The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  IV

  ONE OF YOU IS A DEVIL

  Two errors: 1. To take everything literally. 2. To take everything spiritually.

  —BLAISE PASCAL

  DEODAT LAWSON, THE previous village minister, was the first to try to make sense of things. He arrived late on the afternoon of March 19, hours after the order had gone out for Martha Corey’s arrest. He stayed just over a week. Resettled in Boston, Lawson assisted at Parris’s former congregation. He frequented the homes of prominent ministers, including Cotton Mather. He had been away from Salem for four years but knew the villagers, their affections and antipathies, as well as anyone; were it not for their bristling and snarling, he would still be among them. What he saw astonished him. By the time he set his wide-eyed account to paper, three weeks later, the Salem infestation could legitimately be termed “as rare an history as perhaps an age has had.”

  Lawson could not have returned to the village without an express invitation from Parris, overwhelmed and overworked in the pulpit as elsewhere. He managed to keep only sporadic notes on his sermons that spring, transcribing none at all between the end of March and mid-September, when he lost whole days to hearings. He also remained unpaid. Consumed by the needs of his distraught family and the long hours in court, he must have felt like a man struggling to contain a fire with a rolled-up newspaper. Reports of the Salem afflictions reached Lawson swiftly, the more so as they had broken out in his former home. Already the diabolical descent was the talk of Boston. Lawson equably noted that the distemper erupted among the villagers “after I was removed from them”; he pointed no fingers. He remained a welcome figure in the fractious community, to which he claimed he had returned out of concern for friends. He had had some rudimentary medical training in England, where twenty years earlier he had served, at least decoratively, as a royal physician. He took expert notes. He was in many ways the perfect man for the job. He had a personal incentive as well. An early victim claimed that witchcraft had dispatched Lawson’s wife and infant daughter in 1689; their ghosts fluttered about, demanding vengeance. If indeed his family had been sacrificed to “malicious operations of the infernal powers,” Lawson ached to know more. So did the concerned members of the Boston court. They encouraged him to investigate.

  Lawson made his way that Saturday to Nathaniel Ingersoll’s, an inn as well as a tavern. He had no sooner dropped his bags than he received a visit from Mary Walcott, the daughter of a village militia captain. A close neighbor of both the Parrises and the Putnams, Jonathan Walcott had served as a Lawson deacon. No less pertinently, Mary Sibley, the witch-cake enthusiast, was Mary’s aunt, as was Ann Putnam Sr., in whose household Mary Walcott lived. The sixteen-year-old spoke for several minutes with the minister. As she turned to leave she stopped dead in the doorway. She had been bitten! It was already late afternoon; the room was dim. Candle in hand, Lawson examined Mary, whom he would have remembered as a child rather than as a young woman. He found two distinct sets of wounds. Something had clamped its jaws around her wrist, imprinting teeth marks on both sides.

  Early that evening Lawson strolled down the road to the parsonage, just north of the inn, in the company of Ingersoll’s wife. Sabbath prayer may already have begun in the first-floor parlor. Parris had little need to describe the commotion of the prior months as Abigail treated Lawson to a vivid display. The pale girl raced back and forth through the room, “making as if she would fly, stretching up her arms as high as she could and crying ‘Whish, whish, whish!’ several times.” Without success Hannah Ingersoll tried to restrain her. Transfixed, Abigail pointed to a figure invisible to the others: “Do you not see her?” she asked. “Why there she stands!” Could they really not make out old Rebecca Nurse in the parlor, clear as day? Even in the presence of two ministers, Nurse dared offer Abigail a book, from which the eleven-year-old emphatically and repeatedly shrank. “It is the devil’s book for ought I know,” she chided the specter. She did not need to sign; it would suffice merely to touch the volume, Nurse assured the petrified youngster. This was the first Lawson had heard of the dark acts of Rebecca Nurse, a devout mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother who turned up elsewhere as well that day. She was the hazy second specter Ann had glimpsed in the old Putnam pew. Racing to the fire—it was the same hearth before which Tituba had met the winged creature—Abigail began to remove chunks of burning wood. These she tossed blithely around the house. Lawson thought that she intended to run straight up the chimney as, he learned, she had attempted many times. It was that evening, several miles away, before the fire in another village parlor, that some malignant force stopped Giles Corey when he opened his mouth to pray.

  Parris had arranged for Lawson to deliver the following day’s sermons. They are lost to us, though the texts could not have been remotely as memorable as their reception. Amid the pews sat five contorting girls and women, along with Martha Corey, the fear mounting inside her; all knew she was to be arrested for witchcraft. Justices Hathorne and Corwin as well as at least one of the town’s two ministers joined the congregation. Lawson began the service, to be interrupted by writhing girls. Pastors were accustomed to preaching past disturbances, through the stamping of feet on the wood floor, the chirps of birds in the rafters, the wails of infants, the dog that vomited or congregant who fainted dead away. The convulsions stopped Lawson cold, however. He had never seen such a thing. Normality returned with the singing of the psalm, after which he prepared to rise from his pulpit seat for the sermon. A voice rang out in the stillness. “Now stand up and name your text!” commanded Abigail Williams. Some minutes into Lawson’s discourse a second voice rang out. “Now there is enough of that,” announced Bathshua Pope, a forty-year-old matron, newly afflicted. The propriety-minded Parris could only have burned with shame. Women did not speak in meeting, demurely or impudently. The fine for interrupting a minister was five pounds or two hours on the block. Those who had done so previously were Quaker women, who ventured eerily similar-sounding commentaries. “Parson! Thy sermon is too long!” one had offered. “Parson! Sit down! Thee has already said more than thee knows how to say well,” instructed another. From the front of the rough-hewn meetinghouse, Parris’s niece sounded the same note after Lawson obliged her by naming his text. “It is a long text,” carped Abigail.

  She behaved no better that afternoon. From the pulpit Lawson announced his doctrine for the day. “I know no doctrine you had,” she countered. “If you did name it, I have forgot it.” She went on to disrupt that sermon too, pointing to an astounding sight. All eyes must already have scuttled and darted in Martha Corey’s direction. Abigail redirected the congregation’s attention skyward. “Look where Goodwife Corey sits on the beam,” cried the eleven-year-old, gesturing to the rafters, “suckling her yellow bird between her fingers!” Young Ann Putnam indicated something more dangerous yet: the canary perched on Lawson’s hat, hanging from a peg in the high pulpit. Adults reached out to silence both girls. It was neither the first nor the last such interruption. A fair number of Parris’s 1692 sermons would be sacrificed, a parishioner later complained, to the “distracting and disturbing tumults and noises” of the bewitched.

  The next day Martha Corey stood before the meetinghouse as she had done precisely two years earlier when she became a full church member. This time the room was packed, the gallery and pulpit stairs overflowing. Portly Salem town minister Nicholas Noyes opened the noon hearing with what Lawson described as “a very pertinent and pathetic prayer.” The magistrates took seats behind the refectory table. Gently at first—the Coreys were not only church members but substantial landowners—Hathorne posed his questions. Why did she afflict these people? If she had not, who did? By way of response Martha Corey asked permission to pray, a request the justices denied. She persisted. “We did not send for you to go to prayer,” Hathorne crisply informed her; they were there to discuss witchcraft. Corey insisted that she had had nothing to do with sorcery in her life, again contending that she was “a gospel woman.” She
appealed to the Lord to “open the eyes of the magistrates and ministers” so that they might apprehend the guilty party. Hathorne chafed at the sanctimony as at the implication that he was anything less than clear-sighted already. Growing more caustic, he broached the matter gnawing at all minds: If she was not a witch, how had she known that Ann Putnam would ask about her clothing? Corey had barely opened her mouth to reply when clerk Ezekiel Cheever interrupted. She had better not begin with a lie, he cautioned. Putnam weighed in as well. “You speak falsely,” Corey’s deacon contended as she tried to explain. Her husband had reported on the earlier examinations. Hathorne turned to Giles Corey. Had he indeed told his wife as much? He had not. “Did you not say your husband told you so?” Hathorne needled the accused. Either she fell speechless or Parris could not make out her answer amid the commotion. He left a blank in the record.

  Even had Corey attended Tituba’s hearing, she would not have been prepared for Hathorne’s tone. Stringent then, he turned vicious now. He reminded her that she stood before the authorities. “I expect the truth,” he intoned. “You promised it.” The idea that she had anticipated the deacons’ question was highly problematic. Hathorne harped on it for some time, pummeling Corey for an explanation. The girls several times interrupted his inquiry to indicate a man whispering in her ear. “What did he say to you?” demanded Hathorne. Corey had neither seen nor heard a thing. She ventured a bit of counsel, however. “We must not believe all that these distracted children say,” she asserted, eliciting fresh agonies. Hathorne quibbled with his spirited suspect about the definition of “distracted,” a word she used three times in a matter of minutes. By its nature, Hathorne noted, distraction was fleeting and changeable. The girls were utterly consistent. She alone believed them mad. “It was the judgment of all that were present,” both Hathorne and a Salem town minister reminded Corey, that “they were bewitched.”

  She could not help with reports of the spit, the book, the canary, or a suspicious ointment unearthed at her home. As it would continue to do, ignorance registered in the courtroom as defiance; Hathorne urged her to confess. “So I would if I were guilty,” she rejoined. Corey was formidable but not imperturbable; she bit her lip and wrung her hands throughout the interrogation, the most punishing of the preliminary hearings. She was on her feet for a very long time, interrupted by witnesses bearing clarifications and suffering afflictions; Parris transcribed in fits and starts between outbursts. “Now tell me the truth, will you,” demanded Hathorne, “why did you say that the magistrates’ and ministers’ eyes were blinded and you would open them?” Framed as such, the question struck Corey as absurd. She laughed as she answered. Mercilessly Hathorne pressed on, leading his defendant to pose a preposterous query of her own. “Can an innocent person be guilty?” she asked.

  The court seemed to expect special powers of her; she had none to display. You say we are blind, challenged Hathorne. “If you say I am a witch,” huffed Corey. He begged her to elucidate, as she seemed in her doctrinaire way to have promised. If not, he had a different question. “What did you strike the maid at Mr. Thomas Putnam’s with?” Hathorne asked. “I never struck her in my life!” Corey cried. Two witnesses disagreed. Had she no iron rod, no familiar, no covenant with the devil? She had not. Did she truly believe she would go unpunished? “I have nothing to do with witchcraft,” she vowed, as the room stirred and as Hathorne introduced the subject of the March 1 hearings. Why had she attempted to prevent her husband from attending? “I did not know that it would be to any benefit,” she answered. From the long, narrow pews came a different answer: Martha Corey had no desire to root out witches. She smiled to see her meaning so willfully misconstrued. Hathorne reprimanded her; were the girls’ troubles a laughing matter? “You are all against me and I cannot help it,” Corey conceded. Did she not believe there were witches about? She could not be certain. But Tituba had confessed as much, Hathorne reminded her. “I did not hear her speak,” she replied coolly.

  The crowd was incensed. Corey grew more and more flippant (“If you will all go hang me, how can I help it?”), the girls bolder and bolder. Yelping and snapping, they mocked her replies. She was no gospel woman, they sniggered. She was a gospel witch! Observers informed Hathorne that when his suspect bit her lip, teeth marks bloomed on the arms and wrists of her accusers. Thenceforth court officers observed Corey more closely. Indeed each time she clasped her hands together the girls shuddered. When she shifted her weight, they involuntarily, raucously stamped their feet. If she leaned against the bar—she stood for well over an hour, probably closer to two—they crumpled in agony. While she had registered no complaint before Lawson’s return, forty-year-old Bathshua Pope now felt the witch reach deep into her bowels as if to tear them from her body. Howling in pain, she threw her muff at Corey. The room was thirty-four by twenty-eight feet; afflicters and afflicted stood in awkward proximity, a foot or two from one another. Witnessed at close range, in the cramped pews, amid the smudged light and fretful whispers, the writhings and screechings were as terrifying as any sorcery. The muff failed to reach its mark. Pope leaned down to remove a shoe. Launched more effectively, it hit Martha Corey squarely in the head. She could not have found it easy to defend herself, as her hands appear by this time to have been bound, for the protection of her victims.

  Hathorne allowed Corey’s accusers to interrogate her. There were now ten, almost as many women as girls; they fired questions from all sides. Why had Corey not joined the other witches mustering before the meetinghouse? For how long was the covenant she had signed with the devil? (They answered for her: ten years, of which she had served six.) Hathorne tossed out a catechism question. Corey answered correctly, though in Lawson’s view she did so oddly. At the girls’ instruction, the authorities examined her hands. Had the canary left a mark between her fingers? A pin she had stuck in one of her victims turned up in the child’s hair. Before the hearing wound down, Reverend Noyes announced himself satisfied that Corey practiced witchcraft before their very eyes.

  Hathorne was beside himself with frustration. He was intent on a confession, nowhere in sight. He got only senseless shrieking and stamping; his suspect remained alternately bemused and self-righteous. The case, he reminded her, appeared open-and-shut. Did she not see that the afflicted were every bit as rational and sober as their neighbors? Here Corey appeared blind. They could not prove she was a witch, she informed the Salem justice, who—like Noyes, a hard-liner from the start—believed they had irrefutably done so. That afternoon a constable led the self-declared gospel woman to the town jail. She would spend the next six months in chains, awaiting trial.

  WHILE THE AFFLICTED saw nothing further that day of Martha Corey, they enjoyed little peace. Ann Putnam Sr. woke the next morning to a visitor. At dawn Rebecca Nurse pounced upon her, dressed only in a linen undergarment. She carried a little red book. For two hours the women wrestled, Nurse denying the power of God and Christ and threatening to wrench Ann’s soul from her body. Meanwhile the beggar Sarah Good’s five-year-old daughter flew about the village, sinking her teeth into Mary Walcott and Ann Putnam Jr. Both displayed raw imprints of her miniature mouth. With a glance, tiny Dorothy Good sent the girls into crippling spasms. She choked and pinched them, goading them to write in the devil’s book, of which suddenly there were a profusion in Salem village.

  Probably the same day a delegation assembled to pay a call on the Nurse homestead. Though not among the original settlers, Rebecca and Francis Nurse had firmly established themselves in the village, where they acquired a three-hundred-acre farm from a Boston minister who had inherited it. Over the course of nearly fifty years of marriage, they had raised eight children, along with an orphaned Quaker boy. Theirs was a thriving, close-knit clan, the marriage a solid one. All of the children had survived; they demonstrated no inclination to sue one another. A woodworker by trade, Francis Nurse had emerged as one of Salem’s most active citizens, serving as juror and constable, appraising properties, surveying borders,
and arbitrating land disputes. He had sat on the committee that made the initial overture to Parris, though the two men’s relationship had since soured; more recently, Nurse had served on the committee that withheld Parris’s wages. Prosperous and widely respected, the Nurses had strong ties to the Sibleys and much of the community, as was clear from the late-March delegation. It included three members of another prominent village family as well as Peter Cloyce, a Nurse brother-in-law. None were related to a bewitched girl or the men who had filed the original complaints. (Also among the delegation was Justice Hathorne’s sister, Elizabeth.) Someone—most likely Parris or Hathorne—had dispatched the group to tease out any knowledge Rebecca Nurse might have of recent events and to gauge her reaction to their disquieting news.