Children of Salem

by Robert W. Walker

“Put up to it by Goode, yes.”

  “M’god.” Jeremy hadn’t seen this coming, and yet all the signs were there. The missing sword from over Parris’ hearth mysteriously gone, mysteriously returned, the so-called chicken blood stain on the floor, the witch pie that was meant to solve problems of being bewitched, but which could contain worse things than a ‘witch’s urine’, say like blood, bile, tainted crushed meats. There’d been no reluctance on Tituba’s part to take to the stable, a place where she may or may not have continued her dark plan with Goode.

  Jeremy recalled the bloodstained straw. And what about Betty Parris? Had she been lured outside to the barn to witness a ‘blood sacrifice’ and to be told that the Black Man who carried his Black Bible, the minister of Satan himself, had written Betty’s name in his god-awful book, because she had been a bad girl with Mercy?

  All supposition on Jeremy’s part. All enough to hang a witch so far as a man like Samuel Parris was concerned. His target was Goode, but he’d take out another, his Barbados servant with Goode, if necessary.

  Parris again started toward their destination. He kept fingering some paper folded lengthwise and posited in his inside breast pocket.

  As they continued in silence, Jeremy gave a moment’s thought to the rights of an accused witch in New England. Here the law of England prevailed, despite the overthrow of Governor Andros, which had left things in such disarray that Increase Mather must go to the new King of England—himself seated after a revolution coinciding with what had occurred in the colonies, law must prevail. Guilty until proven innocent ruled, but Goode and Tituba did have some rights: the right to face accusers, the right to a speedy trial, the right to a rope rather than being burned at the stake—considered barbarous. After all, witch or no, they remained English citizens, under the law.

  “We’ll burn that bitch Goode at the stake,” Parris blurted out as they neared the parish house, but rather than go in the gate, he kept going, Jeremy trying to keep up. Parris’ face had become red. His remark about putting witches to the torch informed Jeremy that Parris knew less of the law than he’d pretended. However, this was no time to correct the man. If Jeremy wished to avoid another lecture on the horrors of disagreement, and the absolute need to concur with one Samuel Parris, he must choose his battles wisely. For the moment, he simply wondered where they were going.

  “Tituba will also feel the full brunt of the law,” continued Parris, “but at least she has brains ’nough to’ve confessed.”

  “So-ah . . . when were they apprehended?” began Jeremy, slogging onward. “And where’re these wretches being held?”

  “Last night, during your strange absence, sir.” They passed the barn where inside Dancer still waited for feed. “As to where they’re being kept? Where do you suppose?”

  “Your root cellar? The village jailhouse?”

  He wheeled on Jeremy. “Absolutely not. This is no simple civil matter, Jeremy.”

  “Salem Town Jail?” A place for pirates, thieves, cutthroats, and murderers, Jeremy thought. He also thought about the sudden, swift progression of things here, and knew that by placing Goode and Tituba into Salem Town Jail that he had automatically upped the ante. There was a village jail where they might have been housed, but to house them at the Town sent the message that they were not simple miscreants who’d be dealt with by the church assize or the village civil court, but rather the criminal court. It made Jeremy wonder how long had Parris been preparing to hatch these complaints and arrests? Which launched a vivid memory of that first night when Parris may well have seized upon the moment of Jeremy’s arrival to encourage Tituba’s contacts with Goode by putting his servant out of the house.

  Jeremy recalled how he had protested her treatment at the time, saying that he’d be perfectly willing to take the stable that first night. Tituba Indian had gone from living beneath the stairwell like a cur, to living with the dumb animals in the stable, to living in a filthy, disease-infected jail cell the likes of which was the worst in Jeremy’s experience anywhere—save for the hovel that passed for a jail in the village.

  In fact, the quick progression from housekeeper-servant to enemy of the family, and now the colony, had so many levels as to resemble the layers of an onion; Jeremy could not help but wonder just how much of it might be manipulation on the part of Samuel Parris—how to get rid of not one major thorn in his side, Goode, but a second, Tituba with one fell swoop.

  Jeremy also wondered about the nature and weight of the so-called evidence against Goode and Tituba might be: a doll in the likeness stuck full with pins? A portion of witch pie? The minister’s sword? What? But Parris had also spoken of a confession. How many bruises, welts, and waves of the whip, had it taken to elicit this confession?

  But for now he must keep step with Parris, who did not go toward his barn or orchard but onward toward the center of the village.

  “Curious, Samuel, but have you anything beyond the black woman’s confession?”

  “I do.” He nodded vigorously as if he’d discovered the secret of youth. “I do.”

  “I’d like to hear it.”

  “You will in due time; in due time, everyone will.”

  Jeremy wondered what he meant by everyone? Everyone in the village? Salem Harbor? The entire colony of Massachusetts? He also wondered what Parris meant about revelations yet to come? “What possible revelations, Samuel, can be had in this matter if everyone in the village already accepts that Sarah Goode is a bona-fide witch who works in both white magic and black?”

  Parris again stopped but this time he posted a notice on a post outside Ingersoll’s. He’d brought his own small hammer and pocketful of tacks, unseen until now. Jeremy assumed it was a birth notice and paid no attention to the document except to see that Parris had another copy yet in his pocket.

  Again they were on the march, this time straight across the street, going back toward the parish house and barn, where Jeremy hoped to feed Dancer and find a quiet moment to weigh all that had happened in so short a time.

  “She’s a blackhearted witch, that Goode,” Parris shouted to anyone passing by. “Everyone’s heard her curses on me!”

  “But as I say—” Jeremy tugged at his sleeve—“the village knows that Goode is, was, and always will be.”

  “A witch, yes!”

  “A witch she has always been, sir. No surprise in it. One in every village, accepted as part of village life, sir.”

  Parris’ lips curled in an inscrutable smile, and he repeated some of Jeremy’s words. “Always a witch, raised a pagan by her mother.”

  “That’s what people say.”

  “And raising her child the same—the reason I took the child from her!”

  “Everyone knows that as well, sir.”

  “Despite a front of her being a Christian by joining the village parish—so long ago no one recalls the event—the woman continues to practice her agnostic, heretical practices.”

  Jeremy read the hatred that’d taken root between the lines in Parris’ little speech. “So what do you propose happens to Tituba?”

  “She’ll burn, by damn, right alongside Goode!” Parris wheeled in the middle of he street, shouting it for all to hear. “She’s a traitor to me, to my family, and to God ’imself.”

  “Witches and convicted traitors get the rope in English law, sir. Besides, you say she’s confessed.”

  “Traitors to God are burned at the stake!”

  Perhaps in Romania, Germany still, Great Britain hundreds of years before, thought Jeremy, but he didn’t wish to argue. Apparently, no one’s informed Parris that you don’t burn people in modern day Massachusetts, that the King’s colony extended to its citizens the laws of England, and that the days of witch hunts and witch burnings were long over.

  Jeremy realized that they hadn’t returned to the parish house but to the meetinghouse where Parris busied himself again with tacks and notice. This time, Jeremy took a moment to read what the minister had prepared. The notice proclaimed two
witches had been discovered operating in the Devil’s arts and arrested within the village limits.

  Jeremy noticed a gathering crowd around the notice put up at Ingersoll’s now. He realized that the village was filling up with the curious by the minute. How business at Ingersoll’s was suddenly booming. Some congregated about Ingersoll’s steps, while others on the street came for the meetinghouse door, anxious to read the minister’s words. In fact, word had already spread of the warrants sworn out and the arrests of Goodwife Goode and Tituba Indian—the two witches named in the warrants and now publicly posted.

  Jeremiah had seen and felt such electrified air once before, in a hamlet along the Connecticut River. The mob had lynched a witch in that instance. No trials, no delays, just a lynching of a perceived threat, and he and every sensible man present, counted on one hand, could do nothing to stop the violence. In fact, Jeremy had suffered a concussion when he had stepped in and tried.

  “I’d like to interview Tituba, sir,” he said to Parris who looked stricken at the suggestion. “You say she’s confessed, so I’m sure she’ll not burn at the stake or hang for that matter, and I should like to learn as much from her as I might—about how these dark measures can seep into the thoughts of a servant.”

  “You beware, Jeremy, lest she taint you. I suggest you keep your distance. She’s not fully confessed.”

  Is this a confession on your part? Jeremy wanted to ask but thought it wise to simply listen.

  “I mean, Tituba’s only confessed to an association with Goode whom we know to be guilty beyond question.”

  “Tituba confesses only to entering into a covenant with Goode?”

  “Thus far, yes.”

  “A conspiracy to make your child fall ill?” Jeremy again recalled the strange doll that he’d seen in Goode’s possession not once but twice.

  Parris looked off into the distance as if studying the Nurse homes nestled a-ways off. “But that Barbados black knows more, Jeremy . . . far more. And I will break her. Make no mistake about that.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  April 13, 1692, late evening

  Two weeks had passed and tonight at the village home of Judge John Corwin, Jeremiah Wakely sipped brandy where he stood at the hearth fire. Corwin had opened his wine cellar and brandy cabinet to his guests, and none had more spirits in the village than did the judge. Jeremy stared hard at the accused witch, Tituba Indian, who was bound hand and foot to a chair in the middle of the common room. Her back made stiff by the ladder-back chair that’d become a part of her, she quietly wept as the men talked of the weather, the poor crop season, the news from Boston and London, and little Betty Parris’ condition, which had, like a disease, begun to infect other village children, most notably Mary Wolcott and Mercy Lewis, the minister’s nieces, and Anne Putnam Junior, the daughter of a militia lieutenant and deacon in Parris’ church. Furthermore, as Putnam and Parris were related, and so too the children, it appeared on the surface an attack against a single godly family of the village parish.

  People were aghast at the notion that bewitchment could be so contagious but somewhat pleased to think it directed at one family and not everyone in the Salem.

  “Don’t you see the pattern here?” Parris burst out when Judge Jonathan Hathorne suggested a medical condition and mentioned the lack of proper medical people in the village, and that he’d never had any relief at any time in his own ailments from Dr. Porter.

  “But sirs,” continued Parris, palms extended in a plea, “they strike at my daughter, nieces, I tell you, and now my cousin’s daughter!” Parris paced and ranted. “Who’ll be next? Your honor’s grandchildren? Not that I’d wish it ’pon anyone’s child but if they dare strike at a minister, why not a magistrate like yourself?”

  Hathorne stricken features at the suggestion spoke of sheer horror.

  Parris continued. “I tell you this is Satan transformed, working through the weak-minded Goode and this—” he pointed at the bound Tituba—“this disturbed and misguided servant of mine.”

  The sheriff had escorted Tituba to the Judge’s house in chains. The chains remained rattling about the thin woman now as she heaved with fear and whimpering.

  “So you see it as a run at us from the Devil himself, Mr. Parris,” said Mr. Noyes, who’d been caring for Reverend Higginson and taking up the slack at the First Church of Salem Town.

  “Aye, precisely what it is!” Parris turned on Noyes, who’d come as eyes and ears for the ill and bedridden Reverend Nehemiah Higginson.

  Jeremy had carefully watched Noyes, trying to ascertain if he did or did not have Reverend Higginson’s complete trust—if he did or did not support Samuel Parris’ bid for the parsonage deed. If he did or did not know of Jeremy’s ruse.

  So far, Jeremy feared Noyes a noisy little man not capable of forming his own opinion on the matter of the threat to Salem either way—be it Parris or the forces of the much-touted forces of the Invisible World. So far, as with Judge Hathorne, Parris handily led the man.

  In fact, Noyes—and it seemed both village civil magistrates, Corwin and Hathorne—were all too willing to follow Parris’ twisted logic as he spewed forth his version of events. He even recounted the parlor trick that day at the Putnam hearth when he “exorcised” a pile of vomit from a frightened child.

  Not one of these supposed learned men had questioned a single precept or assumption that Parris had laid before them.

  Outside yet another drenching winter rain had settled over a sodden gray Salem. Corwin’s home and jurisdiction extended only to the village limits, whereas Hathorne’s bench was in Salem Town, but both courts handled small claims and suits, and whenever a case smacked of a theological matter, the judges bowed to the churches to conduct their own trials, as in the decision to excommunicate Sarah Goode and to divest her of her child. Corwin had signed off on that bit of justice.

  If a farmer believed by some means his cart wheel had been sabotaged by a neighbor, if his cows, hens, pigs, or sheep had been bewitched, if his crops had in any manner been tampered with—often the claim being witchcraft or devilish chicanery and curse—again Corwin and Hathorne acted in the best interest of everyone by keeping it a local matter and most often a church assize matter, wherein the church elders and minister made the final ruling on a matter.

  At the same time, Jeremy knew that such magistrates earned their living by the number of cases they decided. All quite loose for a ‘system of government’, and Jeremy was often aghast at what provincial judges moved forward with—cases that should never have seen the light of day.

  Even so, Jeremiah Wakely hoped and fervently believed that the judges of Salem would nip Parris’ fiery claims in the bud, here and now, tonight. Before this witch-hunt went any further or got out of hand. After all, Corwin and Hathorne were the two wise men in this, Jeremy told himself. But he had misgivings. It seemed everyone was following Parris’ lead like so many puppets on a string, and so he cleared his throat and commented.

  “Gentlemen, I have seen this sort of thing in Maine and in Connecticut, and I can tell you that you do not want to turn matter into a spectator sport.”

  “Sport? You talk of sport?” countered Parris immediately. “What’re you saying, Mr. Wakely.

  “I am saying that to feed fears of witchcraft among us to the general population only breeds the worst kind of chaos, and you might well have lynchings and barn burnings on your hands.”

  “Mr. Wakely, you of all people,” shouted Parris, charging toward Jeremy. “You’ve seen my daughter’s affliction. You heard what Dr. Porter and Dr. Swain have diagnosed.”

  “True I’ve seen her condition, and I did hear Dr. Swain pronounce her beyond his help.”

  “Beyond his help? He said the same as Porter—bewitched—which put her condition beyond them both, beyond medical help.”

  Jeremy’s last look at Betty had come only hours ago when Parris insisted he see her condtion at its worst. He had for once not exaggerated the circumstances. While Mar
y Wolcott suffered from fever and nightmares and talking gibberish, Betty’s body lay twisted in poses impossible to imagine or to be believed without one’s having seen it. The girl had gone into a catatonic state. All the same, Jeremy defended his position in a calm manner.

  “I am only suggesting that we have a duty, sir, to seek other answers, other solutions, more experienced medical help perhaps . . . before we begin hanging witches from every tree and turning Salem Village into a-a Goya painting.”

  “Sound idea,” said Reverend Joseph Hale of nearby Waverly. Hale had entered from the storm late, removing his wet overcoat just as Jeremiah and Parris had crossed swords. “We must go slowly, carefully, gentlemen.”

  “Who is Goya?” asked Corwin, pouring himself another brandy.

  Parris had cornered Judge Hathorne now and whispered in his ear while the fire at the hearth invited Hale near, spitting embers and blue flame within the red. Flames were tamped now and again by rainwater seeping down the flue. The flames were welcomed by Hale, a tall, good-looking man below the black uniform of minister as he kept up a noisy appreciation of warming his hands.

  Jeremy stood near the hearth as well, but the same flames that warmed Hale only recalled Parris phony exorcism to Jeremy’s mind. He imagined Noyes would have applauded Parris’ performance at the Putnam hearth, but he withheld judgment on Hale for now.

  Then everyone was surprised when at the door stood the stooped over Reverend Nehemiah Higginson. Young Reverend Noyes immediately flew to him, helping him with his coat and hat. “What, sir, are you thinking? Coming out in this weather? In your condition? You could catch your death.”

  “Quiet Nicholas!” The old man was interrupted by a chronic, gut-wrenching cough. “We both know I’ve already caught my death.” More coughing as the others muttered and mumbled their welcoming words to the elder minister. “What little time I have left, I mean to make the best of, gentlemen. Now, please, shall we dispense with curtseys and courtesies, eh? For the sake of time and an old man who has precious little of it?”

  “You know the purpose then of our meeting?” asked Jeremy, who had been fawning as if meeting a saint, saying how much he had heard of Higginson’s good works in Salem Town. Meanwhile, Jeremy was thinking: This is the man who’s pinned his final hopes on me.