Tituba of Salem Village (16 page)

Mercy sat down on the settle near Betsey, thinking, I’ll wait until some of them go home, and pretty soon Abigail will go outdoors, and then I’ll catch her and pinch her and get the cards from her. Abigail was sitting at the table, too, eyes sparkling, cheeks flushed as though she were excited.

But it wasn’t like that at all. Abigail did not have the cards. Good had them. She took them from somewhere in her layers of rags and placed them on the trestle table.

“I want my fortune,” she said.

Tituba said, “First return the gold chain.”

Good reached inside her dress and took out a fine gold chain. She flung it at Abigail and it went on the floor. Tituba said, “Pick it up, Abigail, and put it away.”

When Abigail came back into the room, Tituba said, “All right—now the cards.”

Tituba unwrapped them, examined them, counted them.

“They’re clean,” Good said. “I wrapped ’m in a clean cloth, and they’re all there. I kept ’m out of sight.”

Mercy moved over to the table to watch.

Tituba shuffled the cards, laid them out. The first card that turned up was the hanged man, and Tituba frowned and shook her head.

“What’s wrong?” Good asked, leaning forward.

“Something to eat,” Dorcas said.

“Be quiet,” Tituba ordered. “I’ll get you something to eat, but you’ll have to stay quiet. When I begin to read the cards, think about them but don’t say anything. Don’t ask any questions. Wait until I’ve finished.”

“Why?” Mercy Lewis asked.

“Because it breaks the spell,” Abigail said.

Breaks the spell? Mercy thought, troubled. Tituba can cast spells? She must have unusual powers if she can do that. Where does she get this power from? She followed Tituba over to the fire, curious as to what she was going to give Dorcas to eat. She noticed that Dorcas was holding a little doll-like figure in her hand. She was sitting on the settle close to the fire. The doll looked as though it had been made from an ear of corn with the shucks left on. It had cornsilk for hair, and a bit of dirty linen formed the skirt. Dorcas was bent over the doll, and she was sticking thorns in it with a fierceness that suggested she enjoyed what she was doing.

Tituba gave the child a piece of johnnycake and picked up the doll. Mercy looked at it, too. She saw that the doll looked rather like a child. The face and eyes and nose and mouth had been skillfully drawn with a piece of charcoal.

“Who made the dolly for you?” Tituba asked.

“Me mother.”

“What’s the dolly’s name?”

Dorcas beckoned Tituba to come close and whispered, “Patience Mulenhorse.”

“Why are you sticking thorns in your dolly?”

Mercy thought, It’s not a dolly. It’s a puppet. She was so frightened she felt sick. This was what witches did, made a figure to represent somebody and then stuck pins or thorns in it, and then the person sickened and died.

The child beckoned to Tituba again and whispered, “Won’t tell.”

Tituba put the puppet back on the settle and sat down at the table, shuffled the cards again and laid them out. She studied them for a long time. She pursed her lips, shook her head, and picked up the cards. She divided them into two sections, shuffled each section separately, and laid them out on the table. She kept frowning as though she were dissatisfied. She divided the cards in three sections, shuffled each section separately, and laid them out on the table again.

Finally she said, “There is death in the cards. You must leave Salem Village. Go somewhere else to live.”

Good thrust her face almost into Tituba’s. “What kind of stinking fortune is that to tell anybody? Leave the place where they live?”

“You don’t live anywhere,” Anne Putnam said. “You sleep in barns and in haystacks.”

“If you stay in the Village,” Tituba said, “you will be hanged.”

Goody Good jumped up and swept all the cards off the table onto the floor. She took one leap across the room and grabbed Dorcas by the arm. “Those are the devil’s cards,” she shouted. “The devil’s cards in the devil’s house.”

“It’s all there in the cards,” Tituba said calmly. “Three times I’ve shuffled, and three times I’ve laid them out. You watched me. And three times the Hanged Man was the first card I turned up. You saw it.”

“Curse on you,” Good shouted. She snatched Dorcas off the settle. “Curse on this house and all within—”

She left the door wide open behind her. As she went down the path she turned and bared her blackened teeth at them just like a wolf.

Mercy felt a shiver go down her spine. She couldn’t swallow her own spittle. It was a frightening thing to be cursed like that. She watched Tituba pick up the cards, her dark-skinned hands moving so swiftly that in no time at all they were neatly stacked in a pile on the table. She could spin a fine strong thread, linen or woolen, so fast it seemed as if it wasn’t done by human hands. She could find herbs near the roots of a tree, hands feeling around the root, head on one side as though she were listening to some voice nobody else could hear.

Mercy tried to say, “Give me the bound boy’s cards,” and no words came out. She felt the outside of her throat, and it felt as though it had swollen, increased in size. It seemed to her that the words wouldn’t come out of her mouth, were stuck inside her throat, and were swelling up in there.

Tituba let the door stay open to air out the room. It got colder and colder inside. Finally she closed the door.

Abigail said, “Ugh! It still smells like Good in here. No wonder. Her child dropped the dolly. That’s why the room still smells.” She threw the cornhusk doll far back into the fire. It blazed up suddenly. Thick black smoke blew back into the room.

Mercy thought the face had twitched in the flame as though it were alive. There was a sound—Mercy heard it just as plain—a queer quick sound of protest.

Abigail said, horrified, “It cried out. The dolly cried out.”

“That was Betsey,” Tituba said sharply.

Betsey was staring at the fire, shaking and trembling. She began to cry. “How dreadful. The little child was burned up.”

Abigail turned on her, shouting, “Don’t you dare say that.”

They all began to talk at once, filling the keeping room with their cries of protest, their accusations and denials.

Then the room was suddenly quiet because the Reverend Parris came home. Mercy wondered if he really thought they sat quiet like this when he was out of the room. Mary Walcott was knitting. All the rest of them were sitting down, their long gowns covering their feet, their hands folded in their laps.

He stood in front of the fire, warming his hands. He told them that a six-year-old child had been burned to death. She had gone to stir one of the big iron pots which hung from a lug pole in the chimney at the Ingersolls’. The lug pole broke and the child lost her balance and fell into the fire. It had happened just a little while ago.

There was a terrible stillness in the room.

“Whose child was it, Mr. Parris?” Mercy asked, remembering the puppet made of an ear of corn, the dried silk looking like dark brown hair, the face drawn to look like a child’s face, the thorns stuck deep into the dolly’s body.

“The Mulenhorse child. It was not steady on its feet, at best. It had been having fits and spells, and it had complained of being pricked and pinched. The mother thought the child had been overlooked by a witch.”

“What was the child’s name, master?” Tituba asked.

“Patience. Patience Mulenhorse.”

“Well, why don’t you say something?” Abigail demanded. “I know what you’re thinking—” and she screamed. Betsey fell off the settle and lay insensible on the floor. Abigail began to run around the room, running in circles, around and around. It made Mercy dizzy to try to follow her; she had to keep turning her head.

Then Abigail ran straight towards the fire, shrieking, “I’ll burn myself up. I’ll burn myself up.”

It took all of them to hold her back. Tituba slapped her very hard, and she quieted. It was quite a while before Betsey regained her senses. Tituba held her in her arms and talked to her and crooned to her.

On the way home, Anne Putnam clung tight to Mercy. Anne rode behind her on the horse, holding on to her. They were shivering and shaking. Their teeth chattered. They talked in whispers saying that they felt hot and then again that they felt cold. They didn’t dare talk about what had happened at the minister’s house.

Mercy kept wondering, What have we done? Have we raised some evil spirit from the dead? Anne had put that bright coin in the bottom of the bowl of water, but we all kept telling Betsey to look in the water, look in the water. We knew she’d go off in a trance. I wanted to talk to Mr. Burroughs’ wives and Anne Putnam wanted to talk to her Aunt Bayley—

She made her thoughts shift back to the Mulenhorse child who had burned up in the fire. This had happened before, especially in winter. Sooner or later the sapling in the chimney that held the hooks for the pots would char all the way through. And then it would break. It wasn’t the first time it had happened. It wouldn’t be the last. It didn’t mean anything—

Ah, she thought, but the dolly cried out. I heard it. Then she thought, I’ll tell Pim that Tituba has his cards. I’ll tell him to go to Tituba and get his fortune told.

Chapter 13

Mercy Lewis woke up in the middle of the night. It was so dark she couldn’t see the room at all. It was so cold she knew the backlog must have burned all the way through. She lifted her head and looked towards the fireplace. Yes, nothing left but a red glow.

I’ll have to get up and put a log on the fire, but it’s too cold to move. Even with a pile of quilts over her, she was cold. She could hear the wind howling outside. She lay there, not moving, feeling sorry for herself. She had a half-sick mistress and Anne, who wasn’t much for cooking and cleaning, was no help. Mercy had to do all the indoors work. Fortunately Anne and her mother didn’t eat much.

At least the Putnams weren’t mean about firewood. Some places she’d been they were very mean. When she worked for the Reverend Burroughs he practically counted each stick as it went on the fire, froze himself and his wife and his children. Strong he was, too. He could lift a cask of molasses by himself. A short man. Very dark. Black hair. Black eyes. His eyes were like Good’s—shiny, alive, the expression malicious.

If he had a religion she couldn’t imagine what it was like. Certainly not like other people’s. She always thought of him as the little black minister. Well, he wasn’t black like Tituba, but with his black clothes and dark hair and eyes and swarthy skin, the name suited him.

Once he found her in his study, looking at one of his books, and he shook her till her teeth hit against each other inside her head, and he boxed her ears so hard she heard a ringing sound in them for a month after.

Suddenly there was a sound she didn’t recognize; she heard it under the wind. She called out, “Master Putnam, Master Putnam.” She didn’t expect a reply, and there was none.

She didn’t dare move. It sounded as though someone or something was tapping on the kitchen window. The window was high up from the ground—how could they reach it? And what was it?

She lay shivering under the heavy quilts. Even if she shouted, the Putnams wouldn’t hear her. Then there was a knocking at the door—and whoever or whatever it was knocked gently—ta-ta-ta-
tah
, ta-ta-ta-
tah
. Again and again. The rhythm of the bound boy’s song echoed in her mind: Let the world
slide
, let the world
go
. Pim was at the door. She was sure of it.

She raised the big wooden bar, lifted the latch, and opened the door just a crack. Pim pushed the door open and came in, bringing a cold blast of air with him. He laid a bundle down on the settle, and she knew instantly that he was running away.

“You’re going tonight?”

“Yes. And you can come with me. I’ve figured out how to do it.”

“Why’ve you got to go so soon?”

“Because Tituba read my cards. She laid them out three times, and each time the cards said the same thing, that if anything happened that was strange, I was to leave right away.”

He paused and lowered his voice, “And this afternoon—”

“You don’t have to whisper. Can’t none of ’em hear you. I thought Indians was raiding one night, and I screamed till I thought my throat would burst open. Nobody heard me. Just as well because there weren’t a raid. Just branches against the windows.”

When he started to say something, she said, “Wait. I got to fix the fire, or we’ll freeze to death.” He helped her pile logs on, and he used the bellows on it until there was a big roaring fire, and the room began to get warm, and it was filled with a cheerful yellow light from the fire.

She said, “What happened this afternoon?”

“That Abigail Williams, the parson’s niece—she came to the ordinary. She and her cousin Betsey Parris, and they fell down in fits, and Abigail tried to crawl in the fire. I tried to hold her back, and I couldn’t. It took me and John Indian and Goody Ingersoll and three men, strangers to me, to hold her down. She was hollerin’ and screamin’ and crying out, ‘I’ll ride him down, I’ll ride him down,’ and acting like she was a horse. Then she yelled, ‘I’ll not sign, old witch. I’ll not sign the book,’ and shrieked so it hurt my ears. Then Betsey Parris fell down unconscious, with froth and foam at her mouth. Then the other one began to dance, jumping up and down in one place till I thought she’d drop. And her tongue hung out of her mouth so far it near touched the floor.”

“What was the matter with them?”

Pim made his face stern, pulled at an imaginary beard, and Mercy thought his beard would be bright red when he had one and it would tickle any girl who kissed him. The thought surprised her because it seemed to just pop into her head out of nowhere. Pim stood with his legs far apart, rocked back and forth, looked very thoughtful, and still pulling at an imaginary beard said, “It is possible that an evil hand be on them,” and he laughed.

“It’s not to laugh at,” she said soberly.

“Well, some of the men in the tavern said they’d been overlooked by a witch. Does that sound better?” Then he said, “Who cares what they say? You said that when I went you wanted to go with me. So I’ve got boys’ clothes in the bundle for you. You’ll have to wear ’em. I can chop off your hair and no one will know you’re a girl. I even brought along a scissors.”