Conversion (13 page)

“What happened to Mr. Mitchell? Did he quit or something? I thought he was out sick.”

Now she looked up. A shadow darkened her face. “You really don’t know?”

I shook my head.

“Well,” Ms. Slater said, “I’m afraid all I can tell you is, you won’t be seeing him again. And not to worry about it.”

The substitute teacher gave me a long look, as though sending me a telepathic message. But whatever it was, I wasn’t getting it.

“Thanks,” I said, and slipped out the door.

SALEM VILLAGE, MASSACHUSETTS

MAY 30, 1706

S
he
bit
you?” Reverend Green exclaims.

“Yes.”

“And you think the marks on her arm came from her biting herself.”

“Yes. Though maybe she had Betty Parris bite her, too. To make it look better. Abby had a way of making people do things.”

“Some people have that way about them,” the Reverend says. “As though they compel you from inside your own mind.”

“They do,” I agree, watching him.

“But you must’ve gone straight downstairs and told them what had happened.”

My right fingertips brush over the skin inside my left wrist. A semicircle of pale white marks still lies there, a memento of Abby Williams that will always scar me.

“I didn’t.”

I bring my gaze up to meet his. I hate showing him how wretched I am. But that is why I’ve come. So that at last, someone will know.

It’s some days later, around February 25, when I’m at the table peeling potatoes with one of my sisters. Our only servant at that time, a sullen girl named Mercy, is busy brewing, and my mother squints over her needlework, making a sour line of her mouth when she drops a stitch. My father is looking over his accounts. The previous day my aunt visited, after many weeks of us not seeing her, and there was a dreadful row that I didn’t understand. Now my father’s spent all day in his books, scribbling figures in the margin. Every so often my mother glances at him with worry in her face. But it’s not my place to ask.

I haven’t been back to the parsonage, and I’ve told no one what Abby’s done. I’ve bandaged my welts myself, but they’re starting to seep and itch.

If the rumors are true, several worthy gentlemen spent the last many days up in the parsonage attic, gathered about Abby and Betty’s bedsides, united in prayer. They’ve fasted, and Reverend Parris’s been heard to claim that Satan is laying siege to Salem Village, and that the village must look into its soul and find what sin we’ve committed that’s brought such misery to bear.

My mother has her theories about which families might be harboring the sin. My father has them, too.

“Coreys, I’ll warrant,” she’s muttered. “And those Procters. He’s a godless man. Not been to meeting since I don’t know when. And his first wife never kept the house that way. She was a gospel woman, but this one . . .” She shakes her head and tsks over Elizabeth Procter’s housekeeping.

The talk of Betty and Abigail is nothing but pity for their suffering Christian souls. They are innocent lambs being punished for the sin that’s hidden in the heart of the village, and we should all examine our souls with open eyes to root out the evilness within.

I’m prising the eye out of a potato with a paring knife when the sound of hoofbeats drawing up to the yard outside causes me and my sister to look up. The creak of wagon wheels, and a young girl’s voice says, “Thank you, Uncle.”

Then a sharp rapping on the door.

“Get it, Mercy,” my mother says. She’s learned that there’s no point waiting for Mercy to know what her duties are without us telling her.

Without ceremony Mercy stalks to the door and pulls it open. A stooping man of middling build and grizzled appearance steps in and hands the servant his hat. He stamps the snow from his boots and looks around. Behind him trails a girl about my age in a cloak too big for her, who beams when she sees me.

“Thomas?” he asks. “Good day to you, Goody Putnam. Girls. Is he in?”

Mother has put her sewing aside and gotten to her feet.

“Dr. Griggs.” She comes over to take his hand. “Yes. He’s in the best room. I’ll take you.”

“Sit with the girls, Elizabeth,” Dr. Griggs says to the creature behind him with a gesture to us. “Make yourself useful.”

Betty Hubbard rushes over and puts her arms around my neck. I return the embrace. She’s gotten taller since last I saw her, which doesn’t seem that long ago, but it was before the snow, that’s sure. Now she’s the same height as me.

“Ann!” she cries. “I begged him to let me come.”

“Come and sit, Betty,” I say, bringing her to the bench.

I hand her a potato so that we may both look busy while we talk. She turns it in her palms. We can hear muffled adult voices in the other room, but we can’t hear what they’re saying.

“We’re on our way to the parsonage,” Betty Hubbard informs me in a whisper. “Reverend Parris sent for Uncle special, and I made Mother have him take me. Said I was a friend of Betty Parris’s, and it would do her well for her to see me there.”

I laugh.

“Scamp, you,” I say. “Since when were you a friend of Betty Parris?”

Betty Hubbard, the Other Betty, smiles behind her wrist and says, “Well, I
would
be her friend, if she’d have me. And I do wish her well, hand to heaven I do. She’s so little and frail. But how are you, Ann? It’s been an age since I saw you. Isn’t the cold wretched this winter? I don’t hardly go out at all, and you must not either. Mother says it’s the worst she can remember, and you know she can remember since before Moses was found in the rushes.”

“I’m all right, I guess,” I say.

Seeing Betty Hubbard makes me realize how tired I’ve been. For weeks now I’ve been coiled tight as a snake under a rock, worn down with worry. Sitting next to Betty makes me uncoil some, and all I want to do is rest. If it were warmer, I could sneak off to the hayloft and lie on my back and count the wasp nests under the eaves until I fell asleep. But it’s too cold, and I’ve too much to do.

I pick up another potato.

“I was going to the parsonage pretty regular,” I say. “I can’t make heads or tails of Betty Parris. She won’t talk. When it’s just us, she’s well herself, but when the adults are there, she acts like a wooden poppet. But even with just us, she won’t speak. She must be sick, but of what?”

“Hmm,” Betty Hubbard sniffs. “Why’d you stop going?”

“Oh.” My welts throb under my sleeve, invisible and insidious. “No special reason. I had chores.”

Betty Hubbard looks at me under her eyelashes. “Not afraid of that Abby?”

I glance at Betty, eyes wide, suddenly fearful. What has she heard?

“I would be,” Betty Hubbard whispers.

The door to the best room thumps open and Dr. Griggs reappears, followed by my father and my mother, who flits about the two men like a moth around a lamp.

“. . . be getting there as soon as we can,” Dr. Griggs is in the middle of saying. “If we go now, Thomas, I warrant we’ll be there within the hour, or at least no more than two. Can you?”

“Indeed,” my father says, groping for his greatcoat. “Ann, I don’t know how long we’ll be. Can you have the girl get us a pone?”

He’s talking to my mother, who is also Ann. Sometimes he teases me and calls me “Junior,” as though I were an eldest son. I’m not, though. And never can be.

“Elizabeth!” Dr. Griggs barks to his niece. “I trust you made yourself a boon to this household in my absence?”

“Oh, yes, Uncle,” Betty chirps, placing down the identical unpeeled potato that I handed her upon her arrival.

“But what if there’s contagion?” my mother asks from the table near the hearth, where she’s wrapping some corn bread in a napkin to give to my father. Mercy’s standing by watching, as though she’d never heard of a pone, much less how to wrap one up.

“We’ll be taking every precaution,” Dr. Griggs assures her. “All will be quite well, Goody Putman.”

It’s a matter of indifference to most people if our name is Putnam or Putman. I’ve even seen my father sign our name both ways. Sometimes I wonder if one is righter than another. If I can secretly be two people at once.

“Goody Putnam,” Betty pipes up, tying her scarf under her chin in preparation to go. “Couldn’t Annie come with us? I’d be so much quieter if she could be there. She loves Betty and Abigail as much as I do.”

I’m torn, part of me yearning to flee across the yard to the barn no matter how cold it is and hide in the stall behind our old cow where no one will find me. But I admit to being curious. If Dr. Griggs is called, they must be nearing the end of the praying. I want to know if Abby’ll be found out. I look at my mother, trying to arrange my features into a semblance of filial piety.

“Betty’s right. Perhaps I ought to go?”

My mother looks between us, worried.

“You’re certain there’s no danger?” she asks the doctor. “Thomas, you’ll watch her, won’t you?”

“Of course,” my father says. “I’m sure the Parrises’ll be only too glad of the extra help. Annie, step lively.”

I drop my eyes and hurry to the door, assembling my winter garb with an air of submission and obedience. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Betty Hubbard smiling. She winks at me. A smile twitches my cheek.

“Here.” My mother thrusts the wrapped pone into my hands. “It could be a long night. You mind your father. And Mrs. Parris. Make yourself useful.”

I nod. “Yes, Mother.”

Betty and I follow close on the heels of Dr. Griggs and my father, who are murmuring between themselves about Reverend Parris and what we’re likely to find.

Once we’re settled in the back of the wagon, Betty takes my hand. As the doctor tells the horse to walk on, Betty whispers, “I can’t wait to see them with my own eyes, can you?”

“I can’t,” I agree. But the gleam in Betty Hubbard’s eye is troublingly bright.

I don’t know how much time passes. In the parsonage’s hall there’s nowhere to sit, so Betty Hubbard and I stand, tucked in a corner out of the way by a straw pallet rolled up against the wall. The men are all up in the loft, and the excitement of their voices is almost enough to drown out the occasional cries breaking forth from Abby, and now from Betty Parris, too. We hear pounding and shattering and rumbling of feet, and a man’s voice shout, “Grab her! The window!”

The hall is packed with women, some of them pretending to make themselves useful by stirring a pot or folding a cloth, and some there under pretense of errand, baskets clutched on their laps. A few hands busy themselves with darning. But the majority sit and stare, their eyes steady on the ceiling of the hall.

“Ann!” a scream rings out. “Oh, Ann, God in heaven, they want me to sign!”

A commotion overhead as all the eyes in the long hall swivel to me. Betty Hubbard widens her eyes with excitement, and I can tell she’s struggling not to smile. She tugs on my hand under our cloaks and whispers, “You get to go up!”

“Ann Putnam?” a male voice calls down the loft ladder. “Would someone send up Ann Putnam?”

“Fetch her,” Mrs. Parris says to Tittibe, who’s standing close to her husband, John, a blocky Indian used by the Parrises as a man of all work. Tittibe and John exchange a look, and she releases his hand and approaches me with a worried expression.

“Come, my Annie,” Tittibe says.

She holds her hand out to me. A sheen of sweat gleams on her forehead.

I take her hand and feel the stares of the village women as Tittibe leads me to the attic stair.

“Ann! Is someone bringing her?” the impatient voice calls, which I now take to belong to Reverend Parris.

“Hurry now,” Tittibe says to me.

On trembling arms and legs I hoist myself up.

In the loft, I find Betty Parris and Abigail Williams tucked into a trundle together, though I can scarcely see them through the forest of black-coated men clustered around the bed. They are murmuring their bafflement.

“. . . cannot be a brain fever, for her face is cool to the touch . . .”

“. . . and what of the marks? Is it a pox of some sort? . . .”

“. . . the coolness of the feet and the disordered speech must surely mean . . .”

“Here! It’s the girl she’s asking for.”

A man I don’t recognize takes hold of my upper arm and steers me roughly to the bedside. I behold Betty Parris, lying stiff as a board, purple rings circling her eyes. Next to her Abby sits bolt upright, hair streaming back from a sweaty forehead, a finger outstretched, pointing at me.

“There she stands at Ann’s shoulder! Do you not see her? She holds the book out to me, but I will not sign!”

“What book?” Dr. Griggs asks, looking curiously between Abby and me. “What does she mean, child?”

“I don’t know of any book,” I say.

The bite marks under my sleeve are itching something fierce.

“Ann, tell them! Tell them how we’ve seen their Sabbaths out on the rye field from this very window, where they ate red bread and drank blood like sacramental wine! Tell them how they bade us sign their vile book, but we wouldn’t!”

“A book!” Reverend Parris gets to his feet and rushes to me. He takes me by the shoulders and shakes. “What is she speaking of? Who conspires against me? Tell me!”

I feel the force of him, his fingers digging into my upper arms.

“I . . . I . . . ,” I stammer, panicking as the many older learned male faces crowd down upon me, all urging me to explain, to tell them, to reveal the truth of what Abby’s saying. And the oddest part is, I feel myself wanting to tell them. They are so keen to know, and I want to obey. Of course I know Abby’s dissembling, I saw that wicked grin, I know she’s reveling in the care that’s been lavished on her these past weeks. But now all the eyes are on me, fine men in periwigs, who’ve been to the college and can read the Word and are accustomed to being harkened to by other men and women and girls like myself. They’re all bearing down upon me, and I’m powerless to find the words they want to hear.

“Show them, Annie!” Abby screams. “Show what happens when we don’t sign the book!”

Wordlessly I reach down and roll my sleeve, turning my inner arm faceup to catch the yellow lamplight. Reverend Parris releases my upper arms and steps back that he might see. Dr. Griggs peers down at my arm, squinting.

I’m on the point of saying that Abby bit me, that she’s a liar and a rogue and they should beat her, but the focused breathing of the roomful of men as they stare at my tender flesh stops my tongue. A silence falls over the company, and even Abby seems to be holding her breath, awaiting the doctor’s verdict.

Dr. Griggs looks the marks up and down, takes my arm in his hand, and turns it this way and that in the light. Then he stands upright, pressing his lips together in thought and looking each gentleman in the face.