ABOUT TWENTY MILES NORTHEAST of Boston as the bluefish swims, between Marblehead and Cape Ann, Charity’s Point juts into the ocean. It forms a natural jetty at the southern end of North Cove Beach. At the tip of Charity’s Point lies a great rock with a sheer hundred-foot face that drops straight down to the ocean. At the foot of this little Gibraltar, the confluence of tides and currents has eaten away a deep bowl where the ocean swirls angrily, high tide or low. The bottom of the bowl is lined with jagged rocks.
In the summer of 1692 a fourteen-year-old girl hurled herself from the top of the giant boulder to her death. Charity Coughlin chose that manner of death over the gallows to which she and the other accused witches had been condemned. She made her point, and in the process gave her name and a legend to an otherwise insignificant little chunk of New England coastline.
Nearly three hundred years later a middle-aged schoolteacher named George Gresham took the same route. If Charity Coughlin had died as George Gresham did, if she had known that her body would be flattened, crushed, and broken, that it would be sucked across the rocky bottom of the bowl at the base of the great boulder and flipped up against the face of the cliff by the churning surf—she might have chosen the gallows as a pleasanter way to die.
The route to the tip of Charity’s Point isn’t usually difficult, but when I returned there in August for my last look, it took me nearly an hour. I parked at the municipal lot at the northern end of North Cove Beach and followed the wet, packed sand along the curving water line. Then I cut back away from the beach through the dunes. The sharp beach grass cut at my ankles, and the soft sand shifted under my feet. There was no path. I clambered over and around the boulders. My knee ached, and my breath came hard.
I sat on the flat top of the huge rock out at the tip, where I could look almost straight down into the crashing surf one hundred feet below. Mist sifted up through the roar and boom of the breakers, filming the jumble of rocks around me with a slick, oily sheen.
I lit a cigarette and felt no qualms about the poisons I was sucking into my lungs. A month earlier I had been a living corpse, my jaw wired shut, electrodes taped to my skull, half choked by my torn and swollen tongue. My shattered knee had been packed in ice.
I shifted my position to ease the throbbing in my knee. The orthopedist said I had been lucky. Simply a matter of ligaments. It could have been worse, he’d said matter-of-factly. A blow like that could shatter the patella and pop the cartilage, dislocate the whole intricate structure, as when the quarterback catches his spikes in the turf and gets hit from one side at the shoulders, and then two hundred and seventy pounds of defensive tackle smashes him low from the opposite side.
The young doctor had demonstrated with his hands on me, and I’d shuddered.
Soon I’d be able to wade a gentle trout stream like Nashoba Brook or the Squannicook. And I’d try a round of golf, although I knew that driving my legs through the ball properly would hurt.
The pain I could bear. Hell, the pain would feel good. It would remind me I was alive.
George Gresham should have been so lucky.
I pulled my knees painfully up to my chin and hugged them against the evening chill. A breeze sprang up. I cursed myself for leaving my sweatshirt in the car.
The moon had risen above the cloud bank. Its beams shattered on the ocean, a million tiny crystals of light. A beautiful, peaceful sight from Charity’s Point. I was only dimly aware of the continual crashing of the surf below.
I gazed off to my right to the lights of Peach Point. Beyond that, tucked into the great cove of Massachusetts Bay, lay Boston, where I lived and worked, barrister to wealthy Brahmins and any others willing to pay my fees. Forty-two years old, and happy just to be alive.
Three months earlier, Florence Gresham had called me to report that her son had died. It had seemed at the time like a routine matter for her family’s attorney. I could settle estates with my eyes closed.
But it had gotten complicated.