Six Women of Salem (43 page)

The other prisoners in the yard stare at Tituba, who wonders again what would be happening now if she had held out against all those questions last March. But denying the charge had not helped Sarah Good, so perhaps nothing would be different for her. She walks away from the others, trying to get some distance between them without beating a retreat. The day drags on with occasional seabirds gliding overhead and the sounds of passersby through the fence.

After more time the gate swings open again and another group enters. Rebecca Nurse this time, also returning from her trial. This older woman does not shout and struggle. She looks exhausted and stunned—a far different appearance, though the verdict must have been the same as Good’s. Out in the lane the woman’s family calls to her, offering hope, assuring her that they have not given up yet. One of them sees Tituba and frowns, the confession once again remembered.

Tituba mulls over Sarah Good’s news—testimony against her—they still remember
that.
Eventually, when the rest are dealt with, the confessors will be tried, and then what? When she is no longer potentially useful,
then
what? She does not like to imagine what will happen.

A deputy rounds up the prisoners in the yard and herds them back inside the jail. She hears Sarah Good’s voice from another room: “One child dead and the other left behind—alone in that prison with witches and pirates, burglars and baby killers.” The fierce shout rises to a sob: “Dorothy!” Sarah cries before a guard’s voice tells her to shut her mouth.

Tituba has heard that despairing tone before, of a mother calling for her child.

“Dorothy, what will become of you?”

Tituba shivers.
What
will
become of such a young child? What will happen to any of us here?

(
11
)

Still shackled, Rebecca Nurse shuffles into the Salem meeting house and pauses, blinking, just inside the door to let her eyes adjust to the dusky interior after the brightness of the midday street. Faces turn to stare at her, as people shift on the benches and in the pews while bolder youths lean over the rails of the galleries above. The familiar high space rises above her to the beams under the ribs of the roof lost in shadows.

As a girl in Yarmouth she had seen a seat in the grand stone church there made from the skull and vertebrae of a whale that had washed up on a nearby shore, a trophy from the sea. To sit in it was to pretend to be Jonah swallowed by the whale. Now, in this distant rustic land, she feels swallowed indeed, consumed by events. Yet she must still trust in God. She knows her own innocence. This fight is not over, Francis and their children have told her. They have names and documents. They will go to the governor himself if they have to and
make
him believe the truth. There is still hope, they say.

The guards urge her forward down the center aisle toward the pulpit. It is Sacrament Sabbath, but the bread and wine will not be offered to her even though she has been a communing member of this church for two decades. So many Sundays she has shared the Lord’s Supper here, joining the other full members reaching in a line of the faithful that goes all the way back to the Apostles in a chain of fellowship that honors Christ and his great sacrifice.

But not today.

Not for her.

She has been told the vote was unanimous. The elders had formally asked the voting members—the men—if she ought to be excluded from the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, from communion—excommunicated. As the civil court had so recently considered her case and found her guilty of witchcraft, of joining the Devil’s forces against the Lord’s people, then her partaking of the Sacrament would be hypocrisy at best—a sacrilegious lie. People had testified that they saw her not only distributing Satan’s sacrament but partaking of it also.

Now here she stands, guards gripping her frail arms to keep her upright, to prevent her escape—as though she could suddenly bolt and run—brought to hear the church’s decision pronounced to her face. The younger minister, Reverend Nicholas Noyes, a stout amiable gentleman—but not amiable now—stands ready to deliver the judgment. Today he is all seriousness, as he has been at the hearings and trials. He begins to speak, but most of the words buzz past Rebecca’s fading hearing. He recounts her supposed sins, the crimes the court thinks it has proven against her.

The Lord knows my heart,
she thinks.
I know I am not perfect. I have let my temper flare from my control. I have not done everything I might have done and ought to have done. But I have not done
that.
I have not willingly joined the Devil’s troop.

Mr. Noyes lists detail after detail, with only the occasional phrase making its way to her hearing.

“For these and many other foul and sinful transgressions . . . pronounce you to be a leprous and unclean person . . . cast you out and cut you off from the enjoyment of all those blessed privileges and ordinances . . . which you have so long abused . . . deprive you of them . . . that you may learn better to prize them by the want of them.”

Rebecca’s legs ache from standing.

“And for the greater terror and amazing of you,” Noyes continues, “deliver you up to Satan . . . you who would not be guided by the council of God . . . for the humbling of your soul, that your spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus, if it be His blessed will.”

No,
she thinks.
I at least tried to follow God’s councils.

“As an unclean beast and unfit for the society of God’s people . . . pronounce you an excommunicated person from God and His People.” At last he finishes talking, and one of the elders steps forward.

She catches some of his words: “ . . . depart the congregation as one deprived worthily of all the holy things of God.”

At which the guards nudge her to turn and walk back down the aisle and out the door into the glaring daylight as Reverend Noyes leads the congregation in a blessing on the Sacrament that he and the rest of the members will soon share.

____________________

A
lthough this deprivation of the Sacrament was the most severe punishment the churches could impose upon an errant member, many who were so cast out—for lying, infidelity, and the like—were later reinstated if they showed sufficient change of heart and habit. But for Rebecca, facing death by hanging if her family could not obtain a reprieve, there would be no such future redemption
.

Mary Warren, meanwhile, continued among the afflicted. Day after day she witnessed against suspects and writhed and shrieked in pain when the specters appeared (or seemed to appear). If she doubted her visions now, then she no longer dared to mention it. Perhaps she had come to believe that the afflictions were real—at least some of the time. Consciously or unconsciously she responded to suggestions—other people’s suspicions, general gossip, the movements of the accused.

Mary testified with the others on July 2, when Ann Pudeator faced them a second time. This record for this case is spotty. Goody Pudeator had been sent to Boston’s jail back in May, but she may have been set free like Abbott, for here she was again—back in Salem, arrested anew, and brought to Beadle’s tavern.

There Sarah Churchill, who, like Mary Warren, no longer tried to recant, accused Pudeator of trying to recruit Sarah by offering her the Devil’s book to sign. More damning, however—and the possible catalyst for her second arrest—was the death of her neighbor Goodwife Mary Neal (ironically a distant relative of Rebecca Nurse). Jeremiah Neal told how his late wife grew more ill after the defendant, this “ill-carriaged woman,” borrowed the mortar they used to mix medicines. Regardless of all the woman’s pretensions of neighborly concern, his wife had weakened and died. The many jars of who-knew-what the constable had seen when he fetched Pudeator from her home seemed suspicious. Her answers did not impress the court, and soon enough some of the afflicted began convulsing. Although Annie Putnam, like Sarah Bibber, said she had never seen the woman before that day, she too convulsed until the court, over Pudeator’s protests, ordered the suspect to touch the wrists of the afflicted to free them from their seizures. Her touch only temporarily relieved Mary Warren, who continued to be wracked by shuddering seizures.

Mary was present for the questioning of Mrs. Mary Bradbury as well that day, for the old woman had been brought down to the court from Salisbury.

Annie blamed the woman for her family’s losses, repeating her father’s complaints: “[Mrs] Bradbery or hir Apperance tould me that it was she that made my ffathers sheep to run away till they ware all lost and that she had kiled my ffathers cowe and also kiled that horse he took such delight in.”

The suspect’s specter assaulted both Mary Warren and Annie, and both said they saw the ghostly form of Annie’s dead uncle John Carr drift into the courtroom and heard it accuse Mrs. Bradbury of murdering him. Before the day was out, the specter of a slave woman named Candy tormented Mary and Annie as well.

Back on Friday, July 1
—
before Rebecca Nurse’s excommunication, while her family continued to gather more potentially life-saving documents, and the day the grand jury considered the case of Martha Carrier—two new specters beset Annie Putnam, Mary Warren, and Mary Walcott. Consequently, Thomas Putnam and John Putnam Jr. entered a complaint against “Margret Hawkes Late of Barbados now of Salem and her Negro Woman” before Clerk of the Court Stephen Sewall.

On Monday, July 4, Mistress Hawkes and her slave woman Candy faced not only the magistrates and the three victims listed in the complaint but also Deliverance and Abigail Hobbs.

The identity of these suspects is uncertain. They had evidently not been in Massachusetts for long, but they had been there long enough that Candy could tell what the locals
thought
was happening. She confessed in short order.

“Candy no witch in her country. Candy’s mother no witch. Candy no witch, Barbados. This country, mistress give Candy witch.”

“Did your mistress make you a witch in this country?” asked one of the magistrates.

“Yes. In this country, mistress give Candy witch.” Her mistress, she went on, brought her pen and ink and had her make a mark in a book.
That
action made her a witch.

Magistrates Gedney and Hathorne wanted to know
how
Candy tormented her victims. When she volunteered to show them, they allowed her to go, with a guard, to fetch her poppets from her lodging.

She returned with a handful of odds and ends—rags, grass, a lump of cheese, a knotted handkerchief. Poppets had been described before but not produced in court, and seeing actual poppets sent Mary Warren and the Hobbs women into convulsions. They said they saw the Devil helping Candy and Mrs. Hawkes pinch the rags to cause them pain.

The magistrates decided to experiment on the poppets to see if the objects themselves held a sort of magic or if the suspects were directing the effects. They ordered Candy to untie the knots, but that had no effect and offered no relief to the afflicted. Then they ordered Candy to eat the blade of grass, but again, nothing. The magistrates, forgetting they ought not have anything to do with magic, took the rags into their own hands and burnt one of them. The afflicted shrieked and writhed as if on fire. Unnerved, the magistrates doused the rags in water. Two women—not identified but perhaps the Hobbs—gasped and strangled as if drowning. A third—perhaps Mary Warren—bolted from the building and, with guards trailing behind her, ran headlong for the river.

Rattled by it all, Mrs. Hawkes confessed to witchcraft as well. Both she and her slave were held for trial.

Burdened by the presence of the child growing within her and oppressed by the increasing heat of summer, Mistress Ann Putnam had the satisfaction of knowing that at least
one
of the witches would soon no longer be a problem. The near acquittal of Goody Nurse must have unsettled her as much as it had frightened the afflicted witnesses, but the justices had, as the Putnams saw it, corrected that error. Not that Rebecca’s family seemed to accept the verdict, as definite as it now appeared to be.

While Annie and the others continued to speak out against the suspects and endure their torments, Ann had the additional pleasure of knowing that her family’s long-time adversary Mary Bradbury was also under arrest. The woman could protest and claim innocence, but Annie and the Warren girl had reported the ghost of Ann’s own dead brother—John Carr, draped in a winding sheet, up from his restless grave to name his murderer—appearing in the courtroom. The next day Rebecca Nurse’s excommunication followed. Ann would think this was most appropriate for one who had lied all these years about her devotion to good and her reverence for God, as Ann believed, yet all the while plotted to bring it down, to let the Devil’s rule prevail even here in New England, the new Zion. Although Ann, as she saw it, felt other witches still prowled and persecuted the innocent, she could feel some comfort in the thought that the Nurse harpy would be soon turned off, unable to hurt any more of them. Her child would surely be born when the world was safer. Surely the Putnams would prevail.

But Rebecca Nurse’s family saw the matter
very
differently. Knowing their mother’s innocence and still trusting in the power of reason, they increased their efforts to save her. Francis Nurse already had a petition from three dozen neighbors that attested to Rebecca’s good character: