The Witches: Salem, 1692 (12 page)

Hathorne was beside himself with frustration. He was intent on a confession, nowhere in sight. He got only senseless shrieking and stamping; his suspect remained alternately bemused and self-righteous. The case, he reminded her, appeared open-and-shut. Did she not see that the afflicted were every bit as rational and sober as their neighbors? Here Corey appeared blind. They could not prove she was a witch, she informed the Salem justice, who—like Noyes, a hard-liner from the start—believed they had irrefutably done so. That afternoon a constable led the self-declared gospel woman to the town jail. She would spend the next six months in chains, awaiting trial.

WHILE THE AFFLICTED
saw nothing further that day of Martha Corey, they enjoyed little peace. Ann Putnam Sr. woke the next morning to a visitor. At dawn Rebecca Nurse pounced upon her, dressed only in a linen undergarment. She carried a little red book. For two hours the women wrestled, Nurse denying the power of God and Christ and threatening to wrench Ann’s soul from her body. Meanwhile the beggar Sarah Good’s five-year-old daughter flew about the village, sinking her teeth into Mary Walcott and Ann Putnam Jr. Both displayed raw imprints of her miniature mouth. With a glance, tiny Dorothy Good sent the girls into crippling spasms. She choked and pinched them, goading them to write in the devil’s book, of which suddenly there were a profusion in Salem village.

Probably the same day a delegation assembled to pay a call on the Nurse homestead. Though not among the original settlers, Rebecca and Francis Nurse had firmly established themselves in the village, where they acquired a three-hundred-acre farm from a Boston minister who had inherited it. Over the course of nearly fifty years of marriage, they
had raised eight children, along with an orphaned Quaker boy. Theirs was a thriving, close-knit clan, the marriage a solid one. All of the children had survived; they demonstrated no inclination to sue one another. A woodworker by trade, Francis Nurse had emerged as one of Salem’s most active citizens, serving as juror and constable, appraising properties, surveying borders, and arbitrating land disputes. He had sat on the committee that made the initial overture to Parris, though the two men’s relationship had since soured; more recently, Nurse had served on the committee that withheld Parris’s wages. Prosperous and widely respected, the Nurses had strong ties to the Sibleys and much of the community, as was clear from the late-March delegation. It included three members of another prominent village family as well as Peter Cloyce, a Nurse brother-in-law. None were related to a bewitched girl or the men who had filed the original complaints. (Also among the delegation was Justice Hathorne’s sister, Elizabeth.) Someone—most likely Parris or Hathorne—had dispatched the group to tease out any knowledge Rebecca Nurse might have of recent events and to gauge her reaction to their disquieting news.

They arrived at the spacious Nurse home to find seventy-one-year-old Rebecca sick in bed. She had not ventured out for over a week but assured her visitors that she only felt closer to God in her infirmity. She asked immediately after the convulsing girls, in particular about the Parrises, among her closest neighbors. She had not called at the parsonage. She felt remiss but had her reasons: she had suffered fits when younger. She feared their return, she explained, offering a little, lost nod to contagion. She did grieve and pray for her neighbors, the more so as she knew of the severity of the symptoms; she had heard they were shattering to observe. She worried too as she understood that villagers as innocent as herself had been accused of witchcraft. As gently as they could at high volume—Nurse had lost much of her hearing—her visitors broke the news that she had in fact been named. The old woman sat dumbfounded for some time. Finally she allowed that she was “as innocent as the child unborn.”
Her callers left satisfied that she had had no inkling of their mission until they revealed it.

If the delegation intended to clear Nurse’s name, they ran into trouble soon enough. Probably the next day Reverend Lawson called on Ann Putnam Sr. He found her lying in bed, surrounded by visitors. Wednesday was baking day in New England; the yeasty smell of fresh bread replaced the spiked, acidic scent of wet ash. Ann was particularly pleased to see her former minister, of whom she was fond. Husband and wife requested that Lawson pray with them while Ann could manage to do so. She followed Lawson for a short while before she began to seize. At prayer’s end her husband attempted to lift her from her bed to his lap; her limbs were so stiff she could not be coaxed into a sitting position. She went on to twitch violently, arms and legs flailing, while she disputed, eyes closed tight, with a Rebecca Nurse whom she alone could see. “Be gone! Be gone!” she instructed Nurse. “What hurt did I ever do you in my life?” she pleaded. She knew what Nurse wanted. She would not have it, Ann informed the wraith, with whom, in a trance, she debated a description of Judgment Day. Nurse insisted that the biblical passage did not exist. Ann struggled to name it, her mouth twisting grotesquely, her breath jagged, her limbs contorted. Finally, she succeeded. She had in mind the popular third chapter of Revelation, the reading of which she defied Nurse to endure, appealing to the minister at her side. Lawson hesitated. He felt out of his depth, alarmed by the forces at play in the room and apprehensive of unleashing more; he stood at the edge of bibliomancy. Having now watched an anguished, intelligent friend struggle for a full half hour however, he decided to risk one small experiment. Before he reached the end of the first verse, Ann Putnam’s eyes fluttered open. She was perfectly well. It had been the case before, those around the bed informed him, that the texts she named in her fits—there seemed no rhyme or reason to her choices—brought immediate relief. From Salem town, warrants went out for Rebecca Nurse and five-year-old Dorothy Good.

At ten the following morning, elderly Rebecca Nurse stood before Hathorne and Corwin. Hathorne turned first to Parris’s niece and Ann Putnam Jr. Would the eleven-and twelve-year-old repeat their charges? Abigail contended that Nurse had beaten her that very morning. Ann howled. Hathorne invited others to register their complaints. Two girls stepped forward, as did a former constable. “Are you an innocent person relating to this witchcraft?” Hathorne asked Nurse, posing the question for the first time in an open-ended manner. Before she could reply, Ann Putnam Sr. cried out: Nurse had brought the black man to her and tempted her to defy God! “O Lord, help me!” cried Nurse, spreading her arms heavenward. As she did so the girls hurled themselves about, choking, ribs heaving. Did she not see how much agony she caused when her hands were loose? Hathorne asked.

For the most part Hathorne inclined that Thursday toward generosity. Before him stood the unlikeliest of suspects. His sister may have vouched for Nurse. It remained possible that she did not yet know she was a witch and had been led astray; he allowed that he was himself uncertain as to what to make of the wispy apparitions. The evidence before him was, however, irrefutable. Tituba—who continued to run the show from the Boston prison—had professed her love for Betty Parris while simultaneously torturing her, Hathorne reasoned. Had Nurse no familiarity with spirits? Like Corey, she could see neither the black man whispering at her side nor the birds in the rafters to which the girls pointed. Hathorne invoked shame: What a sad thing it was that upstanding church members should be charged with witchcraft! “A sad thing sure enough,” echoed the shoe-hurling Bathshua Pope, launching into convulsions. They set off an unbridled chain reaction. Hathorne attempted to extract an answer as to whether Nurse thought the afflictions voluntary or involuntary. She hesitated to opine. Hathorne turned the puzzle around. If Rebecca Nurse thought the girls counterfeited, then she “must look upon them as murderers.” It was a weighty remark; already he had thought his way past the judicial leniency of the previous years. They were dealing in death sentences.

In fatigue or despair, Nurse at one point dropped her head to her chest. Elizabeth Hubbard’s neck seemed automatically to snap. Abigail Williams warned that if Nurse’s neck were not righted, Elizabeth’s would break; several villagers stepped forward to correct the older woman’s posture. The sixteen-year-old instantly recovered. Shrieking, Mary Walcott, the Putnam cousin, displayed a fresh set of teeth marks. Biting and pinching disrupted the room. Ann Putnam Sr. went stiff as a plank in the course of the hearing, from which her husband carried her. She left chaos in her wake. Lawson did not see her go as he had excused himself after two hours, to prepare his sermon. Screeches and roars reached him some distance from the meetinghouse. Even at close quarters Hathorne and his half-deaf suspect could barely hear each other, for which others offered an alternate explanation: Nurse missed Hathorne’s questions because the black man whispered in her ear.

While many in the room wept with fear, Nurse remained dry-eyed. Hathorne found this curious and incriminating, especially as it was understood that a witch could not cry. (More exactly, she could shed only three tears, only from the left eye.) The villagers too professed themselves appalled by her indifference. Hathorne continued to poke around, less than constructively. Why had she not visited the Parrises? And what ailed her exactly? “Do you believe these afflicted persons are bewitched?” he asked at last. “I do think they are,” she agreed, surveying the bedlam. Lawson was himself stupefied by the disjointed limbs and distracted minds, as awed as the villagers, who whispered “they were afraid that those that sat next to them were under the influence of witchcraft.” He could nearly make out the hammering hearts, the raised hairs on the backs of necks, the tickle of fear in the throats. Whatever they were in the presence of appeared contagious, as he allowed in his Thursday-afternoon sermon. Rebecca Nurse was not among those who reconvened for it. Several saw her riding by the meetinghouse with the unidentified black man. She perceived things differently, en route as she was to the Salem town jail.

The crisis thus far had been met with more action than analysis.
Lawson attempted to redress the balance. The villagers hungered for solace and elucidation; over the course of several hours, in the overflowing, unpainted meetinghouse, he delivered on both counts. He had prepared carefully, well aware that he was sitting in a tinderbox, addressing the justices and Salem ministers, families of the afflicted and of the accused. Picking up on Parris’s tropes and texts, Lawson permitted that the devil ranged and raged among them. He delivered a short biography of Satan, one that allowed him to display his knowledge of Hebrew and Greek. The flourish of erudition aside, the hybrid creature he summoned—it boasted “the subtlety of the serpent, the malice of the dragon, and strength of the lion”—sounded like a cousin of the furry, fiery beast Tituba had met in the Parris parlor. That that beast was especially eager to “distress, delude, devour” should come as no surprise: the more pious a people, the more vigorously did Satan persecute them. Lawson registered a special plea for his beleaguered colleague. Reverend Parris deserved their spiritual sympathy at all times but especially now, when he and his family labored under such dreadful circumstances.

Lawson ventured a few additional reasons for Satan’s particular grudge against Salem. The villagers might consider whether the Lord had singled out their address for this diabolical rendezvous as a sign of “holy displeasure, to put out some fires of contention that have been amongst you.” Three signatories of the 1687 Salem town letter advising the villagers to take their animosities elsewhere sat in the pews that afternoon in the felted gray light. They could not have disagreed. Lawson inveighed too against charms and superstitions; he knew all about the witch cake. He understood that the villagers needed answers, but such experiments merely gratified the devil. He added a pestilential note: Satan “spread the contagious atoms of epidemical diseases” in order to destroy more effectively. Lawson warned against false accusations and premature conclusions. There was but one antidote to the old serpent’s venomous operation: prayer!

Everyone was guilty in this provocation, lectured Lawson. And everyone should apply himself to solemn self-examination. All the
villagers—not only those jolted awake in the electrifying presence of the bewitched—were to search their hearts and embrace their faith. A legion of devils should be met with a multitude of prayers. Lawson’s lyrics were soothing but his melody martial: Satan had descended, armed, among them. As he mustered his troops, the villagers were to prepare for spiritual warfare. They should assume every piece of godly armor; this was a trial greater than any they had faced. They must and should be afraid. At the same time, Lawson begged the justices to do all in their power to “check and rebuke Satan.” They should prove “the terror to and punishment of evil-doers.” Glancing off the question of whether Satan might borrow the shape of an innocent, he called for a vigorous investigation and a firm prosecution.

Solemn self-examining may have transpired over the next days but so did plenty of biting and devouring. That Thursday Martha Corey’s husband admitted to a town minister that he suspected his wife of witchcraft. Corey was the third husband to suggest the woman to whom he was married was a witch. Rebecca Nurse—whose husband alone did not step forward—continued to torture Ann Putnam Jr., flaying her for thirty minutes with an invisible chain. Tender, ringed welts rose across the twelve-year-old’s skin. Little was discussed in and around the village that week besides the Nurse testimony, the Lawson sermon, and the arrest of Dorothy, Sarah Good’s daughter. Both Lawson and the senior town minister, John Higginson, accompanied Hathorne and Corwin to prison to examine the child. She had demonstrated a remarkable ability to cripple with a glance, a feat she managed even while several men held her head in place. Dorothy confessed that she too had a familiar, a little snake that nursed at the lowest joint of her index finger. Holding out her hand, she displayed a red spot about the size of a fleabite. Had the black man given her the snake? the justices asked. Not at all, replied the five-year-old, who was to spend the next nine months dragging herself about in heavy irons. Her mother had.