Six Women of Salem (10 page)

(The same June court session also annulled Ralph and Katherine Ellenwood’s marriage due to his “insuffiency.” Katherine declared that she “would rather die than live with this man,” whereas Ralph was reported to have blamed his problem on the presence of witches in the neighborhood.)

Perhaps forewarned by the contentious Carr probate, Thomas Putnam Sr. wrote a will of his own in February 1683, “being ancient and sensible of the declining of old age, and weakness, and symptoms of mortality daily attending upon me.”

Meanwhile, as Burroughs’s opponents circulated angry letters that led to slander suits and grievance committees, Ann gave birth to a daughter on May 29, 1683. Despite family resentments over the Carr estate, she named the child Elizabeth—her mother’s name. The Putnams, however, evidently never cared for Burroughs and likely showed no disappointment when he departed for Maine along with other returning refugees. After four Sabbaths bereft of a minister, several complained of the abandonment. Burroughs did return to the Village in June, but he did so only to collect his back pay and then settle the debt with John Putnam Sr. for his late wife’s funeral. Part of the belated pay was to cover what was owed, but even so, Putnam had Burroughs arrested for debt. Other men posted a bond for his release, and the suit was dropped when the Village voted to pay Burroughs £15, though the embarrassing affair continued to gall him.

The Village next asked Deodat Lawson to preach, offering him £60 a year, but no wood. By April they added thirty cords of wood and reduced his pay to £40, then once again changed this sum to £60 with no wood. This indecisiveness and arbitrary fluctuation would prove to be a lasting thorn for all the Village ministers.

By now Ann’s sister Mary was far away in Connecticut, where Bailey was minister of Killingworth. (Her brother Richard would visit them there and marry a local girl before returning to Salisbury with his bride.) Ann’s mother, having seen the problems of dying intestate, made a will of her own in March 1684, but she likely kept the details of it to herself and the witnesses. In July 1685 Ann gave birth to another son and named him Ebenezer.

In January 1686 Thomas Putnam Sr., now over seventy, formally deeded his eldest son, Thomas, the homestead and several parcels of land that he was already using (reserving the right to cut wood on the property during his lifetime). Two days later Thomas added a codicil to his will and died by springtime. Once the older sons and sons-in-law learned the particulars of the will, more trouble erupted: the lion’s share, as they saw it, went to the youngest son, Joseph,
not
to the eldest, as was customary. Ann’s husband, Thomas, petitioned Joseph Dudley, then president of the Council of New England, asking that probate be delayed until he could speak his piece. The matter went before the council in July, with Daniel Wycom acting as attorney for Mary Putnam, widow and executrix. The will’s witnesses, Israel Porter and John Leach, verified that Thomas Sr. had indeed signed the document. The sons and sons-in-law petitioned for the eldest brother, Thomas, to serve as executor instead and “bring in a true inventory . . . so that each of us may have the proportion of our deceased father’s estate which by the law of God and man humbly belongs unto us.” This was “the cry of the fatherless and motherless,” for the will, as they saw it, “was occasioned to be made as it is by our mother-in-law [i.e., stepmother], by which instrument . . . we shall be extremely wronged.”

However, the council let the document stand as it was.

The will detailed the approximately 150-acre farms that Thomas Sr. had already given to sons Thomas and Edward. All the sons were to share the ten acres in swampy Blind Hole Meadow. The 120-acre farm was to go to “Mary, my beloved wife, and to my son Joseph Putnam, born by her, my said wife.” They were each to own one half, keep it in good repair, and on Mary’s death the whole would pass to Joseph, who, meanwhile, would get all the farm tools (his mother would have half the use of them), “plow gear and cart, . . . mill stone and cider mill.” He also specified that a house his wife had purchased from her first husband’s family before she married Putnam was to remain hers for life; after her demise Thomas and Joseph were to divide it equally down the middle.

To the four children of his deceased daughter Ann Trask he willed £10 apiece on their coming of age at twenty-one. He had evidently promised the other daughters, Deliverance, Elizabeth, and Prudence, £100 each in household goods and “current pay,” some of which they had already received in household items. Bond servant Joseph Stacey was to inherit eleven acres of upland and swamp once he served his allotted time.

Widow Mary Putnam was to receive £50 in plate and other goods (but not coins) that she could will as she wished to Thomas’s children at her own decease. She and Joseph were to be executors jointly—an unusual stipulation, as Joseph was still only sixteen—and the boy would fully inherit at the age of just eighteen,
not
twenty-one, as was normal.

The codicil adjusted the sums due to the daughters and bestowed to sons Thomas and Edward a certain orchard in the event they lost another parcel to the Topsfield men in the ongoing boundary dispute.

The Topsfield dispute did in fact continue, as did the Village argument over whether or not to settle Lawson permanently as its minister. By February 1687 Salem town once again had to mediate, advising a year’s cooling-off period. The mediators, Reverends John Higginson and Nicholas Noyes along with Magistrates Bartholomew Gedney and William Brown Jr., commented on the factions’ contentious and un-Christian behavior. Such “settled prejudice and resolved animosity . . . have a tendency to make such a gap as we fear . . . will let out peace and order and let in confusion and every evil work.” This too fell on deaf ears.

Instead, Lawson accepted a temporary (paying) post as chaplain in one of Sir Edmund Andros’s frontier campaigns. Some in the Village criticized him for deserting his flock, though the flock had probably been slow in paying him. In his absence his wife and baby daughter sickened and died, so now Lawson had even less incentive to return to Salem Village.

Meanwhile, by the spring of 1687 Thomas, who wrote a fine, clear hand, finished the task of transcribing the Village records into a new volume, the old being full of crossings-out and marginal notes. The committee to oversee the copy, which had voted to omit certain “grievous” or “unprofitable” entries, paid him forty shillings.

In September Ann gave birth to another daughter, naming her ­Deliverance.

By the following June a new minister, Samuel Parris, and his family had been invited to the Village. This candidate seemed more acceptable to the Putnams and to enough of the others, even if they harbored silent doubts. In an October meeting the voters agreed to the choice, and with no heed to their earlier problem with Bailey over the first parsonage, they voted to give Parris “our ministry house and barn and two acres of land next adjoining to the house” if he “take office upon him amongst us and live and die in the work of ministry amongst us.”

None of the earlier candidates had been ordained as permanent minister, even though the ideal situation was for a minister to remain with a particular flock. Ordination was not automatically bestowed at the completion of studies but was instead considered a reciprocal arrangement, almost a spiritual marriage, marking the occasion when a candidate joined in union with a particular church.

Given human nature, the ideal was not always realized.

While this matter proceeded, Ann heard of the death of her sister Mary Bailey far off in Connecticut. Less personal but distressing all the same was news from Boston that a certain Goody Glover had been found guilty of bewitching some children and hanged for the crime—a reminder that every family was vulnerable to spectral evil as well as to the many illnesses and material misfortunes that befell mortals. But Ann already knew firsthand about the fragility of families and the brevity of life.

The next year brought a successful—if risky—revolt against Governor Edmund Andros even as negotiations between Parris and the Village continued unabated. Ann, pregnant again, learned that her brother John, who never did recover his full senses, was failing in health. After two or three weeks of sickness he died peacefully in September, and his brother William (rather than James, as their father had wished) tended to him to the end. William claimed John never blamed anyone for his illness, but others (his sister Ann, no doubt) strongly suspected Mrs. Bradbury of foiling his courtship by driving him mad. Ann herself gave birth to a daughter in October and named her Sarah, likely to honor her sister Sarah Baker, who seems to have already died in Boston along with several of her children, as she was not named in their mother’s 1684 will.

Parris’s ordination in November promised a new beginning for the Village, but baby Sarah’s death in mid-December was yet another loss, another occasion for grief and spiritual reflection. The child, “not quite two months,” may have had an odd rash and may have convulsed as she perished.

To Ann, it did not seem quite natural.

Compounding this loss, news came of devastating frontier attacks from bands of French Canadian and Abenaki allies, striking Schenectady, New York, in February and Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, in March. A disastrous expedition against Quebec, foiled by weather and smallpox, soon erased any euphoria over a successful counterattack on the French town of Port Royal in Acadia (Nova Scotia to the English). And in the Village, factions again festered and erupted, as thirty-eight taxpayers withheld the minister’s rates.

Ann’s son Timothy was born in 1691. That same year her mother, Elizabeth Carr, died on May 6. Ann had been searching her soul and felt comparatively certain—as much as anyone could be—that she
was
indeed saved and worthy enough to partake of the Lord’s Supper. Now that they had their own local church, the long process toward church membership finally led her, at age twenty-seven, to apply. Samuel Parris recorded her acceptance as the thirty-first member in the Salem Village Church book in both English and scholarly Latin:

1691 June 4
—

At church meeting 4 June 1691

Admitted into the church:

31. Ann (wife to brother Thomas) Putnam. An Aetat 27 [i.e. age 27 years]

By the end of the month her mother’s estate was probated, and Ann learned of Elizabeth’s bequests, somewhat outdated by other recent deaths: medical and funeral expenses; £1:10:9 to physician James Smith; the maid’s wages; and £1:10:0 to “Mrs. Jackson for housework.” Only two shillings each to sons George and William, one to the grandson John Woodmancy, only one to Mary (now deceased), “and to my daughter Anna Putnam one shilling.”

One shilling—a mere token sum, commonly given as one step above disinheritance. The rest would go to John and Richard.

Ann was now the only living daughter, and in the absence of earthly riches, she would need to “store up treasures in Heaven”—spiritual gains.

The girl kneels ahead of her mother in the canoe and watches the English sloop grow larger as they approach it across the salty Amacura River. ­Below, the sun casts nets of light crossed by the dark lines of little fish that dance in formation over the river bottom. She turns and smiles at her mother, who drives the canoe forward with sure, steady strokes of the paddle, first on one side, then the other. More canoes glide with them, bringing eight women and two children (counting themselves) to trade with the foreigners on the ship. The girl is pleased that she has been allowed to accompany the women to see how business is conducted. In the bottom of the canoes—scraped smooth and fire-hardened from single logs—are the goods they have grown or made themselves: casava bread, sweet potatoes, and sturdy woven hammocks.

What a fine day. What an adventure!

The child watches the bright birds flicker in and out of the trees along the banks, with their calls echoing over the water. She feels the sun warm her skin, for she and her mother wear only
queyua
slung around their hips, not the layers of heavy cloth the foreigners put on. If they are lucky, however, the men on the ship will have some European textiles to trade.

The sailors, jabbering welcome in their own tongue, let down a rope ladder to help the women and children climb aboard. As the eldest woman among them steps across the deck toward the head man of the crew—he wears more clothing and a fancier hat—his gestures of welcome suddenly become a lunge. He seizes her.

The other men grab three more of the women and then the two children. The girl cries out in terror.

“Dive for it!” the elder woman shouts. “Get help!”

Four women manage to leap from the rail and head for shore, with no time to climb into the canoes. They swim like otters, but the sailors scramble into the women’s canoes to hunt them down—the swift craft that brought the band to the boat now proves their undoing. The men haul the women from the water, wrestle them into the canoes, clout them, and tie their hands and feet—no pretense of hospitality now.

The girl tries to cling to her mother. No one at home knows they were taken. No one is near enough to hear their shrieks and wails. The headman looks toward the shore as though he expects pursuit and then barks orders to his men, who bring out firearms and swarm the rigging to adjust the sails. As soon as the tide turns, the ship eases downstream.

No one comes to the shore.

No one rescues them.

How sharp the memory of that last day of freedom, of a normal life. How painful the last memory of home.