Tooth of the Covenant

by Norman Lock

  “Then I’ll leave my story for the Tooth Rat to gnaw.”

  “You’ll give it up?”

  “I’ll give it up. In any case, I’ve work to do on Blithedale before I give it to Ticknor.”

  “I’m glad of it.”

  “Your eyes, dear, they no longer pain you?”

  “They are better—and I’ll be obliged to you, husband, if you allow me my complaints without bestowing them on your characters.”

  “I do beg your pardon.”

  “There are days when I wish the ink in your inkwell would freeze.”

  “Sophia, I’m ashamed for not having encouraged your ambition. You surrendered your art for me without protest, as you did your maidenhood. I remember your joy at seeing your Isola San Giovanni hanging in the Athenaeum and Waldo Emerson’s delight in the medallion portrait you painted of his brother Charles. My ‘Gentle Boy’ will always look to me as you drew him. I allowed you to waste your gift, and I’m sorry for it. You’re right: I make too much of myself.”

  “That reminds me, Nathaniel: The lenses in your great-great-grandfather’s spectacles are cracked. I noticed it when I was dusting the curio cabinet this morning.”

  “They could not bear to look again on Old Salem. They’re happier in the cabinet, where they can see your pretty face. What’s that you’ve drawn? Is it me wearing a steeple hat, asking for your forgiveness? Or John Alden stammering before his Priscilla?”

  “Pshaw! You’re an incorrigible fantasist, Nathaniel!”

  “Whose throat is dry.”

  “I’ll make us tea, shall I?”

  “Yes, please, my dear.”

  Who remembers Bridget Bishop now that 160 years have passed? Who knows or cares what hardships and agonies she bore and whether or not she did so bravely? In any case, did she not bring them on herself? She would not hold her tongue, and she would wear the red bodice! I think that it was not the slanders of John Indian and the village girls, nor the frontier raids by the Wabanaki and the French, nor drought and fear of famine that turned the province upside down, but the Puritans’ covenant with God, which promised His chosen people that confession followed by punishment would atone for sin and bring an end to their affliction. We are not the chosen ones, and there will be no end to affliction. Each of us has his own complicated business to oversee, which may succeed for a time but must inevitably fail, as stars fall according to laws other than Divine. Let men and women look to their own welfare, for governments are blind!

  On the subject of God’s existence, I have nothing original to say.

  “India or China, Nathaniel?”

  “China, I think.”

  “I’ll cut you a slice of currant cake.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “There’s little nourishment in words, husband, even those you might come to eat.”

  If there is witchery, it is in the stories that we tell, their power to enthrall, transform, uplift, and corrupt. A scarlet letter or a great white whale—what are they if not figures in a tableau behind which lie truths that can crack the foundation of the world and let the angels or the devils out into broadest day!

  L’ENVOI

  Dear Sophia,

  When people or places disappear, they leave a shadow behind them where stories can take root, grow, and sometimes become perennial. There the dead can quicken, and a town long before changed beyond recognition can be restored. A hand can reach up through the ages from its grave and touch another’s beating heart—quickening or stilling it. Wanted or not, stories thrust themselves upon me. They are devilish hard work for small recompense. Yet I tell them as though—leaky or not—they were the vessels of Grace.

  Your Nathaniel

  In that whiter Island, where

  Things are evermore sincere;

  Candor here, and lustre there

   Delighting:

  There no monstrous fancies shall

  Out of hell an horrour call,

  To create (or cause at all)

   Affrighting.

  —Robert Herrick,

  from “The White Island;

  or Place of the Blest”

  AFTERWORD

  Doubt is the tooth of the covenant we inherit;

  it can bite and gnaw where conscience has its quick.

  Many books have been written about the Salem witch trials. Tooth of the Covenant is not intended to be one of them, although the madness of 1692 is stitched in scarlet threads into the fabric of this novel. Nor did I set out to correct our misconceptions about the Puritans, who were likely no purer in their time than we are in ours, although they may have been more guilt-ridden. Nor is this novel a revenger’s tragedy, although allusions to Hamlet and his problem are ample. (Like Isaac Page, Hawthorne’s proxy in the tale, the Danish prince wrestled with the problem of spectral evidence.) In Tooth, I wanted to show a mind slipping its moorings, gradually losing its way amid an unfathomable reality, and ending in delusion—in the case of this novel and of the Salem of 1692, a commonly held one.

  What the novel does concern is the power of storytelling to raise the dead and, by its persuasive and transgressive art, to confront a persistent ghost. To imagine the burden of the ancestral guilt carried by Nathaniel Hawthorne was reason enough to want to write this book. To suggest that his melancholy, taciturnity, and habit of producing somber narratives regarding sin and remorse are due to familial shame is nothing new. How he might have used his craft to silence his great-great-grandfather Hathorne (the most vigorous prosecutor of Salem’s accused) is a novelty that combines literary biography and the metaphysics of fiction writing. The novel shows the ultimate failure of the storyteller’s quixotic quest to alter history or a human heart—another’s or one’s own. Isaac Page’s failure to remake the world is our kind’s tragic patrimony. It is also a salutary reminder that no one ought to presume to impose a point of view.

  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.

  Aside from the fascination of considering Hawthorne’s unattractive qualities as the result of a predisposition to guilt, if not sin, is the disturbing idea that few individuals immersed within a culture (those fitted with the “spectacles” of a particular way of seeing) can judge it clearly and fairly. When Isaac puts on the spectacles, he assumes John Hathorne’s point of view; moreover, being a man of ordinary character, he cannot resist the strength of the communal delusion. I stated the dangerous dilemma in the novel this way:

  In 1851, Isaac was open to ideas as long as they were sensible. In exile, however, his intellectual toleration would lead him to an uneasy recognition of Satan and his cohort. That was no more astonishing than clear water’s turning dark by the process of infusion—a minor marvel witnessed in a pot of tea.

  The best of nineteenth-century literature was not small in scope, nor did it consider moral, social, or political ideas outside the jurisdiction of fiction. My ambition has been to confer on readers a larger view of the American present by writing essential stories of a nation being violently made, unmade, and remade. To reach toward the sublime, I have found it necessary to lean away from myself.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In writing this tale for Nathaniel Hawthorne (a singular presumption), I strove to simplify the complex Puritan mind without falsifying the spirit of the times or the possible motives of the central figures whom I have chosen to represent them. I could not have minimized the theology and history that I include in the book. Seventeenth-century Puritans cannot be understood outside of their faith and history; their mind is alien to ours in many respects. I peppered my story with invention and exercised a storyteller’s prerogative to shape events. (Time is shapeless, after all, a fact that makes the composer’s art possible.) In some instances, I have consolidated characters, sketched actions, and taken liberties with actual places. For example, I exaggerated the distance between Salem and Winter Island to suggest Isaac’s temporary isol
ation from the mainland and its fevers. There was a public house there, licensed by Salem Town, which used the island as a wintering place for its fishing fleet and as a pasturage. The inhabitants were few. (Salem Neck and Winter Island would not be conjoined until much later.)

  History is a complication beyond my powers to unknot. In the case of a character in a story buried underneath history’s avalanche, however, the creator need not inquire much further into his circumstances than the rock that struck him. I leave remote causes to students of time’s accrual, whether they be historians, archaeologists, or theologians. They are better equipped than a novelist, at least this novelist, to penetrate what Perry Miller called, in his book by that name, the New England mind.

  I acknowledge a debt to the following persons for having corrected some of my initial misunderstandings of Puritanism: E. Brooks Holifield, Ph.D., Emory University, author of Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War; William Huntting Howell, Ph.D., Boston University, author of Against Self Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States; and Emerson W. Baker, Ph.D., Salem State University, author of A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience. (For any errors that remain, the fault is mine.)

  The language used in this novel is steeped in seventeenth-century prose. Like Arthur Miller’s in The Crucible and Hawthorne’s in The Scarlet Letter and his colonial New England tales, my antiquing gives the necessary illusion of an appropriated time without attempting to reproduce its peculiar usages or orthography, except as they may appear in excerpts. Yeas and nays there are, but thee and thou have been purged from the story’s vocabulary as unnecessarily obtrusive.

  Passages in the novel beginning with the following words were taken from records kept of John Hathorne’s examination of Bridget Bishop and Rebecca Nurse, respectively: “I am no witch” and “It is very awful to all to see these agonies.” I have borrowed lines from other Salem witch trial testimonies, as well. (The originals have been altered on occasion, though not their sense, to be consistent with the novel’s diction.) I have also quoted several passages by Hawthorne from his tales set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (His zealous readers will discover them for themselves.)

  I read or consulted: American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, edited by David S. Shields; A Break with Charity: A Story About the Salem Witch Trials, by Ann Rinaldi; The Crucible, by Arthur Miller; Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait, by Carlos Baker; Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, by John Berryman; The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, by Perry Miller; Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620–1647, by William Bradford; The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, by Edward S. Morgan; Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project site (salem.lib.virginia.edu); Six Women of Salem, by Marilynne K. Roach; The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony, by James and Patricia Scott Deetz; Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea, by Edmund S. Morgan; “The Witchcraft Trials in Salem: A Commentary,” by Douglas O. Linder (www.famous-trials.com); and The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell.

  Philip Roth’s rebuke to the Puritans in The Dying Animal and his admiration for the “riotous prodigality” of Thomas Morton and the “mad Bacchanalians” at Merry Mount is passionate; so, too, is William Carlos Williams’s essay on the maypole in his book In the American Grain. Holding a contrary opinion of Morton, Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620–1647 condemned him as one of the “gain-thirsty murderers,” a profiteer who would sell “the blood of their brethren … for gain.”

  Occasionally, the reader will encounter a phrase or clause set off by quotation marks that may seem to have no referent in the text. These I found in the secondary sources named above, especially in The New England Mind; Six Women of Salem; The Story of John Winthrop; and Of Plymouth Plantation. They are best thought of as expressions of the culture that Isaac struggles to comprehend. Needless to say, my gratitude to the scholars who brought them to our attention is boundless. Borrowings from the Bible are numerous and taken from the King James Version, which likely would have been in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s possession, and not the Geneva version, which the Puritans would have read. References to Hamlet are also abundant. (The sentence “An old white horse galloped away in the meadow” belongs to T. S. Eliot; I can think of few more beautiful ones in the English language.)

  To tutor my sensibility, I listened to anthems and fuguing tunes by our country’s first composer, William Billings, of Boston, a tanner by trade. No amount of acclimatization could allow me to feel and re-create the terror of the time of which I write, not only that imposed by churchmen and magistrates but—perhaps more dreadful—that inspired by the wilderness, which was so readily peopled by devils in the popular imagination. This wildness may be considered a major character in the novel.

  This acknowledgment is the ninth I have written since Erika Goldman and Jerome Lowenstein, M.D., copublishers of Bellevue Literary Press, first made room for me on its publication list. By now, I thought to have been able to express my gratitude without resorting to the usual formulae, but I find that I cannot. To say it plainly, my thanks to you, Erika and Jerry, and to your able colleagues Molly Mikolowski, Laura Hart, Joe Gannon, and Carol Edwards.

  BELLEVUE LITERARY PRESS is devoted to publishing literary fiction and nonfiction at the intersection of the arts and sciences because we believe that science and the humanities are natural companions for understanding the human experience. We feature exceptional literature that explores the nature of perception and the underpinnings of the social contract. With each book we publish, our goal is to foster a rich, interdisciplinary dialogue that will forge new tools for thinking and engaging with the world.

  To support our press and its mission, and for our full catalogue of published titles, please visit us at blpress.org.