THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT Read Online Free PDF Page B

adore that phrase of Lincoln’s when he asked the country to carry on “with malice toward none.” And what of the prettiest Puritan sermon, the “city upon a hill” one John Winthrop delivered on a ship approaching Massachusetts in 1630? He aspired toward a covenant of community, decreeing, “We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.” Are there any nobler words than that? And yet, did Winthrop ever live next door to a neighbor who was training a puppy? Would he have been so keen on us suffering together if he had just awoken to screams of “Naughty, naughty, no, no!”
    The most bizarre episode in Puritan history is the Salem Witch Trials. Twenty innocent people were executed in Salem during the witchcraft hysteria of 1692. Which is horrifying, yet manages to make for a surprisingly nice weekend getaway. I went up one Saturday, ate dinner in sight of the Customs House where the Salem native Nathaniel Hawthorne began The Scarlet Letter , then got up for Sunday breakfast at the coffeehouse where the Sons of Liberty plotted the Revolution in 1776.
    Salem boasts everything you would want from a trip down American memory lane, from information to anxious giggles. At the Witch Dungeon Museum, a place about as dignified as it sounds, there is the fun kind of bad actress in a period costume emoting through a reenactment of Elizabeth Proctor’s witch trial, “I am not a witch! I am innocent!” There’s a colorful old guy walking-tour guide named Bob who must not be a member of the chamber of commerce because he says things like “They hung dogs for being witches, that’s how stupid these people were.” There are freaky talking mannequins in the Salem Witch Museum that recite the Lord’s Prayer and while they do resemble shrunken apples they nevertheless help the visitor understand how hard it must have been for the condemned to say the line about forgiving those who trespass against us. There’s an old cemetery so archetypal it looks as though a child has drawn it as a decoration for Halloween. There is the seventeenth-century House of the Seven Gables that Hawthorne wrote about, where I decide to stop reading The New York Times “House & Home” section because, during the tour, the slave quarters strike me as really pretty. And there are a few yellowing historical documents to look at in the Peabody Essex Museum so that I don’t feel like a total cheeseball, even though I just bought a whiskey glass emblazoned with a little yellow highway sign with a silhouette of a hag on a broomstick that says, “Witch XING.”
    On July 19, 1692, a woman named Sarah Good stood on the gallows and answered the minister making a last-ditch effort to get her to confess to witchcraft. She famously proclaimed, to the reverend and, I’m guessing, the town, “You are a liar; I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.” Could she have any idea then that, three centuries later, bloodthirsty tourists would sip her life story from a souvenir shot glass? What would she think of the local ice cream parlor going by the name Dairy Witch? Or that the high school football team is called the Salem Witches? Or that a cartoonish witch logo adorns the town’s police cars and newspaper? Or that the town that put her to death based on the harebrained testimony of a few teenage girls would remake itself as a vacation spot nicknamed Witch City?
    As Bob the tour guide said of Salem’s witchcraft hysteria, “We’re not ashamed of it.” On the one hand, why not? It’s a shameful episode. On the other hand, there are few creepier moments in cultural tourism than when a site tries to rewrite its past. Once, I took a boat tour up the Hudson and visited a seventeenth-century Dutch farm. At