Conversion (34 page)

“What are you talking about?” Tad shouted. “I broke up with you because I’m your
teacher.
I’m twenty-three, Emma! Do you understand? Twenty-three! I’m not allowed to love you the way I want to. Do you understand?”

Her chest heaved, her face red with weeping. “But—I saw you! You were at her house! I watched you leave! Colleen was there, we saw you with her!”

Tad glanced at Spence and me cowering in the willow branches, and shouted, “No, you didn’t. My apartment is in Beverly, Emma. Her house is between my apartment and the park. Remember?”

“But—”

“For God’s sake, you’ve been there! Why do you think we had to drive up from the other direction? You think I wanted to drive right past my student’s house? With you in the car?”

Emma gasped a ragged breath and started to keen. Her entire body trembled, her mouth pulled back in a rictus of pain, tears pouring from her eyes and into her hair.

“Emma,” Tad murmured, smoothing her hair away from her forehead, cradling her. He placed a soft kiss on her pale eyebrow. “Emma.”

Something burst. I couldn’t explain it. One minute I was there, watching my friend’s lover lean forward and press his lips to her, kissing her eyelids and cupping her cheek and smoothing her tears into her hair, and the next all I could see was red, and fireworks exploded in my brain and I was surrounded by sparks raining down from the sky, as if all the stars were falling around us, lighting up the willow and raining sparklers everywhere, flaming up into a deep red glow, and then, there was nothing.

“Colleen?”

I groaned and rolled onto my side. There was grass in my mouth.

“Hey,” someone said. A guy. He rested his hand on my cheek.

I blinked once, twice, and turned my head in the direction of the voice.

A face swam into focus. It had a funny flop of hair on top, and sideburns, and pleasant smile lines around the mouth. The face was frowning down at me with concern, lit up with garish carnival lights. I could hear children screaming, and the music of the carousel. I broke into a smile.

“Spence,” I sighed.

“Can you sit up?”

“Huh?” I groped around myself, feeling the damp mud underneath me. I pressed my hands against the ground, testing to see if it would give. It didn’t, and I maneuvered myself into a sitting position with care so as not to dislodge any of the rattling pieces inside my head.

“Are you okay?” He was picking willow leaves out of my tangled curls and brushing dirt off my shoulders. His eyes looked worried.

“I’m—” I looked around myself, as if maybe the answer had fallen out of my pockets. Then I remembered, and my eyes widened. “Emma!”

“Shh,” Spence shushed me, placing a finger on my lips. He glanced over his shoulder, and I followed his look.

My friend was sitting cross-legged on the ground, her limbs tangled together with my disgraced AP US History teacher. His fingers were in her hair, and he was kissing her pale eyebrows, murmuring, “I’m so sorry, Emma. I’m sorry.”

She was crying, softly, but her face was smooth, her eyes closed, her hands twisted in his T-shirt, soaking him in.

I looked back at Spence, who mouthed,
We should go.

I nodded, wordlessly, and he helped me to my feet. My knees felt watery. Spence wrapped an arm around my waist and we tiptoed away, leaving Emma and Mr. Mitchell—Tad—alone together, in the shadows, unobserved, the only place where they were allowed to be.

SALEM VILLAGE, MASSACHUSETTS

MAY 30, 1706

Y
ou started to believe?” Reverend Green whispers. He’s edged nearer to me in my telling. His handsome face is inches from mine. I can smell his breath, the sharpness of cider and ink.

I study his face. His teeth and lower lip are still darkened from licking the tip of his quill. The whiskers on his face are growing in from a long day listening to me. It’s nearly dark, and I’ll be sent home soon. But then again, we both know how it ends. We both know the root of my infamy. Why even bother to finish?

Without making a conscious decision about what I’m going to do, I take the Reverend’s cheeks in my hands and pull his face to mine. His skin feels like satin under his rough whiskers, and I have just enough time to know the warmth and salt of his lip as I take it between mine. It’s soft and delectable, and my tongue edges forward, wanting to touch him, wanting to taste him, wanting to take him into my mouth. Our kiss lasts only an instant before his hands close over my wrists and he pushes me away from him in horror.

“Ann!” he hisses with a panicked look at the door.

We struggle, his fists gripping my wrists and forcing me apart from him.

I laugh, pulling my wrists free and wiping my mouth on the back of my sleeve. I wonder if my own lip is stained with ink now. The look of tension in his face suggests that yes, it is.

“Don’t worry, Reverend Green. It’s almost over,” I whisper to him.

The next day, a Monday, the village reassembles in the meetinghouse to witness Martha Corey’s examination. We girls are there, and the crowd in the meetinghouse is even denser than it was yesterday, with more of them milling about outside, craning their necks to hear reports repeated by listeners stationed at the door. They lead her in, her imperiousness dampened by the binding around her wrists, and she’s brought, glaring, up to the front of the room while Goodman Noyes begins with a prayer. Goody Corey looks appalled that she must listen to prayer while her hands are bound at her waist.

“Goody Corey. You’re here to answer to the charges brought against you,” Judge Hathorne bellows so that everyone can hear.

The woman who once boxed my ears after I trod upon her foot lifts her chin and says quietly, “I should like to go to prayer.”

“Very well.”

We all wait, obedient to the judge’s mandate, while she closes her eyes in silence.

Finally, unable to keep the assembly waiting any longer, Judge Hathorne interrupts her silence. Pointing to us, he says, “Why do you afflict these children, Goody Corey?”

On cue, we girls begin to tremble and shake.

“Afflict them? I do not,” she says with a toss of her head.

“Who does, then?” Judge Hathorne asks, looking down his long nose at her.

“I don’t know. How should I know?”

Our numbers have grown. In addition to me, the two Bettys, Abby, Mary Walcott, and Mercy Lewis, there’s my mother sitting with us, as well as Goody Pope, Goody Vibber, and Goody Goodall. At a look from Goody Corey the women around me shriek. My mother’s hands fly to her throat, as though she were choking. Some of us scream of being bitten and pinched.

“I see her likeness coming!” one of us screams. “She’s bringing a book! She’d have us sign it!”

Onlookers shout encouragements, urging us to look away, urging us not to sign.

Goody Corey frowns at us and holds her bound hands up. “I have no book.”

“She has a yellow bird!” I cry, half out of my mind, unsure where the words are bubbling up from. “It used to suck betwixt her fingers!”

“Do you have any familiar spirit that attends to you?” Judge Hathorne asks the prisoner at the bar.

“I have no familiarity with any such thing. I’m a gospel woman,” Goody Corey insists.

“Ah! She’s a gospel witch!” I scream.

The judge turns his attention to me.

“Tell us, child. You have proof of this?”

“Yes,” I say, scarcely aware of what I’m saying or what part of my fevered mind invents it. “One day when Lieutenant Fuller was at prayer at my father’s house, I saw the shape of Goody Corey and someone else, I think it was Goody Nurse, praying at the same time to the Devil. I’m sure it was the shape of Goody Corey.”

Goody Corey looks on me with a mixture of pity and distaste. Her face says that she’s always thought I was a rogue, and that now she’s finally been proven right.

“They are poor, distracted children,” she says, keeping her voice measured and sane. “And you’d do well to give no heed to what they say.”

“On the contrary,” Judge Hathorne says, his voice mild and instructive. “It is the judgment of all who are present that these children are bewitched. It is only you, Goody Corey, who claims they are distracted.”

Uncertainty pulls at Goody Corey’s cheek. For the first time I think Goody Corey sees the danger. While she weighs how to answer this charge, how to face those powerful men who are aligned against her, she bites her lip.

Abby screams, and we all join in, a pleasurable and horrible echoing in the meetinghouse, and it feels so good, the screaming, letting out all the fear and recrimination and frustration we carry around day to day.

“Look!” Abby wails, producing my arm with the infected bite. “See how Goody Corey afflicts us!” Mary Walcott holds out her bitten arm, too.

Next to me I spy Betty Hubbard digging into the flesh of her inner arm with her fingernails, clawing into herself deep enough to draw blood, and she holds up her arm and shrieks, “And I, too, Goody Corey sends her shape to bite and bedevil me!”

Around me all we girls are screaming, producing bite marks on our arms and wrists, and the magistrates and spectators crane their necks like pecking chickens to get a better look at our ripped skin, our bleeding flesh, the evidence of our bewitchment.

Goody Corey’s face drains of blood, and she slips as though she cannot stand. She leans forward against the bar, pressing her breast to it, and more screams burst forth from our mouths as we hold our hands to our breasts as though our breath is being crushed out of us. I hold my hands there, too, and I can almost feel it, I am screaming, the air is being crushed out of me as I watch, and I am helpless to stop it.

“You foul creature!” Goody Pope screams, doubling over with her hands on her belly. “You’re tearing my bowels out!”

Goody Corey turns half of her face to us, and Goody Pope is so overcome with rage that she throws her muff at Goody Corey’s head. The throw goes awry, glancing off Goody Corey’s shoulder, though she winces as though she’s been slapped, more from surprise and shame than from pain. With a guttural screech Goody Pope tears the shoe off her foot and hurls it at Goody Corey’s proud, wincing face. The shoe hits its mark with a
thwack
and Goody Corey cries out, bringing a hand to her cheek where a fresh gash has begun to ooze dark red blood.

Goody Corey’s feet shuffle, as though she is fighting the urge to run away, and I feel my own feet move, and all of the girls arrayed about me stamp their feet in a thundering chorus as though powered by something wholly diabolical.

Judge Hathorne glances between us and the pitiful woman at the bar, whose eyes well with tears. Blood trickles down her face between her fingers, fanning a dark red stain across her linen collar. At the sight of the blood Abby rises to her feet, teeth bared like a wolf set to tear out the throat of a wounded calf.

“Why did you not go to the company of witches who were mustering before the meetinghouse?” Abby screams, pointing a servant’s finger at the cowering, lordly Goody Corey. “Didn’t you hear the drumbeat? You have familiarity with the Devil! He’s a black man whispering in her ear, her yellow bird sucks betwixt her fingers in the assembly!”

“What yellow bird?” Judge Hathorne says. “You, check her hands.”

A bailiff approaches Martha Corey and says, “You hold your hands out like the judge asks.”

Shaking so that she can barely obey, Goody Corey extends her bound fists out for his inspection. The bailiff peers between each finger, holding her hands gently in his. Abby catches my eye and tries to get me to understand what she wills me to do. I’m trembling, too, and Abby pokes me hard in the ribs and hisses, “Do it.”

I scream, “It’s too late! It’s too late! She’s hidden the teat so you won’t find it. She removed it with a pin and put it on her head!”

It’s nonsense, what I’ve babbled, but the judge waves a hand to catch the bailiff’s attention and says, “Check for it.”

Goody Corey wears her hair like my mother does, brushed straight back and plaited into a heavy braid that’s coiled and fastened at the nape of her neck, tucked up under her coif. It’s held together with hairpins.

The bailiff nods, and Goody Corey says, “But . . .”

He places a hand on the back of her head and forces her to tip her chin to her chest. With his free hand he hunts up into her hair. His eyes light up, and he withdraws a long, sharp hairpin.

The entire assembly gasps.

Abby, sensing her moment, points a vibrating finger at the woman weeping before us, a few threads of gray hair now hanging loose about her shoulders. “She had covenanted with the Devil for ten years! She told me! Six of them were gone, but there’s still four to come!”

Judge Hathorne exchanges a purposeful look with the other magistrates who flank him at the bench.

“All right. Let me ask you this, Goodwife Corey. How many persons be there in the Godhead?”

It’s a catechism question, one that we all can answer without so much as a thought. But Goody Corey has been reduced to tears and sniveling, and stands propping herself at the bar, alone, shaking her head, and saying, “It cannot be, it cannot be. I? But how could I? I never did. I never would. I’m a gospel woman. I love Jesus.” Her speech devolves into gasping and muttering, and the blood oozes down her cheek.

“She’s answering but oddly,” one of the magistrates whispers to Judge Hathorne, who frowns with his woolly brows knotted together, and nods.

“Goody Corey,” Judge Hathorne bellows, and she rolls her eyes at him like a hunted animal. “Do you deny these charges being made against you? Do you mean to say that you’re not a witch?”

She sputters. “No! No! Not I, never I!” She chokes back her sobs, and the audience gathered in the meetinghouse blusters with tension, one voice after another raised against her.

The magistrates lean their periwigged heads together while the assembly murmurs among themselves. I spy Abby out of the corner of my eye, and she’s wearing a hungry smile. Goody Pope is laughing, her eyes bright. I feel what they’re feeling, the intoxicating sense that this squirming wretch who used to scorn us now twists at our mercy, these men with their self-important robes and beefy faces all harken to us, acting at our will. I gaze on the weakened form of Goody Corey, a woman who used to think that she could order me about, could box my ears whenever she felt like it, and as the tears begin to stream down her face, I draw myself up to my full height and I smile.

After that day, I’m empty of pity. Nineteen people mounted the steps to the gallows. Nineteen people heard a final prayer while a mob of friends and neighbors harried them to damnation and threw rotting vegetables at their weeping faces. Nineteen people felt the stool yanked away and their desperate feet kicking at nothing. Nineteen people felt the rope bite into their necks, purpling their mouths, blood vessels bursting in their eyes as the flames of hell licked at their heels. And I condemned them all.

I condemned them all.