Tooth of the Covenant by Norman Lock

Author:Norman Lock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

As soon as she came near all fell into fits.

“Bridget Byshop, You are now brought before Authority to give acc’o of what witchcrafts you are conversant in.”

“I take all this people [turning her head & eyes about] to witness that I am clear.”

—The Examination of Bridget Byshop at Salem village

19. Apr. 1692, by John Hauthorn & Jonath: Corwin Esq’rs

SUMMER 1692

THE PROVINCE OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY

I

saac no longer felt a stranger in Salem Village. With every breath, he tasted the animated atoms of what particularized it in time. They were as stimulating to his tongue as if he had drunk cold water from a limestone spring. Each thing’s novelty, the character of each person, so unlike that of people five generations hence, stung like an astringent on a wound. Now and then, he thought of Constance, but the very idea of a wife was shrinking like ice on a hot skillet.

It was already the fifth of June when Isaac realized with a start that he had yet to walk the mile separating Thorndike Hill, where William Dill had his cowshed, and the heart of the village, where the meetinghouse, watch house, pump, and pillory marked the crossroads. On nearby Andover Road stood the parsonage, where Betty Parris had first nursed the viper at her childish breast that had set neighbor against neighbor like teeth on edge, and Ingersoll’s ordinary, where Hathorne and Corwin interrogated the accused witches brought before them by Deputy Sheriff Herrick. Five days were left till Bridget Bishop’s soul would be unhoused, and her body rudely planted in the ground, to come again as bane.

Bridget was being irresistibly drawn toward the gallows while Isaac dallied with Hannah Smyth. Now like a vexing tooth beyond salving, his conscience pricked. He knew he must act or be no better than the man he’d gone to such lengths to confront—worse, in fact, since Isaac had the benefit of a retrospective view. And yet his rancor toward John Hathorne was less sharp than it had been the week before. Isaac, who, in Lenox, had pictured himself as Joshua, was, in Salem Village, more and more a Judas.

His day’s work done, Isaac put away his tools and went to meet Hannah at the stile. Taking an eastern route, they crossed the Great River at Indian Bridge and went on to Mile Brook, which skirted the Birch Plain at the border of Wenham, where the old plantation farms were already shrouded in darkness. The pleasure they took in each other was not an uncommon one in Salem, not even under the stern, beetling authority of the New Jerusalem. Next to the willows aslant the brook, they lay together in the grass.

Except for a faction whose narrowness made them sullen, Puritans were not the ascetics Isaac had supposed, although in that dangerous year, they made a greater show of pious living than heretofore. A woman’s skirts might not have billowed, but neither were they drab. Dressed in a brocaded waistcoat, a wealthy man would serve his

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