by Norman Lock
“God provides for the dung beetle and the louse,” said Hannah. “Our guest would not ask for more.”
“Well said, Hannah! Goodman Page, the Lord loves you as much as He does the meanest of His creatures.”
“The cross would have been a pretty piece of joinery,” said Isaac, “seeing as how the Lord made it.”
Buxton gasped not by reason of Isaac’s impiety but from the weight of his lordly gut sitting on his lungs.
“My husband, who knows about stiles, said ours is one to admire,” said the mistress, her eyes glazed like the skin of the goose, which she was daintily nibbling.
Buxton pulled a thread from the Gospel of Matthew: “‘His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.’”
“It will give the carpenter joy if you’ll put a few talents in his pocket,” said the naughty Hannah.
Buxton turned to her and snarled a thread from the Book of Malice: “And as for you, Mistress Sloth, I say unto the Lord, ‘… cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth’ over the ruined tarts!”
Hannah filled the portly pair’s flagons to the brim. “I ought to have baked a witch cake,” she said, winking at Isaac. “For surely it was a witch who weeviled the flour.”
“It be very like a witch to bedevil a tart,” said the mistress of the house, suppressing yet another belch.
“Satan is the patron saint of tarts, drabs, and trollops!” said the plainly besotted master, pleased with himself.
“It be blasphemous to say Satan is a saint!” cried Hannah, looking to Heaven in mock consternation.
The mistress guffawed into her claret cup.
“Pray you, straighten the Delft,” said Master Buxton, pointing to a cockeyed ceramic plate hanging on the wall, by which token the little world of Salem knew him for a man who laid up treasures for the love of God.
Having done as bidden, Hannah furtively knocked awry a portrait of her mistress, whose youthful complexion resembled a dish of curds.
“I cannot draw breath!” gasped Goody Buxton. “Lord, save me, for I feel I am like to die of it!”
“You’re being strangled by your corset, Elizabeth! It’s too tightly cinched.”
“Hannah does it to spite me!” carped his goodwife, fanning her red face with a pudgy hand.
Hannah smiled serenely.
“Girl, fetch your mistress a cup of water!”
Hannah had not taken two steps when the master gave a second order: “And more wine!”
“Tomorrow you’ll be on your way again,” said Buxton in a tone that left Isaac uncertain whether he had spoken in the interrogative or the imperative. He was inclined to think the latter. Isaac was eager to be away from the fatuousness of the wife, the buffoonery of the husband, and the greediness of the pair of them. They were like rats in a pharaoh’s granary, eating themselves to death. If God be an indwelling spirit, as the Antinomians maintain, Isaac could not imagine Him sitting, serene and majestic, within the Buxtons’ lard-caked hearts.
Master “Rowley Powley” became fabulously sick. His great face, with its massive jowls, inclined dangerously toward his plate, where the goose’s remnant bones were embedded in the sauce. Hannah saved the plate in time, but the man’s profusely perspiring head fell hard against the table. Elizabeth Buxton stared, perplexed.
“Goodman, will you help me lug Lord Gut to bed?” asked Hannah.
“Aye,” said Isaac, and between them, they raised the beef-faced sot, dragged him over the doorsill of his chamber, and put him into bed, boots and all.
“Will he live?” asked Isaac, mopping his own face after having struggled with a grampus, which was presently snoring with the might and dignity befitting a landowner, slaveholder, and a covenanted member of Salem Village Church.
“I live in the hope he will not.” Then she sang a lilting air over the inert lump of flesh and sated appetite, as the Devil himself would have sung over the bloated corpse of a hypocrite:
Let such a hog
Lap whey like a dog,
While we drinke good Canary.
“Hannah, will you walk with me tonight?”
“I will.”
She led Isaac out the door. Goody Buxton, her extravagant headdress askew, had managed to get herself into a wing chair and was snoring in concert with her husband.
ISAAC HELPED HANNAH OVER THE STILE. His hand trembled when he freed the hem of her dress, which had caught on a splinter. Teasing him, she sang:
O Hangman, stay thy hand, And stay it for a while For I fancy I see my true love A coming across the yonder stile.
He took her arm, and they crossed the meadow. The sun was low in the sky, and to the east, on the other side of the Great River, black night draped over blacker Hathorne’s Hill. Near Thorndike Hill, William Dill lay like a dead man on his cot, having not the strength to light the Betty lamp. At the far side of the meadow, where the Buxton place bordered the Putnam family burying ground, Isaac once again saw the white horse.
“It’s a beautiful animal.”
“What is?”
“Buxton’s mare.”
“Molly’s in her box. I put her there myself before I made the supper.” She turned in the direction of his gaze. “There’s no horse there. It may be an apparition that you see.”
“I don’t believe in a spectral world, where wicked girls watch invisible spirits flit from the Devil’s consorts into the minds and bodies of their victims!” He had spoken emphatically, as one would have done whose resolve was loosening. Certainty is a two-stranded skein: thought and action. The former unravels first. (Many a time there is a third strand, called “doubt.”)
“You believe, then, that they are wicked?” she asked seriously.
“I do!”
“I, too, have thought that they be wicked girls, who want only to do mischief.”
In Hannah, he saw the immature strain of a skepticism that, a century hence, would ripen into the Yankee temperament. He could not see so far as a barleycorn into her heart, however, to be certain of her motives.
“Then you don’t believe in the spectral evidence being used to condemn those they cry out?” Isaac could have been a magistrate examining a suspected witch instead of a man out for a country walk with a girl.
Hannah shook her head, signifying … What? he wondered. That she did not believe in an invisible world of malicious agents? She scoffed at the notion that they were apparent only to Annie Putnam and her claque? Or might it be that Hannah could go no further into the matter than to shake her head in uncertainty? Always, for as long as Young Goodman Brown lived, he would doubt the virtue of his once-dear wife, Faith. And so, too, would their author, Isaac Page, for his sins—no, for his great-great-grandfather’s sins.
“And yet the magistrates be godly men,” said Isaac. In just such a tone, Mark Antony had incited the Roman mob against the noble Brutus.
She gave no reply, and they walked on together in silence.
“My eyes ache,” said Isaac to change the subject. They did, in fact, pain him.
“Shall I send out my specter and heal them with a kiss?” asked Hannah, having recovered her good humor.
“When I first saw you, I took you for a witch,” he replied, only half in jest, because of a disconcerting sensation that he felt first on one eyelid, then on the other. “You turned my wits.”
“It’s a power the Devil gives to women to ensnare a man,” she said, smiling.
Turning his head sharply, Isaac saw the white horse and, where the last light of day was dying into night, a woman in the shape of Goody Buxton making haste toward a towering pine that could have been the very tree set blazing by Captain Standish when he subdued Comus and his crew at Merry Mount. Isaac could almost hear the pine shriek.
Frightened, he turned to Hannah. Her eyes were cold; her mouth seemed full of teeth.
He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and saw again the gaily smiling girl, her auburn hair peeking from her cap.
“Isaac, you look as though you’ve been bled! I thought the greedy fool had stuffed and swilled himself nearly to death, to have been made so sick, but perhaps the goose was spoiled. You’d better sit before you fall flat.”
So shaken was he, he let her help him sit.
“Rest your head in my lap.” She was all tenderness and solicitude.
As Isaac fought his rising gorge, he could not believe that, moments before, her pretty face had appeared bestial. Doubtless, his distempered fancy had betrayed him. Might he not have been mistaken in the white horse, in podgy Mistress Buxton’s phantom, and in the infernal tree? Surely, they’d been figments of an imagination inclined to morbidity, intensified by a rich dinner and the impression left with him by the master and the mistress that the world was turning helter-skelter! He shivered in momentary fear.
“You’re cold!” Hannah took off her shawl and covered him.
Yes, he told himself. Something I ate disagreed with me, or else the noxious air wafting from the kitchen midden has made me sick. The smell had been appalling.
“Shall I get Dr. Griggs to come?” she asked.
While preparing for the journey, Isaac had encountered Griggs in John Hale’s A Modest Enquiry. In Salem Town, on the afternoon that Isaac mended the stile, Roger Toothaker, one of the “cunning folk,” was being watched by William Griggs, the court’s physician, for evidence of diabolical operations and mischief. Griggs had previously declared that the accusing girls, who sniffed out witches like pigs do truffles, “were bitten and pinched by invisible agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way … so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits, or natural disease to effect.” In the doctor’s opinion, Abigail Williams and her sorority of spites were “sadly afflicted of they knew not what distempers” and likely “under an evil hand.” Griggs’s testimony was as good as a writ, and a writ a death warrant. Roger Toothaker would die in Boston jail on June 16—six days after Bridget Bishop flew.
“Dr. Griggs has often attended my mistress and master with physic and leeches.”
“Nay, I’m feeling better now.”
“You scared me, Isaac Page!”
And you, me, Hannah.
“Will you rest awhile longer?”
“Help me up. The grass is wet with the evening dew.” After she had done as he asked, he said, “Let’s walk on.”
“If you’re able.”
“Aye, a walk will do me good.”
She laid a palm on his brow. “You are too warm, I think.”
“The cool night air will soon fix that.”
“What way shall we take?” she asked.
“There where the tall pine tree stands like a finger pointing heavenward.”
“It does seem a finger, now you say it.”
“Does it enjoin us to look to God, or does it accuse Him?”
“You mustn’t say so, Isaac!” she whispered. “There be people abroad in the woods at night. You need take care not to be misconstrued.”
“What sort of people go abroad in the forest after dark?”
“They are not all like us.”
“And do they dance?” he asked slyly.
“Aye, there be some girls who like to dance among themselves.”
“Do you like to go dancing in the woods, Hannah?”
“Sometimes.” She had hesitated in answering him. Had she seen the tall pine burst into golden flame? Had she seen the birds fall like torches from their burning nests? Did she hear, as he did now, the fire roaring? Did she smell its acrid smoke?
“Aren’t you afraid of meeting the Devil when you dance?” he asked, helpless not to cast a look over his shoulder.
“He’s shy of dancing girls—afraid that we’ll step on his tail in our merry reels.” She had made light of the Devil, but Isaac sensed that her bold words were shadowed by apprehension. Suddenly, she took his hand and cried, “Oh, Isaac, I saw the awful fear on Mary Warren’s face when the imps stopped her mouth as she tried to tell the truth! She swore to the magistrates that they threatened to burn her with ‘hot tongs … to drown her and make her run naked through the hedges!’”
“Mary Warren,” said Isaac, as though she had stepped out of the forest and curtsied to him. “Mary Warren,” he repeated like a man who had become stupefied or entranced.
He knew the story of the Proctors’ hired girl from his past—that is, his future—research into the trials of the witches. Racked by the magistrates’ relentless examining, Mary had come to believe, as they declared, that having confessed to shamming and then recanted, she’d given the Devil license to assume her form and torment the afflicted who cried out on her in court. Mary must make one with the girls again, she knew, or be destroyed.
And was she herself not mocked and hurt by the apparition of Alice Parker, who had killed Mary’s mother and stricken her sister deaf and dumb? Mary was caught in a tightening noose, whose braided strands were fear and vengeance, so that she must cry out more witches. Among those Mary had condemned were John and Elizabeth Proctor, who had tried to compel her silence to save themselves from hanging—or so Mary Warren claimed and, in time, came to believe. Who can know the truth where liars reign?
“It was the Devil’s book, my master Proctor brought me,” Mary had sworn to John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, who beamed on her, leaned back smugly in their chairs, and flounced their neck cloths complacently.
That great pine tree, Hannah; say it does not burn!
She did not reply. Had he spoken aloud or only in his mind?
Isaac and Hannah walked into the woods. Now and then, he would turn his head sharply, wanting—and at the same time dreading—to see a phantasm beyond the periphery of his vision. As a child, he had believed that another world existed just out of sight; whether it meant him good or ill, he could not have guessed. He would gaze into a mirror in the hope of glimpsing in a corner of the reflected room a face not his own. God’s face. He’d search the looking glass until his eyes pained him. More and more, his eyes hurt him now, as if he were keeping watch.
WINTER 1851
LENOX, MASSACHUSETTS
his rum is a fiery concoction! Nature intended its raw essence to sweeten our coffee or reward a restive horse and not, in its distillation, as a means to rout reason, corrupt the Indians, or barter for slaves. Thus are innocent purposes often bent. The world is ceaseless alchemy, and only a few poor scribes, like destitute and defamed Edgar Poe, can sometimes transmute reality’s base metal by plying the aqua regia in their inkwells. I have not the skill to produce the noble metal gold (or a morsel of chocolate for Sophia). My genius, if I can call it that, is to turn a shameful doubt into stories, guilt into tales. In any case, it scarcely matters whether one is a giant of his age and trade or Barnum’s Lilliputian; time’s maw swallows them both with equal relish.
And so to you, the lately wretched Mr. Poe, and to my friend Melville (though he does tend to force himself on one), I drink—and to all else who spin straw into nothing but baskets, and empty ones at that. Certainty, like liquor, is a corrosive that eats away at truth, which is said to be sober. How easy it is to rebuke this woman or exculpate that man when one is convinced of his own rightness! Because they dwell in uncertainty, philosophers would make poor judges and worse theologians—or authors of romantic tales, whose readers want a pretty ending.
Nathaniel, you would do better to pour libations than drink them! Ah, writing is a mean occupation. I’ve heard it said that the portion of rum that evaporates during its manufacture is called the “angel’s share.” It’s a lovely conceit, and so from this bottle, I offer up the spiritus to the fallen angels of my tribe.
“Nathaniel, you’ve drunk enough for one afternoon!”
“Sophia, my dear! You startled me. Are you feeling refreshed?”
“No
t in the least. Nathaniel, you’re never so talkative as when I want to take a nap!”
“I ask your pardon. My voice and I do get on well together. Excepting you, I can think of no one else I’d rather talk to, although I tend to speak foolishly when there’s no one by to hear. Come and sit. Have you heard enough of my new tale to offer an opinion?”
“‘All things desire to return to their origin’ is farfetched even for you.”
“It was Henry Thoreau’s conceit, you know, and he must take the blame for it.”
“Husband, I hope you’re not so small-minded as to sulk at a criticism.”
“I’m not sulking! But you’ve got the little end of the horn. The interest of my tale lies in the Salem of 1692 and not in time travel.”
“Then I’d leave your great-great-grandfather’s spectacles out of it.”
“Ah, but they have another part to play. I entreat you, Sophia, to withhold judgment!”
“Very well.”
“But what of the story itself?”
“I think you should give the Devil his due. He makes no appearance. Readers ought to feel the horror of creation’s bogey, or they’ll believe that Salem folk were fools, or worse.”
“I cannot write the Devil! He is beyond my skill. Readers can get their fill of horrors in Dante’s and Milton’s books!”
“Don’t be peevish, Nathaniel! It’s unbecoming in a man of your eminence.”
“I’m a parvenu in the business of letters. I envy those artful Salem girls the cunning of their embroidery. Their stories were so rich in uncanny detail that I ask myself if they weren’t indeed tormented by specters—or with the writer’s itch at least.”
“Nonsense! Sit down and finish your tale. If you like, I’ll play the part of scribe.”
“Won’t you take the barkeep’s part first and pour me a glass of rum?”
“Dypsomania is an unattractive quality and unworthy of your—”
“Noble name?”
“Nathaniel, I’m sick of your unending argument with a dead man!”