by Norman Lock
Caleb had been used to keeping the Sabbath by rowing across the harbor to Marblehead to worship in secret with a Baptist enclave. Lately, he had been keeping to his father’s house or his own on Brod Street. He knew better than to be seen to stand apart in a dangerous time, when a word shrieked in spite or fear could blast a man, woman, or child. In Salem Town, the Court of Oyer and Terminer had been convened on May 27 and was grinding the accused with the pestle of the zealots’ law. Grim judges were probing consciences with the fervor of a surgeon hunting for an abscess with a knife. After Governor Phips brought the province’s charter from London, making Massachusetts a law unto itself, death warrants held in abeyance could be executed. One of them had swept Bridget Bishop to Kingdom Come—God’s or Satan’s. The sea winds that had once seemed to cleanse the atmosphere of Salem Town blew ill; its stink carried far and wide.
“Think you those girls are wicked?” asked Caleb.
Isaac was afraid to answer him, knowing that a man can seem honest, but it is cunning that makes him appear so. He turned the table and asked Caleb what he thought of the invisible world.
Caleb gnawed a crust. “I think there be hidden shoals, which can tear the bottom of the staunchest boat.”
Isaac nodded warily.
“But I don’t suppose God puts rocks in the way of ships to drown men.” He chewed his crust some more and then concluded: “Nay, I don’t believe in spectral evidence. I don’t believe people can be judged by proofs of devilry that only some can see, and they be unreliable. By God, who are these children to say yea or nay to who should live or who should have his neck stretched? I say they are wicked and should be flogged!”
Isaac guessed that Caleb’s rancor was caused by the flight of his friend Philip English, whose wharf stood empty. His ships had been seized and his goods distrained. “I’m of the same opinion,” said Isaac after a pause in which he’d debated with himself how to respond.
Caleb looked relieved. He may have had doubts of his own concerning his apprentice’s beliefs and, despite them, had resolved to risk his property, liberty, and life by being round with him. Thus will like-minded persons find each other, no matter how much the world conspires to keep them fearful and apart.
“It’s not safe for me here,” admitted Caleb. “I’ve been working against them, you see. I expect any day to hear the sheriff banging on my door.”
Isaac was amazed by this intelligence. “Working against them, how?”
“There be men and women who don’t much like what has happened in Salem. I won’t give you names, though I trust you, but they are not mine to give, because it would be the death of them were they discovered. They be good people—I tell you that much, friend, and we had hoped to put an end to the business. But now it may’ve gone too far to stop. We fear a pack of vicious girls, who have power to send us to jail or the gallows. Why, even Cotton Mather and John Hathorne dance to their tune! Hathorne has a stone for a heart, and that be frozen. It is the nineteenth of July, and Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Good, and Sarah Wildes were, this day, pushed from the gallows ladder.”
“More will follow,” said Isaac with the confidence of foreknowledge.
The massacre of innocents—“Desolation of Names,” in Cotton Mather’s words—would not end until September 22, when the last convicted witches twitched at the end of the hangman’s rope. Not till October would Governor Phips forbid the use of spectral evidence in court after Increase Mather and Thomas Brattle had condemned it as unreliable. Even so, the holy terror continued into January 1693, when Chief Justice Stoughton ordered the executions of women whose hangings had been delayed by the unborn children in their wombs. Fortunately, his order was countermanded. Salem had finally lost its appetite for murder. The snow was unpacked from the hearts of its people. It was stained like that in a stable yard, to continue the figure.
“I do fear to be in Salem during the humiliation,” said Caleb.
“Then you must leave at once!” asserted Isaac.
The General Court had called for a day of humiliation, when “all persons are required to abstain from bodily labor and to resort to the public meetings to seek the Lord.”
“The people will pray and fast for deliverance from Satan’s power,” said Caleb. “In their zeal to worm the body politic of wizards and witches, I may find myself delivered up to prison.”
Isaac could have told him that nowhere in the notorious history of Salem did the name of Caleb Grimes appear—not among those cried out, examined, or jailed, those who fled, died in prison or on Proctor’s Ledge. An early death could not have been foretold by reading Caleb’s palm, hidden by a pewter mug half-emptied of its ale.
“Then you must be off this very afternoon!” exclaimed Isaac, unwilling to dissuade him on the evidence of history, which is not wholly reliable.
“Think you that God will judge me a coward?”
“‘And when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another,’” said Isaac, quoting from the Gospel of Matthew.
Caleb was satisfied of Isaac’s loyalty. “I leave tonight.” He took Isaac’s hand and said, “It’s arranged, but my house is being watched.”
“What can I do?” asked Isaac, carried forward by a sudden gust of comradeship.
“We’re shaped alike, our height and shoulders much the same. After sundown, when I’m wont to leave the yard for the day, you’ll put on my cloak and hat and walk to my house, where you’ll stay till morning. In the dark, I’ll row across to Marblehead. Friends have engaged a ship to carry me thence to New York,” where there were no witches, only the crafty Dutch, crusty Germans, Catholic French, Protestant Swedes, Sephardic Jews who had emigrated from Brazil, and the lordly English. “Will you do me this service, Isaac?”
“Gladly!”
And so this Prince Hamlet of a man, who had allowed his purpose to blunt, promised to save Caleb Grimes from the great-great-grandfather whom he had sworn to obstruct or, if need be, pay in kind for the terrible judgments he had wrought.
IV
hen the potboy from the tavern in Eccles Lane arrived with Caleb’s beer, as he did every night, Isaac noted the presence of a darkly mantled figure lurking in the thickset trees. By then, Caleb was on the way to Marblehead.
Isaac fell asleep after finishing the beer, which tasted sharply of spruce. In the morning, he broke his fast with brown bread and ale, the custom of the time, locked the house behind him, and walked toward the wharf.
In Essex Street, a man accosted him. “Mister, what business had you at Grimes’s?”
“I fed his cat.”
“A cat, you say? What kind of cat?” “A house cat.”
“Imp familiars do often assume the shape of a cat.”
Isaac’s words had been reckless, and he tried to make light of them. “I assure you, it is an ordinary cat with an appetite for nothing larger than mice.”
“You seem a comical fellow.”
“The Lord bids me to be joyous.”
The black-suited man fell silent a moment. “And where is Grimes this morning?”
“I don’t know.”
“Am I to believe he entrusted his house to you without saying where he was going?”
“A master need not take an apprentice into his confidence.”
“Did he say, at least, when he would return?”
“Tomorrow, or the day after,” replied Isaac with a vague shrug of his shoulders. “Till then, I’m to watch over his property.”
“Are their thieves in Salem Town that he should fear for his goods?”
“Is it not written that ‘… the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night’?”
Isaac’s impious gibe angered his inquisitor. “You take the Lord’s name in vain!”
“I do not, sir, unless it be vanity to quote from Scripture. If that be the case, there are a great many vain persons in Salem. The words I spoke are from First Thessalonians.”
“I know it! I admonish you not to trif
le with Holy Writ nor with the pleasure of the court, which has writs of its own to hobble impudent fellows!”
Isaac felt the silver piece sewn into his pocket. Taking courage, he remarked flippantly, “Why do you trouble an innocent citizen on his way to work?”
“I suspect there be mischief in you!”
“There be none, I assure you. If my words offended, I beg pardon. It’s a fault for which my friends have often reproved me. I’ll strive to amend it. With your permission, I’ll go about my business, which has only to do with boats and ships and nothing at all with mischief.”
“I’m not done with you yet, fellow!”
“I’ve told you all I know of Master Grimes’s comings and goings.”
“‘He hath made a pit and digged it, and is fallen into the pit he made.’”
“I pray you are mistaken, sir, but in any case, I am well clear of it.”
“Nonetheless, I’ll watch again tonight. As the Lord said, “‘… I set watchmen over you.’”
“Then you must come in and sit to rest your feet awhile. When the boy brings beer, we’ll drink a jar together—one and done, of course.”
His antagonist relented, but he took down Isaac’s particulars in a small red book, which frightened the people of Salem, as though it were the Devil’s own, where diabolical contracts were recorded in blood. “What church are you?” he asked, having paused in his writing.
“I’m new to Salem Town and have not yet decided the matter. In that it be a grave one, I think I ought not to consider it in haste. I tell you, sir, if a man be reckless and stumbles, it is often the Devil who picks him up. I would keep the Devil far from me, for the good Lord’s sake.”
“And your own soul’s, Goodman Page.”
“Aye, my soul be precious to me.”
“Grimes is not of our church,” said the spy, insinuating a depraved character.
“He’s not spoken on the matter.”
“Why should he wish to make a secret of his faith? Were he covenanted, he would gladly boast of his good standing with the Lord.”
“There are some who’ve taken faith so deeply into them and hold it so jealously to their breast, they are loath to speak of it.” Isaac smiled. “Master Grimes is a man of few words.”
“Faith, if it be genuine, ought to be shouted from the rooftop. It pleases God’s ears to hear it.”
“Those who are mistaken in the truth of their sanctity will not be saved,” replied Isaac.
The spy, who accounted himself God’s own, had been sent by the magistrates to sniff out sin. “It may be that Caleb Grimes is a Baptist.”
“Is it not allowed?”
“It be frowned upon. It would have gotten his tongue pierced by a red-hot poker when the Bay was still a colony. I would reintroduce the practice.”
A few more minutes of sharp palaver followed before Isaac was allowed to go his way, with a warning that, at a time of extraordinary affliction, when the Devil was at his last gasp, the court would punish evildoers harshly.
After his flip encounter with civil authority, Isaac rebuked himself for being a fool. Now you’ve made yourself remarkable! And by the time the evening shadows had begun to lengthen into night, he had frightened himself. He heard a plangent voice whose source may have been his own mind or the Devil, who whispers sweetly to those at the end of their rope: “Go forth and hang yourself.”
At that alarming instant, the memory of Constance, whom Isaac had all but forgotten, swept over him like a breeze in which a half-familiar odor and a half-remembered music were entwined, and something else—the taste of a kiss when kisses were new and love had not yet declined into affection, which is both greater and less than love. Feeling the coin in his pocket, Isaac was again seized by the wish to go home.
“Caleb got away,” said Seth Grimes, laying a hand on Isaac’s shoulder.
“What’s that, you say?” So distracted was Isaac that the old man’s words had been like the noise of a fly.
“Caleb got away. In two days, he’ll be in New York. Pray God he will be safe there! He’s a good son and a godly man. His contempt is for the elders of Salem and the rings the lying girls have put through their patriarchal noses.”
“What of Timothy and Alan?” They were the old man’s other, younger sons.
“They have wives and children and are not part of the opposition. I’m grateful to you for helping Caleb escape. You’re a friend to my son and me, and I ask the Lord’s blessing on you.”
They shook hands warmly.
“Seth, I would ask a favor of you.”
“If it be in my power to grant, you shall have it.”
“Tomorrow, I’d like to borrow a skiff and row to Marblehead.”
“What do you want there?” asked the old man with neither a suspicion nor a challenge.
“I’ve no wish to be in Salem on the day of humiliation, when the righteous flail themselves into ecstasy.”
“You can have the boat that took old Rebecca Nurse home.”
The night of her execution, the family disinterred Rebecca’s remains from their hasty grave on the lower ledges, near the stream that flowed into the North River. Caleb rowed her washed and shrouded corpse to the estuary and onto the Woolston River, which divided Royal Side from Northfields. He continued up Crane Brook to the village, where the Nurse family kept a piece of ground for the burying of its own.
Isaac stayed a second night at Caleb’s house “to mind the cat.” The spy did not return to skulk among the poplars or to put his feet up and share a jar. The potboy brought beer, and after Isaac had finished it, he fell asleep. Unlike the previous night, he was troubled by dreams. The black-suited, high-crowned officer of the court was examining him.
“The court sent to Rhode Island and has discovered that none remembers an Isaac Page.”
“An itinerant carpenter would not be memorable.”
“What say you, fellow? Did you hope to deceive Salem’s magistrates in order to work some devilry?”
“I know not how to work devilry.”
“Tut, tut.”
“I tell you, sir, I am harmless and blameless of deceit!”
“You’ve been cried out as a witch!” “Who calls me so?”
“Bridget Bishop.”
“She was hanged a month ago, and more!”
“If she say you are a witch, then you are one. Dead witches needs must speak the truth; it is God’s punishment on them for their wickedness.”
“This is foolishness!”
“You are in contempt of court, man!”
“I see no court, only an unkindness of ravens and a knot of toads!”
The officer had indeed resembled a raven when, thrusting his hands behind his back, the black skirts of his coat had stuck out stiffly. And when he squatted to cosset a passing cat, he looked very like the dank creature that witches stir into boiling pots.
“Hear that!” he croaked. “He invokes toads! Surely, this be proof he is a wizard!”
“I know nothing of it!”
“You are damned and will not taste God’s mercy or look upon His face!”
“No one can see into another’s breast to discover if he be saved or not.”
“God’s ministers and magistrates will sniff out your corruption, which is as an evil stench in my nostrils.”
“None can know if another has received God’s saving grace, which is His free gift to mankind.”
“Not to all, Isaac Page! He gives it only to His saints.”
Then the scenery of the dream had shifted by invisible hands. What is a dream if not a play, and what is witchery if not that, also, and who, if not Salem’s shamming girls, were the most consummate actors in the dreaming Province of Massachusetts Bay?
Now Isaac was in the forest where he had walked with Hannah the night he’d supped at the Buxtons’ table. He sensed the presence of a mystery, sinister and dreadful. It hemmed the path amid the closely ranked trees, which disclosed imperfect glimpses of the moonless, sta
rless sky. The enormous pine tree burned—a fiery finger pointing not to enjoin the villagers to look to Heaven but to guide the witches to an unholy conclave, where souls would be signed away. Isaac knew he was not alone in the woods, though he could see none but himself and his own two feet as he made sure he was earthbound. Fronds of bracken rattled, and crushed sweet fern released a dark perfume. Hooves clattered on the path but left no mark as unseen congregants rasped and hissed where no church had ever been gathered nor solitary Christian prayed.
The Devil spoke to Isaac, promising luxurious living and supernatural power if only he would sign his registry. Dark words poured into Isaac’s ears, like loathsome matter running in a ditch. He vomited what seemed like the contents of a fen. Then the Devil changed his tune, and Isaac blushed to hear that master of blasphemous revels play, with the nimblest of fingers, a carnal rhapsody on invisible strings. The infernal anthem was not meant to be sung by troubadours or Meistersingers. Not even the covetous wretch Salieri, who wished Mozart dead, could have led those impish musicians and satanic choristers. How very great and fearful was the noise they made as Isaac stumbled over roots and ruts toward the great witch meeting!
He came into a clearing lighted garishly by fire streaming upward from the crackling tree. He watched virgins, goodwives, and crones shed their clothes, their bodies clad in nothing but a coppery light. They behaved shamelessly, dancing widdershins around the inexhaustible pine. Painted on canvas in lurid colors, the scene would please a juiceless rake ogling it in his closet, but it appalled Isaac. It would’ve done so in any century.