Tooth of the Covenant

by Norman Lock

  “I can no more separate his story from my own than I can skin water!”

  “Then for Heaven’s sake, finish it.”

  As soon as she came near all fell into fits.

  “Bridget Byshop, You are now brought before Authority to give acc’o of what witchcrafts you are conversant in.”

  “I take all this people [turning her head & eyes about] to witness that I am clear.”

  —The Examination of Bridget Byshop at Salem village

  19. Apr. 1692, by John Hauthorn & Jonath: Corwin Esq’rs

  SUMMER 1692

  THE PROVINCE OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY

  I

  saac no longer felt a stranger in Salem Village. With every breath, he tasted the animated atoms of what particularized it in time. They were as stimulating to his tongue as if he had drunk cold water from a limestone spring. Each thing’s novelty, the character of each person, so unlike that of people five generations hence, stung like an astringent on a wound. Now and then, he thought of Constance, but the very idea of a wife was shrinking like ice on a hot skillet.

  It was already the fifth of June when Isaac realized with a start that he had yet to walk the mile separating Thorndike Hill, where William Dill had his cowshed, and the heart of the village, where the meetinghouse, watch house, pump, and pillory marked the crossroads. On nearby Andover Road stood the parsonage, where Betty Parris had first nursed the viper at her childish breast that had set neighbor against neighbor like teeth on edge, and Ingersoll’s ordinary, where Hathorne and Corwin interrogated the accused witches brought before them by Deputy Sheriff Herrick. Five days were left till Bridget Bishop’s soul would be unhoused, and her body rudely planted in the ground, to come again as bane.

  Bridget was being irresistibly drawn toward the gallows while Isaac dallied with Hannah Smyth. Now like a vexing tooth beyond salving, his conscience pricked. He knew he must act or be no better than the man he’d gone to such lengths to confront—worse, in fact, since Isaac had the benefit of a retrospective view. And yet his rancor toward John Hathorne was less sharp than it had been the week before. Isaac, who, in Lenox, had pictured himself as Joshua, was, in Salem Village, more and more a Judas.

  His day’s work done, Isaac put away his tools and went to meet Hannah at the stile. Taking an eastern route, they crossed the Great River at Indian Bridge and went on to Mile Brook, which skirted the Birch Plain at the border of Wenham, where the old plantation farms were already shrouded in darkness. The pleasure they took in each other was not an uncommon one in Salem, not even under the stern, beetling authority of the New Jerusalem. Next to the willows aslant the brook, they lay together in the grass.

  Except for a faction whose narrowness made them sullen, Puritans were not the ascetics Isaac had supposed, although in that dangerous year, they made a greater show of pious living than heretofore. A woman’s skirts might not have billowed, but neither were they drab. Dressed in a brocaded waistcoat, a wealthy man would serve his guests Madeira in chased silver goblets rather than cider or ale in tin cups and take pride in his jade chess pieces. He might have stood before a magistrate and confessed to having fornicated with another sort of jade, but he’d be forgiven because his wealth and standing were a proof of his heavenly election. Though the saved might stumble and fall on the way to their foreordained reward, they would find their footing and pass, in God’s time, through the eye of the needle. Those predestined for glory will achieve it—struggle against it however they may; this is Calvinist doctrine, and on it rested the Puritan state.

  “What troubles you, Isaac?” asked Hannah, putting her dress to rights. “Is the work at the sawmill not to your liking?”

  “I’ve been neglecting a duty.”

  “What is it?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “You are unfriendly!” she chided.

  “It was an oath taken long ago and in another place. It doesn’t concern you, Hannah.”

  “You speak harshly, and I wonder if I’ve not been reckless in confiding what I kept most secret. Are we not now very like a husband and wife, Isaac Page?”

  “It pleases me to think it, but not everything a husband knows can be told to his wife.”

  “Does the opposite hold true?” Her pretty mouth was screwed into a pout.

  “Aye.”

  “Henceforth, I’ll keep my secret safe from you!” She’d spoken with a vexation that Isaac had not heard before in a voice that had been either flippant or beguiling.

  “Hannah, don’t be cross! I must do this one thing first.”

  “And you won’t tell me what thing you must do?”

  “I’ve business with the magistrates.”

  “I shudder for any who has business with them.”

  “Will you be patient with me?”

  “I’ll bear it awhile. But hear me, Isaac; I’m not Hagar, and I won’t be cast out into the wilderness!”

  He wanted to ask what she had meant by “wilderness,” but he let the matter drop.

  The next morning, Isaac crossed the Great River at Log Bridge and walked east on Meeting House Road toward the village’s seat of government, spiritual and civil. Although he was not yet ready to speak to him, Isaac wanted at least a glimpse of his great-greatgrandfather, who was a frequent visitor to the meetinghouse and Ingersoll’s now that he had souls to weigh. As Isaac drew near to the crossroads, he was overcome by the fear and nausea that had stricken him in Andover Woods. His skin prickled, his legs buckled, and he bent forward toward the dusty lane, as if his spine were a rod conducting an electric current between the heart of Salem Village and his own, which beat so fast, he feared his ribs would crack. The antique spectacles in his pocket had reached their magnetic source, he supposed. They yearned to rejoin their owner, Magistrate Hathorne. The intensity of the moment terrified Isaac. He felt, he would later say, as one pegged out on the ground, waiting for the fire ants to devour him.

  He turned and fled like a man with the Furies at his heels. He hurried south on Ipswich Road and, between Governor’s Plain and Orchard Farm, entered the town of Northfields. He crossed the North River on a ferry pulled by a team of straining mules. He hardly stopped for breath until he reached the wharves of Salem Town. Like any other port, Salem’s was a basin in which the dirty linen of many foreign nations steeped. There men and women compacted with their own devilish appetites and wore their sins like finery, indifferent to constables, ministers, and magistrates. They were stains on the hem of the town, frustrating the resolve of the most beefy-armed of washerwomen to scrub them clean.

  II

  saac stopped fifteen miles short of the place where John Winthrop and his bedraggled flock of saints had made landfall at Boston, on the Charles, in 1630, at the start of the Great Migration. By the time Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, Bartholomew Gedney, and other of Salem’s magistrates had taken in hand the righteous winnowing of “the precious from the vile,” towns and villages surrounding the city upon a hill had become a home to informers, their meetinghouses courts of no appeal, their ministers autocrats, and the moral high ground where their covenants had taken root a wasteland of stony hearts. In the “redeemer nation,” of Massachusetts, moral and civil law were identical and administered by pious men, who would trample, in big black boots, over the rights of man, which had yet to be proclaimed by Thomas Paine. The high ground in Salem Town was occupied by the place of execution. (Is it not often so?) Zeal is a pivot by which love can turn to hate, sanguine hearts become sanguinary, and the hangman’s rope grow taut.

  Spellbound, Isaac watched Massachusetts Bay tremble, a dazzle of gold coins minted by the evening sun. In time to come, the wharves would multiply from a handful of wooden fingers resting on the water till, in 1846, when Isaac was appointed Inspector of the Revenue for the Port of Salem, fifty piers fretted the harbor, crowded with stevedores, ropewalkers, sailors, merchants, carters, draymen, and drabs—all clamoring in the tongues of several nations, amid warehouses, custom sheds, chandleries, counting-houses,
rum holes, and brothels.

  The bay that sprawled before him in 1692 was the same Isaac had studied through his glass from the balcony of Salem Custom House as he stood beneath a gilded eagle and a blue slate roof. He and Constance had lived on Chestnut Street, where he wrote tales set in the time and place in which he now found himself. The best of them contained an element of doubt, as if the storyteller could not entirely be sure that demons had not left the forest in which they had been hiding since creation’s first instant to harry New Englanders. The more Isaac struggled to purge himself of medieval superstition, the more mired he became in “error.”

  Isaac Page was born, Minerva-like, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s brain, which ought to have left him no room to harbor thoughts or desires of his own. But could Hawthorne be sure that a rebellious thought would not sometimes cross his creature’s mind? Would he not resent his author, as his author sometimes did God, and wish to disenthrall himself? What is the chain that binds a creator to his figment? Are the links adamantine or gossamer? Invoking Magistrate John Hathorne that he might be rid of him, how could Hawthorne hate him who, long ago, had passed into dust and—the final stop in humankind’s mournful recessional—words? Nothing was left of his great-great-grandfather to hate, since one cannot abhor a noun, a jostle of adjectives, or even the verbs by which men do wrong.

  ISAAC THOUGHT OF THE PURITANS’ first winter, 1630, when the livid bay at Boston’s ragged hem had frozen. He pictured himself shivering in a wattle and daub hut, huddling by an inadequate fire, and straining his eyes to read dismal tracts by the light of a tallow candle, a scene such as John Winthrop had described in his journal. In vain did Isaac try to imagine the taste of boiled acorns chased with water neither sweet nor wholesome. Trembling with fevers and in fear of the Devil’s own savages, two hundred souls perished before the Lyon returned from England with supplies. Isaac admitted to himself that he could not truly picture or imagine the desperate circumstances from which his ancestor had sprung. Lives are bound to be stunted when seeds are sown among tares.

  It’s folly to think I can judge him honestly! The fault lies in our stars.

  Then a voice, which might have been his, whispered, “Remember who you are, Isaac Page, and the guilt you carry in another’s name.”

  What keeps me from boarding that Dutch fluyt straining to be away with the tide? Isaac asked himself, sick of his wavering. I could travel to the Spice Islands, in the Banda Sea, delight in the odors of nutmeg, clove, and cinnamon, and dine with the senapati of Java on fish and coconuts. I could claim an uninhabited island and declare myself lord of its mosquitoes. I would make it my capital of Naught and pray, as John Winthrop did, “O Lord, crucify the world unto me!”

  Isaac was startled by a hand clapped on his shoulder, a hand heavy and raddled as a ham.

  “By the glaze in your eye, I guess you are a seafaring man looking for a ship.”

  “I’m no seafarer and have never ventured onto any deeps, save what a ferryboat could reach,” replied Isaac, who noted the milky cast of a cataract covering the other man’s eyes.

  “Well, friend, you’ve the look of a man out of his element.”

  “I am that,” replied Isaac. The element is time, he added to himself.

  “Smoke?” asked the other, who had opened his pouch.

  “Thank you, no, I’ve a canker.”

  The man prepared his pipe. Shall I describe him as he busied himself with the totems of his vice? One would call him an old man, although he had lived six less than threescore years. His face was darkly seamed, his hair white, his back bent no matter how he tried to stand erect, and his feet were well gone in the arches. He gave the appearance of being someone who had toiled much and hard in every sort of weather.

  “Seth Grimes is my name,” he said, having put his kindled pipe between his teeth and offered Isaac a hand to shake. “Shipbuilder here in Salem Town. I came out to see the Beverly. I laid her keel. These days, my sons bear the brunt.” He studied Isaac’s palm as though to read the younger man’s destiny in it. “By your calluses, you’re a farmer or mechanic.”

  “A carpenter,” said Isaac. “I’m looking for work.”

  “Can you let a rabbet into a sternpost?”

  “I think you mean something other than what I eat in stew; but if it be joinery, one join is very like another. I’m handy with a drawing knife, mallet, augur, and chisel.”

  “You speak sense, mister. Would you like to learn boats?”

  “Aye, if it be for wages. I’ve had enough of Salem thrift.”

  “Like you the sound of five shillings and found?”

  Isaac agreed and shook hands on it with Grimes, who clapped him on the back again. The two men walked to a dock on the harbor’s far side, where the noise of hammering, sawing, and gouging timber—each noise peculiar to its tool—escaped the open casements of a long, narrow shed on which was painted with a flourish:

  GRIMES & SONS, SHIPWRIGHTS

  GRIMES AND HIS THREE GROWN SONS taught Isaac the refinements of their craft—far stricter than the joinery he had learned at Brook Farm. Errors are intolerable in a shallop or a ketch. His ears delighted in the chuck of a mallet, the skirl of a file, the chuff of a saw, the sweet sound of a brace and bit, the silken whir of a plane or an adze as he shaved the tender wood like a barber following the grain of a man’s cheek with a razor. A false note would raise the father’s eyebrows and cause his fellow musicians to frown. Seldom did they misplace a note or sour a tune unless it be that the wood was at fault because of a knot or a scab of resin. Isaac enjoyed his work, and the days passed—one very like another.

  He had a room above a ropewalk. He ate his dinner at Gedney’s tavern, often in the company of the old widower. After a chop or a roasted bird, the two liked to play Put or Nine Men’s Morris. They drank ale, and if they scoffed at the “one and done” rule, they took care not to become besotted. “The stocks be a poor breakfast,” said Grimes, who was not talkative, except as it concerned a boat taking shape in the yard or anecdotes of his sons. Later, Isaac could recall their having discussed, once only, “the witch business in the village.”

  “The times are passing strange, Isaac,” said Grimes. “I wonder at them and at the stories I hear of goings-on in the village. I try to pay them no mind, but my friend Philip English has had to flee the town, and his wife, Mary, whom I know to be a good soul, is locked up in Arnold’s jail for witchery. She’s confined with Goody Nurse, as well as that Emerson woman, who buried her newborn twins in the garden, and Grace, the black slave, who birthed her child down a privy hole. Or so they say.”

  “They do have much to say,” said Isaac.

  “Aye, and much rubbish besides.” He smoked pensively. “It’s said that Rebecca Nurse’s specter choked Mary Warren, so that she couldn’t testify against her, and Philip’s specter pricked the girl with a pin. For the life of me, I can’t fathom how those simple girls can weave such fancies into stories that the whole province accepts as God’s truth!”

  “He keeps His truth well hidden,” said Isaac glumly.

  “It be plain enough for masters Corwin and Hathorne—God rot them!”

  “It’s difficult to know what God wants of us,” said Isaac.

  “I tell my sons we should build an ark. You’d be welcome to sail with us. Ah, but my boys only laugh at me! Young men are fools.”

  “You think He intends to drown His people in New England?”

  “I think it won’t be long before George Herrick comes to take us all to jail.”

  III

  he day of Bridget Bishop’s hanging had come and gone unnoticed by Isaac. He had not walked to Proctor’s Ledge to see her tumble down the ladder’s rungs. If he’d heard shouts and huzzahs carried on the wind to Derby Wharf, he would have mistaken them for the screech and cries of sea-birds, which were ample at Salem Harbor. He would have remained blissfully unaware of her execution and extinction had it not been for another of Richard Pierce’s broadsides, which Isaac did not r
ead till weeks after the event.

  NEWS OF PERSONS PREVIOUSLY EXAMINED IN SALEM VILLAGE

  (Published at Boston, on the 1st day of July, in the Year of Our Lord 1692}

  2 June. Bridget Bishop, of Salem Town, is convicted of witchcraft.

  10 June. Bridget Bishop is hanged at Proctor’s Ledge, in Salem Town.

  16 June. Roger Toothaker dies in Boston jail.

  29-30 June. Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Sarah Wildes, Sarah Good, & Elizabeth Howe are sentenced to death by magistrates John Hathorne & Jonathan Corwin at the Salem Town House.

  Isaac sat with the paper on his lap and stared at Salem Harbor through the open window of Grimes’s shed. Gold disks of water sliding in the evening sun entranced him as he pictured the hangman kicking away the gallows ladder and dropping Bridget, bound and hooded, into Heaven, Hell, or oblivion. Only this was sure: She broke her neck at the end of the rope and was put into the ground.

  “What be your opinion, Isaac, in the matter of witches?” asked Caleb as he dipped his bread into his ale. The two men were eating their supper. Caleb had not spoken to him before of the madness. The eldest of Grimes’s sons, he appeared troubled, as if a warrant had been issued for his arrest and Deputy Herrick was on his way to serve it. “I took her for a scold but not a witch,” said Caleb, stabbing the broadside with his thumb at the place where Bridget’s death was reported.

  Isaac stuffed his mouth with bread, so that he would not have to answer.

  To be sensitive in callous times, one must be like an oyster, which needs to hide its tender part inside a shell; so it was with Caleb. At first, he had seemed careless of Isaac and his feelings. “You’re not building a privy,” he would remark when Isaac had drilled a crooked peg hole. “If Noah had left the girdling to you, the ark would have foundered before reaching Mount Ararat,” when he had scanted the timbers set around a hull. “You’re not making a shave horse,” if Isaac had chosen planks for a false keel without enough heft. However much Isaac resented the other’s carping, he realized that it was not only needful but also given without malice. Until that time, the most complicated structure Isaac had built was a privy. At the end of the day, Caleb would clap him on the back or tousle his grizzled hair, as if Isaac were a young apprentice, when, in fact, he was a dozen years older than Caleb. Isaac admired his uprightness—all the more so because of his own backsliding. He’d let his purpose dampen, and not even Bridget’s death was spark enough to rekindle it.