Tituba of Salem Village (15 page)

“I want my fortune told,” she said boldly. “Can ye read ’em?”

Abigail shook her head.

To Tituba’s surprise, Betsey, who never interfered, who always stayed silent, said, “Tituba can tell your fortune. She learned how in Barbados.”

“Tell my fortune,” Good ordered.

Tituba said, “The minister’s black slave doesn’t tell fortunes for tramps. You have the child’s golden chain and the child’s cards. That’s enough. Be off.”

“If I give her back the chain will ye tell my fortune?”

Betsey said, “Oh, Tituba, please do. The gold chain belonged to Abigail’s mother. If you’ll tell Good’s fortune, Abigail will get the chain back. It’s such a little thing for you to do.”

Abigail said plaintively, “It’s the only thing I have that belonged to my mother.”

“I’ll not do it now. You come back when the master is not here, and you give the child her chain, and then I’ll tell your fortune.” Tituba held up her hands, checking the items off on her fingers. “First, the master will not be home. Second, you will give Abigail her gold chain. And then I will see what’s in the cards for you.”

Though it was very cold outside, they aired out the keeping room after Good and her child left. She kept looking back at them as she went out the door, her gaze malevolent, and she muttered to herself, “I’ll be back. I’ll be back.” They let the door stay open. The money cat came in, sniffed the air, and left again, ears flattened against his skull. The keeping room grew colder and colder. Tituba sent the little girls upstairs where it was warmer.

Tituba washed the table, washed the bench, washed the floor, scoured it and sanded it. She could still smell Goody Good. She put a cedar log on the fire, scattered a little grated nutmeg on it. There was a faint fragrance in the room, and gradually it overcame the sour smell of Good. She closed the outside door, thinking, Not good to burn cedar too often, not good for the eyes, and set to work to prepare the food for their noonday meal. It was surprising how much Goody Good and Dorcas had eaten.

When Abigail and Betsey came downstairs, Abigail frowned, wrinkling her nose. The kitchen had warmed up. It smelled of cedar wood and of spices. Something delicious smelling was bubbling in the big iron pot, and the cedar logs were burning with a hot, brilliant, flaring flame.

“This room smells good,” she said. “But I don’t. I can still smell that horrible old witch where her head leaned against my dress.”

“Why do you call her a witch?” Betsey asked.

“Because she put a spell on me. She made me drop those cards. Now she’s got my gold chain, and she’s got the cards, too.” To Tituba’s surprise, Abigail burst into tears.

Chapter 12

Mercy Lewis was running pell-mell through the woods. She kept looking over her shoulder. She was alone and frightened. She had finally managed to slip out of the house without Anne Putnam. She was going to the minister’s house to get the fortune-telling cards. She had to give them back to Pim.

The last time she went to Deacon Ingersoll’s, sent on an errand by Mistress Putnam, Pim had cornered her in the outer hall, whispered fiercely, “Give me back my cards!”

She had made her voice low and soft, “I haven’t got them,” she said, smiling at him, thinking to beguile him, trying to move away from him. He kept following her until he had her backed against the wall, and he put his hands on the wall on each side of her so that she was caged there.

“Where are they?”

His breath was in her face, and he smelt of onions, and she turned her head away. “At the minister’s.”

He grabbed one of her hands and held it and bent it back. His hands felt like iron hoops. He kept bending her hand and her wrist, back and back. She didn’t scream for fear someone would come out of the taproom, and he’d say, “My cards are at the minister’s house. Mercy Lewis, the Putnams’ bound girl, took them there.” Not even playing cards, but real fortune-telling cards.

“Ah, don’t,” she gasped. “Don’t—”

“Stop lying then. Where are my cards?”

His face had crimsoned, and with the bright carrot-colored hair above the red face, he looked like a demon. She thought her wrist was going to snap in two, and he looked so furious and so dangerous that she closed her eyes. He’d probably sold his soul to the devil long ago, and it wasn’t even safe to look at him.

The hall door opened, and Goody Ingersoll said, “Pim!”

He dropped Mercy’s wrists and turned away from her faster than she’d ever seen anyone move.

Goody Ingersoll said, “You look all fussed up. What’s the matter with you?”

Pim said, “I’ve been hurrying,” and went into the taproom and grabbed a birch broom and started sweeping the hearth, raising clouds of dust.

“Don’t loiter there in the hall, girl. Come in or else go out. All you lazy thriftless girls hang around the bound boys. Come, come. Maybe a box on the ear will speed you.”

Mercy delivered the message to Goody Ingersoll and hurried back home. Her wrist still ached. She hadn’t dared go near Ingersoll’s since then.

She was just beginning to be friendly with Pim when he had loaned her those cards. He said he didn’t know how to tell fortunes and he ached to know what was in the cards for him. She’d said, I’ll find someone who can teach me, and then I’ll be able to tell your fortune, and mine, too.

They were beautiful cards, brightly colored, and the edges were shiny as though they were gilded. Abigail had taken them away from her. Abigail was like a cat—sly and quick and thievish. Well, she thought, you might as well say she was thievish. She stole the cards. If you take someone else’s belongings without asking them, it was stealing.

She had to stop running to catch her breath. When she started off again, she told herself to walk slowly. But every sound made her hurry along faster and faster. Sometimes a great branch fell out of a tree, making a crashing sound, enough to scare a body out of their wits. There were rustling noises overhead, but she couldn’t see what caused them. She caught glimpses of the cotton tails of rabbits. Squirrels and chipmunks ran up and down the trunks of trees.

As she approached Deacon Ingersoll’s she left the trodden path and went deeper into the woods, keeping out of sight, ducking behind trees, and staying there when she heard the jingle of harness. Once when she peered out cautiously it was a farmer jogging along on a nag. Another time it was the Reverend Samuel Parris on Ingersoll’s fine brown mare. Nobody knew why Ingersoll should have given that mare to the minister.

When she went on her way again, she kept looking up because of a sudden movement overhead in the branches of a tree, and then looking down because she thought something moved in the thickly piled leaves along the path. She climbed over fallen trees, skirting thickets of brambles, avoiding wet sedgy places. She kept making small sounds of fear under her breath, “Oh! Oh! What was that? Oh! Oh!” Once she fell flat on her face, and she was so tired and so frightened that she simply lay there, listening to a terrible thumping noise, shocked when she realized she was making it herself, the sound of her own heartbeats.

When she got up, she felt rested. She thought, I’m bigger than Abigail, and I’m older than she is, and I’ll catch her out behind the minister’s barn and take the cards away from her. Once I’ve got them, I’m going to throw them in the bound boy’s face.

She heard the jingle of harness again and ducked behind a tree and peered around it to see who it was. Anne Putnam, Jr., went past on Master Putnam’s oldest farm horse. Mercy was well beyond Ingersoll’s when she took to the path again. There were rustling sounds behind her. Twigs cracked. Someone shuffled through dried leaves. She stopped to listen, and the sounds stopped. When she went on, the rustlings started. Indians? No. They moved silently through the forest on moccasined feet. It must be a large animal that was following her through the woods. She began to run again, making so much noise herself that she couldn’t hear whether someone was running behind her.

She ran until she had a crick in her side and had to stop and lean against a tree. There was no sound at all. She looked back, and her cheek scraped against the rough bark of the tree, and it hurt. It was one of those moments when she felt so sorry for herself that she could have cried.

There was nothing to be seen or heard. The trodden path curved off out of sight beyond a great pine tree. The silence was more frightening than the sounds of movement. She thought, This forest goes on forever and forever. Who knows what lives in its dark, mysterious depth? Perhaps a demon lived there, and his voice would presently sound like thunder, calling, Mercy Lewis, Mercy Lewis, Mercy Lewis. She covered her ears with her mittened hands, for she had almost convinced herself that she would hear her name called out by some hideous demon that the wild Indians said their prayers to.

When she started out again, she followed the path. She tried to walk so quietly that no twigs snapped under her feet, no leaves rustled. Suddenly something grabbed her from behind. She had heard no footsteps, nothing. She recognized the iron grip of Pim’s hand. She screamed, thinking that with hands like that he must have been apprenticed to a blacksmith. He’s been playing hide-and-seek with me here in the woods—and she threw her head back and screamed again.

“Scream until you choke yourself,” he said. “Nobody’ll hear. I want my cards.”

“I haven’t got them.”

“Where are they?”

Before she could answer, he said, “Don’t tell me any more lies about the parson having them.” He twisted her arm warningly.

“I never said he had them. I said they were at his house.”

He twisted her wrist, and she screamed. “Scream till you choke,” he said. “Where are my cards?”

“Abigail Williams, the minister’s niece, has them.”

“How’d she get them?”

“She took them away from me. She kept them.”

“Kept them for what?” He twisted her wrist again.

“Tituba can tell fortunes. She’s going to tell our fortunes.”

“Tituba?” he said. “John Indian’s wife?”

She nodded, and he said, “She can tell fortunes?”

“Yes.” Mercy’s hands were suddenly freed, and she began to rub her wrists.

“I still want my cards back, understand? You get those cards or don’t ever come in Ingersoll’s ordinary again. Not ever.” He suddenly pushed her cloak aside, reached under it, and pinched the soft flesh of her upper arm. “Go ahead. Scream,” he said and pinched her again. “I can box ears just as good as your mistress, and I’ll lay in wait for you, and when you come through these woods, I’ll box your ears, and I’ll cut a switch and I’ll—”

Mercy didn’t scream again. Her eyes filled with tears. She didn’t make a sound. The tears simply brimmed over, and big drops slid down her roughened cheeks.

“Oh,” he said, disconcerted, and moved away from her, frowning. “Don’t cry. Here.” He sopped up her tears with a dirty piece of cloth that he pulled out of the pocket of his leather breeches. Then he bent forward and kissed her.

The carrot-colored hair, the flushed face, the firm, warm lips close to hers startled her so that she stopped crying.

“I won’t hurt you any more,” he said. “But please get my cards. They’re the only thing I really own. Even these clothes—they’re not mine. If I should run away, they’d say, ‘Run away, the bound boy from Deacon Ingersoll’s,’ and they’d say I was wearing his clothes.” He lowered his voice. “I’ve been thinking about running away, but I needed somebody to kind of look ahead and see what things would be like for me and where I ought to go. If Tituba can tell fortunes, she could tell me.”

“Could I go with you when you run off?”

He looked at her doubtfully. “Two runaways from one place and one of them a girl? They’d catch us sure.”

There was an embarrassed silence. He said, “You’ll get my cards for me, Mercy?”

She nodded. She never thought she’d like him; he’d been so hateful, she’d been afraid of him. But now—she would keep thinking about that blazing red hair practically in her face, that gentle kiss, the sound of his voice when he said why he wanted his cards back and how desperately he wanted to know what the future held—

“Yes,” she said softly. “I’ll get them for you.”

They went in opposite directions. He went towards Ingersoll’s, and she went towards the minister’s house. She kept thinking, Abigail is smaller than I am, younger than I am. I’ll get the cards from her. Pinch me, will she? I can pinch, too. She stopped and pulled off a mitten and practiced on a fold of the coarse linsey-woolsey of her skirt, turning it, grabbing it between her fingers, and then turning the fingers, thinking, And the flesh will turn, too, and it will hurt, and I will get Pim’s cards.

Her fingers were freezing cold, and she put her mitten back on. The places on her arm where Pim had pinched her would hurt for two or three days. They hurt the way a mark of the devil would hurt, or so Mistress Putnam had told her.

Afterwards she wished she’d stayed home, not gone to the minister’s house that day. A dreadful thing happened there, and she didn’t get the cards. She forgot them.

When she entered the keeping room of the minister’s house and saw that Goody Good and her child, Dorcas, were there, she started to leave. Usually there was a good smell in the room. It came from the bundles of dried herbs hanging from the rafters and from whatever Tituba was cooking in the black pot over the fire. Goody Good’s smell overlaid the other odors. Almost everybody thought she was a witch. She looked like one with that matted gray hair over her face, ragged clothes, and an ugly-smelling pipe.

Anne Putnam was there, too, and Anne said, “Oh, Mercy, I’m so glad you came. I do not like going through the woods alone. We can go home together.”

Mary Walcott was sitting on one of the settles, knitting. She was always knitting. She was a close-by neighbor of the minister’s, so she was always running in and out of the house. Horse-faced Mary Warren was sitting at the trestle table. Mercy looked at her and thought, She’s like a big, slow-moving work horse. The talk was that her Master Proctor worked her like a horse. Goody Proctor was said to be delicate. Elizabeth Hubbard who did all the work at Dr. Griggs’s house was at the table, too. She was an orphan, and though she was Mrs. Griggs’s niece, she always looked so pinched and thin and scared that Mercy wondered just how well they treated her.