The Witches: Salem, 1692 (17 page)

IF PUTNAM’S HINTS
struck the justices as cryptic, the suspense lasted all of two days. Already Hathorne was receptive to their tenor, having ordered the additional arrests. Any number of discrepancies had presented themselves over the previous six weeks; he barreled past each and every one. When an unlikely charge surfaced—at one point someone accused Dr. Griggs’s wife—it evaporated. Tituba’s tall man from Boston too disappeared in the shuffle. He would return as a short man from Maine.

Hathorne never asked saucy Abigail Hobbs to produce the finery the devil had promised. Nor did he quarantine the girls or interview them separately, as every legal manual advised. He made no attempt to match teeth marks to dentistry, which would have yielded some surprising results, one of the accused having, noted a contemporary, “not a tooth in his head wherewith to bite.” Hathorne does not appear to have questioned how—despite all the grievous pinching, choking, biting, punching—
the bewitched remained in the pink of health. He trusted their spectral sight even when he himself could not make out a middle-aged parishioner perched, in her skirts, on an open beam. He viewed the descent of witchcraft as did Cotton Mather: the business was “managed in imagination yet may not be called imaginary.”
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When the girls contradicted themselves, when they fumbled with an inconsistency, he turned a blind eye, discarding the facts that failed to fit his extraordinary case. Neither the fists in the mouth nor the timely trances nor Mary Warren’s charge that the girls dissembled gave him pause. All signs indicate a prosecutor single-mindedly pursuing a preordained end.

At Hathorne’s elbow, throughout hearings and in prison interrogations, sat Reverend Nicholas Noyes, a plump, uncompromising poet.
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A Salem fixture for a decade, Noyes was good company, vivacious and witty, the owner of the best local library, a Massachusetts mark of distinction. The son of an Essex County justice, the forty-five-year-old minister was comfortable in a courtroom. Noyes was friendly with the Putnams; the Sewall brothers considered him an intimate. He assumed a vocal role, challenging suspects before their testimonies, validating bits of evidence, offering his expert opinion, and making it impossible for suspects to get a word in edgewise. At one point he performed a courtroom experiment with burning poppets. He tackled any suspect who attempted to invoke Scripture in his or her defense. Neither Noyes nor Hathorne seems to have wondered why, when Bishop pressed herself upon her victim in bed, nearly stopping his breath, the wife at his side did not see her, or why children carted away by the devil never went missing from their households. Some things were illogical. Others made less sense. Why, for example, had Tituba flown on a stick to a meeting that took place in her own backyard?

Hathorne interrogated ruthlessly and incarcerated reflexively. If there was a crime in your past, he would unearth it, with the “cross and swift questions” recommended under the circumstances. Through April 22 every suspect who appeared before him wound up in prison to await trial, whether he pleaded innocent or confessed to witchcraft. On the one hand, Hathorne was taking no chances. Salem homes echoed “with the doleful shrieks of their children and servants,” as Mather would put it. Their symptoms were nerve-rackingly, bloodcurdlingly authentic; the raving disrupted all affairs. The ground had thawed. The busiest season of the year was upon the villagers. It was time to plow and plant, to sink peg holes into the earth for seeds of Indian corn, to shear sheep and wash wool. On the other hand, Hathorne had reason to proceed with caution. Witchcraft constituted the gravest of crimes. Its facts were simple; its forensics difficult. Three possibilities presented themselves: the girls were bewitched; the girls dissembled; some kind of conspiracy was afoot. The situation was baffling. And like all baffling matters, this one seemed at once inexplicable and obvious. Hathorne opted for witchcraft and fixed on rooting it out. Not everyone shared his conviction. Under blistering interrogation, several of the first suspects agreed that something ailed the girls but would not concede it to be sorcery. Hathorne proceeded as if he knew better. What else, after all, was a witch likely to say on the stand? Moreover he had in hand—had had in hand for seven weeks—incontestable evidence, the sole certain proof of witchcraft. “It is no rare thing for witches to confess,” observed the British legal expert most regularly consulted at Salem. Tituba had made Hathorne’s case. Tiny Dorothy Good and wild Abigail Hobbs buttressed it.

Hathorne all the same entertained some small, discomfiting kernel of doubt. In receipt of Putnam’s enigmatic letter, he designed an experiment for April 22. That Friday two extraordinary gatherings took place in Salem. Hathorne’s hearing was the less sensational, which was saying a great deal. The largest crowd yet piled into the dark pews and galleries of the village meetinghouse; they obscured the windows and Parris’s view. Amid the crush of bodies, accusers squinted and craned their necks
to make out faces. With a full docket of suspects, Hathorne arranged for the marshal to lead in the first defendant without introduction. “Mercy Lewis,” Hathorne challenged the nineteen-year-old at the front of the room, “do you know her that stands at the bar?” The mounting number of witches may have alarmed Hathorne. Or the irregularities among testimonies had begun to tug at him; he may have singled out the Putnams’ maid because of her earlier foot-dragging. Among the eldest of the girls, Mercy seemed the likely ringleader. She could not name the suspect.
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Hathorne appealed to the next accuser, almost certainly young Abigail, Parris’s niece. She was struck dumb.

Ann Putnam Jr. saved the day, correctly identifying Abigail Hobbs’s stepmother, Deliverance Hobbs. Ann claimed the Topsfield woman had tortured her. Turning to the accused, Hathorne posed the usual round of questions: Why did Hobbs hurt these people, how had she come to practice witchcraft, whom did she suppose afflicted them if she did not? He had tried to trip up the girls. Having succeeded, he moved on. Meanwhile, in the half-light, the suspect engaged in some table-turning of her own. She too was afflicted! In that very room a week earlier she had seen birds, cats, dogs, and a human apparition—who happened to be none other than Mercy Lewis, the Putnam maid. Deliverance Hobbs proceeded to reject each of Hathorne’s prompts. No apparition had introduced a book or demanded she sign one. A tug-of-narrative-war ensued, Hathorne growing irritable as the story slipped from him. He prodded Hobbs, dubious that in a matter of days she had gone from tormentor to tormented. She was spared having to explain by the girls’ assertion—the two youngest pointed excitedly to the ceiling—that Hobbs was at that moment not before the bar, where they could not see her at all, but above their heads, on the meetinghouse beam. This made more sense to Hathorne, who returned to his familiar line of inquiry. He left the
incriminating Mercy Lewis comment to fall by the wayside, where it remained.

What did Hobbs have to say about the apparition above their heads? Who threatened her if she confessed her pact? Hathorne pounded the Topsfield woman with questions. “I have done nothing” were her last words before she swerved again. If something happened in the room to change her course, Parris did not record it. Hobbs may have deemed it futile to attempt to outmaneuver Hathorne; plenty of defendants admitted to having been overawed by magistrates. She had lost contests to her stepdaughter before. She now blurted that Sarah Wilds, the Topsfield constable’s mother, had two nights earlier brought her a book, with pen and ink; that with pins and images, Deliverance Hobbs had afflicted the girls; that she had made the acquaintance of “a tall black man, with a high-crowned hat.” Hathorne had his confession. He was very soon to have a good deal more. Over the next twenty-four hours, Hobbs lent the conspiracy its binding logic, connecting the village afflictions, Putnam’s prophecies, Tituba’s black man, and Abigail’s insidious reference to the Maine woods.

Hobbs managed as well to make sense of the bloody battle waged the previous afternoon at Ingersoll’s. Following her testimony, Hathorne asked her privately if she had suffered any pains that Thursday. She reported a sharp stab to her right side, still sore. The justices ordered several women to examine her. Hobbs undressed behind closed doors, revealing evidence of a rapier wound. She now learned how she had acquired it: it seemed she was the woman into whom—at Abigail’s direction—Hutchinson had sunk his dagger at the inn. William Hobbs resurrected himself from that battle to appear before Hathorne on the twenty-second. He professed himself as innocent as a newborn babe. How, asked Hathorne, did he explain his ability to strike people down with his eyes? At this, Abigail called out that Hobbs intended to assault Mercy Lewis, who began to writhe. Could William Hobbs truly deny his complicity? demanded Hathorne. “I can deny it to my dying day,” vowed the middle-aged farmer, one of Topsfield’s earliest settlers, a man whose
wife had now confessed to witchcraft and whose wayward daughter had testified against him, asserting that he read no Scripture at home. Had he not known for some time that his daughter was a witch? Hathorne asked. Hobbs had not. He agreed that something preternatural ailed the girls. “Do you think they are bewitched?” asked Hathorne. That Hobbs could not say. Constable Herrick carted Abigail’s parents, along with six additional suspects, to jail that afternoon.
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The following day the justices interrogated Deliverance in prison. They could not have done so out of earshot of the others, closely confined in the cramped space. Expanding on her confession, the Topsfield woman described the other Salem assembly that Friday. Summoned by a diabolical trumpet, a group of witches had descended on the village, to hold a parody of a communion service. Deliverance eventually produced eleven names. The numbers rarely agreed but steadily increased, from Tituba’s nine to the twenty-three or twenty-four of whom Deodat Lawson heard to Abigail’s forty. Later reports would put attendance at one hundred, a tally that rose to three hundred and seven, ultimately to an eye-popping five hundred, nearly the population of the village itself. The witches assembled in Parris’s pasture, not too derelict for their diabolical purposes, which Hobbs revealed: they were to bewitch each of the villagers, although they were instructed to do so gradually. Parris’s niece had emerged from the parsonage in time to see the witches assembled at a long table, tankards in hand. For their sacrament, they took “red bread, and red wine like blood.” Deliverance Hobbs affirmed that those previously accused were in attendance, omitting only the names of the confessed witches.

Most crucially, Hobbs explicated her stepdaughter’s reference to the Maine frontier and the visit Ann Putnam Jr. had received just before her
father composed his loaded letter. A terrifying, dark-coated apparition had alighted in the village. “What, are ministers witches, too?” Ann demanded of the specter. He racked and choked her and nearly tore her to pieces, only then introducing himself. He had murdered several women and—evidently a secret agent, in the employ of the French and Indians—dispatched a number of frontier soldiers. He had murdered Lawson’s child and wife. He had bewitched Parris’s niece. He confided that his mission was a frightful one: he who should have been teaching children to fear God had now “come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the devil.” Witches not only identified themselves to their victims but preened a little, like the James Bond villain who inventories the tortures to which he is about to subject his prey.

The figure impaled by the pitchfork outside Ingersoll’s, Ann Putnam’s self-pitying minister, the officiant at the witches’ Sabbath, and the mastermind behind Thomas Putnam’s conspiracy turned out to be the same person. He was no mere wizard, warned Ann Putnam. A New England child had every reason to be acutely sensitive to hierarchy; it permeated all. Ann’s April visitor bragged that he outranked a witch. More powerful yet, he was a conjurer. (Days later, he introduced himself to Abigail with the same credentials.) He happened also to be a little black man who lived in the woods. He was strong, devious, and omniscient. And he was familiar. While Ann Putnam Jr. knew him as a bloodthirsty conjurer, she had also met him as a child of four. Mercy Lewis knew him as her ex-employer, having served in his household in the 1680s. Abigail Hobbs knew him as a leading citizen of Casco, Maine, before the Indian raid of 1688. Hathorne knew him as his former brother-in-law. Everyone in Salem village—where he had never administered any kind of sacrament to his congregants, who had never ordained him—knew him as their former minister. On April 30, a warrant went out for the arrest of Lawson’s predecessor. By the time a constable delivered George Burroughs to Salem from the far reaches of Maine a week later he could not be incarcerated. The jail would not accommodate another prisoner.

Under close supervision, Burroughs lodged in an upstairs room at a Salem town tavern. Despite his preternatural powers, he was allowed visitors; the handsome, headstrong minister still had friends in Essex County. Urged to visit by a local militia captain, Elizer Keyser begged off. A forty-five-year-old tanner, Keyser was terrified, convinced Burroughs was “the chief of all the persons accused for witchcraft or the ringleader of them all.” Under duress, he ventured a peek at the superhuman mastermind. Burroughs stared steadily back at him. Later that evening in a pitch-black room, twelve quivering, glow-in-the-dark jellyfish swam up Keyser’s fireplace. He called excitedly to his servant. Tilting her head, she marveled at the creatures gliding up the immense chimney. They remained invisible to Keyser’s wife, proof they were “some diabolical apparition.”

As Keyser collected himself before his village hearth, Burroughs paid a second spectral visit to the Putnam household, an address where—in corporeal form—he had never been entirely welcome; he had after all supplanted Ann Putnam Sr.’s brother-in-law, Reverend Bayley. On May 8 Burroughs warned twelve-year-old Ann that his first two wives would soon appear to tell a great many lies. She was to pay them no heed. Sure enough, two chalk-white women disturbed the air, dressed in linen burial shrouds; ghosts now fluttered freely about amid wizards and witches. Red with fury, “as if the blood would fly out of their faces,” the spirits demanded justice. Burroughs should be “cast into hell.” At these words the minister vanished. His wives explained that he had murdered them. One unwound her shroud to display the fatal wound under her left arm; the next morning Ann saw Deodat Lawson’s dead wife and young daughter, with whom she had been friends. Burroughs had killed them as well. These were the crimes to which Abigail had alluded in recruiting Hutchinson and his pitchfork two weeks earlier.