The Heretic's Daughter

by Kathleen Kent

  I called to Tom to stop idling and finish up his work but I got no answer. The heat had made me peckish and mean, and Hannah kept a safe distance from me, fearing more slaps than tickles. I could see her playing in the straw, pulling what was left of the yarn hair from my poppet. I had no reserves of strength left to bully her, so I called out to Tom again and saw his face appear above the ledge.

  He threw down a jagged whisper, “Sarah, come up here. Right away.” His face was at all times a mask of concern, but there was something to the pitch of his voice, a fearfulness, that made my chest cave in on itself.

  “Is it him? Is he coming?” I asked, feeling suddenly light headed and panicked. After all of the waiting it had come to this. That we should be taken without any ceremony or family left behind to give us a final farewell. I heard a low, wet snarling from the yard as the lurcher signaled an intruder, and while I climbed the ladder to the loft I wondered why he wasn’t giving his usual frantic barking. I stood next to Tom at the open loft, and when he pointed up the road, I saw the dog. He came towards us, drunkenly weaving his way from one side of the road to the other, his head matted with the froth around his mouth, his tongue hanging down from between his teeth, and panting feverishly as though he had been running a great distance. The lurcher pulled backwards against his chain and his growls turned to a whistling whine. The cur continued his staggering walk towards the lurcher until he came to a stop about twenty or thirty yards from the front of the barn. He lowered his head until it touched the ground, the drippings from his mouth staining the packed dirt to a black mud, and bared his teeth all at once.

  There is a space of time before a mad animal charges, a space that may last a few heartbeats or a few minutes, as though the sickness thickens the brain as well as the blood and makes the course of thought sluggish and interrupted. I looked down to the open doors below the loft and knew that once past our lurcher the cur could charge the barn and savage Hannah before I could climb down the ladder.

  “Tom,” I whispered, afraid to look away, “where is the flintlock?”

  He pointed down below to the stalls, and when I looked I saw it propped against one of the beams. The lurcher, at the very end of his chain, had thrown himself belly down and was lying motionless, no longer whining, no longer twisting against his tether, his lip curled up over his fangs. I could hear Hannah talking and singing to herself and I took a chance and shushed her. The cur moved his head slowly towards us and stared through the open doors with bloody weeping eyes. He took a step and another and then stopped. A low grinding sound came from his throat and he sneezed mightily, spreading the foam from his dewlaps for yards around. Every moment that passed I feared to move lest I bring the dog charging into the barn, but with every breath that he did not move I cursed myself for not running to lift Hannah to safety. The dog took another few steps and I tensed to turn and make a grab for my sister.

  Tom held my arm and said softly, “There isn’t time.” He took from his pocket a few small objects which clicked together as he palmed them. He drew his arm back smoothly and let loose a stone, which flew in a high arc, landing twenty feet behind the cur. He did it without hesitation and with the surety of a boy standing on a riverbed, hitting his target on the far shore. The dog startled and wheeled around towards the noise. Tom let fly another stone, which landed ten feet beyond the first. The cur growled and charged the dust kicked up by the stones and then stood wavering on unsteady legs, searching for his prey. Then something, perhaps the shadow of a passing bird or a foraging squirrel or a leaf rattling in the wind, led him stumbling down the road away from us. For the rest of that day as we bent and reached and sweated our way through barn and garden, I watched the slight, hunched figure of my brother and wondered at his coolness and presence of mind. After the cur had wandered away like a fever breaking on a summer flux, my trembling legs gave out, and it was Tom who helped me to my feet and guided me down the ladder. It was Tom who picked up Hannah and to her great confusion held her rocking to his chest. It was Tom who picked up the flintlock with steady hands and walked the forty or so yards down Boston Way in pursuit of the dog, taking careful aim and bringing it to its end with one shot to the head.

  Late afternoon as we sat on the threshold of the back door waiting for Father’s tall form to appear from the simmering bracken of Falls Woods, Tom turned to me and said, “I’m not useless.”

  I looked at him with surprise as he wiped the damp grit from his forehead with his sleeves. The sleeves that had given up their buttons to make the eyes for my poppet, or rather the poppet I had given to Margaret.

  He continued in a pinched voice. “You’re not the only one on this farm who can take care of us when Father’s away.”

  I started to protest but he cut me off, saying, “It’s the way you look at me. It’s the way you dismiss me and pity me with your eyes. Up there, in the loft, there was not once that you thought to ask for help. But I am just as able as you. I can work as hard as you. And I can take care of us as well as you can.” He looked at me defiantly, his brows knitted together, his dark hair curling around his ears and I thought of the stones stored in his pocket and carried around for who knows how many days and weeks. The ammunition of every boy used in the chasing of birds and for skimming across the smooth surface of a pond. The ammunition he had used with calm assurance to save us from calamity.

  “I miss her as much as you,” he said, making knuckles of his hands between his knees, tightening and stiffening his back, forbidding the tears to come. But once he had said the words, I saw the misery that rested in purplish bands like bruises beneath his eyes and that pinched his lips into a perpetual frown. I took my thumb and wiped a small circle of dirt from his cheek that his sleeve had missed.

  “I’m the oldest now on the farm when Father’s gone. I can take care of us,” he said, reaching out and tugging at my apron to move me closer. I thought he would hold my hand or put his arm across my back but he didn’t move to touch me save where his knee pressed into mine. Even so, there was a shifting away of something weighty and grasping about my shoulders, and we sat together for a long time, the sun behind us casting furlong shadows across the fields leading to Ladle Meadow.

  ON JULY 30TH Aunt Mary was arrested again in Billerica and taken to Salem Village for questioning. She had been released to go home after Mother’s examination but Mary Lacey cried out against her and so she was taken along with Margaret to face the judges. After a lengthy and punishing examination, she finally admitted to afflicting Timothy Swan and others and said that she had attended witches’ meetings with my mother and two brothers. My mother had told her at these black Sabbaths that there were no fewer than 305 witches throughout the countryside and that their work was to pull down the Kingdom of Christ and set up the Kingdom of Satan. She said that the Devil had appeared to her in the shape of a tawny man and had promised to keep her safe from the Indians if she would sign the Devil’s book. When she was asked if she looked to serve Satan, this good and gentle woman answered that, because of her great fear, she would follow him with all her heart if he would deliver her from the Indians. Two days later, on the first day of August, while she and Margaret were in prison, a small party of Wabanaki attacked homes close to theirs in Billerica, killing every man, woman, and child. The Devil had kept his bargain with her and perhaps for this reason Aunt never changed her testimony of guilt, as some would do once the prison doors were locked.

  The third session of the Court of Oyer and Terminer began on Tuesday, August 2nd, and would last for four days. Mother’s sentencing lasted the better part of two days. Appearing to give verbal testimony to the court against her were Mary Lacey, brought from her prison cell, Phoebe Chandler, and Allen Toothaker. And even though Richard and Andrew had given sworn statements against her, Cotton Mather moved to strike such admissions as there was so much spectral evidence offered from other sources. This, the one kindness from the man who would later call my mother, the only woman in the colonies to face down and cha
llenge her accusers, a “rampant hag.”

  She was condemned to hang on the 19th of August along with the Reverend George Burroughs, formerly of Salem Village, John Proctor, who wrote to the governor of my brothers’ torture, George Jacobs, an old rambling man of Salem, and John Willard, a young man who had nursed one of the girls who was bewitched and who woke one morning to find that the hand that worked to heal was often the first bitten.

  ON AUGUST 10TH I woke with a great calmness. The heat of the day was as thick as ever but the evening before had turned suddenly cool. So much so that before retiring I had climbed the stairs to the garret room and pulled an old quilt out of Grandmother’s trunk. Beneath the blanket lay the cross-stitch piece that Margaret had so lovingly made for me and within it was wrapped the ancient shard of pottery. I tucked both into my shift and lay under the quilt with Hannah in my arms, feeling the pottery’s sharpness press like an accusing finger into the skin over my ribs. When I rose from bed, I dressed with great care, tearing out the knots in my hair with my fingers where the comb would not go and tucking the strands neatly into my cap. I put on my stockings, so little worn, and took a rag to my shoes, giving a glimpse of the leather beneath the dirt. I made whatever breakfast I could for the four of us and then I went to stand at the front of the door, my head turned to the north, waiting for my visitor to come. Knowing that he would come today, just as my mother had known when a neighbor was sure to appear for an unannounced visit.

  He appeared soon after with a warrant for me and for Tom, and I believe he was more than a little shaken to find such a tiny sentinel poised and at the ready on the threshold of our house. He held the warrants up to Father’s face, but Father’s eyes never let go of the constable’s and soon I could smell the sour essence of fear come off the man in heady waves. He spied the poppet in Hannah’s arms and dragged it from her, saying only, “I am to take any poppets found to the court.” She continued her steady, sharp wailing even as we were led out to the yard and placed in the cart. We had been tied, but loosely, and it would take only a little while before we were free of our bonds and could sit holding each other’s hands.

  As the constable was climbing onto the boards and taking up the reins, Father took hold of the horse’s halter and held it so tightly that the horse could not lift his head. “You know me, John Ballard.”

  The constable answered beneath his breath, “Aye, I know you.”

  “And I know you as well. And my children had best arrive in Salem the way they left.” Father then let go of the halter and stood back, reaching down to grab hold of Hannah’s shift and pull her from the wheels of the cart.

  As John Ballard flicked the reins he said, “It’s not me that will harm the children. But once I deliver them it’s out of my hands.”

  We pulled away up Boston Way Road, Tom and I sitting close together, Hannah running behind, screaming and calling for us to come back, terrified to be left without us and in the company of Father, who stood in the yard, towering and still.

  THERE WERE NINE judges in the meetinghouse-turned-court on that Wednesday, August 10th, along with jurors, plaintiffs, witnesses, and lookers-on, so many in fact that grown men sat upon each other’s laps in order to watch the inquisition of such young children. We were the youngest among the accused, apart from four-year-old Dorcas Good, and every eye, every gesture, every breath was turned in our direction as we were led through the crowds and planted a few feet in front of the assembled magistrates. John Ballard handed to the chief judge my poppet and when his receipt was signed he left us without so much as a backwards glance. There was much rustling and sorting of paper and quiet sober speaking between the judges, and I looked through lowered lashes to the right and to the left of me to see their faces. My heart was a pick hammer in my chest, and dark particles danced in my vision as though the very air were disturbed by its beating. I felt Tom move closer to me and stand with his arm touching mine.

  The poppet, worn and mangled by Hannah’s rough play, was handed from judge to judge to judge, and the solemnity with which they studied it seemed so out of place with their calling that a quivering smile started to form on my lips. I felt its mate, a nervous bubbling laugh, start to rise with my terror from my belly, and to keep it from spilling forth I clamped my palm to my mouth. The same unwanted laugh that had erupted over the antics of the black boy in the Andover meetinghouse threatened to make me a chittering monkey in the faces of the men who could with a word end my life. I heard a loud commotion to my right, and when I turned my head I saw a group of young women and girls standing in tortured agony, their hands clapped over their mouths as if they were nailed there, cawing and moaning and straining to speak through their fingers.

  One of the girls managed to spit out, “She tries to silence us. To keep us from giving testimony. Oh, my tongue, my tongue burns. . .”

  I looked back at the judges and the chief of them, John Hathorne, the very same judge who sentenced my mother to be hanged, said to me darkly, “How long hast thou been a witch?”

  For a moment I could not answer or take my hand from my mouth and so he asked me again, lowering his head and speaking slowly and carefully as one would speak to an idiot child, “How long have you been a witch?”

  I lowered my hand and said, “Ever since I was six years old.” There was a collective sigh from every bench, but all talking was shushed into silence so that no words would be missed.

  “How old are you now?” John Hathorne asked.

  “Near eleven years old.” I could feel Tom’s eyes on me and so, for his sake, tried to quiet the quivering of my face.

  The judge paused some to let the clerk scratch my answers onto paper and then he asked suddenly, as if to befuddle my senses into revealing the truth, “Who made you a witch?”

  I looked at him, my eyes wide with fright, my lips parted to suck in the air that seemed to elude my lungs, and I could not speak. I had been ready to give them any story they wanted about my own guilt. That I flew on a pole, my toes curled into the wind, that I baked bread for the witch’s altar, that I danced on the graves of their mothers. But here it was and so soon. I knew what answer I had to give them but I could not speak. I was like one who stands stranded on a cliff over the ocean, unable to climb the wall behind them and too afraid to jump for fear of landing in the swirling eddies below. The moments stretched out and I could hear the restless stirring of the girls next to me, who would be all too willing to throw out a name, or two, or three, if I didn’t give them one to write in jet ink on the waiting parchment. I felt Tom press something into my palm and felt the smooth hardness of a small river stone and my fist closed tight around it. And then I gave them the name they wanted. The name of the woman who was already imprisoned, waiting to die.

  I took a step off the ledge and said, “My mother.”

  There was a satisfied nodding all around and then one of the lesser judges asked John Hathorne in a forced whisper, “How was it done?” and the chief magistrate turned to me and repeated the question loudly, as though I were deaf.

  “She made me set my hand to a book.” The outpouring of breath from the bench was as pleased and expectant as if I had pulled out of my apron a loaf of bread freshly baked. I looked across the faces of the men before me and saw in their eyes interest and enmity, curiosity and fearfulness, but to a person I saw nothing that could be called in good faith compassion or pity or even reserved judgment. I heard a small animal noise behind me and turned my head to see one of the bewitched girls make a mewling noise like a cat. She was dressed in dun homespun wool like me and wore a simple cap like me, and her hair was the same color of rust, so we could have been sisters. But in her eyes I saw only spite. I felt suddenly sick, a dark curtain drawing itself around the edges of my sight, and I reached out for Tom’s arm and held it tightly.

  Then Judge Hathorne said to me, “Go on,” and his voice seemed swathed in bolts of rough batting and any meaning was severed from the sounds formed by his lips. My knees lost their hold and I
felt Tom’s arms go around me, lifting me up, forcing me to stand. Then the chief judge motioned for the clerk to cease his writing and he said to me, folding his hands tightly together, “Do you know where you are?” I nodded my head and he said, “Do you know whom you address?” and I nodded again.

  “Then you know that we will have the truth from you. You must answer every question put to you, completely and willingly, or it will go very badly for you. Do you understand what I am saying to you? We make no promises for leniency because of your tender years, and if you do not reveal to us your involvement fully in this witchcraft, you put at risk your immortal soul. The body can be sacrificed, but once the soul is lost it is lost forever.”

  The words worked their way through the batting, and the silence after was like the silence between the laying down of the fowl and the descending axe upon the block. And when the axe finally falls, hindered by flesh and bone, it makes a dull, muffled sound like a weighted latch forever bolting a door, or a mountain of paper being moved from one magistrate’s table to another. Judge Hathorne motioned to the clerk to ready himself and asked me again, “How were you made a witch?”

  “My mother made me set my hand to a book.” I knew they were thinking of the Devil’s book but in my mind’s eye I saw Mother’s red diary buried at the foot of a lone tree on Gibbet Plain. The diary I had sworn to hide and protect from men such as these.

  “How did you set your hand to it?”

  “I touched it with my fingers. The book was red. Red, the color of blood. And the pages were white. Very white like the color of. . .” My voice trailed off and I saw the clerk straining to hear me, but when I looked at him he lowered his gaze and reached for a clean sheet of parchment, as though my last words had rendered the first page untouchable.