Tooth of the Covenant

by Norman Lock

  “An uncle gave it to me. When a young man, he’d been in the East India Company. The curse I got from Midiates, who got it from a curse tablet inscribed in ancient Greek. I knew the ivory box would attract the avaricious. The curse inside would prevent the superstitious from stealing it.”

  “Enoch, why do you pretend to be mad?” He had once asked Dill a similar question.

  “We are all mad who live in these times. I was one of God’s ministers. I had a small church in Beverly and preached on the Sabbath until the autocrats of holiness charged me with heresy.”

  “What heresy?”

  “You’re right to ask, since there be many, and mine is as detestable as the rest in the eyes of the Puritan ministers. Like them, I preached that Christ had made a covenant with the Father: He let Himself be betrayed, scourged, and nailed to a cross to atone for the disobedience in Eden. Unlike them, I taught that He died for everyone and not only for the few elected to salvation before they were born. As the Hollander Jacobus Arminius had done, I rejected the theology of man’s entire depravity and unconditional election. Even if we sinned in Adam, God gives us all sufficient grace for faith. Like Anne Hutchinson, I believe we can enjoy direct revelations from God, apart from Holy Scripture and without the ministers’ intercession. My heterodoxy makes me a danger to them and an affront to the Almighty, who might send His all-devouring wrath against His chosen people in Massachusetts to punish them for my errors.”

  Enoch took a sharpened quill from his desk, as though he intended to write—what? His confession? A jeremiad? Theses that he would nail to the meetinghouse door? But it was only to rid a fingernail of a speck of dirt. “Men suffer most when heresy and treason are accounted one and the same.”

  In the colony’s first decade, Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams had taught that one could earn life everlasting by acknowledging God’s sovereignty, the authority of the Scriptures, and Christ’s redemption of our kind’s sinful nature. She preached that man, in utter helplessness, was led toward salvation by the Holy Spirit, which God placed within each person by the grace of His son’s death and Resurrection. In her opinion, the Puritans had fallen into error by placing the Covenant of Works above that of Grace. She avowed that an outward show of godliness was no guarantee of good standing with God for even a covenanted church member.

  “Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams shook their fingers and bit their thumbs at Winthrop and the ministers of the Bay,” said Enoch. “If not stopped, they would cause what Massachusetts feared worse than savages—a schism. Divisiveness ends in bloodshed when men’s faith is rabid. God is no good reason to go to war against one’s neighbors. Men, not He, are responsible for the evil that befalls them.”

  The colony’s churches were insufficiently Calvinist for Roger Williams, who wished to purify the Puritans of their lingering attachment to England and its idolatrous church. Had John Winthrop and the General Court not banished him from the Bay Colony, he would have held its congregations to an impossible standard of holiness. The many who flaunted their sanctity were, for Williams, deluded or hypocritical. (In his zealotry, he declared that Quakers should be scourged for having “set up a false Christ.”) He came to realize how preposterous his standards were when he could find no one in Plymouth Colony—the place of his church in exile—saintly enough to share in the body and blood of Christ, save his wife, and her only grudgingly. In time—that bitter solvent—he would embrace “the dung heap,” as Winthrop put it, and tolerate other faiths, no matter how repugnant they seemed to him.

  Faith, like liquor, taken at full strength can addle the brain and bring whole nations to grief.

  “I believe that children are not born desolated and depraved!” said Enoch fervently. “It’s a sweet thing to contemplate, Isaac—too sweet for the sour faces of the ministers and magistrates of Salem, who call this misstep or that misdeed a ‘sin,’ when God Himself has not forbidden it in Scriptures. They would hang us for our thoughts!”

  Abruptly, he rose from his chair and went to a sideboard. “I’ve been a thoughtless host. Will you take strong water or beer?”

  “Some beer, thank you.”

  Enoch poured two tankards of beer from a handsome Rhenish jug.

  “In Beverly, I preached a toothless covenant made between God and His creatures, which does not require them to gnaw their own vitals. We needn’t crucify ourselves or one another for His love. In fine, I taught that no one is predestined for Heaven or for Hell; the afterlife will be as our acceptance or refusal of Christ’s gift of redemption shapes it. Isaac, there be no visible saints or signs of God’s saving grace legible to any living soul! We can’t see the truth about ourselves, much less others. We are poor sinners, and the best of us—the godliest among us—are troubled by fear and uncertainty.”

  Seldom had Isaac heard the matter so nicely argued. “And they call this ‘heresy’!” he said, his voice shaken by indignation.

  “It’s the string of a commonplace discord too frequently harped upon since the beginning of our vexatious relations with the Almighty,” said Enoch, wiping foam from his bearded lips.

  “A hymn for martyrs.”

  “I haven’t the courage of Saint Catherine, Anne Hutchinson, or Roger Williams. I was glad to let my brother hide me. Why, the magistrates will hang George Burroughs, formerly the minister of Salem Village, because he can lift a matchlock by a finger inserted in the barrel and a barrel of molasses with only his two good arms—feats of strength, it is said, that are impossible without the Devil’s assistance for a small man like him! It seems that only weak and puny men are without sin.”

  “And if you are brought before the magistrates?”

  “Who can say whether or not I’ll renounce my convictions and henceforth polish a bench with my backside in Salem Meetinghouse?”

  When had Isaac and Constance last sat together in the familiar pew, beneath the hymn board, listening to the minister raise subjects no more controversial than the next church social or the state of the church’s drains? Isaac wondered at how remote that Sunday morning was from the house on Tinker’s Island—was and, at the same time, will be! He smiled to think what tense schoolmaster Matthew Rhodes would propose for such an absurd chronology.

  “I’m fortunate to have no wife to care for,” said Enoch. A deep sigh belied his words.

  Constance, said Isaac to himself, and then he repeated her name aloud with a tenderness that begged the other man to ask, “Who is Constance?”

  “My goodwife.”

  “Ah! Is she safe?”

  “She is far from this.” His glance took in the simple furnishings, the brass and pewter plates and cups standing in a rack nailed to the plastered wall, a fowling piece, a tin cartouche box, a linen chest, a press, a churn, a scale, a wheel—the movable property of a householder who was better off than the general but not nearly so well-off as a Salem merchant or magistrate. Isaac’s gaze had taken in the Rhodes brothers’ few things, but the word this comprehended all of New England in the second year of the final decade of the seventeenth century. “She is safe at home.”

  “God grant she remain so,” said Enoch.

  Once again, Isaac nearly yielded to the desire to have done with his fruitless sojourn in an alien civilization, which he could entirely despise if only his mind’s wavering would end. He longed to palm the silver coin until he could feel it sear his flesh with the recollected heat of its minting and recall him to Lenox and Constance. He yearned to take her in his arms. Never more would he punish her with his melancholy. Henceforth he would write sunny tales of piazzas in Rome and not spend another brooding thought on John Hathorne or his execrable times.

  Isaac noticed an hourglass on Enoch’s sideboard, standing next to the bottle of strong water, which, in a later age, he would call brandy. There is, he told himself, a moment so brief that it is measured by the time it takes for one grain of sand to pass through the hourglass’s neck. Although impossible to detect it, there must be an instant when the number of
grains below and above the neck are equal, when the past and future have reached an equilibrium and time is in abeyance. At that instant—too brief to be called one, too improbable even to be called a rarity—the doorway—for so it can be imagined—stands open. What if I’m here on Tinker’s Island by virtue of time’s open doorway and not that of Hathorne’s spectacles? A grain of sand having fallen into the glass’s bottom half and the equilibrium at an end, what if the doorway closed, never to be opened in my lifetime? Squeeze the Liberty dollar as hard as I can, I can’t ever go home. What then?

  “You look tired and worn,” said Enoch kindly, and Isaac thought that there could not be two more dissimilar brothers in New England than Enoch and Matthew Rhodes. He considered telling Enoch his own extraordinary tale and, by it, pull the thorn stuck in the tender flesh of his brain, his heart, or that undiscovered organ where guilt and sin are lodged. He stopped short of admitting to a journey as perilous as Hannibal’s crossing the Alps, Cain’s flight from Eden to the Land of Nod, or, to speak presumptuously, Christ’s dire passage from the Mount of Olives to Calvary. Isaac knew that he was alone in the New World of 1692 and sensed that he ought not relax his vigilance. It’s a short walk to the gallows, he told himself, and for the first time in his exile, he felt at risk of the executioner’s expertly knotted rope.

  “Does your brother truly believe you’re mad?” he asked his host.

  “It gives him satisfaction to hear that I send my spirit out to torment the magistrates. Though no spirit of mine flies across the sound to kick Hathorne and Corwin in their pompous arses, I pray they will feel the scorch of my ire. Ill will can do as much harm as specters, when it be hot. Mine is piping. I tell you, Isaac, that there be many mad folks in Salem, whose brains are boiling in resentment.”

  Having his own cowardice in mind, Isaac said, “You do more than I.”

  “I’ve done nothing, except to leave a paper curse for tyrants to find. I should have nailed my theses and my challenge to the meetinghouse door! The intolerance of God’s people in Massachusetts is a wonder to me, since they themselves were persecuted in the Old World.”

  “I’ve heard it said that John Hathorne is not necessarily an evil man, though he does evil things,” said Isaac, canvassing still another person in the matter of his ancestor.

  “Evil things are done by evil men. Or do you think, as I have heard said, that a kind of plague has turned men’s wits against themselves and their neighbors? You might as well blame it on the flour with which they make their bread. To say that Goodwife Tomlin split her husband’s skull with a felling ax because he complained his roast meat was raw or that the Reverend Cripps should be forgiven for beating his slave because his worry over other men’s souls had made him irritable—these be feeble defenses, Isaac Page!”

  “Some say the hostiles have made every man fear his neighbor,” said Isaac doggedly, trying to justify the evil that men do—to salve his pricking conscience, which had been lately insisting that he carry out his purpose and return to the family he had all but forgotten.

  “There will be those who blame the Indians until the day comes when there are no more Indians. Then they will turn against their negro slaves. Aye, New England is nervous about the ‘savages.’ In January, they burned York, Maine, until nothing but charred timber and scorched stones were left. Fifty Englishers were murdered, and another hundred taken into bondage. At Salmon Falls, the Indians roasted Christians on spits. In Cotton Mather’s gaudy words, the attack was a ‘diabolical satisfaction.’ The Europeans have had enough satisfaction of their own, since our first trespass in the New World. The province also dreads the French, the Dutch, Parliament, the Act of Toleration, and King William, who may decide that Massachusetts is impudent for behaving in a manner ‘repugnant to the laws of England,’ which, in many ways, are more just than those of the city upon a hill. I detest the smug saint who beats his Bible and his wife with equal fervor.”

  Isaac had seen the same fierce glint in Enoch’s eyes in those of evangelists in the 1830s, during the Second Great Awakening in New England, as well as in Methodist camp meetings in the “burned-out districts” of New York after the fires of revivalism had swept through them.

  “I don’t doubt your sanity,” said Isaac as he filled an earthenware cup with strong water poured from a squat green bottle. “But I do the wisdom of such an outspoken airing of belief to a stranger.”

  “Are you one of Hathorne’s or Corwin’s men? Are you a deputy, an officer of the court, or a witch hunter?”

  To each, Isaac answered, “Nay.”

  “Then why must I be wise? New England is filled to the hawse pipe with such wisdom ‘as makes cowards of us all.’”

  “You know the play?”

  “Hamlet? It’s the book and gospel for those who prefer doubt to the overweening vanity of conviction.”

  “It teaches us to hesitate.”

  “I’d rather hesitate to imprison a child, hang a man or a woman, confiscate the person’s property, and deny the survivors an inheritance. In this age of unshakable belief, hesitation is strength and not weakness. Who is Hamlet if not a man who cannot accept spectral evidence?”

  Isaac grew quiet as he ran his finger around the rim of his cup.

  “What brings you here, Isaac Page?”

  Enoch’s question broke the spell cast by Isaac’s revolving finger. By “here,” did Enoch mean Tinker’s

  Island, or the New World of 1692?

  “Curiosity,” he replied evasively.

  “About the letter in the ivory casket and its author.”

  “And what your brother had to say about you.”

  “Matthew means well, though he can be prickly.”

  Isaac helped himself to more brandy as Enoch continued: “During the 1640s, when the king’s neck ought to have itched in anticipation of the ax, which, at the end of the decade, fell at the people’s pleasure, the English Puritans held a majority in Parliament. No longer hunted and oppressed, the nonconformists ceased their exodus to New England: The Great Migration ended. With no new planters to buy their clapboards, cattle, corn, and fish, economic necessity obliged the colonists to sell Massachusetts cod to the Roman Catholics of Spain, whom they detested in principle. Dearth, it seems, can compel even saints to do business with the Devil.”

  “Your point being?”

  Enoch shrugged. “The thought was in the air, and I plucked it.”

  Isaac put down his cup. He rubbed his eyes and moaned.

  “What’s the matter, Isaac?”

  “My eyes—I can’t see clearly.”

  “The fault of ardent spirits—or of a new thought,” said Enoch slyly. “If the cause be ocular and not oracular, you’d be wise to visit the spectacle maker in Boston. I have a feeling that you’re not wise, as men go.”

  “I have spectacles,” said Isaac, remembering the pair he carried in his pocket. “But they aren’t mine.”

  “Whose are they?”

  “John Hathorne’s.” The cause of this remarkable imprudence could be set down to the pain in Isaac’s eyes, which distracted him, or to the brandy, which was nauseating him.

  “How came you by them?” asked Enoch, amazed.

  “Fate,” replied Isaac, and he would say no more.

  Enoch opened his mouth—Isaac supposed that he meant to question him further—but he apparently decided to go no further into the matter. Enoch may have rejected the idea of witches, specters, and apparitions, but he accepted that of fate, which rules us even now, reader, in our own day.

  “Let’s see what abominations Matthew has caught for our supper,” he said, rubbing his hands in anticipation.

  The two left the house and walked toward the inlet. The ocean noise grew louder as the dense woods standing between them and the shore thinned. When they stood face-to-face with the Atlantic, waves came clashing on the shingle. Enoch and Isaac watched Matthew haul the remains of an ox head from the water and onto the gravel beach. Rags of pale gray flesh waved obscen
ely in the churning water, and—to Isaac’s horror—black rivulets of eels poured from the mouth, neck, and eye sockets of the beast’s ruined head. It might have belonged to Moloch, the Canaanites’ god of child sacrifice. Isaac dredged up from the murky depths of his revolted mind a passage from Paradise Lost.

  … Moloch, horrid king, besmear’d with blood

  Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears;

  Though, for the noise of drums and timbrels loud,

  Their children’s cries unheard that pass’d thro’ fire

  To his grim idol.

  The eels squirmed madly, each naked body tracing the letter s against white and yellow pebbles, which hissed as though to give voice to beasts. Deftly, Matthew gathered them into a barrel partly filled with seaweed and saltwater. Joseph stood impassively, Enoch gazed on the scene benevolently, and Isaac retched. So violent was his upheaval, it could have raised the bloated corpses of those who had sailed from England in high hopes, only to drown, or dug from a dismal fen the ancient key that had locked the gates to paradise. He vomited, as if he would be rid of the last particle of humanity and henceforth be a stone. Isaac wondered at how plainly he could see the grisly, monstrous form of Moloch, whole and entire, while the other men remarked only on the eels.

  “We shall dine royally!” crowed Matthew as he banged the barrel lid shut with the heel of his hand. To make amends for having insulted Pieter Koorne, he told Joseph, “When I take you and Isaac back to Jupiter Cove tomorrow, I’ll give you a sack of eels to treat the Dutchman.”

  With a nod of his head, Joseph tersely acknowledged Matthew’s appeasement.

  “Father was taught to bait eels with the severed head of an ox by a man who’d lived in Friesland,” said Enoch. “A putrid carcass cannot fail to excite eels, which, for a time, are happy dwelling in corruption.”

  Isaac remembered the immaculate swans on Wilkins Pond and shuddered to picture them passing sedately above a controversy of serpents.

  Matthew ran two stout hickory poles through two pairs of iron rings fastened below the barrel head and, taking hold of the end of a pole, as if it were a handle, he bid the others do the same. With a grunt, they lifted the heavy cask and carried it between them, like a sedan chair in which some Byzantine eunuch sat.