Six Women of Salem (28 page)

“It was Goody Oliver,” Goody Hobbs says, referring to Bridget Bishop by her second husband’s name, a woman already arrested. “She would have me to set my hand to the book, but I would not, neither have I, neither did consent to hurt them again.”

The magistrates seize on the capitulation and ignore her denials. What about her earlier accusations? Had not Goody Wildes appeared to her and tempted her to sign the Devil’s book?

Off to the side among the other prisoners, Mary English understands how the magistrates interpret the matter but wishes the woman would stand up to them. Mary Warren knows too well what the magistrates expect and what they will do about it.

Goody Hobbs’s resolve wilts further. Yes, she saw those things. Yes, she was tempted. Yes, the specters ordered her not to tell about them. Yes, she did confess before. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, she signed. “It was Goody Oliver that tempted me to deny all that I had confessed before,” she says, defeated at last. “All that I confessed before is true.” She names her fellow witches—Osborne, Good, Burroughs, Oliver, Wildes, Nurse, the Coreys, and the Procters—but she does not know who the man with the wen is.

Someone had overheard her talking with disembodied voices. The witch specters, she says, brought a feast of roast and boiled meat to the jail, but she did not eat any of it.

Yet the magistrates clearly account her a confessed witch.

Later, after the magistrates leave, Mary Warren tries to explain what it is like for a confessor. “The magistrates might as well examine Keysar’s daughter that had been distracted many years,” she says, naming an odd woman well known in Salem town, “and take notice of what she said as well as any of the afflicted persons.”

“When I was afflicted I thought I saw the apparitions of a hundred persons” for “my head was distempered.” She did not know what she said then in her fits. And when she was well again she could not say that she had seen the apparitions at the times she said she had seen them.

Distempered, distracted, or dissembling? Mary English and the other prisoners listen and remember.

____________________

A
lthough it is not clear whether the other suspects in Salem’s jail witnessed the magistrates interviewing Goody Hobbs on May 3, the gist of the encounter would soon become common knowledge there and in the town at large.

The magistrates did not believe Mary Warren’s attempted recantation, and they told her firmly that they did not. Had not she herself told them that the specters promised to stop hurting her if she joined them? Now that her pains had stopped, what else were they to think? She
must
have agreed to join her tempters. That made her a witch, did it not? And being an admitted witch—for she had said she was—she would be locked up with the rest of the prisoners, people
she
had accused, people whose guilt
she
had revealed. How would she like that? And how did she think the other witches would receive her after her betrayal? Her thin retraction would hardly help her with
them
, now would it? She would be locked up with the likes of Burroughs, the ringleader of them all.

To judge from what other reluctant “confessors” would say, Reverend Noyes may have lectured her on what she had done, as he saw it, until Mary realized that he and the magistrates would believe a damning confession of witchcraft but would not believe a retraction of the confession, no matter how often she repeated it.

Some local families had journeyed to the capital for the election, staying with kin to enjoy the festivities. By week’s end all were back, and news filtered through the region: of the fast day that the General Court had ordered for May 26 to ask Heaven’s mercy on the time’s troubles, but without specifying the witch scare; of the second arrest warrant for the elusive Philip English; and of old Bray Wilkins’s illness and his grandson Daniel Wilkins’s odd behavior.

Ann Putnam perhaps contented herself with getting much of the news from Thomas, who still escorted Annie and the maid Mercy to the hearings. It was safer that way for her and the child to come, posing less risk of having further fits and seizures. Although the afflicted discovered more and more witches, the Putnam household was not backing away from their perceived duty in opposing them.

Ann Putnam could only watch as specters besieged Annie. Though Rebecca Nurse was bodily imprisoned, the girl said that the woman’s specter still roamed freely to attack the afflicted and brag of her many murder victims.

On May 2 Annie and Mercy had stood with the other afflicted girls, Goodwife Sarah Bibber, and John Indian against yet more suspects, two of them defiant widows. The light-fingered Dorcas Hoar, known to consult books on fortune-telling, muttered imprecations against her accusers. Susannah Martin was openly scornful, laughing when Annie threw a glove at her. She labeled the afflictions “folly,” and although she claimed some concern for the afflicted, she nonetheless addressed Mercy with dripping sarcasm and talked back to the court. Not only did she
not
believe that her accusers were bewitched, but she also made sinister reference to their master, as if the afflicted were the witches.

“You said their Master,” the magistrates observed. “Who do you think is their Master? “

“If they be dealing in the black art, you may know as well as I.”

This only drove the accusers to worse convulsions, and when the bench asked her to explain how it was that her appearance hurt the girls, she countered with a reference to the story of a spirit counterfeiting the form of the Prophet Samuel. “He that appeared in [the] same shape as [a] glorifyed saint can appear in any ones shape.” Others had pointed out the parallel, but again the court brushed it aside.

“Have not you compassion on these afflicted?” the magistrates asked.

“No, I have none.”

The magistrates ordered the latest prisoners, none of whom had confessed, straight to Boston to await trial. The law had to send someone to Maine to apprehend Reverend George Burroughs. Philip English, as Marshall Herrick reported, was still not to be found.

Burroughs himself arrived in Salem May 4, escorted from Wells, Maine, then locked by himself into an upstairs room of Thomas Beadle’s tavern. But no further hearings would happen yet, for Hathorne and Corwin were in Boston, representing Salem in the annual election.

The Burroughs specter, meanwhile, still besieged Ann Putnam’s household.

Ann watched helplessly as specters attacked Annie and the maid. On Saturday, May 7, Thomas and Edward Putnam along with visiting neighbors witnessed Mercy Lewis, who had worked for the Burroughs family in Maine, flinch away from an invisible specter. Her former employer, she told them, continued to push a book at her to sign. It was not the same volume the specter had brought earlier but rather a new sort of book, one she had never seen before. The specter claimed there was no harm in it. “I tould him I did not beleve him,” said Mercy, “for I had been often in his studdy but I nevr saw that book their but he tould me that he had severall books in his studdy which I never saw . . . counjuring books . . . and he could raise the divell and that he had bewicthed his Two first wives to death.”

When Mercy asked the specter how he could torment people when his body was locked up in Salem, the specter boasted, “that the divell was his sarvant and he sent him in his shap to doe it.” Then the specter fell to tormenting Mercy “most dreadfully,” but the girl would not give in. Thomas and Edward heard her shout, “Mr. Burroughs I will not writ in your book tho you doe kil me.” As Thomas wrote soon afterward: “we ware redy to fear that every joynt of hir body was redy to be displaced.”

Nor did Mercy and Annie give in the following day, a Sabbath, and a Sacrament Sabbath at that; although they, along with the Williams and Walcott girls, were sorely tortured.

“We cannot drink of the cup of the Lord and the cup of Devils,” said Reverend Parris, stating his sermon’s text. “You cannot be partakers of the Lord’s Table and the table of Devils.”

As Thomas and Ann Putnam shared in the Lord’s Supper with the other full members, they, like many others, must have wondered about the apparent swarm of neighbors who
had
drunk the Devil’s sacrament, pledging themselves to evil, a situation serious enough that Thomas and John Putnam Jr. headed to town that same day to enter complaints against a brace of new suspects from Reading and Woburn.

But that was not the last of the specters, because Annie now reported one of an old gray-haired man calling himself Father Pharaoh and claiming that even her own father addressed him so, as unlikely as that was. Annie refused to call such a wizard her grandfather. Thomas Putnam and Robert Morrell witnessed “her hellish temtations” and heard her shout, “I will not writ old pharoah I will not writ in your book.”

But once again the Putnam household witnessed the most vicious assaults from the George Burroughs specter. It threatened to kill Mercy Lewis if she dared to witness against him. “[H]e tould me,” said Mercy, “I should not see his Two wifes if he could help it.”

But Annie saw the two dead Burroughs wives, and the sight of them terrified her even more than the sight of their husband’s specter. They looked like corpses, Annie told her parents, dead women wrapped in winding sheets ready for the grave. The two ghosts, from what Annie said, grew angry at their husband, reminding him how cruelly he had treated them, telling him that they would be in Heaven when he was in Hell. At this insubordination, Burroughs’s spirit vanished, leaving the wives to speak their piece.

The first wife told Annie how her husband had killed her in the Salem Village parsonage, stabbing her under one arm. The ghost drew her sheet aside to display the wound. The second wife said that Burroughs and his present wife had murdered her in a boat going Eastward “because they would have one another.” The ghost wives pleaded with Annie to bring their complaints to the magistrates and charge their husband with their murders right to his face. If he still wouldn’t admit the crimes, they might have to appear in court themselves, Annie reported.

Ann remembered the first wife, buried now in the Village; the second had been a Hathorne widow when she married him. Such terrible developments likely seemed chillingly logical to Ann and Thomas: What would murder mean to someone who threw away his own soul?

The following morning, the day of Reverend Burroughs’s hearing, Mercy Lewis, recovering from “a kind of a Trance,” said that his specter snatched her away (in spirit, presumably) to “an exceeding high mountain” from which he showed her “all the kingdoms of the earth.” Burroughs “tould me that he would give them all to me if I would writ in his book,” Mercy told the Putnams, “and if I would not he would thro me down and brake my neck.” Yet she defied him, answering that “they ware non of his to give and I would not writ if he throde me down on 100 pichforks.”

However, Mercy survived these threats and was well enough to go off to the Village meeting house with Thomas and Annie to serve as a witness in the day’s hearings. At some point Thomas wrote a summary of her vision to show the court, a document that refrained from commenting on the obvious parallel to the Scriptural episode in which Satan tempted Christ in similar manner and in which Christ—like Mercy Lewis—refused to be tempted.

Considering how Ann and Thomas felt about Reverend Burroughs, the man’s hearing was probably too enticing to miss, regardless of whatever precautions against more convulsions she may have taken previously.

With a minister accused of going over to the enemy, two assistants, William Stoughton and Samuel Sewall, had journeyed north from Boston to preside over Burroughs’s hearing in Salem Village along with local magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin. Stoughton, aged about sixty, a Dorchester landowner and career politician, had, like Sewall, studied for the ministry before turning to secular pursuits. He had served on the Governor’s Council even under Sir Edmund Andros (when Goody Glover was condemned as a witch) and, despite the unpopularity of that regime, retained his same position as assistant. Samuel Sewall, twenty years younger than Stoughton, was a Boston merchant and office holder who had quit his position in the Boston militia under Andros over a matter of conscience. Both men had reputations of fairness. Stoughton expressed no doubts about the validity of spectral evidence. What doubts Sewall had of the situation at this point he kept to himself.

Ann and the rest of the onlookers in the meeting house had to wait while the magistrates first questioned Burroughs privately, “none of the Bewitched being present” (as Samuel Parris recorded), which was a professional courtesy. Once the magistrates and the prisoner repaired to the packed meeting house the racket began.

Right at the start Susanna Sheldon declared that Burroughs’s two dead wives had appeared to her to accuse him of killing not only three children when he was Eastward, two of them his own, but of murdering them as well, the first smothered, the second choked. The magistrates ordered Burroughs to turn and look at his accuser, which resulted in Susanna and most of the other afflicted falling to the floor. If someone even spoke his name, they were affected.

As someone was about to read Mercy Lewis’s statement of her recent tortures—probably Thomas Putnam, who had written it out—Burroughs looked at Mercy, who then “fell into a dreadful & tedious fit.” The afflicted witnesses were, for the most part, overcome by fits that prevented them from speaking against Burroughs until the convulsions subsided, making the whole process more difficult than usual. To the magistrates, the “Preternatural Mischiefs” convulsing the afflicted were such as “could not possibly be Dissembled.” Mrs. Ann Putnam certainly accepted their reality.

Mary Walcott also reported that the ghost wives demanded vengeance, adding that Burroughs had unsuccessfully tried to kill his first wife and their child while she was in labor. (This surely reminded Ann of her own dead children.)