Conversion (19 page)

SALEM VILLAGE, MASSACHUSETTS

MAY 30, 1706

B
ut I don’t understand. What did they hope to accomplish with this exercise?” Reverend Green asks me with a curled lip.

“It’s a very old method, Reverend Green. I’m surprised you’ve never heard of it.”

“I was brought up to put my faith in God first, and then in science. Not in old superstitions and wives’ tales. They lead foolish people away from the truth.”

I watch him with an appraising look. It’s so easy for him. Judging like that.

“Be that as it may. They had Tittibe bake it into a biscuit, and then Goody Sibley bade John feed it to one of the dogs in the yard.”

“A dog?”

“A dog, yes.”

“The illogic astonishes me,” Reverend Green cries, throwing his hands up to heaven. “Though I don’t know why it should.”

“The illness had a preternatural cause. The doctor said so! Whyn’t they look for a preternatural solution?”

“How on earth could they think feeding a urine cake to a dog would be a solution? You explain to me how such simple minds work, because I’ll never understand it otherwise,” he challenges me, ramming his fingertip into the top of his desk.

“Well, as I understand it, there were two ways Goody Sibley thought it might work. First, it was thought that perhaps the illness, or charm, or whatever it was, might travel via our water into the body of the dog, and we’d be freed.”

“Oh, freed. I see.” The Reverend’s voice has taken a sarcastic turn. I suppose I can understand why, given all I’ve said. There was no charm in me to pass away, nor in Betty Parris or Abby Williams either.

“Or,” I continue, “the other thinking was that the dog’s munching the cake would reflect the charm on whoever had bewitched us. That it would cause the person pain, and so she’d be forced to set us free.”

The Reverend watches me, wheels turning behind his eyes. “Now that’s interesting,” he remarks. “Having a small part stand in for the whole. Not as ignorant as I’d assumed. How did it turn out? Successful, I presume?”

I glare at him.

“We all stood out in the yard shivering, up to our ankles in snow, watching the dog devour the cake. When the dog was licking his chops and the cake was gone, Reverend Parris took hold of me and forced up my sleeve, to see if my arm were healed. But it wasn’t. The wound was as red and seeping as it ever was.”

“It would be,” Reverend Green says.

“Then he sent everyone away. He wanted to pray alone that night. But the word was out in the village. And the word on everyone’s lips was
witchcraft.
”

Everyone is waiting. I watch people bustle about their business in the village, and to the untrained eye everything looks much the same. Pigs root in the streets, their fur crusted with frost. One day there’s a warming, and the snow goes soft and wet, dropping in chunks from the trees. That night, a freeze so deep that when we all awake the next morning, it’s like the village has been dipped in glass.

A week or thereabouts has passed since Mary Sibley told Tittibe and John to make the charm, and now everywhere I go I hear whispers. I imagine I feel people’s eyes on my back, but the moment I turn, I see nothing. Heads are down, bent to their work. I’m greeted in my comings and goings as usual, but there’s some fear underlying the words. Like the normalcy is all just people acting in a play.

A steady stream of gentlemen—ministers and magistrates and doctors and the town fence-viewer—tromp in and out of the parsonage, and if you pass close by, you can hear men’s voices in prayer. Women cluster in the parsonage’s hall, inventing reasons to be there. The first meeting day after the doctor’s failed visit, the minister exhorts us all most grievously. He blames the village. He has sensed the current of our wariness, sees it carrying him and Betty and Abigail further away from our care, and so he tries to swim back into our good graces by presenting us with evidence of our own moral debasement. He stands ready to forgive us on God’s behalf, if we’ll only repent.

Reverend Parris is scared.

One afternoon I’m in Ingersoll’s Ordinary with Betty Hubbard, who’s staying on in our house while Dr. Griggs attends to the girls in the parsonage. I’ve been sent there by my mother for supper with Betty and one of my younger brothers, and we’re at a table in the corner near the fire. It’s warm in the corner, and I push my coif back from my forehead, which is shining with sweat.

“Let me see it,” Betty says.

“No,” I say, holding my arm to my waist where it will be safe.

My brother’s not listening, as he has told us that he thinks girls are poison, and he won’t eat off my plate either, and I can’t make him. I’ve given up arguing with him. At this point, I might secretly agree. Maybe girls are poison.

“Come on, let me see,” Betty insists.

I look around to ensure that we’re unobserved. The tavern is crowded, bachelor men bent together in one corner, families crowded around tables, babies wailing. I can’t see anyone staring. But I have that feeling that people are looking away the minute my eyes land squarely on them.

“No one’s looking,” Betty Hubbard says, as though she’s heard my thoughts.

I lay my arm on the table and pull up the sleeve, grimacing as I do so. The crust of blood on the welts has soaked into the linen of my shift, and pulling it free peels the new skin away. Betty leans in close and sucks on a tooth.

“It’s still drawing,” she says.

I nod. I dip my fingertips in my cider mug and dab the alcohol on the semicircle of punctures. It stings, and I grimace and pull the sleeve down quickly. My little brother watches with a wrinkled nose.

“That’s foul, Annie,” he informs me.

“Be still,” I hiss at him. “Or I’ll send you home without supper, and who d’you think Mother will believe, when you ask her for something to eat?”

He sulks in silence.

“Perhaps you should show it to my uncle,” Betty Hubbard muses.

“But he’ll think I’m still bewitched.”

“Aren’t you?” Betty asks, raising her eyebrows. “As ever you were before, I mean.”

I grunt and swirl the cider in my mug, staring down into it.

“He’s got Abby and Betty to attend to. I don’t know why Abby doesn’t just confess.”

“She’s right comfortable up there, that’s why,” Betty Hubbard says.

Our food comes, roast pork with pickled apple, and we gnaw into it. There’s some singing in the Ordinary, and my brother beats time along on the table. We’re smiling, mouths greasy. I know my mother’s sent us out to get quiet in the house while my father labors over his account books, but I’m happy for it. It feels good to be among the other villagers, to feel safe and another face among many. To be warm while all outside is cold and barren.

The door slams open midsong, and it’s my friend Mary Warren, the Procters’ girl. A gale blows around her skirts before she can get the door closed, earning her scowling from the table nearest the door and some conspicuous buttoning up of jackets. She spots us and hurries over. Eyes track her movement with curiosity, and I see a few heads lean to whisper in other ears.

“Mary! Have you eaten?” I smile up at her, feeling warm and pleased that we can make a party of us four.

“Yes, yes, they eat early.” Mary waves me off and sits on the bench next to Betty Hubbard.

“Why, what’s the matter? You look frightened half to death,” Betty Hubbard says with concern. And it’s true, Mary’s face has no color. I feel my meal begin to curdle in my stomach.

“I’ve just come from them,” Mary says. She never likes to name the Procters. She hates waiting on them as much as Abby hates waiting on the Parrises, but Mary’s a more godly girl than Abby, and keeps her complaints close. “Goody Procter’d heard a rumor in the town, and I just went to the parsonage to find out after it, and it’s true.”

“What’s true?”

Mary looks at my brother. “Go find Goody Pope’s boy, John.”

My brother pouts.

“You heard what Mary said to you,” I say, flicking him on the back of his wrist with my fingernail. He yelps.

“But he’s not here!”

“How d’you know he’s not here if you don’t bother to look?” Mary says.

My brother gets to his feet, looking confused.

“And don’t you come back ’til you’ve found him,” I exhort.

He slinks away, casting a baleful glance at us and at his unfinished rib. When he’s out of earshot, Mary leans in over the table, and we lean in, too. I hear chairs and benches creak around us, and conceive that other tavern-goers are also leaning in to listen, but that could just be my imagination.

“Betty Parris’s going to tell,” Mary whispers.

“Tell?”

“Sure enough, she is. They won’t let her alone. All day and all night, for three days, they’re after her to say who’s bewitching her. They’re going to make her tell. I think we should go over.”

“You think she’ll confess they’re just playing?” I ask, panicked.

If they do, I’ll be catching hellfire and brimstone rained down from my father. And Reverend Parris will beat Betty Parris and Abby raw.

“What else can she say? Unless Abby thinks of something better. Come on. We should go.”

I hunt through the crowded hall to see if I can spot my brother to tell him we’ve gone, but he’s nowhere to be found.

DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS

TUESDAY, VALENTINE’S DAY, 2012

A
week later, and I couldn’t stop looking at my phone.

The library at St. Joan’s was a deep stone cavern, eerily narrow and tall, with walls of books leaning up into the dimness overhead. The only light came from a distant clerestory of leaded Gothic windows tucked under the wooden beams holding up the roof and the green glass lamps dotting the wooden library tables. As a result, people liked to go in there to sleep.

Deena was bent over her physics textbook at the library table across from me, scratching the part in her baby dreads with the end of her pencil. I arranged my books, including my new copy of
The Crucible,
into a protective wall around my half of the table. Between us, a green-shaded desk lamp buzzed every so often, its brass pull chain hanging exactly where a procrastinating student might most want to play with it, and so I was rolling it between my fingers. The word processing program on my laptop was open to a new document.

The page was blank.

Cursor flashing.

I pulled my phone out again. Nothing. I frowned and stuffed it back in my sweater pocket.

Deena glanced up at me, then looked back down to her physics book as though ready to let it go. She sighed, changed her mind, and kicked me under the table.

“Colleen,” she said. “You’ve got to stop.”

“Not even a text?” I said. I was whining, I knew it, but still.

“Come on.”

“How long does it take to send a text message? Like, two seconds?”

Deena put down her pencil and crossed her arms. “What are you so upset about?”

“Nothing,” I grumbled.

I mean, it wasn’t like Spence was my boyfriend or anything.

Reading my mind, Deena said, “What’d you expect, roses? You’ve only hung out with him, like, once.”

“But we text every day, though.” I heard myself talking and realized who I was sounding like.

Anjali.

Deena saw the thought cross my mind.

“I just channeled Anjali right then.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

“I really wish she’d just write us back and tell us what is going on.”

“I know. I’m worried, too.”

“You haven’t heard from her either, have you?”

“Nothing. No selfies on Instagram, even. I guess maybe you were right.”

We lapsed into silence. I pulled out my phone again. Deena opened her mouth, but I silenced her with raised eyebrows.

Hey

I tapped.

No, not to Spence. Jeez. I wasn’t desperate or anything. It was to Emma. I knew she was bored, and I wasn’t getting anything done anyway.

Hey. How’s school?

I smiled. When Emma wasn’t in school last week, Deena and I had a momentary panic that all of our friends were dying and no one would tell us. But before second period I established that Deena’s theory about nervous parents keeping people out of school for no reason was true, at least as far as the clannish Blackburns were concerned. Emma was on lockdown, getting her homework assignments by e-mail and slowly going crazy. But the good news was, Emma could keep us updated on media reports while we were stuck in class.

Boring. Weird. Nobody’s here. How are u?

“Tell her I say hi,” whispered Deena.

Good. Got into Endicott!!!

I held up my hands in a silent V-for-Victory, and showed my phone to Deena.

“Oh, like anyone’s surprised,” Deena said, grinning.

AWESOME!! D says hi too. Any news?

Deena watched me typing, then sank her head back into her physics book, her pencil making notes in a margin.

WBST says up to 25. True?

I frowned and looked around where we were sitting in the library, as if seeing the lack of people would either confirm or deny what Emma had just said. I whistled between my teeth.

Hard to tell . . . nobody here.

Another text came in while I was typing, so I hit send and then opened it.

The play. Don’t forget.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I said out loud.

Deena looked up at me with a quizzical expression.

“Just some jerk,” I whispered.

She rolled her eyes and bent back to her work.

DOING IT NOW SHUT UP.

The phone buzzed again.

Come over after? Mom driving me CRAZY.

Emma.

“You want to hit up Emma’s after school?” I whispered to Deena, who was my ride home.

“Um.” Deena bit her lip and gazed at a point on a distant wall of the library.

I frowned. I’d thought for sure she’d be happy to go see Emma. She’d been out for a week.

“Deena?”

She shifted in her seat. “Well. I mean. I’ve got kind of a lot of stuff to do at home.”

“But I just told her we were coming.”

This statement was not, strictly speaking, true. But I was annoyed. Emma was our friend. And she wasn’t sick, not really. She just had a hypochondriac for a mom. What was Deena’s problem? I considered asking her this while I watched Deena try to come up with a credible excuse.

The phone vibrated again, with the text from
UNKNOWN
.

“Dammit,” I muttered, scrolling to the new text message.

Don’t forget.

“Hilarious,” I whispered. “Psycho.”

Who are you, anyway? Leave me alone I’m WORKING.

I stuffed the phone deep into the recesses of my shoulder bag, irritated with everyone.

“C’mon, Deena,” I said. “She’s our friend. She’s not sick, not really. You know that. And I need you to drive me.”

Deena scowled.

“Fine,” she said, flipping a page in her physics book with finality.

“I don’t see what the big deal is. We won’t even stay that late.”

“I said it’s fine.” She flipped another page.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

I stared at her for a long moment and then, shaking my head, opened the paperback of the play with unnecessary force, cracking the spine flat. I rustled through the pages of one of my history books, ignoring Deena if she happened to notice my deliberate noise, and settled in to read.

An hour passed. Deena knitted her fingers together and stretched, palms out, and I could hear her knuckles pop. The sound caused Jennifer Crawford, who was napping at the far end of the library table, her head on a pile of Faulkner, to twitch in her sleep.

I flipped a page in the play, frowned, and ran my finger down a list of names in the history book at my elbow. Then I flipped the page back.

“Huh,” I said. “That’s funny.”

“Hmm?” Deena inquired, resting her chin on the backs of her hands and smiling at me. That’s one of the things I really like about Deena. We can get annoyed at each other, but it will eventually take care of itself, whatever it is, if we just let it lie for a while.

“This girl in the play. Ruth.”

“What play?”

I held
The Crucible
up so she could read the cover.

Deena made a face. “And you all actually compete to be in that class? I mean, Calc BC, okay, I can see competing to get into
that.
Because math is
real.
”

I smiled and said, “This is just extra credit.”

“Oooooh,” Deena said, raising her eyebrows. “Does Fabiana know you’ve got some extra credit?”

“No,” I said, keeping my voice low.

“You’re really gunning for her,” Deena remarked.

“No, I’m not,” I said. But I didn’t know why I said that, because it was totally true. I was gunning for her. Why shouldn’t I?

“What about her?”

“Who? Fabiana?”

“No, the girl in the play. Ruth.”

“Oh!” I flipped back a few pages, and peered at my notes. “That’s just it. She doesn’t exist.”

“What do you mean, she doesn’t exist?”

“Look,” I said, shoving the history book across the library table. Deena leaned closer so she could see, the green library light casting strange shadows in the hollows under her eyes.

“Um,” Deena said. “What am I looking at?”

“Okay, here’s the list of names. Right? They’re the girls who accused women at Salem like three hundred years ago. And now, look.”

I thrust the play across the table. Jennifer Crawford yawned, stretched, and raised her head halfway off her arms, looking at us curiously.

“So?”

“So, these are the characters in the play who are the afflicted girls, and they’re all the same as in the history book. Right? Abigail, Betty, Mary, blah blah blah. But. There’s a Ruth.”

“So he made someone up. Big deal.”

I sat back, ruminating.

“Why would he? Everyone else is a real person. It even says here”—I flipped some pages in a different book, one on literary criticism—“that Arthur Miller did research for the play in the real historical records. Like, real trial transcripts and stuff. There’s a couple of them in the index here. They’re crazy. Like a
Law and Order
episode.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Jennifer Crawford asked from her book pillow.

“Some play Colleen’s reading,” Deena answered.

“Huh?”

I held the cover up for her to see, too.

“Oh, yeah, I had to read that,” Jennifer Crawford said, propping her chin on her fist.

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Deena said, going back to her science book. “He’s a playwright. He can write whatever he wants. It’s all made up anyway.”

I glared at her.

“That for Mr. Mitchell’s class?” Jennifer Crawford asked.

“You mean Ms. Slater’s class?” I said. “Yeah. It’s just a paper.”

“History,” Deena snorted. “Who cares? It already happened. Math gets us into space. And music gets us into bed. History’s, like, already over.”

“But why would he make up only one person out of the whole thing? He could’ve made up everyone. Or no one.”

Jennifer Crawford grinned at me and said, “Maybe he’s hiding something!”

“Oh, yeah. He’s a Freemason,” Deena teased. “It’s all code.”

“Maybe,” I said, sticking the end of my pen in my mouth. I chewed it for a second before realizing that I’d put the business end of the pen in, instead of the cap, which I discovered when a nugget of ink burst under my molar.

“Aw, dammit,” I said.

I stood up, wiping my chin and rushing to find a trash can to spit. Ink and drool leaked over my lower lip, onto the back of my hand.

Jennifer Crawford laughed out loud. “Nice one!” she called.

I made my way to the very nunlike washroom in the library, a plain cell of chipped tiles with two antique sinks and a toilet with one of those high boxes and a pull chain to flush. I peeled my lower lip down and inspected my teeth, which were now purply black and rotten looking, like I was wearing a zombie Halloween costume.

“That is basically the sexiest look I’ve ever come up with,” I muttered, running the water in the sink. “Good thing I did it on Valentine’s Day. I should send Spence a selfie so he can admire my intoxicating charm.”

The door to the washroom opened and Jennifer Crawford came in. She gave me a small smile and offered me a paper towel.

“Thanks,” I said.

She shrugged.

“I think it’s kind of interesting, actually,” Jennifer Crawford said.

“What is?” I dabbed at my lip and teeth, pausing to moisten the paper towel under the sink. Why was she always cool only when no one else was around?

“That he changed only one person’s name. But you’re right, he must have based her on someone and changed the details. Do you know who she’s supposed to be?”

“Not yet,” I said. “There were a lot of afflicted girls, turns out. More than you’d think. I’d never heard of a lot of them. Some of them weren’t even girls. A lot of them were grown women. And there was one man, did you know that? John Indian. That name sounds totally fake.”

“Huh,” Jennifer Crawford said.

“I know. It’s crazy. Now I kind of wish we’d talked about it in class.”

“Me too. Mr. Mitchell would’ve rocked that.”

“Oh, I know.”

I watched her in the mirror over my shoulder. She was inspecting the roots of her pink hair and rummaging in her handbag for a lip gloss. Like we were just friends hanging out gossiping in the bathroom.

“Jennifer,” I said.

“Mmm?”

“Are you worried?”

“Me? What about?”

“What do you think? About getting sick. About . . .”—I paused, gesturing with my hand in a circle of global consequence—“all of it.”

A smile curled up Jennifer Crawford’s cheek.

“Nah,” she said. “Not really. Why, are you?”

I shook the water from my hands and saw that my efforts had largely been in vain and I was going to spend the foreseeable future with blackened teeth.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.”

I thought the reporters would all be gone when we were finished with sports, because they usually petered out over the course of the day as other newsworthy things happened in other parts of town. But this time the herd of reporters was just as thick at five as it had been that morning. Deena and I peered at them from a crack in the upper school front door.

“Should we just run for it?” she whispered.

“I guess,” I said.

“Or we could sneak out the door by the gym and go through that lady’s backyard to get to the back fence of the parking lot,” Deena suggested.

“Hmm,” I said.

I didn’t relish a long tromp through someone else’s yard after I’d already spent the afternoon running up and down a hockey field. Plus, the last time we did that, the lady had been home and threatened to call the cops on us. That would really put a damper on the afternoon.

“I say we run for it,” I said.

“Okay.” Deena grinned. “Ready? Set? Go!”

We threw our coats over our heads like we were mob informants running down courthouse steps to a waiting limousine and sprinted together, laughing, to Deena’s car. Cameras clicked in rapid succession and questions were shouted at us, each overlapping the other.

“It’s up to twenty-five now, you girls know that?”

“Aren’t you scared for your safety?”

“D’you think it could be asbestos, or something in the water?”