The Witches: Salem, 1692 (11 page)

PRAYER, EVERY MASSACHUSETTS
minister agreed, was the sole powerful and effective remedy against the devil. And it was prayer that Parris embraced in 1692. Massachusetts had held colony-wide fasts to counteract witchcraft as early as 1651. Parris convened a series of them at his home, in the village, and in nearby congregations. On Friday, March 11, a group of ministers assembled at the parsonage for a day of devotions. The girls remained largely quiet, though at the conclusion of each prayer, noted Hale, himself the father of three children under the age of seven, “they would act and speak strangely and ridiculously.” More severely affected, blond Abigail Williams wound up in a fit, her limbs pretzeled. At some point thereafter Parris decided to separate the children, opting to send off his daughter. The choice may have been practical; the family could not spare Abigail, the servant. They lodged nine-year-old Betty with Stephen Sewall, the town court clerk, soon to grapple with contorting young women both day and night. A distant cousin, he was a magnanimous man. The Sewalls were themselves parents of three children under the age of four. And Betty’s fits persisted, leaving her hosts disheartened. Late in the month, the “great black man” of whom Tituba spoke visited, offering Betty anything her heart desired. He would carry her to the city of her dreams, evidently neither Salem village nor Salem town.
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That was the devil, explained Mrs. Sewall, herself a minister’s daughter. If he returned, the child was to inform him he was a liar from beginning to end.

All talk was of witchcraft; increasingly, the day began with an account of what had transpired in the night and how the afflicted had fared. It
was the wrong moment to sound a dubious note, as it was the wrong season to be the one whose premonitions turned out to be true. Between the time the Boston jailer clapped irons on the three Salem suspects and March 12, a new specter began to pinch Ann Putnam Jr. Her distraught father turned to his brother, Edward Putnam, and Ezekiel Cheever, the horse-borrower, serving as court recorder. A church deacon, Edward Putnam had joined in pressing the initial witchcraft charges. On Saturday morning, March 12, the two resolved to call on Ann’s latest tormentor. She was a church member in good standing. Before riding the few miles south they stopped at the Putnam farm to speak with Ann. Was the twelve-year-old possibly mistaken about the identity of her afflicter? Could she describe her clothes? Unfortunately, that afternoon Ann could converse with the witch but not see her. The spirit had blinded her until evening, when she vowed to reckon with her. In doing so she had however also introduced herself by name.

Martha Corey was alone at her home in southwestern Salem when her visitors arrived. All smiles, she invited them in. She also anticipated their question—a misstep. Putnam and Cheever had barely settled when she announced: “I know what you are come for. You are come to talk with me about being a witch.” She was not one. “I cannot help people talking of me.” Corey shrugged. Edward Putnam revealed that his bewitched niece had indeed named her. Corey was prepared, or thought she was: “But does she tell you what clothes I have on?” she asked. So flabbergasted were her callers by the prescient question that they asked her to repeat it. The twelve-year-old had been unable to do so, they reported, as Corey had “blinded her and told her that she should see you no more before it was night, that she might not tell us what clothes you had on.” Corey could only smile at this subterfuge. She had no cause for concern, she assured her callers. She was a devout woman who “had made a profession of Christ and rejoiced to go and hear the word of God,” as both men knew she unfailingly did. Her deacon reminded her that professions of faith alone would not clear her name. Witches had infiltrated churches for centuries. Neither party appears to have
mentioned the only obvious stain on Corey’s record: before her first marriage, in Salem town, she had borne a mulatto son, now a teenager.

Cheever and Putnam had no need to resurrect that fifteen-year-old history, as Corey incurred a new stain that afternoon. She took her doctrine seriously; she relished the opportunity to discourse on it. She considered herself “a gospel woman.” She found herself explaining why she had unsaddled her husband’s horse in her failed attempt to keep him from the hearing. It struck her as distasteful; how could any good come of such a thing? In that she was correct. Her husband had reported that the girls identified specters by their clothing, a dangerous shard of information. Cheever and Putnam emphasized the seriousness of the charge. Corey remained unmoved, intent on squelching idle gossip. She did not necessarily believe there were witches about, an inflammatory assertion at the best of times but impossible now. Tituba had confessed, Putnam and Cheever reminded her. The evidence was conclusive.

Corey backtracked a little, though not without acknowledging another form of blindness. She promised to “open the eyes of the magistrates and ministers,” a particularly imprudent remark. The three spoke for some time; Corey was articulate and steadfast, a little given to lecturing. She proved an attentive listener too, paraphrasing their minister’s apocalyptic assertion that the devil had come down in a great rage among them. As for Tituba, Good, and Osborne, she would not be altogether surprised if the three turned out to be witches. “They were idle, slothful persons and minded nothing that was good,” Corey huffed. Her case was altogether different. Secure in her piety, she believed herself invulnerable. Her callers rode home by way of the Putnam household, where they discovered Ann to be at peace. Only that evening did the fits resume. They continued through the following day, when another unidentified specter shimmered into the room. Ann did not know her by name, though she could say that the pale, serious woman sat in the meetinghouse pew Ann’s grandmother had previously occupied.

Two days later Martha Corey rode north to the Putnam household, to
which she had been summoned, presumably by Thomas Putnam. He may have wanted to charge Corey to her face. She had no sooner dismounted and entered the house than Ann began to choke. In a strangled voice she accused her visitor; her tongue then darted from her mouth, to be clamped sharply between her teeth. Her hands and feet twisted. When she regained her ability to speak, she pointed to a canary sucking between Corey’s second and third finger. “I will come and see it,” she announced. “So you may,” challenged Corey, rubbing the spot. The bird vanished, after which Ann lost her sight. Drawing near Corey, she crumpled to the planked floor. Ann accused Corey of blinding another woman in meeting that week, demonstrating with her hands, which could thereafter not be unfastened from her face. She described a spectral spit on which a man was impaled, roasting, under Corey’s supervision. No one else saw the spit but all knew of it from the Goodwin children. At this, the Putnams’ nineteen-year-old maid, Mercy Lewis, stepped in, waving a stick at the apparition. It disappeared, only to return. She offered to strike again. “Do not if you love yourself!” warned Ann, but too late. Mercy recoiled from a terrific blow to her arm. “You have struck Mercy Lewis with an iron rod,” Ann informed the nonspectral Corey, who must have been as stunned as everyone else. She had not budged. She saw no spit. So severe were the girls’ pains that the Putnams demanded that Corey leave. Mercy’s condition deteriorated. As she sat before the glowing fire that evening, her chair crept toward the hearth, propelled by invisible hands. Only with difficulty did three adults manage to save her from being delivered feetfirst to the flames. As he stepped in to help, one man observed bites along Mercy’s skin. Her fits lasted until eleven that night.

With both her daughter and her maid afflicted—the two in no way conformed to Cotton Mather’s 1692 description of women as “the people who make no noise at all in the world”—Ann Putnam Sr. weighed in four days later. She had been the child who arrived in Salem with Reverend Bayley, the first village minister, when he had married her older sister. Now thirty, she had in the intervening years lost that sister and a
brother. The previous spring, she had lost her mother as well. She had also recently lost a crucial court case. After a decade of litigation, she was deprived of any claim to her father’s large estate, one that had included several islands, meadows, and a ferry. In thirteen years she had borne seven children, of which Ann Jr. was the eldest. Having lost an eight-week-old baby in December, she was again pregnant. To those strains was added a new one. As she reported, she found herself exhausted on March 18, consumed by “helping to tend my poor afflicted child and maid. About the middle of the afternoon I laid me down on the bed to take a little rest, and immediately I was almost pressed and choked to death.” Soon Martha Corey’s specter materialized, inflicting indescribable tortures; had it not been for the men of the household, she would have been torn to shreds. Between assaults, Corey offered “a little red book in her hand and a black pen.” Corey commanded Ann to inscribe her name in it.

The warrant for Martha Corey’s arrest went out the following morning, a Saturday. Corey could not be apprehended until after the Sabbath, which left her time to attend meeting along with her accusers. It was no doubt a sensational occasion; congregants did not often pray with a flesh-and-blood witch in their midst. Already she had claimed several additional victims, including Parris’s niece and Dr. Griggs’s maid. That Saturday evening, Giles Corey, now in his seventies—no model citizen himself—sat by the fire alongside pious Martha. She was his third wife; the two had married seven years earlier. She encouraged him to go to bed. He attempted first to pray but found himself speechless; he could not so much as open his mouth. Martha noticed as much and ministered to him, after which the spell lifted. Her arrest seemed generally to jog her husband’s memory. Five days later he confided in a Salem town minister that there had been—as William Perkins termed it in the book in Samuel Parris’s study—some “working of wonders” on the Corey farm that week. His ox had suffered a strange episode. A cat had behaved oddly. Needlessly, Martha had suggested he put the animal out of its misery. Now that he thought about it, his wife had lately been given to sitting
up after he went to bed. “I have perceived
her to kneel down on the hearth as if she were at prayer, but heard nothing,” he mused. The unheard words proved nearly as incriminating as mangled, muttered ones. Why would a woman drop silently to her knees by herself, late at night, before the fire? Corey intimated she was casting spells. It was equally possible that his wife had come to wonder, heart sinking, if she had perhaps spoken too plainly when her deacon had called two weeks earlier.

DEODAT LAWSON, THE
previous village minister, was the first to try to make sense of things. He arrived late on the afternoon of March 19, hours after the order had gone out for Martha Corey’s arrest. He stayed just over a week. Resettled in Boston, Lawson assisted at Parris’s former congregation. He frequented the homes of prominent ministers, including Cotton Mather. He had been away from Salem for four years but knew the villagers, their affections and antipathies, as well as anyone; were it not for their bristling and snarling, he would still be among them. What he saw astonished him. By the time he set his wide-eyed account to paper, three weeks later, the Salem infestation could legitimately be termed “as rare an history as perhaps an age has had.”

Lawson could not have returned to the village without an express invitation from Parris, overwhelmed and overworked in the pulpit as elsewhere. He managed to keep only sporadic notes on his sermons that spring, transcribing none at all between the end of March and mid-September, when he lost whole days to hearings. He also remained unpaid. Consumed by the needs of his distraught family and the long
hours in court, he must have felt like a man struggling to contain a fire with a rolled-up newspaper. Reports of the Salem afflictions reached Lawson swiftly, the more so as they had broken out in his former home. Already the diabolical descent was the talk of Boston. Lawson equably noted that the distemper erupted among the villagers “after I was removed from them”; he pointed no fingers. He remained a welcome figure in the fractious community, to which he claimed he had returned out of concern for friends. He had had some rudimentary medical training in England, where twenty years earlier he had served, at least decoratively, as a royal physician. He took expert notes. He was in many ways the perfect man for the job. He had a personal incentive as well. An early victim claimed that witchcraft had dispatched Lawson’s wife and infant daughter in 1689; their ghosts fluttered about, demanding vengeance. If indeed his family had been sacrificed to “malicious operations of the infernal powers,” Lawson ached to know more. So did the concerned members of the Boston court. They encouraged him to investigate.

Lawson made his way that Saturday to Nathaniel Ingersoll’s, an inn as well as a tavern. He had no sooner dropped his bags than he received a visit from Mary Walcott, the daughter of a village militia captain. A close neighbor of both the Parrises and the Putnams, Jonathan Walcott had served as a Lawson deacon. No less pertinently, Mary Sibley, the witch-cake enthusiast, was Mary’s aunt, as was Ann Putnam Sr., in whose household Mary Walcott lived. The sixteen-year-old spoke for several minutes with the minister. As she turned to leave she stopped dead in the doorway. She had been bitten! It was already late afternoon; the room was dim. Candle in hand, Lawson examined Mary, whom he would have remembered as a child rather than as a young woman. He found two distinct sets of wounds. Something had clamped its jaws around her wrist, imprinting teeth marks on both sides.

Early that evening Lawson strolled down the road to the parsonage, just north of the inn, in the company of Ingersoll’s wife. Sabbath prayer may already have begun in the first-floor parlor. Parris had little need to describe the commotion of the prior months as Abigail treated Lawson
to a vivid display. The pale girl raced back and forth through the room, “making as if she would fly, stretching up her arms as high as she could and crying ‘Whish, whish, whish!’ several times.” Without success Hannah Ingersoll tried to restrain her. Transfixed, Abigail pointed to a figure invisible to the others: “Do you not see her?” she asked. “Why there she stands!” Could they really not make out old Rebecca Nurse in the parlor, clear as day? Even in the presence of two ministers, Nurse dared offer Abigail a book, from which the eleven-year-old emphatically and repeatedly shrank. “It is the devil’s book for ought I know,” she chided the specter. She did not need to sign; it would suffice merely to touch the volume, Nurse assured the petrified youngster. This was the first Lawson had heard of the dark acts of Rebecca Nurse, a devout mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother who turned up elsewhere as well that day. She was the hazy second specter Ann had glimpsed in the old Putnam pew. Racing to the fire—it was the same hearth before which Tituba had met the winged creature—Abigail began to remove chunks of burning wood. These she tossed blithely around the house. Lawson thought that she intended to run straight up the chimney as, he learned, she had attempted many times. It was that evening, several miles away, before the fire in another village parlor, that some malignant force stopped Giles Corey when he opened his mouth to pray.

Parris had arranged for Lawson to deliver the following day’s sermons. They are lost to us, though the texts could not have been remotely as memorable as their reception. Amid the pews sat five contorting girls and women, along with Martha Corey, the fear mounting inside her; all knew she was to be arrested for witchcraft. Justices Hathorne and Corwin as well as at least one of the town’s two ministers joined the congregation. Lawson began the service, to be interrupted by writhing girls. Pastors were accustomed to preaching past disturbances, through the stamping of feet on the wood floor, the chirps of birds in the rafters, the wails of infants, the dog that vomited or congregant who fainted dead away. The convulsions stopped Lawson cold, however. He had never seen such a thing. Normality returned with the singing of the psalm,
after which he prepared to rise from his pulpit seat for the sermon. A voice rang out in the stillness. “Now stand up and name your text!” commanded Abigail Williams. Some minutes into Lawson’s discourse a second voice rang out. “Now there is enough of that,” announced Bathshua Pope, a forty-year-old matron, newly afflicted. The propriety-minded Parris could only have burned with shame. Women did not speak in meeting, demurely or impudently. The fine for interrupting a minister was five pounds or two hours on the block. Those who had done so previously were Quaker women, who ventured eerily similar-sounding commentaries. “Parson! Thy sermon is too long!” one had offered. “Parson! Sit down! Thee has already said more than thee knows how to say well,” instructed another. From the front of the rough-hewn meetinghouse, Parris’s niece sounded the same note after Lawson obliged her by naming his text. “It is a long text,” carped Abigail.

She behaved no better that afternoon. From the pulpit Lawson announced his doctrine for the day. “I know no doctrine you had,” she countered. “If you did name it, I have forgot it.” She went on to disrupt that sermon too, pointing to an astounding sight. All eyes must already have scuttled and darted in Martha Corey’s direction. Abigail redirected the congregation’s attention skyward. “Look where Goodwife Corey sits on the beam,” cried the eleven-year-old, gesturing to the rafters, “suckling her yellow bird between her fingers!” Young Ann Putnam indicated something more dangerous yet: the canary perched on Lawson’s hat, hanging from a peg in the high pulpit. Adults reached out to silence both girls. It was neither the first nor the last such interruption. A fair number of Parris’s 1692 sermons would be sacrificed, a parishioner later complained, to the “distracting and disturbing tumults and noises” of the bewitched.

The next day Martha Corey stood before the meetinghouse as she had done precisely two years earlier when she became a full church member. This time the room was packed, the gallery and pulpit stairs overflowing. Portly Salem town minister Nicholas Noyes opened the noon hearing with what Lawson described as “a very pertinent and
pathetic prayer.” The magistrates took seats behind the refectory table. Gently at first—the Coreys were not only church members but substantial landowners—Hathorne posed his questions. Why did she afflict these people? If she had not, who did? By way of response Martha Corey asked permission to pray, a request the justices denied. She persisted. “We did not send for you to go to prayer,” Hathorne crisply informed her; they were there to discuss witchcraft. Corey insisted that she had had nothing to do with sorcery in her life, again contending that she was “a gospel woman.” She appealed to the Lord to “open the eyes of the magistrates and ministers” so that they might apprehend the guilty party. Hathorne chafed at the sanctimony as at the implication that he was anything less than clear-sighted already. Growing more caustic, he broached the matter gnawing at all minds: If she was not a witch, how had she known that Ann Putnam would ask about her clothing? Corey had barely opened her mouth to reply when clerk Ezekiel Cheever interrupted. She had better not begin with a lie, he cautioned. Putnam weighed in as well. “You speak falsely,” Corey’s deacon contended as she tried to explain. Her husband had reported on the earlier examinations. Hathorne turned to Giles Corey. Had he indeed told his wife as much? He had not. “Did you not say your husband told you so?” Hathorne needled the accused. Either she fell speechless or Parris could not make out her answer amid the commotion. He left a blank in the record.

Even had Corey attended Tituba’s hearing, she would not have been prepared for Hathorne’s tone. Stringent then, he turned vicious now. He reminded her that she stood before the authorities. “I expect the truth,” he intoned. “You promised it.” The idea that she had anticipated the deacons’ question was highly problematic. Hathorne harped on it for some time, pummeling Corey for an explanation. The girls several times interrupted his inquiry to indicate a man whispering in her ear. “What did he say to you?” demanded Hathorne. Corey had neither seen nor heard a thing. She ventured a bit of counsel, however. “We must not believe all that these distracted children say,” she asserted, eliciting fresh agonies. Hathorne quibbled with his spirited suspect about the definition of “distracted,”
a word she used three times in a matter of minutes. By its nature, Hathorne noted, distraction was fleeting and changeable. The girls were utterly consistent. She alone believed them mad. “It was the judgment of all that were present,” both Hathorne and a Salem town minister reminded Corey, that “they were bewitched.”

She could not help with reports of the spit, the book, the canary, or a suspicious ointment unearthed at her home. As it would continue to do, ignorance registered in the courtroom as defiance; Hathorne urged her to confess. “So I would if I were guilty,” she rejoined. Corey was formidable but not imperturbable; she bit her lip and wrung her hands throughout the interrogation, the most punishing of the preliminary hearings. She was on her feet for a very long time, interrupted by witnesses bearing clarifications and suffering afflictions; Parris transcribed in fits and starts between outbursts. “Now tell me the truth, will you,” demanded Hathorne, “why did you say that the magistrates’ and ministers’ eyes were blinded and you would open them?” Framed as such, the question struck Corey as absurd. She laughed as she answered. Mercilessly Hathorne pressed on, leading his defendant to pose a preposterous query of her own. “Can an innocent person be guilty?” she asked.

The court seemed to expect special powers of her; she had none to display. You say we are blind, challenged Hathorne. “If you say I am a witch,” huffed Corey. He begged her to elucidate, as she seemed in her doctrinaire way to have promised. If not, he had a different question. “What did you strike the maid at Mr. Thomas Putnam’s with?” Hathorne asked. “I never struck her in my life!” Corey cried. Two witnesses disagreed. Had she no iron rod, no familiar, no covenant with the devil? She had not. Did she truly believe she would go unpunished? “I have nothing to do with witchcraft,” she vowed, as the room stirred and as Hathorne introduced the subject of the March 1 hearings. Why had she attempted to prevent her husband from attending? “I did not know that it would be to any benefit,” she answered. From the long, narrow pews came a different answer: Martha Corey had no desire to root out witches. She smiled to see her meaning so willfully misconstrued. Hathorne reprimanded
her; were the girls’ troubles a laughing matter? “You are all against me and I cannot help it,” Corey conceded. Did she not believe there were witches about? She could not be certain. But Tituba had confessed as much, Hathorne reminded her. “I did not hear her speak,” she replied coolly.

The crowd was incensed. Corey grew more and more flippant (“If you will all go hang me, how can I help it?”), the girls bolder and bolder. Yelping and snapping, they mocked her replies. She was no gospel woman, they sniggered. She was a gospel witch! Observers informed Hathorne that when his suspect bit her lip, teeth marks bloomed on the arms and wrists of her accusers. Thenceforth court officers observed Corey more closely. Indeed each time she clasped her hands together the girls shuddered. When she shifted her weight, they involuntarily, raucously stamped their feet. If she leaned against the bar—she stood for well over an hour, probably closer to two—they crumpled in agony. While she had registered no complaint before Lawson’s return, forty-year-old Bathshua Pope now felt the witch reach deep into her bowels as if to tear them from her body. Howling in pain, she threw her muff at Corey. The room was thirty-four by twenty-eight feet; afflicters and afflicted stood in awkward proximity, a foot or two from one another. Witnessed at close range, in the cramped pews, amid the smudged light and fretful whispers, the writhings and screechings were as terrifying as any sorcery. The muff failed to reach its mark. Pope leaned down to remove a shoe. Launched more effectively, it hit Martha Corey squarely in the head. She could not have found it easy to defend herself, as her hands appear by this time to have been bound, for the protection of her victims.

Hathorne allowed Corey’s accusers to interrogate her. There were now ten, almost as many women as girls; they fired questions from all sides. Why had Corey not joined the other witches mustering before the meetinghouse? For how long was the covenant she had signed with the devil? (They answered for her: ten years, of which she had served six.) Hathorne tossed out a catechism question. Corey answered correctly,
though in Lawson’s view she did so oddly. At the girls’ instruction, the authorities examined her hands. Had the canary left a mark between her fingers? A pin she had stuck in one of her victims turned up in the child’s hair. Before the hearing wound down, Reverend Noyes announced himself satisfied that Corey practiced witchcraft before their very eyes.