Children of Salem

by Robert W. Walker

  “But I don’t think it applies beyond the boundaries of the village, Mr. Herrick,” Jeremy countered.

  “Who is that, speaking?” It was Thomas Putnam in his uniform still.

  “Why it’s Jeremiah Wakely,” said Bray Wilkins beside Putnam. “That imposter priest. He’s behind this matter at the jailhouse!”

  “What matter at the jailhouse?” asked Tarbell. “We know of no such matter?”

  “Where’re ya coming from, then?” demanded Putnam, holding a gun on them.

  “We’ve just come from the family plot to pay respects to the dead. Went there a bit late but it was on the spur, ya see.”

  “Family plot?” asked Herrick.

  “Take them under suspicion!” shouted Putnam at Herrick.

  “Hold on, all of you! This is a civil matter, and I am in charge, not the militia. So you’ll not be taking orders from Mr. Putnam, not tonight, not here and not now.”

  This only calmed the men somewhat. Jeremy could literally feel their enmity and venom as if in waves passing over everyone in the wagon, and he worried terribly for Serena, and he was angry with himself for allowing her out with them. So far, she was being taken for a man and being smart enough to keep silent.

  “Okay, I want you men to sound off, and Nigel here will take your names, and if we need speak to you by light of the sun, we’ll come find you then. Now sound off!”

  “John Tarbell!”

  “Ben Nurse!”

  “Joseph Nurse!”

  “You know me,” said Jeremy.

  Serena cleared her throat and sent up a coughing jag, to which Jeremy said, “Young Killean Wakely, my half brother visiting from Woburn.”

  “Put him down, too,” ordered Herrick.

  “We only stopped at the cemetery plot,” said Ben. “We’re returning from John’s home to my father’s place.”

  “Coming from a birthing party!” added Joseph, returning to the reins and his seat beside John. “Tarbell’s done fathered another one again—or haven’t ye heard?” He slapped Tarbell on the back and the two laughed good-naturedly. “Makes four, right, John?”

  Tarbell spoke with a drunken slur. “Plenty of Canary wine!”

  “So you mean fellows had naught to do with breaking out prisoners down at the jail?”

  “A jailbreak? Tonight?” Ben sounded amazed at the notion.

  “You may search our wagon, but you’ll find naught but a few jugs of whiskey,” Joseph added.

  “Gotta keep Tarbell happy the way you do a bear!” Ben joked.

  When the night riders didn’t laugh with Ben, he shouted, “All right then, do you see any prisoners here? Go ahead, search the wagon! We’ll get down and you can have at it.” Ben leapt off and onto the dirt path.

  “If we were to break anyone from jail, it’d be our dear, sainted Mother,” Joseph added. “Do you see Mother Nurse here?”

  “Fact is,” replied Herrick, giving the wagon and its occupants a cursory look, “your mother was one of a few who didn’t escape the jail.”

  Jeremy had noticed a number of prisoners too sick or too depleted to stand much less run from the jail. He spoke up. “If we’d had any notion there’d been a jailbreak ahhh . . . do you need men to help you, sir?”

  The men with Herrick grumbled at this, and there was a brief discussion before Herrick returned with, “We’ve enough men, but thanks for the offer, Mr. Wakely.”

  Jeremy and the others instinctively knew the others did not trust them. “Well then if you’re satisfied, Sheriff,” said Joseph, “we’ll be on our way.”

  Ben, seeing his bluff had worked, leapt back onto the wagon.

  “Yes, be off,” said Herrick.. “But when these escapees are caught, if they should point a finger at you Nurse men, you will be arrested for aiding and abetting fugitives, some of whom have been condemned as witches.”

  “And good luck to you.” Jeremy waved Herrick and his men off.

  The moment Herrick and his men rode out of earshot, Serena whispered, “You’re the consummate liars Ben, Joe! And you, my husband. So I am now your brother?”

  “Half brother!”

  She lightly thumped him and laughed.

  “I’m sorry about your mother, dear heart. Really I am. I’d hoped that faced with our all of us well intentioned children of hers, putting our lives on the chopping block that . . . well she’d change her mind and come with us.”

  “My prayer too. Unanswered.”

  “You have to admire her determination and faith.”

  “I do. Still it saddens me.”

  “She’s dying for her faith,” muttered Ben, who’d gone solemn.

  “There’re worse things to die for,” Jeremy assured the others.

  Serena dropped her head and her weight against him. Jeremy held her close.

  “She’s already dead.” It was Ben, still full of self-recriminations at having failed this night.

  The rest of the trip home was uneventful and silent. Each of them had gone to their thoughts, and their thoughts were cast in fear.

  Chapter Three

  July 19th came like a fast wind. Rebecca and the four others to be executed with her stepped from the jail and clambered up the boards laid over the muck by Gatter, boards leading up and into the jail cart. It’d had a former life as an ox cart, but with modifications, the huge, creaking wooden wheels now carried an entire metal cage forged of wrought iron. Flat bars as thick as a man’s arms. Now the Witch Cart as it was called was filled with the five to be sent to heaven or hell depending on what an onlooker believed. The cart seemed to rattle, but this noise came of the shackles around the ankles and wrists of the accused. A new order since the jailbreak was that prisoners be kept in chains at all times.

  And so the noisy, rattling of chains filled the air with each turn of the wheels on the cart pulled by two oxen provided by Judge Corwin. The cart bounced over rough terrain and trundled off toward Watch Hill and the gallows—at times looking as if it might tilt completely over. When the cart would teeter on the verge of tilting, Anne Putnam, Mercy Lewis, Mary Wolcott and other girls who’d joined them in accusing so many people of witchcraft would shout and scream that they saw a crowd of other witches—invisible to the general public—trying desperately to knock over the cart to impede its progress and stop the hangings.

  To be sure, the villagers had turned out in droves to witness what might happen next; everyone was curious for one reason or the other. Most curious to see if the accused might not at the last break and shout out their guilt and beg for the milk of human kindness and the olive branch offered by the judges and the ministers: that if the guilty but state their crimes and name names of others equally guilty of bewitchments and murder, that they would be spared. That their stone hearts could be melted, and that they could be rehabilitated to the love of Christ and God, and the hatred of the Antichrist.

  Many another in the holding cells across the colony had repented, so why not these facing the rope—minutes now away?

  Other villagers came in the hope of seeing the witches hung no matter what they confessed. Still others came to see the result of their handiwork—among them Reverend Samuel Parris, while others came to bid loved ones a final adieu even if from a distance, like the proud and upright Nurse family.

  The sky, a brilliant, blinding mix of sunshine, blue, and scattered pure white cloud looked down on the falling-apart ox drawn cart. Children chased alongside the jail cart, some throwing clumps of dirt and rocks at the accused within, and a crowd the likes of which Salem had never seen awaited the cart at its destination below Mr. Fiske’s finely wrought gallows with its equally spaced six platforms of which only five would be put to use today.

  Suddenly, Sarah Goode raised a fist to them, cursing the children who dared throw rotten eggs and apples and tomatoes at the bars, splattering ugly juices onto the condemned. The celebrated children capable of seeing into the Invisible World of Satan only shouted back, ridiculing Goode and the others in the cart.

/>   Rebecca Nurse knew of the Invisible World only from her reading about it in books—one of them penned by Increase Mather. She believed the notion had a place in every Puritan text. But at no time in the history of Essex County or the Massachusetts Bay Colony had anyone seen into this world—certainly not to the degree and accuracy of determining that an invisible witch held a knitting needle dripping with blood, one that she plunged into children who then fell into a dead faint.

  But for now, Rebecca must concentrate on God’s glorious other world—also invisible to men, also taken on faith alone, that place where she was staring at the entire time where she stood in the cart—skyward. She took in the azure expanse of it, and the inviting clouds that seemed to be opening up and beckoning her within. The crowd around her had faded into nothingness.

  People seeing her in a sort of trance began to point and speak of Witch Nurse’s looking so at peace. Hearing this going around, the chief accusing children began to call it not peace but an attempt to contact an army of witches to descend upon them all.

  Rebecca heard none of this; she was beyond it, above it. The idea that she was in God’s hands and would soon be in God’s house controlled her entirely now, and it was in this frame of mind that she remained calm and in an attitude of acceptance and prayer, which many in the crowd both recognized and understood. Among these the entire contingent from her large, extended family—many of whom, Serena and Jeremy among them, felt a sense of overwhelming pride in her and peace for her, as if they together all sent up a shared prayer and each word was the same.

  Whereas Goode, and to a lesser degree the other women condemned to die this day, presented a picture of hatred and rancor as they engaged the crowd, cursing at them all as if dealing with a single rabid animal they must destroy if by no other words than a dying woman’s curse, Rebecca conveyed as gentle a nature as a lamb led to slaughter but without the innocence; rather in her eye was a knowing look when she did chose to scan the crowd—a look that said, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” It was an attitude she’d preached to the others in the cell with her this entire time, and she had given hope and faith beyond the gallows to any number of her converts behind bars, and in fact, she had even converted her jailer, Weed Gatter—or so it was being bandied about. In fact, those who shared the cart to the gallows with her had all taken her teachings as Rebecca, no matter her excommunication and condemnation before the authorities and her accusers remained a teacher of the Good Book. And the only soul that had not been touched by her and converted to the faith that kept Rebecca strong in the face of this horror tale remained Sarah Goode.

  The others in the cart now bowed their heads and began to pray with Mother Nurse. They prayed now for a speedy end.

  Their accusers got to the foot of the gallows ahead of the cart, awaiting them. The accusing children and many adults who’d accused the condemned continued to scream in torment and agony at the foot of the gallows. Some wallowing in the mud and shouting that the invisible cohorts of the condemned were trying to suffocate them in the mud. It turned into a mud romp and a mud fight, the stuff being slung over the heads of those crowded nearest the afflicted children.

  Seeing this from where they stood on a buckboard at a good distance, Jeremy said to Serena, “Blood and mud pies they will have and laugh in private to make fools of us all.”

  Serena held an arm around her father, who had insisted on being on hand. As had Joseph and Tarbell. Ben had gotten on a horse and had ridden in the opposite direction, and no one knew where he might end up this day.

  “Sad day in New England when nothing short of hanging five women can end this suffering,” Francis said, his eyes raining tears.

  “Goodwife Nurse has lived a lie!” shouted Anne Putnam Senior, her eyes wild, her voice giddy, her clothes covered in mud that continued to fly, thanks to her daughter and the others.

  “She’s a murderer! Same as Goode!” shouted Thomas Putnam, his uniform splotched from the mud slinging as well.

  “She’s flying over the gallows!” screeched Mercy Lewis, pointing overhead and circling. “Do you see? Can you not see her invisible shape!”

  “There, there!” They all pointed to the top of the gallows and the treetops and many saw a strange, preternatural wind moving the leaves.

  “Evidence it is! “ shouted Mary Wolcott. “Evidence Mother Nurse has sent her invisible demon through the bars to chase after us!”

  Mercy Lewis screamed, “Belying the hag’s false serenity!”

  “Look you all here!” Anne Putnam Junior held up a knitting needle dripping blood to the sunlight. “She’s stabbed me with it, here!” She held up her underarm, displaying a splotch of blood.

  “She done stabbed me in my petticoats!” added Mercy, showing a bloody splotch on her clothes.

  The accused by now were ordered from the cart and onto the gallows steps. Soon they lined the gantry, facing the crowd.

  Goode shook rattling chains and her fists at the crowd and laid on a terrible curse on them all but in particular, she signaled out Reverend Samuel Parris. “May your life dry up like bone, and may your progeny curse you forever!”

  Rebecca raised a single hand and the crowd silenced their booing of Goode to hear her soft words. “I forgive you, one and all. You know not what you do.”

  This slowed the cries for blood for half a minute until Anne Putnam Junior fell over in a dead faint. Other of her young colleagues in the business of seeing into the Invisible World of Satan screamed and chanted that Mother Nurse did it. Mercy shouted, “That Nurse witch has struck Anne down by use of her invisible other shape!”

  The crowd chose once more to join in the chant to hang the witches.

  The nooses had been placed over each of five heads now covered with grain sacks, save for the two most callous of the witches, according to the children—Goode and Nurse, who had both declined the blindfold, each for a different reason. Opposing reasons—Goode so she might face her accusers and continue cursing them with her evil eye and to spit venom at the crowd; Rebecca because as she cried out, “I will meet my Maker as I am.”

  Reverend Parris in a show of mercy, pleaded for a final time for the condemned to petition him for mercy, to recant any oaths they’d given George Burroughs and the Antichrist, to save their souls by way of confession. None shouted for Parris’ so-called mercy, and Goode, seeing a bucket of water at her feet kicked out and sent it splashing over Parris’ black coat and face. Goode giggled and shouted, “The water is like my curse on ye, Samuel Paris—a stain on your soul! Reverend!”

  The trap below Goode was pulled hard by the hangman as if anxious to shut her up; in that instant, Sarah Goode danced on air, body fell and yanked so hard as to crack her head on the underside of the platform—a crack loud enough to bring a groan to many in the crowd. The crack and subsequent snap of her neck swapped prominence with one another. Her legs didn’t kick long as she was almost instantly killed, but her body continued an eerie twitching to the shouts of the crowd. Clapping rose from the accusers.

  This clapping continued as Susannah Martin’s form dropped, and Mrs. Putnam swooned, fainting straightaway to Little Anne’s terrifying revelation that even in death, Susannah Martin’s spectral self had stabbed her mother. She held up a bloody hand to prove it. The hand was discolored with red and the brown of dried mud.

  The third trap flew open and Elizabeth How fell kicking, her death rattle drowned out by further clapping and cheering. The fourth trap went and with it Sarah Wildes whose overlarge eyes had always marked her as a witch in Topsfield. Those same eyes now grew as her throat was stretched and she kicked until no more movement was left, and yet some in the crowd said her eyes remained alive and staring and emitting an evil on anyone who stared too long into her gaze.

  Only Rebecca remained and some cried out from the crowd, urging her to return to her former pious life, to give up her coven names, and to repent of her evildoing. But it was as if Rebecca could neither see nor hear any o
f them, including Parris, until her gaze skyward came down on him. For a long, silent moment, with Parris halfway up the gallows stairs, their eyes met. In that moment she seared his soul with a smile, and Samuel Parris had one realization that made him stumble from the gallows.

  “What did she say to you?” Putnam asked him.

  Deacon Ingersoll grabbed hold of Parris who seemed to have become dazed—perhaps bewitched at the last by Rebecca Nurse. “Did she say something? I could not hear over the crowd and the accusers!”

  “No, she said nothing.”

  “The eye? She gave you the evil eye?”

  “I-I’m all right. None of them can touch me,” he lied. Deep within his soul, Parris had felt a painful truth, that he had just looked into the eyes of one of the chosen among them—someone who from the beginning of time—had her name in God’s book; he realized she was innocent of every single accusation raised against her. He realized that it was the first time he had considered the woman completely without guilt, and that she was bound for the place every Puritan prayed for, and he also realized at the same moment that he was not. That his soul was trapped here and in perdition if not Hades.

  # # # # #

  From the distance that they chose to safely maintain, the Nurse family watched the inevitable tragedy unfold at the gallows, seeing the condemned summarily killed one after the other while armed militia and guards stood all around to prevent any disturbance of this officially sanctioned murder. And they had seen the moment between Mother Nurse and Samuel Parris, and how disturbed he appeared as he stumbled off. He did not stop but rushed away, going back toward the village in his black uniform, alone. He did not turn back and did not watch when the final platform was dropped, its hinges crying out.

  Rebecca had lost a great deal of weight while in prison, and when she fell, her weight was not so taut on the rope as the others, all of whom were heftier. As a result, Rebecca suffered longer—so long, in fact, it was no longer fun for the more sober among the crowd, especially when they watched the blood spilling over her lips and marring her clothing at what seemed the very spot where Christ had been pierced by a Roman spear while he suffered on the cross. In fact, someone shouted, “She is a martyr to this madness! She is closer to God and Christ than any man, woman, or child here!” The voice sounded like some drunkard, but in a moment Serena and Jeremy realized it was Ben! He had come with a wagon, the rear decked out with blankets and a pillow like an oversized coffin. He drove through the crowd, parting them and placing the bed of the wagon as close to his mother’s body as he could. Tarbell and Joseph rushed to join him, and by now Ben had a huge knife in hand, making his way beneath the gallows, and shouting through the drop, “You, bloody hangman! You cut her down or I will!”