Six Women of Salem (54 page)

Other women told how they were “frighted into” false confession, hounded until “at last they did say even any thing that was desired of them.” They wept with anguish, “enough to affect the hardest heart;” wrote Mather, and they especially lamented that they had accused others, people they never even suspected.

Goodwife Mary Tyler’s own brother-in-law had broken her down with his badgering, his main argument being “that God would not suffer so many good men to be in such an errour about it.” Now she knew that “she was guilty of a great sin in belying of herself, and desired to mourn for it as long as she lived.”

The gentlemen were impressed and convinced by the woman’s words and by the way she spoke them “with such affection, sorrow, relenting, grief, and mourning, as that it exceeds any pen for to describe and expresse the same.” But other, younger confessors, despite the sympathetic audience, may have held to their confessions, including Sarah Churchill and some of Mary Bridges’s daughters who lacked their mother’s resolve.

As Goodwife Rebecca Eames told Mather and Brattle, even her principal accusers, Mary Lacey and Abigail Hobbs, who had taunted and spat at her during her examination until she confessed, had admitted that they knew nothing against her, “Nothing but the Divells delusions.”

Unfortunately, the surviving notes say nothing about what Mary Warren might have said.

The legislature, besides considering the recent petitions, faced the problem of what some would call “white witchcraft.” By October 25 the House passed a new act specifically forbidding both the practitioner and the client from engaging in fortune-telling and juggling (meaning sleight of hand) in order to reveal a person’s future or the whereabouts of lost or stolen items, as such information could come only from evil spirits. “By useing such unlawfull Arts some have been drawn to the horrid sin of Witchcraft to the high displeasure of Allmighty God and theire own destruction.” Anyone harboring “any Books of Conjuration, witchcraft Judgling or the like” was to bring those dangerous volumes to the local justice of the peace for public burning.

Anyone committing such attempts at magic would be “publickly & severely whipt” or be fined not more than £20 for a first offense. A second offence would result in the offender standing “upon the Gallows, w[i]th a Paper on his or her breast signifying the Crime, and be whipt as aforesaid, and Imprisoned during the Pleasure of the Court.”

Anyone who consulted a fortune-teller or the like, just observed or even heard of such goings-on and did not report it to the justice of the peace, or concealed anyone who possessed “such unlawfull Books” would be fined £5 or be publicly whipped for the first offense and suffer “double punishment” for a second.

The House sent the bill up to the Council for their approval. As word of this proposed new law circulated, many must have recalled the fortune-telling by egg and glass that some of the afflicted girls had tried (and the results) or Mistress Mary Sibley’s witch-cake charm. Rebecca Nurse’s family certainly noticed how this law undermined the validity of the questions put to the supposedly bewitched girls in their fits. If devils deluded or conspired with the “afflicted,” then questioning the girls was tantamount to questioning those devils.

On the following day the legislature proposed a public fast day for the province, wherein the populace would pray for guidance to understand why God had allowed Satan to cause such havoc among them, and, as Judge Samuel Sewall understood it, to understand how best to proceed in the tangled matter of suspected witches. The bill summarized the government’s view of the problem by noting that the Devil had prevailed to the extent that “severall persons have been Seduced, and drawn away into that horrid and most Detestable sin of Witchcraft.” Therefore, to prevent the spread of these “Satanicall Delutions,” the government had formed a special court of Oyer and Terminer composed of “Certaine Gentlemen of the Council . . . persons of known Integrity, faithfullness and . . . Sufficiency who have Strenuously Endeavoured to Discharge their Duty to the utmost of their Power, for the finding out & Exterpation of that Diabollicall Evill so much prevaileing amongst us” for the punishment of the guilty and for “cleaning the Reputation, & persons of the Inocent.”

However, “Notwithstanding the Indefatigable Endeavours of those Worthy Gentlemen, with Others, to Suppress that Crying Enormity,” they found “the most Astonishing Augmentation and Increase of the Number of Persons Accused, by those Afflicted,” that many of these suspects were “persons of good Conversation Godliness and honesty.” And complicating this at the same time, “severall persons have Come and Accused themselves before Authority, and by many Circumstances, confessed themselves Guilty of that most abominable Wickedness; with divers Other Strang & unaccountable Occurrances of this Nature through the Rage and malice of Satan, greatly threatning the utter Ruine, and Distruction of this poor Country.”

Therefore, they ought to ask for “Divine Assistance” in finding “the Right way, that those That are guilty may be found Out, and brought to Condigne [i.e., deserved] punishment, the Inocent may be Cleared, and our feares and troubles Removed.” They also suggested that a “Convocation of the Elders may be Called who with the Honble Council and Other persons” would prayfully “make Inspection into these Intricaces . . . in this Difficult Case.”

The bill passed thirty-three to twenty-nine, and most members of the Court of Oyer and Terminer considered themselves dismissed, even though the bill did not specifically say so.

But clearly the bill’s view of the crisis did not match that of Rebecca Nurse’s kin or the people in exile, particularly as it absolved only the integrity and faithfulness of the magistrates and not the unjustly executed. The court had done precious little toward “cleaning the Reputation, & persons of the Inocent.”

____________________

Ann Putnam watches her husband go off toward the fields with the hired men trailing behind. Now that he is home more often, maybe those men will get some actual work done. All summer it was anyone’s guess whether the day’s tasks would be completed. With Thomas so often busy at the court, the men took advantage of their master’s absence. She would send young Tommy out with weak beer for the men to wash down their noon meal, and the boy would return to say he had found the tools but not the men; they had gone off to Salem to gawk at the courts. A farm needed its master’s eye—and the well-placed toe of his boot, it would seem—to prosper.

Thomas has sacrificed so much this last summer,
she thinks,
risking his livelihood to fight against the spectral threats.
Due to just the Bradbury specter, Thomas has lost his sheep, a cow, and his favorite horse.

She turns back from the door and draws it shut. Mornings are frosty now, and some places have seen light snow. Although she is relieved that the long hot spell has ended, she has not felt comfortable in months. Her back hurts, her head aches, her ankles are swollen, and she cannot get out of her own way. The child’s bulk is oppressive even in cooler weather, and she tries to push that ungrateful thought from her mind.

She heaves open the lid of a chest and again checks her supply of child-bed linen: strips to use as swaddling bands, towels to clean herself and the child. She has brewed crocks of beer, now stored in the lean-to for the midwife and the neighbor women who will attend the birth. She hopes that the cakes, resting under a towel, will not grow stale before the baby arrives.

So much can go wrong at the time of any birth. Both the mother and the child—and even both together—can die. And these deaths, however sad, are natural. But in addition there is the matter of witches. At least Goody Nurse is out of the way, safely tucked into Hell, as far as Ann is concerned. And that sister of hers, the Esty woman, is dead as well. The third sister still waits in jail. Might
she
mean to seek revenge?

Annie still testifies, still identifies the witch specters when asked. Alarmingly, fewer people appreciate the girl’s efforts now.

Worse, the children of some Andover witches are being released on bail—their freedom
purchased.

Money could buy anything,
she thinks.

The last Sabbath Reverend Parris had preached, in part, on reconciliation, referring to the “jars & differences” among friends. But the next trials will begin early in November, and hopefully more enemies of God (and of the Putnams) will hang.
Besides,
she thinks,
is it even possible to reconcile with neighbors who harbor witches?

Worrying over this and her other burden, Ann feels a sensation that turns into a stab. She flinches and another stab strikes. Not a witch’s spectral torment—this is the baby, her baby, at this vulnerable time.

“Get your father,” she tells Tommy. “Tell him to fetch the midwife.”

She thinks again of lost Sarah writhing in her arms, convulsing until she died. But the witches will not have this child.

No, they will
not.

____________________

A
nn Putnam gave birth to Abigail, her eighth child, on October 27, a time of gathering storm. The next day brought torrents of rain and the month’s highest tides, which washed away coastal roads and drenched Chief Justice
cum
Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton as he made his way over Boston’s narrow Neck road from Dorchester to attend the General Court. Other travelers, not as lucky, actually drowned in this storm.

That afternoon, having sent a servant back over the flooding Neck to fetch him dry clothing from home, Stoughton asked the governor and council once again if the Court of Oyer and Terminer should sit the following week as scheduled, for many in Boston already assumed the session would not take place. Phips’s answer was a “great silence” that most took to mean the court would
not
sit.

Such an ambiguous nonanswer was not enough. Stoughton was absent the following day, October 29, when James Russell, an assistant who had observed the April examinations of Elizabeth Procter and Sarah Cloyce, asked outright if the temporary Court of Oyer and Terminer would stand or fall. This time Phips spoke plainly: “It must fall.”

On the same day the House passed a list defining thirteen capital crimes, including witchcraft: “If any man or woman be a witch, that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death.” This was the usual definition of witchcraft and entirely consistent with English legal precedent.

On the next Sabbath, October 30, Reverend Samuel Parris brought out the church’s silver baptismal bowl. Over the water, in the shallow, wide-rimmed vessel, two men, both church members, offered their infant children for baptism. Thomas Putnam, holding three-day-old Abigail, presented her to God and the congregation—a living child, a symbol of renewal and hope. But Jonathan Tarbell also brought his son Jonathan, born late the last February, only weeks before his beloved grandmother Rebecca Nurse was arrested for witchcraft.

The Nurse kin had lately avoided their Salem Village neighbors, and none of them trusted Parris anymore. Seeing Tarbell with the child must have surprised more than a few in the congregation. What his relatives thought of his appearance in the meeting house is another question; the awkward tension can well be imagined.

____________________

Tituba watches the people come and go in the jail—guards changing shifts, prisoners being taken out and back to the exercise yard, prisoners’ relatives to visit. With no court sessions this month, activity has slacked off, tensions lessened—but only a little, for the time being. Candy joins her to pace the yard inside the fence. A brief snow has already fallen earlier in the month, to Candy’s astonishment. Now she huddles her shawl closer and shivers when the breeze kicks up, bringing with it the sulfurous scent of low tide from North River. Tituba imagines the slim cut of the channel in the wider muddy width, which she cannot see from the jail.

At the beginning of the month some of the children from Andover were released on bail. No one expected that. And more children have been freed since then. She has heard the guards gossiping about this, and the sums sound unbelievable—more than seven years worth of her master’s salary for only a few children. Can that be true? And how did anyone manage to pay it? The only thing she knows for certain is that no one is going to offer that much money for her freedom, not even to buy her outright.

Even though those young prisoners were let go, other, adult suspects decided to take what chances they could to escape. Edward and Sarah Bishop, the couple with the unlicensed tavern, had left somehow. Their freedom did not preclude their impoverishment, though. The sheriff and his deputies had marched off the day after the first children were released to confiscate cattle and other goods from Bishop’s farm.

Despite the unexpected releases the next set of sessions scheduled to begin in November loom heavier and heavier as time draws on. Life in the jail drags intolerably, yet the remaining time before scheduled trials—considering how they always came out—speeds alarmingly closer and closer, the respite dwindling alarmingly quickly as the month reaches its conclusion. The people already condemned to death but not yet hanged have an even worse time of it—how many days until their last? Not everyone in Massachusetts agrees with the courts, what with the way evidence has been presented and regarded. Tituba wonders if the justices will listen to those tempering voices?

Not until the very end of the month does word come that the Court of Oyer and Terminer has been canceled, postponed indefinitely until England sends advice. How long will
that
take?

Tituba and Candy resume their walk, making one more circuit of the small, open space for the thousandth time.