Tituba of Salem Village (10 page)

The master said, “What unseemly song is that?”

John said, “It is a very old song, master. One they sing in England.”

“Where did you learn it?” he demanded.

“I heard it sung first in Boston in the tavern where you had me work, master. Since then I’ve heard it sung in Deacon Ingersoll’s ordinary.”

“Who sings it there?”

“Fishermen sing it there. I do not know their names, master. Men who come down from Boston sing it, too. I do not know their names either.”

“It is an evil song. Do not sing it here.” He glanced at the flushed faces of the little girls, their sparkling eyes. He said, “It is time for prayers and time you were in bed.” He looked at the big fire in the fireplace and frowned, saying, “We can not afford to keep such big fires going. My wood is still not supplied to me.” He motioned that they were to kneel and then knelt himself and prayed long and earnestly, his harsh voice rising and falling, now in supplication, now in admonition.

“Get to bed,” he said when he had finished. He went back into his study and closed the door.

Betsey started obediently towards the stairs, but Abigail lingered behind. She said quietly to John, “You didn’t tell him that Pim, the bound boy, sings that song. Why was that?”

John said, “Because slaves and bound people do not tell tales on each other.”

“Why?”

“Because their lives are not their own. The people who own them do not protect them. No one protects them. And so they have to protect themselves and each other.”

“What would happen to Pim? What were you protecting him from?”

“They would beat him—”

“It would be good for him,” Abigail said pertly. “He drops things and breaks things on purpose. That’s why you think it’s funny. You laughed—”

Tituba said, “Miss, it’s time for you and Betsey to get to bed. Step lively.”

Tituba watched them as they left the room. Just recently Abigail had learned to make her long skirt express her feelings. Now she made it flounce around her feet and thus express her disdain for Tituba and her objection to being sent upstairs to sleep in a cold room, leaving the warmth of the hearth for Tituba and John. Betsey walked smoothly, and her long skirt moved smoothly, too.

Abigail had closed the door. The latch clicked shut noisily. Then Tituba sighed gently—glad that it was night and she could talk freely to John. The mistress was asleep; the girls were on their way to bed, and the master was shut up in his study. The keeping room was theirs. She sat near the fire on one of the settles, and the cat curled up at her feet. He seemed to stare into the dark corners of the room, for the firelight only reached a little way into the room. He turned his head as though he were watching something. From the way he moved his head the object he was watching was slowly emerging from the darkness that nearly obliterated the door of the minister’s study. It made her uncomfortable for she couldn’t see what he was looking at.

She said, “Come, Puss. Come!” stooped down and picked the cat up and held him on her lap, stroking his head, caressing him under his chin until he began to purr. She said
to
John, “Listen, he’s singing. Just listen to him.”

The master came out of his study, and the cat jumped down heavily with a thump. He crept under the settle directly across from Tituba. Only his nose, his whiskers, and his eyes were visible. His eyes looked enormous, without depth, no bottom, like looking into Boston harbor. He watched the master’s approach with an unwinking gaze.

“Where’d that cat go?” the master asked. He bent over and looked at the cat and then straightened up hurriedly. “I don’t like its looks. Get rid of it.”

Tituba said firmly, “Master, we have to have a cat. There are rats in the barn. There are mice in the house. They are eating our food. We need a cat.”

“I don’t like cats. I never have liked them. Put it out.”

She stood up, looked straight at him. A small woman sturdily built, her expression usually gentle, now defiant. “There are mice in the house, master,” she said, deliberately repeating what she had said before just as though she were talking to six-year-old Betsey.

The master’s eyes flashed with anger, and he lifted his arm as though he were going to strike her. John said, easily, “It’s good to have a cat, master.” He was in the shadows, leaning on the settle, watching them, his eyes narrowed to slits.

The master said, “Yes,” and lowered his arm. He made a complicated business of lighting a candle, and then he went up the stairs to bed.

John said, in a low voice, “He’s quick to anger because of the church meeting in Ingersoll’s late this afternoon. The master was there, and the deacons read him that same thing he read to us, where they had it written down that he was to keep this house and the pasture in good repair and get his own firewood. He knew that that meant they hadn’t given him this house—he has no deed—and he won’t get a deed.”

“What happened?”

John made his voice sound like the master’s. “He shouted at them, ‘I never heard or knew anything of it. Neither can I or will I take up with it, or any part of it.’” And then John lowered his voice still further, “He was so angered that he said ‘They were knaves and cheaters that entered it in the parish book.’”

Tituba said, “He said that to the church people?”

John said, “Yes. And a hush and a stillness came in Ingersoll’s big room. The talk in the tavern is that he’s greedy. He wants what isn’t his. And they say he’s mean-tempered. Lieutenant Nathaniel Putnam said to him, ‘Sir, then there is only proposals on both sides and no agreement between you and the people.’ And our master said, ‘No more, there is not, for I am free from the people and the people free from me.’ Then he left, and he slammed the door behind him, and the folk say it will be just like a war here. Some will be for him and some will be against him, and then they won’t pay their rates, and the meetinghouse will not be kept up, and there won’t be enough to pay his salary.”

Tituba shook her head—rotten eggs on the doorstep to greet them, a door that opens by itself, the general air of neglect, of gloom around and inside this house, that tramp woman named Goody Good who had walked down the weed-filled front path, her rags fluttering around her, turning to shake her fist, and muttering something—threats, inviting disaster.

“I wish the master had never come here.”

John said, “No matter. The slave must survive.” He opened the back door, and cold air rushed into the room.

“Close the door quickly,” she said.

“I’ve got an oak backlog almost as long as the fireplace, almost as wide as a boat. I’m going to bring it in. It will last way along into the morning. When I knock, open the door for me.”

He was covered with a light powdering of snow when he came back into the room. She watched him work the big log into the house by himself with handspikes. She thought, Winter is here; it is beginning to snow. I will be shut up in this house with the master and a sick mistress and two little girls. The house doesn’t want us. The neighbors don’t want us.

But it was warm in the keeping room. The words of Pim’s song echoed in her mind, “Let the world slide, let the world go—”

Chapter 8

The next morning when John left for Ingersoll’s the sun was shining. The money cat went out the door ahead of him. In the doorway the cat turned and gave Tituba a look of annoyance, as though she had fooled him into spending the night in the house when he could have been deep in the forest; she should have let him out of the house as soon as the snow stopped.

He lifted his feet daintily, leaving a clear track of his paw prints. Later Tituba traced his path through the snow. He had gone all the way around the house, had walked around the barn, and then gone towards the forest.

Soon afterwards, Mistress Anne Putnam, wife of Thomas Putnam, clerk of the church, came to see the mistress. She brought her daughter, Anne Putnam, Jr., and the Putnams’ bound girl, Mercy Lewis, with her. Mistress Putnam was a tall, thin woman with flashing dark eyes. The daughter, Anne, Jr., was as thin and white-faced as the mother.

Mercy Lewis, the bound girl, was lively and rosy-cheeked. Her cap kept coming off her head, and a great mass of yellow hair the color of buttercups tumbled down over her face and shoulders.

Mistress Putnam spoke sharply to her, “Mercy, get your hair under your cap before Pastor comes into the room.”

Mercy hastily tumbled her hair into place on top of her head and put on her white cap.

They all went up to the mistress’ bedroom. The conversation made Tituba uneasy. Mistress Putnam said that her sister had died in this house. “But not in this room,” she said, looking around. “We always keep sick people downstairs. She was married to Mr. Bayley who was the minister. Mr. Burroughs’ wife died here, too. He was another of our ministers. He didn’t pay for his wife’s funeral—went off and left all his belongings. We had him arrested and brought back until we could get it straightened out.”

Tituba found herself wondering, Was it Mr. Burroughs who had fixed the loom so it wouldn’t work? Was his the bent-over figure she had visualized carefully wrecking it?

“Just before Mr. Parris came, there was Mr. Lawson—”

“Did his wife die here, too?” Abigail asked, interrupting her. “Tell us about it downstairs. We’d best be going down for Aunt Parris has to rest now.” She said this in such a grown-up way that Mistress Putnam stared at her in surprise.

After Mistress Putnam’s visit, Tituba found excuses for keeping other callers away from the mistress. She was afraid they, too, might talk about all the ministers’ wives who had died in the ministry house.

Mary Sibley came often and brought her niece, Mary Walcott, with her. Mary Walcott was an expert knitter. She taught Tituba how to knit the long woolen stockings they all wore. Goodwife Sibley made broths and puddings for the mistress. She had remedies for everything—for coughs and colds, for frost-bitten fingers, for headaches.

Before the winter snows closed the paths and roads, Tituba came to know many of the bound girls and boys and the slaves who belonged to the farmers in Salem Village. The farmers sent them to the house with provisions for the minister. When there was a knock at the door, late in the afternoon, she knew it would be Black Peter or Mary Black or Cindy, slaves who belonged on nearby farms. Or it might be one of the bound girls, Mary Warren or Elizabeth Hubbard or Mercy Lewis. They brought corn meal, salt beef, salt cod, onions.

By the middle of December, snow was piled up so high they could not see out of the windows. Tituba and the master dug a tunnel-like path to the barn so they could feed the animals. Tituba did most of the digging for the master tired easily. The woodpile dwindled, and Tituba began to wonder if it would last through the winter.

They were never really warm. The mistress shivered under the quilts and the blankets piled on the bed in the upstairs room. The little girls said they couldn’t sleep it was so cold in their room. Tituba let them sleep on the settle in the keeping room where John used to sleep.

She missed John’s visits, and so did the girls. He had brightened the early evening for them with stories and bits of news. He had made them laugh by imitating the speech and the gestures of the farmers and the fishermen. Sometimes he put his hands on his hips and walked back and forth, nodding his head as he talked, copying the exact words and gestures of someone who had been in Ingersoll’s taproom. He could transform himself into an old man, by bending over and putting his hand behind his ear to indicate that he couldn’t hear very well. Or he would pretend to cough and clear his throat, so that you knew the person talking had a rheum in his throat or lungs.

Betsey and Abigail were bored and restless. Tituba, watching them and listening to them, understood exactly how they felt. She felt the same way. The days were so short that it seemed as though night set in soon after they had their noonday meal. She cooked and spun and wove and cleaned. The money cat stayed so close to the fire, his paws tucked under his chest, that she thought he’d singe his multicolored fur. The master shut himself up in his study, working on his sermons and his prayers.

It was so cold in the master’s study that his ink froze in his inkstand. She could hear him stamp his feet and thought she could hear him rub his hands together—a dry sound that she disliked.

On the second of January the weather turned warmer. The snow began to melt—first it softened and then it actually melted. In the afternoon, the master said, “I shall take the mare and go visit the sick.”

Tituba sat by the fire, spinning flax into linen thread.

Abigail said, “Tituba, now that Uncle Parris has gone out, tell us about Barbados,” a note of command in her voice.

“No, miss. Not now. You put more wood on the mistress’ fire upstairs. And Betsey, you carry some of the hot herb tea up to her.”

“When we come downstairs, then will you tell us about Barbados?”

“We’ll see—”

Abigail returned to the room first; she moved quickly with a self-assurance that suggested she was older than she was. Betsey followed close behind her. Tituba made no effort to conceal that thin, frail, awkward Betsey was her favorite. She gave her the lightest tasks, quite often held her in her arms and crooned to her as though she were a baby. Sometimes Betsey seemed to be dreaming, sitting with eyes half-closed. She forgot to answer if asked a question. She stayed quite close to Tituba, leaning against her if they sat on the settle, cuddling up to her as if for warmth and love.

“Now?” they said. “Now? Will you tell us about Barbados now?”

She nodded and stopped spinning. They all sat down at the trestle table and rested their arms on the table.

She started talking about the island rather slowly. Then she got up and walked up and down, talking faster and faster, gesturing as she talked, thinking that if she talked fast enough she could dispel this cold winter afternoon. She hoped to make it disappear—all of it: the gray, heavy sky, the white snow, gray-black trunks of trees, and the forest that surrounded them, ominous, endless—broken here and there by frozen coves and ponds and brooks—ice everywhere. So cold outside that if you took a sudden deep breath of the cold air it seemed to reach inside your lungs and all the moisture in your lungs turned to ice—even your eyeballs frozen, the tips of your fingers, your toes without any feeling, numbed by the cold.