Children of Salem

by Robert W. Walker

  “I . . . I’m terribly sorry. I can imagine no worse torture on earth than to lose a child.”

  “There can be worse.”

  “Really?” Jeremiah squinted at her. “Such as?”

  Her eyes met his squint. “Not never holding your child, ever.”

  “I . . . I don’t understand.”

  “N-Nor seeing it.”

  “You never saw the child?”

  “Not never no.”

  Jeremy tried to decipher this; he had a sense that her cryptic words were fraught with meaning. He was about to inquire when Tituba gasped, and her snake eyes fixed him. “Tell me, are you . . . are you de Black Man who comes in darkness?”

  “Black Man?”

  “De one we keep hearin’ ‘bout in Massa’s sermons.”

  “Ah, yes, I mean no! I mean, I see now…understand your confusion, that is.”

  “De one who come invisible outta de forest.”

  “No, no, Tituba, I am quite human and no spirit or demon or familiar of Satan.”

  “De one who makes you sin, and den makes you put your mark in de book—his black book.”

  “No, I assure you—”

  “A-And once your mark is there, he has your soul, ’less you confess it to God.”

  She’s certainly learned the dark side of the Puritan and Christian catechism. “Trapped for all time,” he said, nodding. “I know the belief.”

  “For all eternity. So says Massa.”

  “Your Master speaks of Satan when he says the Black Man with the Black Book, I know, but I have no book, and I am not black.”

  “Yes, de Devil comes lookin’ like a white minister in black cloak.”

  Satan may take a pleasing form. Jeremy realized he was dressed entirely in black, from head to toe. “You can be sure, Tituba, I am not Satan or his emissary.”

  “Fool!” shouted Parris, standing now at the door, having eavesdropped on them. “I told you not to pay any heed to the heathen. She can’t be redeemed. I’ve done everything. She’s incorrigible. Learns nothing. Nods and nods and says yes a thousand times but understands nothing of Christ or his mercy.”

  “I know Christ,” countered Tituba, spitting. “He don’t help me! He take my baby boy!”

  Parris ignored this as if not hearing, or as if hearing it too often. “Wakely, I had hoped you’d demonstrate more sense than to get sucked into a conversation about Heaven and Hell with a slave wench.”

  “I am not witch!” Tituba came at him. “I am voodoo woman!”

  Parris advanced like a jackal and slapped her hard across the face, shouting, “Wench, I said! Not witch!”

  Jeremy reacted instinctively, stilling Parris’ hand from inflicting a second blow. He wanted to strike the man and send him to his knees, but such an act would destroy any chance of success here. Instead, he shouted, “It was entirely my fault, Mr. Parris! I should’ve heeded you.”

  Parris’ dark eyes bore into Jeremy’s steely gray pools, searching for any sign of deception. With his jaw quivering, and his eyes traveling now to Tituba, he said, “I quite understand, Mr. Wakefield.” There seemed more unsaid between these two than spoken here tonight. Jeremy wanted to hear the minister apologize to the black woman, but he knew that was unlikely.

  Instead, Parris spoke now as if nothing had happened. “Now go to sleep, woman, and you, Mr. Wakefield.”

  “Wakely, Mr. Parris.”

  “Wakely then…come away. Let us all find sleep, shall we, Mr. Wakely.”

  Jeremy glanced back at Tituba who wiped blood from her lip onto her nightshirt. He silently looked back at her and thought he saw a crooked smile. Was Tituba secretly pleased at having upset her master? But realizing that Jeremy was looking, her smile instantly vanished.

  # # # # #

  Jeremy literally followed in Parris’ snow and mud-sucking footsteps as they trudged through the thickening slush back to the parsonage door. Parris missed the excitement at two windows overhead, but Jeremy saw in one an elderly blonde-headed woman, no doubt Mrs. Parris, and at the other second story window two small faces—one a small caricature of Mrs. Parris, the daughter most likely, the other a scarecrow-faced Mercy Lewis, Jeremy assumed. What few notes he had on Parris’ household told him that Mercy Lewis, an orphaned niece, had been taken into the Parris home. His notes had said nothing about the black servant, Tituba. She’d come as a surprise.

  Apparently, Jeremy’s arrival, and the subsequent shouting, had awakened the remaining family members. Parris glanced back at Jeremy, preparing to say something, when he noticed where his apprentice’s eyes were focused. Parris stopped and stared at the upstairs bedroom windows. Immediately, the wife, the daughter, and the orphan scampered from Parris’ sight like mice found in the cupboard.

  Is everyone terrified of this man, wondered Jeremy. Be damned if I’m afraid of this petty tyrant.

  Tituba had revealed a surprising secret, a stillborn child in Barbados . . . and mother denied a moment with her child. This in itself set Jeremiah’s imagination aflame. What more was there to the story?

  He followed Parris inside, both men now chilled to the bone. “I don’t feel right, Mr. Parris, taking a woman’s bed on such a night as—”

  “Bah! I’ll hear no more of it, Mr. Wakely, and you’ve got to get control here. You do as I instruct in my house without question or hesitation, do you—”

  “I intend to sir, it’s just—”

  “No faltering, Mr. Wakely. You are tired…have come a long way.”

  “Too true.”

  “Get ye then to bed—and I to mine.”

  Something about the man and his tone made Jeremy feel like a child being sent off to bed. And fatigued beyond thought, off he went, but before laying down, he closed off the curtain and in the dark, he carefully located his saddlebag and dug into to it. He palmed his inkwell and quill pen, and in difficult circumstances, Jeremy began jotting quick notes to himself in the blank pages of the book he would keep on Reverend Samuel Parris—a book that would eventually find its way back to Mather.

  Unable to focus by the weak and flickering candlelight any longer, exhausted from the long day and travel, Jeremy realized his mind and pen were no longer in sync. A quick few words of hope that he was entirely wrong in his first impressions of Parris before he blew out the light, and without knowing it, nodded off and into a fitful sleep.

  # # # # #

  Jeremy found the cubbyhole below the stairwell dark, dingy, musty, and degrading, a place to keep the house brute, not a place for a man of Jeremy’s stature or frame. In fact, not a place for little Tituba’s frame either. Cramped as a ship’s berth. Part of Parris’ less than subtle method of putting a person ‘in his place’, Jeremy decided. And it did have this affect on the young apprentice.

  Given the bed bugs and the odors, he slept fitfully at best.

  What little sleep he did accomplish was to the tune of tension pulled taut like a wire, so much that it seemed audible, slicing through Jeremiah’s skull, as this dark house seemed to exhale conflict and breathe in anxiety. Subtle yet present like the distant sound of the ocean waves to shore, or a cradle with an insistent squeak. Most of the night, Jeremy lay stiff, board-like as he played Tituba’s words over in his head so as not to forget, but also in an effort to understand her. When he did come awake entirely, he’d hear a squeak-squeak-squeak. At first he thought it a parrot below a black cloth in its cage walking its floor, pacing on clawed feet.

  But after a moment, he realized it was a squeaking floorboard upstairs, one which he assumed Samuel Parris was repeatedly pacing over up in room.

  Calming himself, Jeremiah wondered if Parris prayed like other men, or if he prayed differently, or if he prayed privately at all.

  Finally, Jeremiah gave up any hope of sleep; instead, he sat up, pulled his saddlebag close, opened it, and located his book. He jotted Tituba’s words down as best he could recall—for the record.

  He also jotted down his initial, firsthand reaction to Parris,
writing: the man is arrogant, selfish, puffed up beyond his stature, but small in grace and spirit in my humble judgment. I would add….

  Jeremy fell asleep over his writing, the quill pen and inkbottle left on the wood floor, his journal lying half under him. He dreamed of his powerful right fist slamming into Parris’ teeth.

  The following day, Jeremy opened his eyes on a plump-faced little girl with yellow curls, Parris’ daughter Betty, he assumed. The two stared at one another until she said, “Can I write, too?” She wiped away mucous and her pearl white skin showed blotches of red as if rubbed raw with lye soap, but Jeremy recognized the redness as having done battle with the ague—a fever with coughing enough to turn a child’s insides out.

  “You are feeling better?” he asked.

  “I am. Can I draw?”

  Jeremy realized they were, at the moment, the only two in the house awake. “Oh, oh,” he came to a sitting position. “Your name is Betty?”

  “Elizabeth, like my mother I am.”

  “Sorry, Elizabeth.” He guessed her at ten or eleven.

  “I wanna draw pictures.” She pointed to his pen and ink, her cheeks going wide with her smile. She’s an adorable if chubby doll, he thought.

  He tore out a single blank page from the back of his journal. “Draw? Yes, be my guest.”

  The little girl took the offering and moved on short legs that pumped fast, taking her to a table where she sat and began work. Jeremy stuffed his journal deep into his bag, stood, stretched, and moved to stand over the girl. Admiring her meaningless markings: Circles within circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles, he softly commented. “Wonderful but what is it?”

  “It’s where the witches meet.”

  “Really? And where is that?”

  “The orchard.”

  “Your orchard?”

  “Just beyond it, yes.”

  In a moment, Betty was mumbling something about having been ill when the second girl from upstairs, perhaps twelve or thirteen, came timidly down to view the newcomer. Once again Jeremy held a staring match.

  “You must be Mercy? Mercy Lewis,” he finally said to her.

  “Mercy, no!” she shouted. “Mary—my name’s Mary Wolcott. Mercy Lewis’s my cousin like Betty is.”

  “Really? And here I thought you Mercy.”

  “Mercy’s got sent away,” said Betty over her shoulder. “Father said she was bad.”

  “Bad?” he poked at the word.

  Mary piped in with, “Uncle beat her, but she stayed bad anyway.”

  “And how was she bad?”

  “Killed a layin’ hen for no cause,” answered Betty.

  “She was sent to live with Mr. Putnam’s family yonder,” added Mary Wolcott, pointing out the parsonage window. “Betty’s father told me she had a devil in her, and if I was bad and didn’t obey, I’d be sent away, too.”

  Unsure what to say, Jeremy cleared his throat and muttered, “Another niece, indeed?”

  “Oh, yes, he has a passel of us.” Mary’s smile created dimpled balls of her cheeks.

  Betty piped in with, “He never claimed Dorcas.”

  “Nobody’d claim that brainless child,” countered Mary. “Did you know she eats worms, that one?”

  “Dorcas? What happened to her?” asked Jeremy, standing now, stretching in the clothes he’d slept in, uncomfortable with the idea of sleeping in the raw in such close quarters.

  “She was put up at the Corey’s place, she was.”

  “Corey’s mill on Ipswich road?” he asked.

  “At the mill, yes. Maidservant. That’s a laugh. Dorcas is a dummy. She can’t talk right nor hear good neither.”

  “I see. Sounds as if Mr. Parris helps out all the village children, eh?”

  “He bills ’em out mostly.”

  “Bills ’em out?”

  “Charges a finder’s fee and a monthly one, too,” explained Mary.

  “I see. Rather businesslike of him, I’d say.”

  Parris wife and Tituba, as if by magic, appeared in the kitchen along with the sound of pots and pans. Jeremy had no idea how the one got past him from the steps, and the other from the door, until he learned of a back stairwell straight to the kitchen, and a back door opening on the kitchen. The two women sounded amiable enough as they worked to create the morning meal.

  Parris was the last to rise, sniffing breakfast. All chatter, all talk, even Betty’s drawing, ended when Samuel Parris entered the living area. He called immediately for everyone to drop to their knees and pray with him, Jeremy included. From a kneeling position, Jeremy saw that Tituba went through the motions, hands raised before her lips as if in supplication.

  He determined to do the same. One more thing they had in common.

  “Make those who make our lives difficult, God,”—began Parris, his voice like a knife—“make them pay this day with a curse befalling each. They that are sinful. They who withhold my rightful income, my salary, and by extension withhold food from the mouths of all who are present here today, Lord. Smite them all in Thy name . . . amen.”

  Finished with the brief, spiteful prayer, Parris broke off the handholding. He rose, saying, “Now let us eat and give thanks for what meager bits we do have, shall we? And then I will formally introduce you all to my young apprentice here, Mr. Wakely, sent by none other than the Reverend Increase Mather himself, children. Sent here to your husband woman, and your father, Betty.”

  “And my good uncle,” said Mary with a quick smile.

  “Ah . . . and my good Master,” added Tituba, her eyes twinkling at Jeremy as if they shared a secret. It was an almost girlish competing for Parris’ attention, Jeremy felt. He represented a new excitement— something unusual in her day, and he had given her the gift of his saddle for her headrest, and he had shown sympathy for the loss of her only child. Still, she remained as inscrutable as the parsonage door. Although quite a bit more exotic, and handsome for a woman of her age—which he guessed at forty, close to her Master’s and Mistress’ age.

  While these thoughts fluttered about Jeremy’s brain, a messenger showed up at the door. Parris grimly received the delivered news and walked back to the dining table. After a dramatic sigh, as yet standing over them, he said, “Jeremy, you’re going to witness for me today—an ordeal.”

  “How’s that, sir? An ordeal?”

  “I’ve rounds to make. Come along.”

  “But where are you going, Goodman?” asked his wife, who till now hadn’t uttered a word.

  “The Putnams again.” He held his wife’s gaze for a moment. “In need of me.”

  “Nothing good will come of those people,” she muttered, her eyes on the uneaten meal.

  “Enough, Goodwife.”

  “And that sickly child of theirs, and you putting Mercy in harm’s way by—”

  “Enough, woman!”

  Tituba dared add, “Curse ’pon dat home, dare is.”

  “Quit such talk now, both of you!” Parris’ face had gone red, veins in his neck bulging.

  “I’m sorry, Samuel, but there’s some curse on that sad and peculiar family.”

  Parris pulled Apprentice Wakely by the arm to end Jeremy’s meal. “We go, now. Duty calls.”

  At the same time a flood of words erupted from Elizabeth Parris, directed at her husband. “One or two of her babes lived but a week, others a month, and to end with that sickly yearling, little Anne Junior—just a matter of time before some fever takes her.”

  “We must go,” Parris ordered Jeremy. “Now, Mr. Wakely.”

  Mrs. Parris followed, pursuing to the door, adding, “And I wish you’d never gotten involved with that Dorcas Goode affair, Samuel.”

  He whirled on her, teeth gritting. “I’ve done the Christian thing, Mother, and it’s for the best for—”

  “The best? Are you sure?”

  “—for the child, yes!”

  “No matter how vile old Goode is, Samuel, she’s the child’s mother.”

  Parris’ eyes b
ecame darts of controlled anger. “Dorcas Goode is of an age now when she rightly apprentices in the domestic arts beneath another roof—as with any of our village children!”

  “It’s a vile custom, and when it comes time for our Betty?”

  “Then she goes to another home!”

  Betty, hearing this, raced up the stairs to her room, crying hysterically.”

  Jeremy tried to look invisible, having found a corner. Parris gritted his teeth. “It’s not just custom here, Mother! Listen to reason, Goodwife, it’s religion and it’s law.” Parris turned and waved a hand at Jeremy. “Tell her, Jeremy.”

  Jeremiah knew of the practice of taking children at age twelve and thirteen out of their parental homes to circulate in other houses—girls to be taught kitchen arts and wifely duites, while boys learned under harsh masters—not parents—a trade or at least how to muck out a barn. But Jeremy had never heard it referred to as law. “It is our way, Mrs. Parris, for better or worse.” Worse being the operative word, he said to himself.

  Parris glared at him, his eyes encouraging a stronger remark, but when it did not come, he firmly said, “Elizabeth, a child coming on his or her child-bearing years must be placed under a roof run by those other than a doting mother and father.”

  “To keep them in strict discipline,” added Jeremy.

  Mary Wolcott shrugged at this and as if harping what she’d heard all her life, added, “It’s what’s best. Spare the rod, spoil the child.”

  “That child, Dorcas, was a pack mule for that old woman,” added Parris. “And on that note, we are away, Goodwife. Come along, Mr. Wakely!”

  But Mrs. Parris persisted, following them a few steps out into the snow-laden yard. “Every time you have dealings with those Putnams, Samuel . . . each time you go into their house, you return in a melancholia.”

  “Such comes with the job, dear. We all must persevere.”

  “I hate to see it—how those relatives of yours affect you so.”

  “Mercy Lewis will be of great comfort to Thomas and Anne, I’m sure, and a great boon to them.”

  “Not if she misbehaves, she won’t.”

  “She’s learned her lesson well, and she knows what all of us expect of her.”

  “She’s had a hard time of it—orphaned so cruelly.”