The Witches: Salem, 1692 (14 page)

Plenty of clergymen dabbled in alchemy while inveighing against the occult; popular magic was one thing, elite magic another. A great deal of bet-hedging and base-covering went on; just because you were eminently pious did not mean you hesitated to serve up a witch cake. Like any people under a sentence of predestination, the Puritans developed an obsession with fortune-telling. Almanacs sold briskly, offering astrological wisdoms.
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Harvard’s 1683 commencement was postponed due to an eclipse. By any account the Puritans were very far from kitchen-sink realism; God spoke to them in rolls of thunder, in what sounds like dragon smoke, in glittering comets. It said something about Samuel Sewall that where others looked for heaven’s artillery, Sewall, whose brother had taken in little Betty Parris, kept particularly close track of rainbows—comforting rainbows, noble rainbows, perfect rainbows, a rainbow directly out of the book of Revelation. Sewall installed angel-head carvings on the gate before his home as protective cover. In the anxious murk, religion sometimes seemed a kind of halfway house between reason and superstition.

The Bay Colony may have constituted the best-educated community in the history of the world before 1692. Rarely have so many been able to parse a sentence in the presence of so few books. The majority of adolescent girls in Salem village could read, even if they could not sign their names. (Ann Putnam Jr. numbered among the few who could.) Theirs was also a society in which the most literate happened to be the most literal. The New England clergy collected proofs of the supernatural in part to fend off the surging forces of rationalism. Increase Mather had
harvested prodigies and portents in his 1684
Illustrious Providences,
the precursor to his son’s
Memorable Providences,
the pulpy volume through which news of the Swedish flight and satanic rescue reached New England. A grab bag of apparitions, possessions, earthquakes, shipwrecks, and flying candlesticks,
Illustrious Providences
was a stunning hybrid of folklore and erudition, produced to satisfy the ministers who in 1681 requested a collection of “prodigious witchcrafts, diabolical possessions, remarkable judgments.” Those “native wonder tales” served a political purpose, reaffirming God’s commitment to the New England mission in the face of royal incursions.

The Puritan overlooked nothing by way of sign or symbol. When he headed into the marsh with a gun to hunt waterfowl for dinner and his best pig followed him, it meant something. The fury of hailstones that would shatter Sewall’s new kitchen windows delivered a providential message. (Mather assured his disconsolate friend that the damage was Apocalypse practice.) The thirst for meaning introduced an obsession with causality; explanations were a regular feature of Puritan life. A comet was never simply a comet. A burn in the linen was ripe with meaning. As the Goodwin children twisted and writhed, their father naturally assumed he was being punished for his sins. If Parris read a rebuke in his convulsing children he did not say so publicly. It was the obvious conclusion, however. Cotton Mather would infer as much when another daughter—the Mather home was a dangerous place—fell into the fire.

Human frailty was thought to account for inclement weather; teeth chattering, toes numb, the Massachusetts Puritan had every reason to believe he sinned flamboyantly. Immoderate behavior claimed a fair number of casualties; Increase Mather suggested that King Philip’s War followed from excessive silk-and wig-wearing. A Connecticut cleric wrote down his widowhood to the fact that he had too much enjoyed sex with his wife. Others attributed the deaths of children to their outsize affections for them. Negligence constituted the workhorse of explanations, especially for a generation convinced of its inferiority. They were not the pious men their fathers had been; the idyllic age was behind
them. The Cambridge minister who went hoarse was being chastised for his poor preaching. Was his left knee lame, Increase Mather wondered, in the thirty-fourth year of his sixty-four-year ministry, as witches began to fly through the air, because he had been insufficiently diligent in his service to God? (He spent no fewer than sixteen of every twenty-four hours in his study.) One could not be too careful; Cotton Mather accidentally omitted a daughter’s name from his morning prayer. He finished to discover that an hour earlier the child’s nurse had accidentally suffocated her. When in 1690 Samuel Parris attributed New England’s suffering to lapses in family devotions, he took the problem to a Cambridge ministers’ meeting. The solution was simple: the Massachusetts clergymen were to do their utmost to call on each of their parishioners to “inquire, instruct, advise, warn, and charge, according to the circumstances of the families.”

The full-scale embrace of causality sent the Puritan in two seemingly opposite directions. On the one hand it made of him an enthusiastic litigant. Prior to the 1690s, there were no lawyers in the Bay Colony. There were no accidents either. Every conceivable offense found its way to court, as, it seemed, did most Massachusetts residents, seduced by the irresistible idea—when things fall apart, disappoint, go awry or astray—that someone, somewhere, must be to blame.
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(Much of what we know about the upright Salem villagers comes from the court records, a catalog of their misdeeds. It is at once a dazzling compendium of major and minor infractions and a tribute to a hypertrophied faith in reason.) The residents of seventeenth-century Massachusetts were not more given to transgression than others, only more in love with justice. Even when they rewrote the official record, they remained ledger-keepers and score-settlers. A testifying people whose salvation depended on a public confession, they made for natural witnesses. There seemed never to be a shortage of volunteers to report on what had been said, or what they had
heard had been said a generation earlier. Mutual surveillance could sound like something else altogether in the courtroom. What Cotton Mather had in mind when he exhorted his congregation in 1692 to remain one another’s eagle-eyed guardians was probably not what William Cantlebery’s wife had in mind when—standing in a tree—she invited a friend to join her in spying on the neighbor who shoved Cantlebery off her property, pelting him with a rain of objects.

Vigilant though the settlers were, many things went missing, from mares to fences to virtue. Debt and drunkenness were the popular legal favorites, but trespass in all its forms came close behind. That was unsurprising when land grants were defined as “beginning at a stump and running east four rods, to a stake” or bounded “easterly to a tree ‘pretty big’ either black oak or yellow oak, upon a ridge by the highway.” Even where borders were exact, livestock chose not to respect them. Freewheeling New England pigs sowed havoc for generations; the neighbor’s swine seemed perpetually to be rooting in the peas. Serene Rebecca Nurse had erupted in fury one Saturday morning when the next-door neighbor’s pigs turned up in her garden. She had called to her son to bring his gun. (It would not help her case that the pig owner died soon thereafter.) When Parris petitioned the village to repair his rotten, decomposing fence, he described it as a “make-bait” between himself and his neighbors. Every spring his livestock ventured to their side, their hogs, cows, and sheep to his. Year in and year out, Salem discussed the minister’s pasture fence, which—joining fears of impiety, famine, and invasion—crammed the New England conundrum into a three-word nutshell.

Locks do not appear to have functioned in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, where all kinds of boundaries were trampled and thresholds penetrated. The Salem villagers had every reason to advertise their wives’ fears when left alone; a woman risked assault from a visiting neighbor when her husband descended to the cellar for more cider. Consciously and not, men slipped into beds not their own. (It is interesting that spectral women so frequently disturbed men in their beds throughout 1692 when in the visible world the opposite occurred with some frequency.)
Dark barns proved especially perilous places. The candle knocked from her hand, a Newbury girl informed the assailant who lured her into the stable that “she would as soon be gored by the cows as to be defiled by such a rogue as he.” There was a conflagrative nature to those complaints; angry words between two parties regularly begat angrier exchanges among their relatives, who handed them down, intact and still smoldering, from one generation to the next. In such a way the Putnams’ feud with several Topsfield families had gathered legendary force over the decades; Rebecca Nurse’s family and the Putnams had sued and countersued each other in an epic land dispute. The courts functioned efficiently, with English procedures and remarkable speed. Prison sentences were rare. The workforce beckoned, as did redemption—or a renewed court case.

While the punishments were highly original, the catalog of offenses was less so. Servants suffered regular verbal and physical abuse. They sought revenge by raiding the cellar, stealing the kettle, or planting stones in beds. Before running away with his master’s shoes and horse, one servant informed his mistress she was “an ordinary whore, burnt-tail bitch and hopping toad.” Few were as creative as the girl who slipped the toad into the milk pitcher. Hauled into court over and over—he had an irritating Quaker habit of working, and requiring his help to work, on the Sabbath (he was spotted through a shop window)—Salem merchant Thomas Maule landed there in 1681 for abuse of his maid. He had taken to delivering thirty or forty lashes with a horsewhip to her naked back. She spat blood for two weeks. Why did he so cruelly beat the girl, he was asked, when he could just as easily have sold her? “Because she was a good servant,” explained Maule, who largely sat out the events of 1692 but did not mince words afterward.

What a court could not always do was make sense of things. Sometimes, in the headlong pursuit of reason, the best explanation turned out to be the otherworldly one. Sometimes, the most eminent of New England ministers collectively pointed out, it was the only explanation. Certainly it was the most versatile. One husband blamed his impotence on
witches in the woods outside. If Sarah Good had not enchanted them, how to construe the death of those village cattle? Witchcraft tied up loose ends, accounting for the arbitrary, the eerie, and the unneighborly. As Samuel Parris was discovering, it deflected divine judgment and dissolved personal responsibility. The devil not only provided a holiday from reason but expressed himself clearly; for all their perversity, his motives made sense. You did not need to ask what you had done to deserve his disfavor, preferable to celestial rebuke—or indifference. And when diabolical machinations were what you were watching for, they quickly became what you saw. Amid glaring accountability, witchcraft broke up logical logjams. It ratified grudges, neutralized slights, relieved anxiety. It offered an airtight explanation when, literally, all hell broke loose.

NO ONE IN
Salem village lived alone. But suddenly—after Deodat Lawson’s alarm and Parris’s inflammatory sermon—they seemed less alone than ever. A riot of shadowy sightings followed. On the evening of April 6, Parris reported, John Procter visited the parsonage to attack his niece. He inflicted similar punishments at the Putnam household. The same Wednesday, several miles off, a twenty-five-year-old farmer named Ben Gould woke to find Giles and Martha Corey standing by his bed. They delivered two sharp pinches to his side and returned the following night, Procter in tow. For several days Gould could not fit a shoe to his foot for the pain. He was the first in what would be a series of young male accusers. Men now practiced witchcraft on other men, although they tended not to assault one another in the presence of justices. Nor did they fend off invisible specters in public assemblies, with one notable exception. Parris’s April 10 sermon was interrupted by John Indian, the parsonage slave. John was as aware as anyone that Tituba had now been in prison for five weeks. The spectral Sarah Cloyce descended on him as he sat in his pew; she sank her teeth into him with such force that she drew blood. She assaulted eleven-year-old Abigail as well. Following the sermon, the Putnams’ maid convulsed again at Ingersoll’s. When she returned to her
senses, she could not identify her afflicter. A roll call of suspects was submitted; the same names were on all minds. Had the witch been ancient Rebecca Nurse? Or straight-spined Martha Corey? Sarah Cloyce seemed a safe choice, the warrant having already gone out for her arrest. Twenty-five miles away, in Boston, Cotton Mather that day exhorted his congregants to shake off their sinful sleep, to watch against the devil, for the coming of the Lord, as the “stupendious revolution” was near.

Word of the preternatural events in Salem reached Boston through a variety of channels. Either because Hathorne and Corwin felt they needed reinforcements, because those reinforcements felt compelled to investigate the curious matter for themselves, or because for the first time a male suspect was to take the stand, acting deputy governor Thomas Danforth traveled to Salem to conduct the April 11 preliminary hearing. With him rode a host of officials, including Boston judge and merchant Samuel Sewall. Among the colony’s most eminent public servants, sixty-nine-year-old Danforth had for decades tended to Harvard’s survival as the university’s treasurer and steward. He served simultaneously in the Massachusetts legislature. He had fought to defend the colony’s lost charter and participated in the Andros coup. He cut an impressive figure. For some of the same reasons that brought him to Salem, the April hearing was moved to the less rustic, better-lit town meetinghouse, nearly twice the size of the village one, with an extensive, newly built gallery and stylish boxed pews.

Danforth appointed Parris court clerk that Monday, leaving the minister to record his slave’s account of events that had taken place in his own home. Parris struggled to keep up. The words regularly came too quickly for the Salem recorders. With quill and ink wholly unsuited to the fast-paced, stereophonic scene, they leaped from direct quotes to paraphrase, from unidentified voices in the courtroom to specters, half noting the changes of speakers as they did so. The blots on the page testify to their labor; it was not easy to keep the ink flowing. They corrected themselves as they went. They summarized and editorialized. (For Parris, the fits before them could be “dreadful,” “extreme,” “horrible,”
“miserable,” or “grievous.”) Thomas Putnam beefed up depositions after the fact. It was sometimes easier to rest their pens, to state that the defendant said nothing worth repeating, that the witchcraft was altogether obvious, that the testimony amounted to a mass of lies and contradictions. The clerks noted what they deemed most significant (impertinence, laughter, dry eyes), omitting what they deemed insignificant (denials). The logic of accusations tended to win out over the illogic of alibis. What wound up on the page was not always what the reporter heard but what he remembered or believed; few would prove as fastidious as he had been with Tituba. On April 11, amid the restive crowd, Parris could not always hear or see. Errors crept into his transcripts.