Tooth of the Covenant
Page 1
SELECT PRAISE FOR
Norman Lock’s American Novels Series
On The Boy in His Winter
“Brilliant…. The Boy in His Winter is a glorious meditation on justice, truth, loyalty, story, and the alchemical effects of love, a reminder of our capacity to be changed by the continuously evolving world ‘when it strikes fire against the mind’s flint,’ and by profoundly moving novels like this.”
—NPR
“[Lock] is one of the most interesting writers out there. This time, he re-imagines Huck Finn’s journeys, transporting the iconic character deep into America’s past—and future.”
—Reader’s Digest
On American Meteor
“Sheds brilliant light along the meteoric path of American westward expansion…. [A] pithy, compact beautifully conducted version of the American Dream, from its portrait of the young wounded soldier in the beginning to its powerful rendering of Crazy Horse’s prophecy for life on earth at the end.”
—NPR
“[Walt Whitman] hovers over [American Meteor], just as Mark Twain’s spirit pervaded The Boy in His Winter…. Like all Mr. Lock’s books, this is an ambitious work, where ideas crowd together on the page like desperate men on a battlefield.”
—Wall Street Journal
On The Port-Wine Stain
“Lock’s novel engages not merely with [Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mütter] but with decadent fin de siècle art and modernist literature that raised philosophical and moral questions about the metaphysical relations among art, science and human consciousness. The reader is just as spellbound by Lock’s story as [his novel’s narrator] is by Poe’s…. Echoes of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Freud’s theory of the uncanny abound in this mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction.”
—New York Times Book Review
“As polished as its predecessors, The Boy in His Winter and American Meteor…. An enthralling and believable picture of the descent into madness, told in chillingly beautiful prose that Poe might envy.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
On A Fugitive in Walden Woods
“A Fugitive in Walden Woods manages that special magic of making Thoreau’s time in Walden Woods seem fresh and surprising and necessary right now…. This is a patient and perceptive novel, a pleasure to read even as it grapples with issues that affect the United States to this day.”
—Victor LaValle, author of The Ballad of Black Tom and The Changeling
“Bold and enlightening…. An important novel that creates a vivid social context for the masterpieces of such writers as Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne and also offers valuable insights about our current conscious and unconscious racism.”
—Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wife and The Fountain of St. James Court; or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman
On The Wreckage of Eden
“The lively passages of Emily’s letters are so evocative of her poetry that it becomes easy to see why Robert finds her so captivating. The book also expands and deepens themes of moral hypocrisy around racism and slavery…. Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Lock’s thought-provoking series continues to impress.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[A] consistently excellent series…. Lock has an impressive ear for the musicality of language, and his characteristic lush prose brings vitality and poetic authenticity to the dialogue.”
—Booklist
On Feast Day of the Cannibals
“Lock does not merely imitate 19th-century prose; he makes it his own, with verbal flourishes worthy of Melville.”
—Gay & Lesbian Review
“Transfixing…. This historically authentic novel raises potent questions about sexuality during an unsettling era in American history past and is another impressive entry in Lock’s dissection of America’s past.”
—Publishers Weekly
On American Follies
“Provocative, funny and sobering.”
—Washington Post
“Ragtime in a fever dream…. When you mix 19th-century racists, feminists, misogynists, freaks, and a flim-flam man, the spectacle that results might bear resemblance to the contemporary United States.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
Other Books in the American Novels Series
American Follies
Feast Day of the Cannibals
The Wreckage of Eden
A Fugitive in Walden Woods
The Port-Wine Stain
American Meteor
The Boy in His Winter
Also by Norman Lock
Love Among the Particles (stories)
TOOTH
of the
COVENANT
TOOTH
of the
COVENANT
Norman Lock
First published in the United States in 2021
by Bellevue Literary Press, New York
For information, contact:
Bellevue Literary Press
90 Broad Street
Suite 2100
New York, NY 10004
www.blpress.org
© 2021 by Norman Lock
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lock, Norman, author.
Title: Tooth of the covenant / Norman Lock.
Description: First edition. | New York : Bellevue Literary Press, 2021. | Series: The American novels series
Identifiers: LCCN 2020027690 | ISBN 9781942658832 (paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781942658849 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864--Fiction. | Trials (Witchcraft)--Massachusetts--Salem--Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3562.O218 T66 2021 | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027690
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.
Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.
This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.
Bellevue Literary Press is committed to ecological stewardship in our book production practices, working to reduce our impact on the natural environment.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
paperback ISBN: 978-1-942658-83-2
ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-84-9
For Joyce Carol Oates
&
Charles Giraudet
CONTENTS
WINTER 1851: THE RED SHANTY
SPRING 1692: THE PROVINCE OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY
WINTER 1851: LENOX, MASSACHUSETTS
SUMMER 1692: THE PROVINCE OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY
WINTER 1851: LENOX, MASSACHUSETTS
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the blac
k drop which he drew from his father’s or his mother’s life?
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
… his doubts alone had substance.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Speak. I am bound to hear.
—Hamlet, to his father’s ghost
TOOTH
of the
COVENANT
WINTER 1851
THE RED SHANTY
LENOX, MASSACHUSETTS
he snow keeps me indoors, and I’ve been fretful all week with boredom. I was saving this bottle of Barbados rum for Melville’s next visit. He swears by it to sharpen the dulled wits that come from being shut up with one’s self, like a spice to excite a vapid appetite or (to be modern) a galvanic battery to set a listless man twitching. I saw one resurrect a frog, or at least its hind legs, which remembered, in death, how to flee—too late to save itself, alas. Not that I have any great affection for rum, or frogs, either, though I sympathize with their racial fear of alien hands that would make a meal of them.
A story has been much on my mind of late, the telling of which may lay to rest the surly ghost of one of my ancestors, whose shame has long weighed on me. I wanted to tell it first to Sophia, but my poor wife is in bed with another of her headaches. She is a martyr to an overly sensitive disposition. Lidian Emerson is another whose nerves are finely spun. Waldo may be the nation’s preeminent man of letters and philosophy, but he can be chilly. Remoteness is sometimes a penalty for thinking too much or too deeply, but one the thinker himself seldom pays. Biographies of illustrious men rarely mention long-suffering wives, except as they may have been an adornment to their husbands’ reputations or, in cases of posthumous fame, vestals of their immortality. Although not of the first rank, I don’t exempt myself from the egoism of the scribbling tribe.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth all the fuss, but what are we if not our stories?
Although I don’t much care for the taste of transubstantiated sugar beets, the fumes are delicious. Treats such as this dusky bottle of rum are a perquisite of employment in the U.S. Customs Service—not that I abused the high office of Inspector of the Revenue for the Port of Salem. The title is grander than the office itself. In our democracy, an appointment is often a bone of patronage thrown to dogsbodies in exchange for services rendered. I rendered unto Caesar sufficiently to hoist myself and family from the mire of debt without muddying my gaiters. Nevertheless, an article would sometimes vanish from a ship’s hold and materialize inside the domestic establishment on Chestnut Street of Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Sophia disapproved of my modest embezzlements, unless the contraband happened to be a fancy tin of Casparus van Houten’s chocolates. Eve found common apples irresistible. Consider how much more tempting Dutch chocolate would have been than Eden’s fruit, which once eaten must evermore be obedient to Newton’s law of gravity, as well as nature’s graver one called “death.” I fear the rot that follows it more than the dire thing itself.
A little more rum, Nathaniel? Pour it to the brim, and if any should spill twixt the cup and the lip, so be it. Such an ardent draft may prime the rusted works of speech. My nature tends the other way from garrulousness. Emerson and Henry Thoreau tire of my silences, which are not eloquent but heavy, like a millstone, which can never know the nectar of a peach. But on paper—ah! I’m someone else. I am the prophet Jeremiah and also Solomon, who sang like a troubadour, even though his amorous serenades were meant for God’s ears and not a mortal lover’s. I would sing bawdily, but I’m a somber Puritan dogged by melancholy—“the Noble Prince of Melancholy,” as that good man Evert Duyckinck dubbed me. My infamous ancestor settled his solemnity on me. Only on paper—like this sheet I rest my glass upon—can I speak heart and mind to you, reader, whose eyes and ears belong to me for as long as you are in thrall to my words. I say “reader” hopefully, since, for all I know, you may be falling asleep over these very pages or thinking of something by Dickens or Thackeray.
Fire in a bottle! I can see why a literary alchemist like Poe stoked the blazing furnace of his imagination with it. I prefer the lively Heidsieck. Sadly, I drank the last bottle at Christmas. In lieu of it, I will have a second glass of scalding rumbullion to fortify myself against the biting cold of a winter in the Berkshires under snow.
I am not one of those men of letters who write for posterity. I write to earn the price of a chop and something warming, to put a roof over our heads under which to settle our brains and ease Sophia’s nervous strain, and to provide for the children. I write to be done, once and for all, with debt, which seems everlasting even now that publication of The Scarlet Letter has brought me fame. No, my brief is all with the past—in particular, with my great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, an examining magistrate during the arraignment of the Salem witches who handed down bills of indictment as if they had been sweets. Of the dreary and disdainful men who sat in judgment, he was the most zealous and unforgiving.
I’m preoccupied by his story, which is also mine. He is the grudge I bear and the thorn in my side, the speck in my eye and the needle in my heart. He’s the reason for the altered spelling of the family name. He made me the man I am, one who walks in the shadow cast by Salem’s gallows tree, whose heart is too heavy to be wholly glad and too chill to be completely warmed by any human joy. As Melville wrote of me, I am “shrouded in blackness, ten times black.”
Snug inside the Red Shanty, in Lenox, Massachusetts, I ponder my guilty conscience, while its source, erstwhile Salem magistrate Hathorne, lies safely beyond reach of retribution, if not reproach. There may be enough left of him to make Brother Bones a clapper for a minstrel show or furnish a stage Hamlet with a prop to muse on in the graveyard scene, but the once proud adjudicator of others’ guilt or innocence is unpoetical dust and no different from the mineral residue remaining to the victims of his stern intolerance.
I think some good would redound to me if Magistrate Hathorne could be brought at last to the bar and the rope. (I would spare him the agony of being pressed to death by stones laid, one by one, atop a condemned man’s chest, undeserving though my ancestor be of mercy.) That I am saturnine and uncertain in society, I owe to his twisted root. It hobbles me with the gait and tongue of an awkward clod. I want to rip it from the stony ground, that root, where it took hold and became a blighted thing. Were it possible to dig up the man from where he waits to hear the last trump in Salem’s old Burying Point cemetery, I’d do so, albeit I would find him chapfallen and deaf to my stammered curses. No, to be rid of him, I would need to cross a gulf of time wide and deep enough in which to drown. I needs must go to him, where, in his own age, he is raging, cruel and intemperate.
When I lived in Concord among the mystics, Thoreau gave me a pebble and said, in that sly way of his, which puts me in mind of an evangelist and a confidence man, that I could sense its longing to be reunited with its mountain, if I would yield to the magnetic currents everywhere present in the universe. “However base or obscure, all things desire to return to their origin.”
To return to my origin, I require something far less antediluvian than Henry’s pebble. I need a totem to excite in me a sympathetic resonance for the atoms of Magistrate Hathorne as he was when he walked the streets and breathed the air of Salem in 1692.
Fortunately, I have a pair of his spectacles, which descended through the generations that followed him, along with the odor of his misdeeds. For the Salem boy I was when I lived in my grandfather Richard’s house in Herbert Street, they were more fabulous than Hans Lippershey’s telescope. As I peered through their magnifying lenses, I fancied I saw what John Hathorne had seen in his day: the rutted village lanes, taverns, the parish house, blockhouse, pillory, and the meetinghouse where the younger Ann Putnam and her creatures eagerly manifested signs of a diabolical affliction—the cries, moans, gibbers, pains, and seizures visited on them by demons who had left the forest to destroy the city of the blessed. Fascinated and appalled, I would look through the twin panes of glass till I could bear it no
more. The lenses had been ground for other eyes than mine. My vision was accustomed to the sights of a different Salem, the town where I was born in 1804 and spent my early years.
As a student at Bowdoin College, I read Latin and the classics. I’d have been graduated with distinction but for public speaking, which I could not do. Shyness has always dogged me. I envied the eloquence of my classmates Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, both of whom took the podium with the ease that a Baptist minister does the pulpit. The first became our national poet, the second a senator and a hero of the recent Mexican War. Lacking in oratorical skill, I became a customhouse hack and a scribbler. But a scribbler can create a world larger than the Mexican territories and more overflowing with raw life than what is bounded by stanzas. At Bowdoin, I became aware of my ancestor’s infamy. Now eightscore years later, I intend to scribble a tale with which to bring him to book. I’ll match his cruel sentences with my own and make his past a present Hell. If the Devil was at large in Massachusetts and his imps were eating into the Faith like worms into the pages of a book to set the Word at naught, my words will worm their way into my great-great-grandfather’s guts.
My “envoy”—I’ll call him Isaac Page—will travel to Salem as it was in the year of the witches and confront the man who bequeathed me a melancholy aspect and darkness of outlook. Perhaps he could have willed me no other, since the age in which he had his brief moment was benighted and the conditions harsh. Fear was ever present, and God less inclined to show His creatures mercy. But the fact remains that John Hathorne alone, of Salem’s and Boston’s civil authorities, did not repent of his terrible judgments, not even when Death or the Devil came to claim him at his end.
I say you shall repent, Grandsire, and release the innocents from their hard durance and bid the hangman put away his noose, or you’ll die at the hands of Isaac Page, whom I intend to send to Salem to judge you and, if need be, execute you!