Young Goodman Brown

At sunset in Salem village, a wife with pink ribbons in her cap begs her husband of three months to stay home tonight, and he goes anyway, down a forest path so narrow the trees seem to close behind him. Her name is Faith, and Hawthorne lets that name do its quiet, terrible work. Waiting in the gloom is a traveller who could pass for Brown's own father, carrying a staff that looks like a great black snake, and as they walk deeper the woods fill with people Brown has trusted all his life: the old woman who taught him his catechism, the minister, the deacon, all hurrying toward the same clearing. Hawthorne, whose great-great-grandfather sat in judgement at the Salem witch trials, writes the dark with a dreadful hush, voices half heard in the wind and pine trees burning like candles around a rock of an altar. What chills is how little it takes to poison a man: one night's suspicion that every good face hides another. Then something pink drifts down from the branches.