itch, as though the hangman’s hempen rope were already chafing it.
“Tell me, or I will say the Devil has come to Salem Village in the shape of Isaac Page!”
“I will not say!”
“Then I think there will be another wizard in Arnold’s jail tonight.”
Isaac repeated his refusal. Won’t Dill’s fantastic story prove that he has lost his few remaining wits? he reasoned. But there is the coin…. Let Dill show it to the magistrates; I’ll deny ownership! But might they hold me while they send a marshal to Rhode Island to verify that I had worked there as a carpenter or send a man to Lenox, which will not exist for another seventy-five years? Very likely! And I may find myself in the same oxcart as Bridget Bishop when it rumbles across Town Bridge toward the ladder, whose rungs lead to Heaven, Hell, or neither. Isaac could not escape the horns of his dilemma, save by telling Dill a plausible truth. Then a greater horror dawned: If Dill should squeeze the dollar in his fist, would he fly back to Lenox and the red farmhouse, to Constance and Isaac’s bed?
“One last chance before I drag you to the watch house!” He took Isaac’s arm in his powerful grip. “I could break your neck and bury you in the pigsty, and none would be the wiser.”
“I’ll tell you what you want to know, but first you must set the coin aside.”
“Wherefore set it aside?”
“So that it may breathe!”
“Breathe, is it?” Dill pressed his thumbs into Isaac’s windpipe.
Isaac croaked, “Let me speak!”
“Very well.” He set the coin next to the Betty lamp, where Isaac could not get at it.
Isaac told him that he had come to Salem Village from a Massachusetts town called Lenox. He told him that the year stamped on the silver dollar was that of his departure.
“How was the trick accomplished?” asked Dill, beside himself with excitement.
“It’s not a trick!” Even at that dangerous moment, Isaac bristled to hear his feat derided as a conjuror’s swindle. There were many capital crimes in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, and one would do for Isaac as well as another. He might swing at Proctor’s Ledge for vanity as readily as witchcraft. His neck would stretch not a whit longer.
“Call it what you like, but tell me!” Dill had brought his face near enough to Isaac’s that the latter could smell roasted capon from supper on his breath—that and something else: the odor produced by a body in the heat of an overwhelming emotion. Isaac couldn’t help but smile at the other man’s gullibility. Naturally, a greedy man will believe anything that promises to gratify his appetite. Dill once again put his hands around Isaac’s throat; it would need but a little tightening to send time’s pilgrim to eternity or extinction. The pink tip of Dill’s tongue was visible between his teeth. It was obscene, Isaac thought afterward, a thing to shudder at. “Do you mean to make a mockery of me?”
“No!” gasped Isaac, trying to pull away the other’s hands. Dill watched him struggle for breath and then let go. Later, Isaac would wonder if fireflies shut up in jars by his son, Jack, felt as he had in Dill’s beast house. What would Waldo Emerson say, or Thoreau? Is there a scale of pain and sorrow? Does a whale suffer more anguish than an ant? A man more than a bug?”
“Let me get my breath; then I’ll tell you how I came to be here.”
“Say first whether the coin be the Devil’s work.”
“Aye, inasmuch as men are devils.”
Sweeping his books onto the floor with an arm, Dill sat on the table, his legs drawn up in Indian fashion. “Go on, then, and be quick! I’m at the end of my patience.”
To save himself, Isaac did as a storyteller would: He let loose his imagination, which was inclined to be fantastic, in the “infinite space” of Dill’s cowshed.
“In Lenox,” he began, “I was an alchemist.”
“I could have you hanged for an alchemist as readily as for a witch!” cried Dill.
“I was an alchemist in 1851; now I’m a carpenter!” retorted Isaac.
“For the sake of argument, let’s say I believe you.” Dill waved a hand at Isaac, as if signaling his readiness to hear an incredible story, like a schoolmaster humoring a boy who claims his dog ate his primer. “Why would a man of 1851 wish to be in Salem in 1692?”
“I came here by accident. I was searching for an elixir that would grant eternal life.”
“‘The life of man’ in Salem is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’”
Ignoring Dill’s gibe, Isaac went on with his tale: “At a bookseller’s in Paris, I happened on an extraordinary copy of Mutus Liber, or Silent Book. Twenty-four copies, each containing fifteen woodcuts without annotations, were known to have been printed at La Rochelle in 1677. Not even a rumor of a twenty-fifth copy containing an additional woodcut had ever been heard. Most surprising of all, it was annotated! After an hour’s scrutiny, I realized that the twenty-fifth book contained the Grand Elixir of Immortality, which alchemists had been toiling to discover since Zosimos of Panopolis and Mary the Jewess.”
“Plainly, they wer
e witches.”
“There are no witches!” cried Isaac, pretending to be vexed.
“In the Valley of Ben Hinnom, there were. King Manasseh ‘used enchantments, and used witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards: he wrought much evil in the sight of the Lord.’ Second Chronicles.”
“Only the simpleminded believe in witchcraft, and you, Dilly, claim to be otherwise.” Isaac fretted, notwithstanding. His skepticism in matters of the black arts had been diminishing. It would be the same for a bird caged for so long a time that it could barely remember the sky.
“I profess what my neighbors do,” said Dill airily. “It’s foolish to show the hangman your neck before you’re asked.” Of a sudden, he shook a fist at Isaac. “And I warn you, Isaac, not to call me Dilly!”
Isaac waved it away as he would a fly, having found his courage and also his conviction that he was, indeed, a reasonable man regardless of the madness surrounding him. “Witches exist only in the overheated fancies of their malicious neighbors. The condemned of Salem Village are innocent.”
“Though they be as innocent as the Gadarene swine, Salem’s witches will hang. I pity the poor beasts that Jesus filled with the evil spirits of a madman.” Dill’s glance took in the limits of his small domain. “As you see, I live in an old beast house.”
You smell of beast, said Isaac to himself.
Dill studied the other man’s face. “You’re too long in the tooth, Isaac, to have tasted the liqueur of eternal youthfulness.”
“I got it wrong! I misconstrued the sixteenth diagram. Or perhaps it had been drawn to gull any poor soul who might find it. The compound I prepared and swallowed opened a path between your time and mine. I’ll grow old and die like any other man—but at least I’ll be rich. The people of my day will pay handsomely for the merest thimble from yours. I’ve only to fill my pack and satchel and return to 1851.”
“And peddle our old pots?”
“Aye, and make a handsome profit by them!”
“Isaac Page, you’re a rogue, as surely as if you’ve lived all your days in Salem Village!”
Isaac was not surprised at how readily Dill accepted the lie. Although he was educated well beyond the common, Dill had been born in an age of unreason, when pins stuck into a cloth poppet could prick Mary Walcott’s arm, Abigail Williams’s stomach, and Mercy Lewis’s foot while an imp unseen to all but them danced upon a rafter. Dill knew that a witch’s familiar in the shape of a cat could lick the breath from a babe, and he had seen an Irish washerwoman named Ann Glover hanged for speaking in the Devil’s own tongue, which, later, proved to be Gaelic.