by Stacy Schiff
The eighteen-year-old also picked up precisely where Abigail had left off; it is impossible to believe the two had not met. Twice in the night a strange noise had disturbed Mary in her bed. That had been the previous week, a year earlier, sixteen months before—the details morphed as they emerged. The devil visited the first time in the shape of a horse, the second as “a round, grey thing.” Had he appeared to her when she ran away from home, asked the magistrates, conflating supernatural crimes with adolescent misdemeanors? “No,” Mary replied, “but he put such thoughts in my mind as not to obey my parents.” He did direct her to afflict several people, including Elizabeth Ballard, mentioned now for the first time. Mary worked her sorcery with poppets. She implicated her mother and grandmother, Martha Carrier, and Carrier’s teenage son Richard. What form did her satanic worship take? “He bid me pray to him and serve him and said he was a God and lord to me,” she admitted. The bargain too got more lavish; she would want for nothing. She implicated another Carrier son before divulging something else. “Does the devil require anything of you besides hurting persons?” asked a magistrate. Indeed he did. The witches were to recruit actively. They were to renounce their church baptisms, a prospect that struck at the very foundation of New England.
Mary Lacey Jr. unraveled the mysteries of how a man might manage to spend his day planting English corn while simultaneously communing with the devil and how his neighbors might fail to notice his flight. “Sometimes we leave our bodies at home, but at other times we go in our bodies,” she explained, “and the devil puts a mist before their eyes and will not let them see us.” She illuminated a more pressing matter, too. “Do you hear the devil hurts in the shape of any person without their consent?” asked the justices, who seemed to think a teenager might be able to solve their legal riddle. “When any person strikes with a sword or staff at a spirit or specter, will that hurt the body?” one asked. Lacey affirmed that it would. Both her mother and grandmother sported injuries. The revelation worked an immediate effect: with the validation of spectral evidence, Mary Warren stepped forward. She grasped Lacey’s hand. This time the Procter servant suffered not a twinge of discomfort.
Only then was Mary Lacey Sr. returned to the room. As if affixing a caption to the stirring scene, one of the justices intoned: “Here is a poor miserable child, a wretched mother and grandmother.” It took little more to provoke an emotional outburst. “Oh Mother, why did you give me to the devil twice or thrice over?” the eighteen-year-old pleaded, tears streaming down her face. Mary Lacey Sr. apologized. The teenager managed a spot of revenge: her mother had so often scolded that the devil should fetch her away. Her wish had come true! “Oh, my heart will break within me. Oh, that mother should have ever given me to the devil thus,” she sobbed. She prayed that the Lord might expose all the witches. Officials returned her grandmother to the room. Three generations of enchantresses now stood before Higginson, Gedney, Hathorne, and Corwin in the village meetinghouse. Mary continued her rant: “Oh, grandmother, why did you give me to the devil? Why did you persuade me? And oh, grandmother, do not deny it. You have been a very bad woman in your time.”
Either a new interrogator took over or Foster simply sank under her granddaughter’s onslaught. The justices henceforth addressed her as “old woman.” The teenager, a justice reminded Foster, showed signs of repentance. She could be pried from the devil’s grasp; Foster herself courted devouring fire and everlasting flames. It was time she told the whole truth. With her granddaughter’s help, Foster coughed up a few additional details. She had been a witch for about six years. (The eighteen-year-old immediately upped the number to seven. Foster acknowledged that “she did not know but it might be so.”) The justices read Mary Lacey Jr.’s confession to the two older women. They confirmed having traveled together to the witches’ meeting. They had signed the devil’s book in red ink. They worked their sorcery with poppets. Carrier had boasted to Mary Lacey Sr. as well that the devil would make her queen of hell. Foster’s daughter corroborated the flying accident. The three rode together to jail as a clutch of warrants made their way to Andover.
The next day eighteen-year-old Richard and sixteen-year-old Andrew Carrier appeared before the magistrates at Beadle’s Tavern, where Burroughs had been held. They were to answer to charges of having afflicted Mary Warren. (Lost in the shuffle, Ballard’s failing wife would live another five days.) Both Carriers were fine-looking young men, strapping and smart. Both denied any knowledge of witchcraft. The suspects were landing faster than the authorities could process them; hearings tended to overlap. Comely Mary Lacey Jr. lent a hand, prompting the justices and jogging defendants’ memories. She answered for the boys. They had flown with the devil; at his instructions, Richard had plunged an iron spindle into a victim’s knee. They had stabbed another man to death. Mary’s mother protested that she had taken no part in that attack. Her daughter corrected her, as the eighteen-year-old had obviously so often been corrected herself: “Yes, Mother, do not deny it.” Mary Lacey Sr. proceeded to confirm several names and to describe the torture instrument as well as a practice session in which the witches burned their victim with a pipe. Her daughter shared none of her mother’s hesitation, picking up on each of Hathorne’s suggestions and running with it. She was less successful with Richard Carrier, who contradicted everything, from the nocturnal flights to the pipe attack. In a tone that indicated a certain familiarity, Mary prodded him. They had murdered together! Did he not remember the conversations on their flights? What about his plans to recruit his brother and kill Ballard’s wife? At this the afflicted began to tremble. Blood trickled from Mary Warren’s mouth. The authorities hurried the boys into an adjoining room.
They proved less obstinate on their return. Richard appeared first, admitting to the charges in clipped sentences. For a full year he had served the black man. They had met for the first time in town, when the stranger surmised that Richard felt nervous about riding home in the dark and offered to accompany him. Richard had subsequently done his bidding. He had twice flown to Parris’s pasture. The devil had baptized him with five others; Richard had lent him his likeness to torture Elizabeth Ballard. On Andrew’s return to the room, his older brother greeted him with the news that he had confessed. The sixteen-year-old was a different witness this time around; where earlier Andrew had “stammered and stuttered exceedingly,” he now expressed himself fluently. He had signed with the devil in June. They had met at night, in an Andover orchard. Both boys proved highly credible. With their clear-eyed assistance, the justices arrived finally at the explosive heart of the matter.
TWO MONTHS EARLIER, when most of Salem village had occupied itself with sheep-shearing, with churning sweet, spring milk into butter, with sowing Indian corn, a great swarm of witches had alighted in Parris’s brilliantly green meadow. You might have heard the trumpet that summoned them; it resonated for miles around. The beating of a drum and a great commotion followed as, from as far away as Connecticut, over the course of hours, in a rustle of arrivals, witches descended on the village by every manner of aerial transport. Not all of them could say precisely how they swept into Salem. The Andover witches arrived in a matter of minutes. Mary Lacey Sr. of course sailed on the ill-designed stick with her mother and Martha Carrier. Richard Carrier did not recall the date of the assembly but—his memory refreshed—conceded that he had flown to the village with Mary Lacey Jr. They did so on an unwieldy contraption; assuming the shape of a horse, the devil carried the teenagers on a pole balanced across his shoulders. One farmer traveled alone on a branch. Most flew three or four to a pole. Ann Foster and Martha Carrier’s picnic had preceded that flurry; others from the Andover contingent joined them. Foster counted only twenty-five witches. Richard Carrier reported they numbered about seventy in all. Mary Lacey Jr. estimated attendance at a hundred. The devil appeared in the shape of a black man with a high-crowned hat, another Swedish import. One celebrant noted a cloven foot.
The witches indulged in a satanic ceremony,
all the more subversive as women officiated. Rebecca Nurse sat at the head of the communion table, at the devil’s side; with an incantation, she and Elizabeth Procter handed around crimson-colored wine and bread. Nurse assured Abigail Hobbs that the wine was blood “and better than our wine.” Parris’s niece confirmed that she saw the celebrants eat and drink. What was it they served? “They said it was our blood, and they had it twice that day,” she testified, adding a vampiric twist. As for the bread, it was “as red as raw flesh.” One participant watched Martha Carrier pour the wine. Mary Lacey Jr. recalled that there had not been enough bread to go around. Some had been reduced to stealing provisions, while others, like her grandmother, had brought their own. Not everyone partook. Even at a satanic congress, there were pockets of resistance, despite the phalanx of a hundred and five spectral swordsmen stationed nearby. Sixteen-year-old Andrew Carrier drank from an earthenware cup but did not eat. He was too far away to hear what the devil said when administering his sacrament. Abigail refused the sweet bread and wine; her mother passed up a tankard. Ann Foster kept her distance. A particularly disobliging recruit, Mercy Lewis spat at those who offered the red bread. “I will have none of it!” she howled. Some who accepted the drink found it bitter.
Reverend Burroughs officiated over the sacrament in the presence of two other men. Despite repeated interrogations no one could identify them, although at least one was a minister. The Coreys, the Procters, John Willard, and several other suspects attended, including four women who had now hanged. Several of the men sported very handsome apparel; Burroughs appeared in high spirits. The devil offered his great book, which all signed, some in blood, some with their fingers, others with sticks and pens, one on white bark, usually in red. Only one participant balked, to his immediate regret. He provoked “dreadful shapes, noises, and screeches, which almost scared him out of his wits.” Most noted the names of their confederates on the page. They signed ordinarily for six to eight years; the pacts grew longer as the summer wore on. While there was some disagreement about the particulars—no one was better with the mind-boggling details than Mary Lacey Jr., who had the best memory in her family—there was none about the assignment. Beginning with the Parris household and continuing to Salem town, they were to destroy every church in Massachusetts Bay. In their place they would establish Satan’s kingdom, where his recruits could expect happy days and better times.
The deviance was of a piece; desire comes in a wealth of luscious varieties. The devil seldom waved vaguely from a high mountain at garden-variety kingdoms below. He traded in specifics. He offered Richard Carrier new clothes and a horse; he enticed Carrier’s brother with a house and land. He would pay the debts of a struggling farmer with a large family. For an Andover carpenter, the devil proposed a captaincy in the militia. He promised Stephen Johnson, age fourteen, a pair of French fall shoes; he lured another teenage boy with a suit of clothes. He assured an Andover thirteen-year-old that he would pardon her sins. A child could have a black dog. He tempted an older Boxford woman with a classic: How did revenge on her enemies sound? The enticements could be gender-specific. A fifty-five-year-old would have the “abundance of satisfaction and quietness” she so desired. (He did not produce it; she grew only more miserable. Hanging their heads, many noted that the devil had failed to deliver on his promises, as if his reneging on his offer somehow invalidated the deal.) Theatrically inclined Mary Lacey Jr. could count on glory, a commodity unavailable at home. The devil spread around the grandiosity; several heard Martha Carrier boast that he offered her the queen-of-hell title. She would rule with a minister. Masquerading as Burroughs, the infernal one promised relief from all fear. To another recruit he held out something more spectacular yet. Not only did he intend to “abolish all the churches in the land,” but he would make all men equal. Why not cancel Judgment Day and eliminate shame and sin? No one admitted to having signed his soul away without a reward.
Two days after the Carrier boys offered their rueful accounts, John Procter arranged for paper to be delivered to him. The first man to have been arrested, Procter had been in prison since April. Most of his family had joined him. In irons, he composed a petition on the Salem prison floor. He too had been deposing suspects; the blunt tavern owner who had bellowed early on that the unruly girls would benefit from a beating pieced events together differently, however. Indeed five people had confessed that week. He had spoken with each one; all had fabricated their accounts. How, asked the insanely literal-minded Salem farmer on July 23, could he have attended a diabolical sacrament when he had been shackled in prison? Among the five who had attended the Sabbath were the Carrier boys. Procter happened to know their fate. The court reporter had noted that the boys were carried out “and their feet and hands bound a little while.” Procter revealed that to be something of a euphemism. Andrew Carrier had achieved sudden fluency for a reason: escorted from the room, the teenagers “would not confess anything ’til they tied them neck and heels till the blood was ready to come out of their noses.” Only then had they divulged what they had never done. Procter was all the more outraged as his son too had been strung up, blood gushing from his nose. The torture would have continued overnight had a merciful official not intervened.*
Had Procter attended the hearings he might have commented on a different brand of torture: The authorities pummeled the Andover facts into shape. Mary Lacey Jr.’s testimony is shot through with prompts and leaps, suggestions and propositions; the court dangled deliverance before her as temptingly as the devil dangled glory. Accounts tended to conform in their general outlines, clearer by August, which made the confessions more precise too. As for the discrepancies, the justices wrote them down to satanic wiles. Too much consistency would, under the circumstances, have appeared suspect; the devil addled the brains of his recruits. It made perfect sense when Mary Lacey Sr. could not answer additional questions. The devil, she feared, had made off with her memory. As she climbed the stairs to her hearing, another suspect resolved to confess. Once inside the room she found she could not. The archfiend “doth carry things out of her mind,” she explained.
Procter knew that his trial had been set for August 2, along with that of George Burroughs; he wrote with some urgency. Addressing himself to five eminent Boston ministers, Increase Mather and Samuel Willard among them, Procter warned that a terrible miscarriage of justice was about to take place. He spoke not for himself but for his fellow prisoners. All were innocent. None could expect a fair hearing. They had conferred and could suggest no other explanation: the devil incensed the magistrates, ministers, juries, and people against them. Procter was characteristically forthright: The suspects were condemned before they set foot in Stoughton’s courtroom. Already their estates had been decimated. He knew but did not include the details of his own: upon his arrest, George Corwin had descended on the Procters’ fifteen-acre farm, selling and slaughtering the cattle. He confiscated the family’s belongings, emptying a barrel of beer for the sake of a barrel, and a pot of broth for the pot. He left their young children without a scrap of food. Procter pleaded for either new judges or a less biased venue. The crowd in the Salem courtroom was as bloodthirsty as the magistrates. Might at least some of the ministers come to Salem to see for themselves?
He did not rail against the court, as had Cary, or against the charges, as had Alden. He cast no aspersions on the bewitched. While everyone else secured glory, happiness, and French fall shoes, he demanded only a fair trial. He sent his appeal to those men he surmised would be sympathetic; three hailed from Boston’s First Church, a congregation that included no witchcraft judges. (Ironically, it had been Parris’s Boston home.) He added a few lines designed to unsettle his correspondents. It was the highest of compliments that the devil insolently copied them, parodying baptisms and communions. But they themselves had begun to resemble their enemies. Stoughton’s court, charged Procter, acted like a bunch of inquisitors, engaging in behavior “very like the Popish cruelties.”* They too figured in a Pu
ritan’s worst nightmare; Cotton Mather never hesitated to insert a word like “dragooning” into an account of a diabolical meeting. His father had credited Catholicism with heedless witchcraft prosecutions. Indeed the court seemed to have fallen under the spell of all it reviled.
IF IT WAS supremely difficult to outwit the devil, it was more arduous yet, plain-speaking John Procter would discover, to pry open a padlocked mind. If he received a response to his letter, it would not be in the form of a change of venue. He took the stand as scheduled in Salem twelve days later. But Procter chose the correct address for his petition. Insofar as there was resistance—or at least rumbling—in the ranks, it occurred among the most prominent clergymen, the Bostonians to whom the magistrates would appeal for guidance, the experts on the invisible world, with which most had firsthand experience. Increase Mather had published the influential 1684 volume to which his son’s Memorable Providences stood as a sort of salute. The elder Mather had explicitly questioned various witchcraft claims. “It is also true,” he had observed, “that the world is full of fabulous stories concerning some kind of familiarities with the devil, and things done by his help, which are beyond the power of creatures to accomplish.” Witches could no more transform themselves into horses, wolves, or cats than they could work miracles. Willard had famously treated his strangled, pinched, and roaring sixteen-year-old servant in 1671. When he wrote up the episode, he termed it “a strange and unusual providence of God,” resisting both the words “witchcraft” and “possession.” Each of the five ministers to whom Procter wrote had prayed with John Goodwin in 1688. Three had endorsed Memorable Providences. Most had signed off on the publication of Lawson’s Salem village sermon.*
While the Salem ministers, magistrates, juries, and people marched in lockstep, as Procter complained, the Boston clergy lurched all over the place. The day after Rebecca Nurse was hanged, a group of ministers could be found at the home of Captain John Alden, in his seventh week in prison. Like Sewall, Alden was a longtime member of Willard’s Third Church, the sole Boston congregation that supplied both witchcraft suspects and judges. Along with several ministers, a group of prominent Bostonians took turns leading prayers and singing psalms for the feisty sea captain. Samuel Sewall himself read a sermon. The presence in the room of a witchcraft judge indicates either some calculation or some confusion on the ministers’ parts; when they entreated the Lord to intervene on Alden’s account, did they pray for justice or innocence? Either way they were at least willing to address the Almighty on his behalf. In prison John Procter begged Reverend Noyes for some consolation, to be flatly rejected “because he would not own himself to be a witch.” Together Alden’s friends prayed through the afternoon of July 20, concluding with the 103rd Psalm: “The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed.” Some prayers at least were answered; a drenching, much-needed rain fell that evening.
