The Witches: Salem, 1692 (47 page)

Even those who had reason to believe themselves unpardonably wronged remained tongue-tied. Petitioning for redress, the Corey children noted that their father had been pressed under stones. They could bring themselves to say about their mother only that she was “put to death also, though in another way.” The word “witches” figures nowhere in the heaps of pasteurized reparations claims. Families referred instead
to the “sufferers of the year 1692,” to loved ones who had endured the “late troubles at Salem,” to events precipitated by “the powers of darkness” in the course of “that dark and mysterious season.”

LIKE THE MINISTER’S
fence, pastoral relations in Salem village appeared beyond repair. Phips had not yet written London of his expert management of the witchcraft crisis when Parris invited five churchmen to meet with representatives from the disaffected Nurse clan at the parsonage on the afternoon of February 7. He needed to coax them back into the fold; their refusal to participate in the sacrament spiritually compromised the entire congregation. After a prayer, he inquired into the men’s grievances. They were unforthcoming. Parris suggested they return in two weeks’ time. He knew their position perfectly well; the three had called unexpectedly earlier that morning, when he heard them out in his study. (On that occasion he took pains to separate the parties.) In appealing to the girls to name witches, Parris indulged in the same brand of shameless superstition practiced by witch-cake bakers. How could he have sworn in court that anyone had been raised by a touch or felled by a glance? Had it not been for him, raged a Nurse son and son-in-law, each for over an hour, Rebecca Nurse would still be alive. To their minds Parris was “the great prosecutor.” The men refused to accept communion from their minister until he apologized.

The bulk of witchcraft literature on his side, Parris saw no cause to reconsider his views. And he remained a stickler. The “displeased brethren,” as he dubbed them, returned the following day. Sarah Cloyce’s husband climbed to the parsonage study first. A full church member accompanied him. Parris insisted on a second disinterested party. Both sides believed they were resolving their disputes according to the dictates of Matthew 18, a text that mandated two witnesses to a grievance procedure; the disagreement devolved into the proper interpretation of three verses of Scripture. Late in March 1693, the men produced an unsigned, undated petition calling for a church council to determine “blameable cause,” two words that most in Essex County kept painstakingly apart
that year. Displeased to discover that the men had consulted with neighboring clergymen, Parris asked who, precisely, subscribed to their document. The Nurse contingent allowed only that they spoke for many in the province. Parris stuck the petition in his pocket. “I told them I would consider of it,” he noted. It was a year to the date since the incendiary, one-of-you-is-a-devil sermon that had sent Sarah Cloyce storming from the meetinghouse. The same day, in Boston, Cotton Mather and his wife lost a newborn son, a death Mather attributed to witchcraft.
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When an April delegation called—a group that included widowed Francis Nurse—Parris informed them that he could not talk. He was off to a private prayer meeting. Flanked by various Putnams and his deacons, he met the following week with his detractors. Plucking their paper from his pocket, Parris read it aloud. What did they call such a document? Because he termed it a libel. The Nurses produced a second copy, bearing forty-two signatures. Parris cried fraud. All the signatures appeared in the same hand! Had anyone even signed the document—the charge was staggering in light of events—of his own free will? And was he answering to disaffected villagers or to disaffected church members? Because this happened to be purely an ecclesiastical matter. The two sides went back and forth until nightfall. They were evenly matched. In cogent petitions and dramatic exits, no family had expressed themselves as energetically as the Nurses. And no one was so intent on justice or exactitude as Samuel Parris, who—having devoted nine months of his life to meticulous testimony—now found himself accused of having produced garbled notes. (He was a far more conscientious reporter than many, including Thomas Putnam.)

A large meeting took place at the parsonage a month later. If the Parris children still convulsed, they did so with cause: belligerent, grim-
faced men tramped in and out of their home for a series of interminable, bruising debates. Already well familiar with a regime that rarely accepted apologies and issued none, that dealt in chapter-and-verse accusations and fussy, hoop-jumping technicalities, the children grew accustomed to the heavy footfalls in the entryway porch. After prayers that Thursday, Parris turned to the dissenters. What had they to say? They asked to air their grievances publicly. Parris managed to hold them off. Some fierce, un-Christian name-calling ensued, the kisses on which Parris had so tenderly expounded in October nowhere in evidence. The dissenters appealed to Phips and the provincial authorities. They got nowhere. In the fall of 1694 they turned to the Boston clergy. Willard directed Noyes, Hale, and Higginson to persuade Parris to settle the festering matter before a council of ministers. The word “witchcraft” figured nowhere in those communications.

Cotton Mather was in Salem town that fall and surely reiterated the message: Parris was causing a scandal. (It was on that visit that specters made off with Mather’s papers. He returned home to find his young neighbor Margaret Rule tormented by eight demons—and asking, unprompted, about his missing notes. The seventeen-year-old had heard specters brag that they had stolen them.) Parris explained the village feud to his well-meaning colleagues. He had not been obstructionist. He did however insist on order. The dissenters subjected him to repeated abuse. He had tried to coax them back with his sermons; the church doors, insisted Parris, remained open. (“And as you are my sheep, I expect you hear my voice” did not strike the Nurses as an invitation, much less an olive branch.) He felt he had attempted any number of “kind and heart-affecting wooings.” Still the defectors would not return for the Lord’s Supper. His troubles, Parris insisted, were without parallel. The stalemate persisted. The Nurse men would not share the particulars of their grievances until Parris named a council. Parris would not name a council until he had reviewed the grievances.

On the afternoon of November 13, 1693, still unable to agree on how to proceed, Parris read his own complaints aloud to his critics. He had
seventeen. The Nurse clan breached the covenant. They set an evil example. They were disorderly, accusatory, uncharitable. They reproached the community at home and defamed it abroad. They libeled their minister and harassed him in his own home, spreading word—to the governor, the court, and the Boston ministers—that Parris was “unpeacable.” They claimed that he had made prayer impossible for over a year when they had been in their pews long after “the breaking forth of the late horrid witchcraft.” The meeting consumed an afternoon. Two weeks later Parris informed the Nurses that the church had rejected their demand for a council. They might care to consider what Scripture had to say about making peace. He suggested a few texts. A full year went by.

Weeks after Phips had finally received a reply from the Crown to his February 1693 letter regarding the trials—Queen Mary signed off on a vague response, commending the care with which the governor had managed the crisis and advising him to proceed against any future witchcraft or possession with “the greatest moderation and all due circumspection”—seven ministers again exhorted Parris to resolve the dispute. He spent July 5, 1694, praying, fasting, and mulling over the issue with his stalwarts. He also rejected the ministers’ advice. Weeks later they wondered if they had been unclear. They outlined a simple arbitration strategy. Parris was to resolve the matter before winter. Anglican and Baptist steeples had begun to rise in Boston. Mary Esty climbed to the gallows two years earlier.

In the record book over these months Parris’s hand grows steadily more crabbed and cramped. The strain on him was great; the pressure to settle immense. On the afternoon of November 18, 1694, he returned to the meetinghouse to read aloud a statement several colleagues had vetted, the first public avowal that mistakes had been made in 1692, a paper he termed his “Meditations for Peace.” (It included nine points, in contrast to his seventeen grievances.) Parris considered it a “very sore rebuke and humbling providence” that the witchcraft had broken out in his household. His family included both accusers and accused; he confessed
that “God has been righteously spitting in my face.” He denounced the superstitious practices to which others had resorted in his absence. Acknowledging that he had erred in his “management of those mysteries,” he conceded that he had been wrong about spectral evidence; the devil could well afflict “in the shape of not only innocent but pious persons.” The girls who saw Rebecca Nurse torturing them spoke accurately. So did Rebecca Nurse when she disclaimed responsibility. Here a rustle must have gone through the room; Nurse was both dead and excommunicated. He should not have relied on the girls as diagnosticians. He regretted any inadvisable remarks he had made from the pulpit as well as any mistakes he had committed in recording testimony, a job for which he had not volunteered. He extended his sympathy to all who had suffered. Humbly he beseeched the Lord’s pardon for “all of my mistakes and trespasses in so weighty a matter.” He did the same of his congregants. Might they put “all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and evil-speaking” behind them, to move forward in love?

Parris expressed his desire that the congregation “heartily, sincerely, and thoroughly” forgive one another, which is different from extending an apology. He added too the deal-breaking disclaimer that undercuts all such demands: he begged forgiveness for offenses his parishioners believed he had committed rather than for those he believed he had. As a peace offering however the statement was substantial. Visibly moved, Nurse’s son-in-law allowed that if their minister had acknowledged half as much earlier, a great deal of unpleasantness might have been averted. A public meeting was called for November 26. The dissenters took seats together, joined by a few outsiders. Pressed to share their reasons for withdrawing from the church, the men produced their paper, again refusing to allow it into the minister’s hands. They had no intention of retailing the charges against him until they stood before the proper authorities. Parris prevailed.

On November 26, 1694, more than two years after the witchcraft court had fallen, Parris read a scathing condemnation of his ministry
from the pulpit, Francis Nurse following along with the original on his lap to make sure that his reverend omitted nothing. Parris had fostered a climate of accusation. The girls made prayer impossible; the aggrieved families preferred to attend meeting where they might actually hear the sermon. Given the reckless allegations, they had feared for their lives. They refused to accept communion from the hand of a man so at odds with accepted doctrine, one who expressed no charity and who pursued unfounded methods with the “bewitched or possessed persons.” (They made Parris seem like a bit of a madman, out of step with the rest of the clergy. They nowhere accused him of having manufactured a crisis, however.) He had testified against the accused. His court accounts were faulty, his doctrine unsound, his self-justifications offensive. When he had finished, Parris asked—needlessly—if the issues were solely with him. They were. Did the parishioners withdraw from communion on account of anyone else? inquired a deacon. They did not. Amid frantic whispering and scurrying, Parris launched for a second time into his “Meditations for Peace.” Were they satisfied with his remarks? After an agitated conference, Tarbell replied that they would need to reflect a little. Four nights later they called at the parsonage, to insist on a church council. They found Parris’s apology mincing.

Parris was not alone in being called upon to justify himself that fall. In November 1694 William Phips sailed for London to answer to charges of misconduct. They ranged from embezzlement to assault; in thirty months as governor, he had failed to satisfy a single Boston faction. Stoughton threw him a farewell dinner, one the guest of honor boycotted. Parris’s travails continued well after. In April 1695 an arbitration council that included Willard, both Mathers, and the ministers from Parris’s former Boston congregation assembled in the village. They found fault on all sides. Parris had taken any number of “unwarrantable and uncomfortable steps” in the “late and dark time of the confusions.” He needed to extend some compassion to the Nurse families. Unless the congregation wished to continue to devour one another—it was the 1687 advice of the Salem elders turned witchcraft judges all over again—they
needed to accept his apology. Should reconciliation prove impossible, Parris must go.

A month later a different group of ministers made themselves more explicit. It was time Parris move on. (He was at least making out better than Phips, who died shortly after arriving in London. Stoughton—who did a wizardly job compiling the charges against him—stepped in as acting governor, in which office he served almost without interruption until his death.) Having performed Mary Walcott’s April wedding ceremony, Parris preached his last Salem sermon on June 28, 1696. Weeks later, forty-eight-year-old Elizabeth Parris died. The third minister to lose a wife in the parsonage, her husband buried her in the village, where her stone remains.
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Most of the community remained behind Parris, who refused to leave Salem without his salary. They had lost three pastors already; losing a fourth would only exacerbate matters. They petitioned for him to remain. Suit and countersuit followed. In July 1697 the matter went to three arbitrators, including two former witchcraft judges. To them the Nurse family complained that Parris led his congregants into “dangerous errors, and preached such scandalous immoralities” that he ought be dismissed from his profession. He had stifled some accusations while encouraging others. He had sworn to falsehoods. Both sides reached to hyperbole; as his critics saw it, Parris had “been the beginner and procurer of the sorest afflictions, not to this village only, but to this whole country, that did ever befall them.” The arbitrators ruled against him. Parris returned to Stow, the remote hamlet where he had preached earlier. Immediately embroiled in a salary dispute, he lasted a year.