Tooth of the Covenant

by Norman Lock

  “God loves the Dutch more than the stingy English.” Koorne drained his cup of gin, belched, and spooned up a tender piece of herring. “Look at a Puritan’s face, and what do you see? Biliousness and choler. The saints look as if they have a bellyache. On the Sabbath, they should worm themselves!” He filled his cup again. “Unless God gave them a colicky face for the same reason He gave a rattle to the envenomed snake.”

  Koorne’s talk of scrawny Christian nonconformists called to Isaac’s mind the lard-caked frames of John Buxton and his dame. They, too, were zealous in the matter of meat and drink, and had no more appetite for the spiritual food provided by John Calvin, John Robinson, and John Winthrop than did the convivial Dutchman. But they had not Koorne’s openhandedness or joie de vivre.

  “I supped with a fat Puritan and his fatter wife.”

  “Then they are not the sour-pickled Puritans who bow their heads and pray to the music of their belly’s winge and rumble.”

  “No, but they have the covetousness and bile of the skinniest Puritan in Massachusetts.”

  The Buxtons’ table may have groaned under the weight of plenty, but most other boards in the Province of Massachusetts Bay were not so festive.

  The winter had been harsh. The sap in the wood piled on the hearths had frozen, as had ink in the inkwells and bread on the Communion plates, which to gnaw made some think of the heart of Jesus—frozen and past caring for the chosen people of the New World. During Isaac’s stay in Zion, the cornfields were sere and the rains reluctant. Famine has a fearsome prospect, which can make Aztecs of Christians willing to offer the savories of their neighbors in exchange for a good harvest.

  “Eat some herring, you long-faced Bunyan!”

  “You’ll die like a rat fallen into a barrel of meal!”

  “A barrel of beer, you mean!”

  Koorne held a spoonful of herring under Isaac’s nose.

  “God damn you for a thick-skulled, fatheaded Dutchman! Get your fish out of my face!”

  Laying down the spoon, Koorne took offense. “This morning I listened to you praise the sachem Massasoit. Now there was a glutton! He’d have died in an agony of constipation during one great feeding if Governor Bradford had not sent for a physic.”

  Isaac held his head in his hands.

  “You look as if you could use a physic yourself,” said Koorne, his resentment forgotten.

  “My eyes hurt.”

  “A seed of wild clary put into a sore eye does cleanse it.”

  Isaac suspected that the true cause of his distress lay beyond the skill of herbalist or leecher to correct. What its cause might be, he guessed, had to do with his transplantation to Old Salem. How many generations of herring separated the alewife that lay pickled on a plate in front of him and the fish he had served to Herman Melville during his last visit to the red farmhouse? What a gulf of time lay between the sprats with which Massasoit had fed the famished Pilgrims and those that Moby Dick would have eaten had it not been a figment of Melville’s brain! The water Isaac and Herman had stirred into their whiskeys had been a vein of Arctic ice in 1692. The atoms of air they breathed in the tobaccofumed sitting room in Lenox had been excited by winds prevailing in the summer of the witches. The strain of so great a variance in time must take its toll. Isaac had become a divided man, who could not ascertain the honesty of the ghost he had come to chastise. He could search the weight of pages in The English Physitian and not find a single remedy for doubt.

  “‘The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!’”

  “You surprise me, Pieter!”

  “Even a thick-skulled Dutchman who likes his pipe and tipple may, now and again, read the Scriptures, especially at sea, where time is slow and danger quick to rear. Fear is an excellent tinder for religious fervor.”

  As much as any New Englander of 1692, Isaac feared the Wabanaki, their French allies, and the Canadian wild men, the coureurs de bois, presently at war with the English fifty miles north of Salem. Seventeen years earlier, the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Narragansett, led by Metacomet, had scorched more than half of the English settlements and murdered some eight hundred souls among the Christian population. Isaac’s fear—the more it grew in him—made him less inclined to interfere in the spiritual authority and civil government of 1692 Salem. His scalp was not his own, as it had been in 1851 Lenox. A savage might claim it.

  “Care for a bowl of suet pudding?” the Dutchman asked.

  “Thank you, no.”

  Isaac had been born in the nineteenth century, had attended Bowdoin College, ascended in a balloon, sent a message by telegraph from Boston to New York, and traveled by steam train to San Francisco, a city unimaginable in its vitality and bustle, at the opposite end of the continent, whose immensity, marvels, and wealth none in the colonies could have foreseen. His mind had been shaped by a knowledge of his nation’s history, which, in 1692, could hardly be said to have begun. Isaac’s thoughts were modern, John Hathorne’s medieval. Doubt kept Isaac on the boil; dogma kept his ancestor sullen and assured. The age was blind to other points of view. Celebrated, even adored, in the nineteenth century, Emerson would have been shunned, examined, exiled, or hanged in the seventeenth.

  Who am I to censure someone who lacks the advantage of a fortunate birth in a time when science is erasing the shadows of obscurity and lighting the streets of great cities? Isaac asked himself. Old Salem’s streets at night are dark indeed! Still darker is the forest. Is it unimaginable that a black hog, which is a witch’s familiar, would be loose in it? Is it inconceivable that women would dance in the night woods and, by the heat of lust engendered in their loins, summon the Black Man?

  Even so, what justification could there be for enchaining and imprisoning a four-year-old girl or hanging a septuagenarian midwife and a contentious scold who liked to wear a red bodice and had let her pigs stray into the Ship Tavern’s yard?

  And yet John Barton, a court-appointed surgeon, did discover a witch’s teat on Bridget Bishop, in the hidden place between her “pudendum and Anus.” Moreover, John Bly swore that his son had found poppets stuffed with black swine bristles in her cellar wall, which Bridget had hired them to remove. Goody Lacey had cried, “Oh, mother! We have forsaken Jesus Christ and the devil hath got hold of us!” And little Dorcas Good had left her tooth marks on Annie Putnam for all to see at Ingersoll’s ordinary. Are facts like these not sufficient to prove that demons are busy in New England?

  Are you still unconvinced, Isaac Page? Do you need more proof of witchcraft?

  The Herrick girl from Beverly, who had cried out against the Reverend Hale’s goodwife, recanted after the apparition of Mary Easty told her that it was the Devil in disguise and not Sarah Hale who had been tormenting her. The girl’s retraction proved that Satan could take the form of innocent persons when he went abroad. (John Hale signed death warrants for seventy-two of them.) Didn’t Samuel Wardwell, self-proclaimed fortune-teller of Andover, Margaret Jacobs, and, for a time, Mary Warren herself, whose testimony had undone so many, repent of their accusations?

  No one denied the existence of Satan. In 1706, the grown-up Annie Putnam, the most vociferous of the young accusers, admitted that she had been deceived by “a great delusion of Satan.” All that desolation had been the Devil’s fault and not her own.

  “The dreadful business couldn’t have been a delusion! God would never have allowed the ministers and the magistrates to be in such grave error!” Isaac had spoken aloud.

  Koorne looked up from his pudding. “What’s that you say?”

  “I was arguing with myself.”

  “You’ll find no argument in me!” The Dutchman returned to his dessert, and Isaac to his thoughts, which his mind had been turning on its lathe into more and more desperate fancies.

  I’m a modern man born to an
age of science. But if I were to peer down the barrel of van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope and see, amid the infusoria and animalcules, Satan’s face leering up at me—what then?

  VII

  ne afternoon as Isaac was walking the island’s circuit, keeping the water in view because of the pleasure it gave him, he happened on a young man squatting beside a square-rigged boat, some fourteen or sixteen feet in length from its stem to a broad stern affixed with a rudder. He looked as Alexander may have the moment before he drew his sword and cut the Gordian knot. In other words, reader, the stranger gave every appearance of being perplexed and provoked.

  “What be your trouble, friend?” Isaac had taken him to be a white man, but as he drew near, he saw that he was an Indian dressed like an English laborer.

  “The skeg!” He pointed to a triangular piece of wood near the aft end of the keel.

  “Sea worms have made a meal of it,” said Isaac. “I can make a new one. My tools are at Pieter Koorne’s, where I board.”

  “I know him,” said the Indian. “I’ve brought him soft-shell crabs.” He picked up a sack by the neck. The coarse cloth bulged and leaked water. “He has an appetite for them.”

  “He has an appetite for most things and a belly large enough to accommodate them,” said Isaac. All in all, he liked the Dutchman and had meant the remark kindly.

  “I could name you some well-nourished Salem folk who love their victuals overmuch, though gluttony is a sin with them.”

  “Their consciences have no teeth if the sin is toothsome!” retorted Isaac scornfully.

  “You’re not one of the high-minded sort, I think.”

  “I’d sooner stand with the condemned than with their self-righteous accusers.” Once again, Isaac had spoken rashly to a stranger.

  The Indian looked over Isaac’s shoulder, as if he feared to see the sheriff ready to seize the apostate and show him the amenities of the jailhouse. (Wags claimed that Hell would be an improvement on Arnold’s jail in summertime and worth the sins of admission to escape a New England winter. God’s eternal absence could be more easily endured than the misery of biting flies or sleet borne by a nor’easter.)

  “What’s your name?” asked Isaac.

  “Joseph Quapish, of the Naumkeag people.”

  “Are you a Praying Indian?”

  Joseph spat in contempt either for Christian Indians or for the New Englanders who had forced the survivors of King Philip’s War to choose a life of enslavement in Bermuda or one of conversion in a Massachusetts prayer town. Most preferred to sing psalms in common measure than to cut sugarcane in an infernal climate and die of fever. The Naumkeag people had already been cut down by plague in 1617 and smallpox in 1633—gifts of European adventurers. The survivors had been poised on the brink of extinction even before John Winthrop’s fleet landed at Boston and discovered “the Lord’s waste” waiting for Christians to claim, divide, sell, rent, and squabble over.

  “I don’t pray to your God, though I have to pretend to be a Christian now that Christ is no longer a lamb. I spend as much time away from Aquinnah and its congregation of righteous red men as I can.” Joseph laughed scornfully. “An Indian dressed in a buckled hat, broadcloth coat, and britches worn out at the knees from kneeling is a pathetic sight. It pains me to see my father so.”

  “Do you miss him?” asked Isaac, remembering suddenly his own faraway family.

  “I spend the winter at Aquinnah, the prayer town where my parents repent of the sin of having been born savage and eat the body of Christ. Six days, my father plies the salt maker’s trade, and on the Sabbath, he puts on a tall hat, walks up and down the street, and pretends he doesn’t hear the English boys laughing at him.”

  “You speak well.”

  “For an Indian, you mean.” Isaac made no reply. “I was taught by Mistress Deliverance Bagley, who took it upon herself to civilize the Praying Indians of Aquinnah. She’d been one of Anne Hutchinson’s flock.”

  “Your boat needs caulking,” observed Isaac, tired of the eternal wrangle over piety.

  “You seem to know your business.”

  “I was apprenticed to Caleb Grimes.”

  “I know him; he’s a good man.”

  “Aye.”

  Joseph’s boat was named Pequot, meaning “destroyers of men.” Most of the Pequot had been themselves destroyed by the English and their Narragansett and Mohegan allies during the Mystic Massacre, of 1637, when their village was set alight. The fire was so hot that the Pequots’ bowstrings burned like candle wicks. (The Indian word would descend through the generations that followed the carnage to become Pequod, a corruption of the original word that Melville gave to Captain Ahab’s whaling ship.)

  “Shall we get my tools?”

  The two men walked in silence, as people do for whom conversation can be burdensome.

  “Hallo, you dirty Indian!” shouted Koorne on seeing Joseph.

  “Hallo, you great tub of lard!”

  Koorne got up noisily from the settle. He went to greet his friend, with the rolling gait of a fat man or a seafaring one. Sniffing Joseph as Isaac had seen him do a plate of oysters, he said, “You smell ripe.”

  “And you stink of muskrat!”

  “You make me hungry!”

  “I’ve a present for you,” said Joseph, handing Koorne the damp sack.

  He peered inside and smacked his lips. “Ah, there’s nothing so delectable as soft crabs fried in brown butter!” He poured three cups of Hollands and toasted Joseph: “Gezondheid!”

  Isaac left the tavern and returned, shortly, with his tools and timber from the woodshed. Joseph was toasting the Dutchman’s health in what Isaac supposed was Naumkeag. A comedy ensued as the two men praised each other fulsomely in their respective languages.

  “Come to supper!” called Koorne as Isaac and Joseph were leaving.

  “I can get a better price for my crabs in Salem Town, but I don’t like dealing with the elders,” explained Joseph as they walked back to Smith Pool, where the sailboat was beached. “If I had my way, I wouldn’t go near the place. These are mad times, Isaac, and the English fear ‘savages’ as much as they do their white witches.”

  “Does John Hathorne buy them for his table?”

  “He does. But I’m told he picks at them, as if the shells were stuffed with the tender flesh of Jesus.”

  “What do you think of the magistrate?” asked Isaac cunningly.

  “He is a man eating himself alive.”

  Isaac did not know what to make of the observation.

  Noting Isaac’s puzzlement, Joseph explained, “Hathorne is a true Puritan, and Puritans are hungry for the next world. They gnaw on their own hearts, hoping to please God. The pious ones have no flesh on their bones, and the hypocrites think to prove their good standing with the Lord by the flesh they carry.”

  By Smith Pool, Isaac faired a board to the shape of the Pequot’s ruined skeg. He also strengthened a bracing timber by the mast. He sent Joseph to gather moss to caulk her seams, having no oakum to hand.

  “An abandoned cooperage at Juniper Point has plenty of pitch we can use to coat her seams,” said Isaac. “The moss will keep her dry while we sail around the island.”

  “Are you going, too?”

  “I’ve nothing else to do,” replied Isaac, who had once again been swept up in an outbound tide leading to forgetfulness. He put the caulking iron and mallet in his satchel.

  “It’ll be dark soon,” said Joseph. “We can leave in the morning.”

  “Will we try the Dutchman’s crabs in brown butter?”

  Joseph nodded, and they walked to De Zeeslang as the last of the long day’s eastern light drained from the Atlantic.

  VIII

  t Juniper Point, Isaac and Joseph boiled pine resin in an iron kettle. The abandonment of the cooperage had incited speculation among the islanders. A faction of gossips, who wore leather doublets and breeches (not skirts and bodices), believed that Enoch Rhodes, owner of the works, had been murd
ered by Naumkeag Indians; a second faction argued that he had been arrested by the Puritans and taken to Boston jail. Those with no opinion had lost their tongues to the chief magistrate Death.

  Joseph painted the seams with pitch. Finding needle and thread, Isaac mended the sail by the clew. The Pequot was once more seaworthy. They searched the cooperage and the house for anything left behind that might be useful to them. In the kitchen, Joseph found a letter inside an ivory casket.

  Whosoever shall find this letter, know ye that I have Wickedly & Feloniously practiced Detestable Arts called Witchcraft & Sorcery, within the Township of Salem, upon & against Magistrates Corwin & Hathorne. Several times, in the Day & Night, I Hurt, Tortured, Afflicted, Pined, Consumed, & Wasted them. Whosoever seeks me will not find me, no matter where they search, for I have gone to the Devil. Know ye, also, that I have set a Curse upon this House & the Generations of Men who may desire to inhabit it. They shall be torn Limb from Limb, their Bowels roasted & fed to the swine, & their Eyeballs nailed to the lintel until ravens pick them clean. For this Dire Curse, Satan is my guarantor.

  Enoch Louis Rhodes, Age 52

  Juniper Pt.

  14th of May, in the Year of

  (I will not say “Our Lord”) 1692

  “You’ve been to John Hathorne’s house,” said Isaac, clearly disturbed by the letter.

  “I have,” responded Joseph, seemingly unmoved by Rhodes’s confession and curse.

  “Did he seem hurt, tortured, afflicted, pined, consumed, and wasted?”

  “I told you, he looked like a man eating himself alive.” He fell silent a moment and then went on to say, “He’s consumed by faith and despair. Unless it be by worms such as those that ate my skeg.”

  Faith and despair are in feverish opposition within a human heart, which only death can reconcile. The struggle for supremacy can eat a person alive—even a man like John Hathorne. Perhaps the contest waged within his gaunt ancestor was Isaac’s inheritance, which had made him melancholy.

  “Do you believe in sorcery?” asked Isaac. He had spoken with an odd intensity, as if he thought that Joseph, being of a savage nature, might be closer to the truth of such dark matters.