by Norman Lock
ISAAC’S STOMACH GRIPED at the stink of a Spanish cigar. The Dutchman was eating and drinking lustily, his fat face flushed and sweating as it beamed good-naturedly on his laden table, like a lord surveying his domain. Isaac found his conviviality irksome, and his appetite repugnant. He couldn’t wait to put this gorging, swilling Falstaff out of sight and rest his clear gaze on scrawny Christians who would one day dine in paradise while swine like John Buxton and Pieter Koorne cleaned the Devil’s hooves.
“I’ve missed you, Master Page!” shouted Koorne affably. “Sit you down while I carve a haunch of venison for us. Will you have beer or gin, or both?”
“Nothing!” shouted Isaac fiercely.
“Sacremente! What ails you, friend? Do your eyes still hurt?”
“I’m not your friend, Dutchman! And I want no more of your hospitality, which be the Devil’s own! As for my eyes, they’re sick at the sight of your guzzling. Give me my bill; let me pay it and be gone!”
“Als’t u beleeft,” replied the Dutchman tersely. “As you please.”
Insulted, Koorne wiped his greasy mouth on a cloth he kept tucked in his sleeve for the purpose and went to his ledger. He scribbled Isaac’s debt—his plump hands shaking with rage—and slapped the bill on the table, as if to say, I, too, can be incensed, although I’d rather not be. Anger is bad for the digestion, bad for the heart, and bad for business.
Without another word, Isaac paid the sum. He was about to leave, when he noticed a broadside on a table. He stuffed it into his pocket and left the tavern. If he could have seen his face in a looking glass at that moment, he would have noted its resemblance to those of many in Salem—saturnine and choleric. The likeness would have pleased him. He would inform the magistrates, he told himself, that the Dutchman’s familiar was loose on the island in the shape of a monkey.
In gravelly Dutch, Koorne growled words that were surely a curse on Isaac Page.
Recalling Matthew Rhodes’s gift for the landlord, which Isaac had left in the yard, he fetched the dripping sack, undid its neck, and shook out a turmoil of eels onto the sand-strewn floor. They made a black knot on the planks. Squirming, they unlaced themselves and slithered—with a hissing noise—toward Koorne, as though they meant to suckle at his breast.
RECENT HANGINGS AT PROCTOR’S LEDGE. HANNAH SMYTH, ACCUSED OF WITCHCRAFT & LECHERY.
{Published at Boston, on the 31st day of July, in the Year of Our Lord 1692}
19 July. Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, & Sarah Wildes are hanged at Proctor’s Ledge in Salem Town.
22 July. Martha Emerson, daughter of Roger Toothaker, is accused by Mary Warren & Mary Lacy Jr.
23 July. Mary Toothaker is examined by Magistrates Hathorne & Corwin.
29 July. Hannah Smyth is accused by Sarah Bibber of witchcraft, whoredom, & licentious carriage.
Isaac rejoiced in the news of Hannah’s arrest. She had seduced him. She’d danced naked in the forest, the lascivious light of the inextinguishable jack pine licking her belly and thighs. She would have seen him damned. He would march on the Salem Town House like Joshua and accuse her of lewdness. He would fall upon Hathorne’s neck and weep. To be reconciled with his ancestor, Isaac realized at last, was his reason for going to Salem; that, and to hound the witches from their holes and tree them up Proctor’s Ledge. “Thus I was humbled, then thus I was called.”
When do we learn shame, and when forget it? In April, Isaac would have known how to answer. April had come and gone in another life, however; in this life, at this time, he feels none—a denial that is strange, since shame is a weapon that frightened people use against themselves. The flagellant lashes his own back, even though the strap is handed him by another. Never mind his having sold muskets to the Indians, Thomas Morton needed to be destroyed because he was resistant to shame. Shameless, he would have laughed to be shown the whip, the manacle, or the cross and told to embrace it. He would have made God’s chosen people in the New World the laughingstock of the Old.
XII
saac rowed across the broad harbor to Salem Town and made fast to the pier from which he had departed. He shuddered to think that he had helped Caleb escape God’s wrath, and intended to denounce Seth Grimes as a confederate of his son’s treason. Isaac felt his new purpose like a goad and would have mortified his flesh in Essex Street if he’d had a strop or a birch branch. He told himself that he would keep the fire of His just retribution burning beyond the September 22 executions of Martha Corey, Margaret Scott, Mary Easty, Alice Parker, Mary Parker, Ann Pudeator, Wilmott Reed, and Samuel Wardwell. As recorded in the history of the province, they were the last persons hanged in Salem for witchery.
Along with his zeal to do the Lord’s work came the ambition to make himself visible in the world. Worldly success and godliness were not inconsistent attributes of a man or woman in Puritan Massachusetts; they were signs of God’s saving grace. In gratitude for my collaboration, John Hathorne might build me a house, mused Isaac as he pictured himself and his great-great-grandfather at table, discussing grave matters of state over a cup of sack and a plate of oysters.
He hurried to the Salem Town House, where the grand jury was in session. As he drew near, a hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as the pious love, but joined to words that expressed all that our nature can conceive of sin and darkly hinted at far more. Its source, Isaac knew, was Hell. Rampant on the roof, a creature bred of fire and brimstone and nourished with the flesh and blood of infant sacrifices stood. Its leering eyes were rubies, and its great lapping tongue rasped like flint against the chimney stones, as if to strike fire into the frenzied hearts of the righteous, who, at that moment, were enjoining sinners to confess their wickedness and to accuse others of having signed the Devil’s book. In Earth’s bowels, Hell’s choristers lifted their voices in ecstatic discord. Many people inside the hall would later say that the hymn was passing sweet to the ear. They were the hypocrites.
Isaac threw open the door and strode inside to add his solemn voice to the excoriation of the witches, who stood in attitudes of dejection or defiance, according to their faith and stamina. In the dock, a woman cringed. She seemed familiar to Isaac, and in an instant, he recognized her as the witch and wanton Hannah Smyth.
“You would do well to confess and give glory to God!” warned Hathorne, a vein on his damp forehead bulging.
“Isaac!” she cried as he went to her. “For mercy’s sake, say I am no witch!”
Forgotten was Christ’s admonition that, long ago in Lenox, Isaac had planned to hurl at the magistrates: “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” Instead, he shouted, “I know her for a whore!’”
His words caused a sensation.
“I am not!” she shrieked, as if she already felt the hangman’s rough hand on her shoulder. “I swear I am a good Christian woman.”
“And what of the Devil? Are you his creature?” asked Corwin.
“I have no knowledge of the Devil!”
“Speak the truth, harlot!” enjoined Hathorne. “You must speak it now, as you shortly will before God.”
Sitting blackly above him on a dais was the object of Isaac’s long and, until that moment, fruitless quest to confront the source of his ancestral shame. He looked upon the man with pride and admiration. Isaac had on his spectacles and, perforce, must see the world as John Hathorne saw, and despised, it. It was his dread, magisterial duty to annihilate the corrupt tree and its evil fruit. Is it not written in the Gospel of Matthew: “Every tree that brings not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire”?
“The Lord knows I am no harlot, and that man—he, also, knows it!” cried Hannah, weeping and gnashing her teeth.
Isaac wondered if there mightn’t be the briefest of moments before the noose tightened around a neck—a knot in time between “about to be hanged” and “hanged”—when the sensation of the rope against the skin was indistin
guishable from that caused by the gentle hands of a lover as he gazed into the face of his beloved. Isaac shook his head, amazed that, even now, his mind could entertain such fancies.
“Identify yourself, sir, and say how you know this woman!” commanded Hathorne.
“My name is Isaac Page.” He pointed a damning finger at Hannah, who was near to fainting under the strain. “She seduced me and made me lie with her in the field like a beast. Later, I saw her in a Morris dance. She circled widdershins around a flaming pine tree in the woods at Andover. She did entreat me to dance with her. Fondling herself, she tempted me with her nakedness. Affrighted, I fled the forest.” Isaac’s eyes glinted in sympathy with his inner eye, which was entranced by the lurid spectacle, as though it had indeed happened as he described it.
“Naked, you say? And in a Morris dance?”
“Aye, she behaved lewdly. I hurried from the Lord’s waste, and till this moment, I’ve not seen or spoken to her for my sweet soul’s sake.”
“Mark his words—naked and lewdly!” rejoiced Hathorne, eyes bulging like the vein on his brow. His thin lips were parted. His teeth, which were small and pointed, showed in gums that were oddly pink and seemed themselves indecent. “These be high and dreadful offenses!”
The assembly made noises of exultation, which is next door to fury. Hathorne glared, and the leering faces disappeared beneath masks signifying abhorrence.
“Saw you any witch marks on her person when you lay with her?”
The gawkers leaned forward expectantly.
“I saw none.” He would not go so far as to say he’d had sight of her pudendum and anus.
“No witch’s teat to give suck to Satan’s imps?”
“I did not!” replied Isaac, blushing, although the others packed into the hall—magistrates, ministers, and watchers—were not the least embarrassed.
Hathorne was manifestly disappointed. “How often did you fornicate with the accused?”
“Once only.” Glancing at her face, which he had thought comely, Isaac was repelled by the scars left by smallpox.
“Why once and no more?”
“I saw that she was not honest.”
“How so?”
“I thought her face turned wolfish.”
“Wolfish, when?” asked Magistrate Corwin.
“The moment we had knowledge of each other,” replied Isaac, his face coloring.
“There’s a generous bounty set on wolves,” said Hathorne, his eyes alight with malice.
Almost as one, the spectators sniffed, as though to get the rank scent of the animal.
“Are you certain you saw no witch’s mark?” asked Hathorne, adopting the insinuating voice so useful to those in authority who wish to conceal their stony hearts.
“I saw none,” replied Isaac, who suddenly wondered if he had not seen tooth marks on Hannah’s breast. “I saw her naked.”
“And dancing widdershins. Did she, perchance, send her succubus to you in your sleep?”
“I don’t entertain women—neither visible in the flesh nor invisible—in my chamber at night!” replied Isaac. He was immediately alive to the impertinence of his answer and smiled at Hathorne foolishly. Guffaws in the courtroom only served to increase the magistrate’s ire.
“I warn you not to make light of these proceedings, or you’ll come to know—and soon—what passes through a man’s mind the moment before he drops!”
Isaac’s blood ran cold, and he threw some meat into the arena to make the magistrates and the others slaver. “She sent her specter out to kiss my eyes.”
“Mark that!” said Hathorne gleefully. “She tried to bewitch this man’s sight, so that he could not see truth!”
The onlookers gabbled like turkeys in a yard.
“What say you, mistress trollop?”
“It’s a lie! I swear upon my soul, I never sent my spirit out to this man or any other. And on my oath, I never danced naked or clothed in the woods, save as children do, innocent of foulness.”
“Swearing and oath taking are easily done by one of Satan’s brood. Hannah Smyth, I’m of the opinion that you are the Devil’s creature. What say you, Magistrate Corwin?”
“I’m not sure, John.” Jonathan Corwin appeared uncomfortable sitting at the high table between Hathorne and a third magistrate, Bartholomew Gedney. Gedney’s brother owned the Ship Tavern, in whose vegetable garden Bridget Bishop’s pig had routed.
Isaac considered if Corwin might not have had carnal knowledge of Hannah, the depths of whose wickedness he was only beginning to fathom. Studying her, he saw a monkey’s face underneath a starched cap, while on her shoulder a spectral bird with a woman’s head sat. He shivered in fear.
“How? Not sure!” exclaimed Hathorne indignantly. “How can you doubt she is a witch, man? She has shown her backside to the Devil!”
“I am blameless!”
“I’ve heard enough of witches!” Corwin’s voice was pitched between exasperation and exhaustion.
“Careful you don’t end up in the same sty as this harpy!” Hathorne turned to the crowd and, in John Winthrop’s words, warned, “‘The eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.’”
He turned to Isaac. “Whence came you?”
“From proselytizing the savages on the western frontier,” he replied with a ready lie.
“We have a great suspicion of strangers,” said Hathorne. “They can bring with them the pest or, worse, outlandish ideas repugnant to the one true faith.”
“I bring only the desire to destroy the Devil and his servants.”
Hathorne appeared satisfied. “How long have you been among us?”
Isaac would have replied if the door had not been thrown open. Deputy Herrick led a man wearing chains into the hall, who shouted at Isaac, “You’re a liar, Isaac Page!”
“Silence, or I will have your ankles tied to your neck!” ordered Hathorne, having gotten to his feet. Trussed up until blood issued from their noses, the most refractory of witches would speak truth and confess. “Who is this person who dares to disturb us in our grave business?”
“He’s called Dilly,” replied Herrick. “His Christian name is William Dill.”
“Whether or not he be a true Christian remains to be proved,” said Hathorne airily. “What reason had you to arrest him?”
“Why, by your own warrant!” exclaimed Herrick.
“I’ve issued a prodigious number of them!” Vexed by the man’s impertinence, Hathorne would have a sharp word to say to the deputy after the day’s bearbaiting.
“Geoffrey Hance, of the village, denounced him for having made his chickens sick.”
“Hance, who was denounced Monday by Martha Tyler—I remember now. We’re up to our withers in witches this week!” nickered Hathorne.
“If I be a witch, that man is the Devil himself!” shouted Dill, shaking a finger at Isaac.
A sound like swine routing in rotten vegetables greeted Dill’s charge. Fascinated, Isaac watched as the onlookers, expectant of a new revelation that would disturb the commonwealth and excite the gossips, changed into veritable beasts before his bespectacled eyes.
“Explain yourself, man!” said Hathorne. His voice replete with menace, he had no need to raise it to silence the court.
“I’ve proof that he came neither from the western frontier nor from Rhode Island, as he told many in the village, but from a century and more hence.”
Isaac felt the blood drain from his face and recalled—from far away—a stanza of a song by the Bay Colony minister, physician, and poet Michael Wigglesworth that he had read beside Fairhaven Bay while Thoreau tramped the woods in search of their negro friend, the fugitive slave Samuel Long.
He that was strong at first
Immediately grew weak;
And let the stock of Grace run out,
Like
vessels that do leak.
Hence we are all made weak,
And neither have Free-will
To chuse, nor Power to do what’s good,
But only what is ill.
“Show me your proof!” demanded Hathorne, who had stepped down from the dais.
“He’s a fool, Your Honor, and his words are foolish,” explained the deputy sheriff.
“He lives in a beast house and eats at Widow Stowe’s pig trough!” sneered the Reverend Parris, who, for a niggling sum, recorded trial testimony.
“He is simple, John,” said Corwin. “They call him ‘Dilly the daft’ hereabout.”
Hathorne ignored his colleagues. “Do you feel yourself being drawn toward salvation by God’s irresistible grace, William Dill?”
“I do!”
“And you love God and will not be forsworn?”
“I am a truthful man and know not how to lie.”
“Will you kiss God’s Word, which is to say His lips, which uttered it?”
“I will!”
Hathorne gave Dill a Bible to kiss. He could not have done so more eagerly had he been Adonis bussing Venus as the poet Shakespeare rhapsodized: “Pure lips, sweet seals in my soft lips imprinted, / What bargains may I make still to be sealing?”
“You say you have some evidence against this person.” The magistrate turned his barbed gaze on Isaac.
“Yea,” replied Dill. “And it be hidden on his person, sir, for he would not go without it.”
“Search him!”
A pair of soldiers put down their halberds and, having subdued Isaac, searched his boots, stockings, hat, and clothes. They found the Liberty dollar sewn into his pocket. One of them put it in Hathorne’s outstretched hand.
“What is it? A coin? What does a coin prove, William Dill?”
“You’ve only to look at it closely to have your answer.”
“What does it mean?” asked the perplexed magistrate, having examined it.
“It’s a counterfeit,” said Isaac weakly.
“And what else might you have counterfeited?”