by Norman Lock
“I believe there is evil in the world and there be those who wish it on another. They might as well be called ‘witches’ as anything else.”
Just then a third man entered the room. “Who are you men?” he demanded. “What is your business here?” Large and well knit, he was not to be denied a civil answer.
“We heard the place was deserted,” replied Isaac. “We needed pitch to caulk the boat.”
“You won’t find it in the kitchen!”
Isaac glanced at a ragged curtain hanging at a dirty window overlooking an overgrown garden where a dozen pear and apple trees stooped, their leaves sickened and bark scabbed; at the kitchen’s plastered wall, grimed by the soot of a hearth where not so much as cold ash gave evidence of former warmth; and at the barren table, where conviviality seemed never to have been.
The man ripped the letter from Joseph’s hands. “You’d no right to open it!”
“It’s addressed to ‘Whosoever shall find this letter.’ We found it,” said Joseph evenly. “We opened it.”
The man appeared ready to strike him.
Isaac spoke quickly. “We’re sorry for our trespass. We heard that no one lived here.”
“Heard from whom? The loafers at the Dutchman’s alehouse, I’d hazard to say.”
Isaac affirmed the man’s guess with a nod of his head.
“A shiftless rabble! You and this Indian are likely no better. I suppose you came to find doubloons buried underneath the floor? More than once I’ve wanted to burn the fat Dutchman’s place to the ground and see him roasted in his own lard.”
Isaac noticed a blur of movement—a flirt of light like the underside of a gull’s wing as it lifts toward the sun. Joseph had leaped on the man, and before Isaac knew it, he held a knife at his throat.
“Have a care, you bloody Indian! You’ll cut me!”
“Joseph!” I admonished him.
“The ‘fat Dutchman’ is my friend!”
“Your pot companion!” sneered the other. “Now take your knife away, Indian!”
“Keep still, or my hand could slip,” said Joseph softly.
Fascinated, Isaac watched the scene unfold. He’d had no experience of gutting a fish or dressing a stag whose blood was still hot, much less of cutting a man’s throat, and none at all of men who flung themselves furiously at each other. He might have been an ancient Roman sitting drunk with bloodlust in the Colosseum while two gladiators fought to the death. Violence has a strange power to enthrall and becalm. Some men love it as they do the pipe, the dram, or to lie beneath a lady’s skirts.
Joseph put away his knife and indicated, with a nod and a syllable, which might have been savage, that the other man should sit. They regarded each other for a time made audible by the breath each drew, according to his mind’s upheaval. Joseph looked at Isaac as if to say, I’ve said enough; now it’s for you to speak.
Unsure of the tone he ought to take, Isaac began in conciliation and ended in defiance. “We’ve apologized and hope you’ll make no more of it. We did not come to loot, only for resin. We looked inside the house, as anyone would who is capable of curiosity. We borrowed a needle and some thread—the tools and wood are mine—and would have shortly been on our way if you had not abused us!”
The man looked calmly at Isaac. “I could forgive your trespass and the theft of a little thread—”
“We did not steal it!”
“The thread was not yours to take. I would not have begrudged you it and the needle or the resin. My brother has no more use for them. I’m perplexed, however, by your prying into his cupboards and drawers. What did you hope to find in that casket? Queen Isabella’s jewels?”
The man’s rebuff had been honest and correct.
“You say this is your brother’s house?” asked Joseph after the silence had grown loud enough to hear a fly’s last agony as it surrendered its tiny life to the sticky jam left on a spoon.
“Aye, it belongs to Enoch Rhodes—he who wrote this!” he replied fiercely, clutching the letter, as if he intended to hand up a true bill and indictment against God Himself.
“What became of him?”
“I took him to where magistrates and constables cannot find him.” He shook the letter, as though to curse Heaven with its contents. “Did you read it?”
“We did,” replied Joseph quietly. Rhodes gazed at the Indian’s weather-beaten, somehow injured face, and his own expression softened.
“Then you know my brother is mad. For a man or a woman to be mad in Massachusetts is to be a witch. The magistrates and ministers make no distinction. Whether Enoch’s wits were turned by Satan or some distemper of the brain, it matters not at all to them. I don’t want to see him tied feet to neck till the blood runs out his nose, only to be hanged.”
“How came he so?” asked Isaac.
“Who can say what drives one person mad, another to put his hand to an evil purpose, yet another to make a career as hangman? Juniper Point is not far from Salem Town, and if madness be contagious like the pox, Enoch was liable to the catching of it. He was a sensitive, fanciful boy. Later, he studied theology at Harvard and, in the summer, helped Father make barrels and casks. Enoch used to say that he could see into a human heart. Who can see such a thing and not go mad? He should not have gone into theology—it bedeviled him, and his mind fell to pieces. He heard so much talk about witches that he came to believe himself one. It would’ve been better for him had he thought himself afflicted and behagged, but Providence is sometimes perverse. In his distempered mind, Enoch became a wizard who sent his specter to the magistrates, especially Corwin and Hathorne, who are the worst of them. My brother became a sorcerer to destroy them because, as he said, ‘Evil cannot be defeated by goodness.’”
“I should like to meet your brother,” said Isaac.
Rhodes turned to Joseph, who was staring out the window. “And you, do you want to meet him also?”
Joseph nodded, his eyes fixed on the sickly trees outside.
The man considered a moment and then said, “I’ll take you if you will lie down in the hold.”
“You don’t trust us,” said Joseph.
“You’re right not to,” said Isaac. “To trust is to put yourself in another’s hands, which may close around your throat or open and drop you into your grave.” He cupped his palms and opened them. Rhodes glanced at the floor, as though Isaac had let something fall. “We are all sinners in the hands of an angry God.”
“Will you lie belowdecks like two slaves during the Middle Passage?” asked Rhodes, scowling.
“Aye,” replied Isaac.
“And you, Indian?”
Grunting, Joseph acquiesced.
“What name has she?” asked Isaac.
“Desire, though I dare not paint the word on her stern, since human joy is outlawed in the province.”
Much later, when Isaac was again himself, he read in Winthrop’s journal that the Salem ship that had carried a cargo of Indians defeated in the Pequot War to sell in Bermuda returned with “salt, cotton, tobacco and negroes” in her hold. The ship was named Desire.
IX
saac and Joseph stretched out beneath the shallop’s planked deck, where fish would gasp their last breath on the way to the gutting board and drying rack. Isaac could feel the sea beat against the hull as the boat tacked. Rhodes was at pains to conceal his course to what turned out to be Tinker’s Island. Named for the abundance of tinker mackerel running close to shore, the island lay two leagues southeast of Juniper Point. Lulled by the water’s lapping against the hull, Isaac fell to dreaming.
He was in his rowboat, Pond Lily, on the Concord River, not far from Egg Rock, where Henry Thoreau and Waldo Emerson sat with their backs to the water. Waldo was declaiming, “The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.”
Seemingly beside the point, Thoreau said, “I dislike lawful assemblies more than I do hecklers and troublemake
rs; the first makes empty and vainglorious speeches, which the second rightly interrupts.”
“That smacks of anarchy!” chided Emerson.
“The first smack on the backside sets the infant squalling in protest and revolt,” retorted Thoreau with his customary bite. “The best human beings don’t let up until the undertaker sews their mouths shut.”
The two men philosophized awhile, until they were surprised by the abrupt appearance of Isaac stepping ashore.
“Why, Isaac!” exclaimed Emerson. “We heard you were dead.”
“I was in Salem, working for the revenue service.”
“A plum appointment!” said Emerson with his customary enthusiasm.
“Isaac, you were nothing but a highfalutin tax collector!” said Thoreau contemptuously.
“How do you find the afterlife?” asked Emerson.
“I tell you, I’m not dead! I’m in the Province of Massachusetts Bay!”
“That is where all the trouble began,” said Emerson, swiveling his head like an owl.
“Do you think that it was some evil in my nature that took me to Salem and not, as I had supposed, a pair of my ancestor’s spectacles?”
“We are all carried onward by Fate,” said Emerson. “This fact does not relieve us of the obligation to choose how we are to live our lives. There is little we can do for one another.”
“Did you see your great-great-grandfather?” asked Thoreau slyly as he coiled the beard growing at his throat around his finger.
“I—”
The shallop knocked against a mooring, and Isaac awoke.
“I hope you were not incommoded,” said Rhodes, whose Christian name was Matthew. He had coved Desire on the small island’s windward side and thrown open the hatch. To leeward, Marblehead would have been visible in the wavering distance. Matthew watched his two passengers squint in the sudden glare. Lending each a hand, he tugged them from the hold. He asked Joseph whether he had an inkling of where they were.
“It might be Misery Island for the stink in my nostrils and the stiffness in my bones.”
“It might be,” replied Matthew craftily. “Whatever it be called, there is none here but my brother and us. He gathered the things he had taken from the house—clothing, a pair of shoes, a few books, an iron skillet, and a large pot. “The island belonged to my father. Now it belongs to me, who also hopes to lie here, unless the steeple hats put me in their burying ground and confiscate my property—or impress me as a sailor when they decide to make war on Rome.”
The three men settled into a dory lashed to the mooring. Joseph slipped the line, and he and Isaac rowed ashore. Matthew sat in the bow, holding the pot on his lap. He resembled the Budai, vulgarly known as the “Laughing Buddha.” Isaac had admired a small bronze of the monk at Thoreau’s cabin, a gift from Emerson. Tinker’s Island was desolate, except for a seal lying on its belly atop a granite outcropping exposed by the retreating tide, and an ugly seabird squat against the water-blackened sand. The sound the boat made as it beached reminded Isaac of the day he had met Hannah Smyth, when she poured dried corn into a trough, amid the pecking chickens.
“How do you live?” asked Joseph as they walked deeper into the pinewoods. He had put the question simply, and Matthew took no offense.
“I catch mackerel, cod, and striped bass, dry, salt, and exchange them for rice, molasses, sugar, whale oil, brandy, cloth, fruit, and Dutch tobacco with Virginia traders whose merchant ships stop here on the way to Portsmouth. I have a kitchen garden, and all the wood, salt, and fresh water we need. I’ve said good riddance to the world and would gladly strike the spark to send it to blazes.”
They walked some minutes in silence before Matthew took up the thread of recollection.
“I was a schoolmaster at Wenham and, summers, caught blackfish to sell for their oil till I had my fill of the tablets of the law as handed down from God to Calvin, Cromwell, Winthrop, Mather, and John Hathorne! What a sour, misery-loving wolfish pack of Christians they be!”
Isaac recalled a fragment of his dream belowdecks—a gnomic exchange between Thoreau and Emerson:
“History has judged them.”
“What is history if not the spectral evidence of the past?”
“Waldo, you think too much.”
“A man cannot think too much, although too often he thinks too little.”
“Too much of it can make a Hamlet of a man!” Henry had cracked his knuckles. “What would happen to my bean rows if they were left to the dithering prince of Denmark to weed and hoe?”
X
our house is well hidden,” said Joseph.
“Father traded in liquor and had no use for the Crown’s ‘hog reeve.’”
“Massachusetts men will throw tea into Boston Harbor rather than pay the king’s tax on it,” remarked Isaac imprudently.
“You mistake your tenses—unless you’re the Devil’s man and can foretell the future.”
“You don’t strike me as a pedant, Master Rhodes,” said Isaac, in the hope of changing the subject.
“Grammar is a bulwark against confusion in men’s minds and in their government,” said Matthew, who finished his assertion in a sigh. “I am a pedant, if no longer a master of boys. Now I give instruction to the gulls, which mock me.”
Nothing could be heard of the ocean seething at the island’s edge or of the shorebirds silenced by human trespass and bickering. The three men entered a clearing, where a timber-framed house stood. The bays were wattled and daubed in the manner of the first rude houses built in New England. The place was gloomy, damp, and mossy. His eyes having pained him since leaving the hold of the shallop, Isaac strained to see a felicity of aspect in either the house or grounds that might recommend them as picturesque. (The storyteller’s affliction persists even in a desert or a polar waste.)
The gray sky brightened abruptly. Having knelt to tie his boots, Joseph was struck by the sun’s glance. His face and hands shone in a beam of light, which Jehovah might have flung earthward to mark some new prodigy of creation. Isaac cried out his astonishment at seeing Joseph so transfigured.
Joseph looked up from his boots to regard Isaac’s face. “What be the matter?”
“You’re shining, man!”
Matthew gave a bark of laughter. “It’s fish scales that bedazzle you, Master Page!”
Joseph glanced at his palms and saw that they were shining. Absently, he cleaned them on the grass, which, in turn, sparkled as though sown with brilliants. Once again, dark clouds shuttered the sun, the ray of light withdrew, and the grass gave up its radiance.
“It was a pretty sight, and I don’t blame you for thinking an angel had come among us,” said Matthew, fingering a wen on his neck.
“Widow Bagley says that the Holy Spirit is inside every man, woman, and child,” said Joseph, amused. “She’ll be glad to know it shone in one of the least promising of her charges.”
“‘How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!’” shouted the mad brother Rhodes, who appeared as unexpectedly as the light had done on the dull grass.
“Enoch, where have you been?”
“Cleaning my harquebus.” He spoke to Joseph, who was still kneeling, his hands on a bootlace. “If He be inside each of us, how, then, can we damn anyone to His eternal absence? It would be to banish God from His own creation—a logical impossibility.”
Isaac thought the case too clever by far to have been put by a madman. Recalling Dill’s imposture, he grew wary. He had encountered much in New England that was not as it seemed.
With a smile as radiant as a lunatic’s, Enoch went to Joseph and, with a regal movement of his hand, bid him arise. “I saw you through the window,” he said, jerking his head toward the house. “I couldn’t decide whether you were a fish pulled from the Sea of Galilee by Simon Peter or a dead carp washed up from the Nile after God had set His curse on the Egyptians.” He paused and then went on with devilry in his voice: “Unless you be my lord Lucifer, the shinin
g one.”
Matthew introduced him grudgingly: “My brother, Enoch Rhodes.”
“Even a dead fish will shine in the sun; it’s a property of its scales, you see, and not its flesh, much less its state of grace. Thus do men put on the majesty of the law—even God’s—though they be putrid and corrupt.” Enoch’s voice had a rough beauty. Isaac had not heard its like since Abraham Lincoln’s stump speech for Zachary Taylor, in 1848. “I see that you have no scales.” Enoch studied Isaac as intently as a boy does a dead bird lying on the grass.
“I do not,” said time’s castaway as he dredged up from his mind’s abyss Polonius’s words concerning Hamlet’s fancies: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”
“Then you are an abomination!” thundered Enoch. “For God said, ‘And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you.’”
“Joseph lay where the mackerel rub against the stem and scrape the scales from their backs,” said Matthew, exasperated by his brother. “Isaac did not. Joseph, let’s walk to the inlet, where you can wash your face while I see if there are any eels in the ox head. Abomination they may be, but I do dearly love the flesh of an eel!”
“It is a creeping thing, Matthew, and defiles the man who eats it.”
“And you are an ass, Enoch!” snarled his brother. “You may not eat of an ass, for so it is written!” Matthew and Joseph walked toward the inlet. Enoch led Isaac into the house.
“I READ YOUR CONFESSION,” said Isaac, sitting in the chair offered by his host, who was not, Isaac decided, insane.
He laughed. “It was a merry prank I hoped to play on them who would seize my house and goods. I dare say, none in Salem cares to live in a house accursed by its infamous owner, for whom Lucifer himself stands as guarantor.”
“The casket, I think, is a rare thing. How came you by it?”