Six Women of Salem (21 page)

“I am sure you cannot stand before that Text!” Ann exclaimed, but she was immediately “sorely Afflicted; her mouth drawn on one side, and her body strained for about a minute.

“I will tell, I will tell,” she managed at last. Then she repeated, “it is, it is, it is!” before being choked off again. At last she pulled free. “It is the third Chapter of the Revelations.”

Lawson hesitated, for the Devil might mean to use the scripture against them by encouraging its use as a superstitious charm. He agreed, however, as an experiment, presumably using a Geneva translation of the Bible favored by Puritans rather than the Church of England King James version.

Before he finished the first verse, which ended, “I know thy works; for thou hast a name that thou livest, but thou art dead,” Ann opened her eyes and relaxed as Lawson continued: “Be awake, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to dye, for I have not found thy works perfect before God. Remember therefore, how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast, and repent. If therefore thou wilt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.”

And this comforted Ann, who assumed that Rebecca did not know what well-deserved punishment was in store for her or when it would happen.

Lawson continued to the section about the triumphant soul that Ann had referred to in her fit as concerning her own: “He that overcometh, shall be clothed in white array, and I will not put out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father, and before his Angels”—unlike Rebecca’s name, which, according to Ann’s remark, was blotted out of God’s Book forever.

When Lawson finished, Ann addressed the specter triumphantly: “Did I not say he should go to Prayer?”

This particular fit took half an hour, Lawson noted: “Her Husband and the Spectators told me, she had often been so relieved by reading Texts that she named, something pertinent to her Case; as Isa. 40. 1, Isa 49. 1, Isa. 50. 1, and several others”—including the Book of Revelation, it seems.

Revelation is a highly symbolic work traditionally ascribed to the disciple John; it is framed as a vision the writer experienced and addressed to seven early Christian churches in the Near East. Its meaning is still debated, with interpretations ranging from a literal description of the world’s eventual end to first-century comments on Nero’s regime that were too risky to discuss openly. In seventeenth-century Massachusetts the book especially intrigued Reverend Nicholas Noyes of Salem, who was hardly the only one who found it fascinating. If the Devil were actually making an organized assault on their churches and communities, this possibility too closely matched the action in Revelation.

Edward and Jonathan Putnam were probably among the onlookers, for on the same day they journeyed to town and entered complaints against not only Rebecca Nurse for tormenting Mrs. Ann Putnam, her daughter Annie, Abigail Williams, “and others” but also against little Dorothy Good as well.

So at some point before eight o’clock the next morning Rebecca heard a knock on the house door, and this time the family opened to find Marshall George Herrick with his official black staff of office confronting them. Rebecca had not yet recovered from whatever her illness was, but in spite of her angry relatives, Herrick produced and read the warrant for her arrest. Francis had to have been furious at that, protective and protesting. But nothing he or his sons could do prevented the marshall from bundling Rebecca off to Ingersoll’s. To judge from their later actions, Francis and much of her family followed, frustrated and fuming at the idea anyone could seriously suspect his wife, their mother.

The child Dorothy Good was also brought to the ordinary under arrest. Deodat Lawson saw her there, where she seemed “as hale and well as other children.” Who knows what she might have understood of the events. Perhaps the grandmotherly presence of Goody Nurse was some comfort.

Also about was Mary Warren, having escaped from Procter’s fiercely watchful eye. Besides clouting her back to attention, Procter may have beaten her more than that. But once being forced to focus on her spinning, Mary had calmed, and for a time she had no more hysterical episodes. Eventually, however, Procter needed to be away from home for a few days to attend to business elsewhere, and Mary, brooding on the apparent plague of witches, began letting her nervousness get the better of her. Without her master’s warning blows to jolt her, she started experiencing fits again. If Goodwife Elizabeth Procter tried to slap some sense into the girl, it didn’t work. Mary already resented her mistress, behind her back referring to her slightingly as Betty Procter. (That much she would say to the magistrates; how she may have referred to her mistress when sharing gossip with the other hired girls is another matter.)

The Thursday of the hearing was also lecture day and the Village’s turn to host the talk—a respectable excuse to slip away from work early enough to watch the questioning of suspects as well. Mercy’s name does not appear in the notes of this day’s hearings or on any of the surviving indictments. Mrs. Ann Putnam was definitely an afflicted witness named in the complaint. She had already convulsed that morning before court convened.

Once again Ingersoll’s ordinary was too small for the crowd of onlookers. So at ten o’clock Rebecca stood alone between guards in the packed Salem Village meeting house. She faced the Magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin along with the array of accusing afflicted witnesses. Besides Mrs. Ann Putnam, her daughter, and Abigail Williams (all named in the warrant), Ann’s maid Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, Elizabeth Hubbard, and Mrs. Bethshua Pope were also present. These witnesses were agitated from the start, nervous through Reverend John Hale’s opening prayer and the magistrates’ remarks. Some of them had only seen Goody Nurse’s specter, though it had not harmed them.

Hathorne gestured to some of the younger accusers, asking, “Goody Nurse, here are two An Putman the child & Abigail Williams complains of your hurting them What do you say to it[?]”

“I can say before my Eternal father I am innocent, & God will clear my innocency.”

“Here is never a one in the Assembly but desiers it,” said Hathorne, sounding almost sympathetic, “but,” he added, “if you be guilty Pray God discover you.”

Henry Kenny, Mercy Lewis’s kinsman, “entered his complaint,” then “said that since this Nurse came into the house we was seiz’d twise with an amaz’d condition.” But Parris’s notes do not explain just what had happened, and it is not clear if the incident happened at Kenny’s house or at the meeting house.

Building on this, Hathorne again indicated the afflicted. “Here are not only these but, here is the wife of Mr Tho[mas] Putman who accuseth you by credible information & that both of tempting her to iniquity, & of greatly hurting her.” (The “credible information” was presumably other people’s accounts of what Ann said and did during her fits, the iniquity being the specter’s attempts to recruit Ann’s soul to witchcraft. Other people had witnessed that one-sided conversation.) Not all of the afflicted witnesses were certain that Goody Nurse had hurt them, however, even though they reported seeing her specter at the witches’ meetings.

Rebecca did not associate herself with any specter. “I am innocent & clear & have not been able to get out of doors these 8 or 9 dayes.”

Edward Putnam related an account of Rebecca’s supposed acts of torture.

Hathorne asked Goody Nurse if it were true.

“I never afflicted no child never in my life.”

“You see these accuse you, is it true?”

“No.”

“Are you an innocent person relating to this Witchcraft[?]”

At this point Ann Putnam had had enough of what she saw as lies. Before Rebecca could deny this as well, Ann began shouting, “Did you not bring the Black man with you, did you not bid me tempt God & dye[?] How oft have you eat & drunk y[ou]r own damnation[?]” (How often, that is, had Rebecca taken communion under false pretenses, partaken of the Lord’s bread and wine when she was actually pledged to the Devil?)

“What do you say to them[?]” said Hathorne.

“Oh, Lord, help me.” Rebecca cried. She spread her hands imploringly—and the afflicted flinched away, groaning as if she had thrust some invisible force at them with the gesture.

“Do you not see what a Solemn condition these are in?” the magistrate demanded of her. “[W]hen your hands are loose the persons are afflicted.”

The guards grabbed Rebecca’s hands to hold them still. Across the room she saw the surging mass of the afflicted, and two of the young women were shouting. She may not have heard them clearly, but they accused her specter of attacking them as well. Mary Walcott and Elizabeth Hubbard had not accused Rebecca of actually hurting them before, but now Mary cried out that she had been bitten and raised her arm to display tooth marks on the wrist. Elizabeth Hubbard also accused Rebecca of hurting her now.

“Here are these 2 grown persons now accuse you,” said Hathorne (that is, not children like Abigail and Annie). “[What] say you? Do not you see these afflicted persons, & hear them accuse you[?]”

“The Lord knows I have not hurt them. I am an innocent person.”

But the afflicted cried that the Devil himself stood by Rebecca, whispering in her ear amid a swarm of imp familiars. Many of them convulsed, twitching and flailing in terror at such a sight, causing several people in the audience to burst into sympathetic tears.

“It is very awfull to all to see these agonies,” said Hathorne, and she a woman who had so long professed to be a Christian acting with the Devil right in front of them all by the look of it, “& yet to see you stand with dry eyes when these are so many what [i.e., wet].”

“You do not know my heart,” Rebecca answered.

“You would do well if you are guilty to confess & give Glory to God.”

“I am as clear as the child unborn.”

“What uncertainty there may be in apparitions I know not,” he continued. But what about the familiar spirits? The afflicted could see them right there in court, all flocking to her. “Now what do you say to that?”

“I have none Sir.”

“If you have,” he chided, “confes, & give glory to God. I pray God clear you if you be innocent, & if you are guilty discover you. And therefore give me an upright answer have you any familiarity with these spirits?”

“No, I have none but with God alone.”

“How came you sick?” Gossip had speculated that, rather than being ill, she may have been injured when people struck back at her specter.

“I am sick at my stomach.”

“Have you no wounds?”

“I have none but old age.”

The afflicted again said they saw the Devil and the imps and flocking spectral birds, and they shrieked at the sight. Rebecca leaned back against a support—a chair or a pew—and the afflicted arced backward as if their spines would break. She moved her hands, and they shied away as though they were being hit. To the magistrates and to much of the audience, the cause and effect of her movements and the afflicted’s reactions seemed painfully obvious.

“It is all false,” she insisted. “I am clear.”

“Possibly you may apprehend you are no witch, but have you not been led aside by temptations that way[?]”

“I have not.”

“What a sad thing is it that a Church member here & now another of Salem, should be thus accused and charged,” he observed, referring both to Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse.

“A sad thing sure enough!” Mrs. Bathshua Pope shouted, but evidently she did not throw anything this time. She and the others then fell into “grievous” and “lamentable fits.”

According to some of them Rebecca’s specter detached from her body and hit them on its way out of the meeting house. Outside, her spirit mounted a horse behind the Devil and galloped around the building in mockery. The afflicted screeched so much so that folk up the road heard them, while inside the meeting house people wondered who in the audience would convulse next. Instead of trembling, Ann Putnam froze, locked in paralysis. The magistrates gave Thomas permission to carry her outdoors, and once away from the commotion, she relaxed and began to recover.

The court, however, was not through with Rebecca Nurse. “Tell us have not you had visible appearances more than what is common in nature?”

“I have none nor never had in my life.”

“Do you not think these suffer voluntarily or involuntarily[?]”

“I cannot tell.”

“That is strange everyone can judge.”

“I must be silent.”

“They accuse you of hurting them, & if you think it is [not] unwillingly but by designe you must look upon them as murderers”—that is, did she think her accusers lied, doing so in a charge that could take her life?

“I cannot tell what to think of it.”

The magistrates insisted, so Rebecca admitted she had not understood all that was said. She was hard of hearing, after all.

“Well then give an answer now, do you think these suffer against their wills or not[?]”

“I do not think these suffer against their wills.”

“Why did you never visit these afflicted persons?”

“Because I was afraid I should have fits too.”

“Is it not an unaccountable case that when you are examined these persons are afflicted?” For the afflicted were reacting to her every movement.