The Witches: Salem, 1692 (15 page)

Thomas Danforth orchestrated a sort of chorus, with each of the afflicted—three adult women joined the girls—chiming in. Certain truths emerged quickly. First Elizabeth Procter and later Sarah Cloyce had visited John at the parsonage, pinching and biting him in broad daylight, choking the slave to within an inch of his life, insisting he sign their book. A far more imposing figure, Danforth proceeded less harshly than Hathorne. He had dismissed a 1659 witchcraft case, twice overturning the verdict of the jury. He wanted now to be certain: Did John Indian recognize his two tormentors? Indeed he did, replied the slave, indicating one of them, Sarah Cloyce, standing as if spotlit at the front of the room. Cloyce had known her share of misery; she had fled an Indian raid and spent years in poverty as the widowed mother of five. Her life had been far more difficult than that of her older sister, Rebecca Nurse. “When did I hurt thee?” she protested. “A great many times,” John rejoined. “Oh, you are a grievous liar!” cried Cloyce.

Cloyce’s hearing proceeded more tautly than her sister’s, which she had almost certainly attended. The girls did the bulk of the talking. “Abigail Williams!” Danforth called, having been briefed in advance. “Did you see a company at Mr. Parris’s house eat and drink?” The first to use the word, she replied: “Yes, Sir, that was their sacrament.” A devil’s Sabbath had taken place the day of the public fast. Cloyce and Good served as deacons at that service, held just behind the parsonage. For the second
time, details of the diabolical meeting issued from the minister’s household; over and over, Parris was to hear of witches congregating just outside his home, an idea that may have buttressed his position in the community—it pointed up his righteousness—or shamed him. In either event, he had cause to flinch at this sudden interest in his overrun, underfenced pasture. A white man before whom all the witches trembled presided. Abigail supplied a detail more disturbing than even the blood-drinking: there had been some forty witches in attendance! At this juncture Cloyce asked for water, collapsing into her seat “as one seized with a dying fainting fit,” noted Parris. It was ten years to the day since the disgruntled Salem potter had warned that the village would never amount to a town if its inhabitants did not desist from their quarreling.

Danforth turned next to forty-one-year-old Elizabeth Procter, newly pregnant with her sixth child, a fact of which she may not yet have been aware. Here the magistrate ran into difficulties. One of the girls protested that she had never seen Elizabeth before. Two were struck dumb. Asked if Elizabeth afflicted her, Parris’s niece plunged her fist into her mouth. The doctor’s niece fell into a long trance. The girls had either lost their thread or succumbed to a greater power. Danforth may have intimidated them; the father of twelve, he knew how to speak to a child. John Indian alone obliged him. Scantily clad, Elizabeth Procter had, John revealed, choked him. Twice Danforth asked if he was certain of her identity. John was. Gradually most of the girls rallied, supplying additional details of Elizabeth’s demonic book.

It was probably at that point—the words flew from every side—that Parris’s niece and Ann Putnam Jr. reached out to strike the accused. Abigail’s fist magically unclenched in midair. As the tips of her fingers brushed the older woman’s hood, she howled in pain. They were scorched! When not in fits the two took over for John, directing the room’s attention. The girls would announce: “Look to her! She will have a fit presently”—as the bewitched would. At other times they warned, “We shall all fall!” and seven or eight girls would collapse, raving, to the floor. For their predictive power the eleven-and twelve-year-old were
soon dubbed the “visionary girls.” They pointed to the meetinghouse beam: Elizabeth Procter, the wizard’s wife, balanced there. And soon enough, they cautioned, Procter—who had pronounced their claims pure nonsense—would make the muff-throwing Bathshua Pope levitate. At precisely that moment Pope’s feet rose from the floor. What did he say to this, Danforth demanded of John Procter, suddenly on trial. He barely had time to reply when Abigail pointed to two older women. Procter was on the verge of attacking them, she cried as both began to twist in pain. “You see the devil will deceive you,” Danforth warned the accidental suspect. “The children could see what you were going to do before the woman was hurt.” He strongly advised repentance; Satan toyed with him. “Woe, woe, woe,” Boston magistrate Samuel Sewall noted in his diary that evening, in Latin, the language to which he reverted for delicate matters, like the lustful dream about his wife or his father-in-law’s criticisms. Only later did he add the loaded word “witchcraft” to the line.

Procter singlehandedly attempted to restore some sanity. Brusque if genial, he was of Danforth’s generation. The mother of five of his eleven children, Elizabeth, his much younger wife, assisted with the couple’s tavern. They owned as well a seven-hundred-acre farm. Procter lost no time in informing all who would listen—including the husband of the woman whom he had caused to levitate—that if Parris would allow him a few minutes with John Indian, “he would soon beat the devil out of him.” It was the same blustery note he had sounded earlier. The threat could not have been welcome to Parris, well beyond the point where he believed devils could be thrashed away. At least a few others shared Procter’s opinion. A Salem farmer named Edward Bishop returned John Indian to the village late that afternoon on horseback. The slave fell into a violent fit. Lurching forward, he bit the rider before him, holding on with his teeth alone. Bishop struck him with a stick, lifting the spell. John promised it would not happen again. Bishop heartily assured him it would not, vowing in such a way to cure all the bewitched.

The following morning found Parris in the town meetinghouse
attempting, in his tight, precise hand, to draft a faithful record of the previous day’s astonishments. He met with nothing but interruptions. John and Abigail roared and twisted around him. Mary Walcott, the Putnam maid, sat calmly knitting nearby, though went glassy-eyed for stretches at a time. Emerging from a trance, the sixteen-year-old confirmed what Abigail abruptly asserted: John Procter sat in the marshal’s lap! John Indian corrected her: Procter sat astride the minister’s dog under the very table at which Parris expanded on his courtroom shorthand. John coaxed the animal—presumably the witch-cake eater—out from under the refectory table. He then cried to an invisible Sarah Cloyce “Oh you old witch!” before convulsing so wildly that four men could not calm him. Still at her knitting, Mary Walcott casually looked up to note that the Procters and Cloyce together tortured the Indian. John and Abigail were carried off. Mary remained behind as Parris read his account to the marshal. As he finished, she pointed across the room, knitting in hand: the entire coven—Good, the Procters, Nurse, Corey, Cloyce, Good’s daughter—had assembled. Everyone she named sailed to the Boston prison that day, including Procter, who may have wound up incarcerated without first having been arrested. Giles Corey rode with Martha as far as the Salem ferry but could continue no farther. He did not have the money to cross. He vowed to join his wife the following week, a promise on which he could not make good. He too would be in custody Monday.

Various ground rules had begun to emerge, some of them unprecedented. Witches could be male or female, itinerant beggars or prosperous farmers, young or old, full church members or outsiders. As Giles Corey would discover, expressing sympathy for a convicted spouse—even one whom you had previously maligned—was imprudent. Implicating one was more acceptable; William Good never found himself on trial. The skeptic was a marked man. Having observed both the accused witches and the accusers at closer range than anyone other than the Parrises, John Indian may have reasoned that it was wise to name names before anyone mentioned his. Certainly it was safer to be afflicted than
accused. Suspicions ran wild over an otherwise eerily quiet week. All hung in a state of suspended stillness. Danforth’s interrogation, with the girls’ reports of the witches’ Sabbath, had been the lightning. Now came the thunder, from which even a dog under a meetinghouse table warming his master’s feet was not safe.

MORE AND MORE
often, when one of the girls pointed to a specter, someone else saw it too. Vision grew sharper in Salem village. Memories improved. As early-morning swallows announced the spring, Constable Herrick rounded up four more witches; he ran himself ragged over the next days, corralling witnesses and arresting suspects. Danforth had lent a legitimacy to the proceedings but in no way altered them. The only tangible result was that, picking up where his superior had left off, Hathorne revised his opening gambit, more neutral in April than it had been in March. He may have felt he was now playing on a larger stage.

The first of four very different suspects, Giles Corey walked into the meetinghouse at eight o’clock that April morning, trailing behind him a colorful, seven-decade-long past. While the ferry-side date he had made with his wife sounded to some like demonic collusion, Corey was an obvious target for other reasons. When he had joined the Salem town congregation a year earlier, reference was made to his scandalous reputation. A half century earlier, Corey had stolen wheat, flax, tobacco, and a host of other items from a warehouse. (It belonged to the father of Justice Corwin.) Corey had fetched a canoe load of wood while he was meant to be serving watch, then lied about it in court. He had exchanged blows with the local schoolmaster whom he doused with filthy water; he had been prosecuted for brawling and disturbing the peace. In 1676 he savagely beat a thief with a stick, delivering nearly a hundred blows, pretending afterward that the disoriented young man had taken a fall. He died of his injuries within days.

Uprooting fences and threatening horses, Corey trafficked in Sarah Good’s brand of spite. He warned a neighbor that if his orchard fence did not burn this year, it would the next. Either way, his trees would yield no
fruit. (That neighbor happened to be the father of Corey’s son-in-law. The account of the curse came from his daughter’s twenty-five-year-old husband, testifying against Corey.) Another in-law reported that Corey had stolen wood, hay, carpentry tools, and twelve bushels of apples. Corey tossed a malediction at him too: the neighbor’s sawmill would work no more. Over these years Corey amassed a hundred acres of farmland, a feat that even the most affable of men could not manage without sharp words and bruised egos. By all accounts—including one taken in the courtroom of Hathorne’s father, who heard the assault case—he was “a very quarrelsome and contentious bad neighbor.” His name surfaced regularly in connection with missing mares and dead pigs. There had long been some animus against the Coreys and something ominous about their house.

When flames had shot out of the roof of a Procter home fifteen years earlier, Corey seemed the obvious culprit. He narrowly skirted a different accusation when it was noted that the house could have burned “but by some evil hand.” Corey did not address the witchcraft imputation but did prove he was in bed that evening; he was acquitted. Inevitably he sued John Procter for defamation. Procter’s bluff good nature was such that when the two later met on the road, Corey hauling a load of wood, Procter teased: “How now, Giles, will thou never leave thy old trade? Thou hast got some of my wood here upon thy cart.” Corey admitted as much. The two proceeded to make peace over a glass of wine, bantering and manifesting an “abundance of love,” as one observer recalled. It would come in handy; the men were about to share close quarters.

Plenty of old scores surfaced at the April 19 hearing. Corey did his best to beat them away. “Which of you have seen this man hurt you?” Hathorne asked. Four girls stepped forward. Corey denied the charges. He had entered into no contract with the devil. “What temptations have you had?” Hathorne demanded. “I never had temptations in my life,” scowled Corey, who took the same tack when, from the pews, came three reports that Corey had that very morning suffered a scare in his barn. “What was it frighted you?” inquired Hathorne. “I do not know
that ever I spoke the word in my life,” Corey rejoined, sending his accusers into paroxysms. For their protection Hathorne requested the marshal fasten Corey’s hands. Was it not enough to indulge in witchcraft at other times, Hathorne reprimanded Corey, “must you do it now in the face of authority?” He seemed personally affronted. “I am a poor creature, and cannot help it” came the reply of the ornery old man, sounding—in one of the unlikeliest transmutations that spring—suddenly sympathetic.

Hands bound, Corey did his best to explain. He had no recollection of having been frightened in the cowshed. Nor could he shed light on the green ointment with which Martha had been arrested. It came from a neighbor, whose husband, it turned out, Corey had called a “damned, devilish rogue.” Others introduced some enduring, equally unsavory language. It seemed that Corey had at one time contemplated suicide, for which he considered framing a relative, no great surprise for someone whose in-laws testified against him in court. But you said you suffered no temptations, Hathorne needled. “I meant temptations to witchcraft,” clarified Corey. “If you can give way to self-murder, that will make way to temptation to witchcraft,” Hathorne scolded, rather anticipating Corey’s grisly end, if getting the terms backward.

Another suspect that Tuesday—the only one of the four to have formally faced an earlier witchcraft accusation—proved more defiant. A middle-aged resident of Salem town, probably in her early fifties, Bridget Bishop had a history of petty theft. She and a former husband had fought bitterly; she had turned up once with blood on her face, on another occasion with bruises all over her body. In 1677 she had landed in court for having called her husband an old rogue and old devil on the Sabbath; the couple had been whipped eight years earlier for the same offense. The second time both stood for an hour, gagged, back to back, on lecture day in the public market, a paper advertising their offense fastened to their foreheads. Soon thereafter Bishop’s husband died under suspicious circumstances. Within eight months, at odds with her neighbors and with her stepchildren, saddled by debts, she stood trial for witchcraft. A slave
had been leading his horses through the November woods when they had panicked and plunged into a freezing swamp. Astonished onlookers declared the animals enchanted. A week later, the slave walked into the barn to discover a transparent Bridget Bishop balancing on a beam. She vanished when he reached for a pitchfork.