A Piece of the World(17)
With the skill of a surgeon, he removes the hook from the fish and detangles the line. He insists on rowing all the way back by himself. When we land at the dock, he holds up his palms, red and raw, and grins. He’s proud of his blisters.
Within a few years Al has restored Papa’s old skiff and learned how to build and rig his own traps, fashioning the bows and sills from scraps of lumber, knitting twine for the heads and using rocks as weights to sink them. The traps he builds are better than Papa’s, he boasts, and he’s right: they brim with lobster. He constructs a fish house behind the barn to store the lobster traps and bait barrels, boat caulking and buoys, fishing nets and nails. Before long, he has taken over the blue-and-white buoys and is selling lobster to customers in Cushing and as far away as Port Clyde.
Al can’t wait to be done with book learning. He’s just biding his time, he says, counting the days until he can spend every waking moment in his precious boat.
MRS. CROWLEY TOLD me once—the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me—that I’m one of the brightest students she’s ever taught. Long before the others, I have finished my reading and arithmetic. She’s always giving me extra work to do and books to read. I appreciate the compliment, but maybe if I could run and play like the other kids, I would be as impatient and distracted as they are. The truth is, when I’m immersed in a book I’m less aware of the pain in my unpredictable arms and legs.
AT SCHOOL WE’RE learning about the Salem Witch Trials. Between 1692 and 1693, Mrs. Crowley tells us, 250 women were accused of witchcraft, 150 imprisoned, and 19 hanged. They could be convicted by “spectral evidence,” an accuser’s assertion that they appeared in ghostly form, and “witches’ marks,” moles or warts. Gossip, hearsay, and rumors were admitted as evidence. The chief magistrate, John Hathorne, was notoriously ruthless. He acted more like a prosecutor than an impartial judge.
“He’s related to us, you know,” Mamey tells me when I relay this lesson after school. The two of us are sitting by the Glenwood range in the kitchen, darning socks. “Remember those three Hathorn men who left Salem in the middle of winter? It was fifty years after the trials. They were running from the shame.”
Pulling another sock out of the pile, Mamey tells me about Bridget Bishop, an innkeeper accused of stealing eggs and transforming herself into a cat. Bridget was an eccentric whose colorful clothing—a red bodice covered with lacework, in particular—was believed to be a sign of the devil. After two confessed witches testified that she was part of their coven, she was arrested, thrown into a dank cell, and fed rotten tubers and broth. It took only a few days in those conditions, Mamey says, for a respectable woman to resemble a trapped and desperate animal.
In the courtroom, in front of a jeering crowd, John Hathorne asked her, “How do you know that you are not a witch?”
She answered: “I know nothing of it.”
Justice Hathorne narrowed his eyes. Lifted his index finger. When he jabbed it at her, she stepped back as if struck. “Why look you,” he said. “You are taken now in a flat lie.” He slammed the flat of his hand on the table in front of him—Mamey slams her hand down, demonstrating—and the accusers and spectators erupted in a frenzy.
Bridget Bishop knew it was over, Mamey says. She’d be condemned to death like the others, left to swing on Gallows Hill until someone took pity and cut down her corpse, probably in the middle of the night. Like many of the condemned she was a middle-aged loner, with a house and property that had already been confiscated. Who was there to show support for her? Who would speak to her character? No one.
Eventually the governor of Massachusetts put a stop to the proceedings. One by one the magistrates of the Superior Court recanted, expressing remorse and sorrow about their rush to judgment. John Hathorne alone was silent. He never expressed the slightest regret. Even after his death twenty-five years later—peacefully, in prosperous comfort—his reputation for cold-blooded cruelty lingered.
Mamey tells me about the curse that Bridget Bishop placed on Hathorne’s descendants. Well, not a curse, exactly, but a warning, a reckoning. “You have to admire that woman,” she says. “Using the only power she possessed to instill the fear of God into him! Or the fear of something. But I believe it. I think your ancestors brought the witches with them from Salem. Their spirits haunt this place.”
“For goodness’ sake.” My mother sighs loudly in the next room. She thinks her mother fills my head with outlandish ideas. She thinks I should pay less attention to Mamey’s stories and more attention to my stitches.
WHEN I ASK Papa about the curse, he says he doesn’t know about that, but he does know the Hathorns were a notoriously unruly bunch. A fierce, rugged Scots-Irish clan who emigrated to New England from Northern Ireland in the 1600s, they quickly developed a reputation for sadism against their perceived enemies. “Beating Quakers, double-crossing Indians and selling them into slavery—things like that,” he says.
“How do you know all this?” I ask.
“I drank some whiskey with your grandfather once, a long time ago,” he says.
THE SPRING OF my tenth year, Mother is heavy with child. Mamey and I are doing most of the cooking, which at the tail end of a long winter consists mostly of old root vegetables from the cellar, dried fish and meat from the smoker, stews and chowders. It’s so cold and choppy on the water that Papa and Al can’t go out in the dory. Sam has a hacking cough and a runny nose. The earth is soggy; if I fall on my way to school, I end up mud soiled and damp skirted all day. None of us have much to be cheerful about.