Children of Salem

by Robert W. Walker

  Worst of all, so far as Mercy was concerned, Uncle Samuel had tired of feeding and housing her—his sullen niece—and he’d refused Mercy’s sharing Betty’s room and bed when he caught them playing beneath the covers. All of this had led to his pushing her off on the Putnams.

  Through the crack in the door over the heads of the adults, Mercy saw coins change hands. That stupid Thomas Putnam has purchased me! It’s final now. Thomas Putnam now owned her, lock, stock, and barrel as the woodsman’s ballad said of his livestock, traps, tools, weapons, and women. Mercy felt a pang of terror; she felt like an animal trapped. She’d disliked the look in the middle-aged Putnam’s eye when her uncle had first broached the subject of taking Mercy in as maidservant to Mrs. Putnam. That’d been a month earlier. Apparently, Putnam and Uncle Samuel had settled on an agreeable price, with Putnam having to make payments over time.

  Mercy gulped. She slammed the trap door, the noise like a gunshot. She did not intend to let her uncle for a moment think she was as dumb as Dorcas—that she didn’t know what was going on here. She leapt into Anne’s bed, saying, “Did you hear them jump? I made your father and my uncle go off their feet!”

  Anne giggled in response.

  Mercy pulled the covers over them, and together they laughed at the image of serious grownups, a minister and a deacon, starting with fear at the trap door’s falling. Anne, like Mercy, liked the reaction Mercy had elicited from the adult world.

  “Makes me feel good inside to make grown men jump,” Mercy said between laughs.

  “Me, too,” added Anne. “Me, too.”

  # # # # #

  The following night in the Putnam home

  Mercy Lewis sat up in bed. She’d awakened to a hot, sweaty hand rising along her leg toward her private parts.

  On awaking, she found no one in the attic bedroom aside from Anne, who appeared asleep. If it’d been Anne, Mercy would be more than willing to allow the touching, but if it’d been her father, she wanted nothing to do with it. In fact, the thought made her shiver and want to vomit.

  “Anne? Anne? Were you in my bed?”

  No response.

  “Anne!”

  No reply.

  “I know you were touching me, Anne, and it’s all right.” Mercy touched herself there. “Do ya hear me?”

  No reply.

  Mercy sighed and decided to go back to sleep, but once more the crying coming from Anne Senior’s room downstairs kept her awake. Then she heard little Anne’s voice cut through the attic. “It’s my Uncle Henry touched you, Miss Mercy, not me.”

  “Your Uncle Henry?” Mercy was aghast at the thought. “What Uncle Henry?”

  “I don’t really know him.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know him?”

  “He died before I come ’long.”

  Mercy swallowed hard. “A ghost? A ghost was touching me?” She really shivered now.

  “He comes, my brothers come, my sisters. They all come with the same message.”

  “Message? What message?” Mercy sat up at this news.

  “They all say they didn’t die properly . . . normally, I mean.”

  “You mean naturally?”

  “They claim murder.”

  “Murdered?” Mercy gasped. This is interesting and strange.

  “And they can’t rest in peace cause, cause . . . ”

  “Cause why?” Mercy had pulled her legs in tight, gripping her bedclothes.

  “Cause they want things righted.”

  “They want you to fix things?”

  “Me and Mother, yes . . . fix things so’s they can rest in peace.”

  “What do ya mean, Anne?”

  “Find some justice.”

  “Justice in this world? Ha! Vengeance maybe, huh?”

  “Like that, yeah—my ma calls it settling of scores.”

  “But I never did nothing to your uncle, so—”

  “Don’t matter. Neither did me nor my ma.”

  “—s-so why’s he got his dead hand on me?”

  Anne stuttered, “Ah-ah-h-h . . . ”

  “The hand wasn’t cold neither! But ‘twas warm and big like a man’s hand, Anne.”

  “C-Can I come over there?” asked Anne.

  “Yes, Anne. Yes, you can.”

  The moment Anne came into Mercy’s bed, she felt for the first time that it was no longer strange to have a big ‘sister’ other than her two ghosts sisters who’d died ahead of her. Seven brothers, two sisters, all phantoms now, all crying out for reprisal, and Anne the only one of ten infants who’d cheated death. She and Mercy had this in common—guilt at having been spared. Guilt at being alive. But Anne’s guilt was even stronger, far deeper, and Mercy sensed this, and she wondered how she could use this information.

  She wondered if she could use it as she had the trap door to frighten the adult world. A world she hated.

  And she further wondered how she might use this strange new knowledge to fend off any advances from Anne’s father, and even more urgent advances she felt certain to come.

  “Tell me more about Old Goody Goode,” Anne asked, snuggling into the crook of Mercy’s arm. “You’ve made me curious ’bout her.”

  “Little liar.”

  “Am not.”

  “You’ve always been curious of the old witch. Whether she really has any powers or not. Don’t lie.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I’ll tell ya everything about Goode, if you’ll tell me more about Uncle Henry.”

  “Not much to tell.”

  “Then the other ghosts haunting this house and your mother. Like why they only haunt her and not your father?”

  “Men don’t see ghosts like we women do.”

  “I s’pose not.”

  Anne snuggled more deeply into her newfound, live older, wiser sister, whose developing breasts jiggled like water beneath Annie’s head.

  # # # # #

  Anne Putnam Junior felt it wonderful sharing her loft with Mercy Lewis. She hadn’t had a nightmare in all the nights spent with Mercy, and she’d not had one of her paralyzing fits in all the days since Mercy had come to live with her.

  The fits were horrible; they turned Anne into a drooling vegetable. She’d bite through her tongue if her mother or father should fail to act quickly and to put the ever present wedge in her mouth. During such fits, she went blank in the head. Her mind seemed to overload and go black, eyes rolling back in their sockets, while limbs uncontrollably quaked. At the same time, her extremities became stone: fingers, toes, feet, and hands like stubby tree branches reaching to the sky.

  Anne’s mother had repeatedly explained away the fits as a bewitching, a curse that’d been placed on the Thomas Putnam family from the days when Anne Carr-Putnam, the mother, had made her feelings for the married minister, James Bailey, known. Bad timing as the minister’s wife and children lay dying of a plague on Bailey’s house.

  Against her parents’ wishes, Anne had publicly made it known that when the minister’s wife died, that she would marry Bailey, and one night she went to Bailey and bared her soul and body to him even as his family lay in the back rooms coughing their last. Bailey had soundly cursed and rebuked Anne Carr, and in his anger, he had thrown her naked from his home.

  Anne, immature and unmarried, was told by her parents that her advances on Bailey had been a sinful display; that she’d be cursed if she did not repent of her foolish passion for the minister, and that she must do so at the meetinghouse before everyone. She refused and she never recanted her love for Bailey.

  Today, Anne Senior still suffered for that mistake. And now her only daughter, named for her, suffered for the sins of her mother in the form of quaking fits and an unhealthy body. In fact, all of the mother’s nine other children had paid the ultimate price. Nine dead children before Anne Junior—all lost.

  How many times had mother told Anne the story? How could a minister, a man of God, a man Mother professed her love for—how could he place such a terrible cur
se on the unborn, on all of the issue of Thomas Putnam? Unless . . . unless Bailey was not a man of God after all but an imposter! Else his grief over the sudden end of his own family had turned him to the darkness and the Devil.

  Perhaps . . . or worse.

  Some word went around that Bailey, being the Devil himself used the parsonage badly, and was punished by an angry God. How else to explain why his entire family was destroyed?

  Some went further to say that the next minister, a man named Burroughs, who displayed superhuman strength on more than one occasion, was Bailey returned in a new guise as Salem Village parish minister, again bringing a family with him, and again watching that family wither and die in yet another plague on the parsonage home. A necessary plague brought down upon it by the wrath of God Himself.

  Some went further to say that the next minister, Samuel Parris, was again the Devil who’d found yet another family in order to cover his cloven hoof prints, so as to rejoin the battle for the cursed parish and parsonage home, and that this time the Devil had hold of the deed!

  Anne now believed, magically enough, that Mercy’s presence had dispelled the decade’s curse, and in Anne’s eyes Mercy had indeed cast off the ghosts bedeviling the Putnam home—and quite possibly the entire parish. Now Anne saw Samuel Parris as just a man with a family and a desire to do right and good in the parish. The Devils—if there were any in the parish—were those who stood against their minister, just as her father and mother had said so often in conversation, and to which Mercy agreed.

  For Anne, Mercy proved a godsend. Mercy truly loved Anne, who’d never felt anything approaching unconditional love or even simple affection from anyone, including her parents. The relationship between Anne and her parents had the character of a deathwatch even now after nine years.

  Besides, Mercy told fortunes by the sieve and scissors—a proven method. She also told the future by flames on a log, ripples on water, tealeaves even. Mercy knew all about the planets, stars, stones, and plants. She knew something of poisons too. She knew the magical properties needed to make a person fall sick or come well and heal, and she claimed to know how to bake a witch pie.

  Again in the middle of the night, the children were awakened by Anne Putnam Senior’s night terrors, or rather the result of these—screams and loud argument. Mercy lifted the trap to hear the details. From below, Anne’s mother shouted, “I’m only one person! A woman at that! What can I do? It’s nothing I can manage alone! Haunt Thom! Strike Thom! Bite and pinch and tear at Thomas as ya do me! Wake him with hot coals and bloody pins and needles!”

  Mercy, seeing that Anne had awakened and returned to her bed to sleep alone, asked, “How come these ghosts never go after your father?”

  “Never,” mumbled Anne. “He’s blind and deaf to ’em.”

  “Afraid of him are they?”

  “No, he’s got no eyes for spirits.”

  “No eyes for ghosts?”

  “Like most men, blind to the Invisible World all round us.”

  Every child of Salem Village had the notions of the Invisible World with all its punishments drilled into them.

  “You sayin’ it’s a woman’s lot to be haunted?”

  “Women being more open to invisible creatures, yes.”

  “Women and children like you, you mean?”

  “Yeah, women and children.”

  “Why do you s’pose it’s so?”

  “Dunno.”

  “I could ask Goode or Tituba to do some magic that’d stop the curse on your family forever, Anne, if you wish me to.”

  “You can?”

  “I could.”

  “You think it’d stop my mother’s being haunted?”

  “Depends on how strong the curse is.”

  Anne sat considering this for several silent moments.

  Mercy climbed in beside her and took her hand in hers. “You know on dark nights when there’s no moon, that’s when Goode gets past the sheriff and the curfew.”

  “Yes? And?”

  “And she goes to somewhere in the woods.”

  “Woods?”

  “Swampscott, it’s called. It’s where she meets with the others.”

  “Others?

  “Other witches, and together—well together, their magic is stronger. Tituba has met with Goode out at the swamps in the forests.”

  “Have you?”

  “Have I what?”

  “Met with Goode in the forest.”

  “Me and Betty have, yes.”

  “Betty Paris? When?”

  “The last night I was in my uncle’s house. Tituba woke us and guided us.”

  “Tituba? Did she fly you and Betty on a broomstick?”

  Mercy laughed. “No! We walked, but I saw a black wolf following us.”

  “A wolf?”

  “A wolf who turned into a man, and we all knew a man wearing the black robes who watched everything.”

  “A minister? A werewolf?”

  “A minister with cloven feet, and he slobbered and drooled.”

  “God, a wolf man. W-What’d you do?”

  “Danced with ‘im.”

  “No!”

  “Round a fire, it was.”

  “No! A bonfire?” Anne’s eyes went wide. “I’d love it!”

  “Was only a small fire. We didn’t want to draw attention.”

  “Then Tituba is a witch like Goode?”

  “She’s a good witch.”

  “But Goode is not?”

  “Depends whether she likes you or not.”

  Anne scratched her head over this.

  Another horrid scream came from Mrs. Putnam’s bedroom. Anne shivered and confessed that since Mercy’s arrival, she’d had no visits from her dead siblings.

  “I’m a charm, a good luck charm,” Mercy told her. “Tituba made me a charm.”

  Another scream from below and Anne clutched to her newfound charm.

  “Easy, my little doll,” said Mercy. “Why’re you so afraid? Don’t be afraid. I’ll protect you.”

  Mercy tightened her hold on Anne. For whatever reason, Mercy pictured the old crone, Goode going about her day in Salem Village. It’d always been Goode’s habit to go door-to-door, begging scraps, begging for tatters of cloth, collecting bottles, tin cups, bells. She liked bells and jars. Mercy would see her at the seashore, collecting shells, pebbles, and periwinkles for periwinkle stew. Mercy always saw little Dorcas with her mother, and she imagined what it must be like to be the child of a witch. Yet it made no sense; if Goode were such a powerful cunning woman, then why couldn’t she fix her own daughter’s addled brain?

  And why wasn’t the old woman’s curse on Parris’ house working?

  And why’s it seem I have more influence over Anne and her family than that so-called witch, who can’t even regain her own daughter from Uncle Samuel?

  In the short span of time that Mercy had been under the Putnam roof, she’d been frightened countless times by the night screams. Shortly after her first night the father attempted to corner her in some private place, obviously wanting to put his hands on her. This followed by Anne’s mother’s beating her with the tattling rod when she dared complain. Add to it all how little Anne now hung on her to forget her dead brothers and sisters, and the entire mix boggled the mind.

  Mercy lifted Anne’s frightened little face, tilting it to her lips, and she kissed the younger girl full on the mouth, her tongue exploring. Anne responded to the sensations that Mercy imagined the younger girl had never experienced. Anne hungrily returned the kiss. Mercy then moved Anne’s mouth to her bared breast, offering a nipple, which young Anne grasped with hungry lips and smothered with lapping tongue. “Right . . . right . . . good, my little doll, my little darling. You do this, and I’ll ask Goode to lift the curse on your home.”

  Anne’s warm breath and small mouth filled Mercy’s nightshirt, and the two fell asleep in one another’s arms.

  Chapter Eight

  At the Nurse home the following morning<
br />
  Twenty-four-year-old Serena Nurse awoke that same morning with the unhappy condition of still living under her father’s roof. Her three sisters, and all of her older brothers had all married and were raising children. They each busied themselves in building their own homes and families while Serena was becoming increasingly referred to as the unfortunate one—a role fate had placed her in since birth, or so it went. A huge invisible S hung about her next like an albatross—S for spinster. She might just as well stitch the word to her dresses and shirts.

  Her mother had said only last night, “Your sister Becca’s to have another child.”

  Becca’s third. Serena had replied with a pasted on smile: “Sweet, smart, beautiful Becca, how wonderful for her and John Tarbell.”

  Becca was the eldest sister, named after her mother, Rebecca. Mary, the younger sister, already had three boys, Elizabeth a boy and a girl. Nephews and nieces to spare for Auntie Serena.

  Dressed in a shift-dress and her brother’s white shirt tucked and covered by a cowhide vest, Serena frowned at her reflection and angrily pulled a brush through her hair as if the effort might push unwanted thoughts away. She hoped Mother might later braid her hair, but for now, she tidied it into a ponytail. She was so very tired of having it up in a severe bun in the style of her mother and grandmother; she was even more tired of wearing plain and colorless, baggy clothing—gray, beige, and brown items that hung like a sheet from thick, ugly shoulder straps as big as a harness. To make matters worse, people expected her to then cover this with an equally ugly apron—a symbol of oppression so far as she was concerned. The damnable apron and bonnet. In general, women had one purpose in life—to learn the trade of the good and dutiful wife—the Goodwife or slave to a Goodman! She must conform—as assuredly as all men must learn the frugal and sensible management of resources or husbandry.

  She said to her reflection, “Serenity Nurse—despite your name—you’ll never be treated like someone’s herd animal.” She would never be a resource in that sense, but most good men in their society thought of and treated their wives and children as chattel, and their maid servants had it even worse.