by Norman Lock
Merry and licentious as the rest was a young woman wearing naught but ribbons in her loosened hair. Lustily, she sang as she danced:
Ye Devil she crys,
I’ll tear your Eyes,
When Main seiz’d,
Bum squeez’d,
I Gallop, I Gallop, I Gallop, I Gallop …
“Hannah!” cried Isaac, appalled.
She turned to him and, gesturing lewdly, beckoned him to join her.
“Hannah! Save yourself!”
But she would not be saved. She lay down on the beaten earth and writhed.
Again, Isaac heard voices. Unintelligible in that havoc, they were punctuated by screams, shrieks, and lamentations loud. He recognized them as the utterances of history, as though time’s sharp wind had stripped the accounts written in all the languages ever spoken on Earth.
Isaac cried out and awoke, to find himself in Caleb’s house, all the lights gone out.
V
he following morning, Isaac Page set out across Salem Harbor, which the Naumkeag call Massabequash (in a language that will someday be as dead as the people who spoke it). He might have been pulling his oars through molten lead, so heavy did the water seem and so heavily did he sweat. The July heat was unrelieved by the fitful wind ruffling the harbor too genteelly to raise whitecaps. The large bay seemed to tilt as gray disks of brackish water rolled around the crawling skiff, its groaning lapstrake planks a ground bass to Isaac’s labored breath. He was hardly more than half a mile from the wharf and already regretting the crossing. Scribes and scribblers are a pitiful lot, having strength to drag their pens about the page and for little else.
You’re halfway there, Isaac. You can find a tavern at Marblehead, slake your thirst, and rest before rowing back to Salem.
He caught sight of the Bellevue, a sloop built by the Grimeses. Having found a favorable wind unavailable to Isaac’s skiff, she was spanking northerly toward Winter Island. He had heard of a public house there, which, like Thom Croft’s ordinary, was let alone, if not countenanced, by the Puritans. It looked to be no farther than Marblehead, whose long, dark back he saw. Why not go there instead, Isaac? One outpost is as good as another, so long as you’re away from Salem’s madness.
A cormorant dropped like a stone into the bay. When it lifted its head from the water, Isaac watched it swallow a fish until nothing of it was left to see but a lump in the bird’s throat. “Good or bad, nothing can happen to me, because I belong elsewhere,” he said to the bird. He thought of Lenox and his former occupation. “I was too shut up with books and my own fancies. I should’ve been like Melville, who went on voyages before putting words to paper. If I could only take this home.” His arms opened to embrace the water, the distant island, and Salem as he had come to know it—“as only I can write of it in my own century.” Isaac’s ambition, which had been cold, rekindled; he thought of the book he would write when he was at his desk inside the red farmhouse. Shameless, he imagined his fame after his book—unprecedented in its scope and moral grandeur—was published.
The clouds were piled softly up unto the brink of eternity. A wind bellied the canvas of the scudding sloop. “A pity I have no sail,” he said matter-of-factly. The clouds soared. In the distance, Salem Sound was blue. The water surrounding the boat was pewter, which will not shine no matter how strenuously it is burnished. He dropped oars and, biting into the water with them, made for Winter Island.
The Atlantic opened its tidal gate, and a stiff current pushed against the bow. Seabirds wheeled, their wings flashing a meaningless semaphore. Glancing on the water, the light hurt Isaac’s eyes. Again, he regretted his decision as the birds cried mockingly. He shipped oars to consider the matter, but the ocean did not allow for deliberation, and the boat fell back toward Salem Town. Having left it behind, Isaac had entered an uncanny space, which could not have been surveyed by Digges’s theodolite or described by mathematics. He had blundered into the geography of a dream, where “he sees his nothingness.”
Isaac worked his oars against the current until he came within sight of Cat Cove, which divided Winter Island from Salem Neck. He made for a pier and brought the boat to rest against it. His head reeled, and his eyes stung. Worn by his struggle against the will of water untamed and unconfined, he walked into a grove, lay down beneath the aspens, and quickly fell asleep to the murmur of their leaves.
Words alone can restore a village or a house when nothing of its past remains. Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” rebuilt the ruined North Bridge, where the “shot heard round the world” resounds in perpetuity amid mute stones. How much harder is it to resurrect a man by utterance? A student of human nature must guess at the truth of his subject, trusting either in the persistence of a nub of goodness or in an ineradicable stain on character through the ages. Had Isaac been born other than a New Englander and a scion of a notorious ancestor, his nature might have been optimistic, his outlook cheerful. He was born in Salem, however, and its tainted past was also his. Isaac did not believe in the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
And so it was that Isaac Page, who had left his home in latter-day Massachusetts to alter history and save his family from disgrace, found himself in exile on a tiny island a dream away from the author of that disgrace and shameful history—an exile no less involuntary, appearances notwithstanding, than Tiberius’s on Capri or that of Defoe’s castaway in the Carib.
VI
hat evening, Isaac walked the ambit of the little island, beginning on its leeward side at Cat Cove and Smith Pool, rounding Juniper Cove at its north end, then turning down its windward shore, where the South Channel seethed below a headland. His curiosity could not have been more quickly satisfied had he worn the famous ogre’s seven-league boots. The student of the classics of Arcadia would delight in Winter Island, where sheep grazed in salt-grass meadows noisy with insects, while butterflies, their delicate sails dyed brightly as Javanese cloth, quietly went about their aerial business. Few from Salem Town visited there, except those who rented pasturage for their beasts or brought their fishing boats to the sheltered winter anchorage of Cat Cove. In spite of the commonplace name, Smith Pool appeared enchanted, as though gloomy suspicions had not yet darkened it. A small fort erected on the southernmost part of the island protected Salem Town from French and Dutch warships and the Canadian privateers, known as “Turkish pirates.”
Isaac counted a dozen stone houses with thatched roofs, a saltworks, sheds and racks for drying cod, and a cooperage. The public house had been a stubby Dutch merchantman, which had foundered. Casks were trimmed, sealed, and fastened to the breached hull to float her off the rocky shoal. With much ado, a team of oxen dragged the wreck ashore, where she was put up on blocks, dismasted, and converted into a tavern called De Zeeslang—in English, the Leviathan. The ship’s master, Pieter Koorne, decided to remain on the island with his ship (happy not to have gone down in her). Corpulent and genial, he was just such a human type as inhabits Washington Irving’s tales. Indeed, he might have served as the model of Irving’s portrait of old Manhattan’s governor Wouter van Twiller, who had “not a little the appearance of a beer-barrel on skids.”
Dressed in Hessian boots and galligaskins, cinched with a waistband to keep his belly in check, and topped by a Spaniard’s rakish hat, which he wore indoors and out to keep his brains conditioned, as if they were pickled in Holland gin in the cask of his skull, Koorne had a laugh such as had not been heard in Massachusetts since Miles Standish slew jollity at Merry Mount. Koorne was called by his friends, who included every other person living on the island, “St. Nicholas.” At Christmas, he gave nuts, apples, and wooden toys to the handful of children who mended nets or shepherded their parents’ flocks. In the way of the Dutch, he was accompanied by Zwarte Piet, or Black Peter, who smutted his face with burnt cork. On all other days of the year, St. Nicholas’s pursy helper was called Cornelis Bok, a fleshmonger, formerly of Leiden.
Having made up his mi
nd to stay on the island, Isaac spent his idle hours, which were many, at De Zeeslang. He liked Koorne’s gin, which the Dutchman flavored with tart mulberries. The two played Old Sledge, bowls, and shovelboard, smoked long clay pipes, and ate pickled herring, sacred fare to the Hollanders. Koorne always called to mind a passage from Irving’s comic novel Knickerbocker’s History of New York: “Who ever hears of fat men heading a riot, or herding together in turbulent mobs?—no—no; it is your lean, hungry men who are continually worrying society, and setting the whole community by its ears.” In the islanders’ view, Salem’s ministers and magistrates were just such stringy men. They had, in Shakespeare’s words, “a lean and hungry look.”
A boatswain aboard the Dolphijn, which had put in at the cove for repairs after a voyage from the Dutch colony at Recife, lost his tame monkey to Koorne at cards. The monkey had made himself at home in De Zeeslang till a fire started in the cabin where Koorne and it slept. Afterward, the animal roved the island with none to molest it, except the drover Jacob Watts’s collie dog, which had a prejudice against monkeys.
The antic creature kept mainly to the burying ground, among gravestones worn thin as Communion wafers. Isaac often wandered there because of the view it afforded of the Atlantic. In his day, the place would be known as Execution Hill, where sixteen-year-old Stephen Clark was hanged for setting fire to a hay house. A Salem drab named Hannah Downes had denounced him. (Like the poor, informers and defamers are always with us.) Six lines of doggerel tearfully declaimed from the gallows’ little stage were printed on a black-edged card circulated at the time.
Be warn’d, ye youth, who see my sad despair:
Avoid LEWD WOMEN, false as they are fair.
By my example learn to shun my fate:
How wretched is the man who’s wise too late!
Ere innocence, and fame and life be lost,
Here purchase wisdom cheaply, at my cost.
Isaac doubted that a pyromaniac could have touchingly exhorted a crowd of gaping spectators in rhyming couplets. It must be said, however, that people spoke fairer then.
Ten days following his arrival on the island, Isaac was once again staring into the misty distance from the vantage of the graveyard. The air tasted of brine. With his back turned on Salem, he felt its malign attraction lessen. Straining to see a ship on the horizon, he imagined himself traveling far from the meetinghouse and Salem Town House, where magisterial judgments were turning ordinary men, women, and children into diabolical agents and, by the inexorable process of man’s law, living beings into carrion. Their damned souls were accounted unfit for the genteel company of the future’s resurrected elect, their breath smelling of the sweet fennel they chewed in church to keep their stomachs quiet.
Suddenly, Isaac heard two voices coming from far away and, mingled with them, shrieks and cries. The interrogatory voice belonged—he knew for a certainty—to the man he’d come so very great a distance to confront.
“Goody Nurse. Do not you see these afflicted persons and hear them accuse you?”
“The Lord knows I have not hurt them: I am an innocent person.”
The words had been spoken on March 24, 1692. They’d been carried from Salem on a seaward breeze and circulated in the upper air until such time as sympathetic ears could hear them and a compassionate mind comprehend them. Isaac could not work out why they hadn’t frayed into silence months before reaching him.
“It is very awful to all to see these agonies, and you, an old professor, thus charged with contracting with the Devil and yet to see you stand with dry eyes when there are so many we—”
“You do not know my heart.”
“You would do well if you are guilty to confess and give glory to God.”
“I am as clear as the child unborn.”
“I pray God clear you if you be innocent, and if you are guilty, discover you. And therefore give me an upright answer: have you any familiarity with these spirits?”
“No, I have none but with God alone.”
“How came you sick, for there is an odd discourse of that in the mouths of many—”
“Iam sick at my stomach.”
“Have you no wounds?”
“I have none but old age.”
‘You do know whether you are guilty and have familiarity with the Devil, and now when you are here present to see such a thing as these girls testify a black man whispering in your ear, and birds about you, what do you say to it?”
“It is all false. I am clear.”
A sea wind lashed the high hill, scattering words of accusation and brave denial like petals stripped from branches in a squall. Isaac recalled Hamlet’s colloquy with his father, the murdered king, on the battlements at Elsinore.
HAMLET: Alas, poor ghost!
GHOST: Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing To what I shall unfold.
HAMLET: Speak; I am bound to hear.
GHOST: So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.
In his morbid fancy, Isaac saw himself amid the grave markers on the Nurses’ farm in the early hour before Lauds. The ghost of Rebecca Nurse rose into the clammy air, silencing the nightjars, the frogs croaking grumpily on the riverbank, and very nearly Isaac’s consternated heart. Were she to bind me to her in a covenant of blood, this old woman who had been among the gentlest and most sweet-tempered in the village—if Rebecca Nurse were to demand that I take vengeance on her murderers, what would I tell her? asked Isaac of himself.
He was saved from having to answer by Pieter Koorne’s monkey, which jumped on top of a graveboard and screeched defiance at a shrieking gull. Isaac was immediately addressed by another voice, belonging neither to Hamlet nor the ghost of his father, Rebecca Nurse nor the magistrate.
“I’d like a word with you, fellow.”
Isaac turned, to see the blurred shape of a man walking toward him out of the dazzling sunlight.
“What word would you like?” asked Isaac, shading his eyes with the edge of his hand.
“I’m hunting an accused wizard who fled Salem before he could be judged. His name is Philip English, a merchant and shipowner of the town and, by all accounts, an atheist.”
“I don’t know him,” replied Isaac, who recognized the man standing in front of him as a constable by his black staff of office.
“Why, he be among the best-known men in the parish! He sent his specter to cut Susanna Sheldon’s throat and chop her legs off if she would not sign the Devil’s book.”
“I’ve not been in Salem. I came from Rhode Island and have never heard the name of him you seek.”
The constable took off his hat and mopped his bald head, richly watered by his sweat. Isaac took out his stone bottle of cider and offered it to the constable, who drank from it appreciatively.
“It must be hot work to hunt a man.”
“Aye, but God’s will must be done. I tell you, good-man, the times are out of joint.”
“Because of the witches.”
“They besiege us night and day. I tell you, they be more dangerous than savages because you can’t see a specter to kill with a musket, lance, or ax. A man would sooner part with his scalp than his immortal soul.”
“They mean to do us harm.”
“I was at Salem Town House when Mary Warren witnessed against Job Tookey for the spectral murder of six persons. The ghost of one of them, who’d been living in Bermuda, told Mary that she dropped down dead when Tookey stabbed her poppet likeness through the heart. Why, he murdered two of his own children! The poor mites’ ghosts were under the magistrates’ table, howling to be avenged. The others were buzzing in Mary Warren’s ear. At first, we thought a hive of wasps under the eaves had been disturbed. Though I be a burly man and an officer of the law, it caused me great affright.”
Isaac did not disdain the man for his credulity; on the contrary, he admired him for the earnestness with which he expressed his belief in entities bent on bringing misery to honest folk. He hunted fugitives not for his two shillings a day,
but for the townspeople’s sake. When he bid Isaac “Godspeed,” Isaac bid him likewise.
Isaac preferred death by an arrow or a knife, a musket ball or a farmer’s scythe than by “the rage and malice of Satan.” He did not think he had Giles Corey’s fortitude (or was it plain cussedness) to ask his judges for “more weight” as stones were being laid atop his chest. Could the old man have foreseen his agony, would he not, also, have run?
To be rid of the sensation that a weight had been set upon his own chest, Isaac filled his lungs with the savory odors of the tidal marsh, the salt bay, and the ocean, eternally grinding like a pestle in the mortar of its ancient bed. Like musk, the mixture never failed to stimulate his appetite. He shook off his fancies and walked to De Zeeslang to eat in the lively presence of the Dutchman.
“PIETER, WHAT THINK YOU OF SORCERY?” asked Isaac as he sat musing over his gin.
“I don’t think much on it,” replied Koorne. Isaac noticed an uncharacteristic shadow pass across the other’s face. “The subject makes me bilious.” The Dutchman fished up a slab of roast meat from the salver. “Puritans who sharpen the bones in their arses on hard church benches and privy seats while they strain at stools are mad.” He waved his fork at Isaac. “I don’t trust a man who has no flesh on him.” He put down his fork and took up his glass. “One and done. By God, did you ever hear such foolishness?”
“What do the Hollanders in New York say about the Puritans?”
“That they are all beggars.”
“Why ‘beggars’?”
“They beg for mercy, for fear of a scorched backside. There is no good in them, because there’s not a thimble’s worth of sin in them. ‘God loveth a cheerful sinner.’ Does it not say so in the Bible?” He chewed his meat with gusto. “God loves a fat man!” exclaimed Koorne, clapping his bulging stomach with a pair of beefy hands. “And of all fat men, He loves Dutchmen best.”
“You’ll never squeeze through the eye of a needle,” said Isaac, laughing.