The Witches: Salem, 1692 (26 page)

She submitted meanwhile to an intimate and invasive examination. Either under the supervision of a male surgeon or at his direction, a group of women scoured the bodies of the six female suspects for witch’s teats. Several of the examiners were experienced midwives, although that was not saying a good deal. Where available, seventeenth-century treatises on childbirth tended to omit the finer details; its practitioners—usually older women from prominent families—knew relatively little about bodily functions. Nor was there much guidance as to what the women were looking for. A fleabite, a wart, a mole, anything raised or discolored could qualify as a teat. A panel of Connecticut women engaged in the same task scanned a woman three times but could not agree on their findings; they were unconvinced the suspect’s anatomy differed from theirs. A bystander felt similarly at a Connecticut hanging. After close inspection of the body cut down from the gallows, she announced that if the victim’s marks were preternatural, she too was a witch. Knowledge of anatomy was still primitive enough in New England that at a 1676 autopsy, a heart removed from a corpse was affirmed to be the stomach.

The midwives probed and pressed in tender areas, gauging sensitivity with pins or needles; you had to hope you would bleed when the three-inch pin went in. A Quaker woman subjected to the indelicate procedure swore that she had suffered greater abuse at the hands of church members than she had in bearing five children. While the Salem examiners did not entirely agree among themselves, they did locate several incriminating
signs; three of Newton’s suspects turned out to have “a preternatural excrescence of flesh between the pudendum and anus.”
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These were abnormal protrusions, unnaturally positioned. They appeared in precisely the same place on all three women, which by some logic indicated sorcery. At least some of her examiners were surely known to Bishop, among the three suspects with unusual growths.

The justices seated, officers escorted her into the courtroom for her arraignment. A court clerk called out her name; she stepped forward and held up her hand to acknowledge her identity. The indictments against her were read. How did she plead? Bishop had no choice but to speak for herself, there being no counsel for the defense. Early New England did not like lawyers. (More to the point, lawyers did not like early New England. Their value had been recognized only seven years earlier, when a call went to London to send over a few honest attorneys, if such a thing existed.
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) Newton was the only trained lawyer in the room. It was felt that the innocent could make her case better than anyone else; left to her own devices, the guilty would prove unable to conceal the truth. Then in her late fifties, Bishop had spent six weeks on meager rations in a foul, dank jail. She had been threadbare from the start. She stood before the court filthy and haggard, under intense scrutiny, a sour woman in a cloud of sour air. She pleaded not guilty. “Culprit, how will you be tried?” the clerk then asked, to which Bishop replied with the formulaic, mandatory phrase: “By God and my country.”

By law, court cases were to be scrupulously documented; Stephen Sewall sat before the judges stabbing his quill in his ink bottle, transcribing as furiously as had Parris during the preliminary hearings. Nothing Sewall set down that day—or during any other 1692 witchcraft trial, for which Bishop’s set the precedent—has come down to us. Three decades of evidence against Bishop has. She had been tried and reprieved before; while the stakes appeared greater this time—she had never before witnessed such a formidable gathering—she did not believe herself to be a witch. Once she had entered her plea, witnesses were sworn in, taking the oath to speak “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” One told of having been carried from her spinning wheel to the river, in which Bishop threatened to drown her. Another reported on murders of which Bishop boasted; a third described a ghost of one of her victims. Many—little Betty Parris and Ann Putnam Jr. among them—recounted tortures they had endured at the April hearing. Bishop’s touch had revived the girls, others testified, fulfilling the crucial Deuteronomy-determined requirement of two witnesses to a crime. Deliverance Hobbs swore that Bishop had whipped her with iron rods to force her to retract her confession. Together they had attended the “general meeting of the witches” in Parris’s field. The jurors heard testimony from the villager who had stabbed at Bishop’s shape to produce the gash displayed in her coat. She and her specter were manifestly one and the same.

Any number of suspects could have been said to have enchanted neighbors and afflicted the village girls. Bishop alone could be convicted of having lied in court, several times, during her preliminary hearing. Her history represented such a prosecutorial gold mine that some testimony never made its way to court. Susannah Shelden reported that Bishop had been a witch for more than twenty years; that she knelt and prayed before a black man in a high-crowned hat; that a snake familiar had crept “into her bosom.” Newton did not use that deposition. The court may have heard of a more earthly incident: not only had Bishop stood before Hathorne four years earlier when accused of theft, but she
had spent several weeks in jail that year. A town miller accused her of having stolen a piece of brass. She returned it and twice begged his forgiveness, on her knees. Asked at her 1688 trial to confirm as much, she had denied all. She had stumbled upon the brass in a corner of her garden while weeding. She had never apologized. A most irritating woman, she on that occasion drove Hathorne to frustration.

The court heard other charges that had nothing to do with demonic conspiracies, red books, or petty theft. Newton summoned a sailor who recounted having been awoken one Sabbath at sunrise to find Bishop standing by his bed. With a smile, she struck him on the head and melted out the window. At about noon the same day she caused an apple to fly from his hand and travel more than six feet across the room. Twelve years earlier, “muttering and menacing,” she had thrown hatter Samuel Shattuck’s son around the house, bludgeoning him and separating him completely from all reason. (This was the unsuspecting family warned by a visitor—after one look at the child—that a witch lived in their vicinity.) She had paid the son of the miller with whom she tangled in 1688 in disappearing currency. She had caused his cart to sink into a hole that appeared out of nowhere and afterward vanished. She had bewitched a bag of corn. She slipped through locked doors and closed windows. None of those charges was remotely recent; many clustered around her earlier trial. One involved three generations. These were the ancient, dredged-up, multiply resurrected accusations that the New England air seemed to stimulate and sustain, that defied the laws of nature by growing hardier with age.

Bishop knew she occasioned whispering and that townspeople believed her a witch. She could not have been unaware that she unsettled for other reasons as well. In April the Salem marshal had cited a nocturnal visit; the June jury heard of at least five more. Bishop seemed to have a habit of hopping around young men’s bedrooms, incapacitating them and striking them dumb, symptoms commonly associated with a different form of enchantment. Wanton or flirtatious, she burned bright in men’s minds; they tended to recall her wardrobe precisely. When she visited the miller’s
son years earlier, she had professed a great affection for him, more, he testified, than was proper. He described her flashy red coat with the multicolored edging; Bishop had clapped it around her legs as she jumped into his bed. Samuel Shattuck reported that she called on him frequently for trumped-up reasons and in a “smooth, flattering manner.” She pressed her lips to those of defenseless young men. Although she could not have looked it on June 2—Sewall saw her only as “an old woman”—she may once have been very beautiful.
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Salem tailor John Louder testified to a protracted, moonlit tangle with Bishop. Confronted afterward, she claimed no knowledge of that bedroom tryst; she did not intend to be held responsible for men’s dreams. Shortly thereafter, home sick on a Sabbath afternoon, Louder received a terrifying visitor: a black monster leaped through his window, to stand inches away from him. A cousin of Tituba’s hearthside goblin, it had the face of a man, the body of a monkey, and the feet of a cock. It had come, it announced, to rule Louder. In exchange, it promised to satisfy his every desire. “You devil, I will kill you,” the tailor swore, attempting to clasp the creature but grasping only thin air. The flying monkey and Louder went a few rounds, Louder injuring his arm in the process. Lunging through a window, the creature reappeared through a locked porch door. It lured the tailor outside. As he struggled to chase it away—“The whole armor of God be between me and you!” he cried—he spied Bishop in her orchard. Ultimately the goblin launched itself over the trees, churning up a storm of dirt and fruit; Bishop would several times find herself mixed up with snakes and apples.

In her April 19 hearing Bishop had shaken her head in disbelief, grown hot under interrogation, and appealed to those in the room to clear her name. (No one volunteered.) In the case of the stolen brass, she had quarreled with testimony before a justice. Once Louder delivered up his account of the apple-scattering goblin—it left him dumb for three
days!—she weighed in. Though without counsel, she had the right to question her accusers. She did not even know Louder! She was reminded that their orchards adjoined. They had quarreled over the years. Here she stumbled upon a Catch-22 of the seventeenth-century system. Self-incrimination was not yet an issue. Questioning evidence was risky. As a justice had chided an earlier suspect, his “answer was thought overbold and uncomely for a man under such apparent guilt.”

Among the reheated charges against Bishop was one piece of testimony that trumped all. It happened also to be the most ancient. Seventeen years earlier, she had hired two workmen to demolish a wall of her house. Buried within it were several rag-and-bristle poppets, headless and stuck through with pins. Pressed to explain, Bishop could offer up no reasonable explanation. She made as little progress in attempting to defend herself on June 2. Urged to confess, she insisted on her innocence. The gross lying in court, the muttering and menacing, the various enchantments, the murders, the bedroom visits, were one thing. With the poppets, with the rent in her coat, with the news that Bishop bore a supernatural mark on her body, Newton had material evidence. He received a supplementary gift as well. Probably the day before the trial, as she rode under guard past the empty town house, Bishop glanced up at the stately, heavy-timbered building. A plank crashed down from an upper story, later turning up some distance away.
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The trial proceeded smoothly and swiftly. While she could challenge the choice of jurors, Bishop could not probe them for their views. In the absence of lawyers, there were no points of procedure to be discussed. There was no voir dire, no cross-examination. The justices represented both parties, interrogating the suspect as well as her accusers. Testimony went according to plan, not only because much of it had been delivered before; Bishop appeared unable to dispute or derail it. Though distressed,
the bewitched girls seem to have been relatively quiet. In his account—written later, from court papers—Mather suggested there was more evil on hand than the court knew what to do with. He did not bother to describe the charges that had landed Bishop in the courtroom in the first place for a similar reason: “There was little occasion to prove the witchcraft, it being evident and notorious to all beholders.”

A seventeenth-century magistrate did not hesitate to tell jurors what they thought or how to evaluate evidence. He might direct them to find a defendant guilty. In the absence of sufficient evidence, strong suspicion would do. Reputation carried great weight, which explained how so many ostensibly nongermane testimonies against Bishop wound up in court. If guilt seemed likely but not certain—“reasonable doubt” was still nearly two centuries in the future—a sentence might be adjusted accordingly. You could be convicted of a lesser crime than that for which you had been indicted. In a closing statement, Stoughton summarized the case and reminded the jury that they were to prove the evidence. He offered some instruction that June afternoon. The jurors were to disregard the girls’ robust good health. Bishop’s intention alone mattered. The court did not need to prove that witchcraft had been inflicted, only that it had been deployed. That, explained the sober, much-respected chief justice, was the meaning of the law. His instructions surprised at least one observer. They flew in the face of Mather’s May 31 advice; in the face of Perkins, the authoritative English expert; and in the face of New England judicial history.

Stoughton likely had his verdict by midafternoon. While the jurors had no confession, they had much else. The evidence was overwhelming. Their foreman stood to announce the decision: for having practiced witchcraft on the five village girls on April 19 and “on diverse other days and times before and after,” they found Bishop guilty. The goblin in the apple tree, the bedroom visits, the poppets may have done the trick. The jury convicted however for the afflictions. The ancient histories could not be corroborated. The courtroom tortures had been witnessed by all.
In one of Salem’s more unusual twists, the court found Bishop guilty for enchanting village girls she did not know, as opposed to the men in town she did.
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Doomed, she returned to prison, where just before four o’clock, the women submitted to a second strip search. Bishop’s unnatural growth was nowhere to be found, proof that she had communicated with an evil spirit in the course of the day. All three suspects’ marks had in fact mysteriously vanished. The protuberance discovered on the body of Rebecca Nurse had by afternoon deflated to a spot of dry skin. Its variation proved its diabolical origin; she had evidently suckled a demonic imp. (During her preliminary hearing, Hathorne had asked about any wounds. “I have naught but old age,” the village great-grandmother had replied.) As for Susannah Martin, the tiny, contemptuous Amesbury widow, where her breasts had appeared full in the morning, they were lank and flattened by afternoon. She too had suckled a familiar in the course of the day. Nurse was outraged; the most practiced midwife disagreed with her colleagues. And Nurse could account for her deformities, the result of difficult labors. They had caused her trouble for years. She had not visited men’s bedrooms, transformed herself into a goblin, or pried boards from public buildings with a glance. For having practiced “certain detestable arts called witchcrafts and sorceries” on four village girls, the court however indicted her on June 3.