Conversion

by Katherine Howe

  “And what would he have you do? Kill her with a knife?”

  My father is standing with Reverend Parris off to one side, watching the proceedings, and interrupts. “When the child saw the apparitions and was tormented by them last night, she did complain of a knife. She cried that they would have her cut her head off with a knife.”

  It’s true, Betty’s nightmare had her screaming she was afraid her head would be cut off. She’d been listening to some of Mercy’s stories from her Eastward days. I don’t like to listen to those stories. They trouble my sleep, too.

  “How did you go to the Putnams’ house so late at night? Did you ride?”

  Eager to embellish her story, Tittibe cries, “We ride upon sticks and are there presently.”

  The entire assembly buzzes with interest, imagining Tittibe’s invisible spirit streaking through the night sky with a broomstick between her thighs, and Goody Good and Goody Osburn close behind her, their skirts flapping in the wind.

  Judge Hathorne is as entranced by this idea as any of us. “Do you go through the trees, or over them?”

  “Neither. We see nothing but are there presently.”

  “Why did you not tell your master, Reverend Parris, when this man came to you bidding you do these horrible things?”

  Tittibe’s eyes slide to Samuel Parris, who fixes her with a murderous glare. She trembles where she stands, and says, “I was afraid. They said they’d cut off my head if I told him.”

  “I see,” the magistrate says, stroking his chin in thought as he stares down at the shaken woman. “Tell us more, Tituba. What attendants hath Sarah Good when she is with the Devil?”

  Tittibe’s gaze floats up to the ceiling of the meetinghouse, as though hoping to find the answer scrawled there. When she brings her eyes back to rest on the judge, she says, her voice clear and true, “A yellow bird. And she would have given me one.”

  I think how pleasant it would be for a tame goldfinch to sit on my shoulder or my lap, and accept tidbits from my fingers. Tittibe must dream of such delicate things, too, on those rare days when she’s idle enough to dream. The Devil promises her fine things, and I wish she would tell us more about them.

  “A yellow bird, you say? And what meat did she give it?”

  “Why, it did suck her between her fingers.”

  “Did it!” He glances with great meaning at one of the other gentlemen, who makes a note down to himself. “And what hath Sarah Osburn for a familiar spirit?”

  “When I saw her yesterday, she had a horrible thing with a head like a woman with two legs and wings.”

  Abby starts up from her seat next to me and cries, “Yes! I did see that same creature yesterday as I walked outside the parsonage, and as I watched, it changed to the shape of Goody Osburn!”

  “Very interesting!” the judge says as Mr. Cheever scribbles on his sheets of paper. “Tituba, did you not see Sarah Good also upon Elizabeth Hubbard last Saturday?”

  Next to me on the bench Betty Hubbard nods fiercely.

  “Yes,” Betty adds, though no one’s addressed her. “Sarah Good fell on me, and said she would cut off my head if I told.”

  Tittibe watches Betty Hubbard out of the corner of her eye and readily agrees. “Yes, I did see Sarah Good set a wolf upon Betty Hubbard to afflict her.”

  “Yes!” I cry, seized with the drama of it. “Betty did complain of a wolf, she did!”

  Everyone beams at me, the periwigged gentlemen and the island woman and my friend Betty Hubbard and my father, the villagers all praising how brave I am for speaking the truth. I glow under their praise, so much that I forget what I’ve done. I’ve given them all what they want. I feel pleased. Worthy.

  “Tituba,” the judge says kindly. “What clothes does the man go about in? How does he look?”

  Tittibe stares hard at Reverend Parris. Slowly, she says, “He goes in black clothes. He’s a tall man with white hair, I think.”

  Reverend Parris’s hair has been the color of dirty snow for as long as I’ve ever known him, and he stands over six feet tall. In the pew next to me, Betty Parris starts to bawl.

  “Very good. And how doth the woman go? What sorts of clothes does she wear?”

  Still gazing on her master, Tittibe says, “The woman, she go in a white hood, and the other in a black hood with a topknot.”

  She’s described Mrs. Parris’s usual mode of dress, though many of the women in the village wear the old-style black hood with a topknot. Betty Parris’s bawling rises in timbre, and soon enough Abby Williams is shaking in her seat, screeching at the top of her lungs and coughing with great commotion. Betty Hubbard’s eyes roll to the back of her skull, and she slumps over, senseless. I’m beginning to panic, and I want to get up and run away and hide in the barn behind our house, but everyone is there and everyone is watching me, and my father is there and I have to stay strong and do what they want me to, and so I stay where I am, making myself small on the pew, and soon enough the tears are springing from my eyes, too.

  Judge Hathorne says, “Do you see who it is that torments these children now?”

  Tittibe turns and looks over her shoulder. Her dark eye roams over us, taking in our wailing and carrying on. “Yes,” she says with resolve. “I see. It is Sarah Good. She hurts them in her own shape.”

  Abby stands on the pew and turns to look over her shoulder at nothing and screams, “Leave us! Leave us be, Goody Good! We want none of you! Stop sending your shape to torment us!”

  “And so she goes,” Tittibe says quietly, her eye tracking an invisible thing along the aisle where she herself was dragged, and out the door.

  Our screams intensify, Mary Warren’s eyes lifting to heaven, Betty Hubbard burying her head in my lap and weeping into my apron. Abby coughs and coughs and presents her open hands full of pins, beaming with triumph, a droplet of blood on her lip. I’m helpless to know what I must do, so I do nothing.

  “But they’re still vexed, Tituba. Tell us. Who is it that hurts them now?”

  The slave leans her head back on her shoulders and closes her eyes.

  “I am blind now,” she says quietly. “I cannot see. I cannot see what’s real.”

  Part 4

  March

  MATRONALIA

  That Witches may and doe worke wonders, is euidently proued; howbeit not by an omnipotent power, (as they gainsefayer hath vnlearnedly and improperly termed it) but by the affiftance of Satan there Prince, who is a powerfull Spirit, but yet a Creature, as well as they.

  WILLIAM PERKINS

  A DISCOURSE OF THE DAMNED ART OF WITCHCRAFT

  THE EPISTLE DEDICATORIE, 1603

  Chapter 19

  DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS

  MONDAY, MARCH 5, 2012

  Ann Putnam Junior. That was her name,” I said, tossing a book onto the desk with a thud.

  Ms. Slater put down her red pen and glanced up at me.

  “Oh?” she said.

  “Yes. Look. Arthur Miller called her Ruth. But her name was actually Ann, like her mother.”

  I pushed the book across Ms. Slater’s desk and pointed at a long excerpt of trial testimony, with this one little girl right in the middle of it, talking about yellow birds and all kinds of craziness. Ms. Slater applied her reading glasses to her nose and peered at the transcript.

  “Right you are,” Ms. Slater said. “So? Maybe he just didn’t want people to confuse her with her mother.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Everyone in New England uses the same names over and over again. It’s not that complicated. Look at my brother and my dad.”

  The substitute teacher smirked at me.

  “All right. And?”

  “And I’ve figured out he changed a bunch of other stuff, too.”

  I shuffled through my notes. Ms. Slater leaned back in her desk chair and arched one of her wicked eye
brows at me.

  “For instance,” I said, pointing my pen at a note. “In the play Ruth Putnam is an only child, because all the other Putnam kids died, and that’s why Ann, her mother, is so paranoid and sad and wants to accuse other women of being witches. But the real Ann Putnam—the kid one—had, like, seven brothers and sisters.”

  “It’s a play,” Ms. Slater said, shrugging. “Maybe he just didn’t want the stage to get crowded. You have any idea how expensive it is, using that many Equity actors?”

  She was teasing me, but I didn’t care. I wrinkled my nose at her.

  “The other thing is, in the play he makes it sound like Ruth—Ann Junior—and Abigail Williams and them start the accusations because Reverend Parris catches them casting spells in the woods, and they don’t want to get in trouble. I can’t find a mention of that anywhere.”

  “That’s because it didn’t happen.”

  I glanced up at her, confused.

  “It didn’t?”

  “No, of course not.” Ms. Slater waved her pen dismissively. “The whole they were casting spells in the woods thing comes from one little footnote by one of the girls recollecting it, like, twenty years after the fact. It’s totally unsubstantiated. Abigail Williams wasn’t having an affair with John Procter, either, for the record. She wasn’t seventeen, and he wasn’t forty. She was eleven, and he was in his sixties. It wasn’t about sex. And it wasn’t about magic.”

  I pressed my fingertips to my forehead. Underneath one of Deena’s songs that had burrowed into my mind, an ache was there, I could tell. It wasn’t all the way happening yet, but it was coming.

  “So what was it about?” I asked, dropping my hands to my desk and staring helplessly at the ceiling.

  Ms. Slater sat back and slid the end of her pen into her mouth. She gave it a meditative chew while she considered me. Then she carefully put the pen down on the desk and pressed her fingertips together in front of her lips.

  “What else have you learned so far, about Ann Putnam?” she asked me.

  “Well,” I said, shuffling through my notes again. “In the play Ruth is kind of marginal. But it looks like in the real thing, she was right in the middle of everything. She was actually kind of a big deal.”

  “How so?” Ms. Slater watched me.

  “Um”—I hunted for the note I was looking for—“it looks like she was”—I flipped to another page—“responsible for accusing everyone who was actually hanged. Like, she wound up accusing even more people than Abigail Williams. And her father, Thomas, swore out most of the complaints. That’s crazy! Why would Arthur Miller write her out?”

  Ms. Slater looked at me for a long minute. Then she shrugged. “Why indeed?”

  I slumped back in my chair and stared at the ceiling, thinking.

  “It wasn’t about magic. And it wasn’t about sex,” I repeated.

  “No.”

  I coiled one of my corkscrew curls around a finger, pulled it out straight in front of me, and let it go with a spoing.

  “I’m beginning to see why you didn’t want us to read this play in history class,” I said.

  She half smiled and said, “Is that a fact?”

  “So, what was it really about, then? What was the deal with this Ann Putnam girl, who nobody talks about? Why wasn’t Winona Ryder playing Ann Putnam instead of Abigail Williams? And how old was she when she made that movie, anyway, like thirty?”

  Ms. Slater muffled a snort of laughter behind a professional exterior. The snort morphed into a cough, and she reached for a sip from her coffee mug. After a swallow of coffee she cleared her throat.

  “Sometimes, Colleen,” she said, gazing out the window at the gray Danvers sky, “it can be hard to tell, in history. There’s the dominant narrative. And there are parts of the story that are overlooked. Maybe because they don’t fit with what the people in charge have to say. Arthur Miller isn’t interested in Ann Putnam Junior. He’s interested in sex and conspiracy and evils hidden within good people. He’s basically interested, like a lot of men, in himself. The question is, what are you interested in?”

  I stared at her, waiting.

  She turned her eyes to me and seemed on the point of saying something. Then she stopped herself and tried again.

  “It can be worthwhile, for a researcher,” she said, placing each word before me with care, “to look beyond the dominant narrative. Sometimes, the people in charge”—she stared at me, hard—“all come to one explanation, and once that happens, they will do whatever they can to cling to it. They’ve staked their reputations on it being right. You know what I mean? But an attentive researcher—like you—might be able to see something that all the experts can’t see. She might be able to rewrite the narrative. If she asks the right questions.”

  “You mean, maybe Ann Putnam’s important, but nobody talks about her because she messes up what the experts think really happened?”

  “Maybe,” Ms. Slater said. “Yes. That’s partly what I mean. Also, maybe the experts have their own agenda. Maybe what’s true for one group of people isn’t necessarily true if looked at from another group’s point of view.”

  “So . . .” I paused, wanting her to explain more. “You think I should keep going on this for my extra-credit paper?”

  “Definitely,” Ms. Slater said. She walked her pen between her fingers. “I think you could uncover a lot if you pursue this avenue of inquiry.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” Something was eating away at the back of my brain. Girls. Dominant narratives. Sex. Death. Arthur Miller. Ann Putnam sitting invisible right in the middle of history. I began to gather my books and notes together and load them into my backpack. Ms. Slater watched me do so.

  “See you tomorrow,” I said, making my way to the door.

  “Yep,” she said, lowering her eyes to the papers, pen in hand.

  When I reached the door of her classroom, I paused, my hand on the doorknob.

  “Ms. Slater?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Um. This is a weird question, but have you, like, been sending me text messages the last couple of weeks?”

  She laid her pen down. Her face didn’t change.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Not really. I mean, they’re not weird text messages or anything. Just encouraging me to read the play.”

  “I think sending anonymous text messages would be kind of inappropriate. Don’t you think we’ve had enough American history teachers leave for inappropriate behavior this semester?”

  We stared at each other. Mr. Mitchell. Tad. She knew about him and Emma. The entire school would have been instantly alive with that rumor if he hadn’t disappeared the same day that Clara Rutherford started to twitch. One day he was there, and the next he was gone, and we were too busy thinking about ourselves to care why.

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess one’s just about enough.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “One is too many. But I’ll say one thing,” Ms. Slater said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Whoever sent you those text messages? They’d be pretty psyched about your research, don’t you think? They’d really want you to write your own narrative.”

  A broad smile broke across my face, and it felt like the first time I’d smiled in days.

  “You think so?”

  “Oh, definitely.”

  She returned the smile briefly, and then took up her pen as if she hadn’t just told me the truth without saying a word.

  “Thanks, Ms. Slater.”

  “Go on, scram. I’ve got lives to ruin.”

  I grinned and slipped out the classroom door.

  The Gothic wood and flagstone floor of the entire upper school hallway of St. Joan’s was swathed in plastic sheeting, and had been for two weeks. The sheeting had an odd smell to it, like wet Band-Aid
s, and our shoes squeaked over it as we shuffled from classroom to classroom. I say we, but attendance was down to about a third of our usual numbers. We remaining students were like bacteria in a petri dish, wriggling under bright lights, in an environment we couldn’t possibly understand.

  Since the upper school dean had been fired, we hadn’t had a single chapel or assembly. Official-looking e-mail blasts were issued from the board of trustees, usually authored by Laurel Hocking and Dr. Strayed, and presented with such a chipper tone that we couldn’t help but disbelieve them immediately. Father Molloy occasionally gave us terse updates in advisory, but even he didn’t seem sure of his information. One day, the plastic sheeting appeared. No one knew where it had come from. No one bothered to explain why it was there.

  I came upon Deena standing at her open locker, her forehead pressed to the shelf inside.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

  When she looked up, her eyes were yellow with fatigue, and she held out a paper for me to read.

  “Did you get one of these?” she asked.

  I took the paper from her and skimmed it. It was from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Something about a schoolwide assembly on Friday. There was no signature.

  “Department of Health,” I said.

  “It was on my locker,” Deena said. “Colleen, this is getting crazy. I’m thinking of staying home tomorrow.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder and said, “I know. But if the Health Department is involved, don’t you think that means they’re finally getting on top of it?”

  “On top of it?” she echoed, slamming her locker shut. “It should never have gotten this out of hand. Every time they tell us something new, it looks like they’re lying. I don’t know which is worse—that they know what’s really going on but don’t want to tell us, or that they have no freaking clue at all.”

  I wasn’t used to seeing Deena so freaked out. Usually she was unflappable.

  “Deena,” I said, looking into her eyes so she would know I was serious. “We’re okay. Everyone’s going to be okay. It’ll all blow over soon. I promise.”