by Norman Lock
On a knoll above the inlet, Enoch stopped, and they put down the barrel. “Father wanted to be buried by the sea. We honored his wish and laid him to rest here.” He knelt and poured the sandy ground onto his palm and watched it drain between his fingers. “Sadly, a prodigious storm unearthed the coffin and flushed it out to sea.” Enoch stood and dusted his hands on his breeches. “May it please God to have sent him drifting as far as the Fortunate Islands.”
Matthew said nothing, and the four men carried the barrel the rest of the way in silence. Isaac pictured the bones of old man Rhodes, damned by an inscrutable deity to sail, in an endless Middle Passage, inside his coffin ship—drawing no nearer to paradise than a honeybee shut up in a bottle does a field of wildflowers.
That night, Isaac dreamed that two men wearing cloaks carried him to a hill above the inlet and made him fast to iron rings hammered into a granite rock. Moloch walked from the ocean, eels streaming from his mouth, eye sockets, and nose. With his claws, he dug the eyes from Isaac’s face and gave each to a disciple kneeling at his feet, who ate it. Between their teeth, the eyes crunched like stale Communion bread. Isaac shrieked.
Of a sudden, John Hathorne appeared. He released Isaac from the granite stocks and, putting an arm around his shoulder, comforted him. “What have they done to you, dear Isaac?”
“My eyes! They have taken my eyes, and I can’t see!”
“You’ve only to put on my spectacles to see what you have glimpsed till now.”
Isaac groped inside his doublet. “I cannot see to find them!”
Hathorne put his hand inside Isaac’s doublet and brought forth a leather case. Removing the spectacles, he put them on Isaac. The magistrate’s hands were shining, as if he had wiped them on the scales of Leviathan, of whom it is written in the Book of Job: “His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal” and, also, “He maketh a path to shine after him,” like a slick of blood.
“I see clearly!” cried Isaac, entranced as he had been earlier when he watched the eels whip themselves into a frenzy on the strand, the instant before he vomited.
“Tell me what you see,” said Hathorne kindly, so that Isaac wept grateful tears.
“Moloch.”
“What does he want?”
“For me to go to Salem and denounce the Rhodes brothers.”
Hathorne patted Isaac’s head affectionately, as if he were a child. “That is what you must do, then.”
Isaac awoke. Shut up inside the dark chamber, the terror of his dream persisted. He felt as he had done on certain nights as a boy when he would awake with a dreadful jolt—half in, half out of a nightmare. Uncertain and afraid, he would hide beneath the bedclothes. There he would close his eyes and listen to the clock in the parlor tick amid the heavy silence. In the Rhodeses’ second bedchamber, which he shared with Joseph, who’d slept through Moloch’s and Hathorne’s visitations, Isaac strained to hear something of the familiar world—a clock, a night bird, a rusty cicada, a sleepless fly. He’d like to hear a dog barking in the distance. When he was a boy sent to bed for the night, he loved to hear the barking of the ostler’s bitch chained inside the stable. Now on a strange bed, in an unfamiliar darkness, Isaac began to shiver. Not a dog! he said to himself. The Devil and his legion make familiars of dogs. My nerves couldn’t stand to hear a dog in the night!
His hearing became preternaturally acute, as is said to happen to compensate the blind for loss of sight. He heard a borer worm in the hornbeam tree outside the window, a beetle scraping its armor against the lath inside the plastered wall, a louse crawling through Joseph’s hair. Isaac shivered a second time and would have prayed for morning to make haste, but his voice—even that which droned ceaselessly within his own mind—stammered.
How sharp the Devil’s hearing must be that he can eavesdrop on secrets whispered by adulterers, on sins confessed fervently into the ears of priests, on the sighs of the forlorn, and the groans of those ready to sell themselves for meat when the body is famished or to bargain away their souls for love when the heart is starved!
Isaac awoke beneath a shadow lying across the bedclothes, cast by the hornbeam through the window. Joseph had dressed and gone downstairs. By the smell of ham frying in the skillet, Isaac guessed he was already at his meat. He put on his clothes, tied his hair sailor-fashion, and looked out the window. He could see the distant inlet shining above the tops of the black pines, though, on that windless morning, no sound of foaming wave or hissing sprawl reached his ears. He listened for the worm in the hornbeam, the beetle in the wall, but heard nothing. Instead, he was delighted by the song of a bird and the drone of an industrious wasp building a paper house beneath the eaves. He gazed at the thickly sown conifers and, in the clearing between the saltbox house and the woods, at a shed where Matthew Rhodes stored fishing gear, a brew house, and a half-buried stone outbuilding where he smoked his hams. The world was not in focus, and Isaac fretted that he might never see it clearly again, until he remembered what his ancestor had told him in his dream: “You’ve only to put on my spectacles to see what you have glimpsed till now.”
They were on the dresser. He took them from their cracked leather case, unfolded their wire arms, and put them on. Never till that moment had Isaac known such clarity! His eyes roved the bedchamber and saw horsehair wound into a plaster wall, two warrior ants in mortal combat, a scratch on a heavy oak dresser, concealed by an embroidered cloth. Even more uncanny, Isaac saw, as a seer would have done, the cause of the scratch. In his mind’s eye, he watched a woman, drab and plain, take a horseshoe nail from her apron pocket and—with pent-up fury and the bitterness of disappointment—scar the dresser top. Isaac knew for certain what a mentalist might pretend to know, that she was marking the face, its effigy, of him who one day would die in this house and, after being defiled by nature’s equally solemn rage, go to sea in his coffin. Like the vengeful asp, a shadow flickered its tongue from beneath the bedstead. As it slipped into the room, Isaac saw the dead man’s ghost and knew it was hunting for the wife who had poisoned him.
Aghast, Isaac tore the spectacles from his face, and the view clouded, as if by cataracts. What does it mean? he asked himself, trembling. Having no answer to give, he returned the glasses to their case, saying aloud, “Never did I know such clarity, save when I stood on the shingle and watched the eels slide from the ragged head!” He went downstairs to appease a hunger that lay outside the remedy of breakfast.
ENOCH WAS BUTTERING TOASTED BREAD when the pilgrim sat down to breakfast. He poured Isaac a cup of ale.
“Would you care for a hash of potatoes and ham?”
“Yes, thank you, Enoch.”
“Did you sleep well?”
“I was troubled by a nightmare.”
“Perhaps the eel didn’t agree with you.”
Isaac had not touched the eel. As he sat by the fire with a plate on his knees, the flensed and quartered flesh did, indeed, seem an abomination.
Eating his hash, Isaac felt the weight of the other man’s gaze. “What, Enoch?” he asked peevishly.
“I’m sorry you’re leaving us. There be much more I’d like to say to you.”
Isaac laid down his knife and spoon and asked brusquely, “Such as?”
“Nothing more alarming than theology, Isaac, I promise you.”
Isaac frowned. Of all things in that New World, theology was the most to be feared.
“You’re right to make a face. Theology has many branches. Underneath some of them, mandrakes grow from the seed of hanged men. Women, too, are dropped from branches, but I can’t guess what root or weed might be bred in the shadows of their skirts.”
His appetite deserting him, Isaac set aside his plate.
“Isaac, I do beg your pardon. Religion and politics are unfit subjects at breakfast, when the stomach is impressionable.” He laughed, and once again Isaac couldn’t decide whether the other’s mirth was innocent or perverse.
“My brother wants to be away with the tid
e. But hear me first, Isaac: Go wide of Salem. It’s a noxious place! Whether the poison be distilled from the blasted hearts of our race or from the mephitic waters of Lake Avernus, whose vapor would choke birds to death that flew across its face, I cannot say. But mark this, friend: The Devil is only another point of view, contrary to the general. Stay well clear of Salem! One can’t always hold his breath long enough to escape a stench. Forgive the lecture. The habits of a preacher—who, in happy days, was a student of the classics—are hard to break.”
Avernus, entrance to the underworld. Yes, thought Isaac. So had Salem seemed when I walked out of the forest and into anno Domini 1692.
As they headed for the beach, Enoch asked, “What if Christ had not arisen from the dead after His three days’ harrowing of Hell? What if Satan had triumphed and assumed His form and radiance? What would that make of our religion?”
Isaac gave no answer other than to kick a stone from his path. The two walked the rest of the way in silence.
The tide was high and full of noise. Seawater captured by an iron salt pan trembled in the early-morning light. Matthew and Joseph had brought the shallop close to shore. In two hours or so, Isaac would be on Winter Island. Enoch offered him his hand, which he churlishly refused. “Return to your own place!” he urged. “To breathe the foul air of Salem and to see as they do will drive you mad!”
What did he mean by “your own place”? asked Isaac, but only of himself.
He waded from the shingle to the boat. Joseph pulled him, dripping, over the gunwales.
“Stay clear of Salem folk!” shouted Enoch above the drumbeat of the luffing sail. “You may already have tarried too long to …” The rest of the caveat was lost to a freshening breeze, which stretched the canvas taut.
Watching Enoch dwindle to a dot onshore, Isaac was stricken by a pain behind his eyes, worse than before. He shut them, and after a moment’s darkness veined by threads of light, he opened them on Salem Sound as the boat beat northeasterly from the island’s windward side. Impulsively, he put on the spectacles, and the ache and uncertainty fell away, as though scales had, indeed, been covering his eyes. “But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.”
Through John Hathorne’s spectacles, Isaac gazed on the distant shore of Tinker’s Island. To his amazement, a giant was striding knee-deep in the water, as if in pursuit of him. The great beast stepped onto a sandbar and shook its brazen fist at Heaven, and by Heaven’s trembling light, Isaac saw Moloch. The two other men saw nothing. Matthew was watching the sail, and Joseph was looking out to sea.
Though there be fury on the waves,
Beneath them there is none.
The awful spirits of the deep
Hold their communion there …
Looking at the girdling horizon, Isaac saw Scylla, Cetus, Poseidon, and Hydra—fabulous sea monsters, which had once decorated the ends of the world’s oceans on ancient maps. Beasts, he now knew, were of the world as it truly was. Isaac laughed at his previous ignorance, and the remnants of his former consciousness dissolved as his mind fused with the universal. Moloch was raging in a stentorian voice, which mimicked the roaring surge, while mewing gulls flew up before him, as if Moby Dick were hurtling into their midst, lashing the water white with its flukes.
“The Devil is only another point of view!” What heresy! Enoch had honed his mind on the Devil’s stone! Isaac comprehended, as he had not before, how dangerous was the theology of the Antinomians, which imagined the Holy Spirit dwelling within each human breast. What if it be not God’s radiant person but Satan’s shadow that sits in the plush chambers of the heart and whispers blandishments into men’s ears? Without God’s Word breathed onto the pages of His Book, we would certainly be deceived. Without the church’s ministers and teachers, we would lose our way, like children walking amid the high corn. “Stay clear of Salem folk!” Ha! Isaac would denounce Enoch to the magistrates, and his brother, Matthew, also, for having hidden the apostate. He swore that two Rhodes brothers would be added to the desolation of names before the week was out. In his thoughts, Isaac glorified the Lord’s men, saying, “These have power to shut Heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they desire.”
Isaac’s thoughts then turned to Merry Mount and the madness of Thomas Morton, who had styled himself Comus, cupbearer of Bacchus, and a Lord of Misrule, who had, as it were, opened a school for atheism and debauchery in New England. In Concord, Isaac had heard him lauded by Thoreau, when the Transcendentalist had made himself giddy with dancing and spruce beer. He believed that Morton had been unjustly persecuted by Bradford and the Pilgrims for his liberality and for being “a light in that dark world of dour Englishmen.” Had Thoreau been nearby, Isaac would have dragged him before the magistrates and declared him Satan’s tool.
From a dyer in Salem Village whose father had been a governor’s assistant in Plymouth, Isaac had learned the truth about Thomas Morton: He had sold fowling pieces, muskets, pistols, powder, and shot to the Indians and instructed them in their use. He’d sold them molds with which to manufacture their own shot. Morton had done all this to purchase the means to nourish the drunkenness, gluttony, and licentiousness of his cohort. For this reason, Miles Standish and his men arrested him and took him to Plymouth, so that he could be sent to England and have his treason published. By his great cunning, Morton escaped punishment. Sinners, heretics, atheists, and practitioners of the black arts, regardless of their artfulness, will not escape me now that the scales have fallen from my eyes! avowed Isaac, besotted with self-righteousness.
Arriving at Juniper Point, Matthew dropped sail and docked at the abandoned cooperage. He embraced Joseph fraternally and nodded to Isaac—coldly, he thought.
Isaac glared. You’ll regret your aloofness, as will many another secret sinner in our midst. Henceforth, I’ll use my spectacles to unmask them. I’ll burn them, as boys do ants beneath a magnifying glass!
“It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power—than my power at its utmost—can make manifest in deeds….” How prophetic those words had been, which Isaac had given the dark figure in his tale “Young Goodman Brown” to speak!
I’ll go to Salem Town and tell my great-greatgrandfather that the Devil is abroad in the world, and I have seen him! declared Isaac, as if he were already standing before the magistrate.
“Remember to give the Dutchman his eels!” called Matthew, tossing the squirming sack onto the dock. The sail bellied, and the boat stood to for the southeast.
Isaac had cast out the beam from his eye.
XI
’m sailing to Aquinnah to visit my father. Why not go with me? You can talk religion with the widow Bagley.”
“I’ve business in Salem,” replied Isaac tartly.
“You’ll be safer among the Praying Indians.”
“I have business in Salem! I’ll be obliged to you if you’ll take me to Cat Cove.”
His churlishness offended Joseph, who grunted his assent.
On the way to the cove, the two men kept a wary eye on each other—Isaac’s behind the spectacles, which granted him a godlike omniscience. He looked into Joseph’s heart and saw that it was savage. A stoical countenance hid the wildness and vice of a race of “wicked imps … like the Devil, their commander,” as Captain Underhill had described the Pequots. By exterminating them, New England had done what was needed to save its people from “exquisite torments and most inhumane barbarities.” Or should they have waited till the savages roasted their babes and ate them? demanded Isaac silently and furiously of Joseph. The heathen nations are joined with Satan in making war on the saints of God’s earthly kingdom.
Joseph had turned his face to the water; his beardless lips were set in a grimace. Isaac recalled from memory’s well words of Jo
hn Winthrop vindicating the Puritans’ settlement of New England: “For the natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox, so the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess.”
At Cat Cove, Joseph brought the boat close to shore. Isaac clambered over the gunwale. His feet slipped on slime-covered stones as he sought a foothold in the waist-deep water. An aphorism of Winthrop’s rose to the surface of his agitated mind.
When a man is to wade through a deepe water, there is required tallnesse, as well as Courage, and if he findes it past his depth, and God open a gapp another waye, he may take it.
Isaac would take the way that God had opened for him, which led to Salem Town and his great-greatgrandfather, whom Isaac had defamed.
“My things!” he snarled. Hatred, as flammable as oil, had seeped into his soul.
Joseph took Isaac’s satchel and pack and slung them onto the beach. He would have hit him in the face with the sack of eels had Isaac not jumped away in time. It lay moiling at his feet, endued with alien life.
“Go home and pray,” shouted Isaac, “though you will never see the Lord’s face—neither you nor your ridiculous steeple-hatted father!”
Joseph cursed him in his native tongue. Having put about sharply, the Pequot headed toward the South Channel and open sea.
Isaac stood, sopping, amid the saw grass. Drops of water glinted on the glass panes of his spectacles. A solitary gull laughed in mockery at God and His botched creation, which the devils in Salem were pledged to destroy. The warm, earthy smell of harvested salt hay, once so pleasing to Isaac, made him retch. Enraged, he cursed Joseph and rejoiced as the heavens smote him with a beam of light and set his boat ablaze.
Isaac had been too long in Salem. A better nature can be forgotten, and the rabble’s cause taken up as one’s own. He had put on another’s spectacles, whose lenses were biased.