The Heretic's Daughter

by Kathleen Kent

  We cut west across Preston’s Plains and then south along the snow-blown shores of the Shawshin. We walked over the southern fork of the river, pausing only to look at the silvery remains of frond and fish rigid in motionless sleep. Richard, awkward in his emerging height, went down hard on the ice, and when we laughed at him, he grabbed at us until we all slipped and tumbled into the snow. When Father reached out his long arm to help me up again, he scolded us for our horseplay, but I saw him smile and push Richard back onto the ice. The maple grove was very old, many of the trees forty or fifty feet high. Father told us that the Indians would come there to make their gashes in the trees, collect the sap in hollow logs, and thicken the sap by dropping heated rocks into it. Father chose the best trees, feeling carefully around the crags and fissures with his fingers, never tapping below a lower limb or close to a defect in the bark at the northern exposure. When he chose his site he gently hammered into the bark, in an upward motion, the concave rod, allowing the sap to flow downwards from the inner recesses of the tree. It would take hours to fill the buckets, and so Father headed into the woods to check his traps, leaving Richard behind with the flintlock. Close to the maple stand we had seen the ghost of tracks in the snow. Not a square-toed Englisher’s shoe but a rounded soft-heeled slipper. Father said that an Indian had passed the grove only a few days before us.

  We sat all together in a small circle of sunlight, our backs to the northeast, facing towards the forest, and whispered stories that made the hair on our necks stand on end. We spoke of the newly arrested women in Salem. One of them was an old woman so greatly loved by the men and women in the village that they cried in the streets when she was carried from her sickbed to the magistrates. Having never seen a magistrate before, I fancied them as creatures with the heads of men and the bodies of crows who perched on their long benches and tapped their talons impatiently, waiting to flay their captives muscle from bone. Though Salem was near to Andover, we knew no one from that village, and I believe it never entered our minds that, like the pox, witchcraft honors neither border nor boundary.

  On the 26th of March the weather turned cold again and we knew the mapling was done. Mother rendered the last bit of syrup from our tins of sap and we were allowed the best of winter meals. We were each given a small measure of hot syrup, which we poured onto the drifts to make sugar-on-the-snow. As I poured my portion onto the frozen white of the yard, the brown liquid hardening to a coppery crust, it suddenly looked to me like blood seeping through a shroud. My hand stretched out trembling before me, and, even though my mouth watered for its sweetness, I could not pluck up the taffy crust from the ground. Losing all desire for it, I gave my portion to Tom. Mother, seeing this, felt my head for fever and quickly gave me a strong physic against illness, making me retch for an hour. Within the week, we would hear from Richard that on that day, on that exact hour, a four-year-old girl, Dorcas Good, was examined by three judges in the Salem Town jail. Her little feet and hands were bound by iron manacles so she could not send her spirit out and torment further the girls who were her accusers. They would later return Dorcas to her underground cell, where her mother had been sitting chained in the dark for many days.

  AT THE END of March it snowed steadily and then suddenly stopped. I was wakened in the dark on that last morning of the month by Mother, who said we must go to the barn and lance the horse’s leg or risk losing the horse. A hard nodule had grown to the size of a small fist on the inside of one knee and was hot and painful to the touch. Richard had lanced it once the night before, but the kernel was not pierced and did not seep properly. It was dangerous business and I was warned to stay away from the horse’s hooves and told to only observe and learn. Richard would brace the horse’s head with both arms, holding one long and twitching ear gently between his teeth. When the lancing cut came, he would pull the head down and bite hard on the ear so that the horse would kick back with his hind legs instead of rearing up and striking with his forelegs.

  I was cold and cross from being awakened so early and was only half aware of my surroundings when we left the house for the barn. The world was all of white and blue and black so that Richard’s form moving in front of me turned as dark and shadowed as the trees on the horizon. Our footsteps were muffled by the snow, which is why Allen never heard our approach. We were but twenty paces from the door of the barn when it opened just enough for a slender mannish figure to slip out from inside. At first we could not make out his face, but he was so startled to see the three of us appearing as if sprung from the ground that we could see the whites of his eyes as they widened with alarm. If Allen had been at all clever he could have tried any number of stories to explain his presence in the barn. But he only stood staring at us until at last he bolted and ran, leaving footprints of guilt in his wake.

  Richard with his long legs quickly caught him and pulled him by his hair down to the ground. Allen struggled to his feet and with arms flailing tried to land a balled fist in Richard’s face. He made high-pitched, excitable noises like a woman as he breathed through his mouth, spittle flying in a spray from his lips. Richard leaned in and, as Mercy had taught him to do, swept his right leg under Allen’s feet and knocked him to the ground again. Richard then sat on his chest, pinning both arms beneath his knees so he could not move.

  Mother rushed out of the barn, holding some bit of straw in her hand. Her shawl had come loose from her head, and from the set of her jaw, I felt something close to pity for my cousin. She knelt near Allen’s head and shoved into his face the straw, which we now could see was blackened and smoldering, too wet from a leak in the roof to catch proper fire. Some of the straw fell onto his cheek and must have held a spark, because he yelped in pain.

  “Did you think that burning down our barn would be enough to drive us away?”

  “Get away from me, you howling old bitch.” Allen was struggling furiously but Richard ground his knees further into his captive’s arms and cuffed him about the jaw. Mother leaned her face nearer so that Allen could look her in the eyes.

  “You’re going to have to do a better job of it to get rid of us. You’re going to have to burn us out of the house, but then what good will that do you? You’ll still be homeless and you’ll still be a coward, Allen Toothaker. Just like your father. And I’ll tell you something else, if Thomas catches you about the place, your head will have to look for a new home and your shoulders will be wearing your hat.” At this he blanched, his face turning to the color of the snow beneath him. She stood and motioned for Richard to follow. Allen rolled to his feet and started walking away as fast as his quivering legs could carry him. When he had gotten far enough, he turned and pointed at us with a shaking finger. “This is my land and my house and you stole it from me, but by Christ you will burn for it if I have to go to Hell myself to get the brand to do it.”

  Mother showed him her back and he stood for a moment longer, his thick lips shiny from spit, his close-set eyes mean and pinched. There was a large red welt on his cheek from the spark in the straw, and it blossomed on his face like the mark of Cain. He looked at each of us in turn, and when his eyes found mine I crooked my nose at him. Whatever else he may have forgotten to hold against us, he would never forget that last insult. He walked away through the brightening snow and it was months before we saw him again. But as I followed Mother and Richard back to the house to begin the morning fire, I looked behind me and saw a bit of straw still smoldering in the snow. One small ember winked wickedly at me like an oracle’s eye foretelling some disaster.

  FATHER RETURNED ONE day to the house with a black, cross-haired lurcher on a short chain. He was a noisy beast, of middling size, and Father put him in the barn to give warning when intruders were about the place. Mother said the dog would do his best to mangle the cats, but Father said we would just have to do with a few more mice in the barn. Once the days had warmed everything into a proper thaw, we chained the brute at the side of the house facing the road so that everyone who passed that way could see
his menacing teeth. Father was the only one to feed him so he would learn who his master was. And we were warned to stay well away from the ground circumscribed by the length of his chain, as he was snappish and quarrelsome over his food.

  Our days entered the plodding rhythms of the yeoman. The sun came up and over and down again like the arc of the seeds we sowed from our grain sacks, or the rise and fall of the prodding stick plied to the back of the ox to make him plow faster. Andrew turned fifteen on the 7th day of April, and even though his body had continued to grow, it remained pale and soft, his mind as gentle and cradled as a child’s.

  Robert Russell married the Widow Frye and came to our house for the wedding feast. The new Goodwife Russell was plump in the face and broad across the waist but she was settled and kind and was young enough to bear Robert the sons he had never gotten with his first wife. That she was kind and motherly to Elizabeth, Robert’s niece, when the gossip went that Robert had bedded the girl, showed her true good nature. She would brook no ill words about Elizabeth from anyone and kept her within the house when most women would have turned her out. Soon her good opinion restored Elizabeth’s virtue so that my mother remarked dryly, “Remarkable that with a few words maidenheads become like reputations. Easily broken, easily mended.”

  Robert Russell was our source of news, as he often bartered in Andover and as far away as Boston. At the end of April he told us that twenty-five more men and women had been arrested and were held in Salem Village for consorting with the Devil. Among those arrested was Elizabeth Proctor, a midwife and brewer of simples, and a few days later her husband, John Proctor, was taken to Salem Town jail for coming to her defense. Some arrested were old and nettlesome women. Some were well-to-do, like the Bishops, man and wife, and Philip English, who later bribed his way to freedom. Some were slaves, and one was the former minister of Salem Village, the Reverend George Burroughs, who had been brought back in chains from Maine. The arrested were from surrounding Topsfield, Ipswich, Reading, Amesbury, Beverly, Salem Village, and one from as far away as Boston. Yet not one soul from Andover. They were all alike in being chained and manacled to bring relief to the misery of the group of young women who had been bewitched. But soon, so said the young women, more witches were about, sending their invisible bodies forth to bring fresh torment to the innocent. The accusers renewed their screeching and rolling about, and the best minds in theology and the law that Salem could produce proclaimed that there were more witches yet to be found.

  SUNDAY, MAY THE 15th, brought a sky full of clouds, but so high were they in the bowl of the heavens that the gray seemed uniformly painted there. I sat in the cart on the way to the meetinghouse holding on to Hannah’s skirt with one hand as she leaned over the side, her fat fingers reaching and straining for the turning spokes of the wheels, and with the other hand I held on to the corner of an oilskin that Father had spread over us to save us from the misting rain that started as we pulled from the yard. The air was by turns hot and then cold, and I struggled with my shawl as I sweated and shivered beneath it. Mother had been cross and short with us all the whole of the morning, for she, like the rest of us, dreaded going to the meetinghouse. The air about the congregants the previous two Sundays had been heavy and punishing as the Reverend Barnard peppered his sermons with the names of townsfolk accused in Salem for witchcraft. For the Reverend it was a sign of a greater battle to come. One that could spill over at any moment into Andover. His lurid predictions had taken precedence over the sermons of the Reverend Dane, and, like an angry ship captain upon the foredeck, he cried out warnings of the evils to come.

  We arrived a full quarter hour late. The Reverend was at the pulpit, and he paused in his invocation to follow us with his eyes as we found seats at the very back of the room. There were no open stares from our neighbors, just a ripple of sly nods one to the other and a cascade of knowing exchanges, “you see, you see, you see. . .” As we settled quickly into our seats, I searched the front pew for the Reverend Dane and was surprised to see the Reverend Nason from Billerica along with the other elders seated facing us. He was more grossly fat than ever, but his gaze was keen, his eyes within their restricted field squeezed into sharp focus like a narrow spyglass. He stared at me for a moment, as though he had seen into my hiding place as I peeked at him through the hole in Margaret’s bedroom wall, and then looked sharply away.

  When the psalms had been sung, Reverend Barnard began in a clipped, bitten-off way, “Many this day are tormented. Most of them children. Innocents. Christians. Saints. . . . I myself was witness to this witchery a fortnight ago when I gathered with others of my calling in the home of the Reverend Parris in Salem Village. I saw with my own eyes the work of the Devil as he strove to separate those tortured children from their salvation. My brother pastor, the Reverend Nason, who sits before you, has seen this struggle as well. He has been moved, as I have, to work day and night to stop this spread of evil, and believe me, my faithful followers in Christ, it will spread as contagion is spread without our diligence and scrutiny. But we will find out this black work through prayer and through testimony. Yes, testimony. For it is not enough to fear evil or to pray against evil. It must be dragged into the light of day so that it may be carved out and cleansed and made pure with fire and with the sword if necessary, for does it not say in the Scriptures, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’?”

  And here he stopped for a moment to calm himself, to swallow, to compose his face, which had twisted itself into ticks and grimaces. He pointed to the Reverend Nason and continued quietly, confidentially, as though sharing a secret. “He goes on the morrow to Salem Village to give testimony of a man from Billerica, a physician by calling, who not only claims to have killed a witch but boasts he can foretell a witch at any place. Not through prayer or fasting or by the consultation of his minister but by the use of charms and spells. He has even taught his little daughter this charm making and has boasted of it in taverns in Billerica and here in Andover as well. This is Devil’s work. You see how it spreads? How it crosses borders and roads like a rolling fog?”

  My breathing had stopped, forcing the blood to beat against my skull like a clapper vibrating inside a bell. I saw in my mind’s eye Margaret, standing all clean and straight in front of the Reverend Nason, reciting her catechism on finding a witch, and recalled Uncle’s claims to be able to break the spells of witchcraft.

  “This man works to pollute his own children. See how it spreads? Who may know how he works to pollute others of his family. See how it spreads?” And he began to repeat the last phrase over and over again, catching the eye here and there of his parishioners, making a final chorus to his psalm of retribution. Heads started to turn back and forth (“See how it spreads”) first in our direction, then to Reverend Barnard, and then back to us again, like so many county banners snapping in a cross breeze (“See how it spreads”). There was not a person in the meetinghouse who did not know that Roger Toothaker, doctor by trade, was related by marriage to the Carriers. At the last, his gaze fell heavily upon the Reverend Dane as he sat in the front pew surrounded by his sons and wife and daughters. And there was not a person there who did not know that the Carriers were in turn related to the Danes by marriage.

  Upon hearing the last “amen,” I strained to stand to be the first out the door, but Mother’s fingers closed over my arm, keeping me seated next to her as one by one every member of the congregation passed us in solemn and silent procession, as though viewing bodies at a laying-out. She sat and stared ahead, looking neither to the right nor the left, making her face all smooth, all cold and proud. The only sign of her anger was a blue vein beating fast and hard at her temple. When all had left the sanctuary, she released my arm and I followed her out. The mist had turned to heavy rain and she pulled her shawl over her head with one hand and half walked, half dragged Hannah with the other to the wagon, where Father stood waiting for us. One of my shoes had come off in the wet ground and as I struggled to pull it out I heard a voice
licking at my ear, soft and malicious.

  “Witch,” it said. I looked up and saw Phoebe Chandler. Standing behind her were Mercy and Mary Lacey and some other girls I did not know.

  “Witch,” she said again as I pulled the shoe from the sucking mess and, taking no time to place it back on my foot, walked with it in my hand as best I could through the mud. They followed close on my heels and chanted “witch, witch, witch, witch. . .” The yard was silent except for the hissing sounds of their voices and the soft pattering of the rain. Our neighbors stood about as motionless as stones, letting the rain soak their coats and skirts, their mouths unmoving but their eyes bright and attentive. I stumbled and fell to my knees, covering my apron with black mud, and heard laughter behind me. My face was pointed to the dirt but I could feel the press of bodies at my back and I flinched, remembering well the feel of a rock on the back of my head. Phoebe bent over me and continued in a high, ringing voice the same words, faster and faster, “witch-witch-witch-witch. . .” I did not see at first what made the others take two and then three steps backwards. Phoebe could not have seen, for she hovered over me, chanting to the crown of my head like a chattering squirrel. The soiled hem of a skirt was fast approaching as well as the tips of well-worn shoes, which flung pellets of clay in every direction. When my mother grabbed her shoulders and shook her, Phoebe’s voice was cut off as neatly as new bread cut through with a knife.

  “Here, here. Where do you suppose you live? Were you raised in a cellar to behave so badly?” Mother’s hair had come uncoiling out of her cap and her color was high around her cheekbones.

  “Go on now. All of you.”

  The girls had started to leave until they saw Mercy fold her arms and stand with one hip jutting out, her upper lip curled. Then they all stood and watched as Mother helped me to my feet and held my hand, the mud making a glue between our two palms. Father had been sitting all along in the wagon, and I had two thoughts as I crawled into the straw. The first was that Mother had come to my aid. And the second was that Father had not. The ride home was quiet as we huddled under the oilskin, but I could feel my brothers watching me. I started to shake with the wet and cold and from a lagging fear. Tom put his arm around me and wiped the dirt from my hands with his scarf.