Tituba of Salem Village (12 page)

One morning she had a strange experience. She decided afterwards that she had had a genuine vision which permitted her to look straight into the future. When she stared into the watering trough she saw herself—dark brown dress, dark turban wrapped tightly around her head, a bit of white linen at her throat. She was standing alone on a table. People were seated around her, staring up at her, and their expressions were so angry that Tituba moved away from the trough, frightened.

She was so completely absorbed in her thoughts that she was unaware that Betsey had come out of the house and was standing quite close to her until Betsey tugged at her hand. “Titibee,” she said, “what are you doing? Let me look, too. I want to see, too.” She stared into the water in the trough. “What did you see just now when you looked in the water?”

“The island,” she said, “and the blue water of the bay and the palm trees and the bright birds.” And then she stopped and added truthfully, “and something I didn’t understand. It frightened me to look at it.”

Betsey, leaning over, staring, staring, said, “I can’t see any of that. I see my own face. Very small, very small.”

She pitched forward and would have fallen into the trough if Tituba hadn’t caught her.

“You know, just that fast, I went to sleep. Looking at that water so long put me to sleep,” Betsey explained.

Abigail, who had come out of the house to help carry water, heard Betsey’s explanation and said, “You were having a fit. You weren’t asleep.”

“I was not. I don’t have fits. Do I, Tituba? Do I?”

Tituba shook her head. “No,” she said, “it’s just that there are some people who can’t look at water in a dish or at a round glass ball for a long time. It puts them to sleep.”

Tituba hoped that Abigail would forget that Betsey had this strange ability to sleep or whatever it was that happened to her when she stared at something for too long a time. But Abigail did not forget.

It was almost a year later before Abigail deliberately induced a trancelike state in Betsey. During the months in between, they had survived another winter as severe as the previous one. Tituba had told many stories to the girls about Barbados and the guppy man who was so sly and so smart he could be in two places at once. John and Tituba had planted another garden and harvested the crop. Tituba had learned to reckon time the way the farmers did. She spoke of “sweet corn time” and “at the beginning of last hog time” or “in the middle of seed time for winter wheat.” She learned this from John and Goodwife Mary Sibley. She knew when Goody Good had been in or around the barn by the smell that lingered in the air.

Puss, the money cat, was older and wiser. Abigail was now eleven; Betsey was eight. The mistress spent less and less time in bed.

During those months, the relationship between the Reverend Samuel Parris and his parishioners had steadily worsened. Fewer and fewer of them attended the church meetings. On the Lord’s Day many of them went to worship in the meetinghouse in the town of Salem ten miles away. They did not pay their rates to Reverend Parris—the money and provisions that represented their share of the cost of the support of the minister.

The meetinghouse roof leaked and was not repaired. Bats sometimes swooped down among the congregation.

In October, 1691, a town meeting elected a committee of five men to investigate all the circumstances involved in Mr. Parris settling among them and how Mr. Parris ever came to believe that he was to own the ministry house.

Tituba had never seen the master so angry. He paced up and down the floor of the keeping room most of the evening. He said the men named to the committee were his enemies. He named them: Joseph Porter, Joseph Hutchinson, Joseph Putnam, Daniel Andrew, Francis Nurse.

Every few days after that he called a church meeting. He held these meetings in the keeping room. Tituba sat in a shadowy corner beyond the reach of the firelight, listening to what was said. He told them that the committee appointed by the parish refused to set a rate for the minister. It was decided that the matter would have to be taken to court, the county court in Salem. Only five people came to that meeting.

This decision was reached on November 18, 1691. Tituba felt relieved. They could argue in the court in Salem, and she hoped that it would take weeks to decide the case so that the master’s harsh voice and long prayers would be transferred to some other household. Thus these frequently held church meetings would come to an end.

That same day she discovered that Abigail had been placing bowls of water in front of Betsey, had been persuading her to stare into them. Tituba had started to enter the house from the lean-to in the back. She heard voices, and she paused, listening, one hand on the latch of the big wooden door that led into the keeping room. She recognized the voices as belonging to Abigail, Anne Putnam, Jr., and Mercy Lewis.

“Do you think she’ll have one of her fits today?” Mercy Lewis asked.

Abigail’s voice was light, higher in pitch. “I’ll put a bowl of water on the table.” Tituba could hear Abigail’s quick footsteps, hear the sound of something being set down on the trestle table. “There,” she said, “if she looks at it long enough she’ll go journeying.”

“How can she journey? Where does she go? She’s right here in front of us. We can reach out and touch her. How can she go anywhere and still be here?” Anne Putnam’s voice was a small hushed voice.

“Witches do,” Mercy Lewis said. “A witch can be in bed and fast asleep, and her shape can be miles away, riding on a broomstick. I ride—I ride—I ride—” There was a galloping sound from inside.

“Hush!” Abigail said sharply. “Uncle Parris is in his study. He’s working on his sermon. He can not abide noise. He will thrash all of us if we disturb him.”

There was silence.

Anne Putnam said quietly, “Do you think Betsey will have a fit today? She didn’t have one yesterday.”

Abigail’s voice was equally as quiet. “I don’t know. I can’t tell when she will and when she won’t. She didn’t have one yesterday because we were in the woods and she’s scared of the woods. But if she looks at that bowl of water long enough—Hurry! She’s coming downstairs. Everybody sit down at the table. Leave that place for Betsey—right there—in front of the bowl—”

Tituba gave them just enough time to get settled at the table, and then she entered the room.

“What errand brings you today?” she asked. She hung her shawl on a hook near the outer door.

“Mistress Putnam wondered if you could give her some of the iris tea you make for Mistress Parris. She has a griping in her side.”

“Yes.”

Betsey came into the room.

“Close the door,” they shouted. “Close the door. Don’t let the heat go up the stairs.”

Betsey turned back and closed the door. Tituba sat down at the table in the place they had saved for Betsey. She glanced at the bowl of water, got up, removed it, saying, “I didn’t know I’d left this on the table.”

It was so quiet in the room that when a log fell forwards in the fire, sending up a shower of sparks, they all jumped.

Anne Putnam said, “Tituba, please tell us a story. We can’t stay very long.”

“No,” she said. “I must be at the flax wheel. It’s somebody else’s turn. Mercy, you tell us a story.”

Tituba sat down in front of the wheel, a little away from them. The whir of the wheel, the steady rhythmic thump of the pedal were the only sounds in the room. Puss jumped down from the settle and crouched at her feet. She pushed her long dark skirt over him, covering him up to tease him, and then wished that she hadn’t. Mercy was watching her with a disapproving look that suggested she thought there was a suspicious intimacy between Tituba and the cat. She remembered what Goody Sibley had said about witches and the cats that were their familiars, “The devil gives them the cats to serve them and do their bidding.”

Tituba said, “Tell us a story, Mercy.”

“I can’t tell stories,” Mercy said sullenly. “I don’t know any.”

“Couldn’t you tell us about Guppy, Tituba?” Betsey asked. “Just a little something? I like the Guppy stories.”

Tituba pursed her lips, shook her head. “I can’t talk and keep the thread thin and straight.”

“Then we had all this walk for nothing and there’s snow coming on and the wind is blowing and it’s so cold out it is like being outdoors when you are bare naked.” Mercy drew a deep breath. “They ought to put Tituba in the press yard,” she said spitefully. “That would make her talk.”

“What’s the press yard?” Abigail asked.

“It’s where they press the prisoners to death in the great prison in London. They roll stones on them until they die—bigger and bigger stones, heavier and heavier, until they press their insides right out. They press the ones who stand mute. They’re the ones who won’t answer questions. They won’t say they’re guilty, and they won’t say they’re not guilty.”

Abigail said, “How do you know about it?”

“Pim, the bound boy at Ingersoll’s, told me. He says the smell in the press yard is something dreadful.”

They stared at her in dismay. Betsey burst into tears.

Anne said, “A place like that must be filled with ghosts.” Then she covered her face with her hands and said, her voice muffled, “I shall dream about it all night.”

The money cat left the shelter of Tituba’s long dark skirt and scratched at the outside door.

“It’s cold out there,” Tituba said. “Are you sure you want to go out?”

The cat mewed as though in answer. Tituba got up, opened the door, and the cat went out quickly, tail up in the air, ears slightly flattened against his skull. As she closed the door behind him, she heard Mercy’s shocked whisper, “Ooo-ooo-h! The cat answered her. Did you hear him?”

Tituba pretended she hadn’t heard this. She stood in front of the fire, warming herself. The room had cooled off quickly. Betsey had her head down on the table, still weeping. The others shivered because of the cold air that had come into the room. She found herself feeling sorry for them. They would spend most of the winter indoors. They would have chills and fevers; they would cough and blow their noses from now until spring came. On the Lord’s Day they would sit hunched over in the meetinghouse, listening to the master’s long sermons and his long prayers.

“I’ll tell you a very short story about how the monkey picked out a wife for Guppy,” she said as she sat down at the table. “Monkey went to a simpler—”

“What’s a simpler?” Anne Putnam asked.

“You’re not to ask any questions when I’m telling the story,” she said severely. “Next time I won’t go on.” She was silent for so long that the girls shifted uneasily.

She said, “The simpler gave Monkey a piece of dried root—very dark in color and very shriveled. He told him how to boil it and then add a little vinegar to it and then boil it some more and see that Mr. Guppy drank it. Mr. Guppy would go to sleep, and then Monkey must talk to Mr. Guppy, telling him what he was to do the next day. Mr. Guppy would have a dream, and the next day Mr. Guppy would do just what he’d done in the dream.

“So Monkey did what the simpler told him to do. He forgot that Mr. Guppy was a man and not a monkey. Monkey got quite carried away with talking about courtship and marriage. He described the lady monkey that he wanted to marry, and he sang the song that he had made in honor of the lady monkey.

“Early the next morning, Mr. Guppy got up, put on his finest suit of clothes, and went to the edge of the jungle and called out and then sang. Very soon a delicately built, very beautiful little lady monkey leaned out from the branch of a tree, swung by her tail in time to the music of the song, and then jumped down on Mr. Guppy’s shoulder. She sat there, her tail hanging down his back, one of her small cold paws grasping his ear. Mr. Guppy was delighted. He took her back home with him, and he still has her there. He sings Monkey’s song to her every day, and sometimes he walks into the village carrying her on his shoulder. He can not understand why Monkey sits in a tree and screams when he goes past.”

Tituba stood up. “It’s time for you to go home.”

“Is that all there is?” Mercy asked. When Tituba nodded, she said, “When we come again, will you tell us some more?”

Before Tituba could answer, Anne Putnam said, “What’s a simpler?”

“It’s a man or a woman who gathers herbs and sells them. Herbs are called simples. The person who gathers and sells them is known as a simpler. People go to them to get cures for diseases.”

They were slow to leave. Tituba urged them gently towards the door, saying, “Is this your shawl, Mercy?”

“What’s a jungle?” Anne Putnam asked.

“It is like your great forest—not easy to walk through. Filled with birds. Sometimes there are monkeys. It is warm and moist, and steam rises from the ground.”

“Is it always warm in a jungle?” Mercy asked.

“Indeed, yes.”

“There is no winter?”

“No. People do not have to wear heavy cloaks and shawls.” She took Anne Putnam’s cloak from a hook near the door. “Here’s your cloak.”

Instead of putting the cloak on, Anne Putnam said, “What do monkeys look like, Tituba?”

“Well—” she said, frowning and at a loss for words with which to describe a monkey. “Well—he is a small beast with short hair and paws that he uses like folk use their hands. He makes a chattering noise.”

“Do monkeys have the power of speech?” Anne Putnam asked.

“Only in the stories that folk make up about them.”

“Could you sing us his song—the one the monkey sang in your story?”

Tituba opened the door wide, and freezing cold air rushed into the room. “No,” she said. “I couldn’t. Now hurry along before the whole house is cold.”

Chapter 10

Tituba simply could not keep track of the girls any more. If she went into the barn, she heard snatches of whispered conversation from a shadowy corner, “Let me ask her a question,” or “Look at the water, Betsey. Keep looking at the water, Betsey.” They were always together—Anne Putnam, Jr., Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, Abigail—in the dooryard, behind the barn, in the keeping room.

She scolded; she threatened them. They pretended they did not know what she was talking about. They smiled at her; their faces and eyes were innocent, without guile.