by Norman Lock
Later in the universal frenzy, others would cry “witch” in envy, spite, or dread of being hanged for sending out their specters to sicken or murder their neighbors. Spectral evidence was sufficient to condemn them: Accusers need only descry a witch’s familiar—a mastiff, such as Black Shuck, which had ravaged Yarmouth’s Long Sands, a black hog, or a yellow bird with the tiny head of a woman—for the magistrates to convict the accused of keeping company with the Devil. Such infernal entities were invisible to all but the bewitched. In Salem, there were few brave hearts to call them liars.
Another exchange of voices was audible to Isaac. They were as clear to him as if he had been standing at the meetinghouse window. John Hathorne was interrogating four-year-old Dorcas Good at her mother’s arraignment. The child was terrified, the magistrate cunning.
“And did you never play with a familiar?”
“I had a little snake.”
“Did it leave its mark on you?”
“A deep red spot, about the bigness of a flea bite.”
Dorcas showed the magistrates the tip of her forefinger, where the snake would suck.
“Who gave you the snake? Was it the Devil? Think carefully, child, else you keep your mother company in Arnold’s jail.”
“It was my mother gave it me—not the great Black Man.”
Gulled into betraying her mother, the child would spend that night and many another in terror, hunger, and chains.
Having heard his ancestor flay Dorcas with sharp arguments, Isaac could have cut the man’s throat as readily as the Hebrews did their sacrificial lambs’ or a New England farmer of his own time does a stout’s. Isaac would have gone at once to the meetinghouse and dispatched John Hathorne, but like a shackled prisoner or a man in a trance, he was unable to move an inch from the spot where he stood at the outskirts of the village. The magisterial voice, which mixed blandishment and coercion, arriving from underneath a century and a half of grass, snow, and mud, in their seasonal round, unnerved Isaac. He could not reconcile the fact that the man was dead with the fact that he had just spoken. Momentarily bewitched, Isaac could as well believe that fiends lurked in the thatched darkness beneath the soaring trees surrounding Old Salem as that invisible agencies were the cause of cholera or smallpox. And then his Yankee skepticism declared itself. Evil originates in the mind, he told himself. It does not creep into a man’s soul, like a tick into his clothing.
“Say you have conjured! Say who else has supped with the Devil, and you will go free.”
“I am innocent.”
Isaac’s purpose now grew larger: He had not only to lift the family curse, which blighted his nature, but forestall the hanging of nineteen innocents, the pressing to death of Giles Corey, and the imprisonment of 150 men, women, children, and milk-toothed babes in Boston jail for “the horrible crime of witchcraft practiced by them and committed on several persons.” He must do so for their sakes, as well as his own. God had decamped in that grievous time and taken His mercy with Him. His representatives in Salem and Boston were unpitying. Could there be a more outward display of broken charity than to charge the husbands or the wives of the condemned for their bed and board during their imprisonment and, if need be, for their coffins and burials? Their envious neighbors got their grasping hands on a number of farms confiscated from those whose grief was ample but earthly treasures small, in payment of the debt.
Once again, John Hathorne’s voice sounded in Isaac’s mind, together with that of another of the accused “witches.”
“Have you signed the Devil’s book?”
“No.”
“Have you not toucht it?” “No.”
Borrowed from the Whirlwind, a lesser wind arose, and the words scattered like leaves. You must be as ruthless as the pest that sent a host of New Englanders and a horde of savages writhing to their separate afterlives! Isaac exhorted himself. Mercy is dead in Massachusetts.
III
n a lane skirting Wilkins Pond, Isaac hallooed to a young woman wringing a wet rag into a bucket. The firmament appeared to have drowned in the pond. An elegant pair of swans paddled through the sky’s reflection until a cloud eclipsed the sun and the monogamous birds returned to their native element.
“Whose house is this?” asked Isaac, admiring a plain, though substantial, plank-framed two-story residence with a slate roof, two brick chimneys, and diamond-paned windows, which the woman had been washing, her sleeves pushed up above dimpled elbows.
“John Buxton’s, sir, son of Master Anthony and his goodwife, Elizabeth.”
Isaac had encountered John Buxton’s name in court records of the time. He and Thomas Putnam had denounced Sarah Wildes, Sarah and Edward Bishop, Nehemiah Abbott, Jr., William and Deliverance Hobbs, Mary Easty, Mary English, and the slave Mary Black for “sundry acts of witchcraft … whereby great hurt and damage hath been done.”
Those persons would shortly be in Salem jail. Whether they would ride in an oxcart to Proctor’s Ledge was in men’s hands and not, as the magistrates and ministers declared, in God Almighty’s. Before the year was out, Buxton himself would take the ferry from Noddle’s Island to Boston to think upon his sins in Arnold’s jail for having compacted with the Evil One. None was immune from the spite and envy of his neighbors.
“Who might you be?” Her shape and comeliness would have kindled a spark in a younger Isaac, needing only a little fanning to blaze.
“Isaac Page, of Lenox, Massachusetts.”
She tilted her head to one side, a quizzical gesture he found charmingly comical. Isaac had forgotten that, in 1692, the town of Lenox, Massachusetts, had yet to be founded and would not be until 1767 by pettifogging and deceit. The student of history might well conclude that empires—be they as large as Alexander’s or as small as a neighbor’s dooryard—cannot be established by any other means.
“You may not have heard of the place,” he said offhandedly. “It’s no more than a gristmill and a handful of habitations too mean to be called houses.”
Isaac was relieved that the girl did not question his manner of speaking, which he had laboriously acquired before leaving his own century. He had read John Winthrop’s journals, Election Day sermons, tracts, jeremiads, and ancient pamphlets preserved among the rarities of our nation’s past at Harvard College. He had gotten by heart verses of Anne Bradstreet’s and strophes from the Bay Psalm Book. To complete the subterfuge, he befriended Henry Shaw, a philologist and scholar of Colonial American writings, who taught him to shape the East Anglian vowels of our most native speech—save those belonging to the continent’s aboriginals.
“What brings you to Salem Village?”
“I’m an itinerant carpenter,” he replied. “I travel the country in the hope that my skills will be useful to someone and profitable to myself. I seldom make a profit that cannot be eaten cold or by which I can take shelter for a night or two in someone’s barn. New England’s flinty soil raises flinty men.”
She lifted her face to the sun, which had come out from behind the cloud and turned the pond again to sky. Isaac saw her features clearly; they bore evidence of smallpox, and he was glad the malady had not laid a heavy hand on her. He knew that even virtue, when seen up close, may appear less than perfect. Isaac did not doubt the young woman’s virtue. Her countenance was too frank and unclouded for her to be secretly troubled by vice, nor did he find her face less appealing for the pox. Her beauty, though flawed, enchanted him, as did her dimpled arms.
“What’s your name?”
“Smyth.”
“May I know your Christian one?” asked Isaac, aping the urbanity of a Virginia cavalier.
“Hannah.”
“Hannah,” he repeated softly, as though he had never heard the name pronounced.
“But you must not call me that!” she scolded. “They will say we are too familiar—you, for using my Christian name, and I for allowing it.”
“Who are ‘they,’ Hannah?” He knew the answer. “They” are those who sit in judgment of the tribe.
“Do they speak as one?”
“There be few who would not take pleasure in rebuking us. You’re a stranger here and do not know their ways.”
“And are they not yours, Mistress Smyth?”
For answer, she nudged the bucket with her shoe. The gray water rose up one side of it but did not overflow. Was the nudge a minor act of rebellion?
“What do you know of Bridget Bishop?” he asked.
“They say she curtsied to the Devil.”
“Do you believe it?”
Hannah frowned, smoothed her skirts, and replied, “I believe in charity.”
“I’m grateful for yours, Hannah Smyth.”
“I’ve given you no charity that I’m aware of, goodman!” she replied tartly, as the sun dimmed again.
“Your willingness to answer plainly this pilgrim’s questions is charitable.”
“You said you’re an itinerant workman. Now you call yourself a ‘pilgrim.’”
“Since I’m a carpenter traveling from pillar to post in search of work, I am the former; because I’ve come to Salem to pay my respects, I am the latter. In other words, mistress, I am both.” He smiled and doffed his hat.
“Have you come to pay them to Master Buxton?” she asked warily.
“I’d sooner pay them to you.” He smiled a second time and put his hat back on.
“You’re very forward!” she chided him playfully.
“I mean to see John Hathorne, whose righteous work against the Devil’s spawn I’ve heard praised everywhere by God-fearing souls.”
A shadow fell over Hannah’s face, although a lofting wind had uncovered the sun. The decorous swans moved across the face of Wilkins Pond, where reflected clouds sailed, sedate as icebergs. Hastily, she picked up the wooden pail. Gray water slopped onto the flagstone steps.
“What is the matter, Mistress Smyth?”
“My work obliges me to bid you good day.”
Standing in the doorway, she gazed pensively at the trees round about and bit her lower lip. Perhaps like John Winthrop, the father of the colony—now a province—she saw that New Englanders “were compassed with dangers on every side, and were daily under the sentence of death, that they might learn to trust in the living God.” She tossed her head in annoyance, as if to rid it of a pest.
“And, goodman, if you truly are one, I’m not mistress of this or any other house!”
She turned and shut the door behind her.
IV
saac had last eaten on an April morning in 1851. He was hungry, though less than one would expect after so long a fast. He fancied that he had been traveling through some outer borough of eternity, where rare spirits, who neither ate nor drank, went about their Father’s business. In Lenox, he had jeered at the notion of seraphim and cherubim. On his first day in the province, he did, as well. But the longer he would stay in the New World, which was really an old one, the more willing he would be to accept the prevailing opinion concerning the invisible world, which, in the seventeenth century, was as teeming with evil and well-meaning spirits as a drop of water is with animalcules.
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. Isaac did not shut his mind to modern science on the first day among his remote countrymen, nor on the second, or the tenth. It had to steep awhile in the superstitious age in which he found himself. Superstitions are derided in retrospect, but while they reign, they are meat and drink for the most scholarly of men. (Women were believed to make poor scholars in Isaac Page’s day as well as in John Winthrop’s.) As the juice of the grape can, after achieving perfection in the wine, turn gradually into vinegar, a mind can sour and its thoughts grow caustic. Thus would Isaac Page’s nature warp away from reason until some recollection of his former life (one could as easily say his “future life”) woke him to himself. A dog ought not to be punished for doing what dogs do.
Leaving the Buxton house, sumptuous for its time, Isaac followed the windings of Pout Brook to Rowley Village, also known as Boxford. Not far from an ironworks stood Croft’s ordinary. Slumped was more apposite to its ramshackle condition. The alehouse’s sagging door was open to let in fresh air and let out an atmosphere rank with the sweat of laborers from the foundry and nearby fields, indentured servants from the farms thereabout, sour barrels, bitter hops, and the heavy smoke of tobacco imported from plantations in Virginia and the Indies. In Boxford, uncovenanted souls may have felt safe from the jaundiced eyes and spiteful tongues of Salem villagers and the carnivorous appetite of steeple-hatted ministers for the wastrels in their midst. They may have been careless of damnation. They reminded Isaac of the revelers in Edgar Poe’s tale who had retreated from the pestilence to Prince Prospero’s castle.
Not everyone who gathered at Thom Croft’s was a rogue or a reprobate, although by Salem law and God’s ordinances, which were the same, they sinned for exceeding the limit of Puritan jollity. Coming from an impure age, Isaac knew that anyone might yield to temptation when temptation comprehended the smallest vanity or stumble along the way. He was prepared to forgive all but the most grievous sinners. To the black-suited men of sober countenance, their eyes alight with God and fanaticism, the residents of Salem Town and Salem Village—having been sown in corruption—required constant surveillance and chastisement. God’s own men, it was understood, were beyond reproach. Theirs was the religion of “Thou shalt not,” even unto absurdity: Thou shalt not pull hair, neither a man’s nor a woman’s, howsoever thou art tempted by rage or lust. Thou shalt not drink unto drunkenness, sell strong water to the Indians, dance profanely, or indulge in the “creature called tobacco,” which is the Devil’s weed.
The pipe that is so foul within,
It shows man’s soul is stained with sin;
It doth require
To be purred with fire;
Think of this when you smoke tobacco!
Isaac was about to order a jar from the innkeeper, when he recalled that he had come from the nineteenth century with neither a note printed nor specie minted in the seventeenth. He had only the silver dollar in his doublet to pay for his passage home. Had his pockets been stuffed with banknotes backed by God and gold, they would have been useless here. He was a person without means. Although the earnings of an author of romances had inured him to indebtedness, he felt like a man washed up on an alien shore, with none to vouch for him or lend him the most trifling sum. Charity, Isaac understood, was not meant for him; it was given only to brothers and sisters in the faith and even then with stinginess.
“What will you drink?” asked landlord Croft, a large man whose erect carriage, strong voice, and mane of steely hair belied his threescore-and-ten years.
Croft gave the appearance of someone who did not entertain fools or beggars gladly, so Isaac adopted the pridefulness of a man who’d rather die of thirst than beg for water or listen to his belly grumble than crawl on it.
“I’ve not the means to a gill’s worth of foam, but what I lack in coins, I have in talents.”
Croft’s frank look unsettled Isaac, who nonetheless held the other man’s gaze.
“What manner of man are you?” asked Croft coolly. His cheek, Isaac noted, was faintly scarred by a brand that might have been, when new, the letter P.
“A carpenter who would barter his skill for victuals and, if it pleases you, a place to stay.”
Having suffered martyrdom to the communal ideal at Brook Farm, Isaac was familiar with hammer and saw and bore their calloused warrants on his palms. To further his imposture, he had borrowed tools from an old millwright in Pittsfield, who had them from his father, who had had them from his. They were identical to those Isaac had seen among artifacts displayed at the Boston Museum.
“What say y
ou, Master Croft?”
Croft considered Isaac’s proposition and replied, “So long as your talents are worth your keep, you can sleep in the shed and take your supper in the taproom. I would rather be fair than generous.”
The man went to the hearth and, spooning a stew of venison and turnips onto a tin plate, invited Isaac, with a grunt of sufferance, to eat. His hunger had caught up to him, and he set to its appeasement with the relish of a famished man, while the other put a mug and a hunk of bread at his patched elbow. Having left not an ort of stew to prove the plate had ever been otherwise than clean, Isaac sucked a lacy remnant of ale through his teeth, wiped his lips on a sleeve, as uncouth persons do, thanked his new master, and went outside to earn his keep.
They could have been reared on different planets—so very much at variance were their characters. Nonetheless, Isaac took a liking to Croft, and Croft to him. In the weeks that Isaac spent mending the spavined roof, leaky casements, and sagging door, the two were often in each other’s company, when the taproom was closed to trade in observance of the laws hammered out on the obdurate Calvinist anvil, which the Puritans had lugged with them from England. It was a wonder John Winthrop’s fleet of Nonconformists had not sunk to the bottom of the ocean under the terrible weight of solemnity it carried.
The twenty thousand Puritans who arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the Great Migration of 1629 to 1642 believed that the Church of England—to their mind, idolatrous and lax in its admission of unfit priests and irredeemable congregants—could be purified by the covenanted saints of His Invisible Church, who had been saved before the world of time began. Nothing could be done for the rest of Adam and Eve’s numberless progeny—children of His wrath, born into sin and damnation—regardless of how strenuously they professed their faith or how godly they behaved. None could will or wish his way into Heaven. The matter had been decided before the first day of creation. But the saints must work to be worthy of their election, uncertain of it though they may be.
