Children of Salem

by Robert W. Walker

  “I am well aware of the accusations flying about, Mr. Ah . . .Wakely is it? Mr. Parris, are you at all aware of the demons you’ve already let loose?”

  “I’ve let loose? Me?”

  “Rumor and gossip already has it down, sir, that the village is rife with bewitched children. The population is no longer content with bewitched mules and cows, now it must be children.”

  “There’s no gossip about it!” countered Parris, pacing before them. “My child and others’ve fallen victim to witchcraft.”

  “And you’re sure of that?” asked Hale.

  Parris pointed to the unfortunate Tituba in her bonds. “As sure as you see this witch before us!”

  Higginson found a seat for himself, gaffawing as he did so. “Samuel, your house is not in order.”

  “Order? Order? What order can there be in a house that’s long before me become a-a fulcrum for attack?”

  “And your parish, all of Salem Village, is it all under attack too?”

  “I tell you, sir, it is all true! Not rumor. Invited in is He and not by me!”

  Higginson’s eyes bore into Parris. “ By He, you refer to Bael, Lucifer, Loki, Beelzebub?”

  “He who has many names, yes.”

  It seemed Higginson wanted Parris to say it. “He who calls himself Legion?”

  “Satan. Yes, the Devil himself, Mr. Higginson.”

  Higginson struggled to his feet, Noyes helping at his side. The old man’s cane tapped out an anthem as he moved toward Tituba and circled her prison chair. “You, Mr. Parris, you look on this servant of yours and you see a devil worshipper?”

  “Indeed, I do, sir.”

  “What of you other men? Mr. Hale, Corwin, Hathorne?” Hale held his tongue. Corwin sipped his brandy. Hathorne shrugged.

  “I know what Mr. Noyes believes, sadly I do. He is among the most superstitious men I have ever encountered, but what about you, Mr. Wakely?” asked Higginson. “What do you see looking on this woman of color?”

  Jeremy found all eyes on him. “I see a frightened untutored child without Christ.”

  “Is that truly what you see, Mr. Wakely? Can you be sure of your senses?”

  “I am sure.”

  “Anything you wish to add?” Higginson rounded Tituba like a scientist studying a specimen.

  “I have it on good authority that a confession was beaten out of the woman.”

  “Good authority? What authority?”

  “Her master, here, Mr. Parris.”

  Parris leapt in, shouting, “I have labored years trying to educate Tituba to Christ’s teaching, and she was doing well for a time. She sat in God’s house with my children and my wife, but some cruel evil filters through this place, a passion for wickedness fanned by my enemies, and they latched onto poor Tituba here to turn her from Christ and from my teachings.”

  Higginson understood the twisting, gnarled roots of Parris’ arguments better than any man present. As a result, Parris’ words left the old man cold. The others in the room waited in rapt attention to Higginson’s rebuttal. It came as a long, halting, ratcheting cough.

  Fearing the moment lost, Jeremy leapt in. “What Mr. Higginson is saying strikes me as sound. Caution must be taken. Caution must be our watchword.”

  “Good,” said Higginson between coughs. “Goode, the woman Sarah Goode is a vile and dirty person whose soul is likely the devil’s own for many years now. Hang her and be done with it, Hathorne. Sacrifice Goode and send everyone home happy, and do it quickly and efficiently, so as to move on with your real duties.”

  It’d worked before, Jeremy thought. Throw one sacrificial lamb to the mob and they often went home and tended their farms and the witch-hunt was over. “It’s perhaps our best and only option,” agreed Hale, which lifted the man in Jeremy’s opinion. Better that one should die than two or three or to see this witch hunt multiply.

  “Fools, all of you!” countered Parris. “This is not Goode’s doing alone! That old bat has no power to harm me, and yet she has. I ask you from whence this sudden power comes?”

  “Of course, a minister attacked,” challenged Hathorne. “This is no simple case, and certainly no simpleton’s curse!”

  “What gall it must take to attack a minister’s daughter with their black arts!” agreed Mr. Noyes, shaken. “It could be any one of us next.”

  “There is a war raging, and you men sit sipping brandy and talking as if this nigger here is innocent!” added Parris. “I tell you, she and Goode are but the tip end of this iceberg.”

  “Don’t go down that road, Samuel!” warned Higginson.

  But Parris raced down it. “There’s an entire coven meeting some nights just beyond my apple orchard in those deep woods, and the coven, not Goode or even Tituba here alone’ve cursed our parsonage and parish, but a bevy of ugly-soul’d, devil-worshipping scum!”

  Jeremy saw the smooth-faced, young Noyes shiver as he listened to this news.

  Hale’s expression, beyond a widening of the eyes, remained unreadable.

  Corwin lifted his glass to lips and continued drinking; his reputation had him doing this a great deal of the time.

  Hathorne nodded vigorously and went to Parris, standing beside him in a show of solidarity.

  Higginson shook his head in what, if put into words, might mean damn fools are at it again.

  Jeremy gnashed his teeth, a growing sense that practical and reasonable argument had all but flown up the chimney.

  Judge Hathorne stepped to Tituba’s tied and chained form, standing at her shoulder. “Is this how you repay your master, girl? Harming his child with your ugly friend Goode and her coven?”

  “I don’t do voodoo ‘gainst Betty! Not me! Goode! Goode do it.”

  “Goode and who else?” interrogated Hathorne, his thinning dark hair streaked with gray, his steely eyes coming round to match her stare, to read her.

  “I don’t know none of dem. I don’t go wid dem.”

  “Ignorant, eh? Ignorant and innocent?”

  “Yes, massa. Innocent.”

  The small black woman wore a simple gray cotton dress and sat on the edge of her chair, pulling at her bonds. Anyone could see she was in pain from the scars on her back, scars inflicted by Parris’ whip. Jeremy wondered where the beating had taken place. He imagined it had gone on at the jail, a black dungeon built into the side of a hill away from polite society. Jeremiah had seen jail cells in every community he’d ever been to and nothing compared in depravity to the Salem jails; they were little more than rat holes. The jailkeeper was a rat-faced, filthy man named Weed Gatter and if ever a man looked the devil, this one did.

  Hathorne circled Tituba now as he continued to interrogate her, looking down his nose at her as if looking on trash. Jeremy wondered if the judge kept his distance due to her being trash, or the possibility she was a witch.

  Tituba tried at first to follow Hathorne with her eyes, but this proved impossible as he circled. Jeremy wondered at the complete loss of her former pride and fire. All gone. Beaten from her. She’d gone from lioness to cowed house cat.

  Hathorne came in close behind this submissive Tituba, and he shouted into her ear, making her jump. “We will brook no more lies, girl!”

  “I already say hundred time, I don’t do it!”

  “Lies! More lies!”

  “Goode and her witches do it!”

  Higginson slammed his cane across one of Corwin’s tables, the sound like a gunshot. “I was given to understand, Mr. Parris, that this Bermuda Indian woman of yours is a witness, yet you are treating her as a threat? Locked in chains? Educate me, please.”

  “That was the original report, sir,” replied Parris, “but the crisis has deepened and changed.”

  “Evidence against the woman has increased,” added Hathorne.

  It was the first moment that Jeremy was privy to the fact that all these men had met on this matter before tonight. That this night’s meeting was a continuation of suspicion of witchcraft running rampant in th
e village. Was this the information that old Higginson had wanted to convey to him before he entered the village that first night? The information that had never come?

  “What evidence do you have that condemns this woman before us now?” asked Jeremiah, emboldened by Higginson’s example.

  “Goode tells a different story,” replied Parris, staring out at the rain-soaked village. “According to the old bat, Tituba here created the conditions necessary to the efficacy of the coven’s curse on my house.”

  Jeremy thought of the doll stuck with pins, the sword, the blood at the hearth, and the blood in the barn.

  “—And what Mr. Parris calls a deepening of the crisis,” added Hathorne, a hand on his buttons, “refers to a terrifying increase in the number of children in the village suddenly and inexplicably afflicted in the same manner as his daughter.”

  “I’ve heard rumors, but who?” asked Hale, going stiff at the fireplace. “Whose children?”

  Parris turned from the window and his thoughts. “My niece, Mary Wolcott under my roof, exhibiting signs, and my other niece, Mercy Lewis, in the Putnam household, along with the Putnam girl.”

  “Oh, poor woman, that Mrs. Putnam,” moaned Corwin, “to have this put upon her after enduring so much.” Corwin swallowed more Brandy.”

  “Thomas Putnam’s child is it?” asked Hale, who has his own flock to worry about in Waverly. “Thank God we’ve had no such troubles in our village.”

  “Convulsions and fits she endures, the little one,” continued Parris.

  Higginson held a hand up. “Hold, that child’s been afflicted in one manner or another all her life.”

  “Not my Mercy and not my Mary but they’re falling prey to the same fits and discontent and disobedience!”

  “Mary Wolcott, Mercy Lewis, Anne Putnam, Betty Parris,” Noyes quietly enumerated. “I heard too that Bray Wilkins’ maidservant, the Sheldon girl, that she’s of a sudden down with an awful sickness, too. Perhaps she’s also under attack by invisible forces?”

  Parris nodded solemnly. “It is spreading like a disease, I tell you. It is a disease, one spawned of Hades.”

  “Attack the children,” mumbled a frightened Noyes.

  “It’s what the Fallen Angel does,” declared Parris. “Attack the weakest among us.”

  Shaking his head, Noyes added, “Exactly as the books tell us how He will come with his invisible minions.”

  Jeremy didn’t like the way this was going.

  “How many children must suffer and die before we take action?” cried out Parris.

  “By what stretch do you prove death and murder, Mr. Parris?” asked Higginson.

  “I point to Thomas Putnam’s nine dead children, and it can’t be long before my own is dead of her contortions and afflictions. Thomas Putnam’s also informs me same as Noyes here of a young girl named Susana Sheldon, also showing signs of it. He has seen her up at Will’s Hill, Wilkins’ place. I am told, she had been seen in the company of Sarah Goode.”

  “In all the years no one has ever suspected foul play in the deaths of the Putnam children, so why now?” pressed Higginson, fire in his ancient eyes.

  “It has taken an outsider to see it clearly,” countered Parris, going to the old minister and standing over him where he sat. “It took me, sir.”

  “I see. So now you can see into the Invisible World of Satan?”

  “I have it on authority of those arrested, Goode and Tituba here, that those Putnam infants were murdered by those who midwifed at what should’ve been their birthing.”

  “Confessions beaten from an addled hag and a frightened servant?” asked Jeremy, going to Hathorne t plead for logic. “You can’t trust a confession tortured from a man or woman.”

  “You stay out of this, Mr. Wakely,” Parris said, rushing at him, their noses nearly touching. “You are not one of us, and you have no stake here.”

  “You said yourself it might take an outsider’s eye here, Mr. Parris.” No one challenged this, not even Higginson. Jeremy dared continue. “Your evidence of murder of the Putnam unborn appears as flimsy as blank parchment, sir.”

  “I have more evidence. Much more.”

  “Then reveal it.” Higginson tapped his cane hard on the floor.

  “Very well.” Parris went to a door, opened it and called to someone in an anteroom to come in. “I’d hoped to spare the children this, but you press my hand, Mr. Higginson, you and Wakely. Though I know not why.”

  From the anteroom, Thomas Putnam ushered in both his charge—Mercy Lewis—and his daughter, Anne, to stand before the ministers and the magistrates. “We’re here to give in evidence,” said Putnam as if he’d practiced the line.

  I’ll bet you are, Jeremy thought but held his tongue.

  Higginson shook his head. “These, I suppose, are two of the so-called afflicted girls?”

  “Two of the bewitched, sir, yes,” replied Putnam. “Me daughter and Mr. Parris’ niece, Anne and Mercy beseech you, sirs, respectfully so.”

  The girls both looked as if they’d not bathed since Mercy had been taught her lesson by Parris at the hearth; in fact, the two girls appeared so disheveled they might’ve been in a fight with one another just before coming here.

  Higginson stepped close to the two children, who huddled together. It seemed to Jeremy that they were working hard to not meet Tituba’s eyes even as they stole glances her way. Seeing Tituba in chains and bonds seemed to have a chilling effect on the girls, or so Jeremy secretly prayed. This situation needed a bucket of cold water thrown on it. Perhaps Parris had just overplayed his hand.

  “And I thought not to see any Mercy here tonight,” Higginson attempted to lighten the moment, but it could not be done. “And here is Mercy genuflecting and respectfully doing so. Two lovely children, Mr. Putnam, Mr. Parris, and you believe them witches, too?”

  “No, no sir. You have it wrong,” complained Putnam. “These girls are victims of cruel witchcraft at its foulest, the sort that’s killed my other children!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Both the anemic, frail-boned Anne, and the lusty pink-skinned Mercy Lewis, older, taller, more robust, appeared sheepish among the gathered power brokers of the village and town. The whimpering of Tituba Indian and her rattling chains acted as a counterpoint to what was being said.

  “Tell them, Anne,” said her father. “Tell them what your brothers and sisters’ve told both you and your mother.”

  “Hold on,” interrupted Jeremy. “I thought the girl’s siblings died at or near birth? How can they’ve told her or her mother anything?”

  “They came to us in the night,” said Anne, her voice hardly audible, making Corwin erupt with, “What? What’d she say?”

  “She said,” began Mercy, a good deal bolder, “that they’ve haunted her and her mother ever since.”

  “Ghosts? Spirit?” asked Noyes, eyes wide.

  “Your evidence is the word of a ghost?” said Jeremiah, a startled laugh escaping him. “Your honors, you mustn’t start down that road. It’ll open your courts to every kind of—”

  “They told me they was murdered!” Anne suddenly shouted, startling the grownups. Her eruption also caused every man in the room to lean in to hear what else she might say. “Murdered with long knitting needles the midwives hid in their petticoats.”

  “Needles jammed into their little brains,” added Mercy, demonstrating with a bony finger, “right back here,” added Mercy, pointing to the base of her skull as she pirouetted so as they might see. “And sometimes here!” She indicated her under arm. “To puncture the hearts.”

  Jeremy saw that the back of her neck remained bruised from where Parris had held her head at the fire that day he’d exorcised her demon.

  “Some got the needle up under their arms,” agreed Anne. In the armpit . . . sidewise to the heart,” she repeated Mercy’s assessment. Anne then held up a pair of long, sterling knitting needles that shone in the light, reflecting the flames from the hearth.

  �
�And your ghosts, will they come to court to testify?” Jeremy’s question drew a half-snarl from Mercy Lewis and a glare from Anne who erupted. “You don’t believe me? Then talk to Mother. She’s been visited by all my dead lovelies, too.”

  “We will speak to your mother,” replied Higginson, giving the girls a stern look that made him look the picture of God casting thunderbolts. “And child, if you are lying about this murder business, you will be severely punished, I can tell you. Severely.”

  Parris, a hand on the Mercy’s shoulder, said, “Tell the judges and ministers, Mercy, what you told me about Tituba here and Goode.”

  “I-I saw them dancing naked round a fire in the woods, I did.”

  “Naked? Not a stitch of clothing between them?” asked Noyes.

  “It’s true!” shouted Anne. “I saw it, too.”

  “In another dream?” asked Jeremy.

  “No, not a dream. When Mercy and me was playing about the apple orchard near the church, we saw a fire, and we went to warm ourselves.”

  “That’s when we saw her,” added Mercy, pointing to Tituba, “and-and Goode, and others I could not make out, all dancing and touching one ’nother, and-and taking turns hurting Betty—or a likeness of her.”

  “Taking turns hurting Mr. Parris’ child?” asked Hathorne.

  “The child’s not been out of bed for several days,” countered Jeremy.

  “Not Betty but Betty’s likeness, and-and Goode, she kept stabbing it with needles.”

  A long silence followed this ‘expert testimony’. Jeremy realized that there was just enough truth in the story to make believers of these men of Salem.

  “Take the children home, Mr. Putnam,” suggested Hale, who’d listened without a word.

  After the children and Putnam had left, Jeremy looked around the room at the grim faces of the ministers and magistrates. He pointed and asked, “What’s to become of Tituba, here?”

  “She’s to be held until she confesses her part in all this,” replied Parris, “and given her stubborn heart, that may be indefinitely. However, if she but confess, name names of those she and Goode have conspired with, then she will of course be spared and rehabilitated.”