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!

As I watch an ant cross the parlor floor, bearing a crumb of stale scone or a particle of eternity on its back (who knows to what purposes ants give themselves), I imagine myself in a room that even dust would hesitate to enter. I’m standing before a stiff-necked magistrate who is infuriated by the shouts of boys playing in the road outside his window—an affront to the gravity of a man who handles others’ souls as washerwomen do soiled linen.

"What do you want?" he demands of me.

"To examine you," I reply.

"I am examiner here!"

"Then I would have you examine yourself."

"To what end?"

"To discover the absence of God in you."

"You are standing on the gallows, sir. It would take only a nod of my head to the executioner to have you taken off the Earth. Or perhaps you do not fear me?"

"I fear you well enough because I know the Devil has made himself at home in you."

With those words, I will begin the arraignment of my ancestor. If not those, then some others equally cogent. Ah, Nathaniel! You’re never so eloquent as when you admit your love or vent your rage within the theater of your mind. But the words will gush from Isaac Page’s mouth as they never could from mine. Isaac Page will voice my abhorrence for Magistrate Hathorne.

I’ll see to it.

The Red Shanty’s gate stands open. Isaac has only to step into the lane to begin his journey. The day is fine, the month April—I’ll spare my surrogate a Massachusetts winter. And yet he hesitates, hobbled by uncertainty. But I am his author, and he is my creature—a thing of words, like the past itself and the people who walk there. I have only to write the first sentence of my tale to send Isaac on his way.

Tooth of the Covenant

A NOVEL BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

SPRING 1692

THE PROVINCE OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY

I

n an otherwise unremarkable April morning in 1851, Isaac Page, a writer of literary romances, prepared to set out from the town of Lenox, in western Massachusetts, to save Bridget Bishop from hanging. She would be the first of the witches put to death in Salem Town during the Year of Desolation, 1692, when John Winthrop’s godly plantation in New England, which was to have been an example to all the world of a righteous commonwealth, withered, like an ear of corn in a field no longer green. Perhaps New England’s shores were too stony a place on which to build a New Jerusalem or else God’s chosen had become, in sixty years, mean-spirited, backbiting, tale-bearing Sabbath breakers no more worthy of His favor than the wicked of Sodom or Gomorrah. For whatever reason, He seemed to have turned His back on the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Or so His cold granite shoulder was interpreted in Isaac’s own time by those of a religious bent who made a study of the nation’s past, which will not cease to trouble its present till the course of empire shambles to an end and those who govern amid its ruins are forced to make amends or perish.

Isaac Page was not the pilgrim’s real name, but a pseudonym taken to conceal the identity of his author from his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, the Salem magistrate who did as much as the perjured girls of Salem Village to stoke the fever of unreason in the province. It was Hathorne who sentenced Bridget Bishop to death and set going the cruel engine that separated men, women, and children from their mortal husks.

The writer of romances who lived, together with his wife and children, in a farmhouse painted red, overlooking the Housatonic Valley, was not interested in Winthrop’s city on a hill, in God, or even—let him once be honest with himself—in forestalling a Terror that was inferior to Robespierre’s only in the number of executions. (Seventeen thousand French persons were decapitated by order of the Revolutionary Tribunal.) Isaac Page wanted to save himself from the anguish of a guilty conscience. To do so, he would need to convince John Hathorne that Bridget Bishop and the others whom he condemned were guiltless of sorcery. Should he prove deaf to persuasion, Isaac needs must knock sense into his head with a stick or, if worse comes to worst, cudgel the brains out of the man.

Naturally, Isaac knew that the past had been foreclosed on by time: the lights put out, the doors and windows boarded up, the drapes and carpets left to moths and rot. None can ever live there again, except in stories. But storytelling was Isaac’s one and only skill. By it, he reasoned, he could travel to the Salem of his rawboned ancestor, whose shadow had eclipsed his own and darkened a nature that otherwise would have been genial.

Isaac buttoned a doublet over a linen shirt and put on leather breeches and stockings that red garters kept from becoming, as Ophelia said of mad Prince Hamlet’s, down-gyvèd to his ankle. These articles had served him as a costume for a recent patriotic tableau. For hat, he had a shapeless thing with a dented crown and a ruckled brim to shade his bristled face. Having let his hair grow long in the fashion of an earlier time, he tied it in a sailor’s queue. In his doublet pocket, he carried a pair of spectacles that had belonged to the unrepentant magistrate who had taken in evidence the ranting of a pack of afflicted girls. Like the flagon of Hollands gin quaffed by Rip Van Winkle, the spectacles would convey Isaac backward in time, by the sympathetic attraction transmitted through the ether, which connected all things. Mostly, the so-called savage races were attuned to it, although some poets and writers among the civilized were aware of its presence, residing in a stone, in a talisman, or at the bottom of a glass of ardent spirits.

The spectacles had come to him by the law governing the transfer of a legacy. He had believed them to be of little value until one day he sensed an urgency rarely, if ever, expressed by objects—the wish (call it that) to return to their original owner. With them in his pocket, he had only to set out on the path that began not far from his farmhouse in the Berkshires, to know in his bones the way through space and time to the Province of Massachusetts Bay, where Bridget Bishop waited—along with eighteen others who would follow her to gallows and grave—for the great clock to tick forward to her end. Our bones belong not to us alone but also to our forebears, whose origin was Eden, if one happens to be religious, or a center of creation, if one subscribes to Lyell’s cosmography. (Isaac’s friend Herman Melville would add that his bones belong to his creditors.)

After having said good-bye to his wife, Isaac walked along a country road into the forest and soon found himself amid towering spruce trees on a needle-sown path leading to Old Salem. Trodden centuries earlier by Indians of the Woodland tribes, the path had disappeared beneath Newbold cast-iron plows some years before, as a scar will fade and, in time, vanish. In the way of phantoms, however, the primordial forest had not passed entirely into history. It struggled on in the minds of Isaac and his countrymen, as real a place as Athens had been to the ancient Greeks, and still was to students of the classical age. Aided by the antique spectacles