Mary whistled as she sped over the snow with quick, small steps. It was a beautiful day, cold but still, without the bitter, biting wind so common in Massachusetts once the snows came. She looked forward to seeing Goodman and Goodwife Proctor, and she looked forward even more to spending some time with their serving girl, her friend Abby Williams. Mary saw most of her friends—Betty Parris, Mercy Lewis, Suzannah Wolcott—in church on Sunday, but the Proctors rarely went to Reverend Parris's services, and so rarely brought Abigail with them. Abby could walk the distance, Mary well knew; but Abby never really cared enough about church to make that kind of effort.
Mary turned off the road and walked toward the simple log cabin which stood at the foot of broad expanse of white snow-covered fields which was the Proctor farm. An inviting stream of smoke drifted lazily up from the chimney into the quiet, windless sky, and Mary smiled, hoping that Goodwife Proctor would offer her a cup of tea. Almost everyone drank the tea harvested in the Indias, and that was good enough for Mary, but Goodwife Proctor had managed somehow to get tea grown in the Japans, which was green and rich and much more pleasurable. She probably bought it from that smuggler, Thomas McCollough, but it tasted good, no matter what its source.
She knocked softly on the front door of the cabin and called out, "Goody Proctor? Goody Proctor? 'Tis I, Mary Warren." She heard a sound of motion within, and a few moments later the door swung open and Elizabeth Proctor smiled at her. "Good morrow, Goody Proctor," she said happily.
"Hello, Mary," the older woman said. "Come in out of the cold."' She ushered Mary into the large central room of the cabin and pushed the door shut behind them. "I fear I'll not be in good health until spring, and it portends a cold winter."
"Aye," said Mary, unwrapping her scarf and removing her cloak. " 'Tis but November and already three snowfalls." She held out the small burlap bag she had been carrying. "Goody Corey asked me to bring you this pie."
"Why, bless Martha!" she said, taking the bag. "She's a good woman, no matter what anyone says."
"She's been very good to me, that's a fact," Mary agreed, "taking me in and giving me work and a roof and meals after my parents died."
"Would you like some tea, Mary? I have a kettle a-boil over the fire." She took the pie out of the bag and set it on the oaken table, clicking her tongue appreciatively.
"Aye, I would like that very much, Goody Proctor!" she smiled.
"Fine. Mary, go and fetch Abigail. If you and I are having tea, she should join us. She should be out in the barn, tending to the livestock."
"Certainly, Goody Proctor," Mary said. "I haven't seen Abby in weeks. I was hoping she'd be free for a little while today." She threw her cloak back on, leaving the scarf on the peg beside the door. She walked quickly back out into the cold, making certain to close the door behind her, and then walked around the house toward the small barn which rested in the snow some hundred yards away.
She pushed open the barn door and was about to call out for Abigail, but her mouth froze open and her words remained unuttered as she beheld the sight in front of her. Abigail Williams was lying upon her back in the hay, her skirts thrown up and her feet flailing wildly in the air. John Proctor, his trousers pulled down to his ankles, was lying between her legs, thrusting into her mercilessly. My God! Mary thought. He's raping her!
"Oh, John," Abigail panted, running her hands over his back and through his hair, "John, John!"
Mary backed up as quietly as she could and went back outside. She pulled the door shut, hoping that she had not been heard. It was not forced, she thought as she turned back toward the house. He isn't taking her against her will. She is giving herself to him. Poor Goody Proctor! How terrible! How awful!
How delightfully wicked! She could hardly wait to get Abigail alone and talk to her about it. They had no secrets from each other, and this was the most exciting topic of conversation Mary could think of since the Cheever boy got Magdalene Smith in the family way last autumn.
Abigail and Goodman Proctor! Mary thought wonderingly. How exciting! She went back to the Proctor cabin and said, "I cannot find her, Goody Proctor. Perhaps she is on an errand for Goodman Proctor."
"Perhaps," Elizabeth said innocently. "Here, sit down, child. Let me get you your tea . . ."
. . . Yes, said the thing. . . . I remember. . . . February . . . 1692. . .
. . . Tituba was an Indian, though neither she nor her husband Jon nor her owner, Reverend Parris, knew her tribe.
She had been enslaved so long ago that she had never known any other life, even though her mother had tried to teach her the ways of her people. She had failed in the attempt, and Tituba had been sold to the Parris family long before her lessons could take serious root. Tituba was then told by her owners that she was now a Calvinist Protestant, and she dutifully pretended to be one; but her religion was actually a curious eclectic amalgam of native Indian religion, European superstition, and English Puritanism. She had heard from her mother about the spirits of the forests and the spirits of the groves, about the casting of spells and the brewing of secret herbs, about the bright forces which bless and the dark forces which injure. Reverend Parris had told her long ago that such things were of the Devil, and she naturally believed him. It would never have occurred to her to doubt him. It would also never have occurred to her to stop reverencing the powers of nature about which she had heard so much on her mother's knee. If, as Reverend Parris said, she was in reality worshiping the Devil, that was fine with Tituba. What, after all, is in a name?
Her adherence to an eccentric and personal variant of the "old religion" was an open secret in Salem Village, and though it was a clear violation of the laws of the colony, it was ignored because she was an Indian, and thus presumably incapable of knowing any better. This did not mean she could practice her spells openly; it meant merely that she was left alone to practice them in private. Were the truth to be known, many local people had come to her from time to time for special favors, special assistance, for help in guarding against miscarriage or ensuring fertility, for protection from consumption or influenza, for love potions, for curses against enemies. One woman, Goodwife Anne Putnam, had even asked Tituba to conjure up the spirits of her dead children in an attempt to learn why they had all, but for the eldest, died before reaching full childhood. Tituba's activities were both common knowledge and totally secret, common knowledge because everyone knew everything about everyone else in a community as small as Salem, and secret because such acts of conjuring, which perforce involved calling upon the power of the Devil, were punishable by death.
It was then no surprise to Tituba when Abigail Williams and her friends came to her one day in the winter of 1692 to ask for her help in casting both a spell and a curse. She had no objection to either, for what the white people did to each other was of no interest to her, not after all the things which they had done to her people, to the red people of the forests.
The girls met Tituba in the appointed place in the forest at the appointed time, and she stood beside the small cauldron which bubbled atop the impromptu wood fire and watched them approach. Abigail Williams, her green eyes flashing eagerly, led the group, followed by Suzannah Wolcott, the fattest, most abrasive girl in the village; by Betty Parris, the minister's daughter and Abigail's cousin, small, almost childlike, but headstrong and willful, and an endless source of trouble to her nurse Tituba; Mercy Lewis, a slender girl of great dignity and aloof demeanor; and bringing up the rear, a girl who had not come to see Tituba before, who had not been with Abigail and the others when the subject of the spell and the curse was first broached. Mary Warren trailed behind the other girls, having invited herself along when Abigail told her what was afoot.
Though she regarded the other girls as her friends, and Abigail as her best friend, in truth Mary was something of an outsider whose presence was only tolerated by the other girls, and often just barely that. Mercy had a hearty dislike of her for her timid ways, her inbred obsequiousness, her eagerness to please
. Betty and Suzannah played merciless pranks on her, and only Abigail seemed to treat her with a modicum of friendliness. Inasmuch as Abigail was the natural leader of the little adolescent band, being the prettiest, the brightest, the most glib and the most popular, the other girls extended to Mary a strained tolerance for Abigail's sake. Mary worshiped Abigail. She was everything Mary wished she were, and could never be.
"Girls, you be comin' late," Tituba scolded them. "Much to do, much to do. You got the frog and the salamander?"
They had given Mary the task of finding and catching the two amphibians, and she held out the small jar which housed them. "Here they are, ma'am," she said.
"Don't call her 'ma'am," Betty Parris said testily. "She's my uncle's slave, not my mother!"
"Give it here, child," Tituba said, taking the jar from Mary's hand. "Now listen to me, all of you. What we be doin' is a hangin' thing. Any of you talk to the reverend, we in trouble deep."
"We know that, Tituba," Abigail said. "Don't worry. We aren't going to tell anybody anything."
"Of course not!" Mercy said emphatically.
"Good. Now here be what we're doin'. I makes the potion in the pot, and you all dances around the pot while I says the spells. Then we takes the potion and you gives it to Goodman Proctor to drink. He drink it, he fall in love with you. Then you waits two days, then you takes the potion and you sprinkles it on Goody Proctor. All her life then go out of her and go into the potion, and she die." Tituba pulled the string which held the leather cap in place around the mouth of the bottle and removed it. She dropped the frog and the salamander into the boiling water and then reached into her pocket. She drew forth a small pouch and after opening it poured some unidentified brown powder into the water as well. "Now, girls, you takes off your clothes and you dances around the pot."
"Take off our clothes!" Mercy said. "Tituba, it's freezing cold out here!"
"Aye," Betty said. "We'll catch our death of cold!"
" 'Tis February!" Suzannah added.
"Hush," Abigail said. "We'll not need to dance for long, and "tis necessary for the spell, isn't it, Tituba?" The old Indian nodded. "Well, then, we must do it."
"Well, I'll not be first," Mercy huffed.
"We're not all as immodest as you, Abigail Williams," Betty said pointedly.
Abigail ignored the remark. She turned to Mary Warren. "Mary, you and I shall be first, together. Agreed?"
Mary's joy at being singled out for Abigail's special trust easily outweighed her reluctance to undress in the presence of the others, and she began to remove her clothes. Her skin rose in bumps from the cold air, and she shivered, but Abigail was disrobing calmly and so Mary strove to appear as nonchalant. The other girls followed suit unwillingly, and soon all were prancing about in the snow, naked but for their shoes, the speed of their movement made all the greater by the terrible cold. They ran around the cauldron as Tituba chanted in her native tongue, a tongue which even she could not identify.
Mary did not remember which of her friends she heard scream first, but Betty Parris was the first to fall down on the cold, snowy ground and sink into terrified unconsciousness as Reverend Parris came bursting through the woods toward them, screaming and threatening and waving his fists. My God! Mary thought. We've been seen, we're discovered! She joined the other girls in grabbing her clothes and throwing them on, cowering beneath Parris's cane as it rained blows down upon all of them. "Miscreants!" he cried. "Generation of vipers!"
"It wasn't us, it was her, it was Tituba," Abigail cried. "She made us do it, she sent the Devil on us and made us do it!"
"It was Tituba, it was Tituba!" Mary agreed quickly.
"No!" Tituba cried. "No, Mister Parris, not me, not poor old Tituba! It was the Devil, he force me, he force me!"
"It was Tituba!" the girls all cried. "She cast a spell on us and made us dance, she made us do it!"
The cane rained its blows down upon them. Then Reverend Parris stopped and looked at the terrified faces. "Abigail," he snapped at his niece, "clothe your cousin. You girls, get to your homes and stay there. Tituba . . ." he walked toward her menacingly, "I want you to go with me to see Marshal Cheever."
"Not the marshal, Mister Parris, I didn't do nuthin' wrong, I swear I didn't," she babbled. "It was the Devil, the Devil took over my body, the Devil, Mister Parris, not poor old Tituba!"
"So you conjured up the Devil?!" His eyes went wide with shock and disgust.
"No, no, Mister Parris, not me, it wasn't me, somebody sent the Devil on me, somebody else!"
He leaned forward and bore his eyes into hers. "Who?"
Tituba's terrified mind cast about desperately for a name, any name, someone to blame, someone else, anyone else. "Martha Corey, Martha Corey, it was Martha Corey! I seen her with the Devil, she come to me with the Devil!"
Parris grabbed Tituba roughly by the wrist. "Well, we'll see what Goodwife Corey has to say about it!" He began to drag her back toward the town. The girls followed, trembling, Abigail and Mary helping the only semi-conscious Betty Parris.
The madness had begun its descent upon Salem. . .
. . . Yes, the thing said. . . . The madness. . . . March. . . . March 1692. . .
. . . The two months during which Mary Warren had worked as a serving maid in the Proctor household had been pleasant ones for no one. When John Proctor's Puritan sensibilities had compelled him to confess his adultery to his wife, Elizabeth had reacted with wounded pride, forgiveness she felt obligated to give but did not truly feel, and, of course, a demand for Abigail Williams's dismissal from their service. Mary had taken Abigail's place and had thus entered a household of strained conversations, long silences, infrequent but bitterly explosive arguments, and an unspoken suspicion on the part of Elizabeth that a serving maid, any serving maid, even one as shy and retiring as Mary, was a potential threat to the sanctity of her marriage bed.
Abigail had not helped, of course, seeming rather irrationally to hold a grudge against Mary for having replaced her; but inasmuch as Mary was now her only link to John, she repressed her resentment and questioned Mary closely whenever she saw her. It had been one month now since Reverend Parris had discovered the girls dancing naked in the woods, and what little respite Mary enjoyed from the tension in the Proctor home whenever she went into the village was now replaced by fear and anxiety. Tituba had denounced Martha Corey as a witch, and Martha Corey had sealed her own fate by replying to the charge with blasphemous invective. When four weeks ago Abigail, Mary, Mercy, Betty, and Suzannah had been brought in for questioning and examination, the girls were so frightened and so on edge that the latter three began to have convulsions. The examiner, Judge Corwin, voiced his opinion that the three girls were obviously the victims of someone else's witchcraft, and this led Abigail and Mary after a quick exchange of glances, to imitate them. The five girls had thus become the chief denouncers for what was rapidly becoming a standing court for witchcraft charges, and the list of those accused grew longer with each passing day. Each accused in turn accused another, and the five girls would go into convulsions at appropriate moments, thus damning the accused persons with their dramatic evidence. At times Mary felt that she was in reality possessed by a power which she could not control, and the "fits," as the court called them, which had begun in the forest out of fear on the part of Betty Parris, which had occurred spontaneously in court on the part of Betty, Mercy, and Suzannah, which were imitated in defensive pretense by Mary and Abigail, were becoming uncontrollable by any of them. Fear mingled with guilt, and both mixed with an exhilarating sensation of power to half persuade the girls that what they were saying, what they knew to be lies, was truth.
Mary, so accustomed to taking orders and being scolded and walking about in fear of the disapproval of others, found herself growing slightly arrogant. Thus it was that when she returned to the Proctor home from court that day, she sauntered in breezily and tossed her cloak onto the peg beside the door with an aloof aplomb. John Proctor, sitting at th
e table, brooding over his mug of hot rum, looked up at her and glowered. "What do you mean draggin' yourself in here this time of day, girl?" he demanded.
"Please, do not harry me, John," she said wearily. "I have been all day testifying in court." She made to walk by him to the ladder which led to the loft alcove where she slept.
Proctor grabbed her by the arm as she passed and yanked her down to her knees. "What did you call me, girl?" He squeezed her arm tightly.
She gulped. "I—I meant, Mr. Proctor—" she stammered.
"John, unhand the girl," Elizabeth Proctor said as she entered from the same door through which Mary had just come. " 'Tis true, the girl has been all day before the judges." Elizabeth looked tired and worn, and John, ever deferential, ever guilty for his sin against her, released Mary's arm.
" 'Tis her disrespect which angered me," he muttered. He took a swig of rum. "And as for her court, 'tis a pack of salivatin' wolves, if I be asked."
"Now, John," Elizabeth said in a voice of perfunctory warning.
" 'Tis true, Liz, and you know it as well as I," John Proctor responded. "Martha Corey's accused by an addle-brained old slave, and what happens the next week but her husband Giles is denounced as a witch by Henry Duke, who lost a lawsuit to Giles last year. Rebecca Nurse has nine living children and eighteen living grandchildren, and she is denounced as a witch by Anne Putnam, whose children all have died. There is envy workin' here, envy and greed and spitefulness." He nodded his head in agreement with himself and took another swig of the hot spiced rum.
"One—one cannot argue with signs, sir," Mary said tentatively. The hysterical convulsions in which she had indulged herself so frequently recently threatened to rise up in her as she spoke. She had become so adept at bringing them on that the slightest upset, the most trivial emotional surge, served as a catalyst sufficient to bring them on. She trembled. "The Devil is loose in Salem Village. We are serving God's holy purpose in calling out the names of Satan's servants."
Candlemas Eve Page 10
