by Norman Lock
Bridget Bishop won’t be carted off to Proctor’s Ledge for weeks yet, Isaac told himself. Before rushing in, I must think further on the matter. More hangs in the balance than one cantankerous woman. I needs must be circumspect in how I go about the business, which is more complicated than I had imagined in Lenox. I must act, but not rashly. I would not dare to disturb the universe.
Isaac’s mind teetered, like a top spun on a table—none knowing which way it will fall. The argument went thus:
All men and women are equal in guilt and besmirched by sin. This is a New Englander’s bleak view, and in that I am one, I take John Hathorne’s point: The men and women who stand in the pillory and the dock and who will stand on a rung of the hangman’s ladder are guilty, if not of witchcraft, then of some other venal act. Must I destroy my ancestor for being a product—even an exemplar—of his age? A judge wears the opinions of his day as snugly as his judicial robe. I might as well condemn the blue jay for stealing a sparrow’s egg to satisfy its hunger. Or the house sparrow for pecking to death the purple martin chick in order to annex its nest. We are obedient to urges and, also, obligations that are imposed upon us by natural laws.
And yet the accused suffer greatly in prison as they await their doom. If able, am I not obliged to end their misery?
So Isaac picked at his conscience, which would not entirely crust over its wound. To allay the tooth of doubt, which gnawed at him, he would claim to be an instrument of justice—God’s or man’s. Then he would chastise himself for presuming to be an agent of either. He rode a balance beam, which would raise his self-esteem, only to send it plummeting to self-loathing. He would rejoice in his purpose, which was a righteous one, and then suspect that his motives were impure and his heart was morbid. He was a New Englander; his blood was infused with Puritanism. Its stain had darkened his mind’s complexion throughout his maturity. His somberness went largely unnoticed in Salem, where all was overcast in gloom and sanctimonious men and covenanted women spoke a language of pious mottoes worthy of being stitched in Chinese threads on fine New England linen.
He recalled having seen one hanging in the Hances’ main hall, beside an old-fashioned harquebus belonging to the senile elder.
Vincit qui patitur
HE WHO SUFFERS CONQUERS
Such words do sorrow bring, thought Isaac, who came very near to clenching the silver dollar in his fist and going home. Then he saw a pickerel dart; its powerful body was a glance of gold in water tinctured brown by the roots of cedar trees bending over the murky pond like divining rods. Truth, he admitted, is as elusive as this fish, and divination only a guess.
His clothes having dried in the blaring sun, Isaac dressed, but not before sewing the silver coin into his breech’s pocket. He walked up Norris’s Brook and on to the Great River, which he followed as far as Log Bridge. Thence he cut across a corner of Reading Village until he reached Wilkins Pond and the nearby house of John Buxton.
XI
ood morrow, Isaac Page,” said Hannah as she scattered dried corn for the chickens strutting in the yard. “What brings you to the far edge of naught?”
The afternoon sun fell aslant her face, causing her to squint—an expression, Isaac noted, that brought out the mischief in her hazel eyes.
“I’ve been drumming up trade.”
“Have you managed to drum up much?” Her tone of voice was impudent, like her gaze.
“None to speak of. I hope to change my luck at your mistress’s house.”
She turned her back on him to tend the chickens.
“Do you think something can be found for me to do?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she replied without turning around. Had he mistaken the meaning of her parting words spoken the night before?
Temporizing, he sat down in the dust, careless of his clean clothes, and untied his bootlaces and then tied them again. His heart beat loudly above the gritty noise of dry feed spilling into a tin trough. He was about to take himself off sheepishly, when she turned and, eyes bright with teasing, said she’d ask the mistress of the house. As he waited for an answer, he turned his gaze on the pond to see if the monogamous swans were still gliding amid islands of cloud. In August, it would be choked with water lilies, leaving scarcely enough room for a Jesus bug to skitter. In August, Martha Carrier, George Jacobs, Sr., George Burroughs, John Proctor, and John Willard would be hanged unless Isaac screwed his courage to the sticking place and wrecked the machinery of the law, like a Luddite, to stop its heartless progress. In August, Isaac hoped to be far away from Salem.
“I’m to show you the stile at the bottom of the field,” said Hannah, untying the apron in which she tended the geese and chickens and forked up the midden heap. She pushed an untidy lock of hair beneath her cap. Hannah’s hair was the color of a cello, Isaac thought, and as bright as a long-held note played on the D string of that most poignant of instruments.
They walked across a pasture, surprisingly green after the dry spring and a harsh winter that, scholars of the Salem madness would later speculate, had disposed the colonists to morbid fancies. Hunger and misery can undermine reason’s government, especially in those given to argument or grudges.
To say that Isaac and Hannah walked side by side is not to suggest immodesty. Heaven forbid they should hold hands, lock arms, or let their shoulders touch! Having become used to the Puritan way, Isaac was careful to observe its proprieties. Of the two, in fact, he was the more decorous. Between yard and stile, she smiled warmly at him—even boldly, he’d have thought had he been thinking at all. That afternoon, however, he was inclined to let things go. Perhaps the cause of his sangfroid was his defeat of William Dill or the fine weather and the feeling of well-being after his bath. He was experiencing the pleasurable sensation that comes to children—even Puritan children—taken unaware by a warm sun, a tonic breeze, the odors of grass, clover, and, barely perceptible on the wind, the rich scents of woodland and loam.
As they walked the hundred rods or so from the chicken run to the stile, Hannah chattered gaily. Near the end of their walk, she sang a ditty, such as might be heard on a gust of raucous insobriety from the window of an alehouse where “one and done” was not the rule. It began with “Room for a lusty lively lad, / dery, dery down” and ended in a pinch—one that she gave Isaac on his thigh.
He chided her with a line from The Two Gentlemen of Verona: “‘You, minion, are too saucy!’” He had meant to be amusing, but she had felt him flinch.
“Are you the same man who walked with me in the dark?”
Isaac had the naïveté of many of his sex who will chase a woman and, amazed at having caught her, are frightened by her “impudence.”
“Well?” she asked, having stepped into his path, her hands on her hips. “What do you have to say for yourself, Master Page?” Like William Dill, she was in the habit of seasoning the word master with a pinch of sarcasm. At that moment, scorn seemed predominate to Isaac’s ears.
She’ll think me a dull Jack and turn her attention to some lusty country boy.
“Forgive me, Hannah; I couldn’t sleep last night,” he said slyly, knowing that he must play the part of a lovesick swain.
“Oh? And why not, sir?”
“For thinking of you.”
The compliment pleased her. Her eyes searched the four corners of the field. Satisfied to be alone and unobserved, she kissed him on the mouth. Her lips had not lingered, but his blood grew warm. Her lips had tasted salty—no, not salty. Peppery.
“Do you have a sweetheart?” she asked. Lacking experience of amorous young women, he was unable to tell whether she had spoken curiously or coyly.
“Nay,” he replied. “I do not have a sweetheart.” In that he had a wife, the statement was true. But it was equally true that he had forgotten her as she waited for him in Lenox, their son and daughter fretful in his absence. Husbands are capable of forgetfulness. Yet how could he be said to have forgotten what would not come to be for a century and a half? Time had be
en reorganizing Isaac’s mind; his previous connections were being broken; more and more his memories seemed figments of a dream.
They reached the stile; much of it had rotted.
“There’s wood in the barn,” she said, “if you do not scorn a niggling project.”
“Did your mistress mention what it’s worth to have her husband escape a broken neck?”
“Good church folk disdain talk of money!” replied Hannah airily. “Especially with the Reverend Parris, who has the gall to ask for it, as if to preach God’s Word to imbeciles is not reward enough.”
“Aye, they do natter on about sanctity. But shouldn’t they honor the Covenant of Works, and am I not a worker for hire?”
“It is one they make with God and not with itinerant carpenters, whose rough cheeks can stand a razor.” She laughed and would have happily played Phyllis to Isaac’s bearded Strephon if she had read Edmund Spenser. She was a natural for an Arcadian pastoral, although theirs was unfolding not far from Wilkins Pond, in a resolutely prosaic age. (Fifty years before, Cromwell and the Puritans had pulled down the Globe Theatre, a place of “lascivious Mirth and Levity.”)
“I ought to have known better than to come among flinty Puritans!” he said, pretending to be sullen and hoping for a second kiss, no matter that her lips were chapped.
“Well, you will not starve, and there’s a place for you tonight among the cows. I’ll show you where the lumber’s stored.”
Isaac wondered if it was to be his lot in Salem to sleep where cows dreamed the sweet dreams of kine—fresh grass, cool brook water, and an end to the scourge of flies.
Beyond the fence and broken stile, an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
XII
ore bird, Goodman Page?” asked the stout Master Buxton as he sawed a leg from a goose sitting, solemn and headless, on a silver platter. Evidently, the Buxtons stood too high in Salem society for plain pewter.
Isaac chewed on a thigh and anticipated—his mind growing torpid—a good night’s sleep on a mattress stuffed with feathers having once belonged to the goose’s kith or kin.
John Buxton was not one of those stringy Christians whose scowling faces could spoil meat and sour milk. Though he had a seat in the meetinghouse proportionate to his girth (his rotund goodwife had another) and knew the Bay Psalm Book front to back, he believed in a Jovian religion of the flesh and would gladly have made one with the jolly crew at Merry Mount had it not long ago been dispersed by killjoys. An admirable fellow, he bore, without complaint, the gout and other maladies common to those who would not show ingratitude to the Almighty by ignoring the plenty He set before them by refusing the smallest crumb. “God would not have given me an appetite if He had not intended for me to satisfy it” was a thing Master Buxton often said in the company of his corpulent brethren.
To say that Mistress Buxton was plump was not to do her justice. Her figure, which, in her youth, had verged on voluptuousness, had achieved the perfection that fruit does just before it falls and rots.
Neither husband nor wife appeared any the worse for a famishing winter or the recent aggression of the Indians. The pair of them was as well padded as the goose whose juices were beginning to thicken around the carrots.
“Did you suffer much in Rhode Island, Goodman Page?” asked Goody Buxton. “They say the winters be perishing cold there.”
“No colder than Massachusetts’s,” rumbled the provider of the feast, who was zealous in matters pertaining to his province’s reputation.
“I can never remember if Providence is north or south of Boston.”
“Providence is everywhere for God’s elect. All others be damned,” said Hannah.
“Hannah, do be quiet!” admonished the mistress of the house, shaking her finger at the flippant servant. Though lacking in volition, her three chins also shook, as if they had a mind of their own. “Get into the kitchen, where you belong, girl!”
“Massachusetts winters are intended to mortify us and make us worthy of Divine favor,” said Buxton, who wore a dimity waistcoat and a fleck of mashed potato on his cheek. “Is it not so, Elizabeth?”
Her eyes riveted on a buttered biscuit, Elizabeth made no reply.
Isaac’s attention was caught by a shaft of evening light burnishing silver cups and platters and by the oak wainscoting made glorious by coats of beeswax applied, doubtless, by Hannah, whose indentured status was somewhat higher than a slave’s. As in the case of a slave, a servant could be beaten at and for the master’s pleasure; unlike the slave, the servant’s back could not be flayed with impunity—in theory at least. “You’ve many fine things,” said Isaac, a hint of disapproval in his voice.
Buxton received the remark as a compliment and reflected on the exquisite nature of his conscience. “The poor are luckier to have nothing that will give them pangs of guilt for breaking sumptuary laws. I assure you, I have qualms, Goodman Page, and they trouble me constantly.”
“Poverty is its own reward,” said Isaac with an irony that went unnoticed.
“Jesus said the same in the Sermon on the Mount,” assented the mistress, who delivered herself of a polite belch, which caused her wattle to wobble.
“‘They that will be rich fall into many temptations and snares,’” intoned Buxton gravely. Immediately, he shouted, “More goose!” as he wiped sweat from a bald head that reminded Isaac of the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica, which he had once seen on a rainy day in Rome.
Hannah returned from the kitchen, where she had been worrying over the jam tarts. Slyly smiling at Isaac, she carved more bird and heaped the master’s plate with meat. His mouth full of peas and potato, he pointed toward Isaac’s with his knife, and before his guest could swallow his claret, Hannah had served him likewise.
“Excellent goose, my dear!” Buxton mumbled to his wife, who had not fed it, beheaded it, cooked it, or put it on the table, though she would suck the bones of marrow before Hannah took them to the midden heap.
“My goose always turns out well,” she replied complacently, spilling her ruby-colored tipple down the purple front of her brocaded gown.
Isaac Page, he said to himself, you’ve stepped into an engraving by Hogarth, who, in five years, will be born in Bartholomew Close and will be laid to rest at Chiswick in St. Nicholas’s Churchyard forty years before you yourself have drawn your first breath, in a red clapboarded house, at 27 Hardy Street, in Salem. It is a thing to think upon and marvel at!
“Tell us, Goodman Page, if Rhode Island be the godless colony it was when Roger Williams and that obnoxious Hutchinson woman were banished there,” said Buxton. Without waiting for a reply, he continued: “The Siwanoy murdered her at Pelham Bay, along with her children, after the villain Kieft stirred up the tribe against the English in New Netherland. She ought to have remained in Providence, near her friends the Narragansett.” Buxton wiped his perspiring face on his sleeve, leaving behind a glister of goose grease. “Have no truck with Dutchmen; it is a wise saying, and true.” He picked a morsel from between his teeth with the point of his knife. “When he was dead and buried, Williams’s house fell down into its own cellar. We took it as a judgment of the Lord on his deluded soul.”
“Praise Him!” mumbled Goody Buxton, wetting her finger in the claret and then sucking on it delicately. “Hannah, where are the tarts?”
“The tarts are a disaster,” she announced, wiping floury hands on her apron. “The meal was weevily.”
“Bring them forthwith!” shouted the master in high resentment and disallowance. “I will eat the jam out of them.”
“I threw the lot out the back door for the squirrels.”
“Damn! It be a terrible sin to waste God’s bounty on squirrels!”
“It was done according to His will,” said Hannah, putting on a solemn face.
“What? Are my raspberry preserves lost?” asked the mistress in great distress, although she had not picked the berries, washed, mashed, boiled, or jarred them.
“There be
some still in the jar.”
“Bring it, you careless wench!”
Hannah brought the stone jar to the table, and the couple stoically made do.
“God provides!” intoned Master Buxton, licking his apostle spoon.
“And to those of His elect, He giveth jam,” recited his goodwife.
“And to the damned, He giveth their just deserts!” said Hannah, wearing a smile for Isaac.
“It matters not at all to them if they be weeviled!” complained her mistress, thinking of the lost tarts.
“Sinners are not fussy,” replied Hannah with a toss of her pretty head.
“They are like the savages, who are content to gnaw on roots,” agreed her master. Having swallowed another draft of claret, Buxton showed his magnanimity toward his nearest fellow man by saying, “I inspected your workmanship, Goodman Page, and it were well done!”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Isaac. “And I thank you for supper and a bed in the cowshed.”
The mistress of the house clapped her dimpled hands delightedly. “Why, Isaac Page, you made a rhyme! It must be a lovely thing to be a poet.”
“I hope you be not choosy, sir!” admonished the master of the house, trying to get a leg up on his high horse. But he was too wheezy. “It would be churlish to turn your nose up at a cowshed!”