by Norman Lock
“And you say the people of your time will pay money for …” With a quick glance, Dill assessed the contents of his hovel. “For that stone jug?”
“Aye, and more were it glazed Delft.”
“Widow Stowe has Delftware and German brown platters from Frechen.” He had spoken to himself as much as to Isaac.
“You’ve no idea of the value of the most commonplace things around you. Antiquarians of my time would go mad were they to dig up your jug, even if it were in pieces!”
Dill wet his upper lip with the tip of his tongue. “I wonder that anyone should give a fig for Salem and its folly.”
“People of the nineteenth century are fascinated by Salem’s witches.”
“As are we, Isaac Page.”
Secretive, avaricious, and spiteful, Dill was, nevertheless, a bondman to belief, which is little more than a consensus of opinion. In its name, men do tear other men limb from limb, burn their wives, and skewer their children. Doubt—its antithesis—is the tooth of the covenant we inherit; it can bite and gnaw where conscience has its quick. But what doubt could possess a mind like Dill’s, or Hance’s, for that matter? Both had been steeped since birth in the vinegar of communal ignorance—a sourness that tasted sweet to them.
“To modern minds, witches are as fantastic as Saint George and the Dragon. One author in particular, a Massachusetts man—I know him well—has written tales about the Bay Colony that are much admired. ‘Young Goodman Brown’ is particularly fine.”
“An old stoneware jug …”
“The wealthy of my day will pay dearly for a tin spoon or a caudal cup.”
“And where be this Lenox of yours?” asked Dill after a moment’s pensive rubbing of the jug, as though he might summon a jinn to satisfy his wishes in a less roundabout way than Isaac proposed.
“A town in the Berkshire Hills, some hundred and fifty English miles west of here. But the town won’t be founded until 1767.”
Dill fingered his stubbled chin thoughtfully. A silence ensued, in which Isaac heard the jarring cry of a night bird, a faint crackling made by an animal scuttling through underbrush, a creaking floorboard, and a moth desperately beating its wings against the lamp’s glass chimney for a purpose as hidden as Isaac’s own. That his might also prove futile, even fatal to himself, was a possibility he would not allow himself to entertain.
“Then you know the future!” said Dill, as though his wits were slow, indeed, and an idea slow to dawn on him.
“Not as Tituba claims to know it. I cannot see it in a dish of water, a spill of grain, or a cloud of gnats. I can’t read the sky or the guts of a dead animal for portents. I know the future of the Province of Massachusetts Bay as it’s written in books.” He opened one of Dill’s, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, and noticed that Roger Williams had inscribed it: “With Affection for his Pupil William Dill.” “I’m no soothsayer; I can’t foresee the remnant of your years or days, your portion of fame or shame, any more than I can what you’ll eat in the morning. I know the future of Massachusetts, as any schoolboy of my time does.”
“There must be a way to squeeze a shilling from it,” said Dill. His eyes had a faraway look, as if he saw himself as rich as merchant Philip English of Salem Town. In time’s dark slurry, what magic might not be performed in the future to Dill’s advantage?
“Now if you’ll give me back the coin …” said Isaac slyly.
Dill became wary. His gaze narrowed, and his eyes seemed to grow smaller, as if he had donned a mask signifying Avarice. His hand closed around the coin in a fist whose meaning was covetousness and wrath.
Isaac trembled, as a man does who fearfully lays a finger on a galvanic generator to make his hair stand on end. He waited to see whether or not Dill would disappear into the future—Isaac’s own present, where, at that moment, he desperately wished to be. But Dill did not vanish, and Isaac relaxed. This coin, which was carried here by me, will take none but me home, he assured himself.
“What means this coin to you?” asked Dill.
Having begun his tale, a nimble storyteller will ride it—however wildly it careens—until he finishes it or breaks his neck in the attempt.
“My daughter, Alma, gave it to me to buy a bag of sweets for the train. The coin is all I have of her, and I keep it close.”
Dill put aside his mistrust. Tugging at Isaac’s sleeve, like a child greedy for candy, he would not be satisfied until Isaac had explained what he meant by train. The pilgrim compared it to a great iron ox snorting black plumes of smoke as it dragged a line of wagons behind it on a pair of silver tracks. The picture he drew on the slate of Dill’s mind increased the latter’s awe of the future and his resolve to profit by it.
“What price would the Reverend Parris’s Bible fetch in 1851?”
“An exorbitant one.”
“Or, say, some of Winthrop’s papers or a manuscript of Cotton Mather’s?”
“Any price you cared to name.”
Dill’s eyes blazed.
“Of course, you couldn’t spend it here,” said Isaac, liming the branch to catch the bird that would prey upon him.
The blaze was dampened.
“In the Massachusetts of 1692, you’d be like Dives of the parable, whose riches could not buy him an icicle in Hell with which to slake his thirst.”
Dill cosseted the buff-colored jug as a mother would her babe.
“What would this get you in the village marketplace?” asked Isaac. “A kick in the arse.”
“Better to be a rich man in 1851,” said Isaac.
“You mean me to go there with you?”
“You can, or I’ll be the agent for the two of us.”
“I don’t trust you to go without me.”
“Then you can go alone.”
“To your time?”
“Why not?”
“What’s to keep me from staying there?”
“Your cupidity. You won’t be satisfied with what you can sell in one trip. And even should you be and stay, I’ll have Mistress Smyth to console me.”
Dill folded his hands as if in prayer, which is only another word for hope—an attitude toward life as familiar to covetous men as to religious ones.
“God gave men hands to take from the abundance He provides,” said Isaac, happy to be leading the man by the nose in his own beast house, which still bore a faint odor of animal sweat and dung.
“It is His covenant with the visible saints,” responded Dill, his mouth split open in a grin.
“And shall you and I make a covenant between us?”
“Aye, partner Page. When can I leave for Lenox?”
“I must gather the ingredients and prepare the elixir. Then you have only to drink it and be away.”
Dill’s eyes glazed; perhaps he saw himself as a gentleman dressed in fine clothes, riding behind a giant fire-breathing ox.
“I’m curious, Dill, why you pretend to be simple-minded and choose to live meanly.”
“No one envies a poor man, and none fears a simple one.” As if he had remembered an urgent duty, he got into his doublet and put on his hat.
“Where might you be going at this hour?”
“To Samuel Parris’s house to steal his Bible. He’s gone to Boston. If not his Bible, there are certain to be papers of value to the future.”
“What of John Winthrop’s?”
“I can’t wait to pluck them! The present chokes me, and I must fly from it or die!” He paused on the threshold, if a cowshed can be said to have one. “I’ll tell you a secret, Master Page. My mother’s father’s father was Philip Ratcliffe, whom John Winthrop ordered whipped and his ears cut off for ‘most foul, scandalous invectives against our churches and government.’ Were that hypocritical cunt alive and sleeping in his bed, I’d cut off something more precious than ears and sell it for a fortune to the curious of your day!”
The venom behind Dill’s words frightened Isaac. “Will you give me back my coin for Alma’s sake?”
“I
think not, Goodman Page. I’ll keep it in my pocket in case I need it for the toll keeper on the road to Lenox.”
“And if I refuse to send you there?”
“Then Magistrate Hathorne shall have the coin and you to make of what he will.”
Again Isaac wondered who had invited Death to set up shop on Proctor’s Ledge, where the gallows waited to turn men and women into corpses; what had extinguished the light of John Winthrop’s city upon a hill, which was to have been “a brand plucked out of the burning”? A light to light the world.
IX
arly the next morning, Isaac searched the woods for hazelwort, described by Nicholas Culpeper in The English Physitian as “a plant under the dominion of Mars, and therefore inimical to nature.” The whitish roots have a sharp, though not unpleasant, taste. In measure, they have beneficial properties. Culpeper commended them to the cautious use of the herbalist, leecher, and surgeon. “This herb, being drunk, not only provokes vomiting, but urges downward, and by urine also, purges both choler and phlegm.”
Isaac’s first thought had been to administer Artemisia absinthium in a potion that would have racked Dill with convulsions similar to those mimicked by Salem’s afflicted. He could as easily have dispatched him with a mallet, but Isaac feared that, like the murderer in Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” he would become conscience-pricked and give himself away. “I admit the deed!—tear up the planks! here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!”
He had become familiar with plants, medicinal as well as poisonous, at Brook Farm, a utopian community near West Roxbury, Massachusetts, organized on the principles of Charles Fourier, the socialist philosopher. At the farm, Isaac read The English Physitian and concocted curatives for the well-being of the tiny commonwealth. Though Brook Farm had come to naught, Isaac had begun to write a romance shaped by his two years there, which he felt would add luster to his fame and money to his purse once he returned to Lenox and finished it.
Having filled his pouch with hazelwort, Isaac walked back to the cowhouse, where he ground the roots into a milky curd.
Isaac had sent Dill after a jar of honey. He returned with it, radiant with greed. He rubbed his hands together, like a fly contemplating a turd.
“Wealth is our reward for doing His bidding and a symbol of our redemption,” he said, eagerly subscribing to the commonly held fallacy of God’s affection for the Israelites of the Bay. That Dill had broken His eighth commandment by stealing Parris’s Bible, a draft taken down in his fussy, ministerial hand of the testimony of several witches, and Tituba’s Venus glass was of little matter to the impostor of Thorndike Hill.
Isaac stirred the macerated roots into a jar of honeyed water, which clouded. “Now close your eyes and imagine the world of eighteen hundred and fifty-one, as I described it to you.”
Dill put the cup to his lips and was about to drink but stopped, and, in doing so, nearly caused Isaac’s heart to do likewise. “Have you a message for Constance and little Alma?”
Afraid his voice would betray him, Isaac shook his head and urged the other man with his eyes to drink. Dill sniffed the liquid, wet his lips with it, and smiled at its sweetness. And still he seemed to hesitate.
For the love of Christ, drink!
He drank half the potion, and as he made to put down the cup, Isaac stayed his hand and encouraged him to drain it to the lees. “You must drink it all.”
“To Constance and Alma!” said Dill, winking unpleasantly. “I promise to return the silver piece to her and give your wife news of you and Hannah Smyth.”
Dill finished the cup. Almost at once, his complexion turned a deathly pallor. He dropped the cup and sat heavily on his cot. He lay down and commenced to groan. “I feel as though I’ve swallowed brimstone!” He held his stomach and writhed. Soon enough, the potent draft had the desired effect, to the dismay of the one and the disgust of the other. Relief came to Dill, and with it an appalling smell, as Isaac picked his pocket.
“Put away any thought of revenge!” he warned, holding the silver dollar. He tucked Dill’s copy of The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution under his arm. “What would the magistrates say were they to read Roger Williams’s fond inscription? You might as well have signed your name in the Devil’s book as to have that renegade’s name in yours. I’ll take this, as well.” He slipped ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which bore the name William Dill on the frontispiece, into his pocket. “The elders would hang her, and you, also, for reading depraved literature. And now, ‘Master’ Dill, I leave you to your privy.”
X
n Northfields, four miles south of Thorndike Hill, Isaac stopped to bathe in Humphrey’s Pond. He did so with the deliberateness of a Hindu in the Ganges or Thoreau in Walden Pond. Isaac had first met Thoreau at the Lyceum in Concord, when Emerson read aloud his new essay entitled “Nature.” Isaac had twice visited the secluded spot with Thom Croft, who took him there for the pike and pickerel. Wishing to purify himself after his defeat of the minor devil William Dill, he chose the pond as the likeliest place for his own ritual bath. His spirit, he imagined, was as rank as his clothes, which stank from the Betty lamp, and something worse besides.
He undressed behind a screen of balsams, whose resin offered up an incense apt to Isaac’s devotional purpose. Like a savage or a pioneer, he beat his clothes against a rock and wrung them, if not dry, then damp, and then he washed, beat, and wrung them once again, until he was satisfied they were clean. Slowly, he washed himself, pumicing his skin with a flat stone, as though to mortify his flesh. He let the late morning sun fall full upon him and felt with pleasure the gentle warming of his skin. The thought of home revolved briefly in his mind, and he beheld the image of Constance’s face framed by glossy rings of chestnut-colored hair. He was not inclined to dwell in fond recollection on her—strange for a man who had loved his wife above all else. He did not ponder the meaning of his growing disinterest, dismissing it as an effect of his dislocation. A journey such as his must wrench the mind from its habitual orbit. In time, Isaac would come to remember his past as one does a dream—pale, fragmentary, and absurd. Many desperate souls have yearned for the blessing of forgetfulness, but memory is as stubborn as a stain and not easily pumiced from the mind.
Waiting for his clothes to dry, Isaac read, for a second time that day, a broadside printed by Richard Pierce, of Boston. Two years previously, Pierce had published Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, intending to inaugurate the first newspaper in the colonies. The governor and council of Massachusetts had declared their “high resentment and disallowance of said pamphlet” and suppressed it. The broadside named those cried out as witches since the end of February.
PERSONS SUSPECTED OF COMPACTING WITH THE DEVIL;
Cried Out In Salem Village & Salem Town By Elizabeth Parris, Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam Jr., Elizabeth Hubbard, &c.
{Published at Boston, on the 11th day of May, in the Year of Our Lord 1692}
29 February. Tituba, Sarah Good, & Sarah Osborne are arrested.
12 March. Martha Corey, age 71, a “Gospel Woman” and fully covenanted member of Salem Village Church, is arrested.
23 March. Dorcas Good, age 4, is arrested.
24 March. Rebecca Nurse, midwife, age 71, is arrested.
28 March. Elizabeth Proctor, wife of John Proctor, is arrested.
3 April. Sarah Cloyce, sister of Rebecca Nurse, is accused.
11 April. John Proctor, husband of Elizabeth Proctor, is arrested.
13 April. Giles Corey, age 80, husband of Martha Corey, is accused.
19 April. Abigail Hobbs, Bridget Bishop, Giles Corey, & Mary Warren are examined by magistrates Hathorne & Corwin at Salem Meetinghouse.
22 April. Nehemiah Abbott Jr., William & Deliverance Hobbs, Edward & Sarah Bishop, Mary Easty, Mary Black, Sarah Wildes, & Mary English are examined by magistrates Hathorne & Corwin at Deacon Ingersoll’s ordinary.
2 May. Sarah Morey, Lydia Dustin, Susannah Martin, & Dorcas Hoar are examined by magistrat
es Hathorne & Corwin at Nathaniel Ingersoll’s ordinary.
4 May. Sarah Churchill & the Rev. George Burroughs, former minister of Salem Church, are examined by magistrates Hathorne & Corwin at Ingersoll’s.
10 May. George Jacobs Sr. & granddaughter Margaret Jacobs are arrested; Margaret confesses to “sundry acts of witchcraft” & denounces Jacobs & Rev. George Burroughs, “a wizard & conjurer.” On this date, Sarah Osborne (age 49) dies in Boston jail of sickness after 9 weeks & 2 days’ imprisonment, leaving an unpaid bill of £1:3:0.
Pierce’s broadside gave no hint of his opinion in the matter of witches and wizards, and Isaac could not decide whether he meant to uphold the proceedings or to show—by the number of arrests, Goody Osborne’s death, and the extremes in age of the accused—the folly abroad in Salem Village.
Before the year was out, 162 persons would be denounced by the dissembling village girls or by some of those cried out by them as witches in order to escape the gallows ladder. Fifty-two would be imprisoned, including eight children. Threatened with earthly and infernal punishment, four-year-old Dorcas Good would affirm that her mother “had three birds one black, one yellow, and that these birds hurt the children and afflicted persons.” Sarah Good would be hanged in July, and Dorcas’s infant sister, Mercy, would die in prison shortly afterward. Nineteen innocents would be hanged at Proctor’s Ledge, and an old man, Giles Corey, pressed underneath a weight of stones until his ribs cracked. He died in agony and arrears, owing his jailer £11:6:0 for his upkeep. May God forgive us our debts, for none else will.
Witchcraft aside, not all of the imprisoned were of spotless character. Quick to anger, Giles Corey had beaten the half-wit Jacob Goodall to death sixteen years before the former refused to stand trial for having signed the Black Man’s book. Venerated in Isaac’s time as an upright man, Corey braved peine forte et dure not for his principles, but to save his goods and property from seizure. Bridget Bishop was a notorious scold, who wore a red bodice and played shovelboard on the Sabbath to spite the town. The town was all too eager to believe that her apparition went by night to George Herrick’s bed, capered on a rafter in Ingersoll’s cowhouse, and bewitched John Bly’s sow, which became “stark mad.” William Stacy swore before the magistrates that Bridget’s specter had picked him up and flung him at a wall and, more grievous, had murdered his infant daughter by means of devilry.