Tooth of the Covenant

by Norman Lock

  “He told lies about me!” cried Hannah, hoping to save herself from the gallows.

  “Hold your tongue!” admonished Hathorne. “Thou hast a whore’s forehead.”

  “I had the coin made for sport,” said Isaac, feeling the floor on which he stood grow hot like Hell’s own stove. “To amuse my friends.”

  “Methinks it was not made in Boston. On Satan’s forge, perhaps.”

  “He brought it with him, sir, from the days that have yet to come,” said Dill proudly, as someone would do who was keeping a marvelous secret, forgetting that, to reveal it, could send him to his death.

  “This Dill is not honest! He makes a pretense of weak-mindedness,” said Isaac. “Now that you hear him speak, you needs must know him to be a fraud and dissembler.”

  “God has made him sensible, so that he can cry you out.”

  “What is written on the coin, John?” asked Corwin. “That it was minted in the year 1851, in a place called the United States of America.”

  The crowd gasped, as though the stench of brimstone had been in the air.

  “The coin is his talisman,” said Dill. “With it, he did fly from uncreated time.”

  “Fly, you say? Did you hear, Magistrate Corwin? The man flies!”

  “He is no man!” said Dill, who would have rubbed his hands together in triumph had they not been manacled.

  “He reads immoral books!” said Isaac, exasperated.

  “William Dill read books!” scoffed the Reverend Parris. “I tell you he is a natural fool.”

  “God has cast the demons from my mind, which kept me long in ignorance. Hallelujah!”

  “Hallelujah!” shouted the crowd, to this most entertaining of spectacles.

  “Dill is in the Devil’s pocket!” shouted Isaac.

  “I have you in mine!” retorted Hathorne, shaking a finger in admonishment at him.

  “You have the Devil by the tail!” cried Parris gleefully.

  “I doubt you, Isaac Page; I suspect your honesty! I believe you are the Devil himself or his envoy and are in New England, directing your foul witches to afflict the people. Deputy Herrick, be quick and lay hands on this fiend before he wreaks havoc!”

  The deputy hesitated while Isaac shouted, “Satan is on the rooftop! I saw him as I came nigh to the Town House!”

  “He is Satan!” cried eleven-year-old Abigail Williams, one of the original afflicted girls, who had brought the people to their knees and made them quake in terror of the rope.

  “Why, child, does he hurt you?” asked Hathorne.

  “I see his great leather wings, his red eyes, and—do you not see?—a tail that whips back and forth like an eel!”

  “I see it!” shouted another of the girls, then another, and still another in a fearful chorus.

  “I see it!” agreed John Indian, Tituba’s husband, who had been among the first to say he was tormented by impish familiars.

  “I see it, also!” cried Cotton Mather, who had been dubious of specters and of spectral evidence and would conclude, after the witch frenzy had cooled, that the Devil had hoodwinked the ministers and magistrates “into a blind man’s buffet, and we [were] even ready to be sinfully, yea, hotly, and madly, mauling one another in the dark.”

  “See where it stretches its immense wings!” exclaimed Gedney. “Satan, get ye hence!”

  “Satan, be gone!” intoned John Indian and the afflicted girls in unison.

  A few who had been leaning forward on the Town House benches to see this dreadful play unfold crossed themselves like papists, as if they feared that only the Roman Church could do battle with the Prince of Evil.

  “Lucifer has shown himself!” declared Hathorne.

  “The stink of corruption is almost past enduring!” shouted Parris.

  “I see Chaos come, and Ancient Night!”

  “I hear the gibbering of fiends!”

  “He will drag us down to Hell!” groaned Mather, raising his Bible against the beast.

  “Quick, Deputy, throw the double chains on him, or none will be safe from this day hence in New England!” commanded Hathorne.

  Aghast, Isaac cried, “I’m not the Devil or his man. I am—”

  “Is this not the Devil’s coin?” asked the magistrate, holding the silver dollar between his finger and thumb for all to see. Few remained to take note of it. Most had rushed pell-mell into the street, where several persons of notable vision and probity swore that a scarlet beast was, indeed, prancing on the rooftop. “I have you now, demon!”

  “I would speak to you in private!” begged Isaac.

  “Nay, I am no fool to give solitary audience to a fiend!”

  “I am no fiend!”

  “How came you by this token of the future? Perhaps you’d have us believe that you are a prophet.”

  “I’m neither a prophet nor a wizard; moreover, you will be amazed by what I have to tell you.”

  “I think you are the Prince of Liars.”

  “A word, please!”

  “It’s a trap, John!” warned Corwin.

  “Do not parley with him!” urged Gedney.

  “I am one of Almighty God’s earthly representatives,” said Hathorne coolly. “He will see that no harm comes to me as I go about His work.”

  “I can recite the Lord’s Prayer!” declared Isaac, who knew that a witch or a wizard could not.

  “I will not permit such a supreme blasphemy!”

  “Put as many chains on me as you like; I’ll offer no resistance.”

  “Herrick, why are you dithering? Chain him up!”

  The deputy loaded Isaac with four lengths of heavy chain, so that he could scarcely stand upright under the weight of them.

  Satisfied, Hathorne said, “Though you be Lucifer himself, I fear you not. I’ll hear what you have to say. Clear the room!” he bellowed.

  To the noise of benches scraping against the floor, and in some instances toppling, the room was cleared of all but Hathorne and Isaac, who heard halberds clanging on the stairs as the soldiers hurried to the street.

  “MAY I SIT?” ASKED ISAAC. “These chains are ponderous.”

  “They were forged according to The Hammer of Witches, written by the Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer. In it, he set forth the methods by which witches can be known and destroyed.” Hathorne smiled. The aspect of that smile evoked both the words rapture and raptor. But Isaac was too preoccupied to think like a storyteller. “It be rare sport to hammer a witch.”

  “I can no longer bear the weight of iron you’ve piled on me!”

  “Sit, then.” Hathorne studied Isaac’s face. “Even as I forged their links, reading God’s Word while they annealed, I did not believe they would be proof against Satan. How is it you do not burst them?”

  “Because I’m not he!” Isaac had spoken vehemently, so that the spectacles flew from his head and their panes were dashed against the floor.

  At that instant, the lenses in the spectacles John Hathorne was wearing cracked, as well. He took them off and gazed on them, astounded. “This be the Devil’s work!” He held the broken object, as though it were a talisman with which to conjure all the potentates of Hell. “Unclean spirit!”

  “These I wear once belonged to you!” shouted Isaac, retrieving them despite the burden of his chains. “By them, I was able to come to Salem this year from that stamped on the silver coin. The spectacles that you’re holding now came down to me through five generations. Yours and mine are one and the same. If one breaks, the other needs must also!”

  No longer seeing through his ancestor’s biased lenses, Isaac gazed on a world lacking the playhouse machinery by which Hell was hauled up through a trapdoor and Heaven lowered from the flies. Isaac knew himself again as a man belonging to the rational world, where Passion plays survive as quaint reminders of humankind’s darker age. He knew, as well, that he could die on Proctor’s Ledge, which, in the nineteenth century, would be called “Gallows Hill.”

  “You’re a subtle beast!�
� sneered Hathorne. “Little did I know when I arose from my bed this morning that, at two o’clock in the afternoon, I’d have one of the powers of Hell shackled before me, perhaps the Black Man himself.”

  “There are things that can be explained without resorting to the occult,” countered Isaac, thinking absurdly of the locomotive in the Housatonic Valley, which, in Lenox, had affirmed for him the greatness of the age of science.

  “Recite the ‘Our Father’!” ordered Hathorne, since none was there besides himself to hear the blasphemy.

  Isaac had been straining to hear the steam locomotive’s chuffing through the open sashes.

  “By your silence, Isaac Page, I assume you cannot say the ‘Our Father.’”

  Shaking off his reverie, Isaac recited it without faltering.

  “I think the Devil could say the prayer.”

  “I damn him!” shouted Isaac. “The Devil would not damn himself!”

  After a brief silence, his interrogator asked, “Who are you, then, if not he or one of his servants?”

  “My real name is Nathaniel Hawthorne, your great-great-grandson, born in Salem in 1804.”

  The magistrate’s face blanched. His expression changed from astonishment to disbelief, from mistrust to anger. “You must be a lunatic and, as such, belong to the Evil One!”

  “I’m the son of Nathaniel Hathorne, who was master of the Nabby when he died in Suriname in 1808 of yellow fever. His father was Daniel Hathorne, who fought bravely in the American War of Independence against Great Britain and died in 1796. His father was your son Joseph, who would live peaceably, a sea captain and a farmer, until his death in 1762. You will die in 1717, a disgraced man known in my time as the only unrepentant judge in the prosecution of the witches. You will be held accountable for the arrest of two hundred innocent souls and the execution of twenty. Your father, Major William Hathorne, arrived with John Winthrop on the Arbella and is chiefly remembered, when he is at all, for having had the Quaker woman Ann Coleman whipped through the streets of Salem. That is the paternal lineage of the Hathornes in America.” In his mind, he finished the condemnation: It was to rid the family name of tarnish or, failing that, to wreak vengeance on you that I came to this godforsaken place and time. It was to hide my shame of you that I changed the name to Hawthorne.

  His wits recovered, Isaac knew that he had waited too long to achieve anything useful in Salem. It may well have been vanity to believe that he could have done. “Hence we are all made weak, / And neither have Free-will / To chuse, nor Power to do what’s good …” He wanted only to return to his wife and children, to Lenox and his books. Never again would he meddle in what was past. The present would be enough. He would try to repudiate his grim inheritance, and if he could not, he’d live with it. Is not sin the great theme of his tales? Who can say if he could have written them without it. Powerless as he might be to ameliorate the ills and evils of the world, he would write as though he were able.

  “You speak like a sorcerer of the future, yet you insist you are not demonic,” said John Hathorne, grinding the tabletop with a thumb whose nail, Isaac saw, was black.

  “Is God, who sees the end of time, a sorcerer?” shouted Isaac, out of patience with this man, an ordinary fanatic—Isaac saw plainly—whose face betrayed ambition, spite, fear, and a childish belief in a simple world where outcomes were decided by grave combats, such as two boys will wage in a schoolyard with sticks and stones. Isaac could almost pity him were he not the cause of so much suffering, so many deaths, and his distant scion’s own unhappiness.

  “You pile blasphemy on blasphemy, so that I must condemn you!”

  “I am innocent to a witch. I know not what a witch is.”

  “You say the words of Bridget Bishop, as if they were your own. I cannot think but that you whispered them in her ear. You are wily! I shall call for more chains to prevent you from gathering another parliament of specters in the Reverend Parris’s field.”

  “No more weight, I beg you! I can scarcely breathe for it.”

  “What dissembling is this? Satan beseeching me to lessen his pain.”

  “Were I Satan, I would not humiliate myself—nay, not even in my cunning. Were I he, I’d blast these chains apart with a glance! I’d change you into the ass that you most surely are!”

  “Then you’re a common trickster,” said Hathorne sadly. “And your coin is but a pretense with which to gull the ignorant. By Heaven, I wish I had the Devil cornered! I’d nail him to the church door; I’d flay him like an eel; I’d tear off his wings, as boys do flies’! You’re nothing but a halfpenny witch, dressed in a cheap Birching Lane suit. I’ve dealt with a hundred and more like you these past months. But I will have you notwithstanding!”

  “Do I hurt you? Have I sent my spirit through the air to give you colic? I am innocent to a witch! We are all of us—accused, imprisoned, or dead by your arraignment—innocent!”

  “I will have your life, fellow!” said Hathorne, whose piercing gaze might well have seen his descendant’s guiltlessness and found it infuriating. “I’ll nip the head in the hatching!”

  Isaac knelt and wrung his hands pitiably. “I swear I am what I say I am!”

  “Tut, man! You are spineless, like a girl. If you truly are my grandson twice removed, I’m ashamed to acknowledge the relation. Is it so hard for you to die? Do you covet your life this much that you would mewl at the prospect of losing it?”

  “Great-Great-Grandfather, please!”

  “You’re in God’s hands, not mine.”

  “It’s your rope that will bruise my neck!”

  “I’ve listened to your tale, and I judge your wits to be afflicted. Say by whom, and I will make room for you in John Arnold’s jail.”

  “And you will not send me to the gallows?”

  Having judged the man groveling before him harmless, though not innocent, Hathorne assumed the irony with which he habitually cloaked his cruelty. “Nay, sir, I would not hang my heir! Now get up off your knees!”

  Isaac stood with difficulty because of the chains and his will’s weakness.

  “I shall name you a name,” agreed Isaac.

  “Say it.”

  “William Dill.”

  “We have it already from Geoffrey Hance!” “I will corroborate it.”

  “Oh, very well.” Hathorne was weary of the interview, which had gone on too long and produced nothing of importance.

  “And you say I will not hang?”

  “I say it!” intoned Hathorne, speaking in the voice he used to examine and condemn. “In return for clemency, I would know the purpose of this coin.”

  “It’s a pretense, as you said—a thing to gull the gullible.” By dismissing it as nothing more sinister than a childish prank, he hoped to turn the magistrate’s interest from the coin, which Isaac must have or be becalmed in a leaden sea where hope was sunk and joy rationed—one and done.

  “I think not. Methinks it has a significance, and I needs must know it, if only for the sake of curiosity.” In Hathorne’s voice, Isaac perceived the cunning that had undone so many.

  Isaac acquiesced. “It is marked.”

  “How marked?”

  “With a scratch.”

  “What meaning is there in a scratch?”

  “Look hard,” said Isaac. “Harder!”

  “I see no scratch.” Hathorne rubbed his myopic eyes. “I need my spectacles, which your black art made worthless.”

  “I used no arts,” said Isaac suavely.

  “The scratch!” said Hathorne, employing the peremptory tone with which he bullied and harassed.

  “It’s been carefully hidden in the design,” said Isaac slyly.

  “By whom?” Hathorne turned the coin from front to back and back to front again.

  “By his art, the Devil put it there,” said Isaac softly. “Old Scratch. It is his signature.”

  “Show me it!” commanded the magistrate, his eyes alight with both zeal and greed.

  Isaac held out h
is hand.

  Hathorne gave him the silver piece and watched as he pressed the coin against his palm until it burned.

  WINTER 1851

  LENOX, MASSACHUSETTS

  hat do you think of my story, Sophia?”

  “It will disappoint those who praised The Scarlet Letter and may put off any who would otherwise read The Blithedale Romance. No, Nathaniel, I don’t care for it.”

  “For once, I want to write a book without giving a thought to the booksellers!”

  “And in return, they won’t give you a thought or it space on their shelves. Your fixation on your great-great-grandfather is unwholesome. You’re not living in the Salem of 1692!”

  “In those papers your pen has been scratching, I was.”

  “As far as I can see, you’ve accomplished nothing of what you’d hoped to do. Bridget Bishop was hanged twice—once in fact and now in fiction. I don’t suppose she’d thank you. We can’t exchange our ancestors for some others more suitable. Your melancholy distracts you and offends me.”

  “A knowledge of human nature is the corrosive that eats away at a cheerful temperament. All men and women are equal in guilt and besmirched by sin. That—”

  “Husband, I am not guilty, and I haven’t sinned!”

  “—is a New Englander’s bleak view, and in that I am one, the desire to forgive is always opposed by a compulsion to censure.”

  “You make too much of yourself, Nathaniel!”

  “I felt compelled to produce a moral tale.”

  “Mr. Ticknor will dislike it. Besides, I can’t see a moral in it, except that we are helpless and, without free will, cannot choose but ill.”

  “I think that may be the case, Sophia.”

  “Then you have written a bad book!”

  “Be that as it may, I’ve only extemporized one.”

  “I’d throw these pages into the stove, but I can’t stand it when you sulk!”

  “Manuscripts were once written with ink made from gallnuts. Think of the bitterness of their pages!”

  “Your gloom is ostentatious, Nathaniel! Don’t I cheer you? Haven’t I set aside my own art for yours? Do you remember what Lydian Emerson said when we were last at Bush? ‘Save me from magnificent souls. I like a small common sized one.’”