She picked up an awful gingham bonnet that her father always pestered her to wear. She flung it across the room. Finished primping, she stepped away from the mirror and out of her bedroom and into the great room to find it empty. Unusual. Where is everyone, she wondered. “Mother? Father?”
No answer.
Stillness. The house felt heavy with emptiness.
The night before they’d celebrated with ale and melon when Mother Nurse had found the strength to climb from her months’ long sickbed. She’d been ill the entire winter. Mrs. Rebecca Nurse had aged over those months, losing much of her hair, her sight weakening, the old strength in her voice and body now a ghost of itself—until last night. Last night she’d spent several hours at the hearth here in the great room in grand spirits and having a dram of spirits as well.
But where was Mama now? And Papa for that matter?
“Can ya do something with your mother, Serena?” Her father poked his head in at the window. He stood out on the porch, waving his arms.
Serena rushed to his side. “What is it?”
Francis Nurse, stooped with age and a head shorter than Serena, nodded in the direction of the three oaks. “Look at her. Fool woman.”
Serena watched her mother walking amid the snow-covered ground where outdoor tables for picnics stood upended against the oaks. While she had a homespun shawl pinned over her shoulders, Rebecca wore a thin sack-cloth dress, socks and shoes. “I don’t understand. What is she doing with that broom?”
“Dusting the snow away. She’s insisting we ready the tables for a meal.”
“What? Now? In this cold? How could you let her, Papa!”
“I tried to stop her! You know how stubborn she is!”
Serena watched her mother, broom in hand, waddling about beneath her three oaks. Her “precious trees” as she called them. The huge oaks adorned their front yard. Rebecca whisked snow from the upturned tables that leaned in against the trunks. Serena leaned into her father and said, “But it’s so cold; it’s only March.”
“Tell her that. I’ve tried.”
“Obviously not hard enough.”
“‘No sitting on cold ground or benches in any month with an R in it’ I told her!”
“Is she out of her head?”
“Stubborn, ornery is what, like I said. Like you, she is.”
Ornery or uncertain, ornery or fearful, Serena wondered. Was her mother afraid if they waited longer for the traditional Easter gathering beneath the oaks that she wouldn’t be on hand? That she would’ve passed on before April or May when the more clement weather prevailed?
Her long illness and convalescence had had the entire family thinking such thoughts, Serena included. But now her mother was putting down the tables, dusting them with broom. “Perhaps you should lend a hand, Father.”
“I thought it’d dissuade her when I refused to help,” Francis said, a year older than Rebecca.
Serena stared a moment at her square-shouldered, short father, his skin as brown the bark on the oaks, a result of years of labor beneath the sun. “Now you’re being stubborn.” Barefoot, Serena rushed to help her mother with the chore.
“Persuade her away from there and back inside,” he shouted after Serena.
“Why’re you still under my roof, child?” Rebecca Nurse asked Serena now alongside her, helping her to bring down a second table to set it upright.
“I’m too tall perhaps? Too thin maybe? Perchance too awkward . . . ”
“Men like women with rumps as soft and round as the bread we bake.”
This made mother and daughter laugh. Then Rebecca added, “I think it’s your mouth, child.”
“But I don’t swear . . . not often.”
“No, but you’ve never learned to hold your tongue. Men can’t abide a woman—”
“—Who talks back! I know, I know.” Serena had heard this now habitual remark so often that it no longer held any hurt. “Little wonder no one will have me, eh, Mother?”
“Indeed. Candlewick.” It was an endearment Rebecca had given Serena when she was a preteen, one that spoke of her thin and sinewy stature then but hardly anymore. She had filled out, her tomboy appearance gone with her curvaceous body.
From beneath her bonnet, Rebecca said,“I sent your brother, Ben, to call everyone here.”
Serena hadn’t heard the nickname, Candlewick, in perhaps six or so years, but here was Mother saying it as if her youngest daughter was still a child and a tomboy at that.
“Men want women who can work a field,” said Serena while taking the broom from her mother’s hand.
“Like a good mule,” joked her mother.
“Work a field by day, deliver sons by night,” Serena said as they swept away snow and ice from the tables they had leveled.
“But you’ve got good teeth and gums! As good as any mule in Salem,” Rebecca joked on.
“First thing Papa looked for when he met you? I’ve heard you say so!”
They laughed so hard snow fell from the leaves overhead.
“Mother!” pleaded Francis from the porch. “Do come in now the tables are dusted, please!”
Serena, her bare toes pinching with cold now, remembered to wipe the sleep from her eyes. “Father worries.”
“Oh, the old fool. Do you think he’d lend a hand? Not so much as a finger!”
“Mother, we’re done here.”
Serena twirled the broom, its bristles gleaming in the morning sun. Neighbors passed by the gate at Ipswich Road, most with bundles of kindling, vegetables, bags of grain, some pushing carts, and all curious at Mother Nurse’s antics in the snow. Most politely waved and shouted their morning greetings. Serena waved for Rebecca who’d remained oblivious of the outsiders. Any who were not family, according to Rebecca’s teachings were suspect and to be considered ‘outsiders’ and quite possibly mischief-makers to boot.
“There’s too much yet to do, Serena,” began her mother. “If we’re to gather the family and bake and cook and set table.”
“Three tables you mean?”
“Yes, enough for the entire clan.”
“Mother, none will come for an outdoor gathering when’s so cold and blustery.” As if to punctuate her words, a chill gust defied the warm sun to swirl about them.
Rebecca placed a hand on Serena’s forearm and looked her in the eye. “You know full well that if I ask it of my brood, they will come.” Calm assurance from both voice and eyes came through. In fact, Serena saw none of the watery, bleariness of her mother’s illness. Instead it’d been replaced by a certainty and a clarity Serena had missed for too long in her mother’s pale blue eyes.
“Have you really sent word round the compound?” asked Francis in the tone of a slap. He’d ventured out to help Rebecca negotiate the stairs.
“Yes. I have.”
“By Benjamin, I suppose.”
“By Bennie, yes.”
“Mother,” interrupted Serena, “you said Joseph too, earlier.”
“Both, yes—I’ve sent both riding off!”
Benjamin remained her baby, youngest of her children; he too lived in the main house, the old Towne home that had belonged to Rebecca’s father. Serena thought Ben conspicuously absent this morning, and now she knew the reason why. Mother had dispatched him to all the surrounding homes filled with little Nurses, little Eastys, little little Cloyses, and little Tarbells—Rebecca’s twenty-seven grandchildren. She meant to have an outdoor gathering with food, drink, children and grandchildren all in one place. A feast, a spring festival.
“We could as well do this indoors, Mother.”
“No, no,” she absently replied. “He told me specifically that it be outside and today. Beneath the new sun.”
“But today is Sunday. Hold . . . wait. Who told you?”
“A voice . . . a voice inside.”
“A voice?”
“All right, my Maker . . . your Maker.”
“Ah-ah . . . I see. But Mother, everyone will be off to church.
”
“They’ve been told to forgo Parris’ vile sermons for this one day.”
“How long’ve I told ’em all to do just that?” asked Serena, her features tightening at the mention of Parris’ name. “I heard a rumor that he’s gotten himself an apprentice, oddly, someone named Wakely.”
“Wakely? Be it our lost Jeremiah?”
“No . . . most unlikely.” Serena gave thought again to the possibility—one she had dreamed on since hearing the nasty little rumor. “But if it is Jere Wakely—” Serena gave her broom a strong forward push to punctuate her point—“I’ll, I’ll give him a piece of my mind, I assure you.”
“Whoever the poor man is, he’ll be filled with Parris’ venom soon enough if he’s apprenticed to that man.” Rebecca negotiated the steps with husband on one side and daughter on the other.
Francis replied, “Just galls me to hear that country parson speak.”
“Galls me,” added Serena, “his likening himself and his situation to Christ’s condemnation.”
Rebecca grimaced and shivered with a sudden chill. She clutched her shawl, one that she had knitted during her convalescence, tighter to her. “My sisters tell me he’s now likening his own flock to the money changers and Pilate and swine.”
“I told those sisters of yours to mind what they say and to not to pester your mind with such nonsense as goes on in the village meetinghouse!” Francis erupted.
“No, instead you want to bring me all the nonsensical news sweetened and strained like porridge!” Rebecca laughed as she found her favorite porch rocker. “And if you won’t convey the truth no more, Deacon Nurse—”
He’d plopped into a rocker beside her and instantly defended himself. “Now that’s not true and you know—”
“True enough! Keeping me poor dear old feminine ears from harm…keeping me in the dark!”
“Mother,” interceded Serena.
“So then it will be my faithful sisters—and Serena here! She never sugar-coated a thing in her life.”
“You needn’t be upset by that place,” he promised. “I have it on good authority that our Mr. Parris is not long for Salem.”
“Indeed?” asked Serena, who’d remained standing and towering over her elderly parents.
“I imagine June or July and we’ll have seen the last of the Mr. Parris.”
“So you’ve been to see Mr. Higginson again, have you?” asked Rebecca.”
“I don’t understand the depth of Mr. Parris’ venom toward members of his own congregation,” confessed Serena, pacing the porch, lifting the broom anew and sweeping to quell her restless pacing.
“Why it’s mainly due our withholding his payment.” He searched for a pipe and tobacco in his vest pockets.
“Ne’er thought it a good plan, Francis. And don’t smoke so near me.”
“Just till this matter of the parsonage deed is cleared up, you see. But you know, Mother,” continued Francis, “even some of our brothers and sisters disagree with us on the matter of the parsonage grounds.”
“So?”
“So? So who’s to say if they’ll come to my table?”
“Our table! And they’ll come no matter. Disagreements will be put aside,” Rebecca assured her husband and daughter, and then she cheered on seeing a red-brested robin land atop one of the cleaned tables and step about like a sea captain inspecting the deck. “It’s a wonderful sign that!” she erupted.
Mother Nurse then turned her attention on their large holdings, smoke curling from distant chimneys at other homes on the compound. “They owe me that much,” she spoke of the people in the homes on the compound. “They know I’ll give ’em a righteous sermon, sure, and enough gumption to see us through another harvest.”
Serena snickered. “A righteous sermon.”
“What of it?” asked her mother. “Out with it.”
“Just that it’s become something…well, rare in these parts—a righteous instead of a self-righteous sermon.”
“You mea self-serving,” corrected Francis, who’d clamored to his feet and found the other end of the porch where he puffed on his pipe.
Rebecca had for years preached in the absence of an ordained minister in the area. Many people still came to pray with her at the house, including Serena’s aunts.
Their morning’s conversation had Serena convinced that Mother was as sharp-witted as ever; perhaps it’d been her wit that’d kept her going throughout the long winter’s illness. Certainly, Mother had the measure of Mr. Samuel Parris.
# # # # #
The home of Bray Wilkins at Will’s Hill, Essex County, the following morning
Anne Putnam’s father, Thomas Putnam, had spent the night at the home of a business partner, cousin, and friend—Bray Wilkins. Bray as he brayed like a mule whenever he laughed. So far as Thom Putnam felt, a man could never be counted poor if he should stop to count his friends, though he did not fully believe it himself and would rather be wealthy than befriended by such as Bray.
Bray was a lanky, bull-shouldered man, a gray-bearded grandfather many times over, something Thomas believed he’d never be. He held a strong suspicion that his eleven-year-old daughter, Anne, would not live a long life, and another certainty—that he’d never have a son to carry on his name, nor a grandson for that matter.
Thomas could not imagine any man desperate enough to take Anne Junior for a wife, as everyone in Salem Village knew the Putnam girl was frail of heart and weak-limbed, and rather useless, and nothing much to look at; worst of all, she’d lived a life of sickness and fits from birth, a birth defect, perhaps the same as took the lives of her brothers and sisters before her.
Putnam had slept poorly here on Wilkins’ maidservant’s bed. The sixteen-year-old servant girl, Susana Sheldon, had been ordered to give up her bed to Thomas, that she could as well sleep on the floor at the hearth.
Now with everyone in the cramped house gone to sleep, Thomas inched closer and closer to the servant, and in a moment he aroused the comely young thing. “Why don’t you come back to-yer-bed, honey?”
“No sir, if it please you, I am fine here where ‘tis warm.”
“Would please me to be warm . . . warmed by you, Susana.” He ran his hands over her, but she fought off his advances, nearly catching her nightshirt aflame in the effort. In order not to wake Bray or his family, Thomas let it pass, shushing the girl, who certainly could carry his seed as he guessed her age at seventeen or eighteen.
He’d been drinking heavily with Bray all evening, and this morning, he was paying the piper sure. “Head feels split open by the blunt end of an ax,” he said to Susana, trying to elicit a smile from her, but it was no good. “But the look you’re givin’ your dear uncle now . . . now that’s e’en worse than an ax to the head!”
Still no good. Still no easing of the fear in the girl’s eyes. That look as if she might scream at any moment. The same look that had held him off Mercy Lewis up ’till now.
Neither Mercy then nor Susana now had given him any sign of their having any normal, healthy leanings in that direction. Neither seemed to like being touched even on the most innocent of places, a pat on the head, a hand on the shoulder, nor a kiss on the hand or cheek. At the moment, Susana showed no sign of changing or of suddenly acquiescing to his desire. Instead at this moment, she was crouched like an animal, back against the fire, ready to run yet clutching her covers to her bosom at the same time.
A voice in his head told him it was not worth losing friends and respect over. A voice in his head suggested he give it up, and so he decided he must.
As Thomas fought to his feet, knocking things over, the servant girl now stifled her laughter at his discomfort, doing so by pushing thick strands of her own hair into her mouth—which looked to Thomas a sensuous gesture indeed. His back ached from center to shoulder blades, a stinging, radiating pain like a drumbeat. The straw ticking from the rents in the girl’s mattress clung to his back.
He recalled snatches of what he’d said already
to the servant girl, not wishing to repeat himself. But the drink had hold of his memory. He gazed again on the pretty young thing. Scruffy and dirty to be sure, this Susana Sheldon.
He suddenly reached out and pulled her into him, and she twisted away like a large snake. Her features displayed a pure disgust and she pleaded, “Please, sir, if’n you wake Mr. Bray, he’ll tear me up for it.”
“I’ll protect you,” he lied. “Just be quiet, and do’s I say, girl. I mean woman. You are a woman, now aren’t ya?”
But she wouldn’t listen or lay down or obey as he pulled her back to the bed he wished to share with her, and the layers of fear and disdain came out in nails ripping into Putnam’s grip on her. He slapped her hard across the face and under his breath said in her ear, “A word from me, wench, and Bray will flay yer backside in a way only that old brute can. Now me…me, I am gentle with you, love.”
“You’ll wake him and there’ll be hell to pay!”
“Then by all means, we’ll be quiet,” he countered.
“No, sir,” she’d replied and tore away from him, her nightshirt revealing a breast.
“No? Don’t say no to me, Susana. It’s time you were made a woman.” He tried a step toward her, reached out again, but she ducked away.
“Touch me again, sir, and I’ll scream out me lungs . . . sir!”
She was sneering at him now, all fear replaced by hatred. Thomas backed off as again the voices in his head warned him against this foolish action. “I’m…I’m sorry, child. It’s the drink, you see. The devil takes me when I drink too much.”
“Get thee behind me then!” she shouted.
“Shhh…quiet,” he now pleaded and rushed back to her bed and threw the covers over himself.
# # # # #
The following morning, Thomas Putnam’s eyes proved bleary and his head felt like an anvil, but propped on an elbow, he watched Susana going about her morning chores. Putnam had to admire the verve with which she’d delivered that line so memorable even to a man without much memory left: Get thee behind me! He felt there was hope yet, as she had not said Satan in her epitaph.
Children of Salem Page 9
