Six Women of Salem (13 page)

“Mary!”

She realizes her mistress is talking to her, has been talking to her ­unheeded.

“Mary! Stop woolgathering and fetch the water.” (Goodwife Procter sounds cross again. Little Abigail clings to her mother’s apron whining for attention, the child’s tone nearly as irritating as the mother’s impatient voice.) “And be sure you close the lid so none of the children fall in.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

No one has fallen in yet,
Mary thinks, feeling accused (though Goody Jacob’s little girl did
die
in a well across the Village some years back, and her mother was never right in the head afterward, so it
could
happen).

Mary stuffs the polishing rag into her pocket and fetches a pair of buckets and a yoke. As she walks away toward the well she hears the child droning on and on—“Mama, Mama!”—wanting attention. All this does is remind Mary of her own dead mother, and she thinks again how Goody Procter—when displeased—could sound so much like that
other
woman, that Alice Parker. She shrugs off the yoke, sets down her buckets, and hefts the wooden lid off the well.

There, far, far down, floats a circle of daylight and her own dim, ghostly reflection blocking the sun. Another bucket hangs from the long well-sweep, and this one she eases down the shaft toward the water until it shatters the surface into shards of light and dark.

As she lets the counterweighted sweep pivot to draw up the heavy bucket, she hears again in her memory Goody Parker’s ranting as she berated Father, as if he were a servant and not a neighbor, and all this
just
before Mother grew worse, her illness strengthening as she herself grew weaker, she along with Mary’s little sister. Mother died and the sister remained, though she is deaf now, locked into a silence that would not end in this life.

Mary pours the water into her other buckets and wrestles the well’s lid back into place, securing it with a rock on top. Settling the yoke back on her sore neck, she steadies the slopping buckets at the end of their ropes and starts cautiously back to the house.
If it were my house,
she thinks,
I would still face a constant round of work, but at least it would be
mine.
I would have something to show for it.
However, if there is a way to change her future, she cannot see it; no ambitious young man is courting her—and certainly no rich ones.

She notices that someone is trudging up the road from Salem town. If they stop for a drink, she will have to serve the beer. Well, maybe there will be news from the harbor. Maybe someone new will come into her life, perhaps offering her a better future elsewhere rather than slaving here for someone else’s family.

Maybe her fortunes, mysterious as they might be, will change at last.

____________________

M
ary Warren’s family is one of the less well documented, and her origin is still uncertain, for more than one family named Warren settled in seventeenth-century New England—in Plymouth, in Watertown, and elsewhere. The sketchy-yet-tantalizing details of the girl’s life before 1692 exist only in the witch trial testimony, and her life afterward is presently unknown. But during the trials
Mary
played a reoccurring part in the documents, with her voice recorded in the surviving texts, where the words and actions of individuals more prominent in their own and later times do not survive, and her significant presence in those documents became an embarrassing reminder of the panic.

She was
not
the daughter of Abraham and Isabella Warren, who may have had ties with Ipswich and who lived in the Rial Side section of Salem near the Beverly border. (Abraham did have a daughter Mary, but in 1692 she was Widow Green.) Sarah Osborn, one of the first to be accused in 1692, may have been a Warren
before
she married Robert Prince and then Alexander Osborn. Again, the kinship, if any, is presently unknown.

Mary was “about twenty” in 1692, meaning that she was born around 1672, the year Rebecca Nurse joined the Salem Church, shortly before the outbreak of King Philip’s War of 1675–1676. Just when the heart of Mary’s own family disintegrated is not clear, however. Perhaps it was during one of the epidemics of smallpox, a disease deadly in its democracy, not long before the witch scare.

It began—as far as Mary was concerned—when Goodwife Alice Parker asked Mary’s father to mow her grass. This meant to harvest the grass in a meadow, an important crop that would feed a family cow through the winter. Her husband, a fisherman, was likely absent at sea that haying season. Warren said he would if he had the time, but he did not make time to mow, so Goody Parker came to his house in a temper. On the one hand, Warren had his own work to do, and perhaps the illness was already in the household. On the other hand, if grass were not cut, dried, and properly stored in time, it would spoil and be useless, leaving the cow unfed and the owner facing the expense of buying hay. Mary was probably present when they exchanged heated words, thus witnessing the woman’s tongue-lashing, an affront to her father. “He had better he
had
done it” was the phrase that stuck in Mary’s mind, a threat for sure.

Shortly after this encounter her sister Elizabeth fell ill and, following quickly, their mother as well. Evidently, Mary escaped catching the disease—perhaps she was already employed elsewhere at that time—but Mother became weaker and weaker until she died. Elizabeth survived, but she lost her hearing. Engulfed in a terrible silence and overwhelmed by that silence, she ceased to speak.

Yes, Mary certainly remembered Goody Parker’s words.

Alice Parker was married to fisherman John Parker. They lived just south of Salem Neck, not far from the Blue Anchor Tavern, and they rented their home from Mary English. Alice may have been a friend of Bridget Bishop, for their two spirits would be frequently reported committing mischief together. Goody Parker was also subject to fits of catalepsy, in which she suddenly fell unconscious, only to be discovered stiff and seemingly dead. Some of her neighbors were accustomed to this sight—it was a known malady, after all—but it unnerved others. Witches, according to folklore, were said to be able to leave their bodies behind and go about in spirit only to work their evil.

Where the Warrens lived and where the meadow was located remain unknown. The Parkers and the Warrens were likely neighbors, and the grass was perhaps in a rented meadow further out of town. What the shattered family did after their mother’s death is also a ­mystery—where their father and Elizabeth went, whether they stayed in Salem (for they are alluded to only in trial documents), or what happened to the sister later. In the seventeenth century some individuals who lost hearing from childhood illness developed a system of personal signing that their families at least could use with them, but many others did not.

Mary was definitely working for John and Elizabeth Procter by 1692 and living with them inland just south of the Salem Village boundary. John Procter, about sixty years old at the time, was originally from Ipswich, where he still owned land and his brothers lived. He had been married twice before, first to a woman named Martha (possibly White), then to Elizabeth Thorndike. One son, Benjamin, the only one of the first wife’s four children to survive, was now thirty-three and worked for his father. The second wife had born seven children, with at least two of them since dead and the eldest daughter now married and away. In 1674 John married Elizabeth Bassett of Lynn, whose grandmother Ann Burt had doctored her neighbors, and some had suspected her of being a witch. Healing skills were proper woman’s work, but “cunning folk” claimed to heal as well. Although some of those suspicions went to court, Goody Burt was not found guilty of any of it. By 1692 Elizabeth was in her forties and had given birth to six children, only one of whom had died.

Procter rented a three hundred–acre farm named “Groton” from Emanuel Downing (whose London landholdings included the area where Downing Street was later built). The road from Salem ran uphill, dividing the farm as it ran before the house, while North Brook ran south of the road, heading for the North River and Salem Harbor. The bounds, marked by stumps and trees of black oak and white oak, encompassed plow land and a bit of swamp.

Procter obtained a license in 1666 to sell beer, cider, and liquors to passersby only (the neighborhood warned not to tarry there), as so many travelers stopped, hoping for refreshment. This meant that the women of the family served them while Procter and his sons and hired men worked the fields. There were problems in 1678, however, when John Procter was fined for selling “cider and strong water to Indians,” but several neighbors testified in court that the Procters kept an orderly house. As for the charge, according to Zerubabel Endicott, “I fear it’s out of ill will more than matter.” But Giles Corey (whom Procter had mistakenly suspected of setting fire to his house some time earlier) and others described how they found an Indian lying drunk on the floor with a pot of cider. Corey’s wife recalled that Goody Procter had commented that “she might as well let them have drink as other folk.” Unfortunately, that particular customer could not hold his liquor. Others said she had accepted items in pawn for a gill of liquor, a custom that could only encourage debt. Not only Procter but also Corey’s son-in-law John Parker (a farmer, not the Salem mariner) were fined for selling to the Indians this time. Despite this and a few other fines for letting other people’s servants get drunk, the courts renewed Procter’s liquor license periodically.

Mary was the hired girl, earning an agreed-upon wage for a year at a time, plus room and board and whatever tips visitors might bestow. Any servant’s situation depended on the mood of the employer. Some were treated as part of the family, and a few received bequests years later from grateful masters and mistresses. Others were mistreated, with the females sometimes at risk from predatory masters or other males in the family, or they dallied, unwisely assuming they could marry into the family only to be disabused of that notion once they had conceived. “Correcting” a servant included striking or even beating and was within a master’s right if it were not overdone. For instance, Giles Corey went too far when, exasperated by the neighbor’s slow-witted brother he had hired, he beat the man repeatedly with a stout stick. Even with a physician’s attentions, the young man soon died. Corey was tried for murder, but because other people also frequently hit the deceased, he escaped the potentially capital charge and ended up only paying a stiff fine.

However, resentful servants could make employers’ lives miserable, such as by pilfering their pantries, terrorizing their children in the parents’ absence (as Reverend John Hale’s family endured for a time), and even threatening to kill them. Kitchen help had the opportunity to slip poisons into the food, after all.

The Procters attended religious meeting in Salem rather than the Village, so Mary would have listened to sermons there from old Mr. Higginson or his assistant Nicholas Noyes when she was not left at home tending the youngest children.

She would have sat in the galleries with the other servants, for the seating was assigned by earthly rank and separated by sex, with women on one side of the center aisle and men on the other (rather than in family pews, as was the later custom). From up there Mary and the other hired girls could look down on the more favored seats below where the Procters and Nurses sat, and, unless they let their minds wander, listen to the ministers’ long sermons and prayers.

The younger minister Nicholas Noyes frequently referred to the Book of Revelation with its strange imagery. The elderly John Higginson emphasized the uses of life’s trials, for the troubles and sorrows we suffer may at least teach us something, may strengthen us spiritually. Mary’s life had had trials enough for her to brood on—her mother’s death, her own uncertain future—but what would she learn from them?

Between morning and afternoon services—or in whispered conversations when they should be paying attention—the girls and young women exchanged news and gossip. Mary would have heard the other hired girls’ stories of growing up Eastward in Maine or New Hampshire until driven south to Massachusetts, fleeing the attacks of French and Indian forces that came out of nowhere with fire and sword; she would have heard of parents, siblings, and neighbors shot or axed or kidnapped. These raiding parties burned the remote towns, slaughtered the cattle, killed many of the townsfolk, and took survivors hostage. They moved some captives to their own native villages and marched others all the way to Canada, with many dying on the trail. Some captives were eventually ransomed, but others never returned home—melting into a Catholic life, forgetting their own faith, even, especially among the youngest children, their own language. The girls now in Salem had escaped, though many had lost close kin. One girl had slipped away with her family and Reverend George Burroughs to a little island off Falmouth and hid there until Massachusetts sent help.

Memories like that never faded for those who had endured them. For others, just hearing about those horrors increased the dread of what might yet happen.

Homelife with the Procters may have been tense. The older children seemed to have resented Elizabeth. Even in 1678, during the early years of her marriage, when the court questioned their liquor license, John’s then sixteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth (by his second wife) was the one who kept the keys to the cellar and was responsible for serving the drinks. Goodwife Procter may have appreciated the help, though ordinarily the mistress of the house controlled the keys to all supplies. By 1692 stepdaughter Elizabeth was married to Thomas Very (whose sister Elizabeth married Francis and Rebecca Nurse’s son John), but stepson Benjamin was part of the household still, more like an uncle in age to his youngest half-siblings. Years later, after the witch trials, he would state, “I was the eldest son of my father, and worked for my father ‘til I was about thirty years of age, and helped bring up all my father’s children by all his wives, one after another.”