Susannah Morrow (51 page)

Then I rose and went to the window, leaving her to her labors on the floor while I stared out at the darkness growing below,
the soft summer twilight. I listened to the sound of children, laughter, the creak of a well’s rope, and the silence behind
me. Then I realized—’twas no longer silent in the room, but there was the hushed sound of crying instead. I turned to see
my daughter curled on the floor, her shoulders shaking in sobs, her face in her hands—just a young woman crying out her heart,
all demons gone, the air quiet and soft.

Carefully I went to her and put my hand on her shoulder, and her sobbing became greater. “I am such a sinner,” she hiccuped.
“How can God love me now?”

“What happened, Charity? Tell me what happened.”

She looked up slowly from her hands, staring at me through watery, red-rimmed eyes. Then, as if her words had been lodged
in her throat and I had set them free, she said, “I did not mean for you to be accused. I did not mean it, I swear to you!
When I thought you would die, I was ready to die myself.…I would have died, had they hanged you. ’Twas not what I intended.
Not what any of us intended.”

“What did you intend?”

“I meant only to save you. I was…I was so afraid. I have been so afraid.…”

I sat there, listening while she told me how my apprentice had seduced her and she had fallen in love with him. How Judith
had been horrified at her sin and sent the boy away with five pounds and did not tell me what had happened between my daughter
and Sam. Judith had strictly bade Charity to keep it silent as well. Charity had lived in terror that I would find out, and
when Judith died, she lived in fear her mother’s protection would cost Judith her rightful place with God. She feared that
her sin, and the lie about it, kept her mother’s spirit here on earth, in league with Satan. Charity believed Susannah had
come at the black man’s urging, and Susannah, with her London ways and bold honesty, had only made plain that fear.

She had looked for solace with her friends, and they had told fortunes with simple tricks that were in themselves a terrible
sin, and that sin upon all her others cast her into an icy barrenness so great she could not see for the blackness of it.
She had watched me fall, too, into the Devil’s spell, even as she had fought to save me. And now she could no longer see her
mother’s spirit, and she was terrified as she had never been.

“I cannot see the end of it, Father,” she said finally, burying her face once more in her hands. “I cannot see the end.”

I could not bear to see her this way, nor to think of what Judith and I had done to this sensitive girl. I touched her hands,
and when they fell away from her face, I told her, “God cannot punish you for feeling His torments so deeply, my dear. You
are not bound for Hell. This will all end, and not in some eternal flame, I promise you.”

“’Tis not a flame, Father,” she said simply. “’Tis ice, and dark. ’Tis a great cold shadow over my heart.”

“‘Yea,’” I quoted softly, “‘though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with
me.’”

She glanced away. “When I accused those in Salem, was I doing His work? Or the Devil’s?”

I let out my breath in a long, slow hush. “I don’t know. I ask you again: What did you intend when you called out those names,
Charity? Was it the truth you said? Or was it all lies?”

She looked at the floor and went quiet—for so long, I thought she would not speak. Then, finally, she looked at me, and there
was a bleak sadness in her eyes. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I cannot say.”

’Twas a truth I understood, though she could not have known it—she was still so young. What we believed, what we wished to
believe, the uncertainty of experience…We were never far enough from our own minds to see things as they really were. What
was dream, what was truth, and what was only rationalization…

’Twas sometimes safer left unknown.

I
MISSED THE TIDES OF
S
ALEM
. H
ERE, THERE WERE TIDES, YET…IN
this town, those tides did not belong to me. I had grown with the rhythms of Salem. In my mind, I haunted its streets. I
was a free man here, freer than I had ever been in Salem, and yet I felt as if my life was half undone, as if it had always
been so, even before Judith had died, even when I had owned my own farm and made my living turning pieces to fit together
for spinning wheels. There had ever been a hollowness I had tried to fill with God. ’Twas my sin that He would never be enough,
that I was a man with flesh-and-blood desires who needed a partner for this journey. Would He condemn me for that when my
hours on this earth were over? Or was this God I’d been taught to revere not the same God who’d laid out my life, who knew
already the beginning and the end, and every path in between?

I needed devotion and time for those questions; I was too busy to do more than ask them now. My days were caught up in working
at the mill, in caring for my daughters, who were the singular joy in my life. I had begun purchasing wood from the mill,
and I borrowed what tools I could and bought others. In the middle of our lodging-house room, I began again to work the trade
I loved. In the late evenings, I would sit by the light of a candle while I listened to the soft breathing of my daughters,
and work the wood until it was smooth and shining. I fashioned a cupboard for our clothes, another chair, and then a piece
to sell. As the summer went on, and the news of Salem drifted in through the open window, I worked my worries and my fears
into pine and oak and thought of Susannah. I wondered if she was still alive, if she had died already—who knew what news tomorrow
might bring? When I’d heard that they had convicted and hanged poor Rebecca Nurse, I was afraid; when a month later came the
news that George Burroughs and John Proctor had been hanged as well, I began to dread the sunrise. Surely soon, they would
turn to the confessed witches. But I heard nothing of those who had confessed; it seemed they had disappeared into the stone
and mud of the prison. There was only word of more and more accusations, stretching to Andover and Topsfield, even to Boston,
where incredibly, Captain John Alden, the son of our founder, was accused. I heard of farms neglected as relatives spent long
hours visiting those in jail. Despair settled over all of New England; my own sent me often to the window, as Charity had
gone before, staring out beyond the narrow roads and roofs of this town, out to sea, as if I could see through the miles.

“You are not well, Father,” Charity told me one morning in late September, when she woke to find me sitting exhausted at the
table, turning a spinning-wheel rod over and over in my hand. Even the sight of her, at peace now—as the stretch of days had
made her—did not cheer me. On the pallet, little Faith roused and murmured, and Charity scooped her up and carried her to
me.

“You do not sleep,” she said. “You hardly eat. You put me in mind…”

Of myself.
I heard the words she did not say, and I looked up and put aside the rod, taking Faith into my arms. “There is nothing to
fear,” I reassured her. “I am well enough.”

Charity said nothing more, but went to slice bread for breakfast. She called to Jude to rouse herself—the sun was up, and
she must go and fetch some water. Faith wiggled in my arms, and absently I set her down upon the floor to play with a ball
of knotted string.

I heard Jude leave, and then her footsteps again, the splash of water on the stairs as she struggled with the bucket. She
came inside breathlessly, saying, “They’ve hanged eight more. Goody Harrison told me at the well. They hanged Mary Easty too.
And they pressed Goodman Corey to death because he would not plea.”

“What of the confessed witches? Is there word of—” I paused, caught by the way Charity turned and stared at me. “What is it?
Why do you look at me so?”

Her hand went to her mouth. “I did not understand before.…Oh, forgive me—”

“Forgive you for what?” I asked impatiently. “You speak in riddles.”

“’Tis…Susannah you ask after, isn’t it, Father? The reason you are not truly with us is because…you wish to be with her.”

I was startled to silence. Then I said, “’Tis not so simple, Charity.”

“Tell me, Father—do you love her?”

At the door, Jude went still. Faith chirped on, oblivious and innocent. I half expected Charity to fall into a fit, although
she had not done such a thing for months now. I had kept from mentioning Susannah to her deliberately. She had been too fragile
at first, and afterward, I grew accustomed to not saying Susannah’s name, and as a habit grows worse the longer ’tis unchecked,
the more I’d grown adept at avoiding the subject of her. Yet now I saw an understanding in Charity’s eyes that I hadn’t expected,
and I realized—she would be leaving me soon, though she did not know it. Soon she would look up and see a boy standing in
the sunlight, and he would take her breath, and she would go with him. She would become the wife of a fisherman, or a cobbler,
or a shopkeeper. There were so few hours left now that belonged to me, and the truth was that when they had been mine alone,
I had not been watching and so had let them slip away.

And now, ’twas a woman who watched me, and not a little girl, and I owed her the truth, however she might dislike it. “Aye,”
I said carefully. “I love her.”

From where she stood, Jude gasped in delight. I could not take my eyes from my eldest daughter.

Slowly Charity sat upon the bench, folding her hands on the table before her. She bowed her head as if in prayer, and when
she looked up at me again, I saw wisdom in her eyes—wisdom wrest from darkness.

“Then you must go to Salem, Father. Bring her back to us.”

I did not go immediately; I could not. The terror that had all of New England in its grip was not yet faded—to go back meant
my own death, in a town where death had become a daily affair, and I could not leave my girls to be certain orphans. I had
no choice but to wait, past Michaelmas and into October, when the summer heat faded slowly, leaving behind colored leaves
and morning chill.

Then one night, I woke to see the moon shining in through the little window, undulating like the reflection of sunlight on
water, dappling the blankets that lay across myself and little Faith, who had curled into my side to sleep, her gentle breathing
an easy counterpoint to my own. I heard the soft click of the door, and turned my head to see it open, strangely unafraid,
unanxious, simply waiting.

’Twas a shadow that slipped into the room and then closed the door. And I knew, without knowing, who it was. I watched as
she came into the moonlight, and I saw her—not as I’d last seen her, in a stained bodice and dun skirt that hung loose on
her bony slenderness—wearing a bodice of blue with silver lace, cut in the fashion she liked, with slashes in the sleeves
and a neckline cut to show her full breasts. She was laughing as she stepped into the room.

I sat up, the blankets pooling around my waist while the babe beside me slept on undisturbed. I reached out, and she came
to me, and settled onto my lap, and I felt the warmth of her skin, her solidness. I felt the soft strands of her hair, which
fell loose over her shoulders.

“There are days I hear the tides still,” she said to me. “They seem to beat in my heart, and all I can do is think of you.
Will there be tides where we are going?”

“There will be tides,” I told her. “There are tides in New York.” She laughed and answered, “Oh, Lucas, how happy we shall
be there. Come for me now; I am anxious to see you. Come for me.”

Then she was gone.

I woke, disoriented, distressed, reaching for her, crying out with a longing so sharp ’twas a pain. There was no moonlight
playing across the blankets, only the darkness of a heavy-clouded night, but in the shadows I heard the tides she spoke of,
Salem Harbor, the river snaking past the prison that came and went as regularly as the hours. I smelled the sea on the air,
though the window was closed against it now that the weather had turned; I smelled the start of a storm.

’Twas time, I knew. Time to go for her.

When morning came, and with it the wind and the first lashing rain of the season, I kissed my daughters and gave them most
of the money I’d saved, counseling them to be frugal, to mind Charity, to wait for me. They each of them laughed with joy
when I kissed them good-bye and gave me their blessing and their love. I held those things with me like a shield against the
rain as I went to fetch the stabled mule that Sam Nurse had loaned me. ’Twas there I heard the news: There had been a decision
to try the confessed witches, but before trials had been scheduled, Increase Mather had spoken to a convocation of ministers
in Boston and condemned the trials and the spectral evidence used against the accused. An anonymous letter had been circulating
in Boston and Salem decrying the proceedings, raising skepticism and protest. The governor had ordered the trials postponed
and no one else imprisoned.